Back in 2011, a group of academic philosophers started a blog called “Bleeding Heart Libertarians.” The idea behind that blog was simple, but also somewhat vague in terms of its specifics: that you could be a libertarian who favored free markets and limited governments, and still care about the kind of things people on the left refer to as “social justice” – relieving poverty, racial and sexual equality, immigrant rights, LBGTQ rights, and so on. Hence, the slogan of the blog, “free markets and social justice.”

The vagueness of the guiding idea was in some ways intended, and in other ways not. Part of the explanation is that we launched the blog as a way of working out the details of an idea that we were all interested in and attracted to, but hadn’t entirely figured out yet. But a big part of what the vagueness did was allow philosophers– and, later, a number of colleagues from other disciplines– with some pretty radically different normative, empirical, and methodological commitments to rally together under a common banner. Thus, we had people like me, a pluralist classical liberal who supports a basic income guarantee, and people like Roderick Long, an Aristotelean left-wing anarchist who favors “markets, not capitalism.” And everything in between.

Reconciling free markets and social justice seemed like an especially worthwhile project to undertake in 2011. Academic political philosophy was largely dominated by followers of John Rawls, for whom a commitment to social justice (of a particular sort) was paramount. And libertarianism remained a fringe and unfamiliar view within the academy – for most academic philosophers, it was a view that was born and died in 1974 with the publication of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But a critical mass of scholars were working out new ways of thinking about libertarian ideas; and many of us who were excited by the work of scholars like David Schmidtz, Gerald Gaus, and John Tomasi thought that there was a different style of libertarian thought beginning to crystallize. And we didn’t only want to publicize that; we wanted to encourage it, to help build and develop the research program associated with it.

Moreover, if we sought to open mainstream Rawlsian political philosophy and theory to the influence of market-friendly classical liberalism, we also wanted to wanted to steer classical liberal scholarship toward taking egalitarian liberal ideas much more seriously than it often had.

In a more minor way, there was a political background, too. The Cold War “fusionism” of conservative and libertarian politics was put under considerable strain during the George W. Bush administration; the 2008 presidential candidacy of Ron Paul had reenergized a strain of libertarian politics that rejected neoconservatism but embraced a kind of nationalist, anti-immigrant paleoconservatism instead. Libertarians who didn’t feel comfortable entangled with either neoconservatives or paleoconservatives, those who took the “liberalism” in “classical liberalism” seriously, hadn’t quite found a public voice— Brink Lindsey’s 2006 New Republic article calling for a new “liberaltarianism” hadn’t found much uptake. That seemed to leave a gap to be filled.

Things have changed quite a bit in the last nine years, both in the realm of academic philosophy and that of real-world politics. Rawlsianism and its particular interpretation of social justice have receded in prominence. The variety of libertarian and classical liberal views within the academy has become better known, even by those who reject those views. And that variety is now a more firmly established fact among libertarian scholars and students themselves

I like to think that this blog, or at least the people who write for it, have played some role in at least the second of those two developments. We set out with the aim of articulating a new and distinct vision of libertarianism. And – while there are certainly a great number of important details of that vision that have yet to be worked out – I think we have succeeded.  The project of establishing the intellectual space for bleeding-heart libertarian ideas has also more or less succeeded, giving way to the various different intellectual projects people are going to pursue in that space.

In other words, we’ve said what we needed to say.

For that reason, it’s time to bring Bleeding Heart Libertarians to a close. We’ll be keeping the archives open. But we won’t be posting anything new. At least not here. All of us are still actively writing, and many of us are writing on themes that are very much relevant to the Bleeding Heart Libertarian project. But we’ve said what we wanted to say here, and we think it’s best to put a period at the end of that sentence rather than an ellipsis.

We want to thank all of you who’ve followed this blog over the years, who’ve listened to our musings and sometimes gently, sometimes not-so-gently, chided us to do better. We’re grateful to those who have let us know what this blog has meant to them, if simply in giving them a label with which to understand their own beliefs. And we hope that those of you who have been inspired by the ideas on this blog will pick them up and run with them. The blog is finished. But the vision is not.

You can follow Matt Zwolinski on Facebook, Twitter and on SSRN.

You can follow Jacob Levy on Twitter, at the Niskanen Center, and at his personal blog.

You can follow Steve Horwitz on Facebook, here and here.

You can follow Kevin Vallier on Facebook, Twitter, and his personal blog.

You can follow Andrew Cohen on Facebook and Twitter.

You can follow Sarah Skwire on Facebook, Econlog, and Adam Smith Works.

You can follow Roderick Long on Facebook, his blog, and the Center for a Stateless Society.

Observe:

Incel: “Stacy choose Chad over me. I have the right to retaliate by killing Stacy and/or Chad.”

Michael Fett, a guy on Facebook, justifying Guitar Center being looted: “Guitar Center put Mom and Pop guitar stores out of business. They deserve to be destroyed.”

To be precise, though, Guitar Center didn’t put them out of business. We did by choosing to buy from GC rather than the mom and pop stores. GC didn’t show up and burn their stores. It offered a lower price, more convenience, bigger selection, and in some cases better quality. Consumers chose to buy from GC. 

Now, perhaps GC engaged in some hidden rent seeking which screwed over those stores. If it did, fine, that changes things. But that is not what this guy is arguing, nor is what most people argue when they say stuff like this. Instead, they think stores “steal” business from each other. But they don’t, anymore than Chad steals sex from the intel virgin.

New report on the state of the humanities:

https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2020-05/hds3_the_state_of_the_humanities_in_colleges_and_universities.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0lCu4KOkSq62KnkXdaOOaQtMBkxJN6affH61kgOctQZks7GsEJqzulHow

It concurs with what Phil and I say in Cracks and our other published work:

1. Adjuncts are not replacing full-time faculty.
2. Full-time humanities employment is in fact growing rather than shrinking.
3. Most humanities faculty are still tenure-track.

Inside Higher Ed published a piece summarizing this, but the author immediately discounted the stuff on adjuncts because, well, it doesn’t fit the approved narrative. They asked, why is there such a gap between perception and reality when it comes to adjunctification? Here’s a partial answer: Because IHE and the Chronicle keep claiming that adjuncts are replacing full-timers and refuse to fact-check these (easily falsifiable) claims.

By the way, while you might think this is irrelevant to this blog, it’s not. Universities are the gatekeepers to the middle and upper-middle classes. They reinforce and sustain class structure in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. How they spend their money, and how those costs are passed onto students and others, are major social justice issues.

Here are the concluding paragraphs of When All Else Fails.

Over the past eight chapters, we’ve examined a wide range of arguments which attempted to show that government agents enjoy special immunity against civilians. Other arguments tried to show that some government agents at least enjoy special immunity against other government agents or would-be government agents. The arguments all failed. Until we get a successful argument to the contrary, we should conclude government wrongdoers are morally on par with civilian wrongdoers. 

Many of us have seen videos showing the police choke Eric Garner to death.^[i] Half of us have seen “Bou Bou’s” wrangled face after police threw a flash grenade in the sleeping toddlers’ crib.^[ii] The Washington Post now runs a column dedicated to documenting and explaining police abuse.^[iii] One of the most popular genres on YouTube are videos of police violence and of citizens refusing to comply with police requests. This is a topic of major current interest. And the problem isn’t going away.

 Violence is an awful tool. It’s not exactly a last resort, but it’s rarely a first resort. I have not argued for anarchism, for violent revolution, or even for peaceful revolution. I have not defended a theory of social change or articulated a platform for revising unjust laws or removing systematic patterns of oppression. These are difficult problems, and it’s not clear social scientists have made much progress on identifying what works and what does not. My goal here has been quite limited: I have merely argued you may defend yourself and others from particular acts of government injustice the same way that you may defend yourself and others from particular acts of civilian injustice. 

Government agents have a job to do. In their first instance, their job is to project our rights and implement justice, not to trample our rights and thwart justice. When government agents choose to do the latter, they exceed any putative authority they might have. When government becomes the enemy, we may protect ourselves. Our rights do not disappear because senators voted to ignore them or because a cop is having a bad day.

Some government agents sometimes take on dangerous jobs for our benefit. Cops assume a great deal of risk, though not as much risk as lumberjacks, farmers, fishers, roofers, truck drivers, or construction laborers.^[iv] Congresspeople, generals, and presidents take on tremendous, stressful jobs with great responsibility.

 But, at the same time, we each possess an inviolability, founded on justice, which forbids anyone from violating our rights. Government agents take on risk, but they also take on greater than normal moral responsibility to protect rather than violate our rights. How dare government agents do any less? And if they do dare to violate our rights, then they, not we the innocent, should suffer the consequences.

^[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpGxagKOkv8

^[ii] http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-toddler-injured-swat-grenade-faces-1m-medical/story?id=27671521

^[iii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/policeshootings/?utm_term=.78d2a12022ba

^[iv] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-fleetwood/how-dangerous-is-police-w_b_6373798.html

When All Else Fails is about defensive actions, not punishment. If someone had justly and rightly shot the cops who murdered George Floyd, they would be trying to stop them from killing Floyd, not trying to punish them for their wrongful actions. In the same way, if I stop a would-be mugger, I’m trying to protect myself, not reform or punish the mugger, and not trying to change the culture at large.

I largely stay silent on the issue of whether citizens may privately punish state officials and officers.

However, let’s take a quick stab at this issue. In Injustice for All (one of those books about intersectionality, Jacob Levy?), Surprenant and I talk at great length about the hidden financial and other incentive structures which explain why the US criminal justice system is so unusually dysfunctional, abusive, harsh, and violent. Without here getting into the details, one of the findings is that police are rarely punished for excessive violence, including outright brutality, rape, and the like. Prosecutors and politicians are loath to cross them, and juries are loath to vote them guilty, even in cases worse than Floyd’s.

One of the major arguments for public punishment goes as follows:

The argument against vigilantism is familiar. John Locke argues each of us has the right to punish rights-violators in the state of nature. However, he claims, we are biased judges, too lenient on ourselves and too harsh on those who harm us. Private punishment thus creates various “inconveniences”, and our disagreements over private punishment could lead to conflict. Locke argues we should resolve this problem by instituting (as best we can) an impartial, public system of justice, which will correct those inconveniences and overcome our biases. Once that system is established, we should defer to it. We alienate our private right to punish.

FWIW, David Estlund uses a more detailed version of this argument in his own Democratic Reason. This isn’t simply some old thing Locke said that no one believes anymore. Instead, it’s probably the most widespread view among the population at large and still somewhat popular among philosophers, though no theory of punishment wins majority assent in philosophy.

This argument assumes, though, that the state is actually trying to punish people and doing so in a competent and reasonable way? What if–as with the case of the police–the state has largely declared and demonstrated that it won’t punish them, except under unusual circumstances? Many states have upheld doctrines of “qualified immunity” in which police officers are not held legally or civilly liable for their actions. Localities usually decline to punish excessive police brutality. Torts usually get thrown out. When officers are punished–say by losing their jobs (hardly a fitting punishment for murdering a civilian or blowing up a baby’s face)–police union usually succeed in getting them re-instated with back pay. Cops with a long history of racism and violence often just get moved elsewhere, much as the Catholic Church loved to shuffle around its child molesters.

In effect, the state has said, “We aren’t going to punish cops 99% of the time.” If not, then at the very least, this particular argument against private punishment fails. There may be others that succeed. But if this is your main reason to avoid private punishment, here it does not apply.

1. Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd by crushing his neck with a knee while he lay prostrate, helpless, and handcuffed.
   
   This is precisely the kind of case When All Else Fails is about. Every “hypothetical” example in the book is in fact a real case, but we had to say “based on” real cases for legal reasons.
   
   It would obviously be imprudent to attack the cops in this case, as they will likely shoot back and murder you. But would it be immoral–or instead justified–to do so? If you could have shot one from a window and escaped, would it be justified? (I argue yes.) Would it even be obligatory?
   
   
2. Amy Cooper lied to the cops, saying that “an African American man…is threatening me and my dog.” Given how the police in the US often behave (see above), this lie is like calling in the death squad.
   
   Luckily, the police interviewed them and didn’t hurt anybody (as far as I’ve read). But in a nearby possible world, they show up and hurt or even kill the victim, Christian Cooper.
   
   Most people would judge her much more harshly had that happened. She is lucky she isn’t responsible for Cooper’s death. You can use it in your moral luck class.