Roderick and I have been around the block on the relationship between eudaimonism and self-ownership/non-aggression principles (SOP/NAP). Roderick thinks eudaimonism, properly understood, vindicates SOP/NAP as principles of justice, whereas I think eudaimonism underdetermines whether SOP/NAPs are the right principles of justice.[1] In large part due to Roderick’s influence, I too am a eudaemonist. But I think eudaimonism better fits with a contractualist/political liberal account of justice. Roderick and I agree that the virtue of justice requires not using force against others in ways incompatible with their own rational commitments. Otherwise, we really do treat people as subhuman. But we disagree about how to flesh out that broader commitment to treat human beings as ends in themselves. In this post, I want to develop my concerns further, in response to Roderick’s recent post in the recent non-aggression blog wars.

I take it the reason Roderick thinks eudaimonism vindicates SOP/NAP is because there is no better alternative account of what it means not to treat others as mere means. Roderick acknowledges here that a critical premise in a eudaemonist defense of Rothbardian libertarianism is this:

4. The form of deontology best answering to justice’s prima facie content will be a self-ownership principle.

As the resident political liberal, I deny (4). I think a public justification principle (PJP) is a necessary condition on the permissible use of force. A PJP is not a sufficient condition for the permissible use of force, but it constrains the set of moral principles on which coercion may be based. I’m no orthodox Rawlsian because I reject Justice as Fairness. I think Gaus has decisively shown what Rawls admitted late in life – that public justification cannot vindicate any single set of principles of justice, much less those endorsed by Rawls. But I think the same goes for Rothbardian principles of justice because plenty of reasonable and rational people have sufficient reason of their own to reject them (though in my view, far fewer than those who have sufficient reason to reject Rawlsian principles of justice).

In response to this claim, many people respond that reasonable and rational people disagree so much that they have sufficient reason to reject any property regime, which demonstrates that a public justification requirement is too demanding. If a principle entails that no property rights regime can be justified, it must be wrong.

But if we admit that while everyone won’t be able to institutionalize the principles they think best, they may be able to institutionalize principles they believe are acceptably just, but sub-optimal, the possibility of public justification returns. After all, all rational and reasonable people acknowledge that it is better to have some property rights regime that is justified and binding for all rather than none. The question is: which property rights regime?

Answering that question is complicated (though see this), much harder than determining which property rights regime is vindicated by the SOP/NAP. But that’s a virtue of the political liberal approach: justifying classical liberal principles to all persons, classical liberal or no, is much harder than Rothbardians typically acknowledge.

Of course, Rothbardians will reply that the form of interpersonal justification political liberals endorse – public justification – is not a necessary condition on the permissible use of force. But political theorists and philosophers across the libertarian-egalitarian spectrum endorse it, far more than endorse NAP/SOP. The reason for this, I think, is that when we coerce others based on rules and norms that they, on reflection, regard as inconsistent with their projects, plans and values, we subordinate them to our will and treat them unequally. This seems, at least to this former Rothbardian, a much clearer implication of respect for persons as free and equal than the principles of self-ownership and homesteading (though I do think Rothbardian principles are appealing and that aspects of them can be publicly justified to a great many people).

By rejecting PJPs, Rothbardians must be prepared to enforce Rothbardian property rights on reasonable non-Rothbardians. In other words, they must be prepared to use coercion to stop what they take to be violations of their property rights. For example, most people in the world besides a few Rothbardians and Randians think that there are some distributive justice-like constraints on property holdings. A property rights regime is deeply unfair and unjust, for instance, if it regularly ensures that the masses live at a subsistence level while a small elite enjoys a spectacular amount of wealth. Now, as a matter of empirical fact, I don’t think this is how a Rothbardian regime would operate. But for a great many people, the fact that Rothbardian principles of justice permit this state of affairs, however unlikely, means Rothbardian premises are false. I agree.

After all, if some social democrats insist that a spectacularly wealthy elite give up an incredibly small portion of their holdings to the poor in the name of justice, the Rothbardian will simply disagree and side with the elite’s protection agencies who expel those seeking enough property holdings to increase their standard of living even marginally past the level necessary to simply exist.

Rothbardian political principles are unacceptably sectarian and can only be enforced in an authoritarian fashion in a pluralistic world, so they cannot be the prima facie content of the virtue of justice.

In my view, the best arguments for market society are that markets allow people an acceptable if sometimes sub-optimal method of social cooperation that will work to the benefit of all over the long-run. Further, and of equal importance, private property rights, like other liberal liberties, allow us to decentralize problem solving so that every decision needn’t be made collectively or by government. In this way, we can justify property rights as basic rights that constrain moral and political institutions. And while as a matter of economic theory and practice I think much more radically libertarian property regimes are best, I do not think they are required by justice. And this is coming from a Roderick-long style eudaemonist.

In sum, eudaimonism cannot save the NAP/SOP because eudaimonism underdetermines whether the virtue of justice includes a PJP. If so, Rothbardians cannot rely on eudaimonism to vindicate the non-aggression principle without considerably more philosophical work.