Two days ago, Roderick argued that eudaimonism provides an attractive moral foundation for the non-aggression principle despite the claims of public reason liberals. Here I try to show that his criticisms fail. I admit that we are now deep into the non-aggression wars and many of the details may weary our readers. But I encourage you to press on because our discussion fulfills a chief aim of the blog – to probe the foundations of libertarianism.

I. The Dialectic Thus Far 

Matt took the first shot in our recent non-aggression wars by arguing that the NAP cannot explain a wide enough range of our considered political judgments. He, David Gordon, and George Smith have gone around the block on this a bit, and Jason has commented as well. I claimed that the NAP is false as a foundational principle. In response to me and Matt, Roderick offered his eudaemonist case for the NAP as the prima facie content of the virtue of justice. I countered that eudaimonism underdetermes whether the NAP is true because the prima facie content of the virtue of justice may well contain a public justification principle (PJP). If so, then eudaimonism cannot vindicate the NAP.

Roderick’s response to me seems two-fold: (i) show that eudaimonism and public reason liberalism are incompatible, (ii) show that public justification requirements are philosophically problematic in ways the non-aggression principle is not. If Roderick’s (i) and (ii) are correct, then my competitor principle is defeated and the NAP is the last man standing.

II. Public Reason sans the Comprehensive-Political Distinction 

While I’m a kind of political liberal, I don’t think the distinction between Rawlsian comprehensive doctrines and political conceptions of justice is useful. For one thing, our reasons for action are bound up together in much too subtle and complex a way for us to sharply distinguish the comprehensive from the political. For another, public justification doesn’t require anything so complicated. As a public reason liberal, what I care about is that each reasonable person has sufficient reason to endorse a set of common coercive rules for living well together on legitimate and moral terms. I’ve argued in various journal articles that we should prefer a convergence conception of public justification, where all that matters for public justification is that each person has sufficient reason from her own perspective to endorse a common set of social norms. So I deny that we can fully determine the content of justice apart from our comprehensive doctrines. But that’s just to reject Rawls’s political liberalism, not public reason liberalism itself.

However, contra Roderick, I do think we have a sufficiently clear grasp of the nature of justice and legitimacy, and the common good despite our plural views about the good. In other words, we do not need to secure rational consensus on the nature of the good life to determine the proper principles of justice, legitimacy and the common good. I think we can generate and justify common laws and principles from multiple points of view simultaneously, and that we do not have to insist on one path to these principles from a single conception of the good. And thank goodness for that. Otherwise we would have no way to cooperate on moral terms without first agreeing on the right principles of justice in turn by agreeing on the right conception of the good, a Herculean task.

III. Reasonable Pluralism Holds

Because after all, reasonable pluralism is true: the free exercise of practical reason leads to deep, non-culpable disagreement about matters of ultimate import, both with respect to the right and the good. One of the most curious claims in Roderick’s post is the seeming denial of reasonable pluralism. He denies that rejecting the NAP is “ordinarily a purely reasonable or innocent mistake” but rather tends to be a “kind of moral vice.” I obviously agree that one can be culpably wrong without being wicked. I also agree that one can miss the rationale for the NAP via poor mental hygiene.

The relevant question is whether some rational and reasonable people have sufficient reason from their own point of view to reject the NAP. And I think the answer to this is obviously yes. There are so many smart, thoughtful and careful people in the world who think hard about politics. All of us have vice, all of us are ignorant, but even correcting for vice and ignorance, our disagreements about ultimate matters would still persist. And I assume that, as a result, many will reject the NAP on reasonable grounds. Further, plenty of people will accept the NAP on reasonable grounds. But are we really to believe that the main reason people reject the NAP is due to cognitive vice? And that if we were all sufficiently virtuous we’d all accept Rothbardian principles of justice? I find this simply incredible.

IV. Moral Living in a Suboptimal World 

Roderick repeats the common claim that the PJP leaves us with a null set of eligible (potentially publicly justified) rules of conduct with respect to some important social domains. After all, Libertarian Libby and Collectivist Colin may disagree sharply about which property rules are true. As a result, they may discover that there are no rules they can appeal to in order to resolve their disputes on moral terms, that is without appealing solely to the balance of power between them in determining what to do.

But Roderick knows my reply: in cases of reasonable disagreement, the set of eligible rules may contain sub-optimal rules of conduct, ones that both Colin and Libby dislike but prefer to no rules at all. For some reason entirely beyond me, Roderick thinks my reply “treats justice as some global good to be maximized, rather than as a constraint on individuals’ actions.” It does not. Instead, it only acknowledges that a contractualist procedure can show that people have sufficient reason to accept sub-optimal codes of conduct. To see this, imagine that Libby and Colin have two different rankings of deontic principles but that Libby has epistemic defeaters for Colin’s most highly ranked principles, and vice versa. They are both left, let us say, with their second best option, a deontic principle they both have sufficient reason to accept, but both regard as less than fully just. Yet given the value of moral relations with one another, they accept the rule and move on. I do not understand why Roderick thinks this process is a matter of maximizing justice.

Assuming the failure of sub-optimal agreement, Roderick claims that the “NAP has the advantage of allowing us to choose sides between Libby and Colin” whereas the PJP “condemns both sides,” meaning that the PJP provides us with poorer moral guidance. For after all, with the NAP we can set public reason aside and examine their principles on their own merits.

But the NAP forbids us from appealing to all kinds of relevant considerations in settling disputes between Libby and Colin. It’s way more restrictive than a PJP. The PJP is sensitive to a vast array of persons’ practical reasons, whereas the NAP is only sensitive to, well, aggression.

Second, and many political liberals disagree with me on this, but nothing in public reason liberalism prevents us from considering all the factors that would justify Libby and Colin’s respective principles, at least not on a convergence view. The only condemnation required in public reason is when either side insists on imposing her favorite sectarian rule on others who have sufficient reason to reject it.

V. Starving for Virtue? 

Public reason libertarians who allow for diverse justifications and recognize reasonable pluralism must come to grips with the fact that many free and equal persons lack sufficient reason to comply with the authority claims made by Rothbardian property owners when they’re in cases of serious need. For this reason, to coercively enforce Rothbardian property rules in the face of such objections is sectarian, authoritarian and disrespectful.

Roderick’s reply is, well, troubling.

The answer, from a eudaemonist perspective, is that it is more in one’s self-interest to die justly than to live unjustly – better to suffer as a decent person than to survive as a predator.

The implication seems to be that if a Rothbardian society left a non-trivial number of people in a position where they could only regularly meet their basic needs by taking a small fraction of the holdings of the very richest members of society, the needy should choose to suffer because such great suffering is required by virtue. Rothbardian principles of justice fill out the content of the virtue of justice. So for the Rothbardian eudaemonist, the happy needy person is the one who would suffer utter destitution rather than redistribute a small portion of the holdings of the super-rich. Because after all, to take their property, justly acquired on Rothbardian grounds, would be a form of enslavement. The the hungry virtuous man would rather die than “enslave” a billionaire by taking $10 from the billionaire’s bank account to feed needy people in his society.

I submit that all non-Rothbardians will find this claim utterly implausible. The fact that the most brilliant Rothbardian in the world feels the need to defend this claim indicts the entire position.

Roderick continues, but his response does not encourage:

Eudaimonism involves reconceiving one’s conception of benefit and harm; whereas Kevin’s argument leaves conventional notions of benefit and harm unchallenged. … the Rawlsian notion of ‘primary goods’ … has no place in eudaimonism.

I don’t care about primary goods, and I’m happy to allow the content of justice to play some role in reformulating our notions of benefit and harm. Gaus has made this point explicit in his work on public reason (especially in Justificatory Liberalism (see Ch.10, 11 and Pt. III). We must publicly justify particular conceptions of benefits and harms based on the commitments of people in our society given disagreement about what counts as a harm or a benefit.

That said, we cannot give the notions of benefit and harm so much slack that it becomes true to say the destitute, but rational and reasonable non-Rothbardian does not “benefit” from taking a small portion of holdings from someone who would barely notice its absence.

Roderick offers two more replies to the concern that his conception of justice is too consequence-insensitive. He first claims that any principle of justice has counterintuitive implications in certain cases. Fine. But there’s counterintuitive and then there’s counterintuitive. From what I can tell, Roderick expects us to reconceive the ordinary notion of a benefit so completely that the needy non-Rothbardian does not benefit from taking a small portion of a mega-rich person’s holdings. On Roderick’s libertarian eudaimonism, one can only benefit by starving for virtue, or something near enough. That’s too counterintuitive. 

Roderick’s second reply is that the case for the NAP is partly based on consequentialist considerations already. So to charge it with consequence-insensitivity would require “double-counting” consequences. If the NAP is supposed to be sufficiently consequence-sensitive based on the considerations that went into endorsing it, then I demand we triple-count. The NAP is simply too consequence insensitive, even in eudaemonist dress.

VI. The Heart of Our Disagreement is Not Truth vs. Reasonableness 

Roderick thinks that the fundamental problem with the public reason approach is that “it sacrifices truth to reasonableness by giving reasonable but mistaken views equal status with correct views.” Assuming for the sake of argument the one can reasonably reject the NAP (which Roderick implausibly denies), it’s still not clear why reasonably false views and reasonably true views should have equal status. After all, if Libby has the correct view, and Colin has the incorrect view, then Libby’s view should carry the day.

Rawls recognized Roderick’s puzzlement:

They [critics] ask: why should citizens in discussing and voting on the most fundamental political questions honor the limits of public reason? How can it be either reasonable or rational, when basic matters are at stake, for citizens to appeal only to a public conception of justice and not to the whole truth as they see it? Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason! (216).

I too admit the appearance of a conundrum: public reason requires that you not always appeal to the full truth as you see it in political justification. Rawls’s answer to the conundrum, as many of you know, is to appeal to the liberal principle of legitimacy. If state coercion can be justified to each reasonable point of view, then each person accepts the coercion on her own terms, including those with the correct view. So if we do it right, there should be no conflict between comprehensive truth and political reasonableness.

But demonstrating the harmony of these two domains of normativity requires considerable work. Rawlsians pass the justificatory buck to individual adherents of comprehensive doctrines to figure out the connection. And that’s because Rawls wants to (a) emphasize that many such connections are possible and (b) stress that we cannot expound the possible connections in advance of the thought processes of citizens and the civic organizations they are members of. Public reason liberalism aims to identify the core set of rules that can be publicly justified, but public reason liberals reject the claim that political philosophers can give any general account of how truth and reasonableness hang together, for there is no one account, or so we hope.

I think Rawls’s conception of the political is mistaken through and through. I find Jerry Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason much more plausible. But my point here is that public reason does not require us to sacrifice what we take to be true in order to respect the reasonable views of others. If public justification is successful, each person acts only on principles and rules that she herself endorses. The trick of public reason liberalism is to show that comprehensive truth and respect for politically reasonable disagreement are congruent, or at least do not conflict, from a great many comprehensive perspectives. I admit that’s a tall order, but Roderick has given us no reason to despair.

As long as the true morality permits us to live in accord with rules that we regard as less than fully just and less than fully optimal, there need be no truth-reasonableness conflict. Few modern moralities require us to coercively overturn a fairly just social order that all can accept simply to institutionalize the rules we think best, especially when those rules are as deeply controversial and divisive as Rothbardian libertarianism.

VII. Does Public Reason Run Out?

Roderick thinks my commitment to public justification runs out, as he says that I too hold that it’s “sometimes okay to coerce people on the basis of norms they reasonably and innocently reject.” Not exactly. Roderick’s counterexamples involving bodily integrity get their intuitive mileage from the fact that we pretty much universally think that rights to bodily integrity are justified. But if that is so, then rules protecting bodily integrity can be easily publicly justified, as both Rawls and Gaus have argued in detail.

In the off chance that two people encounter one another as innocent threats with no publicly justified set of social-moral rules governing their treatment of each other’s bodies, and no such rules can be reached, then I grant that when Libby defends herself, she has done all she can to treat Colin as free and equal. She has pursued public justification faithfully, but since Colin is so psychologically and cultural unintelligible to Libby, she may be left with no option but to defend herself according to rules not publicly justified to him.

But acknowledging this possibility is compatible with a commitment to public justification, as public justification is restricted by our shared conception of moral agency. We cannot live in moral relations with absolutely everyone ever. But at least public reason liberals try. Unlike Rothbardian eudaimonists, we don’t throw up our hands and insist that people comply with our preferred principles and tell them that virtue requires that they suffer tremendous woe to promote our doctrines.

VIII. Rothbardianism is Not the Content of the Virtue of Justice

In sum, public reason has fewer flaws than Roderick thinks. It doesn’t take a maximizing approach to justice. It’s not incompatible with a comprehensive commitment to eudaimonism. It doesn’t entail that we can determine the content of justice or of benefits and harms entirely apart from our comprehensive doctrines and it doesn’t require us to sacrifice truth to reasonableness.

Instead, public reason liberals offer a form of political justification that can vindicate classical liberal institutions to people other than Rothbardians and that would never imply that virtue requires that people suffer miserably so as not to violate the sanctity of Rothbardian doctrine.