Mondays with Murray: 3 Ethical Philosophies of Liberty
Libertarians, more or less, believe in the non-aggression principle - the overall idea that human beings should not initiate violence against other human beings. Violence should be used only in self-defense; defense of one's body or one's property. Where libertarians often diverge is just how they arrive at this conclusion about how man should act towards one another. In Chapter 2 of For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray identifies three ethical philosophies that lead people to the embrace the libertarian ideal. These are the emotivist, utilitarian, and the natural rights viewpoint.The simplest of these view points is the emotivists, whom according to Rothbard:
...assert that they take liberty or nonaggression as their premise purely on subjective, emotional grounds. While their own intense emotion might seem a valid basis for their own political philosophy, this can scarcely serve to convince anyone else. By ultimately taking themselves outside the realm of rational discourse, the emotivists thereby insure the lack of general success of their own cherished doctrine.
This essentially describes those who base their libertarianism on a feeling in their "gut"; the idea that they just "know" that it is wrong to aggress on others. There are good reasons for people to naturally feel this way, but it is not a convincing argument or consistent viewpoint in and of itself. If the emotivist suddenly started to "feel" that wanton murder was the right thing to do, would he suddenly became a mass murderer in keeping with his philosophy of listening to his "gut instinct?"Next up, the utilitarians:
The utilitarians declare, from their study of the consequences of liberty as opposed to alternative systems, that liberty will lead more surely to widely approved goals: harmony, peace, prosperity, etc. Now no one disputes that relative consequences should be studied in assessing the merits or demerits of respective creeds. But there are many problems in confining ourselves to a utilitarian ethic. For one thing, utilitarianism assumes that we can weigh alternatives, and decide upon policies, on the basis of their good or bad consequences. But if it is legitimate to apply value judgments to the consequences of X, why is it not equally legitimate to apply such judgments to X itself? May there not be something about an act itself which, in its very nature, can be considered good or evil?Another problem with the utilitarian is that he will rarely adopt a principle as an absolute and consistent yardstick to apply to the varied concrete situations of the real world. He will only use a principle, at best, as a vague guideline or aspiration, as a tendency which he may choose to override at any time. This was the major defect of the nineteenth-century English Radicals, who had adopted the laissez-faire view of the eighteenth-century liberals but had substituted a supposedly "scientific" utilitarianism for the supposedly "mystical" concept of natural [p. 27] rights as the groundwork for that philosophy. Hence the nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberals came to use laissez-faire as a vague tendency rather than as an unblemished yardstick, and therefore increasingly and fatally compromised the libertarian creed. To say that a utilitarian cannot be "trusted" to maintain libertarian principle in every specific application may sound harsh, but it puts the case fairly. A notable contemporary example is the free-market economist Professor Milton Friedman who, like his classical economist forebears, holds to freedom as against State intervention as a general tendency, but in practice allows a myriad of damaging exceptions, exceptions which serve to vitiate the principle almost completely, notably in the fields of police and military affairs, education, taxation, welfare, "neighborhood effects," antitrust laws, and money and banking.
From my observation the vast majority of those involved in political debate today are utilitarians. Most debate centers around "what will happen if we enact this or that policy?" or "how can we best create more prosperity?" Again, there are problems with this viewpoint. Sure, the utilitarian libertarian may have concluded - based on some sort of collection of data - that individual liberty is the means to an "ideal" society. But what if the data changes?Just as with the "gut instinct" of the emotivist, the data could seemingly sway those relying solely on libertarian arguments. What if the data tells us that individual rights don't work out so well after all? Would the utilitarian begin to champion totalitarian policies if this were the case?We then have what I feel is the most important foundation for the philosophy of liberty: the concept of natural rights.
"Natural rights" is the cornerstone of a political philosophy which, in turn, is embedded in a greater structure of "natural law." Natural law theory rests on the insight that we live in a world of more than one — in fact, a vast number — of entities, and that each entity has distinct and specific properties, a distinct "nature," which can be investigated by man's reason, by his sense perception and mental faculties. Copper has a distinct nature and behaves in a certain way, and so do iron, salt, etc. The species man, therefore, has a specifiable nature, as does the world around him and the ways of interaction between them. To put it with undue brevity, the activity of each inorganic and organic entity is determined by its own nature and by the nature of the other entities with which it comes in contact. Specifically, while the behavior of plants and at least the lower animals is determined by their biological nature or perhaps by their "instincts," the nature of man is such that each individual person must, in order to act, choose his own ends and employ his own means in order to attain them. Possessing no automatic instincts, each man must learn about himself and the world, use his mind to select values, learn about cause and effect, and act purposively to maintain himself and advance his life. Since men can think, feel, evaluate, and act only as individuals, it becomes vitally necessary for each man's survival and prosperity that he be free to learn, choose, develop his faculties, and act upon his knowledge and values. This is the necessary path of human nature; to interfere with and cripple this process by using violence goes profoundly against what is necessary by man's nature for his life and prosperity. Violent interference with a man's learning and choices is therefore profoundly "antihuman"; it violates the natural law of man's needs.
I'm thrilled when anyone supports the ideas of liberty in general, or even just a specific libertarian policy. In a world where hardly anyone recognizes or understands individual rights, any small step in the direction of liberty should be seen as a positive. I will gladly ride on the Liberty Express with those who derive their philosophy for emotive or utilitarian reasons. But while riding along the way, I will be sure to attempt to emphasize the importance of natural rights; the one philosophical foundation for liberty which will consistently advocate for individual rights, regardless of any swings in emotion or data.I discussed how man can use reason to understand the concepts of natural rights in my interview with Shayne Wissler, author of REASON and LIBERTY: The Foundations of Civilization