I believe I had. And I’ve “presented the counter” (see Block above piece), it’s actually linked too in the Johnson piece - except, it has more than two lines, and doesn’t get skipped over and goes on to lampoon Longs position.
“But if coercive laws have been taken off the table, what should libertarians say about other religious, philosophical, social, or cultural commitments that pursue their ends through non-coercive means, such as targeted moral agitation, mass education, artistic or literary propaganda, charity, mutual aid, public praise, ridicule, social ostracism, targeted boycotts, social investing, slow-downs and strikes in a particular shop, general strikes, or other forms of solidarity and coordinated action?”
- Libertarian qua libertarian, they have nothing to say. As a general ethicist, by all means.
No. This gives an outline really.
"Rasmussen and DenUyl are not satisfied. The view just canvassed confines ethics to rules that apply to everyone. Questions about the good life have no objective answers: here mere preferences reign supreme. In brief, the right is prior to the good:
“The general tendency has been to consider the good as essentially privatized and the right as universalized. The good. . .has come to be regarded as the object of one’s own interest, the object of one’s desires, or those things one regards as beneficial. It is said to stand in contrast to what one may do with any right. What one may do by right is what is allowed to, or demanded of, or required by, all agents equally and universally. . .there is an inevitable tendency in the distinction between the good and the right to deprecate the moral nature of the good to the enhancement of the right. In other words, what is impartial and universal tends to take precedence over goods, which are, almost by definition now, partial and particular.”(pp.22, 26)
They defend instead an Aristotelian view. The good for a person does not consist of his whims and desires, whatever they may be—far from it. Rather, each person has a natural end or function: his leading a flourishing life. This view, which they term perfectionism, “holds that eudaimonia [happiness or flourishing] is the ultimate good or value and that virtue ought to characterize how human beings conduct their lives.”(p.111)
Does not a problem at once threaten them? They deny that the good life reduces without remainder to preferences: the good is objective. Yet they are also favor a political system in which people are free to act as they please, so long as they do not initiate or threaten force or fraud. But are there not many actions that fall within these bounds that an objective ethics would condemn? Suppose that I spend most of my days drinking myself into a stupor. I threaten no one with force, but surely I am not living in accord with my Aristotelian natural end. I am doing what is objectively wrong: how then can I have a right to do it?
Many supporters of natural law view matters exactly as these questions suggest. There can be no right to violate the demands of morality. Thus, Heinrich Rommen, a distinguished historian of natural law, remarked that rights are: “the sphere of right that is ‘given’ with the nature of a person.”(p.64) Your rights are defined by your duties, and there cannot be a “right” to do what is wrong.
The authors answer with their key thesis: The mandates of personal ethics do not directly determine the nature of political arrangements. Liberalism is not “a ‘normative political philosophy’ in the usual sense. It is rather a political philosophy of metanorms. It seeks not to guide individual conduct in moral activity, but rather to regulate conduct so that conditions might be obtained where moral action can take place. To contrast liberalism directly with alternative ethical systems or values is, therefore, something of a category mistake.”(p.34)
The combination of an objective personal ethics with a political system of freedom is, then, logically consistent. But why should we adopt it? Why not, rather, enact a political system whose metanorms require that people conform to their objective end?
The authors’ version of ethics excludes this suggestion. They embrace “individualistic perfectionism.” There is no fixed pattern to which every individual, in his pursuit of eudaimonia, must conform. Rather, “the generic goods and virtues that constitute human flourishing only become actual, determinate, and valuable realities when they are given particular form by the choices of flesh-and-blood persons. The importance or value of these goods and virtues is rooted in factors that are unique to each person, for it is not the universal as such that is valuable. . .Human flourishing is not simply achieved and enjoyed by individuals, but it is individualized.”(pp.132-33)"
Yes - Nicomachean Ethics (p104, Penguin Classic) has a nice table of them. And how are you going - to go about applying these to the cases I mentioned?
I still don’t see how they are. Maybe this might help - “Could you provide an example of “justice” being obtained then, outside of “rights” / the NAP?”
Thickness from consequences—the effects of liberty
Finally, there may be social practices or outcomes that libertarians should (in some sense) be committed to opposing, even though they are not themselves coercive, because (1) background acts of government coercion are a causal precondition for them to be carried out or sustained over time; and (2) there are independent reasons for regarding them as social evils. If aggression is morally illegitimate, then libertarians are entitled not only to condemn it, but also to condemn the destructive results that flow from it—even if those results are, in some important sense, external to the actual coercion. Thus, for example, left libertarians such as Kevin Carson and Matt MacKenzie have argued forcefully for “libertarian” criticism of certain business practices—such as low-wage sweatshop labor—as exploitative.
You… have… got to be kidding me… (the brackets around “libertarian” is mine)
Providing jobs for the poor, is exploitative? rofl! [8-)] [N]
“For much of his career, Murray Rothbard endorsed a form of thin libertarian anarchism, arguing that libertarianism ( in , February 1981, p. 11).”
Didn’t know that.. thanks.
The gradualism that is pushed next is clueless. Again, this whole conception of essentially assuming the conclusion and is if anything - utopian in it’s own right.
“Sciabarra’s critique of Rothbardianism, and his later writing foreign policy, have emphasized the dangers of directly pursuing libertarian policies in contexts where libertarian individualism and anti-authoritarianism are not well-established in the local culture. All this strongly suggests that Sciabarra prefers a form of libertarian gradualism, and suspects that any form of immediatism depends on non-dialectical disregard for the cultural base necessary to sustain liberty.”
How is it even possible to get to the point where there would be pursuing / or an implementation of libertarian “policies” (freedom is actually the absence of public “policy”), without there being the proper underlying structure? i.e grundnorms?
"Second, it should be clear that I have not attempted to provide detailed justifications for the specific claims that I made on behalf of particular commitments"…
Haha! You can say that again. [:D]
It might be - hopefully more so than the other article. I’ll check it out in due time.