Libertarianism without natural rights?

Economics Political Theory
1

While I think the Misesian project avoids the problems with utilitarianism, I don’t think it by itself can provide a sufficient groundwork for libertarianism (i.e. a justification of the NAP). Hence I’m inclined to see the role of the Misesian project as a complement to the Rothbardian project.

Mises’ project is a value-free approach where the economist merely gives technical advice about which means are most suitable to achieving the ends people already have. In Mises’ words:

If the economist states the outcome of his investigation by saying that a is a bad measure, he does not pronounce a judgment of value. He merely says that from the point of view of those aiming at the goal p, the measure a is inappropriate.

But for the Misesian project to justify libertarianism depends crucially on the universal acceptance of the ends of peace and prosperity. Mises can advocate libertarianism to people who share these ends. But he cannot do so for people who don’t, e.g. nihilists, sociopaths, people with very high time preference. As Mises himself recognized:

We may, for instance, try to show a Buddhist that to act in conformity with the teachings of his creed results in effects which we consider disastrous. But we are silenced if he replies that these effects are in his opinion lesser evils or no evils at all compared to what would result from nonobservance of his rules of conduct.

Or as Rothbard pointed out, if people wanted unemployment, Mises would have to advise them to implement a minimum wage. Since Mises cannot criticize ultimate ends, he would have no choice but, e.g., to advise a nihilist to violate the NAP if that was the best means to achieving their ends. Hence I conclude that Mises’ value-free approach fails to justify the principled commitment to the NAP necessary for a libertarian society.

Now, Mises could take a different approach: abandon value-freedom and advocate libertarianism based on his own subjective preferences. This appears to be what Lilburne does here. But I don’t see how this can justify the NAP.

If nihilists go around promoting their subjective preference for aggression, and libertarians go around promoting their subjective preference for the NAP, how do we end up with libertarianism? If values really are subjective and arbitrary, then it doesn’t make sense to try and convince the nihilists that libertarian values are the right ones.

So it seems to me that, at best, the Misesian project can only provide a flimsy justification of libertarianism. As Rothbard put it: “Justice, not the weak reed of mere utility, must be the motivating force if liberty is to be attained.” Hence I continue to think that libertarianism without natural rights is not libertarianism at all.

2

P.S. Lilburne, what do you think of Long’s discussion of natural sympathies here (~22:00-25:00)?

3

Ethical egoism and individual rights rigorously proven here: http://mises.org/journals/jls/4_1/4_1_4.pdf

I wouldn’t say that that is “subjective.” I think both Hume and G.E. Moore (who had similar ethical positions) would agree that there is one objective set of morals. The problem is with discovering what those morals are. You should check out what Moore had to say.

4

Why justify the NAP? Let me ask you and everyone else something: did you have to be convinced of the NAP by argument, or did it strike you as eminently agreeable as soon as you understood what it actually meant? Did it take an intellectual argument to convince you, or just simple clarity? I don’t see that the major obstacle is to justify the NAP, but rather to alert people to such ideas or to even more effective ones as a way of showing them how the State conflicts with values they already hold.

And natural rights arguments are going to work on such people?

Who wants unemployment? And I thought you weren’t a minarchist - without a State who’s going to “implement” minimum wage on everyone else?

The nihilist wouldn’t need Mises’s theory to figure that out. What the nihilist could learn, however, is that certain other “non-libertarian” actions that he otherwise would have performed are not in his interests. Objective ethical prescriptions won’t help with that, as there are no necessary consequences for not following them.

Who exactly needs to have a principled commitment to the NAP for a libertarian society to work? Surely not…legislators!?

This is fine wordcraft. Notice the conspicuous word choice: “Justice” instead of “(objective) ethics,” although that was clearly what he meant. Substitute it back in and see how it sounds:

“Ethics, not the weak reed of mere utility, must be the motivating force if liberty is to be attained.”

It becomes nothing more than a bald assertion.

5

I’m more interested in the inter-play between human morality as it is than trying to derive a “correct” morality. As Mises, Rothbard and others have observed, the most striking aspect of humanity - indeed all life - is its tremendous diversity and variation. This diversity holds not only in means but in ends… we can only conclude from this that it is natural that there should be a variety of moral systems, some which are more liberal and others which are less so. The monk, for example, voluntarily joins a society which is austere and ascetic so that material “flourishing” cannot be presumed to be a universal end.

I think there is a huge opportunity for cooperation between Austrian economics and the relatively young field of evolutionary psychology. The methodology of evolutionary psychology is very similar to Misesian praxeology but it very satisfyingly builds on the foundation of our biology. Rather than trying to build metaphysical arguments to justify some set of moral rules on some “abstract” or “absolute” basis*, EP looks at what evolutionary purpose was served by human behaviors which we know are genetic (their criterion for teasing out behaviors with a genetic basis is to look for behaviors which are culturally universal. If there are no human cultures which do not have behavior X, then behavior X should be presumed to have a genetic basis).

Clayton -

*This is where natural rights/law arguments break down, IMO

6

Personally, I take a few ethical propositions as basic and don’t even try to justify them. If I can’t get someone to agree that “murder is wrong” and that “theft is wrong”, there is no common basis with which to convince each other and so argument would be a waste of time.

7

The further you stretch property rights and the NAP, the more (subjective) gray areas you find. I still subscribe to the bare basics of property rights, and think they would come to the forefront of free markets in law. The gray areas would be handled the same way all other subjective values are handled by the market.

8

LOL.

9

Good point. I’m glad I didn’t have to think with that one.

10

Aren’t you beyond good an evil and above that kind of petty sarcasm ?

11

Not when it makes a point about others ridiculing opportunities at intellectual discussion out of laziness & personal disdain for others differing opinions.

tl;dr version: :expressionless:

12

Common law formation is another “evolutionary” process that has great explanatory power for anarchist arguments. The nice thing about both of these approaches is they do not rely on ethics, nor on Rothbard, nor Mises, nor Austrian economics, nor the NAP, nor even free markets, nor even PDAs or any other AnCap theory of the Rothbardian of Friedmanite variety. The following essay, in particular, circumvents all of that to make the purest, most obvious argument for anarchy I have ever seen.

http://mises.org/journals/scholar/hasnas.pdf

13

Introducing a new category, “significance”, does not undo the circularity of Aristotle’s justification of the PNC (more often LNC but I will use the authors’ nomenclature), it just moves it back one level. We can define new categories as the conjunctions of truth and significance, C1 = True & Significant, C2 = True & Insignificant, C3 = False & Significant, C4 = False & Insignificant. We can treat C2 and C4 identically since, I assume, the authors of the article would consider distinguishing truth or falsity of insignificant speech to be pointless, leaving three categories, C1, C3 and C2/C4. By treating “significant” as roughly synonymous with “meaningful”, we arrive at the three-valued logic, True (C1), False (C3) and Meaningless (C2/C4). Philosophers have failed to demonstrate - without circularity - that PNC is necessary in 3-valued logic any more than it is in ordinary, 2-valued logic. The authors appear to be unaware of the regress argument.

To really illustrate the problem, consider Bob who rejects PNC and Alice who affirms it. Bob rejects the notion that a statement cannot be true and false together, that is, he holds that A & ~A. Alice sets about to prove to Bob that he is wrong on his own assumptions. When she has finished her proof, Bob adds one more step to her proof. Alice concluded PNC and since Bob holds A & ~A he performs the purely formal step of negating Alice’s conclusion… ~PNC. Alice has accomplished too much, she has succeeded in proving both her conclusion and its negation on Bob’s assumptions. The same holds if you introduce a third category of significance/meaningfulness/whatever.

In other words, arguing with someone who rejects PNC is futile but the futility of arguing with them does not demonstrate the necessity of PNC.

The authors’ entire argument breaks down on this point. They cannot distinguish between “circularity” and “vicious circularity”. The whole approach of trying to derive moral authority from a thing’s nature is stilted. Why should we expect that living creatures who evolved in this universe (which, at the smallest scales, behaves in logically bizarre ways) should have metaphysical natures from which we can derive morally imperative codes of behavior? I’ve always found it disturbing that Rothbard concludes in EoL that it is evil for a person to behave in a way which is contrary to their nature. This suggests that homosexuality, birth control and (heterosexual) anal sex, for example, are all evil, since it is manifest that human beings were not designed, by nature, to expend energy in copulation which cannot possibly result in pregnancy. You could counter that since humans behave this way, that evidences that it is, in fact, part of their nature. But then the whole concept of “nature” becomes meaningless because whatever humans do is their nature, so that, everything I do is my nature and is, therefore, moral.

I wholeheartedly agree with Rothbard’s moral approach to liberty… he argues persuasively that once the defenders of liberty cede the “moral high ground”, it is only a matter of time until tyranny emerges (he specifically applies this to the left and right in politics in the article I"m thinking of, can’t remember the name). Humans are moral beings. But we have to be clear on what that really means, in descriptive terms. Humans are subject to the social, psychological and physiological constraints that are imposed upon them by their biology. We behave the way we do because we are programmed by nature to do so. You wear clothes because you want to and your neighbors want you to. Why? Somewhere along our evolutionary history, wearing clothes became advantageous for survival and that behavior eventually became an ingrained part of human society. Today, we experience the feeling of shame that accompanies nakedness (for most of us) as a moral compulsion. It’s not only chilly to go without clothes, you will likely have feelings of guilt and shame, especially if someone begins to mock your nakedness. But what is really happening inside your head? Your mind has not divined that you have violated your nature as a human being and then triggered feelings of guilt and shame… no, your biology is simply responding in the way that it has evolved to respond. The same goes for all feelings of moral compulsion.

Since mankind spent the majority of his evolutionary history in a state of nature, we should expect that liberty is very conformable to his moral sensibility. In my opinion, this is a much more optimistic conclusion than can be reached via the natural rights approach. This means that moral arguments which begin from a foundation of human liberty should be expected to be powerfully persuasive. Rothbard’s emphasis on the moral case for liberty was right, even if his ultimate foundation, in my opinion, is intellectually dissatisfying.

Clayton -

14

Great analysis, Clayton. It dovetails nicely with the latter half of Adam Knott’s recent post that unfortunately got buried in the objective value thread, and with the three Hasnas essays I’ve been talking about recently.

15

I don’t get it, did I say something dumb?

16

Nope, just something someone disagrees with. Ridicule doesn’t require intelligence, you see.

17

You can’t claim rights exist up to a point, but when it gets complicated they cease to. Rights either exist or they do not. You can’t have them exist but fade out after a distance.

18

That wasn’t so hard now, was it?

(Chipping in some change beyond minor modding rebuke…)

What about if you’re in the wild & fighting off an endangered species? They have a right to exist (state or stateless society, via government or the market, endangered species would most likely have some sort of agreed upon protection in allotted areas, by those interested in conservation…), but so do you, but if you kill it, others may persecute you for being a murderer, when you were defending yourself in a life or death situation.

Most (excluding future possible evolutions & higher than average intelligence / complexity) animals do not have a conception of “rights” as humans are capable of, so are they exempt from rights being applicable?

Does not this binary “you either do not have to the right to exist or not” get complicated when one is in a situation to defends one’s right to live from another? Especially if this other is a human?

What if this human saw you as threat, acted accordingly, & you’re both in a situation where there is no mediation & talking doesn’t seem to work?

I would think the violation of ‘rights’ by another complicates the blanket idea that rights either exist or don’t, unless you rationalize murder is okay when defending rights, of which the concept of rights can be perceived to be subjective by others than do not agree or view rights as objective.

Self-defense is also a paradox, imo, in light of this binary view: ‘self-defense’ is a euphemism for “rationalized by social agreements a degree of violence in defense of an aggressor”. Violence is either violence or isn’t.

Doesn’t the concept of self-defense inherently complicate “rights either exist or don’t”?

Just some thoughts.

19

How do you reconcile these statements? Does or does not a common moral sensibility exist across cultures?

20

Hello, first time poster, long time reader/listener here. From what I gather from my limited experience in the Austrian school, it is based strictly on empirical observation. This seems to contradict objective morality, as every individual’s means and ends are distinct (at least somewhat). The assertion that there is an objective set of moral values represents a dictatorship of the majority, because the actual assertion is “these ends and means are correct, all others are incorrect”. Wouldn’t it be more consistent to say: “I hold these values which I believe to be correct” and test them on the market? The values found to be more appealing would spread, and those found to be less appealing would eventually dissolve, or be marginalized to the extent where they would stay out of your life. Of course, the ability to voluntarily secede from a society is the lynch-pin to this whole concept, but even that can’t be “enforced”, because the logic collapses in on itself at that point. So you end up with competing societies on the market, innovating toward maximizing individual human happiness, while the economic market competes to maximize an individual’s material welfare.

As an aside, I am in opposition to evolutionary psychology as a deterministic doctrine. If an individual is aware of the reasons (whether they be biological or societal) for his behavior, he has the free will to change or modify that behavior. Also, even if this were so, evolutionary psychology would not provide an basis for a universally (human species) acceptable morality, because each unique location on the planet would provide for a slightly differing set of evolved morality, so it is impossible to logically determine which is the “true” values set.