My reply to mahall’s post in another thread…
Liberty student is right, you shouldn’t take it personally. Threads of this type often get a one star rating immediately after one certain member in particular comes online.
If all one cares about is winning arguments by any means necessary, and not about the truth of the position, or clarity regarding why you yourself want the social order to be a certain way, then I suppose it’s not a “versus scenario”. If one adopts such a sophistic approach, there aren’t any versus scenarios with regard to arguments. You could take this approach as far as you want to go. “Libertarianism, because of human utility! You don’t understand economics? Okay, libertarianism because the state violates natural rights! You’re religious? Okay, libertarianism, because the state violates God-given rights! You’re into logic? Okay, libertarianism because to advocate anything else would be a performative contradiction! You’re into evolution? Okay, libertarianism because it furthers the species! You’re into aliens? Okay, libertarianism because Xenu demands it!”
To me this approach is not only distasteful, but it is ultimately counterproductive, because it discredits us in the eyes of others. I think this eclectic approach to argumentation betrays a tendency to fetishize libertarianism, and the latter causes non-libertarians to dismiss us as a monomaniacal sect who has nothing to say to those who aren’t already “liberty lovers” at a gut level.
As I argue in this thread, I think even on an individual level, and even for the most gut-level liberty-lovers and state-haters among us, it is at bottom about human utility, and we have simply come to think of the property rights order that we perceive as associated with the greatest possible human prosperity as “just” and “righteous” (and even concocted rationalizations for why it is “objectively” so), because we simply prefer life to death, health to sickness, and prosperity to destitution both for ourselves and our fellow man, and that we therefore ardently want the legal/moral order that is harmonious with those preferences.
I think it is time we acquired clarity of thought (not to mention argumentative power) by recognizing that, and by dropping both the emotional rhetoric and the specious claims of moral absolutism.
And, the utilitarian and moral absolutist approaches do NOT always reach the same end anyway. In fact, generally they don’t. Yes, Rothbard’s moral theorizing conveniently came to a neo-Lockean formulation of “absolutely just” property rights that also happened to harmonize with the most beneficial formulation of property rights from a Misesian utilitarian perspective. I don’t think it is entirely a coincidence that this harmony occurred in the doctrine of an ethicist who also happened to be a master economist. But there are a lot of “libertarian philosophers” who know economics only superficially, so it is not surprising that their ethical theorizing often arrives at prescriptions for society that, if implemented, unbeknownst to them, would impoverish and starve millions of people. “But, hey,” they can always say in their defense, “it’s not about utility; it’s about doing whatever is simply most righteous/libertarian.” The anarcho-capitalist Rothbardian can object to them, saying that there are false inferences in their “rational ethic”, and that what they are calling freedom is actually slavery. But, because the dialogue is divorced from the common (and solid) utilitarian ground of the harmony of interests, such clashes of opposing ethical doctrines invariably devolve into vain logomachy and posturing by each side as being the “true libertarians”.