Virtue People versus Freedom People

Freedom and Virtue: Friends or Enemies? | Brownstone Institute | Bruce Pardy:

November 26, 2023 - "There’s an elephant in the room, the speaker declared. He was right. I was at a gathering, as I often am, of people who aspire to rescue their countries from descending into woke, collectivist hell. But the attendees were not of one mind. Instead, there were two kinds of people in attendance. The elephant in the room was the tension between them.

"Across the West, Virtue People and Freedom People have been working together. At conferences, in think tanks, at school boards, on email lists, in living rooms, on X, and sometimes marching in the streets, they coalesce. These two groups constitute the rebel alliance against authoritarian woke globalism. But their political philosophies conflict.

"Virtue People believe that virtue is the most important thing. Tradition, faith, family, responsibility, dignity, patriotism, community, and spiritual or religious conviction are the pillars upon which the West must be built. Virtue People are often, but not always, people of faith, especially of the Christian variety. Laws, governments, and society, they believe, should promote the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.  

"Freedom People don’t share this view. They believe that freedom is the most important thing. Virtues, they believe, are for individuals to work out for themselves. The primary accomplishment of the West, they would say, is individual autonomy. The purpose of government is to secure individual rights to liberty. Freedom means the absence of coercion. You may decide your values, actions, and groups for yourself. Freedom means 'freedom from.' 

"Virtue People believe in freedom too, especially in this era of illiberal progressivism. But freedom means a different thing to them. Freedom is essential, they would say, but the decline of the West is due to an excessive emphasis on individuality. (If that makes perfect sense to you, you may be a Virtue Person. If it sounds like a contradiction, you are probably a Freedom Person.)

"Freedom, they would say, means the disciplining of desire, which requires limits. Freedom is the liberation to act responsibly, to be transcendent, and to flourish virtuously. We become free, they would say, to the extent that our will becomes coherent with objective Good. Freedom means 'freedom to.'  

"In the political sphere, these two kinds of freedom are incompatible. Freedom People expect their governments to keep the peace and protect the individual – and otherwise to not interfere. Virtue People expect their governments to promote the Good with laws and policies. Virtue People support laws that prohibit behavior that is, in their view, immoral, damaging to human flourishing, or inconsistent with common good. Assisted suicide, prostitution, divorce, pornography, even heresy, just to start, shall not be permitted. 

"To achieve their ends, Virtue People rely on force. At least, that’s what Freedom People would say. Virtue People use laws to achieve their ends, and laws depend on force. Every legal rule identifies a circumstance in which the state will bend the will of its citizens. Without the monopolistic violence of the state, laws cannot be enforced. Virtue People are willing to use that force to achieve their virtuous ends. Therefore, allege the Freedom People, they are willing to use force to have their way.  

"Freedom People are decadent. At least, that’s what Virtue People would say. If morality crimes do not exist and individuals are free to decide their own values, depravity ensues. Libertarians and libertines are cousins, Virtue People would declare. Excessive individualism causes indulgence, narcissism, and social decay.  

"But Freedom People can be virtuous too. They can embrace faith, family, and community. They can disapprove of behavior, such as prostitution, that Virtue People would ban. However, Freedom People make a distinction that Virtue People are unable or unwilling to make. Freedom People see two different questions where Virtue People see only one. How should people behave? How must they behave? For Freedom People, the first is philosophical and personal. The second is legal and coercive. The answer to the first does not answer the second. Freedom People do not impose their moral judgments on others. They will not have others impose upon them. 

|Paradoxically, Freedom People have faith that Virtue People lack. They have faith in spontaneous order. If we leave people alone, they say, things will turn out fine. Individual decisions will coalesce into peace and prosperity. Virtue People do not believe in spontaneous order. They want their hands on the wheel, so that they can manage people to virtuous ends. 

"Freedom People will not be managed. They believe that the West’s problem is too little liberty. Virtue People believe that the problem is too much. Freedom People oppose the administrative state. Virtue People embrace it if it directs people to proper ends. Neither will sign on to the other’s project. Although they cooperate to resist the tyranny of the woke, they are not likely to succeed unless they reconcile. 

"At the gathering, most people were Virtue People. The few Freedom People present slowly realized that they had attended a kind of church to which they did not belong. The Virtue People who filled the room, steadfast in their conviction that they knew best what is Right and Good, did not seem to be aware of them. Or for that matter, that they existed at all.

"Near the end, I spoke with an earnest, soft-spoken gentleman in horn-rimmed glasses. In his ideal world, the law would prohibit behavior that conflicted with the Good, as he perceived it. When I pointed out that some people in the room would oppose that enterprise with all their might, his mouth fell open and his eyes grew wide behind his thick lenses. That possibility had not occurred to him. Not everyone sees the elephant in the room."

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2024 Rand Debate | Virtue vs. Freedom (David Haskell & Bruce Pardy) | Augustine College | April 24, 2024:

Science and scepticism

Scepticism – the only intelligent option | The Conservative Woman - David Seedhouse:

January 29, 2021 - "Of the countless attacks on freedom of thought we have endured this past year, the concerted assault on scepticism by journalists and politicians is the most disturbing.... Hostility toward anyone who questions the scientific orthodoxy, even if they are scientists themselves, has become the norm. According to mainstream media, sceptics recklessly deny ‘irrefutable facts’ (Emily Maitlis, BBC Newsnight). They are ‘dangerous’ (Neil O’Brien, Tory MP for Harborough). They are the ‘anti-lockdown brigade’ (Piers Morgan) bent on sabotaging the sacrifices of others. According to the Guardian, which recently took wanton bias to a new low, sceptics are no better than a ‘robot zombie army’. 

"Whether they doubt government health policy, human-caused climate change, vaccine safety or news-media motives, sceptics are charged with disseminating ‘unwarranted doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus’ (Wikipedia). To their critics their motives are ... designed to ‘foment public distrust of official advice and encourage dangerous risk-taking’ (Guardian).....

"It is hard to explain how horribly distorted this outbreak of condemnation has become. Quite contrary to the name-blackening from people and organisations who really should know better, scepticism IS science. Scepticism is a thoughtful, open-minded approach to life. It does not deny truth, it seeks it. It categorically refuses to accept handed-down authority, no matter how powerful the authority and no matter how personally dangerous it might be to question its validity.... It is faith in the importance of thinking for oneself, of coming to one’s own conclusions about the evidence, as a free person.

• It looks as if the Earth is flat. But a sceptic needs to know if it really is. In the tenth century, Abū Rayḥān Al-Bīrūnī, a pioneering Muslim scientist, used the sun at noon, shadows, sticks and trigonometry to calculate the circumference of the Earth to within 200 miles.
• It looks as if the sun orbits the Earth. But a sceptic needs to know if it really does. Hoping to explain an increasing list of anomalies, ... Copernicus (1473-1543) postulated that if the sun is assumed to be at rest and Earth to be in motion, the remaining planets fall into an orderly relationship.... Consequently in 1616 the Catholic Church placed Copernicus’s case for a heliocentric universe, De Revolutionibus, on its index of banned books. 
• It looks as if the world is composed of solid, permanent objects. But a sceptic is driven to look beyond human senses, to question appearances. This is so fundamental to scientific investigation that Rene Descartes founded the entire scientific method on doubt, advocating a systematic process of scepticism about every belief.
• It looks as if ‘causation’ is as real as rock. It looks as if value-judgments are facts. But both David Hume and Sir Francis Bacon disproved the apparently obvious, advocating scepticism as a means of avoiding biases of perception and other human predispositions. 
• In school textbooks it looks as if scientists conduct experiments to verify their theories in perpetuity. But Sir Karl Popper showed how this assumption relies upon unprovable induction, arguing that open-minded scientists should embrace scepticism by trying to falsify rather than prove their theories.  

"Not only is scepticism the basis of all scientific exploration, it is the token of thoughtful human inquiry in general. In criminal trials, when buying a car, when interviewing job candidates, caveat emptor is the motto of the wise. We must establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, we must test drive, we must seek references – we cannot take matters at face value. Those who are currently turning their venom against scepticism not only show an astonishing lack of erudition, but they are not brave enough to question what they are told, preferring the refuge of conformity to the freedom of disruptive doubt.... 

"Experts disagree. Policies change repeatedly. Data are open to different interpretations. The number of children admitted to hospital for mental health reasons in the pandemic outstrips those with physical conditions. The government won’t say when restrictions will be lifted because it is unsure of their effectiveness, but at the same time it insists they work. It makes no sense. In the face of such a shambles, scepticism is the only intelligent option. 

"We need dissenting voices. We need sceptical data analysis. We need to question and question, and then question again. We need diversity, controversial ideas, insights, new possibilities – we need open, scientific, social and ethical debate. And when we act, we need to do so conservatively, never with such sweeping disdain for civil liberties.... We can no longer accept narrow judgments from a cabal of experts who refuse to engage in sceptical discussion."

Read more: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/scepticism-the-only-intelligent-option/

Lockdowns and libertarianism (1)

by George J. Dance

In October, just as in March, a wave of coronavirus swept through Europe, followed predictably by a new wave of media and public panic leading to lockdowns. One by one, like dominoes, democratic governments in Europe – Ireland, Czechia, Spain, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, and finally the UK –fell to the latter wave, with only a few  (notably Norway and Sweden)  managing to resist being swept under by it. 

Unlike March, though, when the voice of panic was all that one heard, this time some dissenting voices managed to make themselves heard as well. This time, even the mainstream media has had to take note of: 

an increasingly heated [public] debate between two unlikely groupings of scientists, columnists, campaigners and politicians.
On one side there are the lockdowners. They think the only hope of triumphing over Covid-19 is shutdowns to bring numbers of cases back under control. Pubs and restaurants may have to close and households once again may be told not to mix.
On the other are the libertarians. They say we cannot return to those days because it would trigger an economic collapse and allow thousands of untreated cases of cancer, heart ailments and other diseases to mount. Tens of thousands might die, they say. (stress added).

"Each side points to different nations that have had greater success than Britain in fighting Covid-19, albeit with very different policies," the news story continues. "Each has attracted its own set of cheerleaders, politicians and journalists, as well as scientists who have also adopted strong contrasting stances." Some of the scientists have even produced duelling manifestos: for the libertarians, the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which advocates for "allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally;" for the lockdowners the John Snow Memorandum, which calls that very idea "a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence." 

Some people dislike those terms. On the lockdowner side, for instance, economist Tyler Cowen insists that "the emphasis on lockdowns is a strawman," on the grounds that current U.S. lockdowns "are not severe," with relatively few activities on the prohibited list (though he quickly adds that "that list should be expanded"). On the libertarian side, epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta (a co-author of GBD) objects that her politics are Left-leaning, and that she disagrees with libertarians "about the distribution of wealth, about the importance of the Welfare State, about the need for publicly owned utilities and government investment in nationalised industries." 

Since Prof. Gupta has been vilified as a "right wing libertarian extremist" (and even a minion of Charles Koch), one must emphasize the point she is making. Many if not most lockdown opponents are not  libertarians on other issues, and philosophically many are not libertarians at all. (Perhaps 'Covid libertarians' would be a better term.) Still, the key recommendation of GBD – "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal" while "People who are more at risk may participate if they wish" – is the libertarian position on lockdowns, and its supporters (like it or not) are libertarians on this particular issue. 

Libertarians believe in individual human rights, which limit what any person or group (including a government) may do to a person. Though 'liberty' gets most of the attention, those human rights include rights to life, liberty, and property. Calling those 'rights' simply means that harming another's life (by killing, maiming, or raping), liberty (by enslaving or confining) or property (by taking or vandalizing) is a wrongful act that should be prohibited. 

Lockdowns involve various measures to restrict people's movements and actions: by preventing them crossing a city or state boundary, or travelling only a few miles, or even leaving their own homes; from using the public streets or sidewalks; from working or shopping, by closing businesses; and from meeting with small groups of people (in the extreme case, from meeting with any people). All of those measures are compulsory mandates, enforced by coercion  – by the police power. They violate rights to property (ask the bankrupt businessmen) and liberty (our normal rights to work, travel, shop, dine out, visit friends)  – and, as GBD emphasizes, they do not respect our right to life, either. Lockdowns kill.

Libertarians cannot reject lockdowns merely because they are coercive, though, because libertarians do not reject coercion per se. Almost all libertarians (pacifists being the major exception) would allow coercion to prevent people from violating others' rights; which justifies some use of police power in a pandemic. As libertarian philosophy professor Jeffrey Huemer (quoted by Amitai Etzioni in the National Interest) puts it, "“Preventing the spread of infectious disease is within the legitimate functions of the minimal state, which most libertarians accept.” 

Some libertarians try to argue in good faith from that position to lockdowns. A typical argument goes like something like this: 

1. Governments may use coercion to stop any person from violating another person's rights.
2. For person A to give another person B a potentially deadly disease is a violation of person B's right to life. 
3. Therefore, a government may use coercion to prevent person A from giving Covid-19 to person B.

The argument is sound. But it is not an argument for lockdowns. It is an argument for quarantining someone who is known to be (or at least can be reasonably suspected of) giving others Covid; that is, for quarantining the contagious. Quarantine is a power that can be misused; but as per the above argument a libertarian can accept that there is a police power to quarantine. Like all government powers, it should be used as a last resort, if consent cannot be procured, and the quarantined person should have full procedural rights (to testing and a medical examination, for instance). 

The argument's conclusion, though, cannot be stretched into an argument for 'quarantining' the entire 'non-essential' population, because most of that population is not contagious. As many as 90% of Americans have never had Covid-19. 60% of those who have had the disease no longer have it. And 90% of those who do test positive for it play virtually no role in spreading it. None of these people poses a danger to anyone's right to life. The comparative few who do pose a danger, on the other hand, can just as easily be among the 'essential,' still active in the community, as among the segregated 'non-essential.' As uses of the police power to quarantine, lockdowns are both overly broad – as they are used to coerce contagious and non-contagious, innocent and culpable, alike – and also not broad enough, as they fail to quarantine all the culpable. 

Another libertarian philosophy professor quoted by Etzioni, Dan Moller, argues that "What's weird about a pandemic is that our everyday behavior suddenly puts others at risk  – just showing up to work can have huge negative externalities. So libertarians see restrictions on individual liberty in a pandemic as akin to restrictions on pollution." It is instructive to examine the analogy. Governments can and will restrict a known polluter, if they have clear evidence that the company is polluting, and that the pollution is harming someone's health (and therefore violating that person's right to life). They have never claimed the power to shut down all the 'non-essential' businesses, on the grounds that some of them are polluting and they cannot tell which ones are and which ones are not. Yet that is the power being claimed to justify lockdowns.    

Etzioni also quotes the old libertarian chestnut, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins," variants of which he tells us were famously said by Abraham Lincoln, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (The above quote is Lincoln's version.) That is indeed a good libertarian statement, which draws the boundary between competing rights quite well. But, once again, it is not a statement that justifies lockdowns. The latter would be something like: 

In order to save noses, everyone must be handcuffed in the back so they cannot swing their fists (except, of course, when we think it is essential that you be allowed to swing your fist). What, you don't want to wear the handcuffs? Why do you want to give your Granny a bloody nose?

Now, that sounds like what a lockdowner would say. As for me, though, I'll stick with how Lincoln and Mill put it. 

Also read: Lockdowns and libertarianism (2)

The fallacies behind state Covid mandates

No ‘rule of six’, please, we’re British. We can make our own decisions | The Times - Jonathan Sumption:

September 13, 2020 - "The prime minister has declared that he will do 'whatever is necessary' to stop the spread of the coronavirus. One of the things that is necessary, apparently, is to stop us enjoying the company of our friends and family in numbers above six. There are at least three fallacies behind these bossy declarations. One is that the spread of an endemic virus is amenable to government control. The second is that legal coercion is a good way of doing it. The third is that stopping infections is all that matters, so that one does not have to count the human cost.

"If one thing has become clear over the past six months, it is that aggressive measures of social distancing make little difference in the long run. They buy time, but reduce deaths only if they last indefinitely. Even buying time comes at a heavy price in depression, mental illness and misery.... Spain took the most extreme and brutally enforced measures in Europe. Sweden had the mildest measures: no lockdown or school closures and only moderate measures of social distancing. Yet Spain now [i.e., September - gd] has the worst second spike on the Continent and Sweden none at all.

"There are many variables that affect the long-term progress of the disease, including the population’s state of health and age balance. But one thing that does not seem to affect it is government policy. The reason seems tolerably clear. People can spread Covid-19 before their symptoms appear — and even if they have no symptoms. So isolating known cases is always too late. Whatever distancing measures you take, short of shutting everyone indefinitely in a box and feeding them through a tube, the virus will still spread, but more slowly....

"Of all the ways of buying time, legal coercion is the most inefficient. Legal coercion is indiscriminate, whereas this virus discriminates. It attacks the old and clinically vulnerable. Across Europe and the UK, the upsurge of infections is heavily concentrated among healthy people under 50. 

"The increasingly absurd health secretary Matt Hancock gets cross about this being pointed out. But, with a handful of exceptions, the infected young will experience only mild symptoms or none. What matters is not infections but hospital admissions and deaths, which have increased relatively little, both here and in other European countries. This suggests that, while the young and healthy are getting on with their lives, the vulnerable are sheltering themselves. It is happening spontaneously.

"What is more, it is exactly what ought to be happening. People are making their own judgments, guided by their own vulnerabilities and their own tolerance of risk. The result is a far more discriminating approach than the government’s regulatory blunderbuss. Left to themselves, people can manage this virus better than Boris Johnson and Hancock because they can fine-tune their precautions to their own situation and that of the people around them. Taking the decisions out of their hands and imposing one-size-fits-all measures is despotic and ineffective....

"To justify their policies and command submission, ministers have to resort to fear, the classic tool of despotic regimes.... Will the public take it seriously?... Why should they? No one can respect laws made with no achievable objective or coherent plan. There is a limit to what people can be expected to put up with from a government that thinks hyperactivity is a substitute for thought, that seems incapable of matching the measures to the problem and has nothing but crocodile tears for the collateral damage to people’s lives."

Read more: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-rule-of-six-please-were-british-we-can-make-our-own-decisions-9j8zbh5nh

The ethics of social distancing

The Ethics of Social Distancing: A Libertarian Perspective | UNZ Review - Ilana Mercer:

April 23, 2020 - 'Having lived in both the developed and underdeveloped world, I have always associated social distancing with civility and civilization. Cultures that honor personal boundaries have always seemed better than cultures which don’t — more genteel, refined and respectful. Ditto people who keep a respectful distance: They have more merit than those who get in your face....

"In the absence of clinical therapies or a vaccine for coronavirus, the successful return to work rests, very plainly, on the willingness of the citizenry to cover up, keep clean and keep a distance. Why would anyone wish to infringe on another’s personal space, when the stakes are clearly so high? Insisting on unfettered freedom to come and go as one pleases, sans protection, comes at a grave cost to others — it could constitute aggression against innocent others.

"[T]he shuttering of private property by the State is an incontrovertible violation of private property rights. 'Without property rights,' wrote Ayn Rand, 'no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.'

"Even more fundamental, however, is that without dominion over one’s self — self-ownership — there can be no property rights. Rights to the avails of your labor originate in the right of self-ownership. If you don’t own yourself, you cannot own anything else, or produce anything, the avails of your labor and the products of your mind included. And if you are DEAD, DYING or INCAPACITATED — you own nothing....

"In libertarian theory, private property rights originate in that most important of all titles: The title in one’s own body. That body, that fount of life whence all rights originate, is the legitimate object of government protection in a pandemic. For, as I noted years ago, 'Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others — intentionally or unintentionally — falls perfectly within the purview of the night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory'....

"Against this background, the natural rights of economically stricken individuals to reopen their businesses are righteous; they stem not from a state-created right or regulation. Rather, the right of ownership is the very extension of the right to life. In order to survive, man must — and it is in his nature to — transform the resources around him by mixing his labor with them and making them his own. Man’s labor and property are extensions of himself. So, my countrymen are correct to protest the shuttering of their privately owned property, also their sole means of sustaining their lives.

"All the same, there is another, equally compelling side to the ethics of this emergency situation.... Each and every individual is or could be, inadvertently, harboring a weapon of mass destruction. Yes, a WMD — for how many men and women have died and will still die because of the inadvertent actions of the coronavirus-carrying Index Patients, during the 'seeding events'? Each one of us could be firing off deadly virus into a defenseless population, bereft of immunity. Each one of us could become armed and dangerous, or be felled by someone who is. In this case, individuals who willfully violate social distancing strictures can be viewed as willful aggressors against innocent others."

Read more: https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-ethics-of-social-distancing-a-libertarian-perspective/

Bleeding Heart Libertarians exsanguinated

The End | Bleeding Heart Libertarians - Matt Zwolinski:

June 1, 2020 - "Back in 2011, a group of academic philosophers started a blog called 'Bleeding Heart Libertarians.' The idea behind that blog was ... that you could be a libertarian who favored free markets and limited governments, and still care about the kind of things people on the left refer to as 'social justice' – relieving poverty, racial and sexual equality, immigrant rights, LBGTQ rights, and so on. Hence, the slogan of the blog, 'free markets and social justice'....

"Reconciling free markets and social justice seemed like an especially worthwhile project to undertake in 2011. Academic political philosophy was largely dominated by followers of John Rawls, for whom a commitment to social justice (of a particular sort) was paramount. And libertarianism remained a fringe and unfamiliar view within the academy – for most academic philosophers, it was a view that was born and died in 1974 with the publication of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But a critical mass of scholars were working out new ways of thinking about libertarian ideas; and many of us who were excited by the work of scholars like David Schmidtz, Gerald Gaus, and John Tomasi thought that there was a different style of libertarian thought beginning to crystallize. And we didn’t only want to publicize that; we wanted to encourage it, to help build and develop the research program associated with it.

"Moreover, if we sought to open mainstream Rawlsian political philosophy and theory to the influence of market-friendly classical liberalism, we also wanted to wanted to steer classical liberal scholarship toward taking egalitarian liberal ideas much more seriously than it often had.

"In a more minor way, there was a political background, too. The Cold War 'fusionism' of conservative and libertarian politics was put under considerable strain during the George W. Bush administration; the 2008 presidential candidacy of Ron Paul had reenergized a strain of libertarian politics that rejected neoconservatism but embraced a kind of nationalist, anti-immigrant paleoconservatism instead. Libertarians who didn’t feel comfortable entangled with either neoconservatives or paleoconservatives, those who took the 'liberalism' in 'classical liberalism' seriously, hadn’t quite found a public voice....

"Things have changed quite a bit in the last nine years, both in the realm of academic philosophy and that of real-world politics. Rawlsianism and its particular interpretation of social justice have receded in prominence. The variety of libertarian and classical liberal views within the academy has become better known, even by those who reject those views. And that variety is now a more firmly established fact among libertarian scholars and students themselves

"I like to think that this blog, or at least the people who write for it, have played some role in at least the second of those two developments. We set out with the aim of articulating a new and distinct vision of libertarianism. And – while there are certainly a great number of important details of that vision that have yet to be worked out – I think we have succeeded.  The project of establishing the intellectual space for bleeding-heart libertarian ideas has also more or less succeeded, giving way to the various different intellectual projects people are going to pursue in that space. In other words, we’ve said what we needed to say.

"For that reason, it’s time to bring Bleeding Heart Libertarians to a close. We’ll be keeping the archives open. But we won’t be posting anything new. At least not here. All of us are still actively writing, and many of us are writing on themes that are very much relevant to the Bleeding Heart Libertarian project. But we’ve said what we wanted to say here, and we think it’s best to put a period at the end of that sentence rather than an ellipsis."

Read more: https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2020/06/the-end/

The greatest interference with liberty in our history

Former Supreme Court judge LORD SUMPTION gives a withering critique of the Government's lockdown | The Mail on Sunday - Jonathan Sumption:

May 2, 2020 - "COVID-19 is not the greatest crisis in our history. It is not even the greatest public health crisis in our history. But the lockdown is without doubt the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history.... Even in wartime, we never confined the entire population to their homes, 24/7, if they did not have some excuse acceptable to a Minister.

"States have always tried to confine people known to be carrying dangerous infections. But we live in a new world in which, if we are ill, the State will try to cure us. From this, it is said to follow that the State can take control of our lives against our will even if we are healthy, lest we fall ill and need its services too much. Suddenly, it is our duty to save the NHS, not the other way round.

"It is now pointless to object to the imposition of the lockdown in the first place.... The question is how we get out of it. It is a pity that the Government did not ask itself that question when, in the blind panic following the delivery of Imperial College London's Professor Neil Ferguson's statistical projections, it legislated the lockdown on the hoof in a late-night press conference. They now find themselves trapped by their own decisions.

"Ministers have formulated five tests to be satisfied before the lockdown is lifted. What is wrong with these tests is that they are all about health and only about health.... They think that this will allow them to avoid criticism by sheltering behind the scientists. But that is just an evasion of political responsibility.... Ending the lockdown is a political decision, not a scientific one.  It boils down to a single question. Is it worth it? That depends only partly on the science. There are also moral judgments, constitutional values and economic consequences involved.

"First, the medical issue. I am not going to argue about Professor Ferguson's projections. They have caused some discomfort among reputable professionals. They are based on some rather arbitrary assumptions. And they leave out of the account important considerations, such as the adverse health consequences of the lockdown itself or the number of people who would have died anyway from underlying clinical conditions even without Covid-19....

"Second, we need to ask how many deaths we are prepared to accept in order to preserve other things that we value.... To say that life is priceless and nothing else counts is just empty rhetoric. People say it because it is emotionally comfortable and avoids awkward dilemmas. But they don't actually believe it. We went to war in 1939 because lives were worth losing for liberty. We allow cars on the roads because lives are worth losing for convenience. We travel by air although pollution kills. We tut-tut about it, but we willingly do it.

"Third question. What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends ... a crowded football match or a live concert ... a family celebration with children and grandchildren ...  companionship, an arm around one's back, laughter or tears shared at less than two metres. These things are not just optional extras. They are life itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as social beings. Of course death is permanent, whereas joy may be temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is....

"Fourth, there is the money question. People decry attempts to measure the mortality of Covid-19 against the economic cost of reducing it. But this too is rhetoric, and hypocritical rhetoric at that.... You and I and the editor of The Guardian and the driver of the No 9 bus and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the cashier at the supermarket all value and depend on money. Not just in the sense that it pays our wages or pensions.... A thriving economy, of the kind that we are now throwing away, is the source of our security and the foundation of our children's future. We would do well not to sneer at it. Poverty kills too. And when it does not kill, it maims, mentally, physically and socially.

"Last but not least, we have to ask ourselves what are the limits to the things that the State can legitimately do to people against their will in a liberal democracy. To say that there are no limits is the stuff of tyrants.... One of the more impressive observations of the Swedish epidemiologist Professor Johann Giesecke, in the interview in which he justified Sweden's refusal to lock its people down, was ... that there are some things that may work and that a totalitarian state like China can do. But a country like Sweden with its long liberal tradition cannot do them unless it wants to become like China.

"We, too, have to ask ourselves what kind of relationship we want with the State. Do we really want to be the kind of society where basic freedoms are conditional on the decisions of politicians in thrall to scientists and statisticians? Where human beings are just tools of public policy? A society in which the Government can confine most of the population without controversy is not one in which civilised people would want to live, regardless of their answers to these questions....

"Not everyone will agree, which is fair enough. These are difficult value judgments, on which one would not expect general agreement. The fundamental point is that these questions need to be confronted and publicly discussed by politicians without the kind of emotive evasions, propagandist slogans and generalised hype that have characterised their contribution so far."

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8281007/Former-Supreme-Court-judge-LORD-SUMPTION-gives-withering-critique-Governments-lockdown.html

The morality of cannabis

Morality of marijuana comes down to this: Let adults decide | Fresno Bee - Andrew Fiala:

January 24, 2020 - "Fresno may soon join the rest of California in making cannabis commercially available. So let’s reconsider the morality of marijuana.

"The basic argument for legalization ... is libertarian. The legalization of marijuana is part of a rising tide of libertarianism with regard to issues such as abortion, physician assisted suicide, pornography, and gay marriage. Libertarians allow adults to do whatever they want, as long as they are not harming others. Marijuana use can harm others: through second-hand smoke, driving under the influence, and ... Libertarians should want to find ways to minimize those harms. But for the most part libertarians want to leave people alone, even if this means allowing people to make their own mistakes.

"Paternalists disagree. Paternalists want to prevent people from harming themselves. They worry that people are not virtuous enough to choose well. They think people can be profoundly mistaken about what is good for them — and should be prevented from misusing their liberty.

"Libertarians reject this as nosy and intrusive. The libertarian argument has prevailed in California with regard to marijuana legalization. But the question still remains as to whether cannabis consumption is a wise use of freedom or a mistake. Said differently, is there anything wrong with getting high?...

"The Catholic Church teaches that recreational drug use is a 'grave offense' that 'inflicts very grave damage on human health and life.' This argument has been made in philosophical terms by Robert P. George and Patrick Lee, who argue that ... when people masturbate or get high, the body is used as an instrument to be manipulated in order to obtain pleasure. They say that masturbators and drug users express 'contempt' for their bodies. Hedonists see things differently. The hedonist’s goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This means that hedonists will want to avoid the downside of getting high.... But defenders of marijuana often argue that marijuana has less of a downside than alcohol.

"Lee and George allow alcohol use ... if used as a social lubricant to enhance social interactions. But there is a difference, they argue, between social drinking and getting drunk. Of course, ... marijuana is also a social drug. And there is a cannabis culture that includes Bob Marley, Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson. This reminds us that culture matters. Alcohol is the drug of choice for mainstream culture, which takes the consumption of beer and wine for granted. But marijuana is (or was until recently) counter cultural, a drug for Rastafarians, rappers and hippie cowboys. A cultural analysis of marijuana shows how competing views of the drug reflect our thinking about race, culture, and class.

"This cultural divide cuts into our thinking about consciousness.... Philosophers, scientists, lawyers, and mathematicians celebrate rational thought, logic, and problem-solving. Cultures and careers that value quick wit and critical thinking will tend to emphasize sobriety and what [Andrew] Weil calls 'straight' thinking. But artists and mystics view things differently.... For the artist or mystic, there is value in in the stoned mind. Instead of logic and calculation, mysticism values intuition, sensuality, and creative insight.

"These differences in culture, religion and consciousness run deep. That’s why the libertarian solution is best. We’re going to disagree about the morality of marijuana. But as long as harm to others can be minimized, adults should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they want to get stoned or stay straight."

Andrew Fiala is a professor of philosophy and director of The Ethics Center at Fresno State: fiala.andrew@gmail.com.

Read more: https://www.fresnobee.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/andrew-fiala/article239585358.html

Libertarianism and assassination

Today I published a new article on the ethics of the Soleimani assassination at Nolan Chart, "Libertarianism and Assassination." Here is the abstract:

The targeted assassination of guilty people  is ethically superior to war. The assassination-by-drone policy of the Trump regime is ethically bad for the same reason, and therefore morally wrong, and libertarians are right to condemn it.

Read it here:
Libertarianism and assassination
by George J. Dance
https://www.nolanchart.com/libertarianism-and-assassination

Frank Meyer's "fusionism"

Just Don’t Call it Fusionism - Ben Lewis, Austro-Libertarian Magazine:

August 15, 2019 - "Frank Meyer ... a prominent figure in postwar American conservatism, is best known for his attempted 'fusion' of traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism. Even today, Meyer’s name is nearly synonymous with 'fusionism.' But ... the term most commonly associated with Meyer was not his creation, but rather came as something of a pejorative from his colleague and critic, L. Brent Bozell.... Meyer ... disavowed the fusionist label, saying that he was not attempting to fuse two disparate elements together, but was simply attempting to show that 'although they are sometimes presented as mutually incompatible, [they] can in reality be united within a single broad conservative political theory, since they have their roots in a common tradition and are arrayed against a common enemy'....

"[F]ollowing World War II, conservatism was as much a gathering place of opposition to contemporary political and social trends as it was a coherent movement. Two strains of this opposition, however, quickly took form: libertarianism and traditionalism. The libertarians deplored the growth of the state and the collectivization of individuals that was so common in Progressive, socialist and totalitarian societies. The traditionalists, no less concerned about the growth of the state, lamented more the obliteration of traditional society and its methods of communicating enduring values. As these two lines of thought developed, their differences of emphasis led to a tension over which was the true conservatism and the true enemy of liberalism....

"It was this tension to which Meyer devoted much of his writing.... Can the traditionalist emphasis on the attributes of a healthy society – virtue, duty and a rootedness in tradition – be combined with political philosophy that emphasizes the freedom of the individual? For Meyer, the question was not can these emphases be combined, but how they can. His answer began with understanding the proper relationship of the individual to society.

"Meyer believed that 'society is not a real entity'....  What this statement means is not that society as a framework of interrelating individuals, associations, and institutions does not exist, but that it does not exist as an actual entity that can be considered in the same manner as an individual.... 'Society and the state were made for individual men,' he wrote, 'not men for them'....  To Meyer, society is comprised of and made for individuals. It owes its existence to them, and they are its end. All social activity is oriented, fundamentally, towards the individual. Echoing Ludwig von Mises, he concluded, 'Truth has meaning only for persons; beauty illumines the consciousness only of persons; virtue can be pursued only by persons'....

"Meyer was no less concerned about the development of personal and social virtue than were the traditionalists, but he believed that ... virtuous actions could not be truly virtuous if they were not freely chosen.... 'Men cannot be forced to be … virtuous. To a certain extent, it is true, they can be forced to act as though they were virtuous. But virtue is the fruit of well-used freedom. And no act to the degree that it is coerced can partake of virtue – or vice'....

"Meyer’s position on coercion and virtue appears mostly correct, although with some clarification. As Meyer said, it seems that all coercion can do is cause people to act virtuously, not to actually be virtuous.... But the mere appearance of virtue is not the aim of the good society, rather it is actual virtue instilled in the thoughts and voluntary behavior of men.... Whatever the case, even those who have historically accepted a role for the state in the enforcement of virtue must by now admit the truth of Meyer’s statement that, 'If the state is endowed with the power to enforce virtue, the men who hold that power will enforce their own concepts as virtuous'....

"[Murray] Rothbard placed Meyer squarely in the libertarian camp, pointing out that Meyer’s case for the necessity of voluntary choice in the pursuit of virtue not only didn’t clash with the libertarian prohibition of the initiation of force, but was perfectly compatible with it. To Rothbard, Meyer’s appreciation for community and tradition, for the necessary traits of a virtuous society, were not deviations from libertarianism, but were healthy components of the holistic worldview of a thinker who took both political theory and culture seriously.

"Meyer could, perhaps, have made his arguments more appealing to traditionalists by expounding how the moral order could enforce standards of virtue.... Even so, his case against the state performing this task [was] well-argued. In a modern political society, rife with centralization, there is nothing more dangerous to virtue than for its proper defenders to relinquish their duties to the state."

Read more: https://www.austrolibertarian.com/articles/just-dont-call-it-fusionism
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Prometheus Foundation promotes Objectivism

Prometheus Foundation for Advancing Objectivism: Founder’s Intent - The Objective Standard - Craig Biddle:

March 19, 2019 - "[T]he Prometheus Foundation (PF) [is], a nonprofit organization established by Carl Barney to provide funding for ventures that advance Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, scholarships for students who are pursuing careers that advance these ideas, and grants for proven Objectivist intellectuals to boost their productive output.

"I am honored to serve on the board of directors of PF, along with Carl Barney, Jim Brown, Lenny Esmond, David Hardy, Rony Miller, and C. Bradley Thompson. If you think that you or anyone you know might qualify for funding, visit Prometheus Foundation’s website for details and application guidelines....

"Here’s to Ayn Rand for developing a philosophy for living on earth! And here’s to Carl Barney for funding its advancement! —Craig Biddle

"Money is a great power because ... it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility.―Ayn Rand....

"The Prometheus Foundation (PF), in essence, is a store of 'productive energy.' It is money that the Founder/Donor accumulated during his working life and now wishes to use to help make the world a better place for people to flourish. The only substantive, enduring way to do this is by advancing rational philosophy and rational psychology. This means advancing Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and any psychology that integrates with it; such psychology would integrate with Objectivism, with Ayn Rand’s theory of emotions, and her work on epistemology and psycho-epistemology. PF exists solely for this purpose.

"Advancing Objectivism includes promoting Ayn Rand’s novels and nonfiction works, promoting Leonard Peikoff’s books and courses, creating courses on Objectivism, and creating organizations or undertaking projects that explicitly advance the philosophy.

"Every day, in many small ways, Objectivism is slowly changing the world. It is a long game. This is why, through the Objectivist Venture Fund (OVF), we want to invest in infrastructure (rather than one-off programs) that will endure. As of March 2019, examples of worthy recipients include the Ayn Rand Center in Europe, ARC Israel, the Ayn Rand Centre UK and centers in other countries, the Balkan Objectivist Center, the John Galt School, and The Objective Standard.... Carl B. Barney, Founder/Donor"

Read more: https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/2019/03/prometheus-foundation-for-advancing-objectivism-founders-intent/
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Is "tu quoque" really a logical fallacy?

by George J. Dance

"Tu quoque" is a Latin term that translates as "you too." It is the name of a line of argument that is considered a logical fallacy. Here is a standard explanation, from Wikipedia:

Tu quoque ... or the appeal to hypocrisy, is a fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s)... An example would be:

Peter: "Bill is guilty of defrauding the government out of tax dollars."
Bill: "How can you say that when you yourself have 20 outstanding parking tickets?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Wikipedia adds that tu quoque "is a fallacy because the moral character or actions of the opponent are generally irrelevant to the logic of the argument." It also calls it a "red herring"(a diversion) and an "ad hominem" (an attack not on the argument but on the person making the argument), but those two objections to it reduce to the first one: a statement can be a red herring or an ad hominem only if it is irrelevant to an argument.

So, then, a tu quoque is a fallacy only if it is irrelevant to an argument. A moral argument, though, is an argument about right and wrong (about what people ought to do and not do); and a person's actions (what he does and does not do) reflect his moral beliefs (what he believes people ought to do and not do). So: a tu quoque is not a fallacy in a moral argument.

Consider the above example. Peter's parking tickets are indeed irrelevant to whether Bill is withholding money from the government; but it is not irrelevant to whether Bill is doing something wrong. Peter is not just giving us the information that Bill is withholding money from the government. By his use of the terms "guilty" and "defrauding," he is relying on (or smuggling in) tacit moral premises to imply a few equally tacit conclusions:

1. It is morally wrong to commit fraud.
2. Withholding money from the government is fraud.
3. Bill is withholding money from the government.
4. Therefore, Bill is guilty of fraud.
5. Therefore, Bill should stop withholding money from the government; and
6. Therefore, the rest of us should think badly of Bill for withholding that money.

That is the argument that Bill is addressing. He is in fact challenging Peter's premises, with a similarly tacit argument.

1. By not paying his parking tickets, Peter is also withholding money from the government.
2. Therefore, if Peter believed his third premise were true, he would pay his parking tickets (by his first premise).
3. Therefore, Peter does not believe one of either his first or fourth premises. Peter's argument contains a false premise, by his own expressed belief.
4. Therefore, Peter's argument, by his own expressed belief, is invalid.

That puts the onus back on Peter. Moral rules are "universalizable," which is just a fancy term meaning that they are rules not about what Bill should do or not do, but about what people (ie, everyone) should do or not do. The principle of universalizability states that the moral rules that apply to one person apply to every other person, except where there is a good moral reason for treating them differently; equal treatment is the default.

In order to save his argument, Peter has to justify such a difference in treatment. He can argue either that not paying parking tickets is different from not paying taxes, or that different rules should apply to Peter from those that apply to Bill. On the other hand, by simply claiming a fallacy on Bill's part, Peter has to do nothing at all: he wins his point without having to make it; Bill loses to a bad argument, that Peter did not prove (or even properly make).

To repeat: tu quoque is not a fallacy in a moral argument; falsely labelling it as such is itself fallacios.

Limited government as framework for utopia

Why Robert Nozick was a libertarian | Big Think - Scotty Hendricks:

August 13, 2018 - "Robert Nozick ... was a philosopher at Harvard.... After the publication of his colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which brilliantly argues for social democracy, Nozick was inspired to use similar arguments to promote his political positions. Appearing three years later, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) was Nozick’s only political philosophy book.

"He begins by advancing a straightforward premise, 'Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)'.... Nozick’s idea of rights are protections against harm to us or our property. In this way they are negative rights; they assure us that other people won’t bother us and that we can claim compensation when they do, but they don’t obligate anybody else to do anything for us....

"Our having these rights means that it is wrong to hurt people or take their property for any reason unless they consent to such action, excepting when we are correcting for a previous violation of rights. Nozick argues that this premise leaves us with only one option when we’re deciding what kind of state is justified. He calls it a 'minimal state' or the 'night watchman state' and it is much, much, smaller than any functioning state is today.

"Nozick explains that the night watchman state is 'limited to the functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts, and so on.' There would also not be any taxes in this state, as that would be forcing people to hand over their property with or without their consent. It also would not be able to enact laws preventing people from making their own life choices or that force people to make ones that they don't want to make....

"Nozick ... asks how we can build a society that works for a very diverse group of people.... [H]is stance is that you can only build a 'meta-framework' that allows for a variety of people to pursue a variety of life plans. Because of this, the 'utopia' that Nozick alludes to in the title is not one but many.

"In the minimalist state, it will be possible for people to form utopian communities on their own without outside interference. Nozick claims that this is one of the greatest perks of a minimalist state, as it will allow people to choose communities that fit their lifestyle, create new ones, leave ones they don’t like, or avoid utopian dreams altogether without hassle.

"Such utopian communities could be puritanical, hedonist, communist, capitalist, dedicated to eating cheese, or whatever else people think will make them happy. The minimalist state only assures that nobody is forced into these living situations, that nobody is forced to pay for these communities other than the people living in them, that any contracts signed are adhered to, and that nobody tries to harm or defraud the members of such groups."

Read more: https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/why-robert-nozick-was-a-libertarian
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The Scotsman who discovered spontaneous order

Adam Ferguson and the Spontaneous Order of Society - Foundation for Economic Education - Richard M. Ebeling:

November 26, 2016 - "One of the most cherished misunderstandings, if not delusions, of the social engineer – the individual who would presume to attempt to remake society through conscious and planned design – is the confident belief that he (and those like him) can ever know enough to successfully remold mankind and human institutions. An appreciation of how limited is our individual knowledge and abilities to ... make a 'better world' through government regulation, control and central planning has been slow in fully developing ... [but] was a central hallmark of several of the members of the Scottish Enlightenment.

"A leading figure in this Scottish movement was Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), who for several years held a chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.... Ferguson is best known for his 1767 work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society ... [which] contains some of the clearest analyses of social institutions and their emergence and evolution as the spontaneous development of the interactions of multitudes of people over many generations, the results of which are unpredictable, yet often superior to any attempt to actually guide or direct social processes through time.

"Ferguson believed that the origin and nature of man in society had to be derived from historical investigation.... [M]an may be a willing, volitional and acting individual, but he is born into society in the form of families and clans, which then took on more complex and extended forms of human relationship and association over extended time. The formal institutions of society concerning rights and law emerged out of this more primitive human order precisely to delineate private property ownership and impose restraints on abusive political authority.

"Thus, Ferguson argued, society was not created by design to provide safety and security, but, instead, freedom and rights emerged and evolved out of more primitive forms of tribal and collective association as responses to considered injustices and abusive power....

“Like the winds, that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations of man.... Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what is termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments [institutions], which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design....

"Ferguson was insistent that however much we may now see and appreciate the logic and the benefits that have arisen through the evolution of society’s institutions to protect rights, secure property, enforce justice, and maintain the peace that fosters the environment that makes liberty and prosperity possible, the multitudes of human actions and interactions that brought this about were done by individuals giving no thought to how their specific goal-oriented activities would generate the complex order of modern society....

"Ronald Hamowy, an expert on Adam Ferguson who wrote his dissertation on Ferguson and his conception of spontaneous order under the supervision of F.A. Hayek  ... emphasized that Ferguson’s greatest concerns with commercial society came not from the development of the market order, itself, but from the intruding and intervening hand of government into the competitive system....

'In matters of particular profession, industry, and trade,’ wrote Ferguson, ‘the experienced practitioner is the master . . . When the refined politician would lend an active hand, he only multiples interruptions and grounds of complaint’....

"[T]o try to impose ... centrally engineered designs on society limits its potentials and possibilities to what a handful of finite and limited human minds can anticipate and imagine. Far better for all to have the individual liberty, and to respect the freedom of others, to use their knowledge as they see fit in the pursuit of their own personal happiness, so all may reap the benefits that come from the interactions of multitudes of minds the full outcomes of which that no one can successfully comprehend."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/adam-ferguson-and-the-spontaneous-order-of-society/

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The contractarian libertarian

Libertarianism and contractarianism - The Washington Post - John Thrasher, The Volokh Conspiracy:

September 20, 2017 - "Liberalism (in the classical sense) and its more austere cousin libertarianism, are fundamentally doctrines that put personal and political freedom at the heart of things ... typically understood as freedom from government and social interference so that one can exercise one’s freedom to live the life of one’s choosing. Equality is crucial in securing freedom insofar as we understand equality as equality of fundamental rights to non-interference....

"It is a commonplace to argue, as Thomas Nagel did in an early review of Robert Nozick’s epoch-making Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that the libertarian and classical liberal focus on rights is 'without foundations.' Although this criticism is fundamentally mistaken, it is an unsurprising allegation given the preferred intuitionistic method of many of the most important philosophical libertarians....

"I argue that libertarians and liberals should embrace a contractual method of justification.... The core rights that define the freedom and equality of members of a free society are or would be, on this view, the result of an agreement between rational individuals for the purpose of mutual benefit....

"[T]he state of nature and contractual consent are not accurate descriptions of the history of political organization. This criticism, however, misunderstands the basic idea behind social contract theory: to model how a genuinely voluntary and mutually beneficial society would be structured.... The social contract acts as a tool to evaluate existing and possible social rules and institutions.

"Contractual theory, pursued this way, aims to bring the mutually beneficial power of market exchange to social governance. But ... David Gauthier notes in Morals by Agreement, 'before Smith’s invisible hand can do its beneficent work, Hobbes’s war of every man against every man must first be exorcized' (85). Markets require a foundation in basic norms of trust and the assurance that one’s rights are secure. This requires, at least initially, credible enforcement and governance mechanisms. This governance can be achieved in any number of ways, however, not all of which require explicit political institutions.... Indeed, the long-term project of the libertarian contractarian should be to investigate how forms of genuine self-government can realize, in modern societies, the contractarian goals of voluntariness and mutual benefit....

""The contractual approach helps to solve two perennial problems in libertarian and liberal theory ... the foundational problem of whether to base libertarian conclusions on some deontological basis (e.g., natural rights) or to adopt a consequentialist justification [and] how to adjudicate between the anarchist and minimal government strands in libertarian thought....

"[T]he contractual approach preserves a focus on the consequences of political institutions that many find appealing in consequentialist or utilitarian theory....  Similarly, the contractual method, based on rational agreement, provides a justification for rights that doesn’t rely on controversial foundations. This, as I argue more fully in Social Contractarianism, makes the contractual approach uniquely attractive....

"I also argue that the contractual approach can dissolve another traditional dispute between classical liberals and libertarians; whether ... libertarians are really committed to anarchism.... The contractual libertarian can admit that there is no moral obligation or duty to obey the state, but that in a free and open society with institutions that can meet the contractual test, there are good reasons to endorse the laws and social norms of such a society....

"Agreement is the only basis of a free society. These agreements must be voluntary and reflect our perceived interests. A society built on this model would be as close to a truly voluntary society as we could ever hope."

Read more: http://gdspoliticalanimal.blogspot.ca/2017/10/libertarianism-and-contractarianism.html
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Rethinking the Lockean Proviso

Libertarian property rights and the Lockean sufficiency proviso - The Washington Post - Fabian Wendt, Volokh Conspiracy:

September 22, 2017 - "John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) contains a defense of private property that makes use of the idea of labor-mixing. In §27, Locke writes: ‘[…] for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.’ The ‘at least’ clause has become known as the ‘Lockean proviso’. It is usually understood as specifying a limit to labor-based acquisition of private property.

"Since libertarians care a lot about private property and its justification, the Lockean proviso has been an important tenet in libertarian theories of justice....  Right-libertarians either reject the Lockean proviso or endorse very weak interpretations of it, while left-libertarians endorse some egalitarian interpretation of the Lockean proviso (which allows appropriation until one has one’s equal share of natural resources or as long as the appropriation is compatible with equality of opportunity for welfare).

"In between right- and left-libertarianism, there is room for moderate interpretations of the proviso, and in particular for a sufficientarian interpretation, a sufficiency proviso. It is remarkable that this option has rarely been defended. The resulting theory of justice can be called ‘moderate libertarianism’.... [M]oderate libertarianism has advantages over both left- and right-libertarianism because it better coheres with the most plausible rationale for endorsing a libertarian theory of justice in the first place.

"What is this rationale for endorsing a libertarian theory of justice? It starts with the rather trivial fact that persons are purposive beings. They have the capacity to pursue all kinds of projects. Almost all projects require external resources, and they require being able to count on one’s resources. For that reason, persons as project-pursuers need the opportunity to acquire private property in external resources in one way or another. Following Eric Mack, one can take this to establish a ‘natural right to the practice of private property’. Together with the idea of self-ownership, this natural right can be regarded as the core of a libertarian theory of justice. Note that the project pursuit rationale for libertarianism does not rely on the moral force of Lockean labor-mixing. Rather, private property as a practice is justified as being responsive to persons as project pursuers....

"[I]f one embraces a libertarian theory of justice due to the project pursuit rationale, then one should also embrace a sufficientarian proviso. The basic idea is simple: Without sufficient resources, people are unable to live their lives as project pursuers. Because this is so, a libertarian who advances a libertarian theory of justice because s/he cares about people as project pursuers must also care about everyone actually having sufficient resources for living a life as a project-pursuer. This is why some sort of sufficientarian proviso should be incorporated into a libertarian theory of justice....

"First of all, my sufficiency proviso does not apply to specific acts of appropriation, but to the practice of private property as a whole. The practice of private property is justified because private property is necessary for living as a project pursuer, but it can only be justified under condition that it actually enables everyone to live as a project pursuer.

"Second, the sufficiency proviso does not unconditionally require us to bring everyone above the sufficiency threshold. The proviso only prescribes that the practice of private property should be designed in a way that makes sure that everyone has sufficient resources to live as a project pursuer, if this is possible without undermining the point of having a practice of private property in the first place."

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/22/libertarian-property-rights-and-lockes-sufficiency-proviso/?utm_term=.47439424a2b7
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The morality of rule-breaking

Rule-Breaking is Necessary and Moral - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world - David Kelley, Atlas Society:

September 3, 2017 - "By 'rules' I mean self-contained prescriptions about concrete actions or situations, telling you what to do or how to do it. Fasten your seat belt. Don't smoke in elevators. Don't have sex on the first date. Don't drive over the speed limit. Don't hit below the belt. For many rules, there is a rationale provided by some broader principle. But when rules take the place of principles, as is happening more and more often today,... don't let them get in your way....

"Large regions of social life that ought to be governed – and to a large extent used to be governed – by principles of courtesy, justice, and mutual respect have now been bureaucratized by rules. Movie theaters find it necessary to inform their patrons that talking during the movie is forbidden. Interactions between men and women in the workplace are now regulated by sexual harassment rules that attempt to replace the principle of respect and the exercise of judgment....

"Because they are so concrete, no set of rules could possibly cover every situation and action to which the corresponding principle applies. This defect is particularly serious in ethics, the field that provides the broadest and most fundamental level of guidance for human action.

"The advantage of principles is the advantage of concepts: They unite an open-ended number of particular cases under a single abstraction. Of course we pay a price for this ... one has to apply a principle to a particular case by the exercise of judgment, taking account of the specific facts about the context.... But this points to a second defect of rules....

"Rules are formulated for specific contexts, but they never fully specify the nature or limitations of that context. As a result, rules invariably have exceptions and they often conflict with each other. Someone trying to follow the rules without the benefit of broader principles will have no way to determine when he is faced with an exception, or how to resolve a conflict.... The exercise of judgment cannot be eliminated from human life, and the attempt to do so by erecting a network of rules has destructive consequences in public as well as private affairs.

"There is a final defect that rules have in virtue of their concreteness. It is the most serious defect of all, and ... most pronounced in the realm of ethics: Unless rules are anchored in principles, they cannot be rationally justified.... They can be accepted only on faith or authority – i.e., as arbitrary edicts....

"In social contexts, rules laid down by an authority are sometimes necessary to prevent conflicts among people.... But even in this context, rules have all the defects we discussed: they cannot cover every situation, they have exceptions, and if they are detached from rational principles they are an arbitrary expression of will.... Rules that are arbitrary or issued chiefly as a means of asserting authority invite rule-breaking by those independent enough to bridle at subjection to another's will....

"We do need objective standards. But objectivity requires principles, not rules. The choice is to be principled, acting on one's own understanding of reality, or to be ruled – by an explicit authority or by the cramped and encrusted dictates of tradition. For anyone who values his own life and his own autonomy, that's an easy choice."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/rule-breaking-is-necessary-and-moral/?utm_medium=push&utm_source=push_notification
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Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism published

The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism - The Washington Post - Ilya Somin, The Volokh Conspiracy:

August 29, 2017 - "The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism  (edited by Jason Brennan, Bas van der Vossen, and David Schmidtz), has just been published. This book is the most wide-ranging analysis of libertarianism, its strengths and weaknesses, and its applications to a wide range of political issues, to be published in a long time.

"In addition to the editors, contributors include a wide range of prominent libertarian scholars and critics of libertarianism, including Peter Boettke, Geoffrey Brennan, Sarah Conley, Jessica Flanigan, Samuel Freeman, Gerald Gaus,  Michael Huemer, Peter Jaworski,  Anna Stilz, Fernando R. Tesón, Kevin Vallier, and others....

"Here is the publisher’s summary of the book:

Libertarians often bill their theory as an alternative to both the traditional Left and Right. The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism helps readers fully examine this alternative without preaching it to them, exploring the contours of libertarian (sometimes also called classical liberal) thinking on justice, institutions, interpersonal ethics, government, and political economy. The 31 chapters – all written specifically for this volume – are organized into five parts. Part I asks, what should libertarianism learn from other theories of justice, and what should defenders of other theories of justice learn from libertarianism? Part II asks, what are some of the deepest problems facing libertarian theories? Part III asks, what is the right way to think about property rights and the market? Part IV asks, how should we think about the state? Finally, part V asks, how well (or badly) can libertarianism deal with some of the major policy challenges of our day, such as immigration, trade, religion in politics, and paternalism in a free market. Among the Handbook’s chapters are those from critics who write about what they believe libertarians get right as well as others from leading libertarian theorists who identify what they think libertarians get wrong. As a whole, the Handbook provides a comprehensive, clear-eyed look at what libertarianism has been and could be, and why it matters.

"Sadly, the price [$171. on Amazon - gd] may well be too high ... to buy the book ... for anyone but libraries, the very wealthy, and academics with expense accounts. But if you’re at all interested in the subject, you should definitely at least take a look at it and check out some of the chapters."

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/08/29/the-routledge-handbook-of-libertarianism/?utm_term=.ef6fc0504a5e
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