Chapter 29

INTRODUCTION

Libertarians are a minority. According to Pew Research, as of 2014, about 11 percent of Americans both identified as libertarian and knew what the term meant. Doing a cluster analysis on American political views, Pew found that only 5 percent of the sampled population held consistently libertarian views (Kiley 2014). To put that in perspective, libertarians in the United States are a political coalition that is somewhere between the proportion of Asians (4.7 percent) and the proportion of African-Americans (12.2 percent) in the total population. Amongst philosophers, the picture is roughly the same. According to a recent survey of philosophers, 9.9 percent identified themselves as libertarian (Bourget and Chalmers 2014). According to an older survey of members of the American Economics Association, about 8 percent of economists identify as supporters of free market principles (Klein and Stern 2007). So both amongst laypeople and people who have some expertise in philosophical or economic reasoning, the libertarian position is nowhere close to the dominant. While one can likely identify faults with the surveys, it’s unlikely that they are all off by an order of magnitude. Libertarians look like they are somewhere around 10 percent of the population, and advanced training in relevant disciplines doesn’t seem to move the needle much. That advanced training might help self-described libertarians become more consistent in their beliefs, but, at least on its face, it doesn’t seem to convert people toward or away from libertarianism.

That libertarian views are a minority does not tell us much about whether libertarianism is itself correct as a moral or political position. But it does speak to whether libertarianism is, at the present time, something that can by itself usefully guide our politics. I suggest it cannot. Importantly, that is not because libertarianism doesn’t have useful and important contributions to the political discourse but rather because around 90 percent of the population is disinclined to accept a more robustly libertarian social contract.

That said, there are key insights in libertarianism that argue in favor of a robust tolerance of a variety of disagreeing perspectives. This goes beyond a principle of non-aggression. In this piece, I am going to remain relatively agnostic on the correctness of libertarianism and instead focus on how to think about what libertarians ought to aim for politically, given that they are unlikely to convert enough people to libertarianism to be a majority position. What I aim to do here is to show two things. First, I argue that political arrangements can’t hang on a single moral conception, especially when it is contested; and second, that libertarian insights can help us think about the mechanism for generating a social contract. Interestingly, this mechanism depends on a great deal of underlying disagreement. This can help provide a self-interested motivation to tolerate political views that you think are wrongheaded.1

Let’s consider the first claim: that political arrangements ought to be independent of any given comprehensive doctrine. To put it another way, we can see two kinds of tasks for adherents to a comprehensive doctrine such as libertarianism. First, one could work to demonstrate its correctness as a moral theory. In light of deciding for oneself that the moral theory is correct, one can aim to live one’s life in accordance with its principles. Second, one can establish a politics that reconciles the moral view with the goal of living in relative harmony with others. In an all-libertarian state, the second task more or less collapses to the first. In a libertarian population, people convinced of the truth of libertarian principles wouldn’t need anything else to guide their social interactions. At best, a minimal state that adhered to libertarian principles would be established to deal with rule violations and common defense. When a political conception rests solely on a moral conception, then the task of politics becomes simply to ensure that the underlying moral theory is being followed and mechanisms are in place to support adherence to the moral code. However, in a population with more diverse views, the first and second tasks remain distinct. While libertarians may well be compelled by arguments in favor of its correctness, non-libertarians remain unconvinced. Therefore, the second task becomes much more important: developing a set of political rules that works to reconcile one’s moral commitments with the reality of others who do not share those commitments. This second task clearly separates from the first simply because the moral grounding of the political conception that was achievable in the homogeneous case isn’t possible in the diverse case. We cannot and should not legitimize political institutions and rules on grounds that most people do not accept. Such institutions would not be stable, because they would do no work to prevent people from violating rules that they take to be against their interests or against their conscience. For instance, an atheist would be uncompelled by religious restrictions on consuming pork products, because she would reject the premises of the religious justifications. Even if those restrictions came from the true religion, whose theology is correct, an atheist would remain uncompelled. Political institutions must rely on other grounding if they are to remain stable in a more diverse population.

I think that these two tasks represent a division of labor between moral philosophy and political philosophy and show how political philosophy remains essential, even if we were to somehow discover the correct account of morality. So long as other people sincerely disagreed about the correct moral theory, we would still need public rules that would allow all of us to live together. Unlike physical laws for which we can design decisive experiments, moral theory provides no such test that would be universally accepted as conclusive. This is in part because our disagreements run quite deep. Political philosophy is thus meant to provide the tools to manage this disagreement.

DISAGREEMENT RUNS DEEP

A standard way of resolving moral disagreements has been using veil of ignorance–style arguments.2 In Rawls’ formulation, parties behind the veil of ignorance do not know anything about themselves or their social position, including what generation they are, what race or sex they are, what their natural endowments are, or what their economic prospects are. While they know facts about the world and have a suitable understanding of economics and relevant academic knowledge to make informed decisions about questions that they confront in this situation, they don’t know about themselves, nor do they have any ability to calculate probabilities about their likely position. As such, when they are behind the veil of ignorance, they are blind to their own interests. Rawls and others have argued that agents behind the veil of ignorance will come to agree on moral or political principles because it is our conflicting interests that are the source of our disagreements. Once our interests are put aside, we will come to a consensus about principles of justice (or any other moral issues that we are trying to resolve). What this is meant to do for us, then, is that once we determine what parties behind the veil of ignorance would choose, we should ourselves feel bound by this choice. After all, the reasoners behind the veil of ignorance were able to strip away their self-interest and focus only on the morality of the situation.

As (Muldoon et al. 2014) argued, this line of reasoning is mistaken. While divergent interests are surely a significant source of disagreement between parties, we can disagree even if we don’t have conflicting interests. How is this the case? Very simply, the parties can see the world on different terms. In a formal economic model, we would represent this as different agents having different partition sets over state space—that is, agents would categorize things in the world differently from each other. The agents see different “stuff” in the world, and this can cause them to be responsive to different sources of evidence and see different things as problems. To put it in concrete terms, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls imagines the agents in the original position behind the thick veil of reason considering alternative principles of justice using primary goods as the relevant yardstick. Sen has argued that primary goods are inputs to well-being, not outputs, and so instead argues that parties should rely instead on capabilities as a measure, as they capture real choices that people can make. Libertarians might further object and ask for a measure of liberty to be used. Each of these approaches to measurement—primary goods, capabilities, and liberty—would shift the nature of the options under consideration and would change relative assessments. After all, not all distributions of primary goods would lead to the same capabilities sets, nor would an increase in liberty necessarily generate an increase in capabilities. So, the top-ranked option in terms of primary goods is unlikely to match the top-ranked option in terms of capabilities or the top-ranked option in terms of liberty. Note that none of these disagreements require self-interest. In fact, this disagreement isn’t even about which outcomes are best! It is about how to describe the outcomes in the first place. It is about what evidence we attend to when we are engaging in a moral evaluation. Nothing in a definition of rationality tells us which measure to use. But as we have seen, the measure does tell us what kind of evidence we ought to pay attention to. This in turn is going to inform how we value things. It’s hard to value liberty if you’re only measuring, say, material outcomes. You can’t value what you can’t see.

PERSPECTIVES

What we find, then, is that even if we put our interests aside, we can still have deep moral disagreements, and these are most likely to come about when we have different perspectives. If we all share a perspective (for instance, we all hold a perspective that categorizes moral and political arrangements in terms of rights protection, liberty, and coercion), then a veil of ignorance might work. Our particular interests can be set aside while we agree on principles for adjudicating any particular dispute. Alice and Bob might disagree in a contract dispute, but because of a shared perspective, behind the veil of ignorance, they can come to agree on principles that would allow a court to determine who was in the wrong. If we do not share a perspective—if Alice holds a more libertarian perspective and Carol is a luck egalitarian who carves up the world differently—simply setting aside their interests will not resolve their dispute. Carol isn’t going to be more attracted to libertarian principles behind the veil of ignorance, and Alice isn’t going to suddenly start comparing different tax regimes in terms of how well they balance material outcomes. At most, what a veil of ignorance will do for us is block attempts to opportunistically adopt whatever moral perspective suits our current interests. If Alice is deeply compelled by a property-rights argument while she holds most of the property but finds it unattractive when she lacks property, a veil of ignorance might help resolve that kind of opportunistic masking of one’s greed behind a moral principle. But it won’t resolve disputes between a committed libertarian and a committed utilitarian. They simply see different worlds.

In my recent book, Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance, I argue that perspectives are fundamental to an understanding of political disputes. As we’ve already seen, different perspectives will cause us to see the world in different ways. One might be tempted to say that yes, different perspectives will cause us to see the world differently, but that’s just because the wrong perspectives mis-describe the world. So, for instance, an egalitarian perspective might show us one way of categorizing states of affairs, but it would just be wrong in the same way that alchemy is the wrong way to think about chemistry. This would give us reason to reject other perspectives. Unfortunately, I think that this is incorrect. To see why, let’s step back from normative considerations and instead think about what we see when we go to the grocery store.

Alice, Bob, and Carol all go to the grocery store. When Alice looks around, she sees fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, and grains. She’s a vegetarian, so she knows to ignore meats and look at the rest. Bob is looking to lose a little weight and has gotten quite serious about his diet. When he looks at foods, he sees them in terms of fat content. He ignores high-fat foods and favors fat-free items. Carol is a painter and wants things for a still life. She’s interested in colors and textures. She wants a variety of complementary colors and textures and so goes after very different items. Each person in this example categorizes the same stuff in different ways. One would be hard-pressed to say that one of them was wrong. After all, it sure looks like the perspectives were ill-suited to the purposes that Alice, Bob, and Carol were trying to serve. Color and texture doesn’t really help Bob lose weight, and fat content doesn’t really speak to whether Carol would think it would contribute to a still life. What we can notice from this example is that—at the very least—different perspectives are going to be better or worse depending on the task at hand. There isn’t a single, dominant perspective that outperforms all others across all questions we might want to ask.3 We might find some obviously false perspectives, like the ones that categorize foods in terms of what Martians like to eat versus what mole people enjoy, that we might have good reason to try and weed out from the population. But if a segment of the population thinks in those terms, at some point, politics has to be responsive to them, albeit constrained by the views of everyone else.

Given this example, we might think that the answer would be to combine Alice, Bob, and Carol’s perspectives. We can think of color and texture and fat and meat content as distinctions in one overarching perspective. This might work until we start coming up with more considerations that people might have in the grocery store. Is the food halal? Kosher? Is it organic? Grown locally, or the product of fair trade? Does it have a lot of salt? Does it fit a paleo diet? And on and on. Eventually, the categorization scheme would get far too complex for us to reasonably handle cognitively. We only have so much brainpower, and we use perspectives to make a potentially very complex situation manageable.

Compared to the complexity of our social and political life, thinking about grocery-store items is trivial. And yet, even just trying to reason about the things one finds in the grocery store generates many different perspectives—different ways of seeing the stuff—that are going to describe things rather differently and are going to be good at answering very different kinds of questions. While one might have a pretty good handle on one’s needs at the grocery store, it’s far less clear that we all have a good handle on what we should be paying attention to in the social realm. Insofar as different perspectives track different kinds of distinctions we might draw and rely on different kinds of evidence, a multitude of perspectives can prove useful. With this idea in place, we can move on to the second task for this essay, which is to explore why we have self-interested reasons for a robust tolerance of other political perspectives.

PERSPECTIVES AND TOLERANCE

So, even if we are confident that our own perspective and our own values are the correct ones, we can start seeing reasons for having our political life governed by something other than whatever moral theory we take to be correct. First, we might be wrong about morality, and others might have it right. More interestingly, we might be right but only partially right. That is, a perspective such as one consonant with libertarianism might be getting at truly important features of our social world, but it could well be blind to other considerations that also matter. In some sense, this is trivially true in a morally diverse environment; given that it is the case that other people have adopted other perspectives to evaluate states of the world, that very social fact is part of what has to be navigated politically. What’s more, there is a non-trivial sense in which we have this interest. Doctrines such as egalitarianism, utilitarianism, and libertarianism intentionally limit the kinds of informational inputs that are considered.⁴ While this is advantageous for working out a clean and tractable theory, it’s almost certainly going to cause the theories to miss out on important considerations. Given that you can’t coerce people to take on your perspective, you are left needing to contend with how they see the world and how that shapes what they think is politically legitimate.

This is doubly true for minority positions such as libertarianism. Libertarians are very far from being in a position to impose their views through sheer numbers. Rather, they are much more vulnerable to having the views of others imposed on them unilaterally. A better approach for minority and majority positions alike is to find an approach to political life that leaves as much room as possible for differing political conceptions to work with each other without coercing anyone to abandon their perspectives. That is, we should all have reason to endorse a system that allows us to come up with, and revise, a social contract that respects the diversity of our underlying perspectives.

The core idea, then, is that when we face rather diverse social environments, we have both strong epistemic reasons and strong rational reasons to favor a social contract that aims to reconcile these differences in a way that allows parties from each perspective to endorse the contract on their own terms. In this way, tolerance for the views of others is not merely a concession to being unable to dominate them but is rather what enables us to make progress on our own terms. Perspectival diversity, then, isn’t merely a problem to be solved but also a resource that we can exploit for not only refining our own views but also for discovering the full set of nuances of the political sphere. Our challenge is to develop a social contract that is not merely responsive to people’s perspectives and values but also serves to provide a framework within which we can productively engage with each other in a broader social system of social cooperation.

Frequently, critiques of social contract theory center around the idea that the social contract was signed in some distant past, or it was signed by idealized agents in a thought experiment, and so its grip on us appears tenuous. In a similar vein, one might critique social contract theories for running afoul of a version of a central planner critique; given that social systems are incredibly complex, it is remarkably unlikely that an armchair theorist might develop an ideal set of social rules without potentially disastrous unintended consequences. Designing social rules is incredibly difficult. It seems unlikely that philosophers have any special talent for intuiting an optimal set.

I suggest a different approach to social contract theory, one in which contracts are up for revision. What I focus on, then, is not the content of a once-and-for-all contract but rather the process by which social contracts can be revised through time. This has a number of virtues, not least of which is that the contract can be sensitive to the makeup of the population and can be responsive to social and technological changes that might affect the kinds of tradeoffs that are enshrined in social contracts. So, rather than try and convince you of an ideal set of rules or institutions that regulate our social–political life, I present a mechanism by which we can discover better rules. As we will see, this bears an important resemblance to the discovery mechanism found in markets, though it is implemented a bit differently.

In Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World, I outline a three-stage revision process. The first stage is “the view from everywhere”—it is a test for cross-perspectival agreement over particular moral beliefs or social rules. This is a replacement for a veil of ignorance. Instead of eliminating interests, we compare whether positions can be justified across different perspectives or depend on a particular perspective. If there are such beliefs, they serve as fixed points that ground a bargaining stage, where fixed points are excluded from consideration, but all else is subject to tradeoffs. Representatives of different perspectives engage in a bargain over the sorts of rights that they wish to secure that do not yet enjoy more universal agreement. These two stages establish an updated social contract. The final stage is one of experiments in living within the boundaries established by the first two stages. That is, people try out different plans of life that are within the bounds allowed by the social contract. This experience with the revised social contract can help uncover areas where the rules have been a success and where they may fall short. For this reason, these three stages are iterated indefinitely. The final stage generates experience and evidence for the efficacy of the particular arrangement of social rules caused by the social contract. This is then fed back into the first stage, when the cycle iterates again. Rather than arguing for a contract that is fixed for all time, this account of social contract theory is more properly about an evolving contract. In this way, the social contract is meant to better reflect the perspectives and interests of the population that is subject to it and the kinds of problems and resources that are presently available.

Let’s step through each stage in a bit of detail.

The first stage is meant to simply determine whether there are conceptions of rules or rights that have cross-perspectival support. The core idea is that within-perspective support could simply be an artifact of the perspective itself—the biased information processing of any given perspective may lead adherents astray on any given issue, even if in general the perspective is helpful. Cross-validating beliefs between perspectives allows for a kind of robustness check. This can be understood as a version of the Condorcet jury theorem, where it operates on perspectives instead of individuals. True, or at least better, political beliefs are unlikely to be extremely fragile to differing views, whereas bad ideas are more likely to be vulnerable to diverse ways of reasoning. In this first stage, we just aim to find what kinds of robust political beliefs we hold and where we have very little agreement.

The second stage takes the output of the first as its input. Robust political beliefs are held as fixed points. Those areas of disagreement are subject to a bargaining process across perspectives. Contested rights in this process are priced in terms of the externalities they generate—so rights that infringe on other rights are more expensive to obtain. While all parties are treated as political equals and hold equivalent bargaining power, rights in this model do not have to be universal. Some groups can “pay” for sets of rights that they value without having to impose that cost on others who do not value those rights. In this way, everyone has an equal power to achieve the actual set of rights that they find valuable. Some of these will be universal, while others will be more limited.

The third stage explores the consequences of the contract generated by the first two stages. Individuals can explore their own plans of life as constrained by the social contract. The goal is to generate a more robust version of Mill’s experiments in living.5 As adherents of different perspectives explore very different ways of life, we come to find out more not just about how well the rules of the social contract function but also how well different perspectives perform—on their own terms. This is crucial information that we can then feed back into our revision mechanism. Some perspectives will prove themselves to be not very useful, whereas others will outperform expectations. Some portions of the social contract might work very well, while other portions may not. Perhaps we will discover new sources of conflict and new avenues of cooperation that cause us to rethink our initial commitments in light of new evidence. By allowing ourselves to learn about the nature of the problem of political arrangements, we can get better at arriving at solutions. A diversity of perspectives generates more opportunities for us to engage in more discovery.

DISCOVERY

One of the great virtues of the classical liberal tradition is its sensitivity to the deep epistemological challenges that face large societies. This is perhaps best embodied by Hayek and made explicit in two of his papers, “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and “Competition as a Discovery Procedure.” The power of both papers hinges on the idea that the world is complex, and individuals aren’t capable of knowing enough on their own to manage this complexity. In the first paper, Hayek focuses on the idea that an economic central planner can’t succeed in part because the central planner is attending to the wrong problem. The challenge isn’t allocating given resources to their best uses, because we don’t know—we can’t know—what all the resources are or the ends to which they could be put. Markets don’t merely allocate goods. Rather, markets create incentives for individuals to help bring disparate bits of information that might influence what goods are available, what uses they can be put to, and how important those uses might be. The price mechanism helps provide those incentives. Markets are important because they are discovery mechanisms. They help reveal to us complex facts about the world, all the while allowing us to participate in them without having to fully comprehend that complexity. Markets do what no central planner could because markets harness this incredible diversity of information and help to channel it for productive social purposes.

In the second paper, Hayek focused on the idea of market competition being vastly more interesting and important than standard models give it credit for. Competition isn’t merely pitting two strategies against each other, going after a given quantity of scarce goods. Competition is how we find out about the marketplace. Competition brings out new knowledge. The desire to outperform one’s rivals drives one to explore unknown terrain and, in the process, figure out which goods are scarce, how valuable they are, and how they might be used. Whereas Hayek in the first paper laid out the epistemological role that markets play, in this second paper, he develops the argument that competition in markets helps drive the discovery process. Finding new ways of reading a consumer market, or new ways of seeking productive efficiencies, or taking advantage of resources that are under-utilized allows individuals and firms to out-compete each other, but in doing so, these competitive strategies reveal more to us about the world.

The combined insight of these two papers is profound. Markets are engines of economic growth because they are engines of economic discovery. The market mechanism is fundamentally a tool of social epistemology. Its job is to solve a basic problem: It must enable cognitively limited beings such as ourselves to engage in increasingly sophisticated social cooperation to take advantage of a set of resources that we can’t yet fully describe to achieve ends we don’t yet know. Individual participants in markets do not need to have a sophisticated understanding of the broader social mechanism. They simply try and get more of what they want.

These insights are framed in terms of markets, but they are far more general than that. Our political life is at least as complex as our market life. None of us—and certainly no single perspective—has a full handle on the relevant information that would allow us to function like political central planners. None of us can design an optimal set of rules for living together. None of us can foresee the consequences of any given set of rules. This isn’t merely just because of unintended consequences, like if we set a minimum wage too high and it drove some people out of work. Rather, it’s because none of us—none of our perspectives—even pays attention to all the sorts of relevant evidence that may speak in favor of better sets of rules. No perspective captures it all.

Instead, we ought to rely on competition across a range of perspectives to bring out the kinds of data and evidence we need to begin to solve the political analogue to the allocation problem in markets. Namely, we need to discover the social contracts that will best suit us. None of us even has to present a full set of rules to achieve this end. Rather, just as in the market analogue, we can do this work by structuring our interactions with each other such that we are encouraging this kind of a discovery process. Each contribution to this effort will surely be partial, but a social mechanism can help us assemble these contributions into candidate sets of rules.

The social contract theory briefly presented here aims to do just that.

Libertarians are a minority. But libertarians have a tradition that deeply appreciates the complexity of social organization and the hubris of attempting to tame this complexity with an imposition of a priori rules. Just as central planners are going to fail in virtue of imposing their impoverished understanding on a complex world, so would a political philosophy that attempts to impose a single perspective on our complex political life. Taking these insights seriously militates toward a much more robust account of tolerance than we might have otherwise expected. Indeed, it goes beyond mere tolerance—to facilitate this political discovery process, we must embrace and encourage this diversity, as it increases the power of the discovery mechanism. Just as markets function best when they are thick rather than thin, the revision process I have outlined operates best when there are a broad range of competing moral and political perspectives.