Introduction: Respecting and Caring

What is libertarianism? A philosophy book usually starts with definitions. But ­libertarianism refers to a body of related views on politics, justice, and economics. Libertarianism has the integrity of a neighborhood rather than a house. Asking what is libertarianism is more like asking what distinguishes Georgetown from Foggy Bottom than asking how the White House fits together.

There are such things as libertarian conclusions. By contrast, there seems to be no comparable sense in which there are libertarian premises, except insofar as a conclusion can be packaged as a premise. To us, this point—that there are libertarian conclusions but not libertarian premises—seems obvious, but it also seems to be minority view. It seems to be a respected way of passing the time in philosophy to argue that so-called “libertarian premises” can be jiggled and tweaked until they appear to entail non-libertarian conclusions. No one who argues that way, we would conjecture, has seriously claimed to be a libertarian while so arguing. If they did claim to be a libertarian, they would be treated as making a joke or perhaps as not knowing what the word really means.

Each of us has been told more than once that we’re not real libertarians. We can’t say we’ve lost any sleep over worrying whether it’s true. Real libertarians, we hear from our non-libertarian academic colleagues, dogmatically assume that people are robust self-owners and then dogmatically take that premise to its logical implications, biting whatever bullets come with it. We can’t say we’re attracted to that kind of philosophy, and we don’t see any of our libertarian colleagues in the academy doing this kind of work. But the fact is that friends and foes of the view want to simplify the view; friends to make it easy to defend, foes to make it easy to attack.

Caveats aside, here’s a workable characterization of libertarianism. Libertarians conclude respect for individual liberty is the central requirement of justice. Libertarians advocate a free and open society of cooperation, tolerance, and mutual respect. They conclude each individual should be granted a wide sphere of personal and economic freedom to decide for herself how she will live. They conclude that healthy relationships and true ­communities are based on consent. They conclude each person possesses an inviolability, founded on justice, that forbids others from sacrificing them to achieve greater social stability, economic efficiency, or desirable cultural ends. And they conclude that the strength of this inviolability does not depend on one’s social or economic place in society.

Libertarians also typically believe that, in general if not always, granting everyone a wide scope of personal and economic liberty has good consequences, while restrictions on liberty have bad consequences. Libertarians argue that free societies, compared to relatively less-free societies, tend to produce more wealth, happiness, prosperity, peace, good character, scientific knowledge, culture and the arts, and generalized trust. Libertarians do not deny that free societies encounter problems. They accept that markets and civil society sometimes fail. They do tend to be skeptical about the actual empirical tendency of interventionist government to make things better. They worry that the power we give to agents of government for the purpose of saving us will instead be used for whatever purposes that led those agents to seek the power that we gave them.

To a contemporary philosopher or student of philosophy, these sound like different sets of arguments or reasons. They would call the first set deontological and the second set consequentialist. Deontological arguments for libertarianism try to establish that libertarian institutions are intrinsically just, while consequentialist arguments try to establish that such institutions are useful for generating good outcomes.

Early classical liberals such as Adam Smith or John Locke were not enamored of, and not quite aware of, the deontology-versus-consequentialism distinction. They made both sets of arguments with no apparent worry about any sort of conflict.

By the twentieth century, philosophers came to believe that these ways of thinking were deeply at odds. Not surprisingly, and perhaps as a result, we saw a split in libertarian thought. Libertarian economists and social scientists tended to emphasize the consequences of market. For instance, Milton Friedman and other economists in the Chicago School pushed the idea that markets, and civil society more broadly, work better than most people think. James Buchanan and other economists in the Virginia school emphasized the apparently revolutionary ideas that we should judge government by how it in fact performs rather than how it ought to perform, and that we should not pretend that government agents are angels rather than people. For them, the argument was as follows: Markets fail. So do governments. But, generally if not always, markets fail less badly.

In contrast, libertarian philosophers tended to argue that in order to respect others as members of the moral community and as ends in themselves, we owe them an extensive sphere of personal liberty. They argued that we cannot treat individuals as tools to be exploited and discarded so as to promote the good of others or society as a whole.

In footnotes here and there, the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick hinted that he thinks it’s important that markets work well. Nevertheless, his main style of argument was to say to those on the left, “Your argument for regulating the market applies equally well as an argument for regulating friendship, but you think it only ‘works’ as an argument for state control of the economy and not state control of friendship. Why? Do you have a principled, non-question-begging reason to distinguish the two?” For whatever reason, Nozick was read as saying that justice demands libertarianism though the sky falls and though it would “starve or humiliate ten percent of [Nozick’s] fellow citizens” (Barry 1975, p. 332). For a while, academics interested in Nozick seemed to take the bait; they thought their job really was to show that the bitter pill was worth swallowing, never mind that Nozick never meant that.

Contemporary libertarian thought has more in common with Adam Smith’s classical liberalism than what we see in Murray Rothbard or Nozick. Adam Smith, David Hume, and other early classical liberals saw themselves as philosophers studying the humane sciences, which encompassed and integrated the fields we would now call philosophy, economics, political science, and sociology. Interestingly, the majority of the libertarian scholars we invited to participate in this volume would call themselves specialists in politics, philosophy, and economics or PPE. Adam Smith famously began the Wealth of Nations by extolling the division of labor, but contemporary libertarian scholars seem to think that the division of intellectual labor—in particular, dividing the questions of what’s just from the question of what works—has gone too far. It is as if we said, “The job of philosophy is to ponder how unfair it is that some people have green lights and some people have red lights. But to really focus on the deep theoretical, conceptual, ideal theory issues, we have to set aside practical problems like how to manage traffic.”

Perhaps everyone now agrees that consequences matter. Institutions are more like hammers than they are like people. We value hammers for what they help us to do. If a hammer fails to do its job, or if an institution (such as private property, markets, or democracy) fails to help us live together in peace and prosperity, it’s time to look for a better tool. Good institutions are good because of what they help us to do, not because of what they symbolize or who made them.

Still, knowing that we should care about consequences doesn’t tell us exactly how to care about them. It’s an easy mistake to think that if some outcome is required by justice, it follows, for that reason alone, that it is government’s job to make the outcome happen through direct means or to guarantee that it occurs. For instance, if one thinks that a hallmark of a good society is that it produces high culture, one might conclude that government ought to subsidize the arts.

Consider: Karl Marx said the problem with liberal society is that only guarantees “formal liberty.” In a spirit of liberal equity, it guarantees to both the homeless person and the billionaire that no one will steal any yachts or mansions they happen to have. But, Marx said, surely what matters in the first place is that people actually have stuff. It’s only of secondary importance that they feel secure that their neighbors and their government won’t confiscate their stuff. Real freedom is a matter of what workers can do, not what others can’t do to them.

Marx is onto something. Still, libertarians (or, really, anyone familiar with standard economics) have a response: that “real freedom” is found in commercial society and almost nowhere else. That’s not an accident. The resources needed for people to enjoy such freedom need producing. And production happens only when workers and employers alike are secure in their rights.

Contemporary left-liberals sometimes take their cue from Marx. They aren’t by any means Marxists, but there’s an expressed desire to “fix” classical liberalism so as to insulate it from Marx’s critique. Left-liberals sometimes say, following Marx, that what justifies social institutions is that they promote most people’s welfare. They then conclude that this implies that government ought to guarantee that people achieve a certain level of welfare.

Do we want government to issue legal guarantees that people will achieve a certain level of welfare? We don’t answer that question by stressing that human welfare is important. Rather, the answer depends on what actually happens when government issues those guarantees and tries to fulfill them. That depends on how competently, efficiently, and reliably government can fulfill those guarantees compared to all the alternative means of generating the same results. It thus also depends on how people react to the guarantees. There is a difference between guaranteeing in the sense of rendering something inevitable (as when an economist says that capping the price of gas at $1/gallon right now would guarantee a shortage) versus guaranteeing as expressing a firm commitment to achieve a goal (as when the Bush administration guaranteed no child would be left behind).

In contrast, libertarians and classical liberals infer from general observation that most social goals are best pursued indirectly, in particular, through spontaneous orders (Hayek 1960; Schmidtz and Brennan 2010). A commercial market is a paradigm of a spontaneous order. To produce even a lowly pencil requires mobilizing a massive complex system of actors: foresters, miners, sailors, metallurgists, chemists, gluers, accountants, and more. The market mobilizes the army of people who make the pencil, but not one plays the role of general. The cooperative system that produces pencils is a product of human action but not of human design.

Oddly, one of the best defenders of these ideas was the early John Rawls. Rawls asks us to consider the point of a game, such as baseball. We want the game to be fun and exciting. But it doesn’t follow, though we want the game to be fun and exciting, that the umpires or players should “aim” to make the game fun. Umpires on the field are not supposed to judge individual moves or plays on the field with goal of maximizing fun. If they did that, it would mess up the game—the game would not end up being much fun. Part of what produces the fun is the tension and challenge created by having set rules. The rules can be changed or modified for various reasons (for instance, to make the game more fun, safer, quicker, or whatnot), but individual umpires are not supposed to change the rules on the field, and individual plays are not supposed to be refereed with the goal of maximizing fun.

A libertarian might extend the lesson as follows: If you want to make sure everybody has pie, perhaps you should worry less about distributing pie and more about respecting bakers.

That sounds like something a libertarian would say, but in a sense it’s just textbook economics. The dominant view in development economics is that the “least advantaged” enjoy a high standard of living only in societies that have experience sustained economic growth, and that sustained economic growth results from having good economic and political institutions (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi 2004). These institutions include private property, stable government, and open markets.

Societies flourish, in other words, when they treat the people within them as something like self-owners. Libertarians see this as a key part of the argument for self-ownership. We see self-ownership as a moral principle but not one that figures as a basic premise in our thinking, let alone a self-evident one. We consider people self-owners because of what the rejection of that idea implies, both for societies as a whole and for the individuals that make them what they are. The big questions are: For each person, who gets control rights over that person, society, or the person herself? Who has the right to say yes and who has the right to say no? Around the world, we see the following trends: The places that see individuals as ends in themselves and their institutions as tools for supporting individuals are happy, prosperous, and progressive. The places that see their institutions as ends in themselves and their individuals as tools for supporting the institutions are the opposite.

This book explores the contours of libertarian (also sometimes called classical liberal) thinking on justice, institutions, interpersonal ethics, government, and political economy. We’ve invited leading critics to say what they think libertarians get right and leading libertarian theorists to say what they think libertarians get wrong. We’ve asked scholars to help us rethink what libertarianism has been and could be, and why it matters. Libertarians bill their theory as an alternative to the traditional Left and Right. This volume will help readers explore this alternative without preaching it to them.

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 the questions of immigration and trade, religion in politics, or whether paternalism is justifiable in the face of consumers’ irrationality?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acemoglu, D., and Robison, J. (2012) Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown Business.

Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., and Robinson, J. (2005) Institutions as a fundamental cause of long run economic growth. In: Aghion, P., and Durlauf, S. N. Handbook of Economic Growth, Vol 1A, 386–472. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Barry, B. (1975) Review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.Political Theory 3: 331–336.

Hayek, F. A. (1960) The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rodrik, D., Subramanian, A., and Trebbi, F. (2004) Institutions rule: The primacy of institutions over geography and integration in economic development. Journal of Economic Growth 9: 131–165.

Schmidtz, D., and Brennan, J. (2010) A Brief History of Liberty. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.