Even though most any issue-by-issue tally of my beliefs would certainly put me squarely in the libertarian camp in most people’s eyes — I scored in the high 90s on the libertarian purity test — I generally demur somewhat in face of the “libertarian” label, often instead saying things like “I have strong libertarian leanings“. Besides the fact that the label is quite vague given the many different kinds of libertarianism there are, I don’t like that the assumption of the label often implies that the bearer is committed to a huge belief system, complete with some kind of comprehensive ethical system (consequentialist or deontological or a blend of both) undergirding it. I don’t want to commit myself to such systems because 1) I don’t know the right one, and more importantly 2) I don’t think it’s necessary to be so committed in order to make progress. Physics doesn’t have such a unifying theory, and it makes great progress. Why should you need one for valuable political debate? As much as is possible, it seems a better strategy to convince a person of a proposition by appealing to commonplace principles that you both already share instead of forcing him to accept strange, abstract ethical principles that imply the proposition. This is especially true when those same abstract principles seem to imply crazy things that clash with common sense.
It’s this last phenomenon, I think, that makes libertarianism so unpopular with most people. They immediately think that any person who calls herself a libertarian must believe that we should, for example, allow the earth’s total destruction before we forcefully take even a dollar from Scrooge McDuck. They take this as a reductio of all things libertarian. This is unfortunately ironic, however, because when framed properly, libertarianism should absolutely shine insofar as how it relates to “common sense”. I’ll give an example of what I mean in today’s post, and I hope to keep coming back to this theme in future posts, making a broad defense of common sense libertarianism an ongoing project.
Consider the following principle
If there are a number of roughly equally feasible ways of redressing a problem or injustice, one is morally obligated to first try the ones (if any) that don’t violate people’s rights. If they all necessarily violate individual rights, we’re obligated to first try the ones that violate them the least.
(The word “right” is often a dangerous one in discussions like this because it’s hard to precisely define rights in a sensible way. For now, though, I’m going to assume that the common notion of so-called “negative rights” is strong enough for my purposes.)
This principle may not look familiar when stated explicitly, but its broad acceptance becomes evident through some simple thought experiments. For example, if a family is impoverished and starving, many of us might say it’s permissible for the family to steal food from a store or a wealthy person in order to survive. However, we wouldn’t consider it permissible if the family could just as easily get the food from a nearby charity that is giving it away. The second part of the principle entails that even if there are no accessible charities around the family is still only permitted to steal enough food to survive, not enough to make them all obese. Additionally, if they do steal food, they’re obligated to do so in a way that doesn’t incur physical harm on someone if at all possible.
This principle is incredibly intuitive. It’s also incredibly accommodative. It sets no hard limit on how much you can violate people’s rights to solve a problem. It simply says that you first have to try not to. Despite its simplicity and relative conservatism, I think this one principle is the linchpin for strong prima facie arguments against a wide range of government policies:
- Credible researchers have adduced evidence that corn subsidies share a large part of the blame for the current level of obesity. Therefore, bans on soda and other foods aren’t permissible until we at least attempt redress through subsidy repeal
- Governments aren’t permitted to tax or ban something that they still subsidize or otherwise support
- Even if we grant that a person will cause some net financial harm to our country by immigrating here, we must first offer him the chance to gain entry by paying that amount before we bar his entry completely
- It’s wrong to ban health insurance plans that charge for or fail to provide birth control given that the government could simply dispense it for free
- Banning marijuana’s recreational use in morally impermissible unless we first investigate the consequences of regulating it just as we do tobacco or alcohol
Now, the conclusions of these arguments (or sketches thereof) are anything but radically libertarian. Perhaps my bias is distorting my perception here, but I think most people would judge these conclusions to be quite reasonable. Nevertheless, as a libertarian I’m quite happy with them. They represent a vast improvement on current policy, and I’m perfectly happy getting to something that resembles libertarianism in small steps rather than one giant leap.
And of course these arguments aren’t the last words on the issues in question (even though I do think the conclusions are ultimately correct). Even so, the point I want to stress is that the above principle should at least create a strong presumption against the use of government force in these cases. The natural and rational way to respond when asked your opinion on a policy that entails either forcing people to do something or taking their property should be to ask if there is a different way by which one could feasibly achieve the policy’s stated goals. This exactly mirrors how we reason about everyday issues! Imagine if went the other direction and applied a politician’s typical pattern of policy reasoning to daily life:
Friend: Man, I’m really hungry. I think I’ll go take that guy’s sandwich at gunpoint.
You: Uh, don’t you have money that you could use to buy food at that store over there?
Friend: Oh…suuuuuure. That’s another way to do it, I guess. Let’s go.
Nobody claims “common sense” always gives you the right answer, but it’s almost always where you should start. Similarly, I think most people are obliged to, on pain of contradiction, start their deliberation on most policy questions from a libertarian perspective.