The only thing I can think of that you left out would be libertarians who align with Ron Paul in particular, and more generally those who align with the non-MAGA GOP.
I suppose they are somewhat covered under “libertarian conservatives” - especially the latter - but I’m not sure Ron Paul would describe himself as such. I describe myself as a “libertarian conservative” and/or a “‘conservative libertarian”, but do not consider myself a Ron Paul guy.
I do find it interesting that there is no “neat” way to describe/clump most of these differences in the same manner in which you identify 4 distinct flavors of left libertarianism.
Perhaps this is because most of the people who are attracted to libertarian ideas - hardcore Randian Objectivists perhaps excepted - are more open-minded and attracted to ideas than to tribes?
If you leave off "hardcore" it is true of the Objectivists too. Roy Childs wrote Rand arguing that being an Objectivist obliged him to be an anarchist. She was not amused.
I think my discussion of LP or not more or less implied the non-MAGA GOP as libertarians who disapproved of Trump, although I didn't specify GOP. I sometimes describe myself as a conservative anarchist, not because I agree with the right on issues, although I often do, but because I recognize that my preferred system would probably break down under some circumstances and that my arguments might be wrong.
I thought of including pro-life/pro-choice as a division, but didn't think it was as important a one as the others. More broadly I could have included "culturally red/blue tribe."
I was in the thick of the Ron Paul movement from the beginning, and can say about half went over to Trump and the other half mostly left partisan politics entirely.
Re Consequentialist vs Deontological, ... I think an importantly new way of arguing for libertarianism is Intuitionist, eg Michael Heumer (Problem of Political Authority) and Dan Moller (Governing Least). The first two approaches are basically foundationalist—ie, they assume a (perhaps singleton) set of principles, and show that L'ism follows. The new approach relies instead on intuitions about private cases—to the effect that we would not accept in private life the sorts of things governments do regularly—and then rebuts the attempts by opponents (social contract, democracy, etc) to argue that government is special. This is an attractive approach. People find the private cases more plausible than any grand principle(s), and, in my view, their attempts to argue that the government is special are very often feeble.
Re Libertarians vs libertarians, ... Again, there is an assumption here, that the libertarian wants to make society more libertarian. Clearly, they will /want/ this to be so, but they may not want to /make it/ so, since this does seem like a rather collectivist goal, and, more importantly, life is short and the chance of success long. So, amongst libertarians who are /not/ members of a Libertarian Party, it is worth adding those whose goal is rather to make /their own lives/ better approximate what they would be in a libertarian society. Eg, selective law-breaking. Thus, some laws are consistent with (or required by) libertarian principles (eg, against force, fraud), or create a practice I am happy to contribute to (eg, I am actually quite happy for part of my taxes to go to public health services)—I do what these laws require, not because they require it, but because it is a good idea anyway. However, other laws are neither consistent nor attractive (eg, in my case, laws relating to the use of public bushland)—I feel no compunction in breaking them, if I can get away with it.
I consider myself an intuitionist but, although it is an important philosophical category, I don't see it as an alternative to consequentialist/deontologist but as a possible grounding for either. Your moral intuitions might lead you to a deontological bright line version of natural rights or to utilitarianism, although mine don't lead me to either. But it is true that what I get from my moral intuitions doesn't fit neatly into either category.
"the libertarian wants to make society more libertarian"
Because even a libertarian is only a human and is subject to the same impulses which make a man, not merely content to worship by himself, but to make his neighbor worship along him, this being the trouble of humanity in nutshell.
I'm glad classical liberalism fits in there, anywhere! [I've mentioned my own troubles with some self-styled libertarians in a past comment or two, so won't repeat myself here.]
Instead, I'd like to point out a humorous analogy to the divisions among libertarians: it's the divisions among Communists! I grew up in New York City, which is apparently still full of communists. I became aware of the splits in my early 20's [early 1970's] on a social occasion. There was a commie I talked with. My friend was an avowed Stalinist. He talked with an avowed Trotskyist. The latter informed the former about the latest developments in his ideological neck of the woods, saying group X had now split into group Xa and Xb! This sort of thing went on for the rest of the evening. Well before the end I was dizzy with all the splits mentioned!
I will repeat one thing: Push the ideas, anywhere one can, and forget the party politics. I try.
Ah, in recent times I participate in a discussion board of low level academics. It is unsurprisingly leftist, but most obviously a special interest group demanding -- "more". I chime in with a fact or thought or two whenever appropriate or otherwise. The major criticism I have received is that I am a Randian! I suggested the critics read more widely. :-)
All this reminds me of something else: Recently I read somewhere that based on text analyses, socialism had many flavors in the 19th century. It wasn't until the Leninists took over Russia that Marxism became the overwhelming flavor. That's actually a nice phenomenon. There are many flavors if a central power with guns doesn't take over.
I thought of that but it seemed less central. The more general division that is linked to is identifying, on the whole, with blue tribe or red tribe values.
The term libertarian should be properly reserved to those who view the State as the Great Oppressor. They look for and find only malignity in the State.
Some libertarians happened to view the Soviets as a Greater Oppressor than even the American State, leading to strange alliance formed with the conservatives.
This misalliance lead to influx of fatal libertarian ideas into conservativism, to lasting confusion between libertarians and conservatives such that the labels "libertarian" and "conservative" are indiscriminately bandied about, even in learned discourse, and to the mongrel thing that is consevatism today.
Russell Kirk, writing at the beginning of this process, was hopeful that libertarian influence on the conservatives would be limited. "Lunacy repels, and political lunacy especially"-- he wrote. He could not foresee that two generations later, American conservatives would recommend privatizing marriage, and locate moral authority in individuals rather than in the State, which Kirk said is ordained of God.
"For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. "
No Christendom then. I believe Christian theologians built it upon this on when and how the authority could be just or unjust. It is entirely possible, even for a divinely ordained to err, for example King David, but that does not rule out that the authorial was divinely ordained.
I interpret it in more secular terms. The State has authority from itself, since it the expression of self-rule of a particular people.
And where to people get the authority to rule other people, in your context others of the same language/ethnicity/culture? "Self-rule" pretends group action is individual action. It isn't. There is no person named "the French" or "the Arabs."
The state is not merely accidentally related to individuals that comprise it. The very minds of individuals are formed by the State.
In less abstract terms, the will to power, greater in some individuals, naturally allows them to rule. This rule is essential and not necessarily malign to the ruled.
Possibly true of hard core Objectivists but not, I think, of all libertarians who got there via Rand. I offer Objectivist heretics such as Roy Childs, George Smith or David Kelley. And there is an element of the same thing in other libertarian factions such as Rothbardians.
But it is true that there is an organizational core to the orthodox Objectivists and not, I think, to the other categories and a more substantial body of doctrine.
Another, though rare type, is the Christian libertarian. Christ allows us to make a choice. In order to freely choose, freedom from coercion is required. The Bible provides some support. Way back when the Israelites were first begging for a king, God essentially told them they were idiots who already had it good, but he'd let them have what they wanted, good and hard.
There are also the practical types. Freer places tend to be nicer places to live. If one wants to live in a nicer place, one should strive to make it freer.
Christian libertarians are not, I think, rare. Ones who are libertarian because they are Christian, along the lines you sketch, may be. G. K. Chesterton was a libertarian, if a somewhat odd one, and also a prominent Catholic apologist.
Yes, that was what I meant. Religion leading to libertarianism. Sadly, most Christians don't see the connection. But, we also don't consider government a primary concern. As long as any government leaves us alone enough to practice freely, the other stuff isn't as important.
Perhaps Chesterton was a libertarian but not a Manchester Liberal whom he attacked violently. He also proposed Distributionism which for free market types is just a species of socialism.
I believe his argument was that the land had been stolen and so should be distributed. Not a usual libertarian view but no less one than Georgism, which I count as a version of left libertarianism.
I don't think that Distributism is properly classified a socialist. I own Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State, perhaps the longest statement of it (and Belloc and Chesterton were close friends). Distributism did not mean that the state should "gather" and "share" (as Tolkien put it in his portrayal of a socialist takeover of the Shire). Rather, it meant that the ownership of productive assets should be as widely dispersed through the economy as possible, in a way slightly reminiscent of the libertarian idea of "agorism" (where work is done by subcontractors rather than employees) or of the Marxist concept of the society of petty producers (which has exchange value and alienation but no distinct working class). Belloc disapproved of state socialism, but he disapproved on similar grounds of large industrial corporations. This was a somewhat unusual view by libertarian standards but seems clearly akin to libertarianism.
In my experience, to the rare extent they bother to pay attention to Distributism, they think that it must require a constant government interference to maintain a desired property distribution, quite the opposite of libertarian spirit.
However, the matter may be approached from another angle. Already 100 years ago, owner capitalism was transforming to managerialism as elaborated by Burnham, both in the West as well as in Soviet East. As ownership is a public and stable relation between a thing and a person, the giant corporations, with the diffuse, indirect and anonymous stock ownerships, were effectively ownerless. As Belloc had predicted, ownership was getting extinct.
I certainly won't argue that interpretation! Things were messed up, and that's one reason why they wanted a king, to do kingly things like lead in wars and suchlike.
I have to say that an analysis of different dimensions on which libertarians vary, while potentially useful, is not what I mean by a "taxonomy." I'm accustomed to biological approaches, in which entities are divided into mutually exclusive categories: Modern man is a species of genus Homo, which is part of family Hominidae, which is part of order Primates, which is part of class Mammalia, which is part of phylum Chordata, which is part of Kingdom Metazoa (or Animalia), which is part of domain Eukaryotae. We don't have animals that are part of phylum Chordata and part of phylum Arthropoda and part of phylum Chaetognatha, all at once. But it seems that your terms could have a libertarian be a constitutionalist AND an Austrian AND a deontologist. That doesn't enable us to exhibit a type species for any of these categories.
Well, it's sort of like factor analysis, a statistical process that defines groups of characteristics that covary. That kind of analysis is what gave us the Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). A person can be scored on each of these dimensions. But that's not normally called a "taxonomy." The Big Five is called a "scientific model," and as it derives from the lexical hypothesis, it might also be called a lexicon.
Thanks for the link. I don't think she uses the term "deontological" and what she is rejecting would include some consequentialist ethics, such as utilitarianism.
No, but she explicitly rejects Kant as the most repugnant of all ethical thinkers, and Kant is commonly taken as the type specimen of deontological ethics. I agree that Rand is a sort of virtue ethicist, akin to Aristotle or Spinoza or even to Plato (though she rejects Plato's otherworldliness). Tara Smith discusses Rand's approach as neither deontological nor consequentialist; I'm currently working on reading her explanation of how Rand's thinking operates.
> utility (average or total) is not the only consequence that people value.
Utility is definitionally the only consequence a person cares about. While you're right that a person might not care about other people's utility, and therefore care neither about total or average utility, we as economic thinkers must analyze potential economic environments and compare their effects on whatever group we believe is relevant. It seems this will inevitably reduce to some kind of utility function.
An individual might care about other people's utility but care about other things as well. And utility in the economist's sense is related to but not identical with the philosopher's sense. I might, after all, be wrong about what would make me happy,
I've always taken utility to be the ground truth. It is what makes a person happy. They may get it wrong for themselves, so maximizing what they want is not the same thing as maximizing their utility.
Foundationalist/justificationist vs critical-rationalist. The first group holds that libertarianism must be based on something. The second group holds that libertarianism is unavoidably an unsupportable conjecture but that it survives all the criticisms of it so far. https://jclester.substack.com/p/critical-rationalism
Private-property vs eleutheric. The first group takes private property to be a fundamental assumption. The second group takes some theory of liberty-in-itself to be fundamental and ultimately derives private property only from applying it. https://jclester.substack.com/p/liberty-in-itself-a-libertarian-viewpoint
My viewpoint tends to be that we already live in an anarchy, that everyone in the broadly liberal West is free to choose which governments to do business with the same way renters choose what landlord to do business with, and that the only important political goal should be to maintain and expand this freedom, the right to exit – the market should be able to handle the rest. Does anyone know of a name for this ideology?
"That position is sometimes described as utilitarianism but should not be since utility (average or total) is not the only consequence that people value."
I feel like "consequences that are valued by someone" is actually a good definition of utility, why doesn't that work?
Utilitarianism holds that one should act to maximize the total, or in an alternative version the average, utility of all humans, in some versions including future humans, in some all living things. That is much more specific than "some combination of things valued by people."
Individuals ceaselessly struggle for pre-eminence in any society, but while this struggle is not explicitly ruled out in libertarian schemes, the impression one gets is that this sort of thing is not exactly worthy of human dignity. But it plays a fundamental role in Mosca's Theory of Ruling Class. The struggle selects winners, who have both ambition to dominate others and aptitude enough to actually do so, and form the ruling element of the society.
Now, as complementarity of male and female causes family to be, the complementarity of the ruling element and the ruled element causes State to be. This pervasive dynamics, depends as it does on unequal natural gifts and inclinations of individuals, offends the egalitarianism implicit in all liberal schemes.
An individual learns, whatever to the contrary be the ruling dogma of his society, not all are equals, not political equals.
Individuals ceaselessly attempt to achieve their goals. Dominating other people is one way of doing so but, for most people most of the time, not the best way. Other people are striving not to be dominated. The apple tree is not striving not to be harvested nor the bricks not to be turned into a house.
The individual apple tree is not striving for anything, but the evolutionary process produces directional changes that look a lot like "striving." Though in fact the apple tree might be said to be striving to have its fruit eaten (that is, to be harvested) in order that its seeds can be disseminated and grow into more apple trees. Flowers and the fleshy parts of fruits are sort of the plant's advertising budget; the bee that drinks the nectar or the pig that eats the fallen apple is being bribed to do things that have value for the apple tree.
In American discourse, conservative or liberal, private property is held to have a merely accidental relation to the national territory it is invariably embedded in. Property theorists are not intrigued by this embedding nor they devote any thought to it. They imagine homesteading in some virgin land or preferably an island with no relation to the political context of homesteading--resulting in the above accidental relation to the national territory.
Where did the national territory come from? Not through the social compact of private property owners, because there is plenty of land, not owned by anybody. How did it came into the social compact?
To the extent any attention is paid to the territory, it is regarded as a kind of property. But owned by whom? The State, through its citizens, or the citizens themselves, somehow. Both these relatively undefined and underdeveloped ideas are met
.
But this leads to further question. Is the State owns the territory, how is the relation between territory (owned by State) and properties embedded in the territory, owned by individuals or even strangely by the State itself, how is this relation defined?
The picture of territory as something owned does not meet the typical characteristics and expectations of the property rights. States have no rights on territory. They are merely held and secured by brute force.
So, alternatively, an essential relation between a property and the territory it is embedded in may be posited. A particular property exists solely because it exists within a territory where a particular nexus of laws has been defined. Territory comes first, logically and also historically, and particular properties come later.
I believe this view avoids the puzzles and logical difficulties of the previous view.
In the American case, the state is owned by the citizens, who grant the state certain property rights. I don't think this is the situation in many other countries though.
Thanks much for this.
The only thing I can think of that you left out would be libertarians who align with Ron Paul in particular, and more generally those who align with the non-MAGA GOP.
I suppose they are somewhat covered under “libertarian conservatives” - especially the latter - but I’m not sure Ron Paul would describe himself as such. I describe myself as a “libertarian conservative” and/or a “‘conservative libertarian”, but do not consider myself a Ron Paul guy.
I do find it interesting that there is no “neat” way to describe/clump most of these differences in the same manner in which you identify 4 distinct flavors of left libertarianism.
Perhaps this is because most of the people who are attracted to libertarian ideas - hardcore Randian Objectivists perhaps excepted - are more open-minded and attracted to ideas than to tribes?
If you leave off "hardcore" it is true of the Objectivists too. Roy Childs wrote Rand arguing that being an Objectivist obliged him to be an anarchist. She was not amused.
I think my discussion of LP or not more or less implied the non-MAGA GOP as libertarians who disapproved of Trump, although I didn't specify GOP. I sometimes describe myself as a conservative anarchist, not because I agree with the right on issues, although I often do, but because I recognize that my preferred system would probably break down under some circumstances and that my arguments might be wrong.
I thought of including pro-life/pro-choice as a division, but didn't think it was as important a one as the others. More broadly I could have included "culturally red/blue tribe."
I was in the thick of the Ron Paul movement from the beginning, and can say about half went over to Trump and the other half mostly left partisan politics entirely.
Re Consequentialist vs Deontological, ... I think an importantly new way of arguing for libertarianism is Intuitionist, eg Michael Heumer (Problem of Political Authority) and Dan Moller (Governing Least). The first two approaches are basically foundationalist—ie, they assume a (perhaps singleton) set of principles, and show that L'ism follows. The new approach relies instead on intuitions about private cases—to the effect that we would not accept in private life the sorts of things governments do regularly—and then rebuts the attempts by opponents (social contract, democracy, etc) to argue that government is special. This is an attractive approach. People find the private cases more plausible than any grand principle(s), and, in my view, their attempts to argue that the government is special are very often feeble.
Re Libertarians vs libertarians, ... Again, there is an assumption here, that the libertarian wants to make society more libertarian. Clearly, they will /want/ this to be so, but they may not want to /make it/ so, since this does seem like a rather collectivist goal, and, more importantly, life is short and the chance of success long. So, amongst libertarians who are /not/ members of a Libertarian Party, it is worth adding those whose goal is rather to make /their own lives/ better approximate what they would be in a libertarian society. Eg, selective law-breaking. Thus, some laws are consistent with (or required by) libertarian principles (eg, against force, fraud), or create a practice I am happy to contribute to (eg, I am actually quite happy for part of my taxes to go to public health services)—I do what these laws require, not because they require it, but because it is a good idea anyway. However, other laws are neither consistent nor attractive (eg, in my case, laws relating to the use of public bushland)—I feel no compunction in breaking them, if I can get away with it.
I consider myself an intuitionist but, although it is an important philosophical category, I don't see it as an alternative to consequentialist/deontologist but as a possible grounding for either. Your moral intuitions might lead you to a deontological bright line version of natural rights or to utilitarianism, although mine don't lead me to either. But it is true that what I get from my moral intuitions doesn't fit neatly into either category.
"the libertarian wants to make society more libertarian"
Because even a libertarian is only a human and is subject to the same impulses which make a man, not merely content to worship by himself, but to make his neighbor worship along him, this being the trouble of humanity in nutshell.
Or because he wants to live in a libertarian society.
I think you share the impulse you describe, which is why you put comments on my posts designed to persuade me and my readers to your views.
Naturally.
Not naturally to everybody. Your nature is not everybody's. People are different.
I'm glad classical liberalism fits in there, anywhere! [I've mentioned my own troubles with some self-styled libertarians in a past comment or two, so won't repeat myself here.]
Instead, I'd like to point out a humorous analogy to the divisions among libertarians: it's the divisions among Communists! I grew up in New York City, which is apparently still full of communists. I became aware of the splits in my early 20's [early 1970's] on a social occasion. There was a commie I talked with. My friend was an avowed Stalinist. He talked with an avowed Trotskyist. The latter informed the former about the latest developments in his ideological neck of the woods, saying group X had now split into group Xa and Xb! This sort of thing went on for the rest of the evening. Well before the end I was dizzy with all the splits mentioned!
I will repeat one thing: Push the ideas, anywhere one can, and forget the party politics. I try.
I analogize splits in the Objectivists to the early history of Islam. Peikoff is Sunni, Kelley Shia.
Ah, in recent times I participate in a discussion board of low level academics. It is unsurprisingly leftist, but most obviously a special interest group demanding -- "more". I chime in with a fact or thought or two whenever appropriate or otherwise. The major criticism I have received is that I am a Randian! I suggested the critics read more widely. :-)
All this reminds me of something else: Recently I read somewhere that based on text analyses, socialism had many flavors in the 19th century. It wasn't until the Leninists took over Russia that Marxism became the overwhelming flavor. That's actually a nice phenomenon. There are many flavors if a central power with guns doesn't take over.
There's also the pro life/pro choice divide.
I thought of that but it seemed less central. The more general division that is linked to is identifying, on the whole, with blue tribe or red tribe values.
The term libertarian should be properly reserved to those who view the State as the Great Oppressor. They look for and find only malignity in the State.
Some libertarians happened to view the Soviets as a Greater Oppressor than even the American State, leading to strange alliance formed with the conservatives.
This misalliance lead to influx of fatal libertarian ideas into conservativism, to lasting confusion between libertarians and conservatives such that the labels "libertarian" and "conservative" are indiscriminately bandied about, even in learned discourse, and to the mongrel thing that is consevatism today.
Russell Kirk, writing at the beginning of this process, was hopeful that libertarian influence on the conservatives would be limited. "Lunacy repels, and political lunacy especially"-- he wrote. He could not foresee that two generations later, American conservatives would recommend privatizing marriage, and locate moral authority in individuals rather than in the State, which Kirk said is ordained of God.
Did Kirk argue that all states had moral authority or only Christian states? The Chinese empire? The caliphate? The Ottoman Empire?
Kirk is paraphrasing St Paul: Romans 13:1,2.
"For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. "
No Christendom then. I believe Christian theologians built it upon this on when and how the authority could be just or unjust. It is entirely possible, even for a divinely ordained to err, for example King David, but that does not rule out that the authorial was divinely ordained.
I interpret it in more secular terms. The State has authority from itself, since it the expression of self-rule of a particular people.
And where to people get the authority to rule other people, in your context others of the same language/ethnicity/culture? "Self-rule" pretends group action is individual action. It isn't. There is no person named "the French" or "the Arabs."
The state is not merely accidentally related to individuals that comprise it. The very minds of individuals are formed by the State.
In less abstract terms, the will to power, greater in some individuals, naturally allows them to rule. This rule is essential and not necessarily malign to the ruled.
In my experience followers of objectivism come across like members of a religion.
It seems distinctly different to the others listed here, I'm not sure why.
Possibly true of hard core Objectivists but not, I think, of all libertarians who got there via Rand. I offer Objectivist heretics such as Roy Childs, George Smith or David Kelley. And there is an element of the same thing in other libertarian factions such as Rothbardians.
But it is true that there is an organizational core to the orthodox Objectivists and not, I think, to the other categories and a more substantial body of doctrine.
Another, though rare type, is the Christian libertarian. Christ allows us to make a choice. In order to freely choose, freedom from coercion is required. The Bible provides some support. Way back when the Israelites were first begging for a king, God essentially told them they were idiots who already had it good, but he'd let them have what they wanted, good and hard.
There are also the practical types. Freer places tend to be nicer places to live. If one wants to live in a nicer place, one should strive to make it freer.
Christian libertarians are not, I think, rare. Ones who are libertarian because they are Christian, along the lines you sketch, may be. G. K. Chesterton was a libertarian, if a somewhat odd one, and also a prominent Catholic apologist.
Yes, that was what I meant. Religion leading to libertarianism. Sadly, most Christians don't see the connection. But, we also don't consider government a primary concern. As long as any government leaves us alone enough to practice freely, the other stuff isn't as important.
Perhaps Chesterton was a libertarian but not a Manchester Liberal whom he attacked violently. He also proposed Distributionism which for free market types is just a species of socialism.
I believe his argument was that the land had been stolen and so should be distributed. Not a usual libertarian view but no less one than Georgism, which I count as a version of left libertarianism.
I don't think that Distributism is properly classified a socialist. I own Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State, perhaps the longest statement of it (and Belloc and Chesterton were close friends). Distributism did not mean that the state should "gather" and "share" (as Tolkien put it in his portrayal of a socialist takeover of the Shire). Rather, it meant that the ownership of productive assets should be as widely dispersed through the economy as possible, in a way slightly reminiscent of the libertarian idea of "agorism" (where work is done by subcontractors rather than employees) or of the Marxist concept of the society of petty producers (which has exchange value and alienation but no distinct working class). Belloc disapproved of state socialism, but he disapproved on similar grounds of large industrial corporations. This was a somewhat unusual view by libertarian standards but seems clearly akin to libertarianism.
In my experience, to the rare extent they bother to pay attention to Distributism, they think that it must require a constant government interference to maintain a desired property distribution, quite the opposite of libertarian spirit.
However, the matter may be approached from another angle. Already 100 years ago, owner capitalism was transforming to managerialism as elaborated by Burnham, both in the West as well as in Soviet East. As ownership is a public and stable relation between a thing and a person, the giant corporations, with the diffuse, indirect and anonymous stock ownerships, were effectively ownerless. As Belloc had predicted, ownership was getting extinct.
In Judges, "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes."
This is not said in a complementary way but a critique of chaos of that time.
I certainly won't argue that interpretation! Things were messed up, and that's one reason why they wanted a king, to do kingly things like lead in wars and suchlike.
But they had leadership in wars; that was one of the main jobs of the Judges.
I guess this is still sorta on topic.
Apparently they didn't think that sufficient.
I have to say that an analysis of different dimensions on which libertarians vary, while potentially useful, is not what I mean by a "taxonomy." I'm accustomed to biological approaches, in which entities are divided into mutually exclusive categories: Modern man is a species of genus Homo, which is part of family Hominidae, which is part of order Primates, which is part of class Mammalia, which is part of phylum Chordata, which is part of Kingdom Metazoa (or Animalia), which is part of domain Eukaryotae. We don't have animals that are part of phylum Chordata and part of phylum Arthropoda and part of phylum Chaetognatha, all at once. But it seems that your terms could have a libertarian be a constitutionalist AND an Austrian AND a deontologist. That doesn't enable us to exhibit a type species for any of these categories.
The first definition I found online:
the branch of science concerned with classification, especially of organisms; systematics.
the classification of something, especially organisms.
"the taxonomy of these fossils"
a system of classification.
plural noun: taxonomies
"a taxonomy of smells"
So although a biological taxonomy may have the characteristic you describe, I don't think it is part of the definition.
Can you think of a better term for what I was doing?
Well, it's sort of like factor analysis, a statistical process that defines groups of characteristics that covary. That kind of analysis is what gave us the Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). A person can be scored on each of these dimensions. But that's not normally called a "taxonomy." The Big Five is called a "scientific model," and as it derives from the lexical hypothesis, it might also be called a lexicon.
> Rand’s moral conclusions were deontological — mostly.
She actually wrote an essay explaining why she rejected deontological ethics: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/causality-versus-duty/
But she wasn't a consequentialist either. I think it's probably more accurate to classify objectivism as a form of virtue ethics.
Thanks for the link. I don't think she uses the term "deontological" and what she is rejecting would include some consequentialist ethics, such as utilitarianism.
No, but she explicitly rejects Kant as the most repugnant of all ethical thinkers, and Kant is commonly taken as the type specimen of deontological ethics. I agree that Rand is a sort of virtue ethicist, akin to Aristotle or Spinoza or even to Plato (though she rejects Plato's otherworldliness). Tara Smith discusses Rand's approach as neither deontological nor consequentialist; I'm currently working on reading her explanation of how Rand's thinking operates.
> utility (average or total) is not the only consequence that people value.
Utility is definitionally the only consequence a person cares about. While you're right that a person might not care about other people's utility, and therefore care neither about total or average utility, we as economic thinkers must analyze potential economic environments and compare their effects on whatever group we believe is relevant. It seems this will inevitably reduce to some kind of utility function.
Also, if anyone's interested in another take on the subject of a Libertarian taxonomy, I wrote about it a few months back: https://governology.substack.com/p/what-is-libertarianism
An individual might care about other people's utility but care about other things as well. And utility in the economist's sense is related to but not identical with the philosopher's sense. I might, after all, be wrong about what would make me happy,
I've always taken utility to be the ground truth. It is what makes a person happy. They may get it wrong for themselves, so maximizing what they want is not the same thing as maximizing their utility.
I see that as the difference between the philosophical definition and the economic definition.
Foundationalist/justificationist vs critical-rationalist. The first group holds that libertarianism must be based on something. The second group holds that libertarianism is unavoidably an unsupportable conjecture but that it survives all the criticisms of it so far. https://jclester.substack.com/p/critical-rationalism
Private-property vs eleutheric. The first group takes private property to be a fundamental assumption. The second group takes some theory of liberty-in-itself to be fundamental and ultimately derives private property only from applying it. https://jclester.substack.com/p/liberty-in-itself-a-libertarian-viewpoint
My viewpoint tends to be that we already live in an anarchy, that everyone in the broadly liberal West is free to choose which governments to do business with the same way renters choose what landlord to do business with, and that the only important political goal should be to maintain and expand this freedom, the right to exit – the market should be able to handle the rest. Does anyone know of a name for this ideology?
"That position is sometimes described as utilitarianism but should not be since utility (average or total) is not the only consequence that people value."
I feel like "consequences that are valued by someone" is actually a good definition of utility, why doesn't that work?
Utilitarianism holds that one should act to maximize the total, or in an alternative version the average, utility of all humans, in some versions including future humans, in some all living things. That is much more specific than "some combination of things valued by people."
Individuals ceaselessly struggle for pre-eminence in any society, but while this struggle is not explicitly ruled out in libertarian schemes, the impression one gets is that this sort of thing is not exactly worthy of human dignity. But it plays a fundamental role in Mosca's Theory of Ruling Class. The struggle selects winners, who have both ambition to dominate others and aptitude enough to actually do so, and form the ruling element of the society.
Now, as complementarity of male and female causes family to be, the complementarity of the ruling element and the ruled element causes State to be. This pervasive dynamics, depends as it does on unequal natural gifts and inclinations of individuals, offends the egalitarianism implicit in all liberal schemes.
An individual learns, whatever to the contrary be the ruling dogma of his society, not all are equals, not political equals.
Individuals ceaselessly attempt to achieve their goals. Dominating other people is one way of doing so but, for most people most of the time, not the best way. Other people are striving not to be dominated. The apple tree is not striving not to be harvested nor the bricks not to be turned into a house.
The individual apple tree is not striving for anything, but the evolutionary process produces directional changes that look a lot like "striving." Though in fact the apple tree might be said to be striving to have its fruit eaten (that is, to be harvested) in order that its seeds can be disseminated and grow into more apple trees. Flowers and the fleshy parts of fruits are sort of the plant's advertising budget; the bee that drinks the nectar or the pig that eats the fallen apple is being bribed to do things that have value for the apple tree.
To quote C.S. Lewis:
On then! Value means survival-
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present
Standards, though it well may be).
To dominate others, to exert power over them, is often the goal itself.
Question is whether liberal theory takes account of this human nature, and whether or not, liberal conclusions get affected by the will to power.
In American discourse, conservative or liberal, private property is held to have a merely accidental relation to the national territory it is invariably embedded in. Property theorists are not intrigued by this embedding nor they devote any thought to it. They imagine homesteading in some virgin land or preferably an island with no relation to the political context of homesteading--resulting in the above accidental relation to the national territory.
Where did the national territory come from? Not through the social compact of private property owners, because there is plenty of land, not owned by anybody. How did it came into the social compact?
To the extent any attention is paid to the territory, it is regarded as a kind of property. But owned by whom? The State, through its citizens, or the citizens themselves, somehow. Both these relatively undefined and underdeveloped ideas are met
.
But this leads to further question. Is the State owns the territory, how is the relation between territory (owned by State) and properties embedded in the territory, owned by individuals or even strangely by the State itself, how is this relation defined?
The picture of territory as something owned does not meet the typical characteristics and expectations of the property rights. States have no rights on territory. They are merely held and secured by brute force.
So, alternatively, an essential relation between a property and the territory it is embedded in may be posited. A particular property exists solely because it exists within a territory where a particular nexus of laws has been defined. Territory comes first, logically and also historically, and particular properties come later.
I believe this view avoids the puzzles and logical difficulties of the previous view.
In the American case, the state is owned by the citizens, who grant the state certain property rights. I don't think this is the situation in many other countries though.
A citizen can do things. In what sense can "the citizens" do something?
I don't know what you mean by “the state is owned by the citizens”.
I understand that a corporation can be owned by the stockholders but ownership of the state escapes me.
With 300,000,000 people it's pretty darned diffuse ownership. To the point that really all we got now is the occasional vote.
How come it is Americans that have ownership relation with their state and nobody else has it?
It is now more a matter of founding myth than a practical reality. The 'Of the people, by the people, for the people' idea.
In Britain, for example, it was once the king but now parliament that rules.
How would you classify panarchists?
I prefer my pans, indeed all my cookware, be well ordered, thank you.
I had never heard the term before. My Chartertopia sounds close.