I’m not sure that consequentialist arguments for libertarianism /are/ superior to moral ones. First, as you note, even consequentialist arguments depend on the moral assumption that “good “outcomes are morally good, and so even consequentialist arguments are actually moral arguments, but this is not a problem since “I can leverage the existing moral beliefs of the people I am trying to persuade”. But, second, why can’t the non-consequentialist do the same? This is precisely the strategy of a newer breed of libertarian, who argue from comparatively weak moral claims (accepted by very many people) to apparently strong libertarian claims, the best examples being Michael Huemer in his /The Problem of Political Authority/ (as already noted by another commenter) as well as Dan Moller in his /Governing Least/. As Huemer points out, most people are libertarians on a personal level, and would never dream of personally forcing their re-distributive values on others, yet they approve of other people’s (ie, the government’s) doing this, without, it seems, any good explanation of the morally relevant difference between the two cases. This seems like a very good argument, and one which is liable to deliver a version of libertarianism which endorses a set of /intrinsic/ rights to person and property, which I at least find more congenial than the /contingent/ rights—especially re persons!—delivered by consequentialist versions.
Consequentialism is itself a moral philosophy. I argued here that it's the fundamental basis for all moral theories, whether people realize it or not: https://governology.substack.com/p/a-defense-of-utilitarianism . What makes a thing good is always that the expected consequences are good. No one would believe something is good if they simultaneously believed that thing generally leads to bad consequences.
Without moral arguments, you can't determine if an outcome is consequentially good or bad. Is the standard "the greatest good for the greatest number"? This immediately runs into the problem of commensurability; if an action provides a benefit to A and a harm to B, how do you add them together to determine if the total is positive or negative? Does euthanizing all terminally sick people have net positive consequences? Maybe; it ends their suffering, improves the average health in the population, and frees up a lot of resources. Talking about results is important when trying to convince people, but by itself without moral standards it can't justify any system of government.
Very helpful in distinguishing the rhetorical strategies! Consequentialism comports much more with my training and vocation. But in some places I've given up trying.
My problem is that people don't seem to wish to understand economic results, or any other science results for that matter, but do revert to identification of evil people, dark motives, and conspiracies, relying on meaningless concepts, such as exploitation. They do show envy, lots of it.
We can see what's going on here. I just don't know what to do about it. More education won't help. Perhaps less would.
My personal favourite approach to advocating for libertarianism is Mike Huemers approach, where he argues that if anyone else other than the government were doing what they were doing, everyone would oppose it (e.g. taxation would be theft if anyone else was doing it). Then, the burden of proof is simply on the non libertarian to explain why the governemt has this special right that nobody else has. I like this argument the most for a few reasons:
1. It's a simple argument, it doesn't require complicated moral philosophy and anyone can understand it.
2. As far as I've heard, there is no good counterargument to this.
3. It's all-encompassing, you can advocate for many libertarian policies at once with it. If you only rely on consequentialist arguments, you end up having to use different arguments for each issue which is less efficient and will ultimately persuades less people. For example, you would need to give a set of reasons for why legalising drugs would make people better off, and a bunch of other reasons for why abolishing public education would make people better off etc. With the problem of political authority, you can get people to agree with all libertarian policies at the same time.
That said, I also agree with all your arguments in this post, as far as I've heard there is no socialist solution to the coordination problem.
The argument I offered also applies to multiple issues, since it is a consequentialist argument about who should make decisions, not about decisions on a particular subject.
I believe Mike's argument depends on a consequentialist claim, that government not being free to do things would not have catastrophic consequences, the subject of the second half of his book. I confess to not having read the second half since I already agreed with it. I probably should since he is smart and might have come up with arguments that hadn't occurred to me.
That doesn't explain why government has this special right. It only pretends to justify coercion to keep people's thoughts from straying off the approved path, with no discussion of who decides what the approved path is.
I agree. It’s an excellent point, consistent with DFs’ here and elsewhere but not made explicitly.
By agreeing to a form of constitutional government with strong protection of minority rights and with plenty of checks and balances and competing interests, it becomes rational to agree to the negative costs to freedom of government, by making it more difficult - of course not remotely close to impossible - for others to do a set of things against my interests that they might otherwise find to be in their own interest.
[And that’s above and beyond the obvious “for national defense” reason which all but the hardest core anarcho-capitalist libertarians - and happily DF presents as non-crazy on this particular axis - accept as valid.]
One way I could see it making sense is if people who want to take actions reserved for government are required to do so in a venue where other people can review and possibly veto that action; and if it's automatically punishable to take such actions outside that venue. That venue might be a banquet hall, a throne room, a state building, an online chatroom, or a combination of them.
Everything's still implemented by people who may be imperfect, but in that venue, they have a greater opportunity to spot imperfect judgement in each other, and correct it. The resulting laws are therefore better than if individuals acted without coordination. I suspect this was Hamilton's thinking.
The remaining problem in this case is if the structure itself removes the incentive for people to spot imperfect judgement in each other. I do not know if Hamilton addressed this. I can imagine David has, in effect; generally, he argues (IIRC) that that structure can give government agents incentive to overlook imperfections, especially in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the governed.
One way around that is to permit multiple structures to compete - for example, rights enforcement agencies. Hamilton, by contrast, may have gone along with Madison's model, which proposed three governmental agencies and discrete rules for how they could form and check each other.
>Similarly, I do not know any libertarian who agrees with socialists about the material consequences of the alternative systems — if he did, he would find it hard to remain a libertarian.
Not quite sure if thats what youre talking about, but I had the impression that the right did, for some time, more or less accept communist claims of material superiority, and defended their position based on freedom, and transitioned gradually to the consequentialist strategy, which was completed around Reagans time. There where libertarians that whole time who did believe in the calculation problem, but opposition to socialism was much broader than that belief, and it gained acceptance gradually - mainstream economists continued to believe Soviet numbers until the fall.
But you were around at least for the later part of that, you would propably know. On reading my impression, do you disagree?
“ had the impression that the right did, for some time, more or less accept communist claims of material superiority, ”
Methinks this is an incorrect impression.
Hayek warned that the claim was untrue before WWII.
Neither the “libertarian right” nor the “traditional / conservative right” ever - well surely in the last 75 years, anyway - accepted that claim as true, save perhaps for military production.
Now a weaker form of your statement is true enough: many opponents of communism preferred to focus on the freedom issues, and relatively few opponents of communism knew HOW grossly inferior communist dictatorships were on material well-being prior to the fall of the a Berlin Wall.
There is nothing wrong with giving a general explanation of how one thinks that libertarianism will work in practice. Such an explanation is sometimes necessary in order for people to understand, at least broadly, what one is actually asserting by affirming libertarianism. Someone else’s explanation of libertarianism—whether he is a critic or even a self-described libertarian—could diverge significantly from the intended one.
However, any such general explanation—and in however much detail it is given—can never amount to epistemological support. It is ultimately only a conjecture, even if it is a critically-preferred conjecture that one has put to the test of criticism for decades. One sound criticism would refute it. And we can never know what potential criticisms we may have overlooked.
It is logically possible, of course, that the given explanation just so happens to answer all of the criticisms that someone else has in mind. And it might therefore be sufficient to cause the critic to experience a gestalt switch to being inclined to affirm that explanation of libertarianism. However, that is most unlikely. What normally happens is that a critic will immediately have a number of criticisms of the general explanation. And the only way to convince him is to answer each of these to that critic’s satisfaction. And even then, there is likely to be a significant delay while he mulls over the answers to see whether he can come up with a better criticism.
Consequently, the only real way to “argue for libertarianism”, may be to give some sort of general explanation (but this might even be as brief as “Liberty is always preferable to state intervention”) and then deal with each specific critic’s specific criticisms. This is unavoidably individualistic and time-consuming. And, of course, some of the criticisms will either be explicitly philosophical or be based on philosophical errors that require correction. In both cases, philosophy cannot be avoided if persuasion to the libertarian conjecture is to be accomplished.
“In both cases, philosophy cannot be avoided if persuasion to the libertarian conjecture is to be accomplished.”
IMO this is *far* too strong a claim. If nothing else, different people are persuaded / come to believe things in very different ways.
Even if it happened to be the case that all economists and Substack readers fit the mindset you implicitly posit for DF and yourself, there is an even larger number of people who care more about “the facts / the data”.
For them demonstrating the real-world historical success of “more-libertarian” governments as compared to “‘less libertarian, more socialist” governments is more likely to be successful than any discussion of philosophy.
And that is wholly separate from the fact that I happen to agree with DF that persuasive success will be greatest when you assume that folks *roughly* share the same set of common sense values and moral intuitions, just with somewhat different weights, and go from there as he has described.
Having said that, I will grant you that with the woke mostly young miseducated oppressor-oppressed ideology believers, the assumption of somewhat similar common sense moral intuitions is indeed weakest. Until those folks somehow first get closer to center-leftism (traditional progressivism) than oppressor-oppressed zealotry, imo any and all ways of getting them towards libertarianism are unlikely to be at all successful. Might philosophy work slightly better with such folks? Perhaps.
“In both cases, philosophy cannot be avoided if persuasion to the libertarian conjecture is to be accomplished.”
>IMO this is *far* too strong a claim. If nothing else, different people are persuaded / come to believe things in very different ways.
The quoted final sentence referred to the immediately preceding sentence. It was not intended to imply that it is always the case that “philosophy cannot be avoided”.
I’m not sure that consequentialist arguments for libertarianism /are/ superior to moral ones. First, as you note, even consequentialist arguments depend on the moral assumption that “good “outcomes are morally good, and so even consequentialist arguments are actually moral arguments, but this is not a problem since “I can leverage the existing moral beliefs of the people I am trying to persuade”. But, second, why can’t the non-consequentialist do the same? This is precisely the strategy of a newer breed of libertarian, who argue from comparatively weak moral claims (accepted by very many people) to apparently strong libertarian claims, the best examples being Michael Huemer in his /The Problem of Political Authority/ (as already noted by another commenter) as well as Dan Moller in his /Governing Least/. As Huemer points out, most people are libertarians on a personal level, and would never dream of personally forcing their re-distributive values on others, yet they approve of other people’s (ie, the government’s) doing this, without, it seems, any good explanation of the morally relevant difference between the two cases. This seems like a very good argument, and one which is liable to deliver a version of libertarianism which endorses a set of /intrinsic/ rights to person and property, which I at least find more congenial than the /contingent/ rights—especially re persons!—delivered by consequentialist versions.
Consequentialism is itself a moral philosophy. I argued here that it's the fundamental basis for all moral theories, whether people realize it or not: https://governology.substack.com/p/a-defense-of-utilitarianism . What makes a thing good is always that the expected consequences are good. No one would believe something is good if they simultaneously believed that thing generally leads to bad consequences.
Without moral arguments, you can't determine if an outcome is consequentially good or bad. Is the standard "the greatest good for the greatest number"? This immediately runs into the problem of commensurability; if an action provides a benefit to A and a harm to B, how do you add them together to determine if the total is positive or negative? Does euthanizing all terminally sick people have net positive consequences? Maybe; it ends their suffering, improves the average health in the population, and frees up a lot of resources. Talking about results is important when trying to convince people, but by itself without moral standards it can't justify any system of government.
I believe I answered that argument in the post you are responding to, in the passage that starts "One problem with the consequentialist approach".
Very helpful in distinguishing the rhetorical strategies! Consequentialism comports much more with my training and vocation. But in some places I've given up trying.
My problem is that people don't seem to wish to understand economic results, or any other science results for that matter, but do revert to identification of evil people, dark motives, and conspiracies, relying on meaningless concepts, such as exploitation. They do show envy, lots of it.
We can see what's going on here. I just don't know what to do about it. More education won't help. Perhaps less would.
My personal favourite approach to advocating for libertarianism is Mike Huemers approach, where he argues that if anyone else other than the government were doing what they were doing, everyone would oppose it (e.g. taxation would be theft if anyone else was doing it). Then, the burden of proof is simply on the non libertarian to explain why the governemt has this special right that nobody else has. I like this argument the most for a few reasons:
1. It's a simple argument, it doesn't require complicated moral philosophy and anyone can understand it.
2. As far as I've heard, there is no good counterargument to this.
3. It's all-encompassing, you can advocate for many libertarian policies at once with it. If you only rely on consequentialist arguments, you end up having to use different arguments for each issue which is less efficient and will ultimately persuades less people. For example, you would need to give a set of reasons for why legalising drugs would make people better off, and a bunch of other reasons for why abolishing public education would make people better off etc. With the problem of political authority, you can get people to agree with all libertarian policies at the same time.
That said, I also agree with all your arguments in this post, as far as I've heard there is no socialist solution to the coordination problem.
The argument I offered also applies to multiple issues, since it is a consequentialist argument about who should make decisions, not about decisions on a particular subject.
I believe Mike's argument depends on a consequentialist claim, that government not being free to do things would not have catastrophic consequences, the subject of the second half of his book. I confess to not having read the second half since I already agreed with it. I probably should since he is smart and might have come up with arguments that hadn't occurred to me.
> Then, the burden of proof is simply on the non libertarian to explain why the governemt has this special right that nobody else has
In Federalist 15, Hamilton asks and answers this question.
"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint."
That doesn't explain why government has this special right. It only pretends to justify coercion to keep people's thoughts from straying off the approved path, with no discussion of who decides what the approved path is.
I agree. It’s an excellent point, consistent with DFs’ here and elsewhere but not made explicitly.
By agreeing to a form of constitutional government with strong protection of minority rights and with plenty of checks and balances and competing interests, it becomes rational to agree to the negative costs to freedom of government, by making it more difficult - of course not remotely close to impossible - for others to do a set of things against my interests that they might otherwise find to be in their own interest.
[And that’s above and beyond the obvious “for national defense” reason which all but the hardest core anarcho-capitalist libertarians - and happily DF presents as non-crazy on this particular axis - accept as valid.]
But the people who are doing the constraint are also men, so this argument makes no sense
One way I could see it making sense is if people who want to take actions reserved for government are required to do so in a venue where other people can review and possibly veto that action; and if it's automatically punishable to take such actions outside that venue. That venue might be a banquet hall, a throne room, a state building, an online chatroom, or a combination of them.
Everything's still implemented by people who may be imperfect, but in that venue, they have a greater opportunity to spot imperfect judgement in each other, and correct it. The resulting laws are therefore better than if individuals acted without coordination. I suspect this was Hamilton's thinking.
The remaining problem in this case is if the structure itself removes the incentive for people to spot imperfect judgement in each other. I do not know if Hamilton addressed this. I can imagine David has, in effect; generally, he argues (IIRC) that that structure can give government agents incentive to overlook imperfections, especially in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the governed.
One way around that is to permit multiple structures to compete - for example, rights enforcement agencies. Hamilton, by contrast, may have gone along with Madison's model, which proposed three governmental agencies and discrete rules for how they could form and check each other.
>Similarly, I do not know any libertarian who agrees with socialists about the material consequences of the alternative systems — if he did, he would find it hard to remain a libertarian.
Not quite sure if thats what youre talking about, but I had the impression that the right did, for some time, more or less accept communist claims of material superiority, and defended their position based on freedom, and transitioned gradually to the consequentialist strategy, which was completed around Reagans time. There where libertarians that whole time who did believe in the calculation problem, but opposition to socialism was much broader than that belief, and it gained acceptance gradually - mainstream economists continued to believe Soviet numbers until the fall.
But you were around at least for the later part of that, you would propably know. On reading my impression, do you disagree?
“ had the impression that the right did, for some time, more or less accept communist claims of material superiority, ”
Methinks this is an incorrect impression.
Hayek warned that the claim was untrue before WWII.
Neither the “libertarian right” nor the “traditional / conservative right” ever - well surely in the last 75 years, anyway - accepted that claim as true, save perhaps for military production.
Now a weaker form of your statement is true enough: many opponents of communism preferred to focus on the freedom issues, and relatively few opponents of communism knew HOW grossly inferior communist dictatorships were on material well-being prior to the fall of the a Berlin Wall.
There is nothing wrong with giving a general explanation of how one thinks that libertarianism will work in practice. Such an explanation is sometimes necessary in order for people to understand, at least broadly, what one is actually asserting by affirming libertarianism. Someone else’s explanation of libertarianism—whether he is a critic or even a self-described libertarian—could diverge significantly from the intended one.
However, any such general explanation—and in however much detail it is given—can never amount to epistemological support. It is ultimately only a conjecture, even if it is a critically-preferred conjecture that one has put to the test of criticism for decades. One sound criticism would refute it. And we can never know what potential criticisms we may have overlooked.
It is logically possible, of course, that the given explanation just so happens to answer all of the criticisms that someone else has in mind. And it might therefore be sufficient to cause the critic to experience a gestalt switch to being inclined to affirm that explanation of libertarianism. However, that is most unlikely. What normally happens is that a critic will immediately have a number of criticisms of the general explanation. And the only way to convince him is to answer each of these to that critic’s satisfaction. And even then, there is likely to be a significant delay while he mulls over the answers to see whether he can come up with a better criticism.
Consequently, the only real way to “argue for libertarianism”, may be to give some sort of general explanation (but this might even be as brief as “Liberty is always preferable to state intervention”) and then deal with each specific critic’s specific criticisms. This is unavoidably individualistic and time-consuming. And, of course, some of the criticisms will either be explicitly philosophical or be based on philosophical errors that require correction. In both cases, philosophy cannot be avoided if persuasion to the libertarian conjecture is to be accomplished.
“In both cases, philosophy cannot be avoided if persuasion to the libertarian conjecture is to be accomplished.”
IMO this is *far* too strong a claim. If nothing else, different people are persuaded / come to believe things in very different ways.
Even if it happened to be the case that all economists and Substack readers fit the mindset you implicitly posit for DF and yourself, there is an even larger number of people who care more about “the facts / the data”.
For them demonstrating the real-world historical success of “more-libertarian” governments as compared to “‘less libertarian, more socialist” governments is more likely to be successful than any discussion of philosophy.
And that is wholly separate from the fact that I happen to agree with DF that persuasive success will be greatest when you assume that folks *roughly* share the same set of common sense values and moral intuitions, just with somewhat different weights, and go from there as he has described.
Having said that, I will grant you that with the woke mostly young miseducated oppressor-oppressed ideology believers, the assumption of somewhat similar common sense moral intuitions is indeed weakest. Until those folks somehow first get closer to center-leftism (traditional progressivism) than oppressor-oppressed zealotry, imo any and all ways of getting them towards libertarianism are unlikely to be at all successful. Might philosophy work slightly better with such folks? Perhaps.
“In both cases, philosophy cannot be avoided if persuasion to the libertarian conjecture is to be accomplished.”
>IMO this is *far* too strong a claim. If nothing else, different people are persuaded / come to believe things in very different ways.
The quoted final sentence referred to the immediately preceding sentence. It was not intended to imply that it is always the case that “philosophy cannot be avoided”.