I am a libertarian because I'm an utilitarian, and I think libertarianism gives the best outcomes today. There's no universal law saying that must be true though, that's just how it is. If we lived in a world where there was a supernatural higher being that regularly interfered, perhaps living in a theocratic authoritarian state where we ensured no one violated that higher being's rules would result in better outcomes, to get that higher being's favour. If we lived in a world with superintelligent AI, perhaps centrally planning the economy around that AI's advice would result in better outcomes. There are probably other examples of other circumstances where alternative ideologies result in better outcomes than libtertarianism according to utilitarianism.
But in general, I think libertarianism long term result in the best outcomes for humanity. All the problems we pose, I think can be solved by saying libertarianism is just a tool of utilitarianism, not its own terminal value. And we stop using that tool when it's not useful. We can find another method to best fund and run a military that results in the best outcomes, we can find another method for law enforcement, for property rights, and so on, there is no reason we should need to bind our entire society to libertarianism.
I had a revelation with your very insightful words:
"If we lived in a world with super-intelligent AI, perhaps centralized planning of the economy around the guidance of that AI would lead to better outcomes"
It is a response to reservations about the superiority of the market over the centralized economy.
Indeed, AI can solve coordination problems on the production side (supply). We can also imagine that AI will be able to know the desires of individuals (demand). After all, this is what algorithms are used for on the internet. But there will remain the problem of the aggregation of preferences (Arrow's theorem).
I think I agree with this. It seems to me that libertarianism is an ideology, and it’s dangerous to get obsessed with ideology to the exclusion of all else. The way I’d put it, liberty is a Good Thing; but, if the single-minded pursuit of liberty leads to bad outcomes, we may need to remember that there are other Good Things in life. This is particularly true in the real world that we actually live in, as opposed to a future utopia that we can dream about.
Meh ... I'm a libertarian because I am a Kantian about rights, and like the Kantian ideal of trying to articulate universal moral principles to explain particular moral judgments. No doubt that seems too "absolutist" to some, and indeed "ideological" if you like, but I find mix-and-match approaches to resolving specific moral questions suspicious and unsatisfying. It is too easy to hide prejudices in what is not articulated.
Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb that we have individually decided to adopt to simplify our decision-making. I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live; but there’s no guarantee that this can be achieved by strictly following any particular rule of thumb. Furthermore, the welfare of society is a vague concept that cannot be precisely defined or measured, so we’re trying to optimize something without really knowing what it is, and without really knowing what ‘optimize’ means in this context.
Yes, it is satisfying to formulate and follow a rule of thumb that seems good to you, and in our personal behaviour it may be quite feasible to do so. Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
"I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live;"
What does that mean? Principles are not people, don't have objectives. Do you mean that as analogous to "the objective of evolution is reproductive success"? If so, what is the invisible hand mechanism that results in principles that are as if designed for that purpose?
People choose which principles they wish to follow, and I suppose they choose with some objective in mind. I chose my principles with the admittedly vague aim of optimizing the welfare of society, because it seems to me that it’s an objective that other people might share and agree on. If I chose with the aim of optimizing only my own welfare, I’d choose different principles (but I’d hope that other people didn’t share them). If I chose with the aim of maximizing the sales of a certain brand of toothpaste, I’d choose different principles again. And so on.
A central problem of all societies is the conflict between individual self-interest and the general interest and you seem to be assuming it away. Why would you have any more reason to act for the general interest in choosing principles than in choosing actions?
>Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb
I guess that's where you and I disagree. I do think that there are moral principles that apply universally and are not the expressions of some legal system, that are not just "rules of thumb", and so that puts me in the so-called "natural law" tradition. Thus, some acts of gratuitous torture are wrong, even if all societies approved of them. True, I don't claim to /know/ the principles I am inclined to assert in these comments, but I conceive my task to be one of trying to figure out what they are.
>I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society
Fine, but this seems like one of those universally applicable principles, depending on what you mean by the expression "ultimate objective". In one reading, this makes it sound that there are objective purposes in nature, which is the type of thing I am talking about. Of course, if it does not mean that, if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective", then I am simply going to disagree that we /do/ have such an objective—I certainly don't, for example. People (quasi-utilitarians) seem to think that they can escape commitment to some transcendent moral principles by talking about "the welfare of society as whole", but the commitment to that specific goal is itself an example of a transcendent commitment. (Not to mention that, as you say, the notion of optimizing such a thing is far from clear.)
>Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
I agree with this, but it is consistent with what I say. I think there is right and wrong independently of specific societies, but there is—obviously—much dispute about what these are. Still, we all agree that we need to make some decision or other, and so we need to come to some practical way of doing so, and that is where compromise comes in. We have good practical reasons to compromise, even if we are not convinced that what we are doing really is the best thing (after all, if we thought we /were/ doing the best, then that would hardly be a /compromise/, would it?).
" if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective""
There is a third alternative, an invisible hand theory in which some mechanism analogous to evolution produces a pattern of principles that is as if designed for a purpose. I sketch one such in an old piece:
Do you distinguish between the natural law approach to morality and moral realism? I think the former tries to deduce principles from facts of reality, which runs into Hume's is/ought problem. The latter doesn't, treats them as observations not deductions from objective fact.
The core of my thinking on this matter is encapsulated in two claims, that (a) in many situations, it is morally wrong to (eg) kill people [insert other libertarian prohibitions to taste], and (b) this is true NOT just because some (perhaps different, perhaps the same) people made it so. When I use the term "natural rights" in these comments, that's all I mean. I'm more certain of this than I am of any philosophical theory.
So anything more than this is non-core. Thus—to wax ontological and epistemological—exactly /what/ makes it wrong to kill people, and how can we know when it is and it isn't? FWIW, I have no considered view about the ontology of moral facts (apart from insisting that there /are/ some), but I do think we can come to reasonable (≠ true, necessarily) moral beliefs about the moral facts only through (Rawlsian) reflective equilibrium, as I try in my comments.
Now I think most people believe it is wrong to kill people, and not just because people made it so. That is, /real/ Hobbesians are rare. And so, if /they/ want reasonable moral beliefs, then they too must engage in the process of reflective equilibrium, which is to say frustrating and tedious casuistry about the content of natural rights.
OK, I need to clarify. The ultimate objective of my own moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of society, and I guess that this vague objective is shared by many other people; but of course there are also plenty of people who would reject it (not just you!). For example, some people’s only objective is to optimize their own personal welfare, which is rational enough.
I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence, morality, and political principles of human beings. We are just a funny little lifeform on the surface of one little planet in a vast, uncaring universe, and whatever we do to each other matters only to us. The laws of nature govern how we function and prevent us from flying to the moon by flapping our arms, but how we choose to behave (within our physical limits) is entirely up to us.
>I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence ... whatever we do to each other matters only to us.
And what if it doesn't matter to some of us? There are people in world who literally treat others as /things/, to be used in ways (enslavement, rape, torture, murder) no different to physical objects. They don't care. I think that what they do is wrong, and would still be wrong if everyone (including myself) thought otherwise. Do you?
Where criminal penalties are concerned, my quick sketch of an answer might look something like this:
* In general, the better course of action is to confer benefits on those who have benefitted you (to enable them to do so again, and to motivate them) but to confer harms or threats on those who harm harmed or threatened you (to avoid the Danegeld problem).
* This sort of exchange can be viewed as a market, and one that may have a market clearing price of a kind. If your penalty for stealing a sheep is to be fined a sheep, you have an incentive to steal sheep. As the penalty becomes steeper, fewer sheep are stolen. If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
* Our sense of what is a fair penalty is shaped by experience with penalizing over the years or centuries.
"If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly"
More costly to whom? Executing someone is less costly than imprisoning him if you don't count costs to the criminal. Penal slavery is less costly still, where it can be done at a profit, on the same assumption.
> If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
I don't think we should assume that. E.g. enslaving someone is a harsh punishment that might have a negative cost, while keeping someone locked up in a five-star prison is a less harsh punishment that is very costly.
That's not necessarily an unsound point. On the other hand, part of the cost of enslaving someone is the need to defeat them in a fight, when they know that being enslaved is a possible outcome of losing. Enslaving people under conditions other than war may be risky.
Even when you have a state, slavery seems to be limited to a few cases: enslavement of prisoners of war or captives after a war, enslavement of debtors, and enslavement of family members sold to raise money (usually children). It doesn't seem to be a common penalty for a crime.
1. Did the criminal actually become the property of another person, or of the state? Or is "slavery" being used here in a broader sense?
2. Here we seem to be talking about penalties imposed by states, and sometimes by rather powerful ones (see Wasserschweinchen's remarks about North Korea and the Soviet Union below). I was proposing an approach to determining penalties in a society of autonomous individuals. Such penalties may have limitations that a totalitarian dictatorship is not subject to.
The criminal was transported to the British New World colonies. He was an indentured servant, a temporary slave, I believe for seven or fourteen years, depending on details of the legal process. I am pretty sure the usual system was to sell him to a private employer he would then work for.
Indenture was also used as a way in which a voluntary immigrant could pay the cost of coming to the New World. I think the usual system was that the ship captain charged a fixed price for transporting the immigrant, then auctioned him off to whatever purchaser would pay that price in exchange for the shortest term of indenture.
My impression is that slavery for crimes is widespread in North Korea and was widespread in the Soviet Union. Inmate labour (and community service) in other countries fall somewhere on the spectrum between free labour and slavery.
Those are conditions unlike a "market," though. Rather than penalties being a result of many people with roughly commensurate power coming to terms with each other in exchanges of threat for threat, they're imposed by a single entity with overwhelming power. Relative to such an entity, individuals are already effectively slaves whether or not they've been formally decreed to be slaves as part of a punishment.
This essay would have annoyed me greatly in 1982. And probably for a few years after that. That's true even though I did not come to my libertarian views through Rand. (I did stop off the path for a year or two before being convinced of the flaws in her thinking.) It's surely not uncommon for young, idealistic, intelligent people to want a system that provides clear answers to all questions. Especially if they have given up religion, the usual source of certainty.
In my early libertarian years, I was attracted both the Rothbardian approach and to your approach. Over time, I moved to your approach. I also recognized that the need for certainty is a huge intellectual sin.
I think this is a general problem, not specific to libertarianism: this idea of solving problems in a universal way, by logical deduction, starting with an axiom.
If you start with "A=A", it is most obvious. It is completely empty. And any logical deduction cannot, by definition, give it additional content. So any logical conclusion remains empty.
What libertarianism confuses is a concept (definition) with a solution to a problem. For example, what is "property"? Is it a general, universal solution to every conflict? No, it is a dirty, partial, temporary way out of a concrete conflict. Property is a relationship between people, a "right" or a bundle of rights, the permission of others to do something with something, a promise that they will not interfere with such an action. But why should they allow me to do something with something? This is the essential point. Property as a concept only creates the possibility to talk about conflicts and a form of resolution, but does not provide any concrete content.
Take a concrete right. To fish in a pond, for example. They allowed me to do that. So it becomes my right or my property. But it is not universal, it depends on others. If there were no others, I would not need a right to fish in that pond, I would just do it if I wanted to.
The libertarian now invents the story that this right comes into the world because I am the first to find the pond and start fishing there. This creates a universal property right that everyone has to respect. Why should they? Maybe the pond is quite big with lots of fish, why should I be the only one fishing there? Why should all the fish be "mine"? This is where Locke's proviso kicks in. I should leave enough fish for the others. How much? Here begins the real content and conflict. How much do they allow me to take from the world and exclude them from this part of the world? In short, there is no universal solution to this.
So to speak, there are no rights in the world from the beginning, but potentials (possibilities of the physical body guided by the personal mind). These potentials -maybe- lead to concrete rights, concrete boundaries, property and so on. Libertarianism and similar schools of thought turn this on its head by proclaiming a fundamental right from the very beginning.
I think I will assign a value between 0-1 to the culpability of the human shield in that crime when they end up becoming human shield. Clearly in libertarian perspective this value might be subjective but this is how I see it.
Random Joe goes to 7/11 to buy a pack smokes and then is held as hostage by a deranged person who then commits crime. I would assign a value of 0 to Joe's culpability here.
In a village religious zealots catch a lady and her child who belong to a disliked group, the child is killed and the mother is made to watch. The mother is than raped and killed too. The people who did this, continue to live in the village as respected members of the society. I might assign a value of 1 to the culpability of the village in this regard. It might be fine to harm the village to some extent to get to the bad guys.
In the case of Gaza there is undoubtedly a major subset of the population that supports Hamas. But there is also going to be a subset that opposes them or is too young to be morally culpable. This group has no way to leave the strip (to my knowledge, no other country would accept them).
So in this case, do we just spear Hamas to protect that last group?
I am a little surprised you are so... uncertain I suppose... on the matter of killing people who steal. While I would recommend not using high explosives to deter people stealing sticks, seeing as how they might not have known they were stealing for starters, the fundamental root of enforcement is a violent death. As Walter Williams put it "If I get a speeding ticket and refuse to pay it, there will be a warrant out for my arrest to make me appear in court. If I refuse to appear in court or be arrested I will be taken to jail. If I refuse to be arrested and taken to jail, I will be shot.... You should never make anything illegal you are not willing to kill people over."
In the story, the firewood was assumed to be in a wood pile on the owner's property, not sticks out in the forest, so the theft was deliberate.
In the speeding ticket case death isn't for speeding, it is for speeding plus refusing to go along with the normal legal process for punishing speeders. Do you really have no problem with the police simplifying the transaction by shooting anyone they catch speeding?
Regarding the firewood, before blowing someone up I would say put a little sign saying "These are my sticks; don't steal them." Just to be on the safe side, you understand; I grew up where property lines were non-obvious and pile of sticks might just be a brush pile. Generally it is worth while to ensure that the crime is being intentionally committed (or at least willfully negligently) before punishing I think. Whether or not one goes right to high explosives is a question of distributive justice rather than commutative justice I would say. I think it would be proper to spend some effort to find out who is doing it, perhaps why, but if someone got hurt knowingly stealing from someone else I wouldn't have a ton of sympathy for them. The main problem with the explosive is that you might hurt a bystander when it went off, I would say. I personally wouldn't kill someone for stealing sticks unless I really needed them for some reason, like I couldn't cook food without them or keep warm at night, but I wouldn't presume to make that decision for someone else, either.
I don't know that I exactly agree that the death penalty isn't for speeding but for refusing to go along with the process, or rather that it is a distinction that is relevant. The process is downstream of the initial punishment, but that doesn't mean that it isn't what backstops the whole deal. While there a distinction between getting a ticket for speeding and getting summary execution, the power to enforce speed limits comes from the power to impose fines, which is imposed by the rest of the process. The state is saying "If you do what we don't like, we are going to take some of your stuff, by force if necessary."
I certainly do have a problem with the police shooting anyone they catch speeding; in fact I have a problem with them giving people tickets for speeding. I don't think punishing people for potential harm caused to others is just. I think we have gone rather overboard with protecting from potential harm. (I know there are arguments to be made that the state owns the roads, and so they can set the limit at whatever they want and demand that those who use the roads abide by those rules. I don't think we should allow our state to do that, for much the same reason that other victimless crimes are a bad idea, even though in this case there is a stronger argument for it not being a violation of individual rights.)
I suppose my general argument is there are certainly plenty of crimes that are justifiable to stop by killing the perpetrator, a slightly smaller set of crimes that justify killing the perpetrator afterwards (more lenient considering that proving they are the perpetrator is trickier), and a set of things I really don't like people doing but that are not violations of another person's rights (no harm) and so I am not willing to kill someone to prevent them and wouldn't recommend making criminal law about.
Part of the problem is my use of "sticks." I was imagining something like a log that had been split into several pieces. "Faggots" might have been a better term. It has to be large enough so that you could drill a hole in it and fit a stick of dynamite in without it being obvious.
Ah, yea if it is was split wood, obviously worked a bit and stacked, that makes a lot more sense. I still wouldn't jump right to "boom, dead", in part because of the possible collateral damage and in part because I might not mind so much if I found out more (I can imagine reasons I would prefer to share the split wood, or at least come up with a trade even if the person were a thief initially.) Still, I can also think of times when I would not look down on someone for putting a bullet into the perpetrator, either, even in cases where I might not. Say if selling split lumber was how that person made their living.
I was asking not what you would do but what you were entitled to do if you so chose. Putting aside the collateral damage, do you think the victim is entitled to use lethal force if that is the most convenient way of protecting his property? If that is the only way?
Sorry, I meant to make it clear that I thought the answer was "yes" that he was entitled to use lethal force to protect his property. Whether or not it was morally proper in the sense of being worthy of praise, that is a different question. I wouldn't say so unless it was necessary, rather blameworthy in fact. Not punishable, however.
I am making the distinction between what one is entitled to do and what one ought to do, commutative vs distributive justice in the Smithian sense.
Yes, libertarians have historically focused on "persons" (= those with a sufficiently full capacity to be self-determining, "sufficient" being given by the "age of majority" as Peter has it), and some—like me—make the distinctive claim that persons are self-owners. Since, I assume, children are not persons, libertarians have historically left it as an open question what their rights are.
It seems to me that libertarians have a free choice on the issue. For while children are not /actually/ persons, they are /potential/ persons (in the sense that, in the normal course of events, they turn into persons). If you think that only actual persons have rights, then you get Peter's position, that children are simply property—presumably, in the first instance, of the mother, who created them ex nihilo. But that has unpleasant implications—Peter mentions "tell[ing] them to go to bed or eat their broccoli", but, of course, if they really are property, then a parent may do these things with the intention of fattening them up for market. So, if you do think that such implications are to be avoided, then you might be attracted to an alternative position, that /potential/ persons have all the rights of persons /that they can have/. Infants can want not to be tortured, so they have a right not to be tortured. Infants cannot enter into agreements, so they have no right to enter into agreements (and that is why they are not self-owners). Still, I'm not sure that libertarianism, as such, commits one to either choice.
Yes, parents have a duty to provide for their children. Suppose, because of something you did, you reduced a pre-existing adult to the level of an infant, who could be nurtured back to adulthood by providing intensive support. Since you are responsible for their vulnerable situation, you have a duty to provide that support to them, and they the corresponding right to receive it from you. But, as I say, a child has all the rights of an adult that it can have. Since this infant-like "adult" has a right to support, clearly the actual infant themselves also has a right to support. And since, in this case, /the parents/ are responsible the infant's vulnerable situation, /they/ have a duty to provide that support.
Not sure the first two questions raise any special difficulties. More interesting, however, is the third:
>What if the mother doesn't even know precisely who the father is?
I noted in passing above that IF infants are property, then /the mother/ would be the owner of the infant, since she created the infant. And so I say right now that, even though infants are NOT property, /the mother/ is in the first instance the one responsible for providing the care, for the same reason, that she is the one who created the little bundle of obligation. Of course, often, she agrees to do so with the male who impregnates her, and /this/ is the basis of /his/ obligation to care for the child. But sometimes she does not, as in the case you mention, in which case she is the /sole/ person responsible for providing care to the child.
And if she is unable or unwilling to provide care? I said in a previous comment that, libertarian though I am, I accept a duty of easy rescue, that there is an enforceable duty to help others when it costs us little and benefits them greatly. So, if the mother is absent, it seems to me we all together are obliged to see to it that the child gets the care it has a right to, since, if we all share the cost, then the cost to each of us will be little, for an obviously great benefit to the child.
That isn't a problem, none. What rights to rocks have? Libertarianism, like most systems, rights are only coffered upon reaching the age of majority. Children are simply property like rocks hence parent's ability to tell them to go to bed or eat their broccoli on pangs of damage or disposal.
I do not believe that position is shared by most libertarians, and it raises the problem of defining the age of majority and justifying that definition.
How is your claim less arbitrary than restricting rights to men, or to women, or to the kiing?
What is there to stop a parent from putting their children in a well the day before they turn 18. Then the day they turn 18 anfld can engage in contracts, they offer to pull their child out of the pit in exchange for lifelong slavery.
Volokh Conspiracy had a case where a union shined messages on to a restaurant's wall. Without reading it again (WaPo is behind a paywall, last I checked), my memory sez the union and restaurant were at loggerheads over some kind of labor dispute.
I think you gave a talk titled "Problems" at a conference at Columbia University in November 1971. I think I recorded that talk on a cassette. I might have it somewhere.
When it comes to some of these questions -- such as what you may do to protect yourself from a threat -- I distinguish between what the law says you're allowed to do in a libertarian system, and what you are morally justified in doing. Many libertarians (like even more people with different views) seem to think the two should be the same. Maybe that makes sense to a Kantian. I don't see why it should follow for a utilitarian -- a popular moral view that I dislike greatly. Nor for a virtue ethicist (closer to my thing).
Edit: I see that you mention a point very similar to this at the very end with regard to Rand.
- Can a court issue a subpoena to a third party? Or is that slavery?
- Can a court issue a temporary injunction to (e.g.) prevent you disposing of the property in dispute? Or is that definitely wronging someone - albeit we don't know who until the trial is over!
- How do you feel about juries?
Obviously these are mostly aimed at minarchists, an an-cap can reply that my insurance company's private courts can do anything I've signed up to.
Other problems include: problems relating to animal welfare, problems relating to spreading misinformation/information asymmetry, problems relating to the rights of future people, problems relating to monopolization/natural-monopolies/network effects, problems relating to irrationality (especially induced irrationality), problems relating to asymmetric bargaining power (especially inherited power).
"An answer offered by some libertarians is that you are entitled to get your property back plus as much again, the hundred dollars he stole from you plus another hundred. That is a simple rule but I have not yet seen a good argument for it."
As I understand it, if you demonstrate with your actions that you don't respect my right to a television set by stealing it, you can be estopped from complaining if I also take your television set from you (or whatever property you have of equivalent value) after retrieving what you stolen from me.
I'm not a philosopher (no matter what my friends think) nor am I a political scientist, but for me it's less that I'm a "libertarian" so much as I think in many (not all) cases more government involvement/more corporate power/less individual freedom is on average "bad" in some important sense specific to that case. Privacy is an area I'm especially interested in, but there's others for sure.
I understand the appeal of wanting a coherent philosophical framework to work off, it can be a great way to limit hypocrisy or contradiction (which are both good in themselves and also strategically useful), but I think at the end of the day we're all working off intuitions. We should interrogate those intuitions, and where they lead to unacceptable contradictions or abhorrent results we should limit them, but rigid adherence to a pre-established framework seems like it's always going to run into these kinds of problems?
Again, I'm not saying these frameworks are bad. They are not, they can be extremely useful in a range of ways. But saying 'libertarianism leads to these silly conclusions in these cases' to me suggests 'well, maybe we shouldn't be rigidly libertarian in those situations'
I have since turned away from any restitution in criminal or indeed civil cases: the harmed party stays harmed, the harmer is punished and any ill-gotten gains confiscated (but not returned to the harmed party). Otherwise no one will ever buy locks again, or will buy a suboptimal quantity.
I dare say that few over 30s still cling to apriorism, of they are libertarians at all.
On defense, though I don't think it would be enough to turn a profit, a private defence form could credibly promise to retaliate against an attackers troops in an unrelated place if and only of they hurt one of their client. More Guerilla than army, but if you are doing Guerilla anyways...
I am a libertarian because I'm an utilitarian, and I think libertarianism gives the best outcomes today. There's no universal law saying that must be true though, that's just how it is. If we lived in a world where there was a supernatural higher being that regularly interfered, perhaps living in a theocratic authoritarian state where we ensured no one violated that higher being's rules would result in better outcomes, to get that higher being's favour. If we lived in a world with superintelligent AI, perhaps centrally planning the economy around that AI's advice would result in better outcomes. There are probably other examples of other circumstances where alternative ideologies result in better outcomes than libtertarianism according to utilitarianism.
But in general, I think libertarianism long term result in the best outcomes for humanity. All the problems we pose, I think can be solved by saying libertarianism is just a tool of utilitarianism, not its own terminal value. And we stop using that tool when it's not useful. We can find another method to best fund and run a military that results in the best outcomes, we can find another method for law enforcement, for property rights, and so on, there is no reason we should need to bind our entire society to libertarianism.
I had a revelation with your very insightful words:
"If we lived in a world with super-intelligent AI, perhaps centralized planning of the economy around the guidance of that AI would lead to better outcomes"
It is a response to reservations about the superiority of the market over the centralized economy.
Indeed, AI can solve coordination problems on the production side (supply). We can also imagine that AI will be able to know the desires of individuals (demand). After all, this is what algorithms are used for on the internet. But there will remain the problem of the aggregation of preferences (Arrow's theorem).
I think I agree with this. It seems to me that libertarianism is an ideology, and it’s dangerous to get obsessed with ideology to the exclusion of all else. The way I’d put it, liberty is a Good Thing; but, if the single-minded pursuit of liberty leads to bad outcomes, we may need to remember that there are other Good Things in life. This is particularly true in the real world that we actually live in, as opposed to a future utopia that we can dream about.
Roughly my view as well, but I wouldn't go as far as doopilidoo because utility is not the only thing I value.
Meh ... I'm a libertarian because I am a Kantian about rights, and like the Kantian ideal of trying to articulate universal moral principles to explain particular moral judgments. No doubt that seems too "absolutist" to some, and indeed "ideological" if you like, but I find mix-and-match approaches to resolving specific moral questions suspicious and unsatisfying. It is too easy to hide prejudices in what is not articulated.
Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb that we have individually decided to adopt to simplify our decision-making. I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live; but there’s no guarantee that this can be achieved by strictly following any particular rule of thumb. Furthermore, the welfare of society is a vague concept that cannot be precisely defined or measured, so we’re trying to optimize something without really knowing what it is, and without really knowing what ‘optimize’ means in this context.
Yes, it is satisfying to formulate and follow a rule of thumb that seems good to you, and in our personal behaviour it may be quite feasible to do so. Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
"I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live;"
What does that mean? Principles are not people, don't have objectives. Do you mean that as analogous to "the objective of evolution is reproductive success"? If so, what is the invisible hand mechanism that results in principles that are as if designed for that purpose?
People choose which principles they wish to follow, and I suppose they choose with some objective in mind. I chose my principles with the admittedly vague aim of optimizing the welfare of society, because it seems to me that it’s an objective that other people might share and agree on. If I chose with the aim of optimizing only my own welfare, I’d choose different principles (but I’d hope that other people didn’t share them). If I chose with the aim of maximizing the sales of a certain brand of toothpaste, I’d choose different principles again. And so on.
A central problem of all societies is the conflict between individual self-interest and the general interest and you seem to be assuming it away. Why would you have any more reason to act for the general interest in choosing principles than in choosing actions?
>Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb
I guess that's where you and I disagree. I do think that there are moral principles that apply universally and are not the expressions of some legal system, that are not just "rules of thumb", and so that puts me in the so-called "natural law" tradition. Thus, some acts of gratuitous torture are wrong, even if all societies approved of them. True, I don't claim to /know/ the principles I am inclined to assert in these comments, but I conceive my task to be one of trying to figure out what they are.
>I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society
Fine, but this seems like one of those universally applicable principles, depending on what you mean by the expression "ultimate objective". In one reading, this makes it sound that there are objective purposes in nature, which is the type of thing I am talking about. Of course, if it does not mean that, if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective", then I am simply going to disagree that we /do/ have such an objective—I certainly don't, for example. People (quasi-utilitarians) seem to think that they can escape commitment to some transcendent moral principles by talking about "the welfare of society as whole", but the commitment to that specific goal is itself an example of a transcendent commitment. (Not to mention that, as you say, the notion of optimizing such a thing is far from clear.)
>Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
I agree with this, but it is consistent with what I say. I think there is right and wrong independently of specific societies, but there is—obviously—much dispute about what these are. Still, we all agree that we need to make some decision or other, and so we need to come to some practical way of doing so, and that is where compromise comes in. We have good practical reasons to compromise, even if we are not convinced that what we are doing really is the best thing (after all, if we thought we /were/ doing the best, then that would hardly be a /compromise/, would it?).
" if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective""
There is a third alternative, an invisible hand theory in which some mechanism analogous to evolution produces a pattern of principles that is as if designed for a purpose. I sketch one such in an old piece:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Less_Law/Less_Law.html
Do you distinguish between the natural law approach to morality and moral realism? I think the former tries to deduce principles from facts of reality, which runs into Hume's is/ought problem. The latter doesn't, treats them as observations not deductions from objective fact.
The core of my thinking on this matter is encapsulated in two claims, that (a) in many situations, it is morally wrong to (eg) kill people [insert other libertarian prohibitions to taste], and (b) this is true NOT just because some (perhaps different, perhaps the same) people made it so. When I use the term "natural rights" in these comments, that's all I mean. I'm more certain of this than I am of any philosophical theory.
So anything more than this is non-core. Thus—to wax ontological and epistemological—exactly /what/ makes it wrong to kill people, and how can we know when it is and it isn't? FWIW, I have no considered view about the ontology of moral facts (apart from insisting that there /are/ some), but I do think we can come to reasonable (≠ true, necessarily) moral beliefs about the moral facts only through (Rawlsian) reflective equilibrium, as I try in my comments.
Now I think most people believe it is wrong to kill people, and not just because people made it so. That is, /real/ Hobbesians are rare. And so, if /they/ want reasonable moral beliefs, then they too must engage in the process of reflective equilibrium, which is to say frustrating and tedious casuistry about the content of natural rights.
OK, I need to clarify. The ultimate objective of my own moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of society, and I guess that this vague objective is shared by many other people; but of course there are also plenty of people who would reject it (not just you!). For example, some people’s only objective is to optimize their own personal welfare, which is rational enough.
I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence, morality, and political principles of human beings. We are just a funny little lifeform on the surface of one little planet in a vast, uncaring universe, and whatever we do to each other matters only to us. The laws of nature govern how we function and prevent us from flying to the moon by flapping our arms, but how we choose to behave (within our physical limits) is entirely up to us.
>I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence ... whatever we do to each other matters only to us.
And what if it doesn't matter to some of us? There are people in world who literally treat others as /things/, to be used in ways (enslavement, rape, torture, murder) no different to physical objects. They don't care. I think that what they do is wrong, and would still be wrong if everyone (including myself) thought otherwise. Do you?
Where criminal penalties are concerned, my quick sketch of an answer might look something like this:
* In general, the better course of action is to confer benefits on those who have benefitted you (to enable them to do so again, and to motivate them) but to confer harms or threats on those who harm harmed or threatened you (to avoid the Danegeld problem).
* This sort of exchange can be viewed as a market, and one that may have a market clearing price of a kind. If your penalty for stealing a sheep is to be fined a sheep, you have an incentive to steal sheep. As the penalty becomes steeper, fewer sheep are stolen. If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
* Our sense of what is a fair penalty is shaped by experience with penalizing over the years or centuries.
"If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly"
More costly to whom? Executing someone is less costly than imprisoning him if you don't count costs to the criminal. Penal slavery is less costly still, where it can be done at a profit, on the same assumption.
> If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
I don't think we should assume that. E.g. enslaving someone is a harsh punishment that might have a negative cost, while keeping someone locked up in a five-star prison is a less harsh punishment that is very costly.
That's not necessarily an unsound point. On the other hand, part of the cost of enslaving someone is the need to defeat them in a fight, when they know that being enslaved is a possible outcome of losing. Enslaving people under conditions other than war may be risky.
Even when you have a state, slavery seems to be limited to a few cases: enslavement of prisoners of war or captives after a war, enslavement of debtors, and enslavement of family members sold to raise money (usually children). It doesn't seem to be a common penalty for a crime.
Another example of penal enslavement is galley slavery, which was common in Mediterranean powers starting about the end of the 15th century.
In England in the 18th c. transportation was a common penalty. It resulted in temporary slavery.
Strictly speaking it was usually imposed not as a penalty but as something the criminal agreed to in order not to be executed.
1. Did the criminal actually become the property of another person, or of the state? Or is "slavery" being used here in a broader sense?
2. Here we seem to be talking about penalties imposed by states, and sometimes by rather powerful ones (see Wasserschweinchen's remarks about North Korea and the Soviet Union below). I was proposing an approach to determining penalties in a society of autonomous individuals. Such penalties may have limitations that a totalitarian dictatorship is not subject to.
The criminal was transported to the British New World colonies. He was an indentured servant, a temporary slave, I believe for seven or fourteen years, depending on details of the legal process. I am pretty sure the usual system was to sell him to a private employer he would then work for.
Indenture was also used as a way in which a voluntary immigrant could pay the cost of coming to the New World. I think the usual system was that the ship captain charged a fixed price for transporting the immigrant, then auctioned him off to whatever purchaser would pay that price in exchange for the shortest term of indenture.
My impression is that slavery for crimes is widespread in North Korea and was widespread in the Soviet Union. Inmate labour (and community service) in other countries fall somewhere on the spectrum between free labour and slavery.
Those are conditions unlike a "market," though. Rather than penalties being a result of many people with roughly commensurate power coming to terms with each other in exchanges of threat for threat, they're imposed by a single entity with overwhelming power. Relative to such an entity, individuals are already effectively slaves whether or not they've been formally decreed to be slaves as part of a punishment.
This essay would have annoyed me greatly in 1982. And probably for a few years after that. That's true even though I did not come to my libertarian views through Rand. (I did stop off the path for a year or two before being convinced of the flaws in her thinking.) It's surely not uncommon for young, idealistic, intelligent people to want a system that provides clear answers to all questions. Especially if they have given up religion, the usual source of certainty.
In my early libertarian years, I was attracted both the Rothbardian approach and to your approach. Over time, I moved to your approach. I also recognized that the need for certainty is a huge intellectual sin.
I think this is a general problem, not specific to libertarianism: this idea of solving problems in a universal way, by logical deduction, starting with an axiom.
If you start with "A=A", it is most obvious. It is completely empty. And any logical deduction cannot, by definition, give it additional content. So any logical conclusion remains empty.
What libertarianism confuses is a concept (definition) with a solution to a problem. For example, what is "property"? Is it a general, universal solution to every conflict? No, it is a dirty, partial, temporary way out of a concrete conflict. Property is a relationship between people, a "right" or a bundle of rights, the permission of others to do something with something, a promise that they will not interfere with such an action. But why should they allow me to do something with something? This is the essential point. Property as a concept only creates the possibility to talk about conflicts and a form of resolution, but does not provide any concrete content.
Take a concrete right. To fish in a pond, for example. They allowed me to do that. So it becomes my right or my property. But it is not universal, it depends on others. If there were no others, I would not need a right to fish in that pond, I would just do it if I wanted to.
The libertarian now invents the story that this right comes into the world because I am the first to find the pond and start fishing there. This creates a universal property right that everyone has to respect. Why should they? Maybe the pond is quite big with lots of fish, why should I be the only one fishing there? Why should all the fish be "mine"? This is where Locke's proviso kicks in. I should leave enough fish for the others. How much? Here begins the real content and conflict. How much do they allow me to take from the world and exclude them from this part of the world? In short, there is no universal solution to this.
So to speak, there are no rights in the world from the beginning, but potentials (possibilities of the physical body guided by the personal mind). These potentials -maybe- lead to concrete rights, concrete boundaries, property and so on. Libertarianism and similar schools of thought turn this on its head by proclaiming a fundamental right from the very beginning.
> The Human Shield Problem
I think I will assign a value between 0-1 to the culpability of the human shield in that crime when they end up becoming human shield. Clearly in libertarian perspective this value might be subjective but this is how I see it.
Random Joe goes to 7/11 to buy a pack smokes and then is held as hostage by a deranged person who then commits crime. I would assign a value of 0 to Joe's culpability here.
In a village religious zealots catch a lady and her child who belong to a disliked group, the child is killed and the mother is made to watch. The mother is than raped and killed too. The people who did this, continue to live in the village as respected members of the society. I might assign a value of 1 to the culpability of the village in this regard. It might be fine to harm the village to some extent to get to the bad guys.
In the case of Gaza there is undoubtedly a major subset of the population that supports Hamas. But there is also going to be a subset that opposes them or is too young to be morally culpable. This group has no way to leave the strip (to my knowledge, no other country would accept them).
So in this case, do we just spear Hamas to protect that last group?
I am a little surprised you are so... uncertain I suppose... on the matter of killing people who steal. While I would recommend not using high explosives to deter people stealing sticks, seeing as how they might not have known they were stealing for starters, the fundamental root of enforcement is a violent death. As Walter Williams put it "If I get a speeding ticket and refuse to pay it, there will be a warrant out for my arrest to make me appear in court. If I refuse to appear in court or be arrested I will be taken to jail. If I refuse to be arrested and taken to jail, I will be shot.... You should never make anything illegal you are not willing to kill people over."
In the story, the firewood was assumed to be in a wood pile on the owner's property, not sticks out in the forest, so the theft was deliberate.
In the speeding ticket case death isn't for speeding, it is for speeding plus refusing to go along with the normal legal process for punishing speeders. Do you really have no problem with the police simplifying the transaction by shooting anyone they catch speeding?
Regarding the firewood, before blowing someone up I would say put a little sign saying "These are my sticks; don't steal them." Just to be on the safe side, you understand; I grew up where property lines were non-obvious and pile of sticks might just be a brush pile. Generally it is worth while to ensure that the crime is being intentionally committed (or at least willfully negligently) before punishing I think. Whether or not one goes right to high explosives is a question of distributive justice rather than commutative justice I would say. I think it would be proper to spend some effort to find out who is doing it, perhaps why, but if someone got hurt knowingly stealing from someone else I wouldn't have a ton of sympathy for them. The main problem with the explosive is that you might hurt a bystander when it went off, I would say. I personally wouldn't kill someone for stealing sticks unless I really needed them for some reason, like I couldn't cook food without them or keep warm at night, but I wouldn't presume to make that decision for someone else, either.
I don't know that I exactly agree that the death penalty isn't for speeding but for refusing to go along with the process, or rather that it is a distinction that is relevant. The process is downstream of the initial punishment, but that doesn't mean that it isn't what backstops the whole deal. While there a distinction between getting a ticket for speeding and getting summary execution, the power to enforce speed limits comes from the power to impose fines, which is imposed by the rest of the process. The state is saying "If you do what we don't like, we are going to take some of your stuff, by force if necessary."
I certainly do have a problem with the police shooting anyone they catch speeding; in fact I have a problem with them giving people tickets for speeding. I don't think punishing people for potential harm caused to others is just. I think we have gone rather overboard with protecting from potential harm. (I know there are arguments to be made that the state owns the roads, and so they can set the limit at whatever they want and demand that those who use the roads abide by those rules. I don't think we should allow our state to do that, for much the same reason that other victimless crimes are a bad idea, even though in this case there is a stronger argument for it not being a violation of individual rights.)
I suppose my general argument is there are certainly plenty of crimes that are justifiable to stop by killing the perpetrator, a slightly smaller set of crimes that justify killing the perpetrator afterwards (more lenient considering that proving they are the perpetrator is trickier), and a set of things I really don't like people doing but that are not violations of another person's rights (no harm) and so I am not willing to kill someone to prevent them and wouldn't recommend making criminal law about.
Part of the problem is my use of "sticks." I was imagining something like a log that had been split into several pieces. "Faggots" might have been a better term. It has to be large enough so that you could drill a hole in it and fit a stick of dynamite in without it being obvious.
Ah, yea if it is was split wood, obviously worked a bit and stacked, that makes a lot more sense. I still wouldn't jump right to "boom, dead", in part because of the possible collateral damage and in part because I might not mind so much if I found out more (I can imagine reasons I would prefer to share the split wood, or at least come up with a trade even if the person were a thief initially.) Still, I can also think of times when I would not look down on someone for putting a bullet into the perpetrator, either, even in cases where I might not. Say if selling split lumber was how that person made their living.
I was asking not what you would do but what you were entitled to do if you so chose. Putting aside the collateral damage, do you think the victim is entitled to use lethal force if that is the most convenient way of protecting his property? If that is the only way?
If an individual or a gang tries to burn down my home or place of business, lethal force should be an option
Sorry, I meant to make it clear that I thought the answer was "yes" that he was entitled to use lethal force to protect his property. Whether or not it was morally proper in the sense of being worthy of praise, that is a different question. I wouldn't say so unless it was necessary, rather blameworthy in fact. Not punishable, however.
I am making the distinction between what one is entitled to do and what one ought to do, commutative vs distributive justice in the Smithian sense.
Another major problem is what to do about children, what rights do they have?
Yes, libertarians have historically focused on "persons" (= those with a sufficiently full capacity to be self-determining, "sufficient" being given by the "age of majority" as Peter has it), and some—like me—make the distinctive claim that persons are self-owners. Since, I assume, children are not persons, libertarians have historically left it as an open question what their rights are.
It seems to me that libertarians have a free choice on the issue. For while children are not /actually/ persons, they are /potential/ persons (in the sense that, in the normal course of events, they turn into persons). If you think that only actual persons have rights, then you get Peter's position, that children are simply property—presumably, in the first instance, of the mother, who created them ex nihilo. But that has unpleasant implications—Peter mentions "tell[ing] them to go to bed or eat their broccoli", but, of course, if they really are property, then a parent may do these things with the intention of fattening them up for market. So, if you do think that such implications are to be avoided, then you might be attracted to an alternative position, that /potential/ persons have all the rights of persons /that they can have/. Infants can want not to be tortured, so they have a right not to be tortured. Infants cannot enter into agreements, so they have no right to enter into agreements (and that is why they are not self-owners). Still, I'm not sure that libertarianism, as such, commits one to either choice.
Do the parents have a duty to provide for their children for starters?
Yes, parents have a duty to provide for their children. Suppose, because of something you did, you reduced a pre-existing adult to the level of an infant, who could be nurtured back to adulthood by providing intensive support. Since you are responsible for their vulnerable situation, you have a duty to provide that support to them, and they the corresponding right to receive it from you. But, as I say, a child has all the rights of an adult that it can have. Since this infant-like "adult" has a right to support, clearly the actual infant themselves also has a right to support. And since, in this case, /the parents/ are responsible the infant's vulnerable situation, /they/ have a duty to provide that support.
How is this duty to be enforced?
What if the parents disagree on some aspect of raising the child?
What if the mother doesn't even know precisely who the father is?
Not sure the first two questions raise any special difficulties. More interesting, however, is the third:
>What if the mother doesn't even know precisely who the father is?
I noted in passing above that IF infants are property, then /the mother/ would be the owner of the infant, since she created the infant. And so I say right now that, even though infants are NOT property, /the mother/ is in the first instance the one responsible for providing the care, for the same reason, that she is the one who created the little bundle of obligation. Of course, often, she agrees to do so with the male who impregnates her, and /this/ is the basis of /his/ obligation to care for the child. But sometimes she does not, as in the case you mention, in which case she is the /sole/ person responsible for providing care to the child.
And if she is unable or unwilling to provide care? I said in a previous comment that, libertarian though I am, I accept a duty of easy rescue, that there is an enforceable duty to help others when it costs us little and benefits them greatly. So, if the mother is absent, it seems to me we all together are obliged to see to it that the child gets the care it has a right to, since, if we all share the cost, then the cost to each of us will be little, for an obviously great benefit to the child.
That isn't a problem, none. What rights to rocks have? Libertarianism, like most systems, rights are only coffered upon reaching the age of majority. Children are simply property like rocks hence parent's ability to tell them to go to bed or eat their broccoli on pangs of damage or disposal.
I do not believe that position is shared by most libertarians, and it raises the problem of defining the age of majority and justifying that definition.
How is your claim less arbitrary than restricting rights to men, or to women, or to the kiing?
Even if you set the age of majority at day 18,
What is there to stop a parent from putting their children in a well the day before they turn 18. Then the day they turn 18 anfld can engage in contracts, they offer to pull their child out of the pit in exchange for lifelong slavery.
Volokh Conspiracy had a case where a union shined messages on to a restaurant's wall. Without reading it again (WaPo is behind a paywall, last I checked), my memory sez the union and restaurant were at loggerheads over some kind of labor dispute.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/08/17/is-projecting-a-message-onto-the-wall-of-a-building-a-trespass-a-nuisance/
I think you gave a talk titled "Problems" at a conference at Columbia University in November 1971. I think I recorded that talk on a cassette. I might have it somewhere.
If you have it I would like a copy. Jeff Hummel thought he had heard the talk a decade or so earlier than the one I linked.
When it comes to some of these questions -- such as what you may do to protect yourself from a threat -- I distinguish between what the law says you're allowed to do in a libertarian system, and what you are morally justified in doing. Many libertarians (like even more people with different views) seem to think the two should be the same. Maybe that makes sense to a Kantian. I don't see why it should follow for a utilitarian -- a popular moral view that I dislike greatly. Nor for a virtue ethicist (closer to my thing).
Edit: I see that you mention a point very similar to this at the very end with regard to Rand.
In your view are you morally justified in doing more than is legal or less? I can imagine arguments each way.
The obvious cases are ones in which you have information that the court does not have and you cannot believably give it.
Some others I like:
- Can a court issue a subpoena to a third party? Or is that slavery?
- Can a court issue a temporary injunction to (e.g.) prevent you disposing of the property in dispute? Or is that definitely wronging someone - albeit we don't know who until the trial is over!
- How do you feel about juries?
Obviously these are mostly aimed at minarchists, an an-cap can reply that my insurance company's private courts can do anything I've signed up to.
Other problems include: problems relating to animal welfare, problems relating to spreading misinformation/information asymmetry, problems relating to the rights of future people, problems relating to monopolization/natural-monopolies/network effects, problems relating to irrationality (especially induced irrationality), problems relating to asymmetric bargaining power (especially inherited power).
"An answer offered by some libertarians is that you are entitled to get your property back plus as much again, the hundred dollars he stole from you plus another hundred. That is a simple rule but I have not yet seen a good argument for it."
The most convincing justification of the above I've seen is Stephan Kinsella's estoppel approach to justification of rights https://www.stephankinsella.com/2021/05/estoppel-a-new-justification-for-individual-rights-1992/
As I understand it, if you demonstrate with your actions that you don't respect my right to a television set by stealing it, you can be estopped from complaining if I also take your television set from you (or whatever property you have of equivalent value) after retrieving what you stolen from me.
I'm not a philosopher (no matter what my friends think) nor am I a political scientist, but for me it's less that I'm a "libertarian" so much as I think in many (not all) cases more government involvement/more corporate power/less individual freedom is on average "bad" in some important sense specific to that case. Privacy is an area I'm especially interested in, but there's others for sure.
I understand the appeal of wanting a coherent philosophical framework to work off, it can be a great way to limit hypocrisy or contradiction (which are both good in themselves and also strategically useful), but I think at the end of the day we're all working off intuitions. We should interrogate those intuitions, and where they lead to unacceptable contradictions or abhorrent results we should limit them, but rigid adherence to a pre-established framework seems like it's always going to run into these kinds of problems?
Again, I'm not saying these frameworks are bad. They are not, they can be extremely useful in a range of ways. But saying 'libertarianism leads to these silly conclusions in these cases' to me suggests 'well, maybe we shouldn't be rigidly libertarian in those situations'
I have since turned away from any restitution in criminal or indeed civil cases: the harmed party stays harmed, the harmer is punished and any ill-gotten gains confiscated (but not returned to the harmed party). Otherwise no one will ever buy locks again, or will buy a suboptimal quantity.
You are assuming that, in a system where victims are fully compensated by offenders, locks are desirable. That is not clear.
I discuss a version of this issue in Chapter 18 of _Law's Order_ under the subhead "Why Burglary Should be a Tort and Denting Fenders a Crime."
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Laws_Order_draft/laws_order_ch_18.htm
I dare say that few over 30s still cling to apriorism, of they are libertarians at all.
On defense, though I don't think it would be enough to turn a profit, a private defence form could credibly promise to retaliate against an attackers troops in an unrelated place if and only of they hurt one of their client. More Guerilla than army, but if you are doing Guerilla anyways...