Richman's Credo

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Below, I have a few comments to offer on an article in which Sheldon Richman presents his libertarian credo.

Richman seems confident that

[l]ibertarians differ from others in that they apply the same moral standard to all people’s conduct. Others have a double standard, the live-and-let-live standard for “private” individuals and another, conflicting one for government personnel. All we have to do is get people to see this and all will be well.

He believes that

it remains only for libertarians to engage in a series of thought experiments to win others over to their position.

Furthermore, Richman is convinced that

[l]ibertarians make a self-defeating mistake in assuming that their fundamental principles differ radically from most other people’s principles. Think how much easier it would be to bring others to the libertarian position if we realized that they already agree with us in substantial ways.

And to make his point he presents presumably the most fundamental assumption of his credo:

Libertarians believe that the initiation of force is wrong.

However, I am afraid, opposition to "the initiation of force" cannot serve as a fundamental assumption on which to build a coherent theory (let alone one likely to unite large numbers of people), as it quite simply begs the all-important question: what is to count as (legitimate as opposed to illegitimate) force.

So do the overwhelming majority of nonlibertarians. They, too, think it is wrong to commit offenses against person and property.

Again, a petitio principii is involved: how are "offenses against person and property" defined? It is misleading to take an assumption as fundamental, self-evident, and worthy of consensual appreciation, whose conditions are left unspecified.

Can I legally possess plutonium and keep it in my apartment? If yes, the state would commit a crime in requisitioning my plutonium; contrariwise, if private possession is (generally considered to be) illegal, requisition by the state involves neither illegitimate force nor an offense against person and property.

It is reasonable to expect that possession and use of dangerous agents - whether by individuals or corporates - will always elicit competing proposals for restrictions. Just imagine the potential for parental disagreement, if plutonium were a household item. Hence questions of what constitutes "force", and "offenses against person and property" are inherently contentious. In a word: Richman's fundamental assumptions are unfit to establish the basis of universally shared convictions.  

I don’t believe they [the majority of nonlibertarians] abstain [from committing offenses against person and property] merely because they fear the consequences (retaliation, prosecution, fines, jail, lack of economic growth). They abstain because they sense deep down that it is wrong, unjust, improper.

Moral compliance need not always be an immediate, calculated reaction to the dangers and disadvantages of deviance. But ultimately, compliance will be rooted in pain avoidance, sometimes owing to conscious appraisal, more often being the result of people learning to observe cultural traditions.     

If there were no

consequences (retaliation,prosecution, fines, jail, lack of economic growth)

I do not see why people would abstain from what they are intent on doing. Unless it is sufficiently harmful and costly for me to, say, take from my friends whatever I fancy to take from them, it would be perfectly rational for me to do so. Morality is about limits; if such limits are not posited and enforced, there is no moral issue. In the final analysis, we act decently because we have learned to expect that deviant behaviour will be hurtful and costly to us. I do not see what is wrong about the underlying cost-benefit mechanism, especially since it makes moral learning possible in the sense that we may gradually alter our moral behaviour as circumstances and the attendant cost-benefit ratios change. Such "moral opportunism" makes us suitably adaptable to a changing environment. Thus, naturally moral behaviour in a communal-property-society has different characteristics than ethical conduct in a private-property-society. You will not get far when you act in one of these societies in accordance with the moral precepts of the other, and vice versa.

In other words, even if they never articulate it, they believe that other individuals are ends in themselves and not merely means to other people’s the [sic] ends. They believe in the dignity of individuals. As a result, they perceive and respect the moral space around others.

Again: abstention develops against adverse conditions: restrictions. And restrictions are perfectly capable of being culturally transmitted to engender taboos and other forceful habits that may well take the form of believing "in the dignity of individuals" etc.

However, taboos and other forceful habits are all-purpose instruments that nicely blend with any number of cultural preferences so as to spread out into an intricate delta of different versions and conclusions. Some of these may accept the idea of "the dignity of the individual," but interpret it very differently, others will not even acknowledge the notion.

It is a rationalistic error to assume that moral behaviour must be reducible to deductively valid trains of reasoning. For morality to be effective, i.e. improve the chances of survival for a group, it must be able to transmit experiences that transcend the purview of an individual's reasoning.

Those officials [who exercise rights denied to ordinary citizens] are human beings. You are a human being. I am a human being. So we must have the same basic rights. Therefore, what you and I may not do, they may not do. The burden of rebuttal is now on those who reject the libertarian position.

There exist perfectly sound reasons to distribute certain rights differentially amongst human beings, who are otherwise perfectly equal before the law. For instance, in an important respect, the plaintiff and the defendant do not have the same right as the judge, in that only the latter has the right to decide a certain case according to his understanding of the law. There are good reasons that such a custom should have been prevalent for thousands of years. It is also basic to the rule of law. Someone in a community may be better placed to render the community a vital service than others; and this advantage may justify a differential distribution of rights.

By contrast, Richman insists, quoting Roderick Long:

“Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.”

Which seems to beg the question once again. If "equality with judges" means any person's verdict is equally valid, how do we arrive at a workable law?

He goes on to argue:

Undoubtedly the nonlibertarian will respond that government officials were duly elected by the people according to the Constitution, or hired by those so elected. Thus they may do what is prohibited to you and me. This reply is inadequate. If you and I admittedly have no right to tax and regulate others, how could we delegate a nonexistent right to someone else through an election? Obviously, we can’t.

Whether or not a right exists depends often on a complex multitude of factors. Thus, the practice of taxing has arisen from a rich evolutionary lineage. Essentially, taxation tends to resolve game theoretic and public goods dilemmas typical of very populous communities better than other approaches. It is an evolutionary outcome like rights, law, and morality. It is imperfect, but eo ipso open to development, which is a more crucial and realistic quality than formal perfection.

Taxation is a contestable practice; in fact, it is being contested all the time, but hardly ever in such a way as to attract mass support for its abolition. While people may feel reasonably content with taxation as such, it is in principle impossible to establish an ideal consensual level (or indeed mode) of taxation. So taxation is a practice that always will be both accepted and complained about, by most people. Taxation is not amenable to a unique once-and-for-all solution, and therefore must be negotiated and fought over on a permanent basis. Like many other rights that evolve out of a tremendous diversity of interests, and cannot be neatly deduced from first principles by some infallible mathematics of the social good.

Freedom is all about trying out different views, values, and approaches. Freedom makes us better at dealing with problems and issues that must be muddled through, because there is no other way than muddling through them. By contrast, totalitarians deny the true default condition of muddling through and instead pretend that there is a clear and neat and total and final solution, but they do not tend to succeed with their approach for long and end up botching the overall order far worse than the honest muddlers who try to create conditions for honest muddling through.

Science is based on trial and error, markets are based on trial and error, and freedom is based on trial and error. Rationalists do not understand this, which is why many libertarians do not understand freedom.

For the source of my quotes and the consecutive argument by Richman see:

One Moral Standard for All.

See also Elementary Errors of Anarchism (1/2), (2/2), and Politics of Faith and Scepticism (2/2).

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Comments

[Ed Stevens]

Well put, Georg. The full-boil libertarian has always bothered me because of his utter inability to understand that this just isn't a clear-cut binary world. Sometimes (often, in fact) situations/problems/crises do not resolve cleanly into right/wrong, good/bad, black/white, etc. And to expect there to be a moral algorithm into which we plug some inputs and the appropriate solution pops out is to be silly to the point of mortal danger.

I especially liked this passage:

It is a rationalistic error to assume that moral behaviour must be reducible to deductively valid trains of reasoning. For morality to be effective, i.e. improve the chances of survival for a group, it must be able to transmit experiences that transcend the purview of an individual's reasoning.

Every political and social theorist should have that tattooed on the back of his/her hand. Again, kudos.

[Georg Thomas]

Ed, to have in you a careful and discerning reader means a lot to me. Thank you ever so much for your attention and your thoughts.