Is Libertarianism About Rights?
A libertarian friend has asked me if I agree with point 1 of Aaron Powell’s definition of libertarianism:
Individuals have rights it is impermissible to violate.
My answer is that I neither agree or disagree; I just think this statement adds nothing to Powell’s otherwise excellent definition of libertarianism.
Why? Because the statement is an assertion without content. Nothing prevents, say, egalitarians from agreeing with the statement and then adding,
The set of invioble rights includes a minimum income, state-of-the-art health care, and summer vacations.
Libertarians would respond, of coures, by arguing that if a society enforces egalitarian rights, the economic pie will shrink drastically. But this is a consequentialist argument, not a rights-based argument.
Indeed, what libertarians really mean when they say thinks like “individual have invioble rights” is that if a society respects particular individual rights (such as ownership of one’s property and person), then other good things happen. Powell’s point 1 is just a short-hand for this claim.
But if the argument for libertarian policies is that some “rights” have better consequences than others, why not eliminate the middle man and just discuss consequences directly?
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Joe
Yes, but a libertarian like Murray Rothbard would say that the only human right that can exist is the “libertarian” right, that the positive rights argument simply never gets off the ground. And I think he’s right.
Jess Austin
That sort of question-begging works for those who are already convinced. It isn’t persuasive for the audiences that any relevant political philosophy must reach. Those who decide the allocation of public and private resources don’t care about our well-being; like all humans they care about their own. If all we can sputter is, “these are my rights!” they’ll just roll their eyes. If instead we argue as Miron does, about the type of society that results from various governance regimes, we can convince even those whose native prejudices or jealousy would lead them to despise our “rights”.
Bravo, Prof. Miron, on this precise articulation of a point I have long struggled to make effectively.
Brian Weiner
I think it’s helpful to define our rights as things that are not DEMANDED from others, but are RESPECTED by them.
You bear no obligation to provide for my free speech, my free practice of religion, my protection from ‘unreasonable’ searches, and so on. If I exercise these rights you are not burdened and your ability to express the same rights is not limited.
Someone would most certainly bear an obligation in order to provide vacations, jobs, healthcare, etc to all citizens.
Aaron Ross Powell
First, thank you to Professor Miron for linking to my post and offering his critique. I found his first point, in particular, quite helpful and will take it into account when I revise my list of 7 principles.
His second point, about rights vs. consequentialism, is problematic, however, and I took the time to respond at length in a post back on my own blog:
http://www.aaronrosspowell.com/blog/the-dangers-of-consequentialist-libertarianism
Jess Austin
You seem to think that libertarianism is tasked with providing a complete ethical system, rather than a more limited political philosophy. Most citizens already have a basic morality/ethical sense on which they don’t really care to be challenged. It is more effective to accept that fact, tragic though it may be, and speak to them on their own terms. Consequentialism can do that, while your rights-focused argument leaves them cold. (Of course, true believers whose ethical conceptions correspond precisely with your chosen rights framework will agree with you, but they are a small minority.)
The rights focus doesn’t gain you as much as you think, anyway. When you say, “It is not a priori true that Miron’s conception of ‘better’ is best.”, that is trivially correct, but you’re giving up on the debate before it even begins. It isn’t a priori true that the rights you espouse should be extended to all people either: the Taliban would welcome you no more warmly than they would Miron. Many people will not start by accepting libertarian tenets a priori. If you rely on their doing so, you will not persuade. Far better to find some common ground (which need not be universal; it need only be shared by a decisive portion of citizens in the polity under consideration) in the kind of society that most people want, and then show that libertarianism is the way to get there. If you don’t think that latter argument can be made, then you should read Miron more.
Your argument seems rather, well, Burkean anyway. You concede that [paraphrasing] “rights exist” is a statement without content, but you still assume that rights do exist and take a particular form, without providing any basis for that assumption. This is especially problematic when you then question the use of relatively straightforward concepts like “wealth”. The focus on rights that you describe is conservative, in that you’re requiring that everyone start from the same place (again, conservative in the Burkean sense, not as opposed to e.g. “progressivism”). In a modern cosmopolitan society, that isn’t the case. In that context, when you consider accusations of “relativism” to be a critique, you’ve missed the point of liberty altogether. There are differences among people, and a consequentialist can accommodate those differences in ways that a “rightist” cannot.
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