Is Libertarianism a utopian model that only works in theory?

. . . as answered on Quora. . . .

A great humanist instructed us to distinguish between the ethical and the utopian imagination. This is an important distinction.

Libertarianism, I posit, is more a moral than a utopian construct. It rests upon a particular handling of ethical principles regarding force in a universalistic manner, emphasizing reciprocity. It places a regulatory view of law against organizations and groups by nullifying claims to special privileges regarding the legitimacy of coercion, especially on class and group grounds. Liberty is radical, true enough, but only insofar as it bars state operatives from claiming special status, except, perhaps, in very limited, legally circumscribed ways. It is commonplace and unexceptionable in disallowing individuals as such from staking such claims.

Many people consider this utopian. I can see why. By taking on the state, the liberty principle is . . . bracing in its daring and consistency. This is so ‘not done’ that it seemsutopian.

But I regard that as a parallax illusion. The principle is homely and familiar; the state as it normally operates is not.

The best reason to absolve the liberty principle from a charge of utopianism is that it is not salvific in nature or intent.

Liberty relieves no one of responsibility.

The freedom libertarians offer guarantees no one of relief from the need to work, or be of use to others. Benevolent acts of generosity and unburdening (and non-reciprocal aid in general) remain relegated to communal and family action in a free society, and, of course, to private charity. But these are not guaranteed. The State, if it exists under liberty, is not there to serve as Messiah or offer anyone special dispensation. Utopian yearnings for cosmic justice have no place in the libertarians’ conception of law. Demands for godlike, magical fixes have no place in the liberal/libertarian imagination.

What libertarians offer in place of coercively guaranteed equality, or salvation, or advantage, is an environment where quality can more readily progress and evolve, practically achieving that which non-libertarian utopians demand as an indemnity.

What liberty provides is not utopia but, as Robert Nozick famously argued, a ‘framework for utopias.’ For we all have our various schemes for improvement. Experiments in living are what we expect in a free society. Liberty provides a playing field for our attempts to create a better social life. But utopian guarantees with recourse to legitimized aggressive, initiated coercion? Prohibited.

In my experience, most folks reject the libertarian idea not because it is too utopian, but because it is not utopian enough.

Libertarianism has so little to do with religion or ends-specific social scheming that it robs politics, in most moderns’ minds, of ‘all the fun.’

So, back to the question. Does it work only in theory?

Well, libertarianism is a reciprocal morality, arguably the most honed and refined such vision. We human being, whether ascended from apes or created by the Anunnaki, are prone to certain grifters’ plays in our value systems. Our basic moral instincts are, as Herbert Spencer noted (The Inductions of Ethics), to split morality in twain, simultaneously nurturing some with an ‘ethics of amity’ and harshly abusing the rest with an ‘ethics of enmity.’ We moderns jigger with words and principles and values routinely, trying to hide this basic dichotomy, often secreting it into the basic structures of convoluted statist institutions, all protected from scrutiny by some basic cognitive biases. These jiggerings often take the form of something very much like a confidence game trick, and we end up sneaking exploitation and predation and parasitism into our nobly expressed ‘ideals.’

This being so ubiquitous, built into the warp and woof of political life, we cannot know for certain if human culture and character can progress to the libertarians’ refined idea of law as applying equally to all.

We may be too baboonish.

That remains to be seen.

But our defects as a species, whatever their extent, would not scuttle the regimen of equal freedom because it is too utopian, but because too moral. Our desire for the advancement of self and our kinds (whether clan or class or some other clade) at the expense of others may be ineradicable, and the existence of state hierarchies too enticing a shiny (if illusive) savior to forgo out of respect for reciprocal rights.

We will see. Right now, we are so far into the current confidence game of the churning state that more honest regimes seem murky.

What we do know is more liberty is workable. How do we know? Well, one reason we know is that liberty’s current illiberal opposites are not working for the general benefit. We have big hints.

twv
. . . as answered on Quora. . . .

How do Libertarians respond to the idea that a libertarian society is far too Utopian?*

There are a few standard responses that are neither tendentious nor special pleading. Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful:

1. The complaint about utopianism is contextual to a specific time and place. Abolitionism was considered radical, and a completely free labor workforce impossible, in the American states of 1850, by most people. Twenty years later abolition of slavery had been achieved, if messily and at great cost. There were a few libertarians of that time who noted that a more peaceful end to slavery may have seemed utopian, but it was that seeming and that charge that allowed Southerners to stick to the slavery position and the Northerners to their bloody union position that led to the impasse and mass death. Had both unionists and secessionist slavers taken the “utopian” position more seriously, they would have avoided devastation. But they couldn’t, because the utopian charge itself prevented sane reason. Sometimes, the “far too utopian” charge is itself the problem. And everyone today recognizes this truth — but only about past impasses.
2. In Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), philosopher Robert Nozick explained what liberty — which is what libertarians offer — does for utopia. It provides a framework for utopian experimentation. It is not itself utopian. Most utopias fail. So what? So do most businesses. That does not mean we should not provide the framework that allows multiform cooperation, including of market trade, innovation in firms, families and communities, and in the more subtler forms of utopianism that Nozick discusses in his book. Libertarianism isn’t utopian. It merely allows for the greatest diversity of utopian projects.
3. If I remember correctly, Chris Sciabarra argues in his several books that the key distinction to maintain is between radicalism and utopianism, and that libertarians tend to be radicals and not utopians. 
4. Following hints by Hayek and more explicit argumentation by Thomas Sowell, perhaps the key to utopian thinking can be in the vision of human nature and social causation of two distinct approaches to political thought. In Sowell’s schema, the “unconstrained vision,” where human nature is regarded as extremely malleable — perfectible — under the direction of “rational” moralizing and the overwhelming onslaught of institutional design, is the central element of utopianism, whereas in the “constrained vision” man’s characteristic limitations suggest not merely humility but also (perhaps) explicit limits from which liberty itself is defined and derived. So while some libertarians may in fact be utopians because of their Godwinian attitudes about the place of reason in progress, others are more Hayekian in regarding reason as just one tool in the social uplift toolkit, and failure an ineradicable part of sociality. Libertarian figures such as Herbert Spencer dialectically united both perspectives offering a whiff of utopia in their generally hard-nosed and somewhat pessimistic progressivism — Spencer explicitly incorporating decay (dissolution) into his grand schema of organization (which featured growth, that is, evolution, leading to equilibrium and then ineluctably to de-systemizing).
5. Libertarians often sound their most utopian when they give specific conjectures about how a freer society would work. Why do they do this? To aid people to think through how free people can form orderly solutions to problems of scarcity and conflict. Marx wouldn’t do this for his “scientific socialism,” and thereby hid from the world the impossibility of his designs. Alas, when libertarians attempt to comply with a seemingly commonsense demand for specifics, their offered thought experiements sound more contrived in a utopian manner than libertarians’ main position actually is. The future is unknowable; libertarians usually acknowledge this, insisting that the ways in which humans freely cooperate to adapt to changing incentives and disincentives, opportunities and menaces, are manifold almost beyond comprehension. And innovation cannot be dreamt up before the opportunity for implementation is more fiction than factual, thus smacking of utopian. Libertarians’ faith in freedom is not utopian so much as warranted by past experience. And this faith is more of a bet on good odds than the faith of the cult of the omnipotent state. Libertarians’ trust in freedom is more categorical than magical in form, and does not take the distinctly utopian forms upon which statism actually depends: the belief that a few exceptionally smart people appointed by political means can figure out and implement optimal solutions without devastating failures that wind up getting written into the warp and woof of standard state practice. That is a utopian faith — in that it defies all experience. Here, libertarians get to play realpolitik scoffers at fools’ outrageous dreams.

twv

* This answer has been submitted to the Quora page “The Screaming Libertarian.”

As a libertarian, are you more of a conservative libertarian, a centrist Libertarian, a bleeding heart Libertarian, or somewhere in between two of the three given choices?

…as answered on Quora….

I am closest to a centrist, but with a caveat: I regard liberty itself as a moderating principle, as “centrist,” and always have. Liberty is the middle ground between you killing me and me killing you; you enslaving me and me enslaving you; you stealing from me and me stealing from you.

Liberty is an ideal compromise.

But since we live in an unfree, illiberal world, compromises with the existing order are inevitable but not easy. Still, most of us pay our taxes, and I am not advocating a tax rebellion. We muddle through all this, and I am open to alternative notions of reform, acceptance, resistance, and rebellion. Libertarians should be able to argue about this sort of thing. Rationally.

I am not much tempted by either the left or the right, though I respect the good intentions of both movements while rejecting the vices of both. That being said, the silly, witless “bleeding heart” metaphor is not for me, and though I am not a conservative, I have gotten rather tired of typical lefty attitudes on a whole bunch of issues, so I often sound more conservative now than I used to: I don’t think “slut-shaming” is a moral horror, I am not into “trans acceptance,” and I think immigration is a bigger challenge to beltway bleeding-heart-ism than most of my friends do. Further, I do not think that racism and sexism are any more inimical to liberty than older-style vices like greed and pride. Bleeding Heart Libertarians — who think that liberty should promote “social justice” and oppose icky “reactionaries” — don’t like this take.

I just think people should treat each other with respectful reciprocity, granting each other their baseline freedoms while holding each other responsible for their actions. But if most of us ignore most others, and fall short of the rigors of Universal Love and Full Dignity, I think that is OK. Similarly, as useful as religions are for in-group cohesion, all of them are wrong and I can accept none of them, which makes me a non-conservative, I think. My commitment is to philosophy, not tradition or religion, no matter how useful they may be for the masses.

“As a libertarian,” I think we should emphasize liberty, not these other standards, like Tradition or Social Justice. Liberty should adjudicate between the competing claims of these other paradigms.

twv

How can we know whether libertarianism is even possible?

…as answered on Quora….

First, let us be precise. How do we know that liberty, as conceived by libertarians, is possible? That is the question.

Liberty, let us stipulate, is the freedom that can be had by all.

Freedom makes sense in a variety of contexts, and one popular definition is absence of obligations, or socially imposed requirements.

One need not be a philosopher engaged in some elaborate phenomenology to see that obligations, or duties, are inevitable in society; likewise, one need not be an anthropologist or social psychologist to understand that some people wish to avoid one variety of obligations, while others choose a different set from which to unburden themselves. Popularly, some folks of a rebellious nature see in any duty an imposition, and demand liberation — for them, any burden is “oppression.” That may be the urge of the anarchist, or nihilist, or socialist, or merely the froward. But it is not what libertarians are up to.

Libertarians look at the social world as transactional. Force, and threat thereof, is different from cooperation which is different from avoidance; initiated force is distinct from defensive force, which is distinct from retaliatory. Of the many contexts in which freedom makes sense, libertarians see that freedom from initiated force is the freedom that all can have, and, moreover, the variety that places the least amount of obligatory burden upon society, for the duty each individual faces is not to initiate force, violence, coercion, or threat thereof.*

So, can this be achieved? Can coercion be equalized and minimized, as a matter of law?

Well, we can see that it is the basic principle of many realms of social life. It is even a deeply embedded assumption in current law. The libertarian idea is at the heart of why murder and theft and even fraud are regarded as crimes legitimately fought with defensive and retaliatory force.

Of course, many legislated laws — which can be quite different critters from the laws we see in the practice and scope of the common law, where traditional understanding of crimes and torts developed — flout these principles. Many laws as concocted by tyrants and legislators are themselves initiations of force. Libertarians oppose these.

Past American society was burdened with far fewer laws of this latter type than now. So we know that freer societies are possible. But no society has ever been wholly free, by libertarian lights. How could we know whether the fully free society is possible?

We cannot, not now.

I regard the plausibility of the libertarian ideas as a hunch. I know that I prefer the freer interactions in our own society to the forced interactions. Further, by history and social theory (including but not limited to economics) I know that were we freer, we would be, on the whole, much better off: not merely “happier” but more virtuous and adaptable and even honorable. But given that some people even now cannot cope with the little freedom they have, and that many, many people regard their lust to rule over others — as well as to be ruled by others — as bedrock to their own sense of order, that we have to wonder how far this can scale, and to which populations.**

I do not know (with the certainty this word “know” implies) that a fully free society is possible. I do strongly suspect it is not possible with humans as they are — in no small part because we do not have it. Libertarian philosopher Herbert Spencer believed that the basic institutions of society must fit the character and circumstances of the people they apply to. People given to crime, panic, servility, and powerlust cannot be free. Alas, give them the institutions to constrain them from their worst crimes but nevertheless allow them to express their worst natures and what do you have? Any progress to betterment? Any progress to freedom?

It depends.

My basic position is that we are now too far from a free society to know how far towards freedom we can successfully move, and how sustainable a complete form can be. Reason editor Jesse Walker dubbed my position agnarchism, a droll portmanteau. I am a philosophical anarchist in one sense, but my fallibilism (or falsificationist epistemic) is such that I accept limits to my knowledge — I am agnostic on many issues. I do not know how far civilized man can peel back the onion of the state.

But I do know a number of things that point strongly in the direction of freedom.

I know, for instance, that the current political-legal order, along with its nearest reform ideologies, is routinely defended by recourse to lies, careless errors, unwarranted fantasies, and bad reasoning; that masked agendas are the most important agendas; that critiques of freedom as a goal or standard are based, chiefly, on ignorance and outrageous displays of repugnance; that folks who blithely go on pressing “morality” into their politics generally live by preference falsification and false consciousness, and incorporate bedrock vices into their conceptions of virtue; that politics as a whole is an ugly business based on strife and exploitation masquerading as peace and justice; and that the people are generally ignorant of the true nature of the society they live in, and cannot think two steps down the chain of causation of any proposal for reform they make.

To use a religious analogy: I do not know my god exists, but I know that other gods are devils, and not merely in the details but also in the Grand Scheme.

This suggests to me that carrying on the advocacy of equal freedom remains a noble cause, and a matter of honesty.

As it is honest to admit the limits of all our knowledge.

* It gets more complicated, but the basic conception is clear. The basic notion is that libertarians insist that the civilized approach to sociality is to demand the same from each, and the least from each, as well. And upon this bedrock set of minimal obligations people can form their lives, which will of course entail many additional obligations — but which they themselves choose.

** The saddest truth is that some people, now, could very easily manage and thrive in a free society, but others by genes and culture and institutional instruction would not. This is an important point, and is really where actual political and ideological discord rests.

N.B. From the above, it should be noted that there can be no guarantee of liberty, for it depends upon reciprocal restraint. When some attempt to destroy us, or rob us, there can be no assurance that they will not succeed. We must strive, at some expense, to prevent the usurpations that abridge our rights to freedom. It should follow that the freer a society is, the less effort will be required to defend freedom.