Towards a Better Libertarianism
Exploring libertarian psychology and outlining a project for libertarians
I saw a meme1 on Facebook a while back about libertarians.
I confess this post irked me when I saw it. That’s partly because I go out of my way not to paint silly caricatures of my idealogical opponents and would hope others would afford me the same respect. But it’s also partly because there is admittedly a grain of truth here.
Libertarians have a recognizable psychological profile (Iyer, Haidt, et al., 2012) characterized by, among other things, substantially lower concern about harm than liberals and moderately less than conservatives. The only moral foundations with which libertarians were more concerned than both liberals and conservatives were, perhaps unsurprisingly, economic liberty and lifestyle liberty.
Libertarians also scored higher on systemizing than empathizing, in contrast with the other two groups. The authors explain that:
In short, empathizing is about understanding the social world whereas systemizing is about understanding the world of inanimate objects and nature…Research by Baron-Cohen has shown that relatively high systemizing and low empathizing scores are characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism2.
None of this, frankly, should surprise anyone who has run in libertarian crowds. I would not be at all surprised to find out libertarians are disproportionately likely to be high-functioning autists3. I’d be genuinely shocked if they weren’t.
This is all well and good. But then we get to the part of the article that deals with abstract ethical dillemas, and there we do see a somewhat surprising result: libertarians are actually more utilitarian than either liberals or conservatives. They are both more willing to pull the lever and more willing to push the fat man than either of the other groups. Which jives well with other aspects of the libertarian psychological profile, like a cold, rational cognitive style, but not with the general libertarian political disposition. Libertarians are the first to argue that governments ought to respect liberty over utilitarian considerations, in general. I concede that there is this tension, too, in my own beliefs. I too find it difficult to resist the conclusion that we ought to pull the lever (and if we’re going to pull the lever, it’s difficult to see why we shouldn’t also push the fat man).
So what gives? How should libertarians approach this tension in their beliefs?
The lazy approach is to just throw up our hands and give up in one of two ways, which I will call Give Up Approach (GUA) 1 and GUA 2.
GUA 1
We concede that utilitarianism is the One True Ethical Doctrine and call it a day. Utilitarians everywhere are either thrilled to gain so many ideological allies or devestated that those allies happen to be us.
GUA 2
We bite the bullet and refuse to pull the lever or push the fat man.
It might be apparent from my tone that I don’t find either of these solutions particularly satisfying. I would prefer finer-grained data here, but my assumption is that some libertarians with autistic cognitive styles already take approach 1 and some of the more conservative-leaning libertarians already take approach 2. Whether there’s much overlap between those two groups, I don’t know.
For my part, I have to pull the lever. I have to push the fat man. But I hate the idea that liberty is in ordinary circumstances a second-class ethical good behind utility. So even if we stipulate that utilitarianism leads to libertarianism on the whole—and I’m not sure it does—I don’t like it.
Libertarian scholars have tried various approaches to reconcile the intuitions without giving up libertarianism.
Walter Block’s (2015) profoundly unsatisfying analysis sidesteps the issue entirely by asserting that we’re making a category error by treating libertarianism as an ethical theory. He claims it’s a legal theory and that, in pulling the lever, even if the bystander is doing the right thing ethically, the NAP4 dictates he be treated as a criminal.
I guess there’s a surface level plausibility to this analysis. No one, after all, badgers liberals or conservatives or socialists about their answers to the trolley problem. But it seems to me libertarians, in making such categorical ethical claims about use of force, have voluntarily (ha!) opened the door to this line of questioning. You can’t simultaneously claim that libertarianism is a purely legal doctrine and claim, when it’s convenient and you’re arguing against some government action, that the NAP is an ethical doctrine. You get one or the other.
Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty, argued against using abstract thought experiments to challenge ethical theories in general:
In the first place, a lifeboat situation is hardly a valid test of a theory of rights, or of any moral theory whatsoever. Problems of a moral theory in such an extreme situation do not invalidate a theory for normal situations. In any sphere of moral theory, we are trying to frame an ethic for man, based on his nature and the nature of the world — and this precisely means for normal nature, for the way life usually is, and not for rare and abnormal situations.
I hope this seems as wrong to you as it does to me.
When Newtonian mechanics made bad predictions at relativistic scales, physicists didn’t just pack their bags and say “well, it’s right most of the time.” I see no reason for ethicists to do that either.
That aside, again, I have to point out that proponents of the NAP are making an extremely binary, categorical sort of claim, and in doing so they open the door to legitimate questions about edge cases. Or if the NAP doesn’t universally apply, then it seems to me its proponents lose some of the thrust of libertarian arguments; why couldn’t it be that benevolent government action is another exception to the NAP?
Maybe it’s just that Rothbard was an economist by training, whereas philosophers have a long and distinguished tradition of taking thought experiments seriously. How could we not?
Libertarians could plausibly try to argue for some sort of Aggregate NAP Theory, by which we would choose between two bad outcomes that both violate the NAP by simply choosing the one with fewer or less bad5 NAP violations. That, at least, gives us a plausible answer to the OG trolley problem: one NAP violation vs. five NAP violations. And it’s worth pointing out that it does so without licensing insane killing-one-to-save-five organ harvesting schemes, because dying of organ failure isn’t a NAP violation and stealing someone’s organs is.
I think this is getting us closer to something resembling a viable answer. Still, the astute reader will notice a problem here: what if we just redesign the trolley problem to be such that you have the choice to redirect the trolley and hit the one person to, say, prevent a hundred deaths by tsunami or something? Deaths by tsunami aren’t NAP violations6.
And, well, yeah. This version of things does explain away our reaction to the trolley problem, but there are still unpleasant bullets that we have to bite if we want a consistent ethical theory. I think that’s true of any ethical theory, no matter how hard some might insist otherwise.
But I want also to gesture toward the idea that, intuitively, we do assign some premium to natural suffering, i.e., suffering that isn’t caused by any particular person. We typically consider murder somehow worse than a natural death, and not solely because of the fact that the murderer is cutting short the victim’s lifespan.
If someone murdered my grandfather, even if I knew for a fact that, absent the murderer, he would’ve died of a heart attack at that exact moment, I would still prefer that he not be murdered. It seems to me we have an instinctively more visceral reaction to death (or loss of liberty, or property) that’s imposed upon us by someone else’s force—i.e., NAP violations—than we do to the same things occurring naturally. You can make the case that an intuition like this is simply in error, but it’s definitely there.
I submit that libertarianism needs to do some soul-searching on its ethical foundations. It’s not very popular in the academy these days, and you can chalk that up to academia’s left-leaning bent in general, but when our champions like Rothbard are7 just straight up refusing to engage sensibly with philosophical criticism, who can blame them?
Look, despite what I said earlier about libertarianism not being very popular in the academy, a non-trivial percentage of philosophers, around 10%, do identify as political libertarians, per Chalmers’ most recent poll of academic philosophers. So why does it seem like all our champions, apart from Nozick and a few enlightenment philosophers8, come from outside of philosophy?
Hypotheses I might explore in a future post:
Maybe academia genuinely is hostile to non-leftist views, which leads to libertarian philosophers self-censoring.
Maybe libertarian philosophers mostly specialize in fields other than political philosophy and ethics, and so don’t write much about libertarianism.
Maybe libertarian philosophers smuggle themselves into economics departments and do their work there, in much the same way some mathematicians smuggle themselves into physics departments to do math (but with the greater prestige and funding of a physics department).
Maybe this isn’t solely a libertarian issue, and other philosophical schools of thought also end up being largely championed by people outside philosophy.
If anyone has any thoughts, I’m all ears.
It took me twenty minutes of sifting through a page’s posts to find this, so I hope you, at least, get a chuckle out of it. In hindsight I probably could have found it quicker by googling.
The so-called extreme male brain theory of autism has fallen out of vogue in recent years for obvious reasons; personally, I stand by it.
Although it occurs to me that the Facebook post from the beginning, then, is a little like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory being the butt of every joke. That is to say, very politically incorrect but for some reason widely accepted. I have no problem with offensive humor, I just wish the writers would own their decision to make fun of an autistic character by clarifying that Sheldon is, in fact, autistic—because he very obviously is—instead of hiding behind plausible deniability.
Non-aggression principle.
A first pass attempt at clarifying what we mean by “less bad” might be that there’s a total ordering on NAP violations based on what right is being violated and how intensely; stealing someone’s watch is obviously a less bad NAP violation than killing them.
Unless there’s some clandestine CIA tsunami engineering program I don’t know about!
Yes, I realize he’s dead; it just seemed awkward not to word this in present tense. We should probably get some living champions too.
Also dead. I’m noticing a trend here. Anyone up for a seance?
Great article! I had trouble thinking about the ethical foundation for libertarianism but I supported it because I found the good outcomes desirable and the natural rights mostly intuitive. I think that Huemer’s approach is the best and it would be good to persuade people of it to avoid seeming so dogmatic.