Libertarianism Defended

Tibor R. Machan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351922302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Ever since the publication in 1974 of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, libertarianism has been much discussed within political philosophy, science and economy circles. Yet libertarianism has been so strongly identified with Nozick's version of it that little attention has been devoted to other than Nozick's ideas and arguments. While Nozick's version of libertarianism has preoccupied the academic discussion Nozick himself did not respond to the many criticisms raised and yet other defenders of libertarianism have not remained silent. Jan Narveson, Loren Lomasky, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas Den Uyl and many others have contributed impressive arguments of their own in support of the libertarian idea that a political system is just when it successfully secures the rights of individuals understood within the Lockean classical liberal tradition. In this book Tibor R. Machan analyses the state of the debate on libertarianism post Nozick. Going far beyond the often cursory treatment of libertarianism in major books and other publications he examines closely the alternative non-Nozickian defenses of libertarianism that have been advanced and, by applying these arguments to innumerable policy areas in the field, Machan achieves a new visibility and prominence for libertarianism.

INDIVIDUALISM AND LIBERTY

Chapter 1

Is it Responsible to be Free?

‘Why all the focus on rights? What about obligations?’ Or ‘What makes rights supposedly more important than responsibilities?’ This kind of question is often asked of those who consider the free society to be the best and most just.

It is misleading on many fronts, however. For one thing, it presupposes that while the questioner cares about moral conduct, the proponent of freedom and individual rights cares only about leaving people unconstrained and, presumably, unguided by anything other than what these unfettered persons (arbitrarily) choose. While it is true enough that some advocates of rights may also be advocates of arbitrary conduct, such a stance is far from logically mandated by concern for a particular principle of social morality, the principle of individual rights!¹

Indeed, quite the opposite. The requirements of exercising moral responsibility are what justify the concept of rights and the active defense of rights to begin with. We need a concept of rights to specify and safeguard the sphere within which we may function without fear of being routinely interfered with.² A responsible person not only asks that his own rights be respected, but also takes care to respect the rights of others – not primarily because he fears punishment but because he respects the peaceful choices of other individuals, values good relations with them and wishes to enjoy the benefits of the just society that are essential to his own flourishing.

A right is a kind of justified (social) moral claim. It does not exhaust the realm of moral claims or principles. But it is one of them. A right designates a sphere of freedom, a circumstance or environment in which one is authorized to act in a certain way.

If you have a right to use your company’s printer, it means that nobody may stop you from doing so – at least not so long as you abide by any of the relevant provisos attending that right. You may have a right to operate it only when, say, nobody else is using it. And only during working hours. And only if you refill the paper tray if the paper happens to run out while you’re doing a print job. But within the reasonable constraints that attend the right, nobody is justified in stopping you from using the printer.

Note, by the way, that the mere fact of possessing a right does not entail any obligation to exercise that right. Nobody is justified to point a gun at you to force you to print out a document merely because you are entitled to do so, just as no one can force you to occupy a house you own merely because you are entitled to do so. Rights that one gains by contract – such as the right to use the company printer – may, of course, have been granted only on the stipulation that the grantee then accepts certain obligations. But these obligations, even if fulfilling them depends on exercising the rights one has thus contractually gained, are not the same thing as those rights. It is not the possession of the right that in such a case obliges one to exercise the right, but the fact of the obligation (here, as a term of employment). This may seem like a painstaking elaboration of the obvious. But the distinction between a voluntarily accepted obligation and a coercively imposed one tends to get blurred in much discussion of our rights.

By the same token, having a right to vote means no one may stop you from voting if you choose to vote. It doesn’t mean one is obligated to vote – not even that one necessarily has the personal responsibility to do so. After all, there may be no one or nothing worth voting for. Similarly, having a right to publish newspapers, to speak or to worship, means one is free either to do it or not do it. And even if one ought to vote or publish something, one has the authority to abstain. Free men and women have the right not to do what they should, so they may not be forced by others to comply with their moral responsibilities other than to respect everyone’s rights.

A right pertains to what other people may do to one. It designates realms and circumstances in which you may not be coercively interfered with. A fundamental right – like the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that is, the right to make decisions and take actions as one sees fit, unmolested, so long as one does not tread on the same right of others – is a right to be enjoyed by all peaceful citizens within a community, and in virtue of the individual’s humanity as such. A fundamental right is not an acquired right, in other words.

It is also not a made-up or fictitious right. Humans observe the basis for such fundamental rights in our own actual nature as conceptual, choosing beings. We observe that an environment of freedom is one in which beings like us can live right, can thrive. We can identify and theorize about such rights. But we do not invent them, just as we do not invent our own natures. In fact it would be foolhardy and counterproductive to try to concoct ‘rights’ out of whole cloth; for to the extent we attempt to practice them, such fabricated rights, by failing to take into account our actual nature, must work against our nature and undermine rather than support our way of living right.

Yet some people advocate and attempt to impose fictitious rights anyway. These fake-rights advocates are able to ignore or downplay the destructiveness of their efforts by focusing on only one aspect of the results. If I assert a phony ‘right to medicine’ and steal a bottle of cough syrup from you, use the cough syrup, and succeed in assuaging my cough, it is only by regarding the situation very selectively that I can say the fake right I have thus asserted ‘promotes human living’ on net. For I am ignoring a few things: about myself, about the person from whom I stole, about the kind of society I am promoting.

With respect to the person from whom I stole, I am ignoring the fact that he is now a victim of theft. The victim’s own doing well at living – well-being – cannot have been enhanced by what I did. Perhaps he would have given me the cough syrup voluntarily, had I asked. But I have deprived him of that choice. I have deprived him of the ability to make up his own mind about the matter and go by his own judgment. By my coercion, I have violated the fundamental social condition that he requires to promote his own life. (And I have also, perhaps, exacerbated his cough.)³

I am also ignoring something about myself: that by acting as a thug I undermine my own moral capacity to flourish in a social context. For human beings, rational animals, the means of proper survival is our faculty of reason; we are not the non-coughing animal, who survive mainly by not-coughing. If I reflect honestly on what I did, I cannot ignore the fact that the cough syrup was not mine to take, that it in fact belonged to someone else. But I can evade that fact. I can pretend that I acted as a rational, considerate human being, who had every ‘right’ to the cough syrup. I can pretend that my victim deserved what he received at my hand, and that, really, he too is better off as a result of my having robbed him. I can argue that it’s a good thing if people, all people, treat each other as prey and simply take whatever they need, whenever they need it, simply because they need it. I can pretend that we’d all be better off in a society of looters instead of in a society of producers. I can pretend that all the good and complicated, life-serving man-made things like cough syrup come about by magic rather than by hard, rational effort.

I can pretend all these things and by so pretending undermine my capacity to reason, and thus my capacity to serve my own well-being – even as I invite the same kind of assault against my person that I have perpetrated against the owner of the cough syrup. I can erode my own self-respect and the respect for me of others. This is a very high price to pay for a little cold relief. We don’t pay the full price if we do such a deed only once, in a moment of weakness or desperation, and repent and determine not to do it again. We do pay it more and more as we adopt such practices as a way of life. It is not in anyone’s true, human interest to either become a career criminal or to live in a society of widespread mutual criminality. (Now and then it may appear otherwise but that’s a mistake.)

Yet some people do advocate the adoption of such habits, and as a matter of formal social policy; and they even call this demand for institutionalized criminality a demand for ‘rights.’

Why do advocates of systematically violating the rights of others characterize these violations as acts of respecting rights? In part, it’s because we have reached the stage of civilization at which actual rights have been discovered, are widely talked about, and have earned a certain enduring respect. These rights are still in force, and sustain our civilized life even as they are chronically contradicted and undermined. They are part of the ingrained cultural heritage of the West and certainly of the United States. The function of our government is explicitly to ‘secure rights.’

So it is hard to argue outright, ‘Let’s enslave others. Let’s run riot and destroy each other. No more rights!’ And perhaps it is impossible for anyone posing as a friend of society to admit, even to himself, that this is what he is pushing for, at least in some degree. So those who oppose genuine rights seek to steal the respect accorded to them along with all the other things they’re seeking to steal. It’s not that they’re against the rights that government was established to secure, they might say; it’s just that they just want to add more ‘rights’ to the list. Just as hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, so the doctrine of pseudo-rights is the compliment welfare statists pay to genuine rights.

A pseudo-right to health care, welfare or social security implies that one is free either to obtain or not to obtain these benefits, that others may not prevent one from doing getting them. My right to health care means no one may stop me from obtaining such care if that is what I want. In this respect the pseudo-right is similar, superficially, to an actual right. But actual rights do not inherently contradict each other as pseudo-rights do. Do I, as a taxpayer or doctor, retain a right to freedom over my actions or income if you are entitled to rob me or enslave me for the sake of satisfying your ‘right’ to health?

By contrast, respecting the right to speak out or to worship does not require me to do anything for (or to) people, only to avoid intruding on them. To recast these rights on the pseudo-right model, one would have to insist on the ‘right’ to enjoy the mass in one’s home, even if that means legally compelling the church to send you a priest; or the ‘right’ to have your opinions published in somebody else’s newspaper. If we rarely think of perverting freedom of speech and worship in these ways, it’s precisely because we acknowledge the crucial value that these rights have in sustaining a tolerant society and enabling us to act in accordance with our own consciences in these arenas. We don’t mess with these rights because they’re too important. What we need to recognize is that every manifestation of the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ is too important to inflate out of existence with an ever growing list of pseudo-rights that always come at the expense of somebody else’s rights and liberty.

The social attempt to protect our (genuine) fundamental rights through government entails provision for these fundamental rights. As per the Declaration of Independence, this is what government is supposed to be for: to secure our ‘negative’ rights. Such provision does, of course, involve expenses which need to be secured by some, but properly only voluntary, means. It is this fact – the evident cost of government – that has rendered the institution of taxation immune from properly harsh criticism. It is widely but mistakenly believed that without taxes to fund the governmental protection of rights, this protection is impossible. This isn’t necessarily the case.⁴ But even if taxes are viewed as an unavoidable means of ‘positively’ providing for the functions of government that protect our ‘negative’ rights, that would not then warrant extracting moneys from the citizenry to fund all manner of ‘positive’ pseudo-rights. With no moral basis shown for the enforcement of pseudo-rights, the government’s revenues may be used only to protect actual basic rights. The government empowered to protect us from criminality may not engage in criminal conduct toward the very citizenry it is charged to protect.

Where do responsibility and obligation come in, if rights do not obligate us to devote all our time and resources to anyone who happens to demand them?

The concept of ‘responsibility’ pertains to our ability to make moral and rational decisions on our own, decisions for which we can be held accountable precisely because we choose them. Responsibilities, as ordinarily understood, are not a matter of law but of morality or ethics, of how we ought to live. They are everywhere in our lives. With any role we have assumed, that of friend, parent, corporate officer, cabby or athlete, we have, in effect, agreed to fulfill numerous responsibilities. But these need have nothing at all to do with laws.

Some responsibilities you have simply in virtue of being human and alive – for example, the responsibility to sustain our lives, the responsibility to understand and cope with the world around us. Other responsibilities are more specific, undertaken in the course of fulfilling the more fundamental responsibilities: the responsibility for a job, a house, a marriage, children. All of these are matters of choice. Some of these choices result in obligations. But if you hadn’t made the choice, the obligations would not exist either.

The concepts of responsibility and obligation are allied, but obligation is the narrower concept; it means a responsibility that is binding, especially legally binding. The American Heritage Dictionary defines obligation as ‘A social, legal, or moral requirement, such as a duty, contract, or promise that compels one to follow or avoid a particular course of action.’

A civilized person’s sense of responsibility for his own well-being naturally subsumes respect for the rights of others that he hopes to receive for his own rights. But in a just society, respect for rights is not a matter only of mutual moral consideration and good will among responsible persons, but also of law and force – a matter of legal obligation. Such obligations, in a free society, are ‘negative’ in the sense that they prohibit rather than require certain conduct. They include, for example, prohibitions against the committing of violent crimes. Ideally, the legal obligation to respect rights only bolsters or codifies the moral responsibility to respect rights that every civilized adult person gladly accepts anyway. But even normally responsible people are not always so; more important, some persons, those we call thugs and criminals, chose to be irresponsible when it comes to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Individualism and Liberty
• Libertarianism Per Se
• Hard and Soft Statism
• Conclusion
• Epilogue