And here the series continues, for one more part, anyway, the rest to follow later (part 1 here):
values
The values of libertarianism can not be rationally grounded. It is a system of belief, a 'worldview'.
More correctly, libertarianism is an ethical philosophy. It's also, arguably, a political system (or, rather, a multitude of political systems; it's not like we all agree), but since the larger part of politics is the gentle art of making collective decisions and legitimizing their enforcement by means coercive, one could make a fairly plausible argument that it is a rejection of politics. In any case, ethics in all cases precedes politics; ethics gives you an ought-to-be, and politics, in theory, systematizes its implementation, and thus the ethics are the core of the belief system.
And, in re belief systems, what our dear writer fails to point out is that while, yes, the core values, or the axioms, rather, of libertarian ethics cannot be rationally grounded, nor can those of any other system of ethics!
Admittedly, some do better than others; I believe mine superior on the grounds of self-consistency, logical validity and soundness, and a minimal set of axiomatic requirements, but fundamentally, you can scour the entire universe and not find one single particle of ethics. Terry Pratchett captured this one best, if I may quote Hogfather for a moment:
"YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
"MY POINT EXACTLY."
But they all ultimately rest on axioms: in my case, the existence and moral equivalence of volitional entities, from which all else follows by deduction and other processes of reasoning. I freely admit I cannot prove either of those; they are true axioms, non-derivable from deduction nor demonstrable by proof.
But, I stipulate, no-one else has produced an axiom-free system; technically, this is called the is-ought problem, which in simple terms says you can't deduce moral properties from natural properties alone; what is does not determine what ought to be. Philosophers have been beating their heads against that one for centuries, with no particular result. There does not seem to be any particular ethical system carved into the physical substance of the universe for our examination and use. (Sorry, theists; the definition of faith is "the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen", and that sure sounds like an axiom to me, as therefore do assertions of the divine definitions of good and evil, right and wrong.)
Nor is this a problem solely for the deontologists among us; the consequentialists still need an axiomatic standard by which to determine which consequences are better than others, and the aretaics still need an axiomatic standard to determine which virtues are, well, virtuous.
Or, to sum up my whole point here, I saw you palm that card, so kindly quit pretending you're not standing on ground every bit as shaky - or as firm - as the rest of us out here in the Ethical Philosophy Section.
If you are a libertarian, then there is no point in reading any further. There is no attempt here to convert you: your belief is simply rejected. The rejection is comprehensive, meaning that all the starting points of libertarian argument (premises) are also rejected.
Sigh. It would be a sad world indeed, sir, if the only reason to read one's opponents was because they were actually trying to convert you.
There is no shared ground from which to conduct an argument.
There does, however, appear to be plenty from which to criticize it.
The libertarian belief system includes the values listed in this section, which are affirmed by most libertarians. Certainly, no libertarian rejects them all...
I wish to challenge that assumption, at least as they are stated here.
"process legitimises outcome"
This is an underlying belief in all forms of liberalism. All liberal societies include some form of interactive process or procedure. In turn, that has an outcome, which at least partly shapes the society: liberals see this shaping of society as legitimate.
Actually, one of the more distinguishing features of liberal societies is the increasing degree to which they reject the notion that process legitimizes outcome. In the bad old days of yore, after all, a government which followed the right process (usually one based on some notion of the divine right of kings and proper succession, and so forth) could do just about anything it felt like without triggering a revolt. And yet, while today the fundamental notion of democracy is that a properly administered set of elections legitimizes a government, whose proper following of legislative procedure in turn legitimizes the laws it produces, most governments at least pay lip service to the notion that there are some matters ("constitutional law", or a "bill of rights") which proper process cannot legitimize.
Leaving governments aside for the moment, I am at least reasonably comfortable that despite their willingness to put up with all kinds of impositions, should a duly elected representative government obey every single form and procedure in the process to the letter to repeal the 13th Amendment and reintroduce chattel slavery here in these United States, just about everyone would repudiate the notion that the process legitimized that outcome. When it comes to other matters, today, I don't see much sympathy among a large segment of the population for the notion that the duly followed process of the duly elected legislatures which passed anti-gay-marriage bills legitimized that outcome, either.
Libertarians, in fact, are most distinguished by their near-absolute rejection of process legitimizing outcome, inasmuch as we hold that the legitimacy of any given outcome is determined solely by its adherence to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property. No process, however contrived, whoever participates, can by any means render the legitimate, by which meaning non-right-violating, illegitimate or the illegitimate legitimate. (In particular, we specifically reject the notion that a group can have any rights and/or powers which its members do not individually possess.) Process is meaningless in re legitimacy.
Libertarians emphasise this principle primarily in their rejection of (government-enforced) distributive justice. To libertarians, there is no such thing as distributive justice in the usual sense, what Nozick calls a 'patterned distribution'. To them, the outcome of a fair and free market is just.
Okay. Well, yes, the outcome of a free market is just. (Not 'fair'. Eliminate 'fair' from that phrase, if you please. Either 'fair' means no-one was forced or cheated in the course of market operations, in which case it is redundant with 'free', or else it means that the market was compelled to provide someone's preferred result, in which case it contradicts it. In either case, it does not belong in the sentence in question.)
However...
In fact, most libertarians believe that it derives this quality of justice, from its being the outcome of a special process (the free market, or a comparable process).
...this, on the other hand, is entirely incorrect.
As I imply above, process is irrelevant. The free market has no special place, no process privilege, in libertarian theory.
(Yes, we do talk about it a lot. That's because it spends a lot of time being the place where the battle lines are drawn. We do not, by and large, have to spend a lot of time these days defending charities from people who think benevolence ought to be a State monopoly, or fighting to prevent city governments from folding volunteer-run community gardens into their organizational ambit.
It's also because it's a clear example of an organizational/distributional process which demonstrably works on the very large scale and which doesn't appear to yet have adequately functional alternatives, but I'll get to that in a minute...)
But the free market is not, contra our writer, a special legitimizing process, in the sense that going through the market process grants legitimacy. Rather, it is an example of one of a number of distributional processes which are legitimate in a pre-existing sense - along with, say, charity, gift-giving, families, worker-owned cooperatives, kibbutzim, community gardens, and many of the other non-marketist mechanisms that people assume, incorrectly, that we join with the conservatives in dismissing as a load of hippie crap. We don't.
What distinguishes these is not a matter of them being defined as legitimizing processes; rather, they are legitimate because they are examples of voluntary cooperation and exchange, which is to say, no participant in any such process has, at any point, been arbitrarily deprived of their life, liberty, or property.
We reject distributive justice in practice because the same thing cannot be said for it; converting the distribution which is the outcome of voluntary cooperation and exchange into any "patterned distribution" different from it requires violating the inalienable rights to liberty and property of the people on both ends1 of any such transaction, which is eo ipso illegitimate. This is, in our view, no more than the rejection of public-sector forced labor and expropriation as no more legitimate (or legitimizable) than private-sector forced labor and expropriation, which we call "slavery" and "theft".
(We also reject it in theory on the grounds that it's impossible for anyone to meaningfully compute an appropriate "patterned distribution", but we'll get to that in a minute, too.)
revealing of order / perfection
One of David Friedman's books is called 'Hidden Order: the Economics of Everyday Life'. The idea of implicit order is common in libertarian philosophy. The simplest claim is that a hidden order or logic in the world is revealed, through the workings of the market. To varying degrees, this order is then considered sacred: and indeed it is originally a religious doctrine. It comes to libertarianism through the conservative-liberal tradition in Europe, and it has its origins in mediaeval philosophy. The most famous metaphor of the free market, Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is part of this tradition. In the original religious version, the hidden order is seen as the work of God, and it is revealed in the social world of human interactions. Modern secular versions do not see order as pre-existing, in this sense. They speak of 'self-organising' or 'emergent' orders, but the quasi-religious emotion is still there - the sense that something more perfect is revealed. This aspect of libertarianism has cross-connections to New Age and spirituality.
...
Well, that's the first time I've been accused of getting religion in my ethics; usually, we're accused of being atheistic libertines! More to the point, this is the first time I've ever heard someone proposing a religious/spiritualist notion for the origin of our notions of revealed/emergent order. And I'm pretty well educated in the history of these things.
Anyway, ignoring the sneer-quotes, we would point out that self-organizing/emergent orders are a trivially self-evident feature of the natural world, in all sorts of contexts.
Here, for example, is the Briggs-Rauscher reaction, in which a mixture of chemical reactants oscillates back and forth between yellow and blue as a whole. Note: what reacts here, obviously, are billions of individual molecules, all acting independently, and yet it is the solution as a whole that changes color - with no central coordinating authority to tell it to do so. I think we could call that emergent order.
Then there are birds, which flock. Flocking is, in fact, one of the most noticeable things birds do. And yet, no bird in the entire flock is in charge of coordinating the whole thing through all of its maneuvers. So, here, the Straight Dope explains just how all those complex behaviors we see in bird flocks emerge (there's that word again) from sets of relatively simple rules each bird follows. And, for that matter, how we've discovered and emulated those rules for use in CGI movies and computer games.
This is a termite mound, in all its vaguely cathedral-esque splendor. It's a complex structure, which actually has functional uses - it regulates the temperature of the termite brood, and sometimes fungus gardens which the termites cultivate inside the mound. One species, the compass termite, even aligns its mounds with the north-south magnetic field for better thermoregulation. And we're talking about termites, here, insects with brains the size of dust motes. They don't have bloody architects or the ability to handle engineering.
Try it yourself, with cellular automata, like Conway's Game of Life. (Software available from the linked Wikipedia article.) You can see some ordered patterns on that page. Well, get yourself a copy of the game, fill up the grid with chaos, and leave it to run for an hour or two, and see just how many stable patterns, symmetrics, gliders, even glider guns sometimes, you will see on the screen when you come back. Order emerging from chaos, right there in front of you!
Have children? Well, then, as a parent, you've watched the near-empty, semi-randomly connected neural network that we're all born with self-organize itself into a person. And while my point with this whole rant in the form of examples is to explain that this is empirically observable science, not some fluffy spiritual belief, if you have any soul at all, you've got to admit that that's some seriously ineffable shit, right there.
And then there's evolution...
So much for the religious aspect. As for "revealing of perfection", that's teleological. Much like popular misunderstandings of evolution -- no, exactly like popular misunderstandings of evolution -- it assumes that there's some "perfect" end-point that emergent order is trending towards. And just like in evolution, there is no defined endpoint, no higher form, no desirable preferred state. The notion that emergent order produces perfection is another one of those wacky ideas, like the notion that free markets require perfect rational actors to function, that we're regularly belabored with but which, well, no-one actually believes.
What emergent order produces is not perfection, but what works under the circumstances to produce what the pressures upon it demand; it is defined, in short, not by a final goal, but by the demands of the moment. And sometimes, yes, it can be beaten by other techniques. There's a reason why we don't build cars, or bridges, or houses using it, for example, although the increasing use of evolutionary algorithms for various tasks shows our increasing ability to harness it for specific engineering tasks.
(Would-be central planners and regulators: don't get excited by that admission. I'll get to you in a minute, too.)
So, markets. Yes, we do hold up markets as examples of emergent order. Again, this is a trivial observation. My wife makes soap, using ingredients that come from all over the world (the shea nut, to pick one example, does not grow in Kansas). We didn't have to direct anyone in the production of her ingredients. I write software, using libraries and components written by people I don't know and will never meet, and I get e-mail about it and money in exchange for it from more people I don't know and will never meet. No-one's coordinating all of that; it just happens. In our modern, technological economy, just about every single item you have in your house is the product of the collective activity of hundreds of thousands, at the least, of people working together to produce it, none of whom could do so successfully on their own. (The seminal text on this topic is "I, Pencil", which I heartily recommend to anyone who hasn't read it yet; it's short!) And in the absence of the Bavarian Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission issuing stealth production orders to everyone, no-one's telling all those hundreds of thousands of people how to do it. It just... happens, as a natural outgrowth of those bright cave-lads a few millennia ago who decided that notions like specialization and trade might be worth a try.
Now, none of this says that markets are the only way to organize production. What it does say, however, is that they do work to do it, and successfully coordinate the actions of millions of people spread out over wide areas to deliver the products and services that those millions of people want. (Want, of course, in the sense that they actually exert effort to obtain them - which is to say, what economists call a revealed preference, as opposed to what people say they want, which is not necessarily the same thing at all.)
But I will go so far as to point out that, on a purely empirical basis, markets do appear to produce better results, in terms of actually satisfying demand for goods and services, than the alternatives. The Soviet Union, for example, for decades the world's best-known enthusiast for central economic planning, was never able to escape from using markets internally, and even its central planning bureau, GOSPLAN, used Western markets to determine appropriate values to set its internal prices to. Other examples of planned economies in the modern world include such fine non-examples of prosperity for the common man as Cuba, Libya, and Iran. And, of course, the best example of modern economic central planning is North Korea, whose application of this to food production has had its people eating grass, tree bark, and occasionally each other.
Now, we also have an economic theory which explains why this has to be the case, and I could, indeed, talk extensively about ordinal versus cardinal utility, and the subjectivity of utility making it unquantifiable and thus impossible to meaningfully compare directly across individuals, and the calculation problem of turning millions of people's individual utility functions into a set of production directives in anything approaching a useful amount of time, and how incentives affect and distort productivity, and various theorems challenging the ability of even a hypothetical omniscient lighning-calculator to act usefully as a central planner...
But, honestly, none of that matters a damn. Very few of us, as libertarians, favor free-marketism because of its efficiency. Not that we aren't, by and large, rather pleased that we are able to sincerely believe that the system we prefer does win on the basis of its efficiency; nor are we particularly shy about pointing this out to people. But that's not the reason we favor it.
That's because the chief advantage of the market system, in our eyes, is that it works by voluntarism. Each and every participant in a free-market economy is free to buy or not to buy, to sell or not to sell, to work or not to work, in any particular case that comes up. The entire system is controlled, to such degree as it can be said to be controlled, by the individual choices of the participants.
Planned economies, however, even the relatively mild mixed ones, work by top-down command-and-control, to assign tasks and payments for tasks, and reallocate resources according to the plan. This is done coercively. And since this is the nature of every planned-economy, mixed-economy, or other market-alternative scheme our political opponents have brought forwards, without exception, this is, once again, a position that amounts to no more than the rejection of public-sector forced labor and expropriation.
The market's not sacred. We have no religious attachment to emergence, per se. Show us an alternative, non-coercive, voluntarism-based - which is to say, non-rights-violating - scheme for economic interchange, and we'll be happy to give it a try. Indeed, many of us are already active in various agalmic (non-scarce good/gift economy) systems of exchange (also, I may add, creatures of emergent order in structure), open-source software perhaps being the most obvious. It just happens to work well for scarce goods.
But you're never going to get us to buy into any system that relies on authoritarian/coercive control, because our entire ethical system is a rejection of that.
Okay, you know what? This post is already freakin' huge, I'm nowhere near the end of the "values" section, and I really ought to get some work done today. Guess I'm going to break it up into more than six parts after all.
1. Yes, both ends. I do not have the liberty to refuse to accept the proceeds of moral theft.
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