Libertarianism: Elephant which stands on a pin.
Rothbard is very popular among libertarians. Indeed he was one of the people who popularized the word ‘libertarian’. His books ‘For a new liberty’, and ‘Ethics are liberty’ are quite popular. When I use the word libertarian here I mean Rothbardian Libertarian. I will try to show his arguments are not just bad but obviously wrong.
Self Ownership
Rothbard in ethics of liberty argues:
If Crusoe [..] had known of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway — perhaps for “kicks” or from a very high time preference — then his decision would have been objectively immoral, an act deliberately set against his life and health. It may well be asked why life should be an objective ultimate value, why man should opt for life (in duration and quality). In reply, we may note that a proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies it may be shown to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation. Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one’s life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom
First thing to be noted here is that if some one does not commit suicide does not show that they value life. One can abhor life but does not commit suicide because perhaps he suffers from weakness of will. He lacks courage to do something even though he knows that it is the best thing to do. Also if he does choose to live it only shows that he values life over death, not life in a absolute sense. Many religious people believe that suicide is a sin and they will be punished for it, if they choose to not to do it, it simply shows that they don’t want to suffer more. Moreover what follows after death is uncertain. How does this prove that suicidal actions are ‘immoral’? It does not. Don’t we all take part in some-what suicidal actions? When I cross a road, I know that their is some chance a car will kill me, is crossing a road a immoral action? Of course when I do cross the road, it mean mean I value the minuscule chance of death less than the expected value I get by crossing the road. Similarly Crusoe values chance of death due to poison less than the ‘kicks’ he gets from eating it. If Rothbard is right here than almost every action we take will be immoral.
Rothbard’s argument for self ownership are just as bad as the argument mentioned above. I will not engage with these arguments because I want to talk about other stuff. Instead I will leave links from people who already pointed out these flaws in them.See this paper by Marian Eabrasu. Edward Feser has criticized Rothbard and he also responded to some objection raised. Also see Matt Zwolinski’s review of ethics of liberty.
One thing should be clear here. Rothbard did not give any note worthy argument for self ownership.
Life Boats
Rothbard in ethics of liberty address one very commonly raised objection, life boat scenarios. To which Rothbard writes:
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. It is a wise maxim of the law, for precisely this reason, that “hard
cases make bad law.” We are trying to frame an ethic for the way men
generally live in the world; we are not, after all, interested in framing an
ethic that focuses on situations that are rare, extreme, and not generally
encountered.
But these ‘Life boat scenarios’ are more common than Rothbard thinks. We can for example tax some people to provide food for starving people, to pay medical bills for those who would die otherwise.
[…] the application of our theory to extreme situations: if a man
aggresses against another’s person or property to save his own life, he may
or may not be acting morally in so doing. That is none of our particular
concern in this work. Regardless of whether his action is moral or immoral,
by any criterion, he is still a criminal aggressor against the property of
another, and the victim is within his right to repel that aggression by force,
and to prosecute the aggressor afterward for his crime.
One may scratch at one’s head what kind of rights do not impart moral obligation on others? Are these rights in any way meaningful? Heck, the title of his own book is ‘ETHICS of liberty’.
Jan Narveson in ‘The Libertarian Idea’ writes:
There has now come to be considerable agreement in usage among thinkers on this subject on one major point. This is that there is a logical connection between statements about rights and statements about right (and wrong) or duties: the statement ‘A has the right to do x’ entails a statement about right and wrong action. The catch is that this entailed statement is not a statement about A’s action being right or wrong. It is, rather, a statement about the actions of some or all other people. These people are not always the same, however. If Jones has promised me $5, then Jones has the duty to pay me $5, but nobody else does. On the other hand, everyone has the duty to refrain from killing me, so long as I am innocent of any capital crime. Thus we need a place, or variable, in our definition, to be filled out in particular cases with the names of those whose actions are affected in moral status by the right being asserted if what is asserted is true. These are the people whom the right is a right “against”. We will designate these people with the letter ‘B’, understanding that B could be either one person or more, ranging up to everybody: ‘A has a right’ = ‘A has a right against B’ When A has a right against B, what are we saying about B? Specifically, that some possible actions of B’s are required, or alternatively are not to be done, i.e., that B has a duty to do or not to do certain things. We will in general take the statement that B has this duty to refrain from those actions to be equivalent to the claim that they are wrong, and the statement that B has the duty to do them as equivalent to the claim that it would be wrong for B not to do them. These actions of B’s are, of course, different from the actions of A which the claim about rights we are defining says A has a right to do. We’ll call these actions of B’s ‘y’. Thus we have: ‘A has a right against B to do x’ -> ‘B has the duty to do y’
Can a mass murders or a slave owner (I am NOT talking about voluntary slavery) be a libertarian? If Rothbard is not talking about morality, can there be anything un-libertarian about these people.
Perhaps Rothbard mean the term in a political way. We tend to give different ‘rights’ to private and political institution. There are things which agents of the state may do but I should not. The notion I am proposing here is political authority. Walter Block (one of the successor of Rothbard) repeatedly insist that libertarianism is about legality not morality.
Libertarianism is limited to political philosophy; it does not include ethics.
However this is not a satisfactory response considering that libertarians are often arguing that parents have right to starve their children to death, or to sell them (as we will see below). Consider if Stalin argued that private control of the capital is morally fine not legally okay, or if Hitler argued that being a jew is morally fine but not legally fine. Moreover it will suffers from the problem of political authority.
To quote Robert Nozick:
Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what
they may do through the apparatus of the state, or do to establish such an
apparatus.
He also writes:
(1) to fully explain it in terms of the nonpolitical; (2) to view it as emerging
from the nonpolitical but irreducible to it, a mode of organization of nonpolitical factors understandable only in terms of novel political principles;
or (3) to view it as a completely autonomous realm.Since only the first promises full understanding of the whole political realm. Since only the first promises full understanding of the whole political realm, it stands as the most desirable theoretical alternative, to be abandoned only if known to be impossible. Let us call this most desirable and complete kind of explanation of a realm a fundamental explanation of the realm.
For a good explanation of the concept of realm I recommend Hunt’s book ‘Anarchy, State, and Utopia: An Advanced Guide’
No reason to distinguish political realm and moral realm is given by Rothbard or Block. It is not at all clear that the argument he gave above for self ownership is not to be interpreted in moral way. If rejecting self ownership is in fact contradictory then why just limit our self to realm of politics and not go into the realm of ethics. Rothbard fails to understand the reason we want something to be illegal, the reason is because we don’t want that thing to happen. We think it is immoral to do it. The reason I think murder should be illegal is because I think murder is immoral. Rothbard appears to be confused.
If the legal right that was violated by the criminal was not something that gave the criminal a reason not to do it, how can we fairly regard that individual as legally responsible for the violation? Criminal responsibility presupposes that agents are able to internalize legal rules and to recognize their reason-giving force in their daily conduct.
I have also seen Rothbardians criticize Nozick and Bastiat for not distinguishing betweet morality and legality in conversation.
Although at this point I must note that many have criticized Rothbard for holding ‘moral claims’ perhaps unjustly.
Jason Brennan in ‘Arguments for Liberty’ writes:
[Rothbard’s] supposedly self-evident principle [of self ownership] leads to bizarre conclusions: for example, if my neighbors decide to let their newborn starve to death on their lawn, I must not take a single step onto their property to rescue the infant.
Bryan caplan made a similar charge in ‘Thoughts on Jason Brennan’s The Ethics of Voting’
Friedman also made similar accusation to Rothbard.
if I fall out my apartment window and end up clinging to a projecting flagpole a floor lower, I must let go and fall to my death when ordered to do so by its owner.
Huemer too has made similar arguments but not for Rothbard specifically.
Even after devoting one entire chapter to reply to this argument people still keep making the same argument.
Modus Tollens
Rothbard writes on child neglect:
Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.
Walter Block also advocate for evictionism on the grounds of self ownership. Rothbard too has made similar argument(not for eviction but for abortion). It must be noted that they are not arguing that a fetus is not alive and only become alive just after the delivery ( belief which Jan Narveson seems to hold, if I understand him correctly) but that fetus is alive and if mother don’t want to keep him, she may ‘evict’ him. Absurdity of this view becomes clear after a simple thought experiment. Lets say someone ‘X’ is surrounded by a sea and is in a boat. Boat is owned by ‘X’. ‘X’ gives birth to a child in the boat but don’t like this child so she throws the child out of the boat killing him. According to Rothbard and Block such action should be legal! After all it is her boat, she may throw as many people as she wants out of her boat. Shouldn’t we just leave her alone or something?
Rothbard also writes:
But surely the mother or parents may not receive the ownership of the child in absolute fee simple, because that would imply the bizarre state of affairs that a fifty-year old adult would be subject to the absolute and unquestioned jurisdiction of his seventy-year-old parent. So the parental property right must be limited in time.But it also must be limited in kind, for it surely would be grotesque for a libertarian who believes in the right of self-ownership to advocate the right of a parent to murder or torture his or her children
Though Rothbard find this bizarre and grotesque but letting parents starve their child to death, throwing them out of their own body to kill them is not bizarre or grotesque. Rothbard and Block both don’t seem to understand Modus tollens. If Rothbard’s conception of self ownership leads us to killing and starving children, isn’t it rational to give up self ownership than to endorse such heinous acts? There is a reason why Utilitarians go to lengths to justify that their system does not justify intentionally punishing the innocent.
Debates between libertarians on what is right ‘libertarian position’ on a particular issue makes me want to bang my head on the wall. There is no such thing as ‘Libertarian Position’ , there is the position on a particular topic (if morality is objective that is). Sometimes I wonder if libertarians are pulling a big prank on everyone by making people believe in such absurd views.
As Michael Huemer writes:
“[…] most libertarians and philosophers are absurdly overconfident about abstract generalizations. They will cling with dogmatic certitude to the first vaguely plausible speculation they think of, then reject any proposition, however obvious, that comes along later.”
The Problem With Deduction/Monism
Description of his book says:
What distinguishes Rothbard’s book is the manner in which it roots the case for freedom in the concept of natural rights and applies it to a host of practical problems.
Who writes these descriptions anyway? This quality is also noted by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In introduction he writes:
Rothbard was above all a systematic thinker. He set out from the most elementary human situation and problem — Crusoe-ethics — and then proceeded painstakingly, justifying and proving each step and argument along the way to increasingly more complex and complicated situations and problems. Moreover, his prose was characterized by unrivaled clarity.[…] Rothbard demanded and presented proofs and exact and complete answers rather then tentative explanations, conjectures, and open questions.
I don’t think monism is the strength of this book but its weakness.
Consider two books on the same topic, Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism by Michael Huemer and Animal Liberation by Peter Singer.
Huemer’s book appeal to mid level intuition i.e. it is wrong to do great harm to someone for a small amount of pleasure and then works his way forward. On the other hand Singer assumes Utilitarianism as a start and works his way forward. Huemer’s book despite its flaws (which I might write another article about) is much more appealing than Singer’s book. The reason simply being that Huemer appeals to mid-level intuition which most people already accept but Singer starts with a ground level fundamentals which is highly controversial. Singer himself recommends Huemer’s when he has to answer ‘Why don’t you eat animals?’. In forewords Singer writes:
In the future, when people ask me why I don’t eat meat, I will tell
them to read this book.
On the other hand Roger Scruton in his book Human Nature said:
[Singer’s book] contain little or no philosophical argument. They derive their radical moral conclusions from a vacuous utilitarianism that counts the pain and pleasure of all living things as equally significant and that ignores just about everything that has been said in our philosophical tradition about the real distinction between persons and animals
Law of triviality
Law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly or typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
Making good arguments for absolute self ownership is difficult, deciding if absolute self ownership is true then whether or not abortion is just is easy. Law of triviality perfectly encapsulate Rothbard’s and Block’s works. Block has written several paper on evictionism but nowhere he gives any foundation for this position nor do they respond to the objections raised by other people on absolute self ownership. Now perhaps the title of this blog will become clear. The pin signifies self ownership and the elephant is when Rothbard and Rothbardians such as Block use it to comment on whether or not parents have obligation to feed their child or intellectual property is not real or abortion is fine. This is just lazy, intellectually dishonest and intellectually bankrupt. They ignoring the difficult task to reach the easy task. Why do people still take them seriously?
Why such friendly fire?
I am a libertarian and yet I am criticizing other libertarians?
Truth is an end in itself. Thus when I find bad arguments I show what is wrong with them
Bad arguments compete with good arguments. Bad arguments for any position compete with good arguments. Our opponents especially remember all the bad arguments given for a position and thus ignore all the good arguments. Rothbard being as popular as he is, his books are considered important among libertarians and recommended to non-libertarians. And when they find the argument given are shitty, it does not leave good impression on people.
If you think about it, there is not much difference between a person who just happens to stumble across right conclusions through bad arguments and someone who uses bad arguments to come to a wrong conclusion. There is not much difference between Walter Block and Marx. Indeed Walter Block was a socialist before he met Ayn Rand.
Bad arguments influence people. If you can’t distinguish between such horrible arguments then I highly recommend not ‘thinking’ about politics at all.
And because I am a sadist and I enjoy refuting other people. HAHAHA