Strange libertarian argument of the day
This post, in which Andrew Cohen attempts to make a libertarian case for requiring licences to raise children, is apparently not meant as a parody. This argument pairs nicely, I think, with Murray Rothbard’s argument that parents should be free to starve their children to death if they wish (but not to assault them! Because that’s a distinction with tremendous moral importance!). I think the most succinct way to think about libertarian’s problem with children is this: Two of the central commitments of libertarianism are anti-statism and an a strong focus on individual rights, understood in strictly ‘negative’ terms. There’s more tension between these two commitments than most libertarians care to admit, but children expose in a precise and ruthless way. If you lead with anti-statism, you end up in danger of Rothbard’s vile madness; if you lead with individual rights protection, you risk Cohen’s path, in which case real and actual dangers of tyranny, which libertarians should be particularly attuned to, are casually theorized away. It is certainly true that just about any individualistic, rights-based theory has a very difficult time with children, but libertarianism in particular has a tendency to collapse spectacularly in the face of children.
In comments, Jacob Levy makes the argument that the real culprit here is so-called ‘ideal theory’ in which some constraints are treated as fixed, and others are assumed away. This is certainly true, and it bears a family resemblance to outlandish, ahistorical and transparently awful and/or appalling policy proposals from left-liberal philosophers like Peter Singer and Philip Van Parijs (such as financial compensation for those who can’t find a marriage partner and maximum voting ages, in the case of the latter, and the permissibility of euthanasia for certain infants, in the case of the former). On the other hand, I suspect there’s a distinction worth making between ‘really bad ideas that come excessively abstract thinking’ and ‘really bad ideas that come from excessively abstract thinking and badly violate an alleged core principle.’ It’s particularly striking that the thing that gets uncritically idealized by Cohen is state capacity, in an area where the reasons to be skeptical about state capacity are particularly and obviously strong.
I can’t believe Libertarianism is taken seriously, even as a theoretical philosophy, by anyone with even half a brain.
Just take any of their positions, and follow it through to its logical conclusion with real human beings.
The “Then a miracle happens” cartoon covers it pretty well.
Libertarianism isn’t taken seriously by anyone with half a brain or more. It’s just that libertarianism, like Newt, falls into the category of things that look smart to a broad class of stupid people.
Libertarianism is a rabidly faith based philosophically void incoherent ideology, immune to intelligence and reason.
Libertarianism, like most strains of conservatism, is just an attempt to put a principled face on selfishness.
I would say even more so. Libertarianism is pure all-about-me-ness. Libertarians are notoriously “for” the rights and freedoms they want for themselves, including the freedom to screw other people over without government interference, and are at best indifferent if not outright hostile to everyone else’s rights and freedoms, to say nothing of personal wellbeing.
Social conservatism, on the other hand, while equally vile if not more so in many respects, does at least sometimes attempt to embrace the notion of service, community, selflessness and personal sacrifice, if not necessarily the practice thereof.
Libertarianism is a gooey, half-dry dingleberry in the ass-hair of the Enlightenment.
Libertarianism is one of those things like the music of Rush that you think is profound when you are a teenager. But, once you reach mature adulthood you realize it is actually very shallow. It also seems to be a uniquely American thing. I can not think of any non-American examples of Libertarians.
Aren’t libertarianism and the music of Rush basically the same thing?
No, because Rush is Canadian and libertarianism is American. ;-)
Wow. I always suspected Ann was foreign too.
Ayn Rand is wildly popular in India. Years of socialist oppression, which intertwined with casteism, apparently makes her moral argument for capitalism quite salient.
To be fair to Rush fans, their lyrics might be shallow but their drummer is one of the best.
Of course, it is the drummer who is responsible for the lyrics, no?
Just because you drum well doesn’t mean that you are going to be a skilled lyricist.
Weren’t many of the “intellectuals” behind libertarianism European or at least born there?
Also fascist supporters (see Hayek).
I would have said von Hayek was more of a aristocrat/feudal supporter than a fascist
There is this and his support for Pinochet.
If Hayek had been a “feudal supporter,” wouldn’t the “road to serfdom” have been a good thing?
With conservatives of all stripes (including libertarians), the question is who is to be ruler and who ruled, not whether there is to be a ruler at all.
An recent Onion headline: “Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department”.
libertarianism in particular has a tendency to collapse spectacularly in the face of children.
So I do have something in common with libertarianism.
State capacity ends up being one of the things that’s idealized in pretty much any non-anarchist ideal theory. That is, whatever the ideally-best outcomes would be, state actors are imagined to have the capacity, knowledge, and motivation to implement it.
That seems as if it should make libertarians at least somewhat immune to the appeal of ideal theory, for the reasons you identify, but it doesn’t. The idea that you figure out what the right answers about justice are by imagining perfect good-faith implementation is hard to shake.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but it seems to me libertarian theory could really benefit from a bit more attention to Shklar. I expect there might be some difficulty getting past the de-centering of rights, but there’s a lot of potential there.
Yep, you’re preaching to the choir. :-)
I have always found all libertarian arguments strange.
As to the whole “ideal theory” business, holding some constraints as fixed and assuming others away (both in direct conflict with reality) is central to the whole. libertarian enterprise. It presumes a world that simply does not exist outside the fevered imaginations of libertarians. This is why it has failed so spectacularly every time it has been applied (see the current mess in Europe as an example).
It’s not so much that all libertarian arguments are strange as that they’re non-existent. Calling something an argument doesn’t make it an argument. Arguments involve things like using empirical data to establish the validity of premises, arguing logically from clearly stated premises for a conclusion, and using other empirical data to directly support the conclusion and buttress the validity of the premises and of the application of logic. Libertarians simply don’t do these things.
Arguments involve things like using empirical data to establish the validity of premises, arguing logically from clearly stated premises for a conclusion, and using other empirical data to directly support the conclusion and buttress the validity of the premises and of the application of logic.
No they don’t.
I think you mean “nunh-UH!”
Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
Yes, but that’s not just saying “no it isn’t.”
It can be.
Contrarian assertion is contrarian assertion, not argument.
Sorry, the five minutes is up.
Calling something an argument doesn’t make it an argument
The core of libertarian “arguments” is that everything means (and works) exactly as they say and reality be damned.
Earlier this year on the aynrandcontrahumannature blog, I noted that many libertarian arguments have an underpants gnomes structure:
1. A is A.
3. Therefore capital gains taxes are wrong.
Indeed. Libertarians are wonderful at asserting things without even attempting an actual argument. Assertions, however vehement, are not arguments just as underpants-gnome schemes aren’t plans.
I just added your web page to my brokmaoks. I enjoy reading your posts. Thank you!
This is right up there with Sasha Volokh’s famous “saving earth from a collision with an asteroid is immoral” post.
Libertarians are crazy.
And stupid.
1. A friend of mine, who actually had libertarian-leaning sympathies, once pointed out that its very telling that none of Ayn Rand’s protagonists had children. Like djw noted above, libertarian theory does tend to fall apart when children are involved.
2. Did somebody really suggest that monetary compensation be paid for people who can’t find marriage partners? This is a really dumb idea. When do you pay the compensation? How much should the compensation be? What if the person finds a marriage partner after being paid the compensation, do they have to pay it back? Do people who are willingly as opposed to involuntary single get it? What about people who are in relationships but don’t want to formally marry?
as a person that has never been married, I back this proposal and say the amount should be $100,000 per year for me
How very Libertarian of you.
The argument was limited, IIRC, to conditions in which marriage partners of one gender are scarce. It is fundamentally unfair (so the argument goes) to monopolize a scarce resource without compensation. If you are really interested in exploring the argument further, it’s made by Phillipe Van Parijs’s in a book titled (if you can believe it) Real Freedom For All.
Lee: “A friend of mine, who actually had libertarian-leaning sympathies, once pointed out that its very telling that none of Ayn Rand’s protagonists had children.”
Well, sort of: Anthem ends with the hero and heroine preparing to have a child.
What is inherently morally abhorrent about breeding licenses?
I don’t see anything wrong with objectively enforced breeding licenses based on age and financial standing. Since intergenerational income mobility is now a dead letter, any child born into poverty will be condemned to a life of poverty. As I see it, people who find themselves here would have been better off not being born than being born into a life of poverty. The end result is reduced human suffering.
It’s politically much easier to solve the problem of multi-generational poverty by halting the production of poor people than by making the poor less poor because the concept of breeding licenses can be made popular with the rich in a way income transfers cannot.
Breeding licenses only become problematic when they are awarded on the basis of racial or ideological purity. In an American context, any breeding license system would, of course, be used to prevent Democrats, non-whites, and non-Christians from breeding, but this does not invalidate the concept in the abstract.
P.S. there’s nothing wrong with voting age limits, either. Western political economy is falling apart because the industrialized world has a surplus of contented old people who are voting themselves the benefits of collective economic output while pulling up the ladder on everyone else under the expectation that they themselves will die before they feel the consequences of economic mismanagement. See, for example, the hordes of screaming elderly teabaggers waving around guns in response to the idea that anyone other than them have access to affordable health care. Keeping these people out of the voting booth until the boomer bubble has died off would be a huge improvement to society.
the concept of breeding licenses can be made popular with the rich in a way income transfers cannot.
Once you call them “breeding licenses,” you’re going to lose.
The same thing that has already been stated about libertarianism – it might work on an ‘ideal’ world, such as Pluto, but it will never work with humans, for the reasons you state. So, if an idea is predestined to be implemented in an immoral way, the idea itself is inherently immoral.
I think you might mean “Plato.” However, libertarianism would also not work on Pluto. As John Varley, Charles Stross, and others have pointed out, the inhabitants of a space colony will not have many freedoms.
I’m sure Stag was referring to the natives of Pluto, who are all frozen solid. They never age, get sick, raise children or have any social interactions at all. For them libertarianism works perfectly.
Okay, I’ll bite…
Moral argument #1 (as opposed to the practical one, which has already been addressed) is that this is just another way to control women’s bodies and punish them for having sex, and puts almost the entire burden of the law on women, especially poor women.
What are you going to do if a woman gets pregnant without a license?
Moral argument #2 is in response to this:
Probably true. But also undemocratic. You’re basically saying that the selfish wants of a tiny but powerful minority should supercede the rights and freedoms of a much larger if less powerful bloc of society. What about what poor people want? Why should we cater to the rich assholes?
Which leads to Moral Argument #3:
It doesn’t have to be that way.
There’s no morality in making other people suffer so you don’t have to pay higher taxes.
It’s highly ironic to talk about an ideal world where the needs of the poor matter more than the wants of the rich in a thread that started off berating libertarians for living in an ideal world divorced from the reality that everyone else experiences.
In the real world, it’s proven impossible in most countries to do anything about the human cost of grinding intergenerational poverty because the rich and middle class simply won’t allow income transfers, public investment, and class mobility on a scale necessary to fix the problem. This is immutable reality no matter how much it is morally unacceptable.
Reducing the human toll of intergenerational poverty by preventing the poor from breeding looks a lot like a reasonable option because–unlike conventional poverty reduction strategies–conservatives could be Luntzed into supporting it.
So, let me get this right. are you saying if we somehow “halt the production of poor people” there won’t be any more poverty(nobody working the janitor jobs)? Or just that it won’t be multi-generational(your kids get an equal crack at them)?
You can’t get multi-generational poverty if the poor aren’t allowed to breed.
From the article:
For instance, when the parent is a libertarian and/or a Randroid, perhaps? ;)
Very strange post indeed. It’s contradictory in almost every dimension but one. That dimension is the one in which someone has had the actual experience of raising a child in a completely altruistic way. When one hasn’t had that experience, his post is possible.
Biology and the natural bonds of children and parents, even under severely adverse circumstances cannot be rationalized away by some self-indulgent glibertarian brain teaser. I’m the child of a parent raised as a foster child. I’m the stepfather to a son who grew up with all of his memories of me as his dad, and I’m the grandfather to a granddaughter who has lived with us, her grandparents virtually since she came home from the hospital. I’ve seen the consequences of separation of parents and their biological parents and it’s not pretty. The challenges are surmountable but there us always something missing in the heart of each child. To think that a ‘licensing’ format will somehow address greater problems than those they create is naïveté bordering on criminal negligence for a person purporting to be a counselor.
The whole mindless exercise would seem to have these types of conclusions, if followed through to it’s illogical result:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
People are not blank, abstract objects to be subjected to the ignorant thought experiments of others.
The David Reimer example is only applies as to the pseudo-logic applied to interfere in his personal situation thereby creating horrific results.
Would love an edit button.
Happy New Year everyone!
I’m not sure what Peter Singer’s argument in favor of infant euthanasia has to do with anything. It’s not trying to make some sort of abstract argument about the ideal society, it’s just saying that newborn babies lack the cognitive abilities which make them deserving of not being killed. It seems like a pretty practical down to earth argument to me. There are many things in the world that we kill and many that we don’t, Peter Singer is just willing to draw the line in a slightly different place, and for what seem like pretty reasonable arguments.
So is it also valid to argue that people who make Singer’s argument lack the moral abilities which make them deserving of not being killed? If not, explain the difference between the two arguments.
Because that’s a stupid basis on which to judge the value of a life. If you’re saying that it’s wrong to use abstract reasoning to determine the value of a life, then where the hell are we supposed to determine the value of a life from? Jesus?
But to summarize Singer’s argument, basically the idea is that because newborns have no concept of the future, ending their lives causes them no harm. Someone without “moral development” would still not like it if they will killed, so that’s an opinion you have to take into account. A baby has literally no opinion on the matter. The future life that a baby might grow up to have would still have value, but it’s not the same thing as ending a life someone is already enjoying. No harm, no foul.
Either way I think the key point is that Singer is making a very different kind of “crazy” argument from the other examples. Peter Singer isn’t describing something that seems nice in principle but which would get unpleasant in practice: the problem people have with it is the whole killing babies thing itself, not some unforeseen consequences thereof.
I genuinely don’t see why people get so worked up over it, though. I mean, if you support abortions, (and I do) what’s so bad about allowing “fourth trimester abortions?” Obviously the health of the mother stops being a factor at that point, but that’s not the only reason to abort.
No, no, I’m not saying it’s wrong to use abstract reasoning as the basis to judge a human life. I’m asking why the criteria would be limited to the ability to reason, and not include all the other mental capabilities that go into being human.
Then, once you’ve decided that the creature before you isn’t really human – because it’s a baby without reason, or because it is a sociopath without morals, or whatever – we don’t have to take its “opinion” into consideration, right?
(I suppose I should make it clear that I don’t approve of that course, which has the advantage that it’s self-consistent both logically and morally. It’s the people who would argue “we can kill other humans who lack quality X” who have to justify any limits they might propose for X.)
What’s so special about humans?
Species is just another “quality X,” and (as Singer has argued) an even less reasonable one. If you’re not willing to judge a life based on its cognitive abilities, (which is understandable) why on Earth would you consider some technical genetic classification to be important?
I’m not quite sure how Singer got in this as well.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve read that bit of Singer, but as I recall the interesting challenge is to defend birth as a drawing line if the argument you are making pro abortion is the fairly standard fetuses aren’t persons because they lack the necessary mental characteristics of persons (cf e.g., Warren). On the flip side, if the reason for aborting is for the sake of the baby (e.g., to avoid a short, pain filled life), it seems that reason doesn’t go away when you’re born, so infant euthanasia (on this rationale) is equally justified.
Singer, being a utilitarian, of course can mobilize more general interests and effects to approximate normal moral sentiments wrt infants. Obviously, infants not being embedded in their mothers like fetuses have a less direct conflict of interests.
I think the stronger and more interesting challenges to Singer come from the disability advocates folks who attack some of his (widely shared) presumptions of what we should value in a life.
I’ll outsource my reply to the entire disability rights community and movement, starting with the late great Harriet McBryde Johnson.
I’m not sure why you like that column. The argument doesn’t seem different from the “what if YOU had been aborted” arguments of the Christian right.
I like the article a great deal, for many reasons. First and foremost, because it effectively makes the case for the profound shortcomings of Singer’s method for determining relevant criteria for ‘a life worth living’ (again, the disability rights literature provides a necessary and devastating corrective to Singer’s general approach and specific answers on that topic). Singer’s approach to determining ‘a life worth living’ both ignores and silences the lived experience of actually existing people.
As to my analogizing this argument to Cohen; Singer makes an entirely abstract argument about how euthanizing infants is permissible under conditions X, Y and Z. Like Cohen, he idealizes state capacity (because it’s not the interesting philosophical puzzle to him) in an area where actually existing history is quite ugly indeed, but he doesn’t consider that at all, because of the artificial terms he’s set on the debate. The history of actually existing states on these topics is pretty awful; and the currently existing (fragile, imperfect) consensus on life’s value beginning at birth is an important moral accomplishment. Neither of these things matter in the slightest to Singer. Singer ignores the possibility that disrupting this consensus is dangerous because it could be turned to political ends he would find reprehensible. But even more problematically, he doesn’t consider the extent to which we’ve constructed our world and our worldviews, and our philosophical views on the nature a of a life worth living, based on the exclusion of the perspectives and lived experiences of those considered disabled.
I don’t really buy the “first and foremost” argument; it’s a matter of degree and it’s not like some babies that are born don’t receive, let’s say, inattention when the severity of their problems are discovered. And I see the problem with that, but in those moments parents and professionals are also calculating – possibly miscalculating if they think all disabled people suffer in the way that Singer seems to think – but the loss of the unlived life is a funny quantity to try to measure.
And that ties into the second point: it’s also a matter of historical record that sanctity of life arguments tend to invade the womb; the argument that look, see, I lead a great life is an argument against all abortion, and it isn’t simply articulating the disabled experience (which I agree needs articulation).
Myself I see the reason to draw the arbitrary line at birth probably for about the same reasons you do, but the column doesn’t seem to me to touch the argument Singer’s making except to shorten or lengthen the measure of pain or pleasure.
I don’t find that column particularly persuasive, but I suppose it does show how this has more in common with the “strange libertarian argument.” The writer seems to be arguing that euthanizing disabled newborns would bleed over to bad things happening to older people with disabilities, which again leads back into the whole ideal/unideal problem. (I don’t buy the slippery slope argument in this case, but I can see her perspective.)
That said, I do think Singer would probably be more consistent if he just said that infanticide for any reason is permissable, and that singling out the handicapped is unfair to the handicapped.
From a “right to life” perspective, that’s exactly what Singer says. No baby has any more right to life as any other baby. Disability is not a marker of lack of right to life. He’s perfectly consistent on this point.
Since they don’t have a right to life, Singer needs different grounds for the special moral regard we have for human infants. Since he does not locate that in intrinsic features of infants (i.e., a certain level of cognition), he must locate it in extrinsic features, typically the relation the infant has to parents or other members of the community. This amounts to a fairly general and strong protection of infants lives. Where, for Singer, it fails is when the infant has the sort of life prospects that would, on his view, make euthanasia a reasonable choice for someone and there are no parents/guardians with the protecting interests at hand.
Now, the parents/guardians could be mistaken about their own or the child’s interests, and so there is the possibility of Singer style arguments putting (moral) pressure on the parents/guardians of “severely” disabled children toward infanticide.
So, the Singerian approximation of a Berube/Johnson style view would start from the idea that we do much better on interest respect on average if we use birth (or viability) as a bright light for right to life level protections. And I think that’s basically right, though there are still difficulties. But then it’s hard to understand why Singer, for example, isn’t strongly moved by Berube’s point:
AFAICT, Singer is moved by what a lot of people are moved by: The idea that there is a lot of “futile” care in current medical practice. His main target are those who would e.g., deny autonomy in such cases: i.e., Catholic style sanctity of life doctrine.
I do share a lot of that feeling, thought it’s hard to tell whether it’s moral sensitivity or anti-disability prejudice at work. I think there are moral risks either way here: The Singerian risks profound failure of respect for persons; the Johnsonian risks forcing suffering and/or childbirth. I suspect the risks are less on the Johnsonian side, but I need to read more about Johnsonian views on end of life care and abortion.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve read that bit of Singer, but as I recall the interesting challenge is to defend birth as a drawing line if the argument you are making pro abortion is the fairly standard fetuses aren’t persons because they lack the necessary mental characteristics of persons (cf e.g., Warren).
Yes, the philosophical argument is about “personhood” and where one can draw the line regarding what that thing is, philosophically speaking. Which is not the same thing as what political or judicial reality necessitate; there’s probably a good practical reason to have Line X which we don’t cross rather than having to make the personhood determination in each case.
What’s so special about personhood? We kill people all the time, and it doesn’t really seem to bother anyone in practice. All you need is a sufficiently well-established distancing mechanism, such as ‘cost-benefit analysis’ in public safety, or ‘foreign policy’ in, well, foreign policy.
Well obviously there’s an easy measure of the worth of a life in one’s bank account. Somehow opponents of, say, reasonable health insurance don’t get called Nazis in the New York Times.
So first, I really have to say that by “interesting” I meant primarily “intellectually interesting” and I’m worried that that is pretty damn callous. I do think that if your justification for permitting abortion is that fetuses (of certain classes) aren’t persons (and thus killing them, if wrong, is wrong for some other reason than the killing of an innocent person without other sufficient justification), then you need to examine your criteria for personhood and see what’s up with that. And that can lead in several directions including less comfort with abortion.
Second, it’s clearly the case that either being a person nor not being a person is not the final word on whether killing you is morally permissible on most views on killing. Many moral views hold that killing someone else’s pet is wrong (though the reasons vary). Similarly, many moral views hold that killing an innocent person in self-defense (e.g., they have been drugged into a psychotic rage and are attacking you in such a manner that your only option for survival is to response with deadly force) is permissible.
Singer holds that many infanticides, “even” of disabled children, would be wrong even though they, on his view, do not have a right to life. One could develop a Singerian theory that yielded a Berube or even a Johnson policy outcome. This perhaps shows that the Singerian moral perspective is problematic or, in Berube’s terms, a matter of making things up. Or, it’s that the specific moral content of a Singerian style theory is significantly empirical and that a good chunk of the battle is empirical (e.g., on the actual and probable outcomes of certain policies or moral attitudes).
djw, where do you put deep green arguments like those discussed by Erik?
Tibor Machan wrote an article for Free Inquiry around 2002 (I wish I could find a reference) in which he basically admitted that his libertarian ideology couldn’t deal with the problem of orphans. Like in this article too, libertarians can prove to themselves that what they believe is incompatible with how human societies actually work. Somehow they never manage to take the next step and reject the obviously false premise at the heart of the contradiction.
Libertarianism is basically anarchy for rich people.