Libertarianism, Property Rights and Self-Ownership

_Libertarians – propertarians, anyway – rather notoriously maintain that you really ought to be able to sell yourself into slavery, if you want to. After all, you’re your property. You should be able to dispose of yourself as you see fit. (Some libertarians don’t go so far but many do. Nozick, for example. I think it’s pretty hard to resist this conclusion, in princpled fashion, once you’ve bought the strong self-ownership principle.)_

(Left-libertarian) Hillel Steiner has an argument, which I’m not quite sure what to make of, that this isn’t as obvious as people take it to be. If you sell something, then you transfer a right to a new right-holder and (thereby) acquire duties wrt to the new right-holder and what s/he now has rights over. But slaves, being the mere property of others, can’t, according to Steiner, have either rights or duties. (See his _An Essay on Rights_ p.231, fn4. – the original readable via Google Books btw.)

@2, but you aren’t a slave until you’ve sold yourself – when you do the selling, you’re a free person, only after do you become a chattel to be whipped into submission. Force is how one extracts dutiful compliance from slaves. It’s all perfectly logical.

And always worth remarking that, as here, people are too keen to expose a term like ‘feudal’ as if it marks out some special kind of bizarrerie, when in fact all that separates us from it is the passage of time. And in some senses, geography – for what is the rule of drug-lords and gangs if not a form of brutal feudalism?

The good stuff – individual rights, voting, welfare, education – really needs less taking for granted than it gets in these debates sometimes.

Enjoy:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe4.html

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html

http://usbig.net/papers/175-Widerquist-LibertarianDilemma.doc

I guess all of this activity on libertarianism here just proves this word is won by those who work with the pair of words ‘power’ and ‘freedom’ as synonymous. No matter how lengthy the post, it is better to just acknoweledge that and move on. There are enough other words out there and, if push comes to shove, we can invent a new one.

By the way – I read somebody quoting Oscar Wilde as America jumping to decadence without a stop at civilization and interpreting that as a negative for America. I kind of think it is a positive certainly if you see what civilization did to Oscar Wilde: the punishment was civil enough, but it was still punishment undeserved. Sadly, Wilde was too optimistic; the US seems stuck in the law of the strongest (or as it is more widely known: The American Dream).

There is a very brief, oddly Buddhistic way to put this: if liberty means non-frustration of the exercise of legitimate property rights, you can be made perfectly free by being completely relieved of all property, including your own life.

It not only has shades of Buddhism, but lots of other “cynic”-like philosophies, including pietist Christianity. For every hope that dies down here, I have a new in heaven. a popular (and rather grim) psalm here in Norway says. Ibsen also said “Forever owned is only the forfeited”. He was an atheist, as I remember, although he put it in the mouth of a radical Christian.

Let me finish with a final note about the case of Bryan Caplan. I honestly feel a bit bad about having snarked at him so severely because, after I did that, I remembered that I have actually met him. (Hey, he doesn’t look anything like that picture up on EconLog.) And he seemed perfectly friendly and nice, and we got along fine, which causes me to feel irrationally remorseful for my high-handed mockery.

I can sympathize with that. He certainly seems likable enough, but I stopped reading his blog after some particularly egregious “just desserts”-posts.

Two someones?
No.

Jacob Levy and Will Wilkinson are pained by this, because, though they too are libertarians

I’d say they are not, if we want “libertarian” to mark out a distinct view. Rather, they are “classic liberals” in the 19th C. sense. (That’s how they’d come out on Freeman’s account, at least, and I think that’s right. Will’s view has, I think, some other stuff mixed in with it in a way that I’m not quite sure makes a coherent whole, but then, most of use don’t have fully coherent views. ) I think it would be a huge improvement in clarity and coherence if we distinguished, on the one hand, a family of liberal views that run from classical liberals to social-democratic liberals on the one hand, and a family of libertarian views on the other, as a distinct set of views. There will obviously be over-lap. There’s some significant over-lap among pretty much any set of political views, given facts about the world and a mostly common subject matter. But, for example, if you think Hayek (a classic liberal) and Nozick and Navarson, (libertarians) are working with the same basic ideas or assumptions, because they all want a smaller state and are liked by people on the right, then you’ll get confused.

The free/slave children thing existed for quite a while; they were called “sons” and “daughters,” respectively.

It gets worse, from the thin libertarian viewpoint. From feudalism, you can easily take an unbroken chain of just transfers to social democracy.

http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2003/07/08/notes-on-nozick/

There are many, many people who have pointed out that libertarians, by their own dogma, are driven to a belief that slavery is OK. But really you don’t need this philosophical bit about people owning their children. It’s quite sufficient to think about what would happen, in libertopia, to people who would otherwise starve. Of course the libertarian thinks that they should be allowed to sell themselves as slaves, and that interfering with them doing so would be typical liberal interference with the market. Of course the libertarian can not imagine any sort of organized power in libertopia that would drive people into starvation in the first place, like, say, a local monopoly or dominant employer — market failures do not exist in libertaria’s Economics 101 world.

But I really disagree with the whole “the better libertarians are like classical liberals” thing. There’s a reason why classical liberals became modern liberals! If you want to maximize freedom, you have to acknowledge that freedom means the ability to actually do things, which leads you straight towards positive rights — taking some percentage of a rich person’s income to redistribute it to poor people does not restrict their freedom as much as it increases the poor people’s freedom, because the extra marginal income to the rich person doesn’t increase their range of action as much as the income needed to prevent the poor person from having to sleep under a bridge. If you really believe as the classical liberals did, you would have been convinced by the same historical events that convinced them. The people who like to call themselves “classical liberals” are just libertarians with a PR department.

Very neat post and I agree with it’s broad thrust but a few quibbles:

(1) The libertarian alternatives to propertarianism are many. Will and Jacob do not have the same moral theory at all. That matters because it isn’t quite right to say that the ‘Mill’ group wants to maximize liberty. That is a primarily consequentialist reaction to value, not a deontological one (propertarianism is not the only libertarian deontological view either).

(2) There is a meme among some libertarians these days that libertarianism can be understood as a subset of liberalism and that the main differences between social democratic liberals and market liberals is empirical, not normative (Will, Jacob, John Tomasi). But market and sd liberals only have similar lists of values they want to advance. Desert is not really on the s-d liberals’ list but it is typically on the market liberal list; the same in reverse for equality rather than mere suffiency of material goods. Second, even the values held in common are ranked differently. So there are still serious normative differences though they are arguably still ‘in house’.

I’m confused. In the absolute continuum, from the individual caveman (free to do what he/she wants, own what he/she can take care of, and go where he/she wants) until today, is it the advent of clumps of people or the advent of eggheads that removes those liberties?

Sorry, blew the blockquote.

If this be a defense for libertarianism, how about some of the people who name themselves as such publicly toss out a few of their own who don’t meet the criteria? Instead, no matter what the likes of Caplan or McArdle say, they’ll remain members in good standing.

Just my opinion, but until you see libertarians policing their own, and using justifications such as John just gave, this is a little bit too much Christian charity. Particularly in Caplan’s case who is quick to jump to the argument that if you don’t agree with him, it’s because your not as smart as he is. Having seen more than one lazy, contrarian, and dull-witted student whine that he received a poor grade because the teacher didn’t understand his brilliant ideas, I’m a little bit thin-skinned when it comes to tolerance of this trait. Iow, no, from what I’ve seen of the guy, Caplan doesn’t strike me as a particularly nice guy.

I’ll look forward to the book, Jacob. But, I think that the “libertarian” family as I describe it includes not only “right” libertarians, but also “left” ones. Of course, I like more of the left-libertarians’ views on particular issues, but think they go wrong for all the reasons they share with “right” libertarians. And, I think the differences between the family of liberal views and the family of libertarian ones are important enough that it’s useful to distinguish between them. Names don’t matter that much, of course, but I do think that making this distinction helps highlight important differences between families of views that are often glossed together in a way that leads to incoherence.

@2, 4: Arthur Ripstein gives a good account of Kant’s argument against the conceptual possibility of slave contracts in Chapter 5 of his book Force and Freedom, starting at p.135; it sounds similar to Steiner’s argument. I don’t think you’ll object if I add Rousseau, here: “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.” I’ve been telling my students that Rousseau’s point is that I have no right to subtract myself from the moral duties I naturally have to other human beings.

These arguments from Kant (and Rousseau) are sometimes presented as being about human dignity, and then criticized as paternalistic, e.g. “who are you to tell me what my dignity requires? take care of your own dignity and leave me to decide what mine requires.” Freeman (in the article cited above) responds to this objection. His argument is that people are free to agree to servitude, but that they cannot expect other people to participate in enforcing these agreements as valid contracts.

“Nothing about liberalism’s inalienability restriction prevents people from voluntarily assuming the roles of master and subordinate to nearly any degree they choose. If this is the kind of life a person wants to live in relationship with another who consents, so be it; it is protected by freedom of association. The inalienability restriction implies that a person has the right to exit at any time this essentially private relationship. The problem comes with the contrary suggestion: that into this private relationship should be introduced the legal mechanism of contract and the institution of private property, with their provisions for coercive enforceability. Then the voluntary servitude arrangement is no longer merely a matter “between consenting adults”; it becomes a matter of civic law and a publicly recognized right. One party to the arrangement enters the public and political realms to demand, as a right, that others recognize and respect a private agreement bestowing ownership in another person… Alienation of basic rights, if politically recognized, imposes duties not just upon the transferor, but also upon society and its members to respect and uphold such transactions. We are called upon to ignore the moral fate and political status of others as equals, and to participate in their civic and moral debasement.” (p.112)

One problem with this argument might be that it could apply much more broadly. Plato objected to the enforceability of contracts in general, because it encouraged materialism (this is Socrates at 556b of the Republic). Lots of people have lots of different objections to lots of different contracts, but we generally expect them to support the state that enforces all of these different contracts.

Forgot to note that the Rousseau quote is from Book 1 Chapter 4 of the Social Contract, which (to give credit where credit is due) is available in a variety of formats on the Liberty Fund’s “Online Library of Liberty”.

To be fair, is there any explicit political philosophy that when adhered to rigourously cannot be twisted into the absurd by various corner cases? Certainly as an undergraduate, I don’t think I ever found one.

Well, that’s the problem: my political philosophy, such as it is, is mainly just muddling through, taking situations on a case by case basis, etc. I make absolutely no claims with regard to rigour or consistency. But this is not true of libertarians or Randites: they tend to claim they have some sort of axiomatic system that can be logically built from the ground up starting with a few “reasonable” axioms. So, you bet, if they want to claim superiority on this basis I’m going to prang them for it. In fact, that seems to be the motivation of a lot of people.

“libertarians policing their own”, I guess that’s why it makes more sense to abandon the term – it is just such a hassle to be policing people that hold self-refuting views certainly if by doing so it’s you that wind up holding a self-refuting view.

Well, no one – I think not even libertarians – claim they’re a particularly ethical or moral lot. They’re quite happy to say that X isn’t really a libertarian or holds a view that’s not really libertarian when it suits them, only to turn around later and say that X is a member of Distinguished Organization Y to claim some sort of intellectual respectability when it suits them to do so.

“Each individual, as a natural fact, is the owner of himself, the ruler of his own person.”

I find this sentence to be completely without content. With respect to oneself, “owner” and “ruler” are not “facts.” They are metaphors. They make some sort of sense if we imagine that a person is composed of a physical mechanical object, the body, and an inner homunculus, the soul, which bear a relationship to each other similar to that as between a person and a non-person (ownership) or a superior person and and an inferior person (rulership). But if you reject this conception of human existence, then the owner-ruler metaphor is worse than useless.
I don’t “own” or “rule” myself; I am myself. The attempt to make the concepts of ownership and rulership reflexive is nonsensical and results in nonsensical conclusions.

I do understand that there may be legal regimes in which human beings are subject to ownership, and that in such a regime a person who is not owned by another may be deemed to own himself. But this is not the same as saying that it is a “natural fact” that people own themselves. Indeed the whole point of such a legal regime is that it is not a natural fact that people own themseves; they are owned by their owners, who might or might not be themselves.

But, to be honest, aren’t there a lot of times in history when property has been more important than people? The present is really quite unusual in that being less the case than in, say, Republican Rome, feudal Europe, the slaveholding early-modern, etc etc. Surely the AIs could have picked a more propitious moment to infiltrate? Or perhaps their I is not as I as they would like to think?

While tying Randists and a few Libertarians like Caplan up in philosophical knots is kind of fun (at least it was as an undergraduate), given that they have no political influence worth talking about, is it worth the time and effort?

Isn’t Alan Greenspan a Randist? And was he not, for quite some time, as close to being the Galactic Overlord as anyone ever was?

ISTM that relatively few people would sell themselves or their indispensable vital organs outright (although, historically, quite a few sold their children, even without counting marriage customs that can be considered analogous to sale).

But quite a lot might borrow money that they fully expected to be able to repay without being aware what they had pledged as collateral. If you think predatory lending is bad in a universe with bankruptcy laws and some rights inalienable, you haven’t seen it in Libertopia (or perhaps I should say Propertopia?). Market participants, after all, converge on the most profitable possibilities within the legal and societal constraints surrounding them.

I’m not sure I like that society’s idea of a student loan, either. (Naturally, they would be secured by a lien on the educated, and therefore valuable, worker.)

Anyway, I agree that “The question is really what ‘liberty’ means.” Most people are in favor of liberty (at least, the kind that ends where my nose begins) but they don’t mean the same thing by it, so their agreement is illusory. (Similar remarks apply to “justice”.)

“I don’t say all libertarians should be bound by logic to embrace this vision of utopia on the spot, but they ought to recognize libertarianism, minus assumed self-ownership, as a form of the philosophy they advocate, albeit an extreme form.”

I’m not really sure how the logic of this sentence works. Trying to talk about libertarianism, minus assumed self-ownership, sounds to me like trying to talk about consequentialism minus assumptions about the greater good, or theories of punishment minus assumptions about law and justice. It is tough to get that to work even as an intellectual exercise.

Engels, are you thinking of some problems with Bill Gates’ money in particular, or general problems with anybody having legitimate title to their money (in Nozick’s terms), given the actual and deeply problematic historical facts about how goods have been acquired?

But this is not true of libertarians or Randites: they tend to claim they have some sort of axiomatic system that can be logically built from the ground up starting with a few “reasonable” axioms. So, you bet, if they want to claim superiority on this basis I’m going to prang them for it.

Ah yes, the Church of Rand, as we called it in high school. On the other hand, I remember at least one Libertarian classmate claiming indignantly, “I’m not a Randist, I’ve use common sense!” Bryan is a bit odd in that he’s not a Randist, but is still willing to follow his axioms into the swamp of absurdity. The Randists generally try to hide it better and then change the subject when “A is A” leads to high silliness.

Isn’t Alan Greenspan a Randist?

There are lots of admirers of Rand who think she had something useful to say to them (oddly enough, a fair number of young women who felt that Rand gave them the right to say no to family who were trying to foist social and emotional responsibility for family and relationships upon them because you couldn’t expect boys or men to be able to handle that).

However, that doesn’t make them Randists. To be a member of the Church of Rand, you have to accept her philosophy. No picking or choosing parts. Otherwise, you’re just another garden-variety libertarian.

I don’t think that Greenspan falls into the Rand camp in any way much more than a general espousal of “free-enterprise, rah!” I could be mistaken, but I haven’t read any articles where he quoted as saying anything that differentiates him from generic free-enterprise boosters.

Here’s what Greenspan’s Wiki article says about “Greenspan and Objectivism.” Footnotes are omitted. (In case the formatting goes wrong — all that follows is part of the quote.)

In the early 1950s, Greenspan began an association with famed novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand that would last until her death in 1982. He wrote for Rand’s newsletters and authored several essays in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Rand stood beside him at his 1974 swearing-in as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

During the 1950s, Greenspan was one of the members of Ayn Rand’s inner circle, the Ayn Rand Collective, who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. Rand nicknamed Greenspan “the undertaker” because of his penchant for dark clothing and reserved demeanor. Although Greenspan was once recognized as a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, some Objectivists find his support for a gold standard somewhat incongruous or dubious,[citation needed] given the Federal Reserve’s role in America’s fiat money system and endogenous inflation. He has come under criticism from Harry Binswanger, who believes his actions while at work for the Federal Reserve and his publicly expressed opinions on other issues show abandonment of Objectivist and free market principles. However, when questioned in relation to this, he has said that in a democratic society individuals have to make compromises with each other over conflicting ideas of how money should be handled. He said he himself had to make such compromises, because he believes that “we did extremely well” without a central bank and with a gold standard. Greenspan and Rand maintained a close relationship until her death in 1982.

Although Greenspan was indeed a Randian, he wasn’t quite Randian enough for my taste. Just think how much better off we all would have been had he gone Galt in 1980.

It strikes me that philosophies like libertarianism would be perfectly workable, if there weren’t so many other people around.

My favorite objectivist is prof Leonard Peikoff; he’s incredibly funny. Here he makes Bill O’Reilly look (kind of) reasonable.

It’s not just Greenspan. Rand’s books are goofball bibles, Cato has influence.

When Amazon.com still showed their local “most popular in” rankings, Redmond, Washington was always in the top ten for all the Ayn Rand books…

Scrooge, you can so agree to sell land on a handshake. The buyer might not be able to enforce your oral agreement — but that presupposes your unwillingness to go through with it. Also, if you balk, he sues you, and you acknowledge the oral agreement at your deposition, well, that kills the Statute of Frauds as well.

“Freeman emphasizes that feudal Japan … didn’t have a lot of serfs around the place.”

That’s just wrong.

“Now, to repeat: this Freeman sense has nothing to do with serfs”

Brad DeLong has weighed in on this, and I think he’s exactly right.

The starting point of minarchist or anarchist propertarianism is the tiniest hair’s width away from the starting conditions for the evolution the serfdom and feudalism (which, it is important to note, is not appreciably different from any other form of warlordism or rule by organized crime, except for the religious sanction). I have trouble seeing how it can do anything else.

I am a libertarian and I have argued (without relying on any religious assumptions) that parents do not own their children (see How We Come To Own Ourselves), and also that body-rights are different than rights in homesteaded, external objects so that voluntary slavery contracts are unenforceable (body-rights are inalienable), based on libertarian principles (see Inalienability and Punishment: A Reply to George Smith,; A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability; also Slavery, Inalienability, Economics, and Ethics; ). Libertarianism, whether atheistic or not, does not result in voluntary slavery being enforceable or in parents owning children.

These publications may be found at http://www.stephankinsella.com/publications/.

As for whether early America was a quasi-libertarian paradise, not all of us agree with this: see my post Was the American Revolution Really about Taxes?.

John’s argument about ‘thick’ libertarians having no basic philosophical qualm with liberals is instructive, but of limited use. A thick libertarian, as John observes, places heavy emphasis on John’s premise 3, “That in fact treating liberty as property, and everyone as their own property, necessarily will (or will tend to) maximize freedom”. Its difficult to imagine how granting persons the right to make slave-contracts maximizes freedom overall, so premise 3 libertarians (or thick libertarians) as it seems would have to drop slave contracts. Thin libertarians, by contrast, would embrace slave contracts. This might conceivably lead to the kind of propertarian utopia John describes, wherein parents own their children, or the children of slaves belong to the slave owner. This, as I understand John to contend , is a version of the thin libertarian scheme.

“Now, to repeat, libertarians don’t have to buy this hyper-propertarian scheme, by any means. But I think libertarians should admit that it is a libertarian scheme. It’s roughly half of what libertarians believe, plus an argument that the other half is really inconsistent with the half we are keeping, hence ought to be let go.”

I am not convinced. Thin libertarians ground their views in the idea of self-ownership. They do hold that a person has rights to the fruits of their labour (an offshoot of self-ownership), but they do not hold that a person has ownership over their offspring because this would interfere with their self-ownership. Any property right held by the parent is nullified by an analogous property right held by the child to his/her own body and labour. It doesn’t seem to me a principled argument to grant self-ownership only to certain kinds of people because it is more convenient for them. If these theoretical hyper-propertarian (feudal?) libertarians really do exist, they would have to make a principled argument for why self-ownership applies only to adults and hence children can be born into slavery.

John goes on to write:

Why won’t libertarians like my ideal, hyper-propertarian utopia? Because it doesn’t maximize freedom, that’s why. But it does, in a technical sense. If everyone is a perfect slave, infringements of liberty are reduced to zero, by definition. OK, fine. We mean the ordinary sort of freedom. The sort we actually want. Fine, but now why stop at giving people themselves, and nothing else?

To follow in Nozick’s footsteps, we give people themselves and nothing else because they have no natural entitlements to things outside themselves. This point is heavily contested, but nonetheless it is what thin libertarians tend to believe. This argument does not hinge on thin libertarians’ “letting go of any ideal of liberty, in any ordinary sense.” Rather it hinges on an argument on what fundamental rights people have, and as a corollary, how we should understand liberty itself.

To reply to Engels, we might view Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice as being defeated by the necessity of redistributing in order to right past wrongs. Nozick himself acknowledges that fact, at least a little. The problem is that any principle of justice we apply in order to right the injustices of the past will only very roughly ameliorate the actual injustices that took place. Take the example of the dispossessed native american descendant stealing from Bill Gates. Why should Gates himself foot the bill? Because he happens to be white and rich? Gates’ family wasn’t always rich, and certainly Gates’ riches do not derive directly from rights abuses against native americans. We might attempt to penalize persons or groups for past wrongs but not without acknowledging that the results would be borderline arbitrary; formerly dispossessed groups might be getting their due, but there is no way of guaranteeing that they are reimbursed by the right agents.

I realize I’m dragging on, but to respond to Marc’s earlier criticism that we should “…recognize that we are social creatures and that our achievements owe much to civil society.” and I assume that this should imply a moral imperative to give back, I thought I might reiterate a quote from Nozick that I’m sure many of us have read, but that I really do love.

You may not decide to give me something, for example a book, and then grab money from me to pay for it, even if I have nothing better to spend the money on. You have, if anything, even less reason to demand payment if your activity that gives me the book also benefits you; suppose that your best way of getting exercise is by throwing books into people’s houses, or that some other activity of yours thrusts books into people’s houses as an unavoidable side effect. Nor are things changed if your inability to collect money or payments for the books which unavoidably spill over into others’ houses makes it inadvisable or too expensive for you to carry on the activity with this side effect. One cannot, whatever one’s purposes, just act so as to give people benefits and then demand (or seize) payment. Nor can a group of persons do this. If you may not charge and collect for benefits you bestow without prior agreement, you certainly may not do so for benefits whose bestowal costs you nothing, and most certainly people need not repay you for costless-to-provide benefits which yet others provided them. So the fact that we partially are “social products” in that we benefit from current patterns and forms created by the multitudinous actions of a long string of long-forgotten people, forms which include institutions, ways of doing things, and language (whose social nature may involve our current use depending upon Wittgensteinian matching of the speech of others), does not create in us a general floating debt which the current society can collect and use as it will.

Sorry…my apologies for the poor formatting.

Engels@59.

Yeah, that’s an important difficulty for Nozick’s position (I see that Greg above says something regarding it); luckily, I’m not a libertarian, so it’s a problem for me. But I was just using the “stealing from Bill Gates to maximize freedom” example to illustrate the point that (for most libertarians) it wouldn’t be OK to violate somebody’s property rights even if doing so had good freedom-maximizing consequences, because folks like Nozick aren’t consequentialists.

The rest is naivete, selfishness, indifference, racism, and class privilege marketed as philosophy.

I’m a little troubled by the self-righteousness that’s implicit in the sentence. I’m moderately far to the left (at least for Canada), and my leanings could be classified as:

– naive : I’m concerned about the short term misery relief even if there may be long term consequences

– selfish : Well, the policies I espouse make *me* feel better, so in any honest way, I espouse a more egalitarian state for *my* benefit. That it may help others doesn’t make my actions any less selfish.

– indifference : I can’t help notice that I’m not interested in selling off all my possessions and sending the proceeds to where they’re definitely needed, so I’m definitely indifferent to their suffering that in every way is vastly worse than I’ll ever endure. No, I don’t count “feeling bad” for them. If I’m not making fairly major material sacrifices, I’m indifferent in any way that counts.

– racism : I’m a white child of middle class privilege, so I’m inherently racist. More to the point, the policies I support are fairly race-blind. Given the very real effects of racism, my preferred policies could easily be classified as racist.

– class privilege : I certainly believe that it’s the responsibility of those who have the capability and an environment that has allowed them to express that capability to help those less capable and less fortunate than themselves. For those of my class, I have higher expectations and less tolerance for those who fail to live up to what I feel are their social responsibilities. Class privilege at its finest.

In other words, is it necessary to pretend that we’re all noble and they’re all scum in order to express the superiority of our policies? I don’t think we need to claim morally superiority in order to claim superior policies.

Note, there are a great number of people I *do* consider morally superior. However, almost all of them are actually making great personal sacrifices to help where it’s needed most and most don’t spend any time at all pointing out the moral inferiority of those with which they disagree.

Will’s post @6 is great because it shows: wow, some “thin” libertarians really do bite the bullet and say their stateless utopia really would be more hierarchical and authoritarian than the status quo. From Hoppe:

States have not just disarmed their citizens by taking away their weapons, democratic states in particular have also done so in stripping their citizens of the right to exclusion and by promoting instead – through various non-discrimination, affirmative action, and multiculturalist policies – forced integration. In a natural order, the right to exclusion inherent in the very idea of private property is restored to private property owners.

Accordingly, to lower the production cost of security and improve its quality, a natural order is characterized by increased discrimination, segregation, spatial separation, uniculturalism (cultural homogeneity), exclusivity, and exclusion. In addition, whereas states have undermined intermediating social institutions (family households, churches, covenants, communities, and clubs) and the associated ranks and layers of authority so as to increase their own power vis-a-vis equal and isolated individuals, a natural order is distinctly un-egalitarian: “elitist,” “hierarchical,” “proprietarian,” “patriarchical,” and “authoritorian,” and its stability depends essentially on the existence of a self-conscious natural – voluntarily acknowledged – aristocracy.

Tim O’Keefe writes: “it wouldn’t be OK to violate somebody’s property rights even if doing so had good freedom-maximizing consequences, because folks like Nozick aren’t consequentialists…”

Except when they want to be: cf. Lockeian Proviso.

It always seemed to me that ASU should be characterized not as libertarianim but as Calvinball…

Jacob Levy writes: “As much as this pains me—because John’s offered got a fair, interesting, and substantive argument! this is much more engaging to read than most of the digital ink that’s been spilled in the last week!—I’m going to beg off further participation at this stage. Classes ended yesterday, so today is the first day of the year-of-no-teaching in which I’ll be finishing my book that’s really directly about a lot of this stuff…”

Looking forward to the book…

But meanwhile, why not double your participation in comment threads by posting stray paragraphs from the book?

Libertopia is of Heaven and not of Earth.

R. Puchalsky @20:
If you want to maximize freedom, you have to acknowledge that freedom means the ability to actually do things, which leads you straight towards positive rights

I think this is correct (at least once one rules out what the post calls the Buddhistic sense of “freedom,” in which it means “freedom from desire to do or have X, except for spiritual enlightenment”).

Puchalsky is also right, imo, to stress the point that political/ideological views are formed, and either stuck to or oftentimes abandoned, in particular historical contexts (“there’s a reason why classical liberals became modern liberals”). It is psychologically easier, one might argue, to be a ‘classical liberal’ today in a developed country where the mass deprivation and misery that came with capitalist industrialization have been largely — though not totally of course — eliminated. If you were a classical liberal in, say, 1850’s Manchester, you could hardly fail to see at first hand the awful results of your political/ideological views, at least if you walked around the city to any extent. (Of course, you might not draw the connection between your ideology and the prevalent social conditions, but that in itself would require intellectual blinders and self-protective stubbornness.) Whereas a self-identified classical liberal in a big city in a developed country today would have to take a much more thorough walk than his or her mid-19th-century counterpart to encounter entrenched poverty. He could certainly find it, but it would take more effort.

So, to conclude, maybe all present-day classical liberals should transport themselves, via one of those thought experiments beloved of philosophers, to a mid-19th-century manufacturing city, and after that experiment there would not be any more classical laissez-faire liberals. (Dream on, I suppose.)

Incidentally, Libertopia.

CharleyCarp: Depends on what you think of as a contract. If you mean the big legal monstrosities, then it is one thing. But if I lend you something, and you refuse to give it back, then regardless of what the state does my neighbours may not want to have business with you. That is an example of non-coercive “contract enforcement”. In some situations, it may be the only form of enforcement necessary or desirable.

I think that although contracts (by which I mean agreements of any sort, really) and even laws are formally enforced with violent state force, in reality lots of them could be maintained non-coercively. There is not very much I can do without the cooperation of my fellow citizens, and this they are entitled to withhold – that would not be coercion. That they aren’t actually well-organized enough to do so without force doesn’t necessarily mean that the demands they make of me are illegitimate.

“the material, however, is not what makes life. it’s the encoding in the DNA that makes a human being.”

Our DNA is, AFAIK, not *sufficient* to make us. Trivially, DNA sitting there by itself becomes nothing; not even a cell alone does; we need months of a lot of biological support just to get born, and no-one is born alone and lives. But even if you’re myopic about the IP in our DNA, it isn’t enough. We don’t develop just by letting the DNA program ‘run’ on raw material from the womb; the environment of the womb sends and receives signals that affect our development. We are not informationally distinct from our mother (nor are we informationally distinct from our families as we’re raised).

Still, the view that our parents own us because they made us has (hat tip to Ta-Nehisi Coates) recently led to things like this:

“Augusta Boujey is nine years old. Her mother, who is almost white, was owned by her half-brother, named Solamon, who still retains two of her children.”

Let me quote that old commie, Stanislaw Lem:

“By the Ten Noses of the Phoo, I implore you, O stranger, do not utter such vile heresy, which attacks the very foundation of our freedom! Our supreme law, the principle of Civic Initiative, states that no one can be compelled, constrained, or even coaxed to do what he does not wish. Who, then, would dare expropriate the Eminents’ factories, it being their will to enjoy possession of same? That would be the most horrible violation of liberty imaginable. Now, then, to continue, the New Machines produced an abundance of extremely cheap goods and excellent food, but the Drudgelings bought nothing, for they had not the wherewithal. . .”

“But, my dear Phool!” I cried. “Surely you do not claim that the Drudgelings did this voluntarily? Where was your liberty, your civic freedom?! ”

“Ah, worthy stranger,” sighed the Phool, “the laws were still observed, but they say only that the citizen is free to do whatever he wants with his property and money; they do not say where he is to obtain them. No one oppressed the Drudgelings, no one forced them to do anything; they were completely free and could do what they pleased, yet instead of rejoicing at such freedom they died off like flies.

I see an trend in some of what I read for entertainment where the solution of what to do with the “nonproductive” types – read, 95% of the populace – is simply to kill them off in a way that does not imperil the elites. This type of story wasn’t nearly so common thirty or forty or more years ago, but I see a lot of writers trying out the idea either as part of the plot or the back story.

I’d argue that politically conservative philosophies share a basic set of common traits. Note that since we’re talking American politics, this applies to American political philosophies only. Attempting to map these traits onto another country’s political philosophies is not recommended and may void your warranty:

They hold that the natural unit of measure for humanity is the individual: That all moral and philosophical reasoning about what is a) true and b) normative for human beings has to start from one person and build up. That there’s no such thing as a “collective good” or “collective right” or “collective responsibility” that are not derived (logically) from individual goods, rights, and responsibilities. The precise weight put on an individual varies, but the focus does not.

They hold that the government is primarily intended to preserve negative rights, not positive rights: A negative right is an individual freedom that imposes no burden on anyone else. Life, Liberty, and Property is Locke’s holy trinity of rights, for example. You don’t need anyone to do anything special for you to have these things, you need them to NOT do things (kill you, lock you up, take your shit). A positive right on the other hand is specifically a right TO something even if that means it must be provided by people around you, such as a right to health care, a job, a house, a living wage, an education, a pony…

They care about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome: This is where we get into the distribution of wealth, racial/gender quotas, and similar issues. A conservative would argue that as long as there is equal opportunity to succeed in society, the statistical breakdown of who succeeds, how much more they succeed by, and so on is irrelevant. What’s interesting is that because we tend to value education so highly as a basic equalizer of opportunity, many political conservatives are still unwilling to oppose the effective nationalization of our education industry because of this principle.

They believe in limiting domestic government scope and authority, and are skeptical of domestic government intervention: This (what other people have listed first) comes down here because logically it flows from the principles listed above. You’ll note that I specify domestic power and domestic intervention. There’s a lot of debate even within what I’d call “Fringe” conservative movements like the Libertarian party over whether this opposition of government power domestically should translate to a non-interventionist or even isolationist foreign policy, and so this point is really only true in terms of domestic politics.

They are, to varying degrees, originalist: that is, they defer to a narrow reading of constitution with an eye to its original meaning, as of the time it was written. How strict they are about this point, and how they go about determining original meaning may vary, but they would tend to oppose the philosophies that hold that the constitution should be re-interpreted as needed in order to move with the times (and therefore justify potentially unconstitutional laws by simply re-interpreting a tricky passage, rather than being required to pass a constitutional amendment).

Note that I didn’t mention the market at all? That’s because, again, support for the free market isn’t really a root principle, it’s an outgrowth of the principles I already listed, and also because like foreign policy there’s a wider variation of views here.

Doctor Memory@97: Yep. Back in the day I posted on the rec.arts.sf.* groups. Haven’t done that in ages. There’s a livejournal guy who gives occasional updates and has said Friedman and this other character you may know, James Donald, are almost single-handedly killing the group shwi with their bizarre fixations.

If I may attempt to cut through the usual nonsense and make a few points re: the original article:

1. I don’t take “thick” vs “thin” to mean quite what John H. takes it to mean. As I understand it “thick” libertarians are those who say we should be concerned about making social norms and non-state institutions more tolerant and not just with reducing the size and scope of the State. Roderick Long and Charles Johnson might be taken as canonical examples of “thick” libertarians by this definition and indeed they wrote a lengthy and interesting paper arguing for “thickness” in libertarianism on many different grounds. They are no less radically opposed to the State than any “thin” libertarian, and no less concerned with individual rights as side constraints.

2. There are in fact lots more important divisions among libertarians than just “thick” vs “thin” and many other ways to come to libertarianism than the two you cite. Some of us, for example, simply believe that the available justifications for the legitimacy of state force don’t hold water, and that mass force, being in general a bad thing, requires serious justification, so a decent person should not countenance the methods of the state; while market interactions have good moral justifications for their legitimacy, and are in general good things. You don’t need a particular account of property to believe this, and it can get you to a much more radically anti-state place than the “thick” libertarians John mentions would ever go to.

3. Several commenters here have talked of libertarians “policing their own”. I wonder how they feel about neocon calls for Muslims to do the same. More saliently, it seems to me that the Caplan controversy is an excellent example of how we do in fact “police” our own, in the sense of arguing publicly against our ideological confederates when they make serious moral mistakes: Caplan has gotten a great deal of criticism from libertarians of all stripes on his blog.

Most human societies over time have been illiterate and state-less, and yet contracts and agreements have been pledged and enforced.

Illiterate yes. Stateless? Are you kidding me?

They’re not enforced by the violent monopoly of the state, they’re enforced by the fact that if you break them you can’t live there anymore.

This is not coercive?

Except to say that people really do say “Goodwin” when they usually mean “Godwin.”

And to say that the whole argument in favor of “stateless” societies depends on the rather quaint notion that “state” is a term only appropriate to describe the list of things Weber included in his ideal-typical description of modern, bureaucratic states, rather than coercion-wielding political communities of the kind that have pretty much existed since (at least) late prehistoric times.

CharleyCarp:

*Most* human societies have historically and pre-historically been fairly small groups of foragers, herders, and/or subsistence farmers, lightly linked to form larger units. Most human societies have been “uncivilized” — that is, have no cities and very few adults who do anything for a living other than trying to get enough to eat.

Even in societies that have “states”, most people haven’t usually interacted with the state or “the government” more than a few times in their lives.

For instance, Jews have had an exceptionally well-developed system of contract law for thousands of years. For most of that period, Jews have not done much more with “the state” than get it to leave them alone. Jewish contracts were witnessed and enforced by the Jewish community, not “the government”. The government usually had a monopoly on deadly force, and the Jewish community leaders *could* call it in if necessary — but they would go to great lengths not to. If there were problems in the community, they had to work it out themselves, and government-mandated force was the *last* thing anyone would want to invoke. Reputation, gossip, fines, public apologies, shunning, and, at the limit, expulsion — that’s how contracts were enforced. The “state” had nothing to do with it.

John Holbo said:

Sometimes people distinguish ‘thin’ and ‘thick’. ‘Thin’ is the kind of ‘propertarian’ libertarian that Caplan can’t be because the whole inability to make contracts/own your own property thing is a straight-up deal-breaker. ‘Thick’ is the kind of libertarian Caplan can’t be because of all the Mill stuff in my previous post: can’t let society play the tyrant.

I’m not sure that I would be a libertarian through “thick” and “thin”. There are no absolute ideological values in evolution. Talk of libertarianism as abstract theory independent of concrete history is “rationalism in politics”, a vice that once infected the Left. But has now crossed the ideological species barrier to contaminate the Right (cf Russia and Iraq).

Libertarian ideology is an abridgement of historical circumstances, mostly those pertaining to 18th and 19th C Anglophone settler societies (USA, AUS, NZ, SA, CAN). It was pretty cool for some back then. [cue TV theme for Daniel Boone]

The real problem with libertarianism in particular and abstract political philosophy in general is complete ignorance of the anthroplogical basis of the ideological super-structure. It makes no sense at all to prattle on about the theoretical virtues on one or other insitutional arrangements without sounding out the individual foundations.

Libertarianism was the guiding philosophy of bourgois property-owning democracts – famers and merchants and trappers – who founded the US. It is a philosophy of individualist self-government because that in fact was how these people were governed in those days. Both the founding fathers and the common folk were more or less self-sufficient in provision and protection.

Libertarianism only works as a coherent social structure with the following conditions, apologies to Marx, nods to Weber, Durkheim and Darwin:

Economical sub-structure: Based on scarce labour and abundant land. (See Franklin)
Anthropological structure: Christian in religion, Constitutional “regent” and Caucasian race. (USA identity – God, “King” and family values Country.)
Ideological super-structure: limited federal government, private property, rule of law, low taxes and night-watchman state. (Jefferson, Calhoun)

Once you own your own means of production then you are free in the sense of self-ownership. “You” being straight, white males, would not have to:

alienate your labour to capitalist,
bond your labour to a feudalist or
conscript your labour to a statist.

The economic basis of this were abundant arable land and scarce free labour. Ben Franklin understood the economic basis of libertarianism more than a quarter of a millenia ago:

Europe is generally full settled with Husbandmen, Manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in People… Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family;

So long as the population did not exceed the carrying capacity of the land there should be land “enough and as good left in common for others” to keep both Nozick and Cohen happy. Once the land is filled up the frontier closes and that the end of old-fashioned freedom.

Of course all this freedom for some depended on the exploitation and oppression of others. Taken land and forced labour supported the whole structure of libertarian freedom, through the treatment of:

natives as vermin;
coloreds as slaves and
women and children as chattels.

“Actual and existing” libertarianism still resonates in Red-States where some of these economic and anthropological conditions are more or less satisfied. (Although the Red-States are still recipients of large federal handouts in the form of farm subsidies and military bases.)

But there is still enough of the old society about to strike a distant chord. Particularly in Texas where a man yearns to own his own spread, sire a decent brood and roam free accross the land (on horse or car). Thats why guys like Ron Paul will always get a warm welcome there. You de-racinated Brits don’t understand.

I lived in Texas a whiles and was mighty impressed with the general standard of person there. They all drove pick-up trucks, cradled shot-guns and even when they voted Democrat governor they made damn sure she handed out death penalties like parking fines. “We catch and kill our own here.”

Unfortunately this kind of rock-ribbed, red-blooded Republican freedom is a fading, sepia-toned dream in all but the fly-over zone. The current political tendency is to maximise diversity, density and therefore “debtquity”. Thats the basis of high turn-over customised consumerism.

With everyone each day trotting off to the office chook pen/welfare office, the corner convenience store and then back to their rabbit-hutches surrounded by Asian-made consumer durables. The “Road to Convenience Store” is a comfortable existence but not exactly one to make the pulse quicken.

What it does not give is freedom understood as the traditional rights of an Englishman to be master of his own domain. In some ways a pity, but thats the price of progress.

The largest acephalous system I remember from reading anthropology was 11,000 people. I think it was a tribe in northwest Africa. I imagine they had elders deciding things. But every social system of larger numbers is found to have an instituted leader position. Starting with the Big Man tribute-then-reciprocate transaction.

For example, this week several dozen Southeast Asian fishermen were rescued by Costa Rican police from a vessel where they had been held under duress by Taiwanese owners and forced to work for many months under terms much harsher than those they had signed up for. Their passports had been taken, they were forced to work up to 20 hours per day, they were given little food, and they had not been paid the $250 per month they were promised. When there was no fishing to be done, the boat’s owners rented the men out to other employers as construction workers.

A good shunning is certainly in order here. Who’s with me?

” A localist society bounded by those same Enlightenment norms is likely to be far less repressive than one in, say, 850 A.D.”

Interesting. I say “liberal republic” and you say “same Enlightenment norms.” Given the existence of numerous illiberal (and non-republican) Enlightenment positions, I think what you really mean is “if you had a small political unit organized in such a way as to check the arbitrary use of power both via institutional mechanisms and dominant norms, then it would be preferable for that unit to be small than to be large.” I suppose it is only small steps to a kind of pre-Madisonian republican theory, in which small size (and, let us not forget, often the relative social equality of small landholders) is conducive to, or even necessary for, stable republican governance.

I don’t really agree with either the empirical or the theoretical basis of the argument (that large polities dilute the impact of individual political choice and therefore ones ability to decide the rule by which one is governed?), as my rough guess is that very small communities are more prone to majoritarian tyranny than large ones, and I do not see why we should prefer to keep every function of our government close to home. But I suppose what really matters when debating the efficacy of scale are circumstances; we should not expect what “works” for yeomen farmers to “work” for industrial societies, whether we are talking about state-society relations or the ability to remain militarily secure.

It’s just a shame that all the OTHER positions espoused by the major UK parties are also silly, for other reasons. Aircraft carriers, ICBMs and higher wages for all, yay! Unless you work in the public sector, boo! Better schools, yay! With lower spending, boo! etc ad nauseam…

What Jack Strocchi said, 108. Also, various Cossack societies in Eastern Europe.

I’ve long thought that the self-ownership principle was really Cartesian dualism as an economic principle: Inside of each person is a homunculus able to own and transfer property and enter into contracts, including into contracts that alienate him or her from their thoughts, knowledge or even bodies. Otherwise, how could a person sell themselves into slavery and still be able to receive ownership of themselves when manumitted? Since this kind of dualism is rejected for pretty good reasons in both the social and physical sciences and retains a foothold only in religious thought, it probably qualifies as a spiritual belief at best and a rank superstition at worst.

While Friedman’s beliefs about the Icelandic Communwealth genuinely qualify as a defense of feudalism, Nozick’s always struck me as an argument for constitutional monarchy. Presume that at one time the UK was in a state of nature, that each man was freeholder of himself, his land and his things, owing nothing to anyone unless he had freely contracted for it. Then, imagine that the custom arose of selecting an individual to arbitrate disputes and take charge of defending freedom from less high minded (socialist?) continental Europeans. We’ll call him the King. Let us further presume these freeholders agreed to provide financial support to the King to pursue these ends.

Let us further imagine that as time passed and the population grew, the number of freeholders did not increase but the land became full, and much of the population lived – voluntarily – under obligation to some landowner. Now let us further presume that these freeholders agreed – wholly voluntarily – to contract to give up their freehold to the common leader in return for some guarantee of security and limited autonomy and that the King, in return, agreed to limit his own powers in ways that ensure the former freeholders held some influence over his actions.

We might further suppose that the King, with the consent of the freeholders, ultimately established legal codes concerning the power to contract, the operations of courts, the collection of revenue to sustain the King’s activities, and the nature of tenure in land. And, eventually, that the King and his vassals voluntarily conceded the authority to act to a council that was democratically elected.

This is a quite stylized history of the UK, but one not wholly alien to it. If we consider all British land to be under feudal tenure from the crown, then under Nozick’s principles, Britain is already a libertarian utopia.

Libertarianism is based upon our conceptual understanding of ourselves as self-determined, rational actors, and that understanding doesn’t mesh well with reality in the extremes and grey areas.

Unfortunately for critiques like this one that fringes upon that fact, that understanding is built into how we observe the world, and it is impossible for any system of governance to be a really good solution.

Nozick, more cautiously, makes no such general claim. But he does contend that “liberty upsets patterns” of distribution (ASU, p. 160), and argues as if anyone with a proper regard for liberty should see that patterned theories of distributive justice violate a commitment to freedom

Nozick’s taking on Rawls (via Locke). Rawls himself grants distributive justice might entail a loss for some (ie the rich, even the middle class). So, libertarian freedom’ s good for the …rich, and even the middle class–not great for the poor. And for that matter, anti-democratic in the sense that the majority is always right (do people vote on the Constitution? nyet). So most ‘Mericans tend to be libertarian to some degree. For that matter, why is anyone obligated to be democratic (instead of libertarian, or machiavellian, etc)? The usual CT petitio principii

Nietzsche’s a libertarian in a sense–the bad-guy, feudal sense–seize your property, establish laws to keep it yours . Then, seize mo’

you could have private police, courts, and laws.

. . . and private wars, when the private police courts and laws did not agree.

124- Only we wouldn’t call them wars. We would call them disagreements that need to be settled by force.

Both the founding fathers and the common folk were more or less self-sufficient in provision and protection.

The infantile “I did all myself” was never true.

The government usually had a monopoly on deadly force, and the Jewish community leaders could call it in if necessary—but they would go to great lengths not to.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t involved in the dispute resolution. The fact that all parties were aware that if other means failed, the state *could* be called in, made it shape the discussion even without taking action.

“Make a deal, because otherwise we’ll have to call in the state” is not that different from “Make a deal, because otherwise we’ll have to fight”. One part violence, nine parts explicit threats of violence, ninety parts implicit awareness that violence could result if some other solution is not found.

Overall I think you are applying a more “heavyweight” definition of “state” than is appropriate to this type of discussion — in particular, apparently implying that e.g. hunter-gatherer tribes don’t have “states”. Sure they do — albeit small ones.

The infantile “I did all myself” was never true.

And a society in which this in fact reasonably close to being true- but inevitably, given the lack of public order, for only a few- consists of a poor, ignorant, degraded populace comprising almost all of the population, lorded over by a small elite of warlords and their retainers. That is, Western Europe in the Dark Ages or Somalia today. That is what Actually Existing [right-]Libertarianism, or Propertarianism, really looks like. It bears as much resemblance to liberal democracy as a dog turd does to paté de foie gras.

Isn’t the tendency for (some) libertarians to gloss over the negatives of historical periods and concentrate on the positives related to one of their underlying axioms – that bigger government is a bad thing which reduces liberty (or the more nuanced version, almost always a bad thing). This implies that in the past – when governments couldn’t possibly get away with levying the sort of levels of tax they can get away with today without starving almost the entire population, and therefore by necessity had to be much smaller than most of today’s governments – liberty should be much higher than it is today.

_Well, you need an account of how it can be refelxive—just saying it is so needn’t dispel all mystery. Compare: Oh, I’m just saying that being-taller-than is reflexive; I’m just saying that being-a-parent-of is reflexive; etc._

If I thought there was a mystery, I might need to dispel it. The burden of argument is on _you_ jdkbrown .

Here’s Cohen on the subject:

“Persons and their powers can be controlled, among others by themselves, and there is surely always an answer to the question, with respect to anything that can be controlled, who has the right to control it? – even if that answer is no-one. The thesis of self-ownership says that the answer to all such questions about persons and their powers is: the person herself. Why should that answer be judged incoherent?” ….

“We do not say that a person owns some deeply inner thing when we say he owns himself. To say that A enjoys self-ownership is just to say that A owns A: ‘self’ here signifies a reflexive relation. I see nothing in the concept of ownership which (like fatherhood) excludes a reflexive instance of it. Anyone who purports to see in the concept something that excludes its reflective use must say what it is.” (S-O, F &E p. 210-11)

is there any good reason on Nozick’s view why I may not walk off with Bill Gates’ wallet given the opportunity, even if his view of ownership is entirely correct?

Heck no. That’s what’s so cool about Nozickian style libertarianism–“don’t get caught”, and “if it feels good, do it being” or “just win, baybe” are the controlling maxims. Rather superior to the liberal crypto-marxist mommy state.

“The burden of argument is on you jdkbrown”

Well, I wasn’t arguing that ownership *couldn’t* be reflexive, just pointing out that *asserting* that it is isn’t much of a response to those who find the notion of self-ownership problematic.

I haven’t read Cohen, don’t work in political philosophy, and don’t have any considered view on the issue. I’m perfectly happy to believe that Cohen has a much more developed response; and, on the evidence of the quotes you provided, it looks like he does. But I’d point out that exactly what Scott and Bloix (at comment 38) are doing is saying that they find self-ownership mysterious and attempting to meet Cohen’s challenge of explaining why.

No. 135 assumes, without demonstrating, that a society could be created in which not only actual violence, but the threat of violence, no longer exists.

I would love to see either an actual historical example, or a convincing, step-by-step, workable program for getting there from where we are now. Until I see one, I prefer to live under a state with a theoretical and practical commitment to the suppression of private violence, because otherwise I think you inevitably get endless cycle of ambushes and retaliatory midnight house-burnings, as seen in the Icelandic family sagas. (I gather that there is some guy out there who argues that blood feuds are preferable to progressive taxation. I don’t have to read what he says to know that I disagree.)

I would love to see either an actual historical example, or a convincing, step-by-step, workable program for getting there from where we are now.

1. Spread the rumor about an all-powerful, all-knowing supernatural being that will punish you for breaking rules (and even the thoughts about breaking rules) in the afterlife.
2. Make everybody really-really believe it.
3. Perfect society!

Some of us, for example, simply believe that the available justifications for the legitimacy of state force don’t hold water, and that mass force, being in general a bad thing, requires serious justification, so a decent person should not countenance the methods of the state; while market interactions have good moral justifications for their legitimacy, and are in general good things.

[Emphasis added]

I am interested in the fundamental axioms that so inevitably provide such good moral justification for the latter, while deploring the coercion of the former. Especially if one is a capitalist rather than a free market anti-capitalist (i.e., mutualist), which is predominantly the case in modern libertarianism.

A localist society bounded by those same Enlightenment norms is likely to be far less repressive than one in, say, 850 A.D.

Indeed. For example, before it exerted control over Italy, it was absolutely marvelous to live in the early Roman Republic, inspiration for so many Enlightenment values. At least, as long as one was sufficiently close to the top of the class pyramid. Same with the former colonies under the Articles of Confederation.

How do you get everyone (and even a few exceptions will really ruin your day) to believe a threat which is never observably carried out?

You find a fall guy to take one for the team, in a spectacular fashion?

Scientoligists?

It’d be interesting for libertarians of various stripes to develop a country ranking from most to least libertarian. Would there be population inflow or outflow from the most “free” countries?

CharleyCarp:

A community that can impose fines, order expulsion or, when it really thinks it needs to, violent force, is “the state.”

Overall I think you are applying a more “heavyweight” definition of “state” than is appropriate to this type of discussion—in particular, apparently implying that e.g. hunter-gatherer tribes don’t have “states”. Sure they do—albeit small ones.

No, they don’t. You are failing to distinguish between a “society” and a “state”. I’m not necessarily committed to a Weberian definition, but there’s a kind of size and exclusivity to a “state” that makes it different from just a “society”. Note that Weber’s definition excludes societies with e.g. blood feuds from being “states”, because there’s too much sanctioned violence outside the government apparatus — such as it is.

Unlike others, I believe the weakest chain in the Libertarian argument is its reliance on a conceptualization of “property rights” that has little to do with reality.

Libertarians typically speak of property rights as if they are actual things that an individual can keep in her possession, that “no one can take from her.” In truth, a right is nothing more, and nothing less, than a moral obligation directed at others that enjoins those others to behave in a particular way with respect to the person/group that has been granted the right. Clearly, it is not possible for an individual to ‘possess’ the moral obligations that are felt by others.

A truly moral right can never exist in defiance of the general will. It can only ever exist in reality IF society—in its collective wisdom—wants the right to be granted. Now it is true that any individual or group can claim to have a right—(i.e., can claim that others have a moral obligation to treat the group/individual in a particular way)—but simply stating that claim does not cause the right exist. When can society be counted on to agree that a right should be bestowed on a certain group of people?

Answer: Whenever the behavior ‘recommended by the right’ is moral. What makes an action [or failure to act] moral? A simple test can be used to find out: If everyone would benefit if everyone acted in the same way, then the act—-or decision to not act—-is moral. If everyone would be worse off if everyone were to act the same way, then the act/choice is immoral.

Libertarians like to proclaim that property rights are or ‘inalienable’ or sacred, but nothing of the sort is true. The granting of certain rights to property owners is simply a good idea, one that everyone in society benefits from, so long as no other moral considerations are trampled on. If the behavior of some property owners/acquirers would make everyone worse off if everyone were to act in the same way, then it is simply rational for a community to withdraw the ‘right’ that it has granted the property owners/acquirers to do with their property as they please.

No property right exists without the consent of the collective. If Libertarians properly understood this fact, they would no longer be Libertarians.

“No, they don’t. You are failing to distinguish between a “society” and a “state”. I’m not necessarily committed to a Weberian definition, but there’s a kind of size and exclusivity to a “state” that makes it different from just a “society”. Note that Weber’s definition excludes societies with e.g. blood feuds from being “states”, because there’s too much sanctioned violence outside the government apparatus—such as it is.”

The “stateless” character (if we think that’s a correct description) of small hunter-gather groups isn’t a function of “too much sanctioned violence outside of the government apparatus,” but they don’t produce surpluses that enable a subset of their members to specialize in extracting rents.

But as earlier commentators have pointed out, this is a bit of a red herring, as real libertarians shouldn’t be concerned with state coercion per se, but with coercion in general, as any coercive force deprives an individual of (negative) liberty.

Minimal-state advocates wager that the optimal balance involves alienating the right to adjudicate and enforce property claims to the state, whether through internal enforcement of property rights or external defense of the (political) contracting community.

I’ve never been terribly persuaded by this argument, as either (1) you wind up having to define private acts of coercion as illegitimate because they deprive people of their “property right” to “themselves,” which leads you quickly into states that spend a lot of time regulating social and economic interactions or (2) wind up tolerating such a wide range of private coercion that the sum total of liberty looks pretty blech, i.e., claims that women in the 19th century were more free because they didn’t have to pay income taxes to the Federal Government.

So, as #153 (among others) have pointed out, that pretty much leaves you with anarchism and all its attendant problems.

There’s a lot of print here, apologies if this has been covered, but it would seem you don’t need any kind of formal contract with others to choose to be a slave. Perhaps, you chose for legal recognition, you’re choosing for recognition, by others, of something the Law refutes, hence you’re citing that you really don’t want to be a slave because you’re demanding of others.

Abstract Law theory, The Demand Refutes the Request.

I’m sorry, but this posting is a complete waste of time. It keeps running aground on one shoal or another. If you don’t own yourself, then you have no right to life, and whomever owns you can kill you at will. Clearly that is not a workable society. Okay, so this posting was just a thought experiment, but as soon as you run into this impossiblity, then you give up, because all the thoughts that it will generate have no relationship to reality.

I think you’re trying to over-simplify libertarianism, by taking one idea, and saying “Okay, what if libertarianism was totally crap except for this one idea. Let’s prove that One-Idea Libertarianism can’t work, and thus no libertarianism can work.” It’s just … it’s just stupid. And pointless. And frustrating, because you think you’re thinking good thought, but you’re just wanking. Wank away, if you want, but don’t expect your ideas to bear any fruit, having just spilled your fruit.

James, please don’t say “No property right exists without the consent of the collective” and think that that is sufficient to prove that libertarianism doesn’t exist. I own my property because I have a gun and if you trespass on it or try to take it, I’m going to kill you. That should be pretty simple to understand.

The rest of the complications of property ownership derive from the fact that 1) people don’t want to be killed, 2) people don’t want to kill, and 3) people don’t want to have to defend their property 24×7. For example, there’s a registry of who owns what property, and nearly all the time, that works perfectly fine for property ownership. Sometimes, not, though, so there are laws about trespass. These laws emerged from the three principles listed above. And there’s attractive nuisance, hidden deadly hazard, squatter’s rights, etc, etc, complications and cooperation abound.

All of that comes from me offering violence to people who don’t respect my property, not any collective decision about property.

JLR: you presume, without evidence, that serfdom and feudalism is a permanent condition. It isn’t. Look at the history of the last 500 years. People who were formerly serfs slowly gained their freedom. Suggestion: _A History of Wealth and Poverty_, by John Powelson. It’s online now, so you don’t have to buy it.

Chris Bertram @145: If I can sell myself, why can’t I also sell my right to self-ownership? Or, say, some sort of option on my eventual manumission that amounts to the same thing. Maybe I can even sell them separately. (“Sorry, the body’s already sold, but I can give you a good deal on a homunculus and some doll furniture…”)

rea @126: you presume that war is profitable, but you don’t show that. Therefore it’s improper to conclude that private police, laws, and courts inevitably lead to private wars, just as private bananas don’t inevitably lead to private bicycles either.

Apparently, here, red is green, and yellow white.

Dear Russell, are you mad or just stupid? “I own my property because I have a gun”? Really, seriously, that’s your argument? Because in that case, I have a bigger gun and a telescopic sight, and when I blow you out of your shoes one sunny morning, I’ll own your property, won’t I?

Russell Nelson 164:

James, please don’t say “No property right exists without the consent of the collective” and think that that is sufficient to prove that libertarianism doesn’t exist. I own my property because I have a gun and if you trespass on it or try to take it, I’m going to kill you. That should be pretty simple to understand.

If simplicity is what you understand best, then you’ll want to note the difference between having the [moral] right to ‘own’ property and the might to ‘own’ property.

Others have pointed out how ridiculous it is to argue that having the might to possess property gives you the right to possess it. In civilized societies, possessing a recognized [moral] right to own property means that you won’t need a gun to hold onto it, because everyone (who is sensible) will respect your claim to possession.

We civilized types think that’s a really good idea.

_Who does own me, then, if not myself?_

Well the simple answer to that would involve saying that sometimes or in some respects others (beside yourself) have the right to control your person and powers for the common benefit, where their having that right is not a consequence of you having voluntarily transferred it to them. So if there are enforceable positive duties, or associative obligations etc. then you could think of those as negating full self-ownership. As to who holds those rights that might vary: humanity, the community, the family, the state, would all, depending on the exact issue be possible part-owners of you (have an ownership interest in you), with that ownership exercised (on a trustee model) by, say, the state.

States who conscript soldiers to fight in a just war, to give one example, are asserting and exercising rights of control of the persons and powers of those soldiers.

Well, now that the thread has attracted an earnest libertarian, it will last forever.

But note the “I have property because I have a gun and will shoot people!” example, because it is so illustrative. All of libertarianism apparently depends on the existence on guns, not as metaphors for force, but as actual types of weapons. Let’s say that Russell Nelson had to make the same claim but only had a metaphorical bow and arrows. Then the answer would be something like “WTF? The neighbors would surround your house, crazy bow man, and if you really shot somebody without social sanction then his family and friends would burn you out.” The only way in which he can make his property defense somehow an individual action and not something that implicitly depends on community mores is with the totemic properties of a gun as a magically viewed device that lets individuals impose force on anyone who comes near them.

But, of course, guns really aren’t that kind of device. The neighbors have guns too. Russell’s example shows all the foresight and analytical follow-through of the people who hole up in some fortified compound with a pile of weapons and dare the Feds to do anything about it.

As Will Wilkinson and others have shown libertarians have discussed this quite a lot.

The Libertarian leaning economist Glen Whitman is one of the writers on the TV series “Fringe”. One of his episodes “On Human Action” can be seen as a bit of discussion on these problems.

Current, I’m not talking about what analytically inclined libertarians have discussed – I’m talking about what J. Libertarian In The Street seems to keep ending up saying.

Thanks, Ceri B. But I should emphasize that it’s not only about contemporary procedural issues. Russell Nelson offers a defining account of what property is that depends on him individually defending it. But his account implicitly relies on a gun as a sort of individualist magical totem that waves away the fact that property is whatever his community says it is. If they decide that his idea of what is his property isn’t right, the gun isn’t going to save him. That’s true in any society, whether it’s a hunter-gather tribe or a medieval village or a modern city.

And once you accept that the definition of property is not “what I defend” but rather “what the community decides is property”, there’s just no particular reason to accept the libertarian’s desire that everyone play by his rules. Sure, he can argue for them. But he’s really arguing for an exceptionally stupid sort of property rules that reduces the freedom of everyone in a contemporary society, and most people can see that.

Isn’t the idea that property rights not depending on the collective will being disproved by shooting one person a bit like the old martial arts movies where the hero is surrounded but wins because the attackers don’t coordinate their attacks.

So can one shoot a hundred people or a thousand before they can disarm you? Only if they attack one at a time like true libertarians.

I’ve never heard a libertarian use the word “usufruct.”

funny, that.

They’ve gotten plenty of traction with unborn babies for years. So much so that a majority of the population of the US thinks that abortions should be much less frequently allowed than they are. And Chris’ argument plays perfectly into it. Don’t own ourselves? Check. Others having the right to control your person for the common good? Check. State exercising power to protect those who can’t protect themselves? Check.

Or, on the flip side, you can see that almost all of the pro-choice rhetoric is grounded in the libertarian arguments you are making fun of here. You have to parse VERY fine lines to get a pro-choice argument that doesn’t essentially boil down to “it is my body, I have ownership of it”. Which I am certain sounds very convincing to most people here in the abortion context.

Most of the libertarians on the thread, and elsewhere, seem to be arguing that it doesn’t make sense to ‘experimentally’ drop the self-ownership assumption when trying to talk about libertarianism. (See me at 46 for example).

But if it does make sense, it makes just as much sense to analyze pro-choice rhetoric while ‘experimentally’ dropping the self-ownership assumption. And well pro-choice rhetoric looks awfully silly once you drop the self-ownership assumption. Right?

So hilarity ensues! Because those pro-choice people sure are stupid. Right?

Well quite right Sebastian. A lot of pro-choice rhetoric does indeed appear to endorse self-ownership (as some socialist rhetoric did). But it doesn’t follow from the rejection of (full) self-ownership that others have the right to prevent a woman from having an abortion. The extent of the rights that others have over my person and powers is a matter for further elaboration and justification in the light of a whole range of issues, including (this is not supposed to be a comprehensive list) a person’s interest in autonomy, in their own plans and projects, justice, the positive duty to assist others in need, associative duties to family and country (if there are any) etc.

And also, though in a way libertarian, absolutely not feudal (because based on the liberties won by the urban merchant middle classes specifically against the feudal order).

What these arguments demonstrate, if nothing else, is that the desire to reduce moral and political issues to universal rules and simple concepts invariably produces nonsense. As a rule of thumb, for example, there may be nothing wrong with the precept that I have a right to control my own person; but taken to extremes, individualism runs up again the obvious fact that we’re social animals and that absent community personhood doesn’t mean anything and practical personal autonomy is impossible. There are other values besides personal liberty. Making selfishness a metaphysical principle is humanly unwise and theoretically incoherent.

What these arguments demonstrate, if nothing else, is that the desire to reduce moral and political issues to universal rules and simple concepts invariably produces nonsense.

That’s exactly right. I’d have to say that all of my rules of conduct are situational, of the rule-of-thumb sort, and subject to revision at any time. That might be some people’s cup of tea . . . but that’s life.

Of course moral rules are never universal and always have exceptions. I usually make one for myself.

If you don’t own yourself, then you have no right to life

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

Holbo’s writing drives me crazy because it’s so self-indulgent and cutesy. He lets himself go on for thousands of words and his (often interesting) point is just snowed under. So far as I can tell there’s a pretty straightforward argument here, and I wish it had been made more clearly. I mean, isn’t this just a form of the conflict between utilitarian / consequentialist and deontological ethics, which appears in lots and lots of different political theories (including liberalism)? Or maybe not, because it’s possible there were some brilliant new twists buried away in the middle of this ginormous essay that I didn’t have the patience to read through. But if there are, then Holbo would benefit by trimming away a lot of the excess so people can see those brilliant points.

“But it doesn’t follow from the rejection of (full) self-ownership that others have the right to prevent a woman from having an abortion. The extent of the rights that others have over my person and powers is a matter for further elaboration and justification in the light of a whole range of issues, including (this is not supposed to be a comprehensive list) a person’s interest in autonomy, in their own plans and projects, justice, the positive duty to assist others in need, associative duties to family and country (if there are any) etc.”

Sure it doesn’t automatically follow. But then it doesn’t automatically follow that you could sell yourself into slavery either. Are we suddenly allowed to invoke common sense stopping points into the argument? We don’t seem to allow that for libertarian arguments. My point is that nearly all of the actual pro-choice rhetoric is about self-ownership and the alleged right to keep the government off your body. That is libertarian rhetoric. Full stop.

It is precisely the kind of rhetoric being mocked in this post and in these comments. Could you theoretically construct a pro-choice rhetoric that didn’t invoke self-ownership? Maybe. But that isn’t the argument that is actually used in the real world, and it would probably look rather ridiculous to normal people. In the real world, self ownership is the argument. And I think most people on this blog find it VERY convincing.

So maybe it isn’t such a ridiculous premise to have after all.

Sebastian, it makes more sense if you approach it from a relative values weighting perspective rather than a “take X philosophy as a given as far as it’ll go” approach.

Sticking entirely to the libertarian framing: the abortion arguments for most people come down to relative weighting on intent and principles: “value of future quasi-life” vs. “value of what you can do with your own body.” You can make just as strong a case for protecting the rights of a quasi-citizen fetus as you can for retaining the right to do what you want until it reaches full citizenhood, where theoretically all this rhetoric about freedom applies to it. There’s no “taking libertarian arguments X distance”; it’s just tradeoffs.

By contrast, for slavery the arguments always end up outcome-based rather than principles, because, 1) the effects are so blatantly horrible every time it’s tried and 2) the market is involved, and virtually all people have different moral frameworks for market and non-market transactions. Sure, theoretically from a libertarian perspective that 100% ignores outcomes and focuses entirely on a rights framework, there’s nothing wrong with selling yourself into slavery, but that just means it’s a value weighting most people find very, very strange.

_Are we suddenly allowed to invoke common sense stopping points into the argument? We don’t seem to allow that for libertarian arguments._

But Sebastian, the cases aren’t symmetrical. Since my view was that rights of control can be distributed between several persons and agencies, I can allow that the form that distribution takes is informed by a range of considerations and values. The libertarian view is that people are self-owners and can only acquire duties to others (except for duties not to interfere with the property of others, including property in themselves) through voluntary acts. The silly implications of that view turn out to be reasons not to hold it in the first place.

But as I said, you’re right about pro-choice rhetoric (often) invoking self-ownership.

DN, ok. But who exactly were the other “political sorts” and what do you mean by “at the same time”? From what I can gather there was no right of property beyond what was needed for immediate survival.

I need to make an off topic report. I’m not making this up. I am at the AAG conference in Washington DC at the Marriott hotel. The hotel’s internet cafe, equipped with all of 6 internet stations, is run by a platform called iBahn. It has crookedtimber on a list of blocked sites because of a “keyword pedophilia”. I can still access individual posts but the main site is blocked. Isn’t it great to be in the internet age.

What is worse however is that the hotel has exactly one place to get coffee from for thousands of participants. It reminds me of Soviet socialism but hey what would anybody else expect from Washington in the Obama era.

“At least, not until there’s some sort of concerted acknowledgment on the part of libertarians that claiming there was more “freedom” in 1880’s than in the 1980’s is being totally off the wall wacko. ”

Ummm, Tyler Cowen, Megan McCardle, and Will Wilkinson (all relatively prominent libertarian bent people) have all said that was totally off the wall wacko. So we’re already there.

Also, rageahol, Kevin Carson is fond of the term “usufruct”. When I pressed him, he never gave any justification for why usufruct should be preferred to non-proviso Lockean regimes of property, just falling back on panarchy. That fits my pluralist inclinations just fine, which is why Carson is a favorite of mine (though I don’t feel any affinity for the left, broadly speaking).

“Three people . . . and you’re already there. You must be a libertarian with this sort of cartoon innumeracy.”

Well that is kind of an asshole thing to say. What exactly do you want? Which people would have to say things before you would be satisfied that moderate Muslims (oops I mean libertarians) had fulfilled their obligation? You apparently think that citing ONE case is enough to indict all libertarian thought, so why shouldn’t three very strong denunciations be enough? All three of the people I cited are more prominently known libertarians than the one you cite. So what does that say about the validity of your argument?

Correction: Althing. Qv: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althing

“What really underlies the pro-choice position is the belief that, as between a woman unwilling to endure pregnancy and motherhood and a three-inch-long, one-ounce clump of cells with no consciousness or sensation, there’s no question of rights. Of course, if it were discovered that a fetus is fully conscious and has sensations, even experiences, then there would be such a question – except for genuine libertarians, who would invoke the principle of self-ownership.”

I’m not sure this is true–I think some people do argue for the pro-choice position on libertarian grounds, whether or not the fetus is conscious, because the fetus has no right to demand that the woman’s body be at its service. And it’s my impression some philosophers argue for the pro-choice position on libertarian grounds as well. The average person who is pro choice is probably thinking along the lines you outline, that a clump of cells isn’t conscious and doesn’t have rights–that’s why many or most people get more and more uneasy about abortion the later it occurs.

Though I have no evidence of this either. Maybe someone has done a poll on the question.

If the conversation fully turns “libertarianism-propertarianism + abortion” then the thread hits 350+.

The recent announcement of the whatever-numbered post inspires this question: what is the posts/thread maximum in CT’s history?

…and just think of the timing, “lib-prop-abortion + SCOTUS”. Let it hit 500, so far the conversations been good enough to sustain it.

“Three people . . . and you’re already there. You must be a libertarian with this sort of cartoon innumeracy.”

Well that is kind of an asshole thing to say. What exactly do you want? Which people would have to say things before you would be satisfied that moderate Muslims (oops I mean libertarians) had fulfilled their obligation? You apparently think that citing ONE case is enough to indict all libertarian thought, so why shouldn’t three very strong denunciations be enough? All three of the people I cited are more prominently known libertarians than the one you cite. So what does that say about the validity of your argument?

Since you believe in straight talk, let me be equally blunt: your original statement about having three “prominent” libertarians on board so that you’re “already there” was not only innumerate, but innumerate smarmy assholery.

What else is new? More specifically, since you are (also a big surprise) being intentionally obtuse, libertarians need to drop all that smug rhetoric about deriving a political philosophy from first principles before they can start talking about “common sense”. Logical deductions on first principles is what generated that asinine statement about the 1880’s in the first place.

And as for your “three prominent libertarians”? You know as well as I that this is just Kling, Caplan, Boaz, et al, filling in as the Monster of the Week. From here on out, they can’t be cited as either respectable or authority on anything if you want this to be credible.

214: “But who exactly were the other “political sorts” and what do you mean by “at the same time”?”

Well, Locke and his ilk weren’t really “political theorists” in the modern sense–Locke was actively involved in political plots, etc. etc. I’m thinking of Tyrrell, Sidney, etc. Both Locke and Tyrrell (not sure about Sidney), argued that the natural right to property converted into a titular/civil right to property after entering into political society, which both viewed as distinctive from the natural variant. I’ve always felt that the argument begins to unravel at that point (even if one has accepted the earlier derivation of a natural right to property).

There’s libertarian grounds, and there’s libertarian grounds. I agree that a lot of defenses of abortion (and free speech, and the right to vote, and the right not to be thrown in jail without cause…) have a lot to do with libertarian ideas. Particularly so if you interpret “libertarian” broadly, as a loose family of ideas oriented around liberty, instead of interpreting it narrowly as a right-wing doctrine founded on the idea that an absolutist interpretation of property rights underlies everything.

I disagree that most of these defenses rely on the notion of self-ownership. Most people, I suspect, have never thought about that notion and would probably find it rather weird. A question like “Who does own me, then, if not myself?,” after all, only makes sense if you think of me as the sort of thing that can be owned — self-ownership only becomes a problem if you think of people as natural property and if you think that the only question is whose property they are. And that, it seems to me, puts far too much emphasis on the notion of property than there’s any justification for.

Much more natural, I think, to just say that people (like many other things) aren’t the sort of things that are owned. Ownership is not a fundamental attribute of the universe, and property isn’t liberty.

Tyrrell argued that “no man has a natural right to any more things than he can make use of, nor any right at all to those he had no need of, nor had actually seised to his own use.” — J. W. Gough, “James Tyrrell, Whig Historian and friend of John Locke” (The Historical Journal 19:,5 (1976): 586-87

Like Locke, Tyrell thinks that American Indians personally owned the wild animals they killed; again both refer to Cain as evidence of the punishment for murder enjoined by the law of nature Ibid. p. 587

Most people, I suspect, have never thought about that notion and would probably find it rather weird. A question like “Who does own me, then, if not myself?,” after all, only makes sense if you think of me as the sort of thing that can be owned—self-ownership only becomes a problem if you think of people as natural property and if you think that the only question is whose property they are. And that, it seems to me, puts far too much emphasis on the notion of property than there’s any justification for.

I have to say, arguments like this (which crop up a lot in this thread, and apparently share more popularity than I imagined) strike me as incredibly disingenuous or otherwise simply ignorant. Suppose property over some entity is, as in the analysis of Honore, a bundle of rights (the right to use, the right to manage, the right to income from, etc etc). Now, it makes perfect and total sense to ask with respect to each person: who – if anyone – possesses each of these rights. The libertarian answer is pretty clear: that person themselves. A left-liberal, in their intellectually honest moments, will answer (as Chris Bertram has done) that individuals are part-owned by some entity like the state, the community, humanity, etc. Quite often the question is evaded entirely, which I think just reinforces how intuitively attractive and plausible self-ownership is, that people don’t like to explicitly deny it.

I take it that the complaint that self-ownership puts too much emphasis on the notion of property is supposed to tar libertarians as being excessively materialistic and more concerned with property than liberty, but that is where the disingenuous part comes in. There are a bunch of different possible rights that someone can possess over her own person and actions, and all libertarians are saying when they talk of self-ownership is that bunch of rights is maximally extensive.

As for property, and more specifically, self-ownership, having nothing to do with liberty: you are aware, I hope, of the long linguistic tradition in which the antonym of “freedom” is “slavery” – i.e. the ownership of one person by another. It shouldn’t be too hard to see the relevance.

But, Dan, just because you and your particular group of Libertarian buddies have taken a particular basket of rights and agreed to call them “ownership” doesn’t mean those outside your club use that word the same way. Calling Matt “disingenuous” or “ignorant” for making this point makes you sound all haughty and stuff.

There is much to be said for that, Henri. As a diabetic I have a head start, too, with nice smelly..never mind.

I remember a bit in the first volume of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, about the evolution of thinking that led to belief in gods. First there’s the observation that people can make things. Then there’s looking around at the world. Guy says, “Who MAKE the world?” Woman thinks, “I think I detect a logical fallacy.”

There are times when propertarian demands like “Well, then, who does own you?” strike me about like “Well, then, which sky god do you make sacrifices to?” Even in my most pagan moments I don’t have that kind of a relationship with anything I worship, and likewise, I don’t believe that ownership in that sense is a good description for anything very interesting about how societies actually work.

““We” don’t like that language precisely because as long as you talk in terms of people owning themselves, you leave the conceptual door open to them owning other people.”

Yet libertarians for the most part don’t leave that conceptual door open *at all* while to the contrary, it is liberals more like Chris who not only leave it open, but pretty much confirm that their theories of justice operate under the assumption that other people DO own you (or at least the right to use you). So you are making a theoretical complaint against libertarians which doesn’t exist in practice, while ignoring the same against liberal thought.

Well yes, most people do think that some other people have the right to make use of you in some respects. Only libertarians of the utterly fruitcake variety, however, think that this is morally equivalent to chattel slavery.

I’d like to object, btw, to the following in one of Dan’s posts:

_A left-liberal, in their intellectually honest moments, will answer (as Chris Bertram has done) that individuals are part-owned by some entity like the state, the community, humanity, etc._

Not only do I resent that suggestion that my periods of intellectual honesty are fleeting, I also rather doubt that those who (following Kant) deny on conceptual grounds the possibility that persons can, morally speaking, be owned (including by themselves) are being intellectually dishonest. I happen to disagree with them of course, but that’s another matter. They and I agree, of course, that persons may sometimes be justifiably subject to the coercion of other persons for reasons having to do with the securing of some positive goods.

what does “ownership” look like if it cannot be transferred? i’m no philosopher, but transferability seems like an innate part of the legal fiction of ownership (ownership being a legal concept and distinct from mere posession.)

i guess, echoing nearly everyone else in the thread, my point is that “ownership” ceases to be a meaningful concept if we include non-transferable ownership. for example, if i am irritated by glibertarians, i do not own irritation with glibertarians, because that irritation is not transferable. if ownership can be non-transferable, then the word actually seems like it probably shouldn’t be used at all, since it can be variously confused with “to have/possess” and “to be” and thereby provides significantly less information to those we communicate with than those other words. it becomes a sort of halfassed pronoun, but as a verb.

if, otoh, we think that ownership does imply transferability, but that self-ownership is the exception because SLAVERY BAD well, that seems logically inconsistent. you’re making a huge and unjustified exception to the definition of a word that seems rather important to your worldview based on a fundamentally social concern i.e. that you not be seen as venal douchegoblin assholes for suggesting that slavery is ok.

so, either your word loses meaning, or you’re just gigantic douches. choose one.

#245 I resent that suggestion that my periods of intellectual honesty are fleeting

Perhaps that sentence was phrased poorly – I didn’t mean to cast any aspersions on your own personal intellectual honesty, rather that of those liberals (of which there are plenty of examples in this thread) who deny the intelligibility of self-ownership on what are pretty clearly tactical grounds, namely that they don’t want to come right out and deny it. It’s not like the analysis of ownership as consisting of rights is that controversial (incidentally, I had no idea that Tony Honore was one of my “group of Libertarian buddies,” as 239 suggests).

#242 And even if one were to suggest that some of Honore’s incidents vis-a-vis individuals should be in the hands of the state, that doesn’t amount to part-ownership of individuals.

Maybe, maybe not. But even so, it’s hard to deny that the incidents the state does as a matter of fact claim amount to part ownership. If you had a lawnmower in your possession which I had the unilateral power to stop you using in certain (purely self-regarding) ways, as well as a claim to up to 50% of any income you derived from its use, surely it is pretty well impossible to deny that I would be a part owner. Well, that seems to be exactly the position people are in vis-a-vis the state.

In sci-fi, when the minds can be easily transplanted from one body to another, the bodies usually do become property. That opens a whole world of possibilities for new exciting contracts.

SoV: “Given this is how you so frequently behave, why in the world would you expect anyone to take you seriously or believe that you argue in good faith?

I would think, given all the justified ridicule libertarians have been receiving over the last week that you might take that as a hint to be on your absolute very best behaviour, but, well, that’s just me I guess.”

I don’t expect you to know what a good faith argument looks like, as you seem completely incapable of them. I’ve given 3 examples of more prominent libertarian writers criticizing the one example you have given. You apparently don’t think that is sufficient for your purpose, refuse to tell what would be sufficient, and rudely go on and on about how evil libertarians are for agreeing with Caplan, when nearly all of the major actual libertarian voices don’t seem to actually agree with Caplan. And then you accuse me of failing to argue in good faith.

Umm. Yeah. That pretty much speaks for itself.

Chris. Unlike SoV, who I definitely am accusing of intellectual dishonesty, I wasn’t trying to slyly insinuate that you weren’t being honest (or that you are rarely honest). I’m happy to come right out and say it when I think that. Sorry for giving the impression that I thought that of you.

It seems to me that hyper-technical parsing of self-ownership a la “libertarians use the word ‘ownership’ which denotes ‘property’ which may have negative third, fourth or fifth order connotations is missing the forest for the trees. For libertarians who don’t believe in selling one’s self into slavery (which so far as I can tell are nearly all of them), the concept of self-ownership is functionally indistinguishable from the ‘right’ that feminists use to describe what they think the wrongs of society are vis-a-vis gender–that women ought to be allowed to control their own bodies and selves. In fact they take that concept FURTHER than many libertarians by suggesting that this is a right not only against the government, but also a right against other people’s private transactions/interactions.

(And to be clear I’m not attacking feminism when I say it goes further than libertarianism…I’m defending libertarianism.)

We can argue, angels on a pin style, about whether that concept is ‘ownership’ or ‘control of self’, but they are extremely similar in almost all cases, and the cases where they are different, ‘control of self’ in the feminist sense goes even further than libertarians take the ‘ownership’ sense. So criticisms a la this post extend very easily to criticisms of feminism.

“what does “ownership” look like if it cannot be transferred? ”

Read Leviticus 25 (though the King James version uses the term “possession”).

“i’m no philosopher, but transferability seems like an innate part of the legal fiction of ownership (ownership being a legal concept and distinct from mere posession.)”

If you want to get into semantics, I consider ownership to mean the socially recognized right to use/modify/dispose of something (such as a particular body of matter) and prohibit others from doing so.

It is distinct from possession in that possession does not involve social recognition.

I would use “property” as a more specific form of ownership that includes transferability, though this is not a distinction that I could expect others to understand without explicitly defining it.

Still, I think that the notion of “ownership without transferability” is quite compatible with common sense notions. Most people acquire ownership for the sake of use, not for the sake of transfer.

Also, the issue is not purely “transferability”, but the legal enforcement of the transfer. Even when transfer is not enforced, an owner could allow another to use the item as thought that other person owned it. The issue of enforceability occurs when the original owner decides to reposes the item.

There may be legal terms that distinguish between these slightly different bundles of rights, but I’m not familiar with them. Ultimately, I think that terms like “property” and “ownership” can have very flexible definitions (as all non-technical terms do), and we should interpret them vaguely unless an exact definition has been provided.

Any libertarians want to come out and rip this guy a new one for this sort of dishonesty? As I just noted, this would be a very good time for libertarians to be on there absolute very best behaviour.

Or what, you’ll send us to bed without any dinner?

Chuckle. Right. You won’t behave unless there are consequences. We get that.

At any rate, I’m not really sure how the post exhibits any dishonesty – my earlier one was obviously ambiguous between accusing Chris of dishonesty and not accusing him of it, and I have absolutely no problem accepting this and clarifying that I meant the latter. If I had meant to insult him, why would I bother to be dishonest about it?

The dishonesty is trying to push the notion that rather that of those liberals (of which there are plenty of examples in this thread) who deny the intelligibility of self-ownership on what are pretty clearly tactical grounds, namely that they don’t want to come right out and deny it. Without, you know, having to actually go to the work of naming them. You wouldn’t be doing this to try to imply that “liberals” are “just as bad” as libertarians, now, would you? ‘Course not.

Walked through … strange to call it ‘scenery’. Our names for things reveal an inclination to perceive them through the prism of their uses. Even nature, there, is how it can be mined for images, for put-putting aesthetic raptures and touristic fulfilment. The scenic frame is in the framer, who’s nevertheless the only sort of thing around that sees at all. And can we framers intrude upon the sense in which a volcano isn’t majestic — isn’t disruptive — but just is? In which it can’t be winched back into a flyloft, or acted in front of, or translated to JPEG and forgotten about. For it erupting, from any angle you’d observe a different scene, yet none would be the scene of the volcano itself.

“Intellectually honest moments,” indeed. The only response Dan is entitled to is “fuck you.”

But what he’s said is so widely believed that it’s worth addressing on the merits.

The starting place is that there is no such thing as ownership divorced from the state. Possession, control, and use can exist independent of any legal order. But the hallmark of ownership is that it is a relationship that does not require possession or control and instead permits a person to gain access to the power of the state, including force. The whole point of ownership is that it exists regardless of possession, control, or use.

Imagine I inherit some farmland in Georgia. I have never seen the land, and my only relationship to it is that I receive checks from the tenant and pay taxes to the state. If the tenant fails to pay the rent, I can petition the state to put the tenant out, and it will do so. If I fail to pay my taxes, the tax authorities will petition the state to terminate my ownership rights, and it will do so. I do not need possession or control of the land to own it.

Suppose I sell the land to my tenant. My relationship to the land is terminated. I no longer have any interest in it, and no relationship of any sort remains.

My legal ownership of this land was entirely socially created. It has no meaning outside the framework of some sort of government-imposed ordering of relationships through a system of law.

Can this ownership cast any light on my relationship to myself? I would think it’s obvious that it cannot. My relationship to myself is not a legal construct. It is inalienable, not by law or rhetoric or aspiration, but as a matter of physical fact.

Note that I am not claiming that a person cannot legally be owned. There is nothing incoherent about the ownership of one person by another – many legal systems, including those of ancient Israel, the Roman Empire, and our own, have had no difficulty dealing with that sort of relationship. And in such a regime it may be useful to deem a person to be his own owner for certain legal purposes.

But the fiction of self-ownership tells us nothing that we might want to know about fundamental human nature. Human nature is not fundamentally a legal relationship. And in a legal regime without slavery, self-ownership is not even useful as a legal fiction.

Even as a metaphor, analogizing my relationship to some farmland in Georgia to my relationship to myself is profoundly misleading in answering any questions I might have about a person’s place in society. But to say that my relationship to myself is literally identical to my relationship to that farmland is not merely unhelpful – it’s deranged.

Addendum …

_But the hallmark of ownership is that it is a relationship that does not require possession or control and instead permits a person to gain access to the power of the state, including force._

I think I’m right in saying that Roman private law did not grant property-holders access to the power of the state but merely to a customary system of adjudication.

Chris, I don’t see why I have to establish that a concept of ownership that differs from our concept of ownership that might exist. The point is that even if we imagine a non-state property regime, the property concept would be a social one, which is contingent and subject to historical change.

But libertarians believe that property rights are “natural” and thus immutable and eternal (God-given? Generated in the Big Bang? What?) All other human relationships, they argue, can and must be reduced to property relationships. Even the other two members of the original triad – life and liberty – lose their co-equal status and must be derived from property, which then informs the scope of the life and liberty rights. This is not political theory – it’s some sort of fetish or cult.

Even as a metaphor, analogizing my relationship to some farmland in Georgia to my relationship to myself is profoundly misleading in answering any questions I might have about a person’s place in society. But to say that my relationship to myself is literally identical to my relationship to that farmland is not merely unhelpful – it’s deranged.

No doubt. My daughter has “her” locker at school, I have “my” office at work. And even though my office is “mine”, by no stretch of the imagination do I own it in the sense that I do my car. For that matter “my” breath smells like coffee for at least ten hours a day – what does the “my” signify in that statement that even vaguely stinks of ownership. No, this is just libertarians playing more word games of the “No cat has nine tails” type.

SoV: responsibility. You’re responsible for the state of the office, the locker, and that your breath doesn’t excessively offend anyone.

That seems to be the answer to a question, but I don’t know what the question is.

Huh, I hadn’t followed this thread since its earlier days, but subdoxastic’s comment is a good one.

The problem for defenders of propertarianism is that there are plenty of other propertarians who do argue totally insane things and justify them based on the principles and methodology favoured by propertarianism itself. I’ve mentioned the whole “voluntary slavery” position of Robert Nozick and Walter Block. Here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe summation:

‘Accordingly . . . a natural order is characterized by increased discrimination, segregation, spatial separation, uniculturalism (cultural homogeneity), exclusivity, and exclusion. In addition, whereas states have undermined intermediating social institutions (family households, churches, covenants, communities, and clubs) and the associated ranks and layers of authority so as to increase their own power vis-a-vis equal and isolated individuals, a natural order is distinctly un-egalitarian: “elitist,” “hierarchical,” “proprietarian,” “patriarchical,” and “authoritorian,” and its stability depends essentially on the existence of a self-conscious natural – voluntarily acknowledged – aristocracy.’

So a “libertarian” society is authoritarian, an “anarchy” riddled with heir-archy… Which begs the question “What part of an-archy is hard to understand?”

This “natural order” is going to have to have lots of police to enforce all that segregation, separation, exclusivity, exclusion, etc. But, apparently, there will be no rules governing spelling…

Anarchists and other genuine libertarians have been pointing out the obviously self-contradictory nature of “anarcho”-capitalism and “libertarianism” for some time. Proudhon was right, property IS despotism…

What is worse, from an anarchist perspective, is that this authoritarian ideology (“propertarianism”) calls itself libertarian and so tries to associate itself with, when not simply trying to appropriate the word, with the long and rich socialist tradition of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Chomsky, etc.

A very late addendum: it seems a great deal of libertarian advocacy of the past 30 years has been bought and paid for by David and Charles Koch, who have a great deal of oil money:
http://hisvorpal.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/a-demitasse-of-dumbitas/

What are we to make of this?