(Written in Macon, GA): It’s amazing how a comment about libertarianism draws more attention than almost anything else in the “blogosphere.” In a post from last week, I argued that libertarians ought to be concerned about how parents and communities raise their kids, because most people are not raised to value individual liberties as highly as libertarians would want. I also expressed some openness to pragmatic libertarianism while rejecting a pure philosophical form of the ideology. This post provoked comments on my site, in my email inbox, and on the Crooked Timber site, thanks to a nice mention by Kieran Healy. I’d like to respond to several of these comments together:

Continue reading →

Since I?m at a Liberty Fund conference with several libertarians, I?d like to make two comments about this ideology:

1. I?m open to pragmatic but not philosophical libertarianism: If you come at me with a coherent and radical version of libertarianism, I will resist it. In contrast to libertarians, I believe that human beings may make claims on others for economic support; that some of these claims are morally obligatory; and that governments may enforce such claims through taxing and spending. I don?t see a tax as an immoral ?taking? of sacrosanct private property. This is only one place where I part company with abstract libertarian theory.

However, libertarians have also developed a whole set of pragmatic arguments to accompany their core philosophical beliefs. They say that governments tend to fail at their own explicit purposes, are often captured by special interests, and promote upward economic redistribution; and that markets work better. Libertarians often assert that these arguments must apply in all (or almost all) circumstances. They rely on fundamental theoretical reasons that derive from economics, not philosophy?for example, the idea that markets efficiently deliver what everyone demands. I think, in partial contrast, that market solutions often work in particular domains and are worth testing. In practice, this means that I am open to, and interested in, libertarian arguments that take the form, ?A market will solve problem x? (where x is something like poverty, crime, or environmental degradation). Pure philosophical libertarianism, however, says, ?We shouldn?t structure the ground rules of society in order to solve problems of this type; we should simply respect private individual liberty.? I disagree with this formulation, but that doesn?t prevent me from learning practical lessons from libertarianism.

For example, my colleague Bob Nelson is a libertarian who has argued for a long time that cities ought to grant all their zoning power to neighborhood associations. I can imagine granting such associations the right to buy garbage and sewer services on the open market; and the right to operate charter schools. Local police precincts could also be made accountable to the same associations. I suspect that in poor neighborhoods, people could do better for themselves than the city government can do for them. I?m not positive that this is a libertarian position, but whatever it is, it?s well worth a try.

2. Libertarians should be much more concerned than they are with political socialization: For well over a century, libertarian authors have been arguing eloquently for a minimal state. Yet most Americans favor Social Security and Medicare, oppose drug legalization, and are even lukewarm about the Bill of Rights. What?s gone wrong? Perhaps libertarian arguments are not compelling. (That is my own view.) Or perhaps parents and communities are raising their kids to be other than libertarians. A shelfload of books and articles by the likes of Hayek, Nozick, and Ayn Rand cannot counteract powerful socialization by millions of parents.

I mentioned an example in my last post, but let me spell it out a little more. In some metropolitan areas, there?s a stark contrast between neat, safe, prosperous private communities in which open displays of political opinion are banned, and poor, relatively high-crime urban neighborhoods in which you often see political signs and even some picketers and canvassers. There is also a contrast between fancy suburban malls?considered private property?in which canvassing and leafleting are banned, and decrepit urban streets in which you can see all kinds of political speech, including graffiti. If millions of kids grow up in communities that are wealthy but intolerant of public speech, they are likely to draw the conclusion that speech is detrimental to order and prosperity. As I wrote in my last post, this is political socialization for fascism.

Libertarians are loath to restrict private contracts, even those that voluntarily restrict speech. They have a point: we aren?t free if we cannot associate in intolerant communities. But if many people choose to ban freedom within their commonly-owned private property, then they are highly unlikely to raise libertarian kids. This is a big problem for libertarianism. Paper guarantees of freedom mean nothing if most people are against freedom.

The great libertarian economist Frank Knight wrote in 1939:

The individual cannot be the datum for the purposes of social policy, because he is largely formed by the social process, and the nature of the individual must be affected by social action. Consequently, social policy must be judged by the kind of individuals that are produced by or under it, and not merely by the type of relations which subsist among individuals taken as they stand.

Moral: if you want libertarian policies, you need “social processes” that make people libertarians, and those policies may not arise as a result of free choices by individuals “taken as they stand.” What’s more, free parents make choices that overwhelmingly shape their children, which means that there can be tradeoffs between parental liberty and the liberty of the next generation. As Knight wrote, “liberalism is more ‘familism’ than literal individualism.” But if families don’t produce children who strongly prize freedom, then liberalism and “familism” will work at cross purposes.

Montr?al: I?m at a Liberty Fund conference on private neighborhood associations. The Liberty Fund is a basically libertarian foundation that organizes more than 100 small conferences a year. The participants are not all libertarians?or else I would not have been invited.

It turns out that some 50 million Americans now live in some kind of community governed by an association: a condominium, cooperative, or a planned community with a board. Often a developer subdivides some land or constructs an apartment building and sells the units with deeds that (a) impose numerous rules on the buyer; and (b) create a board or other body that can legislate further and enforce existing rules.

These are voluntary associations: you don?t have to buy a house or an apartment in any particular condo or planned community. At the same time, they act like governments, taxing, regulating and fining residents and enforcing their decisions in courts. Indeed, they are more powerful than conventional governments, which are restrained by the Constitution of the United States. Residential associations can, and actually have, banned the display of signs critical of themselves, banned the sales of certain newspapers, even banned the private possession of materials they deem pornographic. The rationale for these rules is to increase property values, although the rules may also have other purposes, benign or malevolent.

These quasi-governments raise questions of interest to libertarians and others. For example:

Continue reading →

I have long supported the Nuremberg Doctrine: soldiers are individually responsible for war crimes, and following orders is no excuse. Nor is it an excuse to say that an action seemed acceptable and triggered no feelings of bad conscience. War often suppresses our conscience or turns it upside down, causing us to view mercy as a tempting form of weakness that we are obliged to avoid. Nevertheless, when we carry guns, operate prisons, or give orders, it is our responsibility to make sure that our conscience is working right. As Hannah Arendt observes, “politics is not like the nursery.” A person with a gun is not a child who knows that he is good if only he is obedient. One can follow orders without meaning to violate a law, and still be culpable.

However, I now see a complication. In the military, you are legally required to disobey illegal orders, but you are equally obligated to obey every legal command. A mistake in either direction can send you to a court martial. In civilian life, we have much more margin for error. If someone, even my boss, tells me to do something, I can say, “I don’t know if that’s legal (or moral), so I won’t do it.” Or I can make an arbitrary excuse to get out of doing something that I fear may be wrong. The worst that can happen to me if I avoid making a yes-or-no decision is losing my job. Because we have this leeway, we should be held fully accountable for participating in any illegal acts, even if we don’t understand the law or realize that we’re doing something wrong. It’s our responsibility to do the right thing, and if we’re not sure, we can duck the issue.

But soldiers are in a much tougher position. They must obey or disobey–immediately. It may be genuinely difficult to see that a grievous wrong is illegal under the hellish circumstances of war. Both historical evidence and experiments in social pyschology show that most people will do the wrong thing in hellish contexts. They will kill and maim other human beings out of duty, even though they don’t want to harm anyone. If most people will act this way, then I must assume that I would, too. And if I have no leeway, no opportunity to get myself out of the situation, then I am especially likely to make the wrong choice.

Thus it seems to me the rule ought to be: Don’t obey patently illegal orders. Indeed, this appears to be the legal standard. It is then a hard question whether the despicable acts committed at Abu Ghraib were obviously illegal. If the accused soldiers were free-lancing–deciding on their own to humiliate and abuse prisoners, and hiding their actions from their superiors–then they are guilty. If they were following orders, even vague ones, then I am open to a verdict of “not guilty,” as long as their commanders are held accountable.

I believe in the moral value of narrative. A story, whether fictional or historical, is a coherent description of a set of events. Its coherence is not simply causal, such that the first event causes the second, which causes the third, etc. Instead, narrative coherence can take many forms, including: unity of character (one agent does a set of things sequentially); unity of community (a set of connected agents do a set of things); teleological unity (a set of events build up to a significant conclusion); or thematic unity (many things with similar meanings are described). Often more than one form of unity applies.

I would like to mention four features of narratives that make them useful for moral reasoning:

1. Narratives enable ?thick descriptions.? In Gilbert Ryle?s famous example, we may either say that someone ?contracted his eyelid? or that he ?winked conspiratorially.? The former is a thin description; the latter, a thick one. Thick descriptions often have moral significance. Contracting an eyelid is neutral, but winking conspiratorially is morally dubious. If it turns out that the contracting eyelid was a signal to commit murder, then that even thicker description marks the act as prima facie immoral.

What justifies a thick description is almost always a story. For example, a video camera would record a wink as a wink, whether it was a signal to commit murder or the result of biting a lemon. We know that it is one thing rather than the other because of what comes before and after it. But we don?t consider every prior and subsequent event, nor do we focus exclusively on actions that cause the wink or are caused by it. Rather, we ?thicken? the description by placing the event within a coherent narrative. This brings me to the second point ?

Continue reading →