The Libertarian Idea: Part One, part one

Last post dealt with the broad philosophical notions that motivate The Libertarian Idea. The explanation was meant to situate The Libertarian Idea relative to other works of, and traditions within, libertarian theory, and thereby to show how strange and counterintuitive a work The Libertarian Idea is. This post focuses on the first part of Narveson’s book, which aims to defend the coherence of libertarianism. The idea in the first part is not to show that libertarianism is true, but to show how it could be true – hence Part I’s title, “Is Libertarianism Possible?”

Libertarianism, Narveson tells us, is the view that protecting or respecting “liberty is the fundamental and only legitimate concern of any just society,” so each of us has a “fundamental right to liberty” (Narveson, 13). Three concepts thus need explication. (1) To know what it is a just society is supposed to respect we need to know what liberty is. (2) To know how to respect liberty we need to know what it is to infringe another’s liberty. (3) Finally, to know what it is to respect liberty we need to know what a right is (because the concept of a right falls out of the other two concepts, I will say very little about Narveson’s treatment of it - and reserve what I do have to say for next post).

The danger to libertarian theory – which Narveson hopes to avoid – is that in providing an account of these concepts one might end up with a theory that doesn’t deliver core libertarian judgments: for instance, about circumstances in which coercion is permissible.

Here’s an example of how this might happen. Let’s say, as we will see Narveson does, that liberty is a scalar concept – one can have more or less of it, up to a maximum and down to a minimum. Thus, A has unlimited (or maximum) liberty just in case A can do whatever he wants to do. A has more liberty when A is able to do more of whatever he wants to do; less liberty when he is more constrained. Finally – you get the idea! – A has no liberty when A can’t do anything he wants to do.

On this conception of liberty¹, it is obviously possible (I would say: probable) that a given distribution of goods – food, for example – can have an affect on the extent to which different people have liberty, or are free. Say that A has all the food and doesn’t want to share it with anybody else. Then B and C are likely more limited in what they can do than if A, B and C have food in equal shares. But then we might say that the first possible distribution of food – where A has it all – constrains B’s and C’s ability to do what they want more than does equal distribution (one is limited in what one can do when one is starving); Distribution One interferes with B’s and C’s liberty more than does Distribution Two. But, then, if interfering with B and C’s ability to do what they want to do disrespects their liberty – violates their right to liberty by reducing them to a condition where they cannot do much of what they want – it follows that there is a libertarian case, albeit not dispositive, for redistribution! (And note that the food example generalizes to any good.)

This is the sort of conceptual vortex Narveson wants to avoid. There are a few available strategies. One is to say that a person can still has maximum liberty even if he is starving. To this end, some libertarians explicate liberty as follows: A has liberty just in case A is not coerced by another agent, i.e. just in case A is not forced to do what another wants him to. Coupled with the (deniable) premise that declining to provide another with food does not amount to forcing him to forbear doing what he would do if he had sufficient sustenance, this conception of liberty implies that a mere distribution of goods (distinguished from the history of that distribution) does not diminish others’ liberty, and so cannot violate their rights to liberty.

Narveson declines to follow this strategy because he thinks how much liberty a person has depends not on the source of whatever affects one liberty, but on what affect that source has. As he puts it: “it is difficult to discern a difference, literally, in the meaning of ‘liberty’ between cases where your liberty is affected by lack of means on the one hand or by the presence of inhibiting factors on the other; or by natural causes on the one hand or human interference on the other” (Narveson, 29-30).

Narveson thus accepts that A’s liberty is a function of the extent to which A can do what he wants to do. If one distribution of goods thwarts A’s ability to do what he wants more than another then A has less liberty on the one than on the other. But it does not follow, Narveson wants to insist, that the distribution interferes with A’s liberty. Narveson argues this is so by introducing a distinction between interfering with A’s liberty and failing to promote A’s liberty. “For a person, A, to “interfere with” the liberty of some other person, B, is for A to bring it about that B is unable to do what B would otherwise be able to do even without A’s assistance.” By contrast, “For A to promote B’s liberty is for A to bring it about that B can perform at will some action or actions that B would otherwise be unable to perform” (Narveson, 30-31). To summarize:

Armed with this distinction, Narveson is able to say that a person may be less free on one given distribution of goods instead of another – so his liberty might be promoted by shifting from Distribution One to Distribution Two – but it isn’t necessarily the case that preserving Distribution One (more precisely, declining to shift to Distribution Two) interferes with his liberty. When A declines to promote a shift from D1 to D2, A fails to bring it about that B can perform at will some action that B would otherwise be unable to perform, but he does not prevent B from doing what B could do even without A’s help.

There are two residual problems for Narveson explication of libertarianism, which I will address next post. This will bring our discussion of Narveson’s explication of libertarianism – his account of how it is coherent – to a close.

The first problem, familiar to libertarians, concerns what it is for A to “bring it about that B is unable to” do something. Obviously if you tie someone up you bring it about that he’s unable to move. But what if you tell him you’ll kill him if he doesn’t stay still? What if you threaten to subject him to withering criticism – and you are a withering critic! – if he moves? Threaten to withhold your love? A solution libertarians pursue in practice is to develop a list of the sorts of things that can interfere with liberty – physical violence and threats of it² – and say that other things don’t interfere. But that isn’t going to fly on Narveson’s view. A wants to do x. B threatens to mock A mercilessly if A does x. Because A can’t handle B’s mockery,A develops an aversion to doing x that trumps A’s desire to do x. B has brought it about that A is unable to do what he wants to do – he has inculcated an aversion in A that is stronger than A’s still occurrent want to do x. This is an interference on Narveson’s view, but it is also a paradigmatic example of the exercise of free speech.

The second problem, less familiar to libertarians because more closely connected to Narveson’s contractarian commitments, concerns who can have liberty. Narveson wants to say that rational agents are the only sorts of things that can have liberty. But are rational agents the only sorts of things that can have wants? If not, what makes rational agents special? For that matter, specialness has the ring of an evaluative, moral property – somebody’s special when he has distinct value, right? But Narveson can’t say this. If who counts as a rational agent depends on who has value then to decide who the bargainers in the contractarian situation are requires making a moral judgment. But if contractarianism presupposes moral judgments then contractarianism cannot be the criterion of morality.

Next post we will see how Narveson deals with these problems. Then we’ll turn to contractarianism, and how it is supposed to ground libertarianism.

Update: Fixed some formatting and added some links.