Libertarianism's Failed Universality

Part II of Deconstructing My Libertarianism.

Dear Reader: I have been struggling with this one for over a month. Not just about finding the right words, or structure, or framework – all of which I am certain that I have not done – but just to get it out of me at all. The landmines, pitfalls, and personal triggers have felt like constant obstacles. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I don’t just blow through it, it’ll never be done and whatever process I’m in the midst of will just be stuck here at this stage. I don’t want that. So warts and all, imperfect ideas, half-formed thoughts, here we go groping in the dark towards something on the other side…

Libertarianism presents itself as an answer to everything.

Now, I’d expect that statement to elicit some controversy. When I was prominent in the Libertarian Party, one of my go-to sets of remarks was specifically geared to push back against the idea that libertarianism was a utopian philosophy. A libertarian world would still have crime, strife, and suffering. Libertarianism does not promise to perfect humanity.

But, though it may acknowledge the imperfection of the human condition, libertarianism does claim a “best” answer – a “libertarian” answer – to nearly anything one might suggest. This is no place more evident than in the proliferation of libertarian tracts stretching far beyond politics to cover the “libertarian” approach to all sorts of topics from parenting to dating to schooling to starting a homestead.

The silliness of trying to map a political philosophy (and not even a particularly robust one) onto some of these areas of life, and the harmfulness of the totalizing mindset that can follow from that, may merit exploration of its own some other time.

Even on political questions, however, libertarianism fails thoroughly at achieving the comprehensiveness and universality to which it so often and arduously pretends. It’s a pretense that stems from core tenants that at first blush seem at once simple and fundamental: all just interactions require consent, don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff, reject violent aggression as a means of achieving political ends, individual rights trump all other considerations. What other basis could one need to answer any political question that could arise?

Examination, however, reveals substantial inherent limitations. For one, there exist a significant number of human beings who, due to youth, old age, or infirmity, are persistently unable to offer affirmative consent or exercise agency (note that all human beings experience transient periods of incapacity to consent, sleep for example, but these are interruptible if consent need be obtained; non-interruptible conditions prove trickier). This is quite the problem for the suggestion that consent must be the sole basis for a just society when that society must also encompass such people.

A simple concession is that an agent must exercise consent on behalf of one who cannot do so for themselves, but if so how is that agent to be determined? Ideally, it might be one chosen at some prior date when consent was possible, but that will certainly not be the case with children, who have never been of a maturity to offer informed consent in even so much as choosing their own agent to represent them.

A child’s parents, or some designee signified by a child’s parents, may be an appealing default suggestion, particularly for one who wants no role to be played by the state. This, however, has a number of flaws: 1) it’s no longer being derived from any inherent natural rights argument or understanding of consent, but rather is an arbitrary if needed solution being plugged in to fill this gap; 2) it would imply a parent’s authority to consent on a child’s behalf to any number of abusive or endangering practices, a state of affairs clearly out of line with the spirit of what any consent-based culture is hoping to achieve; 3) it provides no answer to those whose incapacity to consent also coincides with an absence of any living relatives or explicitly designated agents to act on their behalf.

Given a belief that all interaction (from international trade to a trip to the grocery store, from complex medical treatment to a simple conversation, from public taxation to personal inebriation) must be based upon individually given and obtained consent, the lack of a framework for those incapable of offering it leads to nonsensical outcomes. When I buy a candy bar from my neighbor's son for his elementary school fundraiser, have we engaged in a voluntary transaction? How, if he is incapable of providing informed consent to the sale? When an ER doctor treats the injuries of an accident victim who arrives unconscious, has he wronged them by doing so? When dementia strips a loved one of the ability to understand the world around them, making informed consent impossible, must we shun them lest every visit with them become one to which they by definition could not have consented?

The muddiness here is not just a theoretical problem. It has exposed the libertarian movement over the years to periodic waves of self-appointed “fellow travellers” attracted to the philosophy not in spite of, but because of this lack of clarity around individuals incapable of consent. Libertarianism has, as a result, had to fend off many unsavory creeps over the years, eager to stammer out some self-serving theory of juvenile consent through Humbert Humbert flop sweats. That it at times has done so effectively does nothing to resolve the core incoherence that causes the problem to recur.

Consent is not, however, libertarianism’s only blind spot. It also presents a moral universe that tends to collapse the entire concept of rights into the narrowest, strictly individual construction of natural rights. A right, I’ve said many times as a libertarian, is only that which can be inherent in one in a state of nature (absent the influences and interactions implied by any social or governmental order). Political scientists refer to these often as negative rights. In a state of nature one may say anything they want, may practice any faith or hold any belief, may mix their labor with their surroundings to create property and possessions.

In a state of nature, however, one is not guaranteed survival. The consumption of food, water, even oxygen are not inherent – obtaining and consuming them requires labor (though in breathable atmosphere, the latter requires only the labor of one's lungs). One does not, therefore, possess an inherent natural right to live free from starvation, thirst, or suffocation. Allowing individual natural rights to circumscribe the whole of one’s rights-based system, as libertarianism does, allows for the manifestation of outcomes identifiable to most for their extreme cruelty.

This is because this narrow conception of a state of nature has a key, willful blindspot – culture. Humans, from our earliest primitive natural forms, have existed as social creatures. Man in a state of nature is not one free from social pressures, but one continually navigating them. That includes a balancing of negative rights inherent to the individual and positive rights derived from the cultural and social expectations of the group.

Those expectations may shift on the basis of any number of factors or pressures. In one group of humans, an injured member may expect to be cared for by the others. If that expectation is strong enough that members ignoring it suffer social repercussions, one may even be thought of as having a right to that care. In another group, that right (or even an expectation) may not exist. Neither of those is more natural or unnatural than the other. That may not be as satisfying as a more reductive view holding negative rights as the only rights humans possess, but it certainly better reflects the inherent sense most humans have that a person who fate has placed dying of thirst on your doorstep, lacking all other options, has the right to receive from you a glass of water.

That many libertarians will take umbrage with that assertion demonstrates how it so often adopts an ethical worldview that flattens the world outside of it, creating false equivalence between grave injustice and minor slight. If all non-consensual action is violence, it is a small step to conflating all of that violent action. Taxation is theft, a parking ticket is extortion, regulation is assault. All governments that govern, govern with violence, and there’s not much difference between one where the violence is out in the open rather than hidden behind bureaucracy and procedure.

Except of course there’s a difference.

The tyranny of totalitarian autocracy and the tyranny of your local elected county commission are not equivalents. They’re not even on a scale fit for comparison. It’s not the difference between one orange and twelve oranges, or even the difference between an orange and twelve apples. The difference between autocratic government and democratic government is like the difference between one orange and the concept of ennui. Comparison invites absurdity.

And yet the perennial refrain in the face of any injustice is that it’s just like every other state, every other administration, every other policy. They’re all violence. It’s all bad. It’s all the same. In that, true atrocity is prone to conflation, implicitly or explicitly, with inconvenient mundanity until the ability to resist any of it erodes to nonexistence.

That, however, is beginning to lead into a topic for another day – that regardless of inherent fundamental contradictions in the philosophy embraced by many dogmatic libertarians, the application of that philosophy by them in practice often fails catastrophically to live up to the even standards and expectations of their own premises.

I’m not sure whether anyone but me will find value in my sharing this. It is, however, helping me, I think, to continue to step through a process of deconstruction. Besides, I was a libertarian of very public certainty. I think that confers some ethical responsibility to be similarly public in my doubts. I’ll keep sharing this journey with you. I’m not sure myself where it’s going.

You can find part I of this series here.