My New Dispatch Article on Updating Libertarianism

Libertarian ideology remains generally sound. But I argue it could use a few updates.

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Today, The Dispatch published my article on updating libertarian ideology. The piece was inspired, in part, by insightful articles on the same topic by Randy Barnett and Timothy Sandefur, though my take on the issue is significantly different from theirs. Here is an excerpt from my article:

In a recent essay, Georgetown Law professor and libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett offered a provocative indictment of American libertarianism. The movement needs several updates, he argued, most notably regarding what he considers to be abuses of private power. Instead of evolving, libertarianism according to Barnett has been "frozen in amber since the 1970s."

The state of libertarian thought may seem of little importance to anyone but committed libertarians (some of whom disagreed thoughtfully with Barnett's piece). After all, libertarians are far from being a dominant force in either major political party. The Trump-era GOP has repudiated libertarian ideas it previously had some affinity for, such as promoting free trade and cutting entitlement spending. Democrats are far from libertarian as well. The idea—propounded by some conspiratorially minded people on both left and right—that libertarians secretly dominate American public policy is patently false.

Though I don't agree with most of Barnett's assessment, I do think he's right that libertarianism still needs some updates—just not the ones he proposes. Its traditional core remains valid, even more so than ever in some ways. Nevertheless, libertarianism needs a better theory of the tradeoffs between natural rights and utility; it needs better strategies to address large-scale public goods problems; and it needs to recognize that nationalism is the greatest threat to liberty in most parts of the world today.

The rest of the article outlines the three areas where updates are needed in greater detail. I also explain why I think the core of libertarianism remains sound, and why I differ with Randy Barnett's view that libertarian thought has been "frozen in amber since the 1970s." Libertarian thinkers have, in fact, made important advances since then. But there is room for further progress, particularly (though not exclusively) on the three issues I highlight.

Comments

[JoeFromtheBronx]

I’m not a libertarian but appreciate Prof. Somin’s reasonable and overall consistent takes. Also, it helps that libertarianism is generally appealing to some degree to multiple groups. Like federalism, big debates often arise in application.

"Reasonable," to be clear is not the same as "I always agree with him." I disagree with him on multiple issues. On some, I am wary of his position, but will especially look to others to debate the specifics.

[Bubba Jones]

I've never met an actual libertarian.

I've met a lot of people who believe in personal liberty for themselves.

[SRG2]

I’ve met a lot of people who believe in personal liberty for themselves.

My term for them is "asymmetric libertarians". I have met a very few axiomatic libertarians - including one who opposed traffic lights. And there is that old saw, a libertarian is a conservative who likes to toke.

[Stephen Lathrop]

. . . and it needs to recognize that nationalism is the greatest threat to liberty in most parts of the world today.

To the contrary:

The rise of secular nationalism was a political watershed of the European Enlightenment. Previously, questions of sovereignty, and thus all questions touching the rights of individuals, were reckoned referable to God—with a region-spanning established church the intermediary by which an ordinary person could seek intercession. God was sovereign universally, and the church disposed locally. Ostensible national sovereigns—kings and queens—trembled before that power, or contested it, but found no way to replace it.

With the Enlightenment, the rise of secular nationalism knocked the established church off its perch atop politics. Centuries-long political struggles followed, contested over questions about what alternative notions of sovereignty ought to take up tasks formerly allocated to God.

As it happened, something approximating a definitive conclusion to that struggle was announced by American founder James Wilson, who wrote after the invention of joint popular sovereignty during the American founding era:

There necessarily exists, in every government, a power from which there is no appeal, and which, for that reason, may be termed supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable . . . Perhaps some politician, who has not considered with sufficient accuracy our political systems, would answer that, in our governments, the supreme power was vested in the constitutions . . . This opinion approaches a step nearer to the truth, but does not reach it. The truth is, that in our governments, the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power remains in the people. As our constitutions are superior to our legislatures, so the people are superior to our constitutions. Indeed the superiority, in this last instance, is much greater; for the people possess over our constitution, control in act, as well as right. The consequence is, the people may change constitutions whenever and however they please. This is a right of which no positive institution can ever deprive them.

With that essentially Hobbesian declaration, Wilson took note of the Enlightenment’s rejection of God as the fount of human rights, and also disposed of alternative secular theories of sovereignty which posited a national sovereign with a personal interest separate from—and not infrequently opposed to—that of his or her subjects.

Thereafter, human rights were to be entrusted to a joint popular sovereign, in which citizens acted in a double capacity: first, as subjects of government, under the rule of law, but second, as members of a joint popular sovereignty with power superior to government’s power, and capacity to act at pleasure, without constraint.

In that last major iteration the Enlightenment’s struggle to replace religious sovereignty with a secular alternative, America’s founders discovered among those whose rights needed protection a source of power sufficient as a practical matter to vindicate individual rights against government usurpations. In principle, that arrangement eliminated the too-frequent conflicts of interests between personal national sovereigns and their subjects.

It is thus an enduring problem for would-be libertarians that their philosophy rejects all theories of sovereignty. It leaves them in a paradox. First, they offer no coherent basis to vindicate individual rights which they nevertheless insist must be the first objective of government. Second, they acknowledge, as every historical observer must, that national governments have been by far the most dangerous threats to the rights of their citizens.

That has left libertarian advocacy to struggle mistakenly against joint Popular sovereignty, as if it were merely a continuation of pre-founding era royal prerogatives. Libertarians attempt to do that by means of a kind of rationalist extremism. It amounts to insistence that libertarian axioms support chains of reasoning which enable deductions of political facts. Those are always discovered to support libertarian theory.

Alas, experience and history will always provide better factual basis for policy than can any amount of rationalism applied to politics. And a popular sovereign wielding power greater than government’s will always provide a better method than powerless rationalism to vindicate individual rights.

If libertarians hope to move beyond their accustomed role as powerless critics of government, they have no choice but to develop some as yet unimagined theory of sovereignty to rival that of Wilson and America’s founders. Everything else libertarians aspire to do awaits acceptance and completion of that challenge.

[Brett Bellmore]

Comparing libertarianism and utilitarianism, the former has one huge advantage: You can generally know when you’re violating somebody else’s rights, but utilitarianism confronts a number of problems which mean that you generally do NOT know when you’re doing the right thing according to utilitarianism.

You don’t actually have access to people’s preference rankings so that you can determine their utility in different scenarios, which by itself is enough to make actually applying utilitarianism impossible. The best you can do is attribute preference rankings to other people, which will often be contrary to their actual rankings.

Then there’s the calculation problem: Is utility a scalar or vector quantity? That makes a huge difference in aggregating utility. Actually calculating utility is computationally impossible even if you have everybody’s preference rankings, though, because you don’t have the data to do the math on even if you know what math to do, and you face a combinatorial explosion as the number of people involved grows.

Really, unlike libertarianism, utilitarianism is more of a metaphor than a theory. And it’s so vague it becomes very easy to rationalize almost anything you want, short of running torture camps. (In theory you can rationalize them, too, by positing a sadistic “utility monster”.)

The other place I’d take exception is the way libertarianism and nationalism are treated as opposites.

Libertarianism is not a complete moral theory, it is a theory of what means are acceptable to use in pursuit of one’s goals, but it is agnostic as to ends. People just pursue their individual and freely chosen ends within libertarian constraints as to means.

Nationalism, by contrast, is a theory of ends, not means.

This means that, rather than conflicting, libertarianism and nationalism are largely orthogonal. It’s perfectly possible to be a libertarian nationalist, all you have to do is think that advancing the welfare of one’s own nation is the proper end, and libertarianism dictates the acceptable means.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think the reason Somin sees a huge conflict between libertarianism and nationalism, is that he has covertly integrated universal utilitarianism into libertarianism, to supply the ends actual libertarianism is agnostic about.

His hybrid theory, "universal utili-libertarianism", is indeed in conflict with nationalism, because nationalism is decidedly NOT universalist, it maintains that one has a special relationship to one's fellow citizens and neighbors, treating the welfare of people outside that circle as merely a side constraint rather than a goal, while universal utili-libertarianism treats your next door neighbor as morally interchangeable with some stranger on the other side of the planet.

In that regard, universal utili-libertarianism is a very unnatural moral theory for real world human beings. But it does tend to explain Somin's positions on a wide range of issues.

[David Nieporent]

I think the reason Somin sees a huge conflict between libertarianism and nationalism,

I thin the reason Somin sees a conflict between libertarianism and nationalism is that the former is inherently individualist and the latter is inherently collectivist.

[grylliade]

That may be because your next-door neighbor IS morally interchangeable with some stranger on the other side of the planet. Either one is morally interchangeable with me, in fact, in my calculus; I will choose myself over strangers, but it isn't a MORAL decision; it is simply practical. There are valid reasons to prefer my survival over othersʾ, but they cannot be PRINCIPLED ones, kinda by definition.

You can have "principles" that say otherwise; I hope you reconsider. I will stay with principles that go forward, not ones that look backwards. It's not easy or fun...but I'd rather stick with it than go down a morally bankrupt sidepath.

[Brett Bellmore]

You know, you don't prove universal utilitarianism true by simply repeating its conclusions.