Chomsky has criticized libertarians for this before, to wit: We could imagine a world where everybody’s rights were respected and also one person owns 90% of the wealth and basically has the power to choose who starves and who is fed. The temptation to abuse that sort of power is overwhelming, and with people jockeying for favors, suffering from the loss of favors, and the massive police force necessary to protect large tracts of privately owned land, etc I doubt the society would respect rights in the long term.

Too bad that you have no incentive to express your writer’s voice in this current environment of <a href=”http://insteadofablog.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/bejabbers/”ineffectually short copyrights.

The question is why should this division be of primary importance when it seems that all one needs is a scale to measure moral import and a rule of proportionality? Force with force and non-force with non-force has a certain symmetry but so does big with big and small with small (proportion). What would be the unintended consequences from a libertarian perspective of saying that the non-forcible coercion above is so bad that a little shoving or a good slap from Cher is not out of line? If mild force is not disproportionate to the action (and perhaps you think it is), why does one need to refer to the force/non-force dichotomy to determine the legitimacy of the response?

A related question is why should we expect initiatory force to always be physical (or the threat of the physical)? This seems to underestimate what human will and intention is capable of doing to achieve an end of power. So again it seems to create an odd hierarchy where all physical violence is placed above all non-physical coercion even though this may not match the moral ranking of the action. There is a tension here, to me, and I’m hoping you can help me understand why your view of libertarian ethics requires both the force/non-force division as well as the proportionality. I’m confident it’s not because you knew going in that you wanted to arrive there but rather than you think it is entailed in something more fundamental.

The “strategic-thickness,” “consequence-thickness,” “application-thickness,” and “grounds-thickness” arguments strike me as pretty insubstantial, to the extent I understand them. The grounds-thickness argument, for example — “Sure, private hierarchy is logically consistent with libertarianism, but it’s weird!” — seems like an assertion, not an argument.

Peter, are you referring here to the paragraph on authoritarianism in Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, under the heading of “Thickness from grounds”, which begins “Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. …”?

If so, I’m not surprising you find the argument unsatisfying, because that’s an extremely elliptical capsule version of the argument. It’s intended to illustrate the kind of argument that you would make for a commitment from grounds, not to give a full-on account of the argument for libertarian concern with non-coercive authoritarianism. A fuller version, with the details tricked out, would require a lot more space than I had available in that part of that particular article (which was written for print in The Freeman, and hence subject to constraints of length, and which was primarily about the varieties of thickness, not primarily about making the case for all the details of my own particular thick conception of libertarianism).

There’s a bit longer discussion of the same topic in my “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity” essay in the Long/Machan Anarchism/Minarchism anthology (particularly if you include, as background, the section on equality), which you may or may not find more satisfying.

Whether or not you find it more satisfying, though, what I’m more interested in is whether or not you accept the form of argument discussed. Specifically, an argument in which the arguer demonstrates 1. that the best reason to be a libertarian is some foundational principle X (Aristotelian natural law, rational egoism, Jeffersonian political equality, whatever your view may be); 2. that principle X implies not only that libertarianism is true, but also some other consequent, Y; and, therefore, 3. a libertarian, qua libertarian, has reason to believe in Y as well as libertarianism, even though denying Y is not inconsistent with libertarianism per se, because denying Y would be inconsistent with the reasons that justify libertarianism. (Hence, as I say, libertarians can reject Y without being inconsistent but they can’t reject it without being unreasonable.)

So, do you accept that form of argument as a legitimate one? If so, then great; that was the main purpose of the discussion, and presumably also the main purpose of Roderick’s link to my essay. If not, then what’s the problem with it?

Well, that’s not the argument, it’s more like a tag for identifying the argument. Reducing pages of argument to a one-liner is of course going to look a bit unsatisfying.

If you say to Leftists, “You are right to oppose the oppression of the workers by the bosses, but by the way, please only use moral suasion, boycotts, and alternative institution-building to express your opposition,”

But again, that’s a shorthand cartoon version of what we say to leftists. Anyway, your argument against left-libertarianism would work just as well libertarianism as such, no? After all, aren’t people constantly misinterpreting libertarianism as being either a variant of statist conservatism, or a variant of statist liberalism, or some chaotic lawless version of anarchism?

In any case, talking about how institutions and practices shape a culture seems to me a rather different thing from talking about how people might misunderstand an argument.