Comments Elsewhere

Albert: The difference, I think, is that rights don’t incorporate the subjetive ends of someone in particular but permit the peacefully realization of all of them.

But clearly it does not permit the peaceful realization of any and every end. Some ends include aggression as a consitutive part — e.g. the ends adopted by fascists (who view war as part of a healthy national life) or by the “positive good” faction of slavery apologists in the Southern United States (who viewed the enslavement of “inferior” races by “superior” races as a good in itself). These ends cannot consistently be combined with the nonaggression principle because the end itself is aggressive.

So to be accurate, you’d have to say something more like this: “Rights don’t incorporate the non-aggressive subjective ends of someone in particular, but permit the peaceful realization of all of those that are non-aggressive.” But since “non-aggressive” is just a synonym here for “non-rights-violating,” that is equivalent to saying “Rights … permit the peaceful realization of all the ends that don’t violate rights.” That’s certainly true (analytically true, even), but I don’t see how it proves anything at all about the status of respecting rights vis-a-vis other moral commitments. You could just as easily say that “egoism permits the selfish realization of all the ends that don’t conflict with my own self-interest,” or “Feminism permits the antisexist realization of all the ends that don’t oppress women.” Any given moral commitment is going to rule on the issues that it takes an interest in, and leave the rest of the field open for other commitments to decide.

Albert: I think it’s the other way around. By caring too much for the non-agressive values of people qua libertarian you are endangering your own libertarian positions. People with these non-agressive values (but nonetheless oppressive) will feel threatened not by your particular values / personal views but by your very own political philosophy. They will think that a libertarian order will be a menace to their non-agressive conducts, and actually it’s not. You are saying to them “libertarians, qua libertarians, will fight against your personal non-agressive values, but you are welcomed in a libertarian order”. It doesn’t make much sense to me.

But I don’t want slimy male supremacist types (or racist creeps, or blowhard know-it-all bosses, or whatever) to feel welcomed in a libertarian order. I think they are at best obnoxious deadweight and at worst an active menace to the prospects for liberty. And I think that they should feel threatened by consistent libertarianism: there is good reason to think that a free society would dramatically undermine their ability to go on oppressing and exploiting their victims.

I’m an anarchist, so I do not advocate using force against anyone — even real creeps — who conscientiously abstains from initiating force against others. But there’s no reason why I should have to co-operate with, or evangelize to, or cater to the sensitivies of, or moderate my tone towards, people whose values I find not only morally repugnant, but also specifically a menace to the real-world application or implementation of libertarian principles. I don’t want to be part of a movement that they are part of and I don’t want to live in a community where they feel welcome. (Besides which I think that any movement in which they are happily accepted is unlikely to make any concrete, long-term progress towards freedom.)

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you here, but you seem to be suggesting that it is pragmatically important for libertarians to portray libertarianism as a very big tent, and that failing to welcome anyone who meets the minimal criteria for counting as a libertarian is in some sense a strategic mistake. But I don’t see how this is true. Numbers don’t always determine political victories; political strategy is not just a matter of getting as many people to rally to your standard as you possibly can. If I’m misunderstanding your point, I hope you’ll correct me. If I’m understanding you rightly, it might help if you could explain more specifically you think that alienating (say) nonviolent white supremacists or peaceful patriarchs is harmful to libertarian prospects.

Albert: I think it’s better to fight against these oppresive values simply as moral agents and decent human beigns, not as libertarians. Furthermore, if you as a libertarian promote not only the NAP but also other kind of values, other libertarians with different values will be tempted to promote, qua libertarians, his own values, and the distintion between rights and value will be blurred.

But “I will not tolerate white supremacy, even where nonviolently imposed, and I will actively organize and agitate against it” is a very different claim from “I am going to start shooting people involved in imposing white supremacy, even if they do so nonviolently” are two obviously different claims, which can be clearly distinguished. And if I make the distinction clearly (which, as a libertarian, I take pains to do), then I don’t see how it would my fault if other people then blurred the distinction that I made. Of course any position can be confused or misrepresented, either by people who think that they agree with it or by people who think that they suppose it. But as long as the position can be and has been made clear by the people advocating it, the responsibility for misunderstanding it lies on those who have misunderstood.

Tim: So being unsatisfied with the roundabout nature of the free market argument for competitive antidiscrimination, my aggrieved friends will probably start agitating for direct action, ie for state intervention or personal or group intimidation (if arguably only counter-intimidation), which brings us back full circle to Rothbards argument too.

Just so we’re clear, “direct action” tactics may be either coercive or noncoercive, but they never involve state intervention. Direct action is defined partly by contrast with efforts to make political changes through electioneering or lobbying government officials. The idea here is that the people who want to make the change take actions that directly contribute to bringing it about, instead of trying to influence and enlist the government or other third parties to do it for them.

N.B.: The people who talk a lot about “direct action” today very often endorse coercive forms of direct action (e.g. doing damage to corporations they don’t like by trashing their storefronts). But that’s not because direct action is inherently coercive; it’s because adopting direct action requires you to get out from under certain myths that the mystique of the State promotes (having to do with Law and Order, the necessity of Working Within the System, etc.), and most people who have managed to divorce themselves from those myths aren’t principled libertarians, and have fallen into the opposite error of romanticizing rebellion as such. There are lots of forms of direct action — involving social ostracism, boycotts, pickets, strikes, building counter-institutions, etc. — that have nothing to do with destroying property or assaulting people, and I for one think that libertarians would benefit from spending less time on vain efforts to lobby and evangelize to the established power elite, and more time examining the history of direct action tactics and promoting their future use as a means to liberty.