Comments Elsewhere

My perspective on this, taking a step back, is “what good is it to carry around a conception of social justice?”

Well, the libertarian argument for holding libertarian principles of justice (i.e., justice as self-government, or justice as non-aggression) is usually that you should hold them because they are true. Questions of social good can only be sensibly answered after you’ve answered (tacitly or explicitly) the prior question of what would count as a good social outcome, and a theory of justice aims to supply part of the answer to that prior question.

Justice strieks me as a form of self-governance given the fact that every person is their own tyrant upon the world.

I don’t understand what “fact” you are pointing to here. Could you explain?

What tames the millions of tyrants who then walk the earth?

Judo. Or possibly guns.

In all seriousness, if you are asking how you stop people from violating each others’ rights in a libertarian society, that’s a question for constitutional theory. It’s an important question for libertarians to answer, but there isn’t any single libertarian answer to the question. Minarchists think that the government should take a primary role in stopping crime, along with private citizens acting individually and together for self-defense. Anarchists reject all forms of government on principle, and so favor individual and cooperative private self-defense. Some libertarians think that to build a sustainable libertarian society you need to engage in a process of education and moral agitation to get more people to accept libertarian or individualist ideas. Others think that you just need to give people the right tools and count on them to protect their own self-interest. Different libertarians favor different means of defense (unorganized armed populace, local militias, for-profit specialized defense agencies, martial arts, shifting resources towards security of home and property rather than stopping attacks in-progress or punishing after-the-fact, nonviolent passive resistance on an individual or coordinated level, etc. etc. etc.). A lot of us (myself included) tend to think that libertarians should leave a lot of this up to individual people and particular communities to decide, rather than insisting on a one-size-fits-all strategy, on the grounds that if you get out of people’s way, and let them talk with each other and make their own decisions, you’ll usually get a variety of interesting and innovative solutions to the problem that you wouldn’t get if you handed down a central plan from on high.

So what exactly is libertarianism offering the student of political life?

Boundary conditions on the acceptable means for carrying out political or social projects.