Comments Elsewhere

Richard: “Imagine you find yourself stuck down a well. Libertarians claim that you are perfectly free so long as everybody else leaves you alone, since that way you suffer no interference. But surely we can see that this is mistaken. If left alone, you would dwindle and die. That’s not any sort of freedom worth having.”

As has been pointed out, the idea that libertarians analyze freedom as “non-interference” is a serious mistake; libertarians in fact analyze freedom as “non-aggression”. This is important to your intuition-pump, though, because it is quite certain that endangering other people through reckless driving is an act of aggression, and there is also a good case to be made that refusing to rescue someone in an emergency can, in some cases, constitute an act of aggression. This, however, depends on a lot of circumstantial factors — such as the nature and urgency of the emergency, the role (if any) you played in creating the emergency, the means at your disposal for making some individual contribution to the rescue, the means at others’ (including the victim’s) disposal for the rescue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. (This is important, because you’ll need some pretty burly argument to generalize, as you want to, from your intuitions about the case of a person in dire emergency from having fallen down a remote well, to circumstances that are quite different along all of these axes, such as systemic poverty or the damage from natural disasters or ….)

Of course, I note your objection above that the very institution of private property requires “aggressive interference,” and so (you claim) contradicts the non-aggression account of freedom. But that is just begging the question, in a particularly crass way, against the libertarian; libertarians hold that the concept of aggression is analytically connected with violations of property rights. Thus enforcement of property titles (up to and including the use of violence) is considered by libertarians to be a defensive, rather than aggressive, use of force. While some libertarians (William Lloyd Garrison, Leo Tolstoy, Robert LeFevre) have been principled pacifists, most are not, and there is nothing in the concept of libertarian freedom that demands complete non-resistance; it demands only the abandonment of aggressive force. Maybe you think that this distinction is unjustified or does not do the work that libertarians want it to do; but if so you ought to mention that, and give some argument for it, not just obliterate the distinction and speak as though libertarians have not addressed it.

In a similar vein, your attempt to treat taxes and traffic laws as of a piece with one another is no less question-begging. Libertarians have a perfectly good reason, if you accept the distinction between aggressive and defensive uses of force, to sanction the enforcement of traffic laws but not the enforcement of tax laws. To wit: people who defy traffic laws are putting other people in imminent danger, and threatening to destroy their property or their lives; people who refuse to pay tax are doing nothing of the sort, and are threatening only to keep their own stuff. Of course, again, you might find this argument suspect; but if so the burden is on you to acknowledge that it’s out there and show what’s wrong with it.

Jason: “As a practicing (but moderate) libertarian, I would suggest that winning the permanent gratitude of one other person is easily worth the effort spent in extricating him from a well.”

This may be true for all I know, but it’s certainly not the right reason to rescue people from wells. The right reason is that leaving people to suffer and die is cruel (and perhaps in some cases unjust, i.e. a violation of their rights).

David: “Forget personal feelings … could anyone explain the precise point which cause them to treat ‘freedom’ ( to do anything you like I presume?) as more important than society enforced rules.”

The libertarian conception of freedom is not freedom “to do anything you like”; it is freedom “to do anything you like” without violating other people’s rights (the set of rights being derived from the non-aggression principle; i.e. no slavery, assault, extortion, theft, fraud, or vandalism allowed). The reason for treating it as more important than “society enforced rules” is that vices are not crimes, and slavery is wrong.