David,

You wonder how one can have a productive discussion with someone who simply states “individuals have rights.” Really, I don’t know, but of course it is a ridiculous caricature to suggest that natural rights theorists “simply state” that. It is generally asserted as the conclusion of an argument (Rand inferred it from prior ethical conclusions to the effect that the life of the individual being is its standard of value, together with an auxiliary premise that widespread respect for individual rights is a precondition for the form of life proper to human beings; Hoppe infers it from argumentation ethics; etc.). Maybe you’re not aware of those arguments, but if not, that’s your problem, not natural rights theorists’ problem. Maybe you know those arguments but don’t like them (I’m not especially fond of Rand’s argument or Hoppe’s, myself), but your time would be better spent engaging with the arguments than walloping on straw dogs.

Or perhaps you mean to say that once “individuals have rights” is concluded, there is no further interesting discussion to be had, whereas a conclusion to the effect that “you should maximize good consequences and minimize bad ones” allows for all kinds of subsequent argument about the application of the principle. Of course, if the argument for the conclusion is a good argument, then I can’t for the life of me see why it would matter that the conclusion settles the issue. (In light of the proof, is there any more productive argument about whether or not you might need more than four colors to color a map? If not, how is that an objection?) But it is in any case a mistake to suppose that there are no discussions about how to best to apply principles of individual rights to actual cases. (See, for example, the debate between Walter Block and other open-borders libertarians as against Hoppe on immigration; see also debates among Roderick Long, Rothbard, Spooner, Rand, et al. on intellectual property; see also debates among Rothbard, Block, Nozick, et al. on the possibility of selling yourself into slavery; etc.)

As for whether this style of argument appeals only to “true believers” — that is, whether or not it is an effective form of outreach for libertarianism when speaking with non-libertarians — well, first, I think that whether or not an argument is a good argument is independent of, and more important than, whether or not it is broadly convincing. (The purpose of argument is to justify your beliefs, not necessarily to convince others of them.) But, secondly, I think you’re supposing — without argument — that non-libertarians don’t share a commitment to the non-aggression principle. I think actually that most people do already have some commitment to it; in their own lives they act on the principle that coercing peaceful people is wrong and the problem is that they make unjustified exceptions to that principle in the case of common arbitrary claims of political authority, or else rationalize coercion as not really coercive, in light of some theory about political collectivity. (Didn’t “we” agree to the tax increase?) But if so, the thing to do is to attack the basis for making the exception or the rationalization — something which is quite possible to do, philosophically, without appealing to some kind of claim that they produce bad consequences above and beyond the violations of individual liberty involved.

Jeff,

Perhaps this has not occurred to you, but the primary purpose of a magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education might turn out to be primarily to educate people about (freed-market) economics, rather than to convince them of libertarianism as a moral principle. Of course, you might ask “Well, why educate people about freed-market economics, if not to convince them of libertarianism?” Well, I don’t know; why educate people about nutrition, home-repair, or buying an automobile? There are lots of things you might learn which have some bearing on libertarianism but which are not learned primarily as a means to convincing people of libertarianism.

Of course, the outcome of the education will probably not be irrelevant to libertarianism, in this case. But if one thinks (as I do) that libertarianism is a moral imperative independent of its economic outcomes, that hardly means that people who move in a more libertarian direction because of becoming more educated in economics are moving towards libertarianism for the wrong reasons. Some evils are evil in themselves; others are good or neutral in themselves but evil in light of their full consequences; and some are both evil in themselves and also produce evil consequences. Among the last are some things that produce evil consequences because they themselves are evil. (Getting beaten or tortured over and over again can lead to long-term consequences like depression or debilitating flashbacks. The beatings and the torture aren’t evil because of the long-term effects — they’d be evil anyway, even if the victim had no memory of them at all — but rather the long-term effects for the victim are what they are, in part, because of the wrongness of what’s been done to her.) In this last sort of case, it may be an important part of the dialectic to come to understand how the consequences are evil — not because the evil of the root cause depends on the evil of the consequences, and not because the student is wrongly pretending that it does, but rather because once you understand that the consequence is evil, the explanation for the evil of consequences may have something to do with seeing the evil of the root cause. Why does statist intervention have bad consequences? Well, it has something to do with the fact that it violates peaceful people’s rights to make an honest living through consensual economic arrangements. Seeing the evil of that is part and parcel of fully understanding why it produces the bad economic consequences that it produces.

Incidentally, Jeff, on a different but related topic, as a consequentialist, no doubt you have some notion of what sort of consequences are good consequences and what sort of consequences are bad consequences. (I mean, some notion beyond just “utility,” which apparently you are using to mean not “usefulness,” but rather as a synonym for “the balance of goodness over badness in a consequence.”) Do you suppose you could tell me which are which? What makes a set of consequences a good set or a bad set? And how did you decide that?