Amending Libertarianism Part 1: Ethics Are Not Politics
Libertarianism is an ethical ideology, not a political one.
I anticipate this to be the first of a two-part series of articles dealing with some of the shortfalls of my own basic political ideology, libertarianism. There may be more than two parts as I continue to consider this topic. We libertarians tend toward an idealistic version of the ideology, which often ends up failing when subjected to the very non-ideal world in which we actually live. This first part deals with the inability of idealistic libertarianism to handle the chaos of the political world that actually exists. The second part will deal with how economic libertarianism tempts us toward this same idealization. In both parts, I will suggest ways libertarians can adapt our beliefs into a more complete worldview.
I assume many come to hold libertarian political beliefs after studying economics. For me, it was the way the libertarian schools of economic thought laid bare the errors of socialism. It confirmed what my gut had always told me, that societies have mechanisms built in that help them to get along and prosper when left alone. Perhaps, in those days, I only saw two enemy ideas in the world, atheism and socialism, and thus I needed only two ideologies to navigate anywhere I wanted to go in the world. Christianity and Christian apologetics satisfied the one enemy, and libertarianism satisfied the other.
But, I made one mistake. Because I found libertarian ethics to flow naturally from an unimpeachable logical system, I assumed that it applied to all parts of earthly life, including the political arena. It is an ethical system, and ethics is closely linked with political ideology, so libertarianism must apply to politics if it is true. But, although they overlap, ethics and politics are not one in the same, and the difference is critical.
The error
The first thing to be clear about is that the error in my libertarianism was not in the logic that drives libertarianism as either an economic or ethical concept. In those arenas, libertarianism is true, just as inside a boxing ring it is true that low blows result in a penalty. It’s just that, in the “gloves off” area of political reality, rules don’t apply.
Libertarianism is naturally idealistic. The method of economic analysis, which is many people’s first step toward libertarianism, begins by imagining a simple world, with one simple problem to be solved, and builds from there. With an economist like Murray Rothbard, you begin with Robinson Crusoe alone on an island and inquire how he makes choices to improve his circumstances given limited available resources. Ethical libertarianism is similar. With a philosopher like John Locke, you begin with a lone individual appropriating an unclaimed part of nature with his own labor and derive his rights by extrapolating from this simple state of affairs. In both processes, you begin with an ideal state and gradually add complexity to demonstrate an economic or ethical principle that can be learned from solving it. Thus, at each step of the learning process, you solve a complexity using an economic or ethical principle, and the solution returns you to a new ideal state. All of your characters have found the libertarian solution to be mutually profitable and have acted in their long-term best interests in taking it. At the beginning of each round of inquiry, the world has returned to a new ethically ideal condition, ready to handle the next perturbation imagined by the inquirer.
This methodology is appropriate for inquiring into basic questions about man in an ideal state and what his duties within a secular society would be in such an ideal state. The concepts reached by that method are true in and of themselves.
Thus, libertarianism seems best equipped to teach us about the ideal ethical state of the material world. This is useful, and is still a valuable guide toward Western ideals. It was not, however, designed to teach us how to navigate a world already intractably bound up with entrenched unethical systems, barely restrained evil, and factions with incompatible worldviews fighting for power over all of it. In other words, libertarianism is an ethical ideology, and the problems of the world as it actually exists require a political ideology.
And the hard reality is that we must deal with the world as it is.
Why is politics not a category of ethics?
Political philosophy is intimately wrapped up in ethics. What rulers do to their subjects or to the subjects of other nations are all questions of ethical importance. Rulership, by definition, involves some form of coercion, meaning ethical questions naturally arise at every turn as we are forced to ask what rules should apply to these coercive circumstances. Yet, ethics do not answer one important question: whether anyone else will actually follow those rules. This is the difference between knowing what people should do and knowing how you should respond given the fact that they rarely actually do what they should.
Given the actual state of the world, an ethical philosophy with no separate political component only has the power to bind itself. When we espouse a universal ethic, we subject ourselves to its limitations on pain of hypocrisy. Unless we have a separate politics that tells us when and under what circumstances our actions contrary to that ethic are justified (or are not violations at all), all we have really done is inform our enemies what lines we will not cross so that they can plan their lines of attack accordingly.
Further, when we have extremely ideal principles, we tend to universalize them to all people and and all circumstances. Our ethics become a kind of “grand unified field theory” in our minds, and we can’t resist seeing how they could apply to all facets of life. Thus, if an ethical principle applies between individuals, we assume the same ethical principle must apply between rulers and subjects. After all, rulers are just people too.
But do we actually have grounds to say that this universalization is valid? What fundamental principle tells us that rulers are subject to the same ethical principles as individuals? They are just people, but is the distinction between subject and ruler not meaningful in any way?
It is true that our modern democratic order justifies its existence on this very premise. After all, democracies are “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The revolutionary idea behind democracy was supposed to be that it would finally make rulers equal to their subjects. But at the same time, every democratic ruler who stands atop this premise violates it continually and egregiously, and the intellectuals who give scholarly cover to those modern democratic rulers stand by even their worst abuses. After all, any form of ruling, with the exception of some theoretically perfect direct democracy, is fundamentally incompatible with true equality. Perhaps, the fact that reality doesn’t seem to permit rulers to be truly equal to their subjects is evidence that the belief that they are is unjustified.
In fact, Christian scripture seems to place rulers on a slightly different ethical plane from individuals (e.g., Romans 10 and 1 Peter 2). When they wrote about the authority held by governors, Paul and Peter were referring to a pagan government that they probably expected would eventually kill them. Even the pagan rulers seem to hold their positions by God’s will. Meanwhile, our modern notion that justice requires rulers to be equals with their subjects is based only on intuition of some kind.
Forming a more complete ideology
The difference is that politics is the science of ordering fallen societies.
As long as humans are what they are, politics will involve ethical paradoxes. That is, many of the problems presented in the political realm have no fully ethical solution—under any type of ethics. For example, if a man forces himself upon a woman and she conceives a child she does not want, there is a competing set of rights between her bodily autonomy and the child’s life. Pure libertarianism doesn’t provide a clear answer to this, it is designed for a world in which the original aggressive act against the woman never happens. It is similar for punishment of crimes: pure libertarian ethics don’t provide an obvious justification for punishing the aggressor after the act, especially if it isn’t likely the act will happen again, such as in the case of a “crime of passion.” We require a deeper source of foundational truth for justification in these cases. It is not that libertarian ethics are proven false because they don’t yield clear resolutions to cases like these, it is that an evil act was done and created the paradoxical ethical situation in the first place.
Thus, if ethics cannot answer the questions presented in one realm of life, then that realm of life must be something other than ethics. It may encompass concepts like justice and wisdom, but applied to the question of how we as a society carry out the function of governing ourselves, it falls to the concept of politics.
The path forward is not to discard libertarianism, but to recognize that it is only part of a complete set of ideas. When we recognize that our ethics is an ideal, meant for an ideal world, it becomes easier to accept the needed changes in our thinking because it does not require discarding those core beliefs that have been so important to us. It requires adding to those ethical ideas a set of political ideas that connect ideal to reality. The primary areas of addition must be in how and when one is justified in resisting the political will of others and how and when he is justified in imposing his political will on others. Without these functions, your ethics are only writing on a page.