The Poverty of Philosophers

Maxwell Borders offers a critique of my post in response to Ryan Sager's TCS piece.  Borders takes issue with several claims, open and implicit, that I advanced:

First off, talk of rights seems to make Borders...well, angry.  (ANGRY!)  Borders laments that I'm sounding what he calls the "timeless refrain of the naive libertarian," by talking of rights.  For Borders, the question is: "How do you arrive at these rights?  Faith?  Wish?  Hope?  You don’t know." 

Borders asserts that the notion of rights comprise my "first and last article of faith," and that I need to "go back to the theoretical drawing board" and start over, disregarding the work of centuries of philosophers to make the case for rights.  In so doing, however, I'm not allowed to "cite some scholar, like Nozick or Rawls (or some guy at Cato)."

Well, goodness!  That is a daunting task!  Borders' apparent animus towards the concept of rights notwithstanding (or perhaps in spite of it), I would refer him for one reasonable justification of rights to former anarchist Randy Barnett, who applies the natural law (given/if/then) line of reasoning to the notion of rights.

Of course, I'm not a philosopher, but if it will bring us together, I am willing to concede that rights don't exist in the same way as noses exist, or even in the same way as dumb ideas exist.  Of course rights are a way of talking about things, and not some sort of object in and of themselves.  But since I don't believe that pop philosophy has all that much to offer the field of foreign relations, I'd be content to take criticism from philosophers that IR people don't have much to offer contemporary philosophy.  (If anyone is interested in what appear to my non-philosopher eyes to be pretty devastating critiques of Borders's application of his philosophy to the field of international relations, you can go here or here or here.)

I do know enough about libertarianism, though, to think that Borders has gone off the deep end when he asserts that "real rights...are conferred solely by...political institutions (and military power)..."

In the spirit of Jiu Jitsu, I would turn Borders's own admonition back onto his formulation of "real rights."  How do these real rights come about?  Because governments give them to us?  Can they just be taken away by governments?  Are those who live under despotic governments simply holders of fewer rights, or is it that the rights they possess a priori are being violated by their governments?  I can't quite make sense of this, but perhaps Borders can explain how it's a remotely libertarian position to claim that people don't have rights until governments (bless them!) bestow them upon us.

Then Borders takes up my invocation of the notion of mediated and unmediated consequences put forth by Robert L. Holmes in On War and Morality.  (Holmes was fleshing out the moral distinction between killing and letting die, and demonstrated that there are deaths as a direct result of actions ("unmediated consequences") and deaths as an extended result of (in)actions ("mediated consequences").)  But in responding, Borders really opens the kimono:

Huh?  Mediated, non-mediated?  Moral weight?  OK, I don’t believe that the life of an Iraqi has the same “moral weight” as mine or any other American’s.  But that is a political distinction, not really a moral one.

If Borders is attempting to assert here that the U.S. government should value Americans' lives over the lives of those in foreign countries, fine.  But saying "I don't believe that the life of an Iraqi has the same 'moral weight' as mine or any other American's" sure seems like a moral distinction.  One hopes that Borders isn't relegating foreign citizens to 3/5 of an American or some such.  In light of his rather odd view of what "real rights" are, it would be good if Borders could clarify whether holders of fewer rights are of the same moral significance as we enlightened Westerners.

Borders wraps things up with a straw man:

The burden of proof is on Justin Logan to show why any nation should not do what it perceives to be in its interests – but especially on grounds of so-called universal rights.

I never recall having asserted that "based on universal rights, nations should not pursue their perceived interests."  My complaint about the current course of our foreign policy is that the perceived interests have been so obscenely polluted by various influences that the present administration couldn't tell the national interest from a hole in the ground.  I would assert, though, that the rights that foreigners possess (again, it may be the case that Borders believes that foreigners don't possess rights) should act at least as a side-constraint on state killing abroad.  That is, when there is not an overwhelming need, you can't just go around slaughtering foreigners.

Now, Borders thinks that there is an overwhelming need to change the social fabric of the Muslim world in order to secure the country.  I disagree with this claim, but will accept it for the sake of argument.  Borders is free to reject the rights-based libertarian argument, but how does he get around the prudential/consequentialist argument?  I offered both to Sager, but Borders didn't take up the consequentialist argument at all.  I think it was best formulated by Matt Yglesias:

the notion that anything even remotely resembling libertarianism could underwrite an effort to conscript huge quantities of resources from the American public and deploy them in an attempt to wholly remake the social and political order in a foreign country is too absurd to merit a rebuttal. This is an argument properly directed at egalitarian liberals, and we have reason to be asked to produce some specific arguments about why the dim prospects for succeeding at this were ex ante knowable (such arguments can, I think, be fairly easily produced) and/or why, given the opportunity costs, nation-building in Iraq was not a wise place to deploy the resources in question (this argument, I think, can be produced very easily). As long as the conversation is supposed to be proceeding on the shared basis of libertarianism, however, one hardly needs to say anything. It's coercion, it's planning, it's every non-libertarian thing under the sun.

This is what I think the pro-war libertarians need to take up.  And in addition to that, there's another theoretical point I'm not quite clear on.  How is it that centralization and accumulation of state power domestically is a supreme bogey man, but the total aggrandizement and wielding of power by one's own state in the international sphere is an unmitigated good?  We can certainly agree that U.S. state power is less malignant than, say, Chinese state power, but under what system of logic does it follow that we should therefore massively increase the existing power imbalances in the international sphere and make sure that at the same time we're increasing our power, we wield that power promiscuously and to the fear and chagrin of other power centers in the international arena?  Is there a point at which libertarian instincts and reasoning should apply to an international Leviathan, or does American state power have some unlimited benevolent force behind it -- one that appears when entering the foreign arena -- that takes it out of the traditional libertarian views of power and into some statist views about the nature of one's own state and its infallible goodness vis-a-vis other states?  Can the U.S. government ever have or wield too much power internationally in the view of the libertarian hawks?

Comments

[Max]

Justin: very good response and good exchange overall. Here's my reply: http://jujitsui-generis.typepad.com/jujitsui_generis/2004/11/logans_run_at_m.html#more

I enjoyed the melee (natural hawkishness). This is definitely an issue we should all keep talking about as libertarians, even if it gets personal sometimes. Keep up the good work.

(Hello from me to the Cato gang - Will, Radley, Ben. Look forward to meeting you sometime, as well.)

[Micha Ghertner]

Why do you say Barnett is no longer an anarchist?

[Jonathan Wilde]

One thing to note is that Barnett's natural rights formulation ultimately rests on a consequential foundation, and thus, he avoids the is-ought bridge. I think Barnett's view would be more in line with Max's views - that rights are something created by political institutions based on hypothetical imperatives.

[Bernard]

'but perhaps Borders can explain how it's a remotely libertarian position to claim that people don't have rights until governments (bless them!) bestow them upon us.'

Justin, I'd like to take this up, because it's an issue which appears to lie at the heart of almost every disagreement I have with anarcho-libertarian folks.

First off, I'd like to say that I think the idea of 'natural rights' is silly. To me, a natural law is something you couldn't violate if you wanted to. No government can simply say 'pooh to gravity', or 'we don't recognise the second law of thermodynamics' and simply act regardless. I'm happy with the idea that natural rights are a useful short-cut for fierce arguments which have largely been resolved (eg. freedom is now considered a natural right by most in the west, because we've got past the stage of considering it sensible or ethical to enslave people). As with all useful short-cuts, however, these are only good for as long as they are widely agree'd to be good. If, by some series of events, slavery became gradually popular again in the US, then the assertion of a natural right would cease to hold sway and the argument would need to be resolved once more.

With that in mind, I can confidently assert that rights only make sense within the context of a framework to enforce them. A right without a corresponding obligation carries no weight.

In the context of what I've said above, a libertarian position would be one in which a relatively small number of rights are acknowledged and therefore enforced (namely those defending person and property), therefore requiring a relatively small and carefully restricted government to enforce them. More liberal ideologues posit rights such as 'education, health care, social security' which place more onerous obligations on the government, and which libertarians argue against.

It's not a matter of governments bestowing rights on people. It's a matter of people choosing which rights to publically acknowledge and how the government can best be structured to enforce them.

Does that make sense?

[Micha Ghertner]

Bernard,

No, that does not make sense. I'm one of those anarcho-libertarian folks you disagree with on occasion, and yet I largely share your view of natural rights. (Although, to be fair, the argument that natural rights people like Barnett make is not that natural law cannot be violated, but rather that natural law cannot be violated without facing the consequences. Those consequences being disorder, waste, and potential misery.

That said, I agree with your premise: rights only make sense within the context of a framework to enforce them. But as we've been over before, this does not necessarily require "a relatively small and carefully restricted government to enforce them." To be honest, given the historical evidence, a "relatively small and carefully restricted government" does not stay relatively small and carefully restricted for long. To believe otherwise is just as utopian, if not more so, than advocating anarchy.

David Friedman had some choice words on this subject in the recent Liberty Editors' Conference:

"Usually the argument on anarchy vs. minarchy consists mostly of people trying to argue that an anarchist system can't work and other people arguing that it can work. I'd like to take the other side and discuss why limited government is obviously a utopian scheme that cannot possibly work.

To begin with, the supporters of institutions that are supposed to give us governments that respect and protect rights regard all of history as experimental error — we have after all done the experiment a couple of times — and they believe that if only this time we got it right, if only we wrote the right constitution, or somehow tweaked the system, we could actually get a government which was given a monopoly of the ability to use force on other people and, of course, only use it to protect people's rights."

Continued...

[Bernard]

Micha, the 'slippery slope' argument for absolutism is as tedious when used by anarchists as by moral conservatives ('the reason we can't allow pot is because then there's nothing to stop the government having to legalise heroin').

Can you please highlight the areas of my argument which you actually disagree with, rather than those which you use as a jumping off point for telling me that claims I don't appear to have made don't make sense? At first glance I can't see any.

[Micha Ghertner]

First of all, the slippery slope argument is not invalid, so long as its mechanisms are sufficiently explained. Libertarians use the slippery slope argument against socialists all the time; hell, Hayek's "The Road To Serfdom" is one big slippery slope argument, as indicated by the title.

The argument that Friedman and other anarchists are making against small government is not a philosophical one, but an economic one. Friedman is not saying that no conceptual distinction can be made between state and anarchy. He is saying that the very mechanisms of government, i.e. the economic incentives created by giving one organization a monopoly on the use of legitimate force within a geographic area, are inherently unstable and cannot be restrained, and certainly not by any constitution when the interpretation and enforcement of that constitution is performed by the very same government it was intended to constrain.

Second, the implication of your post above is that the objective/subjective natural rights debate is somehow tied to the anarchist/minarchist debate. It isn't, and that's the main point I'd like to get across. The secondary point is that your statement, "a libertarian position would be one in which a relatively small number of rights are acknowledged and therefore enforced (namely those defending person and property), therefore requiring a relatively small and carefully restricted government to enforce them" is false. Neither libertarianism nor the desirability of rights protection implies that government is desirable or necessary.

[Houman]

Barnett is no longer an anarchist? How do you know that?