Free Thoughts Blog

My general sense is that young libertarians tend to be better read in political philosophy than young progressives or conservatives. And that’s good! We ought to take that philosophical inclination—that sense of one’s self as part of an intellectual tradition—and run with it, embracing the careful study of ideas as an ongoing project.

Like any other field, really getting political philosophy demands time and effort. At Libertarianism.org, we have book lists to help you get started—or dig deeper if you already know the basics. It’s a lot of work, but immensely rewarding. Not only does a deep and broad knowledge of the theory behind various political ideologies make one better at arguing against opposing views, it also gives one a fuller appreciation for the thought of colleagues in the struggle for liberty.

One goal of Libertarianism.org is to show just how big a tent libertarianism is. No one thinker represents the libertarian view, as there is no one view. The most important writers disagree with each other on points minor and, sometimes, major. What ties them together—what makes them all libertarians—is their recognition of the primacy of liberty in the ordering of human affairs, and the limits this places on the state’s authority.

Rather often, however, I hear fans of one philosopher say that another philosopher within our tradition isn’t a libertarian. “You can’t call Nozick a libertarian, not really.” Or, “Rothbard is the only real libertarian.” Or, “If you’re an anarcho-capitalist, you’re not a libertarian.” Or, “Only anarcho-capitalists are libertarians.”

Last week, I wrote about the need to define terms. Those people are defining “libertarian” to mean only the kind of libertarianism they prefer. Now, it may well be the case that one form of libertarianism—Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism or Randian minimal statism or Hayekian classical liberalism—is ultimately better than the rest. And that’s an argument we should have. But it’s definitely not a settled one, nor is it one that should serve as pretext to condemn or ignore schools of libertarian political theory just because they aren’t in complete agreement with each other.  As Rothbard himself said, “Both the minarchists and the anarchists agree on rolling back about 99% of the state, so why not do that and then worry about the other 1% after we get it?”

In the end, even if Nozick’s particular form of libertarianism isn’t ultimately as powerful—or pure or compelling or whatever—as Rothbard’s (or the other way around), we can still learn much from reading both Rothbard and Nozick. And Locke, Hayek, Rand, Spooner, and so on.

Related, let me urge caution about philosophical certainty. If you think you’ve found a philosopher who is 100% right on every issue, it’s likely you haven’t. Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” And he’s right, at least in the sense that very nearly every question philosophers wrestle with was raised 23 centuries ago by Plato. Which means people have been arguing about these issues—and offering their answers to them—for over 2,000 years—without any truly settled.

This shouldn’t cause us to despair, of course. Philosophical thinking has progressed, becoming (generally) more sophisticated, and (generally) jettisoning the outright bad arguments of the past. What it should do is make us skeptical that any new arguments, or any arguments we happen to favor, are airtight.

Note, however, that “not being airtight” isn’t the same thing as “false.” A philosopher can be right on the whole, while getting some details wrong. And often those details aren’t necessary for the value of the overall project to hold up. By recognizing such (frequently minor) failings, we’re able to respond better to critics. We can say, “I know so-and-so’s argument for X doesn’t quite work, but that doesn’t undermine so-and-so’s broader argument, or at least it isn’t fatal.” On the other hand, not acknowledging the bad arguments made by even the best thinkers leaves us open to quick quick rebuttal: “If you can’t even see the problems with that, how can you I trust your assessment of the whole?”

That leads to what I think may be the most important thing to keep in mind while studying political philosophy: We can learn much from, and even deeply admire, thinkers with whom we ultimately disagree on important issues.

This one seems obvious to me, but from experience, some people see things differently, saying things like, “How can you say you enjoy reading philosopher so-and-so. He/she’s not a libertarian!” Or not the right kind of libertarian. Or mostly a libertarian, but holds some non-libertarian views.

As someone who enjoys reading philosophy, if I limited myself only to philosophers with whom I have no disagreements, I’d find myself with no one to read. I don’t even entirely agree with myself over time. My views have changed and will likely continue to change, even if probably not dramatically. As I write this, I’m 34 years old. It would be preposterous to think, in that short time, I’ve figured it all out.

We should never close off fields of inquiry simply because they appear to reach conclusions we find implausible or distasteful or wrong. For starters, what seems wrong to us now may in fact be right, even if the chances of it being right are astronomically small. Socrates told Gorgias, “I count being refuted a greater good. … I don’t suppose there’s anything quite so bad for a person as having false belief about the thing we’re discussing.”

We just can’t know for sure until we explore the ideas. Even if after exploring them we have good reason to reject the conclusions, we can still learn much by studying how the author arrived at them. And learning much is why we’re reading all this political philosophy in the first place.

Editer’s Note: This post is part of a series by philosopher J. C. Lester critiquing Libertarianism.org blogger Matt Zwolinski’s posts on understanding freedom. Here Lester responds to Zwolinski’s “Libertarianism and Liberty, Part 3: It Doesn’t Add Up.”

… Abolition did, of course, increase the freedom of slaves. But it also diminished the freedom of certain non-slaves. Specifically, it diminished the freedom of slave-owners.

No it did not. It diminished the license (the aggressive constraints or proactive impositions) of the slave-holders. License is the opposite of (libertarian) liberty. To free a slave is not to take any libertarian liberty from his slave-owner.

This sounds like a shocking claim. But it shouldn’t be. If we understand freedom in the way that most libertarians do – if we understand it, as Rothbard did, as the “absence of molestation by other persons” – then it is actually quite obvious. Prior to abolition, slave-owners were able to do certain things to their slaves without fear of interference by other persons. They could force their slaves to work, physically restrain them, beat them, and so on, all without the law doing anything to stop them. After abolition, they could no longer engage in these activities without fear of legal intervention. Before abolition, the law allowed them to do certain things. After abolition, it didn’t. Their freedom had been reduced.

No, the slave-owners’ power to restrict the liberty of others (to proactively impose on those others) had been reduced; they had not thereby themselves been proactively or aggressively imposed on.

… Freedom is one thing; justice is another. …

Freedom of action is one thing; freedom from interpersonal aggression (libertarian liberty) is another; justice is a third.

… What is the “unit” of freedom on which our operations of addition and subtraction are to be performed?

This last question is especially important, and challenging. To make it clearer, consider the following example from the philosopher Will Kymlicka’s critique of libertarianism. Suppose we want to compare the freedom of people in London with that of people in pre-1989 communist Albania. People in London have freedoms like the right to vote, …

Political voting is not a freedom but an attempt to oppress others in a majoritarian way. (I have replied at length to Kymlicka’s hopeless “critique of libertarianism” elsewhere.)

… the right to practice their religion, and other civil and democratic liberties.

Many so-called “civil and democratic liberties” are licenses posing as liberties.

People in Albania, let us say, lack these freedoms. “On the other hand, Albania does not have many traffic lights, and those people who own cars face few if any legal restrictions on where or how they drive” (143). Kymlicka’s sense, which I share and I expect most of you do too, is that Albania’s lack of traffic regulations does not compensate for its lack of basic civil liberties. It is, on the whole, a less free society than London. But the question is: can we account for this judgment simply in terms of a quantitative judgment about the amount of freedom in Albania as compared to London? …

Yes we can, but it’s a rough and ready quantity rather than a precise unit. I can often tell you that one object is bigger than another—“more than twice as big”, for instance—without being able to give any exact figures. And I can often do the same with liberty. (One test of ordinal liberty in the current case, incidentally, is the direction of migration—if it is allowed at all. People tend to move from areas of greater oppression to those of lesser oppression.)

… How would such a quantitative judgment be made? …

By starting with a libertarian theory of liberty instead of freedom of action.

Should we count up the individual, particular action-tokens that are forbidden in Albania and compare them with the action-tokens that are forbidden in London? If we discovered that, over the course of a year, red lights produce 18,623,545 instances of people being prevented from acting in the way they desire to act, whereas denial of the right to vote produces only 42,658 such instances, would that be sufficient to demonstrate that the red-lights are more freedom-restricting than the denial of political liberty? Or should we be counting not individual action-tokens but more general action-types, i.e. “the right to vote” versus “the right to drive through intersections as one wishes”? And whether we choose types or tokens, just how are we supposed to individuate actions in order to add them up? Is the right to marry the person of your choice one action? Or a shorthand way of describing an enormously large number of discrete actions?

Muddles about “liberty” aside, comparison of size simply does not entail that precise quantification is required. We know that Albanians had even less libertarian liberty than we had, don’t we?

However we decide to count up actions, the whole exercise seems largely to miss the point. For it assumes that what we care about when we care about liberty is (merely) the total number of actions allowed or prohibited. But why think that all freedoms are of equal value? Why should the freedom, say, to be governed by one’s own conscience in matters of religious belief count for no more than the freedom to count the blades of grass on one’s lawn? Why believe that all that matters in assessing the freedom of a country is the numerical quantity of freedom allowed, and not the substantive quality of that freedom?

The error here is in failing to understand that the amount of the lack of freedom relates to the extent that some infringement matters to the victim. There is no full distinction between quantity and quality. Pushing a passing person into a pond is a lesser infringement of their liberty than raping them if that person finds the latter to be worse.

Libertarians are right to believe that freedom matters. …

How do you know when you don’t have a proper theory of what libertarian liberty is?

… They might even be right to believe that it is the highest political value. But it is a mistake to think that these ideas, however true they might be, can be fleshed out in terms of a commitment to maximizing freedom. Morally, a commitment to maximizing freedom is inconsistent with libertarianism’s proper concern for individual rights. …

Libertarianism is primarily about protecting liberty. And more liberty is better than less. Individual rights are a separate and subsidiary matter.

If you watch enough people talk about politics, you’ll quickly conclude most people just aren’t very good at it. There’s often a kind of emotional intensity that clouds communication. But there’s also a general lack of skill at articulating the complex ideas and frequently-unexamined principles that motivate so much political disagreement.

Libertarians aren’t immune to this. And that’s too bad, because self-identified libertarians are a political minority, and so each interaction we have where the topic comes up is an opportunity to expose another person to our philosophy of liberty.

This post and its followups present some methods for improving our ability to communicate our ideas and for better understanding both our ideas and those of others. You can be the best speaker in the world, but if your opponent feels you’re misrepresenting his views or haven’t taken the time to study his side of things, he’s unlikely to be swayed by what you have to say.

I can’t stress enough that when approaching any topic—whether in debate or not—it’s crucial we think clearly. We—meaning all of us, not just libertarians, or progressives, or conservatives—tend to approach any question with a fog of beliefs, biases, and vague impressions. We seek out evidence that supports what we already think true, and look for ways to reject evidence that doesn’t. We’re more forgiving of the mistakes in reasoning made by those on our side, and pounce voraciously on the most minor mistakes made by ideological foes.

All this leads to spirited debate, but it doesn’t lead to good debate. It doesn’t lead to the kind of debate or discussion that creates a feeling of sympathy in our interlocutors or makes much progress in encouraging them to accept—or at least not so thoroughly reject—our views.

Perhaps the most important first step in ensuring a fruitful debate is also one most easy to skip over: We need to define our terms. Almost nothing derails an argument faster than when both sides use the same words to mean different things. If I say that human beings have rights and you say they don’t, it’s important that we know what the other means by rights.

This happens all the time in political debate. Take equality. Am I for it? Well, yes and no. It depends what you mean by equality. Equality of resources, including forced redistribution? Because if it’s that, then I’m against it. But does equality instead mean equal treatment by the state, equality before the law, and equality of basic rights? Well, in that case, sign me up!

So before plunging too far into a discussion, take a moment to think about whether everyone is talking about the same thing. It’s as easy as asking, “What do you mean by that?”

We should try to recognize when we’re making bad arguments. We never set out to argue poorly. But we often stumble into it, most frequently by not stopping to consider whether the arguments we’re making are at all plausible. The philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his great essay, On Liberty, pointed out that, “while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.” It does us no good in communicating our ideas to have those ideas based on shoddy foundations. But even beyond harming our capacity to communicate well, it also means doing ourselves a disservice. Who wants to believe things for bad reasons?

One of the best ways to avoid making bad arguments is to spend time studying counter-arguments. And the best way to do this is to read—and understand—our critics.

Any argument made often enough will give rise to counter-arguments. Sometimes the initial argument can withstand them, and sometimes it can’t. Likewise, sometimes those counter-arguments will be strong and sometimes they won’t.

But regardless of whether we believe our own positions are inviolable, it behooves us to know and understand the arguments of those who disagree. We should do this for two reasons. First, our inviolable position may be anything but. What we assume is true could be false. The only way we’ll discover this is to face up to evidence and arguments against our position. Because, as much as we may not enjoy it, discovering we’ve believed a falsehood means we’re now closer to believing the truth than we were before. And that’s something we should only ever feel gratitude for.

Second, even if we’re not wrong, understanding and wrestling with counter-arguments improves our grasp of our own views and makes us better able to articulate and defend them.

Allow me the indulgence of quoting again from Mill, this time at length.

In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers—knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter—he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.

Mill is absolutely right. Following his prescription is demanding, of course, but it’s worth it if we want to be better able to convince others of our deserved confidence in our positions.

And it can be deeply rewarding, too, for reasons I’ll explore next time.

Editer’s Note: This post is part of a series by philosopher J. C. Lester critiquing Libertarianism.org blogger Matt Zwolinski’s posts on understanding freedom. Here Lester responds to Zwolinski’s “Libertarianism and Liberty, Part 2: Against Maximum Freedom.”

What utilitarianism seeks to maximize is not the happiness of any particular person but of the aggregate of happiness across persons: the sum of my happiness, plus yours, plus hers, and so on. But maximizing aggregate happiness is compatible with leaving some people destitute. It is even, more disturbingly, compatible with making some people destitute. …

It is also logically compatible with libertarianism. Moreover, happily, it is contingently systematically compatible with libertarianism.

So long as the misery of the few is sufficiently compensated by the happiness of the many, the treatment of fate of any particular individual is of no decisive relevance for the utilitarian. It is for this reason that philosophers as distinct as John Rawls and Robert Nozick have both objected that utilitarianism fails to take seriously the separateness of persons.

In theory, but not in practice. Analogously, libertarianism fails to take seriously the suffering of persons—in theory, but not in practice. For the most part, the classical liberals (a broader church than—anarchist and minarchist—libertarians) did not see a clash between liberty and utility. And they were right. (Although I think preference-utilitarianism, as famously championed by R. M. Hare, is the best version: we often want real states of affairs as ends-in-themselves and would not want happy delusions or pleasurable mental states instead.)

The view that justice consists in maximizing liberty is subject to precisely the same objection. Insofar as it is aggregate liberty that is to be maximized, this view will countenance the sacrifice of some persons’ freedom for the benefit of others, so long as the net result is positive. Rather than freedom serving as a constraint on the ways in which others may permissibly act, freedom on this view serves as a goal to be maximized without any real constraint.

But if “rule libertarianism” is true, as I suppose, then the problem is not a practical one for libertarianism.

This has troubling implications for a variety of policy issues, such as (for example) questions involving the preventative detention of potentially dangerous individuals. On the maximizing view, there is no principled objection to imprisoning an innocent person X merely on the grounds that X is deemed likely to commit some offense in the future. Such preventative detention restricts X’s liberty, of course, but if it prevents X from acting in ways that would have restricted the liberty of sufficiently many other people (by killing them, or stealing from them, etc.), then, on this view, it is justifiable.

We are all “potentially dangerous individuals.” But locking up everyone, even if it were practicable, would proactively impose more than it would prevent proactive impositions. Hence liberty would be lessened thereby. However, it is different if person X is known to be a significant and serious danger to others. Such a person proactively imposes on us if he enters our private streets without our permission. So we could at the very least exclude him from them in self-defense. And if he is a serious-enough danger, then incarceration is theoretically possible. But it is hard to test the issue critically here without concrete examples.

A defender of the maximizing view might argue that such trade-offs are unlikely to be beneficial in the real world as opposed to the world of philosophical thought experiments. And there is undoubtedly some truth to this response. I will simply note, however, that it is precisely the same response that a utilitarian might make to the charges of injustice we have leveled against his theory. And so whatever reasons we have for finding the response inadequate in that context (and I think we have plenty), apply here as well.

But the utilitarian’s response is in practice adequate if he is a rule-preference-utilitarian who embraces rule-libertarianism as the right rule to that end.

Libertarianism does not hold that people are morally free to do all that they will. The freedom of all individuals is sharply curtailed by the rights of others. If I try to punch you in the nose, or trespass on your property, you may justly interfere with my doing so.

This, again, conflates libertarian liberty with freedom of action. It also conflates what libertarian liberty is with whether or not that liberty is a right or is just.

It is easily imaginable that I can promote some people’s (libertarian) liberty at the expense of others’: for instance, the well-known libertarian thought-experiment concerning stealing a gun to shoot a murderer on a killing spree. (In that particular case, I advocate stealing the gun but the owner being able to sue for damages if he wants. Result: utility and liberty maximized—if temporarily and trivially flouted with respect to the gun-owner.)

It was suggested that it might be interesting to have a response from me to Matt Zwolinski’s “Liberty and Property”. However, I see that his post is one of several that form what is more or less one long essay. And so I take the opportunity to reply to them all. I shall try to keep my responses short and avoid repetition except where it strikes me as desirable for clarity or emphasis (though I notice it often does). Consequently, I shall tend to say less as the entries proceed. Where I agree with Zwolinski, or do not significantly disagree, then I shall say nothing. I keep Zwolinski’s titles for each section, and insert my comments below the relevant parts of the original text.

Libertarianism and Liberty, Part 1: A Complicated Relationship

… what else could define a commitment to “libertarianism” other than a belief in liberty? Other political ideologies pay lip service to freedom, and perhaps even hold it as one legitimate value among others to be balanced in the great political calculus. But what sets libertarians apart is their belief that liberty is the highest political value. …

There are several immediate problems with the idea of having a “commitment” to the view that “liberty is the highest political value”. 1) We cannot be committed to any view. We don’t decide what we believe is true or moral: introspection reveals our beliefs. And so a perceived refutation can stop us holding a view at any time. 2) Strictly, liberty is not a “value” (values only exist in people’s minds), but a concept or state of affairs. 3) Libertarianism is, in one sense, not “political” but anti-political in principle (at most, a minimal state is a necessary evil). 4) Libertarianism is not necessarily even the “highest” principle. A libertarian principle might be held to be inviolable. But even that does not entail that it is the “highest” principle. If it is held for modus vivendi reasons, for instance (as I suppose it usually is to some degree, at least), then all participants might have other principles that they would personally rank higher, or value more, than the libertarian principle. However, they realize that liberty is a safer way to promote those other principles than the use of aggression (i.e., flouting interpersonal liberty).

… let’s look at one popular and superficially plausible interpretation. What it means to hold liberty as the highest political value, on this view, is to hold that liberty ought to be maximized. …

Before jumping into issues of maximization, should we not first ask, “what is the best theory of libertarian liberty?” Otherwise, whether or how it can or should be maximized cannot be answered. My own preferred theory of social or interpersonal libertarian liberty is an objective and pre-propertarian “absence of proactive impositions” (on people by people). That is, I take ‘proactive impositions by other people’ to be the relevant aggressive constraints that fit what libertarianism requires to be avoided. Consequently, where an absence is not fully possible—as is often the case—then a minimization will be the most libertarian option. From this formula I have argued that we can derive self-ownership itself and all libertarian property, as well as solving various known paradoxes and newly arising problems. But I can’t go into detailed explanations here. See Escape From Leviathan: Libertarianism Without Justificationism (2012 [2000])

… I am unable to think of a single libertarian philosopher who defends a position like the one I am describing. …

I am inclined to the view that liberty ought to be maximized: why would a libertarian put up with less liberty if more were possible? However, I also incline to a version of what I call ‘rule libertarianism’ (rather than ‘act libertarianism’): as a general rule, don’t violate liberty even where it looks as though greater liberty can thereby be achieved—because it won’t work in the long run.

… The standard libertarian response to such criticisms, of course, is to point out that employment relationships are voluntary, and so whatever restrictions employers impose upon their employees do not actually count as a violation of their freedom in the relevant sense. Personally, I don’t find this response to be all that persuasive. For starters, it simply assumes that what libertarians believe ought to be the case actually is the case - viz., that employment relationships are entirely voluntary. But this ignores the myriad ways in which coercion infests our present system, …

There is considerable confusion about “coercion” among libertarians. Many of them use ‘coercion’ as meaning whatever is unlibertarian. However, libertarians cannot be against ‘coercion’ as such in its plain English sense: roughly, interpersonal force and the threat of force. They can only be against coercion that violates liberty. They cannot be against coercion that enforces liberty or is voluntarily or contractually accepted. And libertarians must also be against plainly non-coercive acts that violate liberty, such as fraud and most theft (some theft also involves coercion).

… often to the benefit of employers and to the detriment of laborers. …

Yes, the state interferes and confuses matters. But the crucial point must be distinguished and not lost: insofar as the state does not impose rules that flout liberty, then “whatever restrictions employers impose upon their employees do not actually count as a violation of their freedom in the relevant sense”. And then it cuts both ways: whatever restrictions employees impose upon their employers do not actually count as a violation of their freedom in the relevant sense. Of course, it would clarify matters to have an explicit libertarian theory of liberty or freedom to apply here, and Zwolinski does not have one.

… Second, the argument assumes that whatever is voluntarily agreed to cannot be a restriction on freedom. But this is either wrong or at least a very strange way of using the word “freedom.” Suppose I ask you to lock me up in your dungeon and throw away the key, perhaps in exchange for your writing a check to my child who I would otherwise be unable to support. However unimpeachable the contract may be on procedural terms, I am, once locked away in your dungeon, less free than I was when I was, well, free. Libertarians might be right in thinking that there is nothing morally wrong with the lack of freedom I now endure. But to infer from this that it must not be a lack of freedom after all is an abuse of language and logic.

This is a mistake that no libertarian ought to make. It comes from having no explicit theory of libertarian liberty. The sense of ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ as the absence of mere physical constraint is completely different from the libertarian sense of not being aggressively constrained (or proactively imposed on) by another person. Once voluntarily incarcerated, Zwolinski lacks physical freedom or liberty but he has suffered no loss of interpersonal libertarian freedom or liberty. There is no “abuse of language and logic” in making this clear distinction. The abuse is in conflating two conceptually distinct homonyms.

The fundamental problem with this line of argument is its reliance on what philosophers call a “moralized” conception of liberty.

Some libertarians are indeed confused in just this way. But there is no need to mention morals at all. Libertarian liberty has an objective content both theoretically and in its observance. It is an entirely separate matter whether such liberty or its observance is moral.

… If, as many libertarians assume, violent criminals voluntarily forfeit their rights to liberty when they commit their criminal acts, then punishing them by imprisonment might not be unjust. But, surely, this does not mean that the criminal is, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, perfectly free when the policemen handcuff him, throw him in their police car, and lock him away in a cell.

The criminal’s physical liberty has been reduced. But his libertarian liberty has not been infringed to the extent that the judicial system was only engaged in rectifying his infringements of the libertarian liberty of others. That ought not to appear paradoxical or unclear.

Freedom and Justice are both important values, and ones to which libertarians do and should give their allegiance. But we should resist the temptation to suppose that they are the same value. That they are not the same entails that it is possible, in principle at least, that they may in certain circumstances come into conflict. This is a possibility that I will explore in a future post.

Libertarian liberty, and freedom of action, and justice are three distinct concepts and states of affairs. But if what I call the ‘classical liberal compatibility thesis’ is true, then liberty will systematically be compatible with justice and human welfare in their practical applications.

Editor’s note: J. C. Lester’s response to part 2 of Matt Zwolinski’s essay  “Libertarianism and Liberty” will be featured in the next post in this series.

In my last essay, I noted that both John Locke and Robert Nozick seem to make utilitarian appeals to the social effects of property in arguing for its justification. In this essay, I clarify the nature of those arguments, and show how they can be developed to provide a genuinely liberty-based defense of private property rights, against the critiques of Spencer and Cohen.

The first and most important thing to note about both Locke and Nozick’s arguments is that, unlike utilitarian arguments, they are individualistic rather than collectivistic in nature. For the utilitarian, all that matters in justifying an action (or an institution like property rights) is its effect on overall well-being. On the utilitarian view, then, property rights are justified if the overall benefits they produce are greater than the overall harms they produce, regardless of how those benefits and harms are distributed among different individuals.

For Locke and Nozick, on the other hand, property rights are only justified if they benefit (or at least do not harm) each and every individual. Now, this probably seems like an extremely tough argumentative hurdle for the defender of property to clear. Could it really be the case that each and every individual is better off under a system of private property rights than he would have been without one? Consider the position of the poorest of working-class Americans today and ask what his situation would be like if nobody had ever appropriated anything. What would his life be like if he enjoyed the full bounty of the state of nature, but none of the results of the past appropriations which (in our world) have actually taken place? He could walk or work or live on any land he chose; he could draw gold or oil from the ground, hunt or harvest all the food he could find from the land, and draw all the fish he wished from the sea.

But how would he get to the oil, or the gold? Without a system of private property in place to protect and provide incentives for creative work, who would have built the tools for him to get it? Who, even, would have built the knife or the spear with which he might hunt or fish? Tools such as these require physical resources, time, and effort to create. And unless people can be relatively sure that others will not seize the fruit of their creative efforts, why should we expect them to invest these scarce goods? No property rights means no industry or trade, even in their crudest and most basic forms. And no industry or trade means, in the famous words used by Thomas Hobbes to describe the state of nature, “no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

So there is, at least, a strong initial case to be made that everyone, even the poorest day-laborer, is better off under a system of property rights than they would be without. But there’s an even more interesting way of developing Nozick’s argument that makes the connection to individual liberty even more straightforward. As we have seen, a substantial part of both Locke and Nozick’s argument for property rights is based on the claim that private property rights make people and resources more productive. But if we think carefully about what this claim really means, it suggests that most of the property that exists today simply wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for private property rights. In a state of nature, we wouldn’t be arguing about how to distribute iPhones, or access to CT scans, or university educations, because people simply wouldn’t have bothered to invest the resources necessary to create these things without the protections and incentives provided by property rights.

And this makes the status of the claim that property rights restrict liberty a bit unclear. Cohen’s argument is that the poor individual who can’t afford a train ticket is being coerced by a system of property rights – if she tries to get on the train without paying for a ticket, men with guns will stop her. And that’s true enough, as far as it goes. But can we conclude from this that property rights in general are restricting her liberty? After all, without a system of property rights, the train she’s trying to board wouldn’t even exist in the first place. So if property rights merely prevent her from using a resource that wouldn’t even have existed in the absence of property rights, does it really make any sense to say that property rights restrict her liberty?

Moreover, if we add to this consideration a list of the various ways in which property rights enhance liberty, the libertarian case in their favor grows even stronger. Protecting an individual’s property in her self and her positions allows her to control her own life – to make choices and plans and to take action safe in the knowledge that, as far as her own belongings are concerned, she alone has ultimate jurisdiction. This is obvious in the case of property rights in one’s self. But property rights in ones own body would do little to enhance one’s liberty if one had no ability to make use of and control external resources like land and other physical goods. Finally, it is because of private property that individuals have the ability to exercise their powers of choice over a staggeringly wide range of options in everything from the flavor of their toothpaste to the aesthetic and cultural character of the neighborhood in which they raise their families. Of course, not everyone likes to call that kind of ability “freedom.” And I won’t quibble over terminology. But whatever we call it, it shares a lot of the liberating power that makes freedom attractive. And the fact that the institution of private property puts such ability in the hands of the masses is one of its great moral virtues.

This, I think, is a rough outline of how a system of private property should be defended on genuinely liberty-based grounds from the critiques of Cohen and Spencer. But it leaves a number of important questions unanswered. I have claimed, for instance, that a system of property rights makes even the poorest better off. But better off compared to what, exactly? What is the baseline against which property arrangements must be compared in order to be justified? And what if there are some people in a capitalist society who aren’t made better off by the sort of property arrangements it enforces? Must we then discard capitalist property arrangements altogether? Or does this, as Jason Brennan has recently suggested, open the door to redistributive policies within a capitalist society, on grounds not of charity but of justice? These questions raise important theoretical and practical issues, but their resolution will have to wait for a future essay.