Free Thoughts Blog

Lots of people do lots of things I wish they wouldn’t. And lots of people don’t do lots of things I wish they would. In fact, I’m rather certain the world would be a better place for me and people just like me if more were willing to go along with my desires and tastes, instead of stubbornly pursuing their own thing.

Take drinking tons of soda. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people consider sugar water a multiple-times-a-day beverage. It’s like wanting to pour chocolate sauce on everything, or eat brownies with every meal. In short, to my sensibilities, it’s gross. And it’s way less healthy than drinking water—which tastes a whole lot better, too.

Part of being civilized—arguably most of being civilized—is recognizing that different people do things differently and that such differences deserve respect. Respecting difference means allowing behaviors we find disagreeable, provided those behaviors don’t cause us harm. This covers big stuff like religious toleration—those people of other faiths sure do eat weird things and have a funny way of talking, but that’s their business—to, yes, even the dreadful behavior of drinking half-a-dozen Cokes a day.

Of course, civilized people aren’t prevented from making their opinions known. I just did, with my quips about soda, and if I happen to see you drinking one, I’m free to tell you what I think. (Though I risk coming across as an officious jerk if I’m not careful.) What civilized people don’t do is hit each other with clubs over such differences.

That’s why the paternalism Sarah Conly offers three cheers for in the pages of the New York Times amounts to a rah-rah for barbarism. Conly, an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College and author of Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, wants those upstanding chaps of the NYPD to flex their might to stop Americans from getting so fat.

To support her preference for state interference, Conly turns to the great classical liberal John Stuart Mill.

In his great work, On Liberty, Mill advances the “harm principle” as a crucial limit on the authority of the state: “[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.”

Which sounds pretty bad for the soda ban. But not so fast, Conly says. She tells us Mill endorsed preventing our freely chosen actions “when we are acting out of ignorance and doing something we’ll pretty definitely regret. You can stop someone from crossing a bridge that is broken, he said, because you can be sure no one wants to plummet into the river.” From that, she gets to the idea that, because people underestimate the dangers of drinking lots of soda, they’re (often/usually) acting out of ignorance when they drink it, and so we’re justified in at the very least making it much more difficult for them to consume the stuff in bulk.

But read the full passage from Mill:

If either a public officer or any one else saw a person attempting to cross a bridge which had been ascertained to be unsafe, and there were no time to warn him of his danger, they might seize him and turn him back, without any real infringement of his liberty; for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river. Nevertheless, when there is not a certainty, but only a danger of mischief, no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk: in this case, therefore (unless he is a child, or delirious, or in some state of excitement or absorption incompatible with the full use of the reflecting faculty), he ought, I conceive, to be only warned of the danger; not forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it.

It seems Conly left out he bit about such interference requiring first “no time to warn him of his danger.” Nor does she seem at all bothered by the important limit that, “when there is not a certainty, but only a danger of mischief, no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk.” Even accounting for the cognitive biases—which Conly says, if only he’d known about them, would’ve led Mill to support soda nannyism—it’s difficult square the harm caused by a large Coke with the imminent danger and certainty of effect needed to override the harm principle.

In fact, a great deal of On Liberty seems perfectly aimed at exposing the immorality of Conly’s paternalism. She should’ve read not only the rest of that passage, but also the rest of On Liberty. Mill warns of

an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation: and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary, to grow more and more formidable. The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase.

This “mischief” results from that urge to have others prefer the same thing we prefer, to have others behave the way we behave. But, like I said above and like Conly seems to forget, civilization means recognizing the primacy of individual choice, even choices we think silly.

There is no reason that all human existences should be constructed on some one, or some small number of patterns. If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common-sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode. Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another. The same mode of life is a healthy excitement to one, keeping all his faculties of action and enjoyment in their best order, while to another it is a distracting burthen, which suspends or crushes all internal life. Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.

Is drinking large sodas a way of life, though? Conly mocks the idea: “Large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity? Really?” But consider that if you drink 32 ounces of Coca-Cola, you’ll rack up 388 calories. A 20 ounce Iced White Chocolate Mocha from Starbucks has 500. Both aren’t good for you, but the Mocha’s worse. The difference is that the kinds of people who want to use government to save ignorant Americans from the harms of soft drinks are the kinds of people who prefer an Iced White Chocolate Mocha to a Coca-Cola.

That Conly calls for a ban Cokes and not Mochas indicates that what really bothers her is the behavior of those low-brow folks who slam giant soft drinks, but not so much the worse behavior of the middle-class and educated who just can’t start the day without a latte. About this tendency to use ourselves as the moral yardstick, Mill noted, “our idea of improvement chiefly consists in persuading or forcing other people to be as good as ourselves.”

So the real trouble is people aren’t acting like Conly—or the majority Conly imagines agrees with her—would like them to. Thus it’s time to call in the law. To which Mill says this:

A theory of “social rights,” the like of which probably never before found its way into distinct language—being nothing short of this—that it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious, passes any one’s lips, it invades all the “social rights” attributed to me by the Alliance. The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each other’s moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard.

To which Conly likely offers another three cheers. Especially when the individual rights she wants violated in the name of social rights are so, well, dumb. “As irritating as it may initially feel, the soda regulation is a good idea,” she writes. “It’s hard to give up the idea of ourselves as completely rational. We feel as if we lose some dignity. But that’s the way it is, and there’s no dignity in clinging to an illusion.”

Writing in The Subjection of Women—regarding a different group then burdened with the charge of irrationality—Mill had this to say about a Conly-style disregard for personal choice: “The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it.”

Conly may cheer the power of the throne, but the civilized among us should not.

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 “Liberty and Property,” “More on Property, Freedom, and Coercion,” and “Against Moralized Freedom.”

Liberty and Property

… we shouldn’t allow the freedom-enhancing power of private property to blind us to its costs—or even to the fact that some of those costs are measured in the currency of freedom itself. That property has the power to limit freedom as well as to protect it shouldn’t be surprising, really. After all, imposing limits on others’ freedom is part of the point of private property. …

The point of private property is that it minimizes infractions of liberty. It does this by limiting acts of license: acts that would proactively impose.

… The Hobbesian state of nature is a state of war precisely because and to the extent that each individual has the liberty to do “anything which, in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means” to the preservation of his own life—even if that thing is the crop you just harvested or your body itself. The freedom of each person to do anything he wishes is a recipe for a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Peace, prosperity, and stability are only achieved when each individual agrees to lay down some of this unlimited liberty and to respect the rights of others.

Hobbesian freedom is having unconstrained action, and it clashes with similar freedom among people. Lockean liberty is the absence of aggressive constraints, and it does not clash with similar liberty among people. They are completely different things.

I suspect that most libertarians will have no serious problems with what I have said so far. My freedom to steal your bread and punch you in the face is, anyway, a pretty unattractive kind of freedom from a moral point of view. So if private property simply places limits on that kind of freedom, that’s a feature, not a bug.

That is only limiting Hobbesian freedom of action that is also license (proactively or aggressively imposing on others) and hence not limiting Lockean (libertarian) liberty.

… A property right in land is a right to control access to that land. It is a “right to say ‘No’.” But if all land is privately owned, and all landowners have a right to say “No” to all non-landowners, then non-landowners are not equally free with landowners. They exist in a state of dependence. Like feudal serfs or the most abject slaves, they live only by the consent of those in command.

However, this consequence is easily avoided by understanding and applying the correct pre-propertarian libertarian theory of liberty. For to the extent that private property in land begins to proactively impose on non-landowners it is thereby not libertarian. This, of course, is largely a theoretical possibility in the real world, but any putative empirical cases can in principle be dealt with in an entirely libertarian way.

… Now, the thing to note about Cohen’s argument, and Spencer’s for that matter, is that it is based on a perfectly ordinary understanding of what freedom is. Cohen is not arguing that the poor lack “positive” freedom or “real” freedom or any other adjectival form of freedom of novel origin and dubious merit. He is arguing that they lack precisely the kind of negative freedom that libertarians purport to be concerned with—freedom from liability to physical interference by other human beings.

This is wrong. That is not the kind of freedom that clear-thinking libertarians are concerned with. Libertarians are concerned with something more like ‘people not being aggressively constrained by other people’ (I formulate this as ‘the absence of proactive impositions’ for reasons of clarity and precision that I cannot briefly rehearse here). And merely protecting one’s non-aggressively-acquired-and-held property (such as from would-be free riders) is precisely not to aggressively impose on the liberty of others. I cannot completely blame Cohen for being so utterly confused when so many of the advocates of libertarianism are almost as confused as he is.

More on Property, Freedom, and Coercion

… Why do I say that property rights limit freedom? I start with the belief that to be free is to not be subject to interference by other people. …

From a libertarian viewpoint, it would be clearer to say that “to be free is not to be subject to aggressive interference by other people.” And then we need an abstract theory of such “aggressive interference” from which property is derivable.

… I then note that property rights are, at their core, socially and legally enforceable licenses to interfere with others. If I have a property right in a piece of land, I get to physically interfere with anybody who tries to use that land without my consent, or call on the police to do my interfering for me. So my having a property right in the land limits your freedom to use it.

On the contrary, it would be more accurate to say that “property rights are, at their core, socially and legally enforceable claims to stop others interfering with us. If I have a property right in a piece of land, I get to physically defend myself from anybody who tries to use that land without my consent, or call on the police to do my defense for me. So my having a property right in the land limits something more like your Hobbesian freedom-of-action to use it and not your Lockean freedom-from-aggressive-interference.” Of course, all this is clearer with a more precise and explicit abstract theory of libertarian liberty than that we “not be subject to interference by other people”. And then we can see how property is objectively derivable from observing liberty.

Against Moralized Freedom

That the individual who owns no land is subject to interference by others seems undeniable. But what the libertarian can perhaps argue is that this is not the kind of interference that renders him unfree. Interference with the activity of another only renders that person unfree, we might say, when it does so in a way that violates his rights. Someone who is enslaved against his will is unfree. But someone who is forcibly prevented from enslaving another is not. In both cases, the person’s actions are coercively interfered with. But freedom is a moral term, the argument claims, not a neutral one. And it is only interference that violates its target’s moral rights that counts as a genuine infringement of freedom, on this view.

It greatly confuses matters to conflate 1) an objective theory of libertarian liberty as the absence of interpersonal aggressive constraints (however that might be formulated) and 2) whether there is a moral right to such liberty. Admittedly, it is a common confusion among libertarians. However, it is a far worse confusion to view libertarian liberty as mere interpersonal freedom of action, as Zwolinski does.

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.)