The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism

Matt Zwolinski, Benjamin Ferguson, Matt Zwolinski, Benjamin Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032247557
• eBook ISBN: 9781000569223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Have you ever wondered what libertarians think about vaccine mandates? About gun control? About racial and sexual inequalities? While libertarianism is well known as a political theory relating to the scope and justification of state authority, the breadth and depth of libertarian work on a wide range of other topics in social and political philosophy is less well known. This handbook is the first definitive reference on libertarianism that offers an in-depth survey of the central ideas from across philosophy, politics, and economics, including applications to contemporary policy issues.

The forty chapters in this work provide an encyclopedic overview of libertarian scholarship, from foundational debates about natural rights theories vs. utilitarian approaches, to policy debates over immigration, punishment and policing, and intellectual property. Each chapter presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of historical and contemporary libertarian thought on its subject, and thus serves as an essential guide to current scholarship, and a starting place for discovering future lines of research. The book also contains a section on criticisms of libertarianism, written by leading scholars from the feminist, republican, socialist, and conservative perspectives, as well as a section on how libertarian political theory relates to various schools of economic thought, such as the Chicago, Austrian, Bloomington, and Public Choice schools.

This book is an essential and comprehensive guide for anyone interested in libertarianism, whether sympathizer or critic.

Part IFoundations

1Natural Rights

Eric Mack

DOI: 10.4324/9780367814243-3

Introduction

This essay is about the character and structure of the natural rights theorizing which grounds – or at least seeks to ground – natural rights that strongly point to libertarian conclusions.¹ It focuses entirely on this first phase of natural rights argumentation. It is not concerned with the ways in which libertarian-minded natural rights thinkers employ or refine their affirmations of natural rights to support downstream conclusions about, e.g., what property rights and contractual rights individuals have and how those rights are acquired or why there must be radical limits on the use of coercive power by the state or state-like entities or under what special circumstances an individual may act toward other individuals in ways that would normally be forbidden by the rights of those others.

Natural rights are to be understood as our baseline, original moral rights. They are rights that come with being a person because the basis for affirming these rights is some deep feature (or small set of deep features) of all persons. That is why, if there are such rights, all persons possess the same natural rights. The point of saying that our natural rights are moral rights is to indicate that these rights are prescriptive rather than descriptive. An individual’s moral rights identify what conduct toward that individual others are morally required to engage in or avoid. If one has a right against all other persons not to be enslaved, all other agents are morally required not to enslave one. Of course, it does not follow from one having a right not to be enslaved that others will respect that right. It is all too evident that this natural right – along with others of comparable significance – has been massively violated throughout human history. To assert the right is not to deny that such violations occur; it is to condemn those violations.

Not all moral rights are natural rights. There are also acquired moral rights, e.g., moral property rights and moral contractual rights. By acting in and upon the world in certain ways, an individual can acquire just title to certain particular objects, e.g., this or that acorn, field, laptop, or tractor. And by interacting with others in certain ways, an individual can acquire contractual rights to others supplying her with specific goods or services. Since property rights and contractual rights depend upon the particular actions that different individuals have performed or the particular interactions into which they have entered, different individuals will possess different property and contractual rights. Nevertheless, the acquisition of specific property and contractual rights may depend upon our possession of a natural right to acquire property and a natural right to have contracts with one honored. If this is the case, as I believe it is, the acquisition of specific property and contractual rights is evidence for the existence of those background natural rights (Mack 2010).

The grounding argument for natural rights that strongly supports libertarian conclusions has a basic abiding structure. I support this key contention in two ways. First, I offer a highly stylized statement of this argument that orders the types of consideration that are common within grounding arguments for libertarian-friendly natural rights in a philosophically promising way. Second, I show that this basic structure – of course, with some local variations – is to be found in the foundational arguments of prominent natural rights theorists. I survey arguments offered by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), John Locke (1632–1704), Lysander Spooner (1808–1887), Ayn Rand (1905–1982), and Robert Nozick (1938–2002). With the exception of Grotius, each of these thinkers takes his or her advocacy of natural rights to support libertarian (or classical liberal) conclusions. Grotius is included because he is a crucial and telltale founder of natural rights thinking even though the overall bundle of conclusions that he reaches can hardly be described as classical liberal or libertarian.

The Abiding Structure of the Grounding Argument for Natural Rights

Natural rights serve to protect individuals in their pursuit of their own rational ends, in their promotion of their own greatest good. Such rights make moral sense only against a background that sees each individual’s success at living well as a separate, ultimate good. If individual lives and their flourishing did not each matter in their own right, there would be no rationale for the inclusion in morality of robust rights that are protective of each individual devoting herself to her distinctive good.² Since individuals and their flourishing do matter in their own right, it is at least morally permissible for one to decline to sacrifice one’s good even if doing so would save others from more extensive losses of their own. It is at least permissible to use all of the drug available to one to save one’s beloved child even if five other children – each beloved by his or her parents – could be saved with one fifth of the dose necessary to save one’s own child.

However, bare permissions do not cut much moral ice in a world in which we are each vulnerable to interferences with our exercise of those permissions. To be free is not merely to have those moral liberties. Freedom also requires that others be morally bound to allow one to exercise those liberties. And, of course, if others are bound to be circumspect in their conduct toward one, one is also bound to similar circumspection in one’s conduct toward others. Since other persons have the same moral standing as oneself, the affirmation of morally protected freedom for oneself requires one’s affirmation of that freedom for everyone else.

Moreover, if each individual’s life and attainment of well-being matter in their own right, it seems this fact must have import with respect to one’s conduct toward others. However, that import cannot be that each must equally serve the life and well-being of each other individual or that each must serve the aggregate of everyone’s well-being or some other concatenation of ends or conditions valued by people at large. For that would require that each deny the separate, distinct, and freestanding value of her own life and flourishing. Rather, each takes cognizance of others’ standing as beings with rational ends of their own by allowing each other person to seek her ends in her own chosen way subject only to the constraint that she abide by a like recognition in her treatment of her fellows. Individualism undercuts the moral demand that individuals subordinate their lives to some interpersonal good but individualism also constrains each individual’s pursuit of her own ends by requiring each to allow all others equally to pursue their own happiness or flourishing.³

Hugo Grotius at the Birth of Modern Natural Rights

It is striking that this basic argumentative structure is highly salient in the enormously influential masterwork The Rights of War and Peace, which the Dutch philosopher and legal theorist Hugo Grotius published in 1625. Grotius begins this treatise by confronting a challenge to the possibility of justice and rights that is posed by the Greek skeptic Carneades. According to Grotius, Carneades held that,

Nature prompts all Men … to seek their own particular Advantage: So that either there is no Justice at all, or if there is any, it is extreme Folly, because it engages us to procure the Good of others, to our own Prejudice.

Grotius 2005, 79

Either there is no justice because all human action is simply a matter of persons pursuing their own private advantage or there is such a thing as justice – which sometimes calls for one not to pursue one’s own advantage; but to pursue such justice rather than personal advantage is folly.

Grotius rejects Carneades’ conclusion by pointing to a further and different type of motivation that Grotius takes to be unique to human beings. This is the “Desire of Society,” which is

… a certain inclination to live with those of his own Kind, not in any Manner whatsoever, but peacefully, and in a community regulated according to the best of his Understanding … Therefore the Saying, that every Creature is led by Nature to seek its own private Advantage, expressed thus universally, must not be granted.

Grotius 2005, 79 and 81

Grotius’ view is not that the Desire of Society is a counterbalancing rational impulse to promote the well-being of other people. Rather, Grotius broadly accepts the pervasiveness and the rationality of individuals pursuing their own interests and ends. Only “expressed thus universally” is Carneades’ claim to be rejected. Indeed, Grotius’ position seems to be that it is rational for each of us to abide by our “Desire of Society” precisely because that is what truly serves the private advantage of each of us. According to Grotius, our understanding teaches us that ongoing cooperative relations with others are essential to our individual well-being and that such ongoing cooperative relations depend upon ongoing general compliance with certain constraining rules. The Desire of Society is our disposition to abide by those cooperation sustaining rules.

Grotius cites Seneca’s explanation of why such a cooperative order is essential to each person’s preservation and happiness.

In reality, on what does our Security depend, but on the mutual Exchange of good Offices? Certainly nothing but this Commerce of Benefits can make Life commodious, and put us in a Condition of guarding against unforeseen Insults and Invasions. How miserable would Mankind be, if everyone lived apart, and had no Resource but himself? … But in Society with his like he finds the wanted Succours. Nature to make him amends, has furnished him with two Things, which from weak and miserable as he would have been, render him very strong and powerful; I mean, Reason and a Disposition to Society … Take away the Disposition to Society, and you will at the same Time destroy the Union of Mankind, on which the Preservation and Happiness of Life depend.

Grotius 2005, 86 n.2

According to Grotius, the principles that sustain “the Union of Mankind” form the core of the Laws of Nature and “People which violate the Laws of Nature break down the Bulwarks of their future Happiness and Tranquillity” (Grotius 2005, 95). It is “Folly” to act contrary to these laws of nature because, in so seeking some “present Advantage,” a man “saps the Foundation of his own perpetual Interest” (Grotius 2005, 95).

What specific principles of justice or natural rights does Grotius identify? According to Grotius, “Right, properly so called” consists in

… the Abstaining from that which is another’s and the Restitution of what we have of another’s, or the Profit we have made of it, the Ob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Foundations
• Part II Key Concepts
• Part III Institutional Regimes
• Part IV Social Issues
• Part V Domestic Policy Issues
• Part VI Global Policy Issues
• Part VII Libertarianism and Economic Thought
• Part VIII Critiques of Libertarianism
• Index