Liberty is among the greatest values ever discovered. It is the open door of human flourishing, and once you appreciate that, you want it. Once you recognize that liberty is a condition of a fully human life, you feel infringements of your liberty as wounds to your life — and just as a wound to your arm is more your concern than a wound to my arm, a restraint on your liberty places a greater demand on your attention than a restraint on mine.
In The Disaster of “Me” Libertarianism, James Peron seems to miss this basic point. In the essay, he rails against libertarians who focus on liberty as it applies to them, and particularly against middle-aged, straight, white male libertarians who focus on liberty as it applies to middle-aged, straight, white, males.
Mr. Peron is right that libertarians should be aware of how the principles of liberty apply in other people’s lives as well as their own. And he is quite right to point out that past “golden ages” when the freest people were freer were generally periods when some portion of the population was far more oppressed than anyone is now; we ought to be quite shocked if anyone suggests that an age of slavery was an era of great freedom, even if the people who were freest at the time had legal rights that should have been extended to all but instead were taken from even those who had them.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of any given person, the liberty that is most important, like the life that is most important, is his own. Even among laws that restrict us both the same way, a law that prohibits something you want to do and I do not, impinges on your life more than on mine: for example, those who enjoy marijuana must either give up a form of recreation they like or risk being imprisoned, whereas my recreational choices are not affected by pot prohibition because I have no desire to get high. So if you want to smoke pot, you probably care more about that particular aspect of liberty than I do. Even though we are both equally unfree with respect to smoking pot, the lack of freedom affects your life in a way it does not affect mine.
And the same applies where the law divides us into classes. Minors are deprived of their rights to a greater extent than any group of Americans except the inmates of prisons, jails, and psychiatric hospitals. Every lover of freedom ought to recognize that this is outrageous. But the feeling of outrage is quite properly felt most strongly by those who are thus denied their rights, and after them by those who have personal ties to them (especially minors other than their own children, since much of the control over a minor’s life of which he is deprived is given to his parents). If a minor does not feel the outrage, I would speculate that it is either because he does not recognize that he has the same moral rights as his elders or because his relationship with his parents is such that the restrictions that bind him because of his age rarely chafe.
The reason each person’s liberty is more important to him than anyone else’s is rooted in the nature of value. Value is relational: A value is valuable to, or valued by, a valuer. While things can be objectively valuable — and liberty is! — this does not mean they are valuable without being valuable to someone; it means that the person or people for whom they are valuable have objective reason to value them. That objective reason is rooted in the needs of the valuers’ lives. (See Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics.)
Because liberty is objectively valuable for all humans, a point on which I assume libertarians agree (if they believe in objective value at all) and therefore which I will not defend here, everyone has a reason to value his or her own liberty. The mere fact that liberty is valuable to you, however, no more gives me reason to secure your liberty than that food is valuable to you gives me reason to gives me reason to feed you. In both cases, something needs to be added to tie my interests to yours.
Sometimes, of course, that’s easy: If you’re my friend, I have a general interest in you (and you in me) that warrants looking out for you if I can. But from any given person’s perspective, most people are strangers.
Why then care? There are a number of reasons; I’ll discuss two important categories.
First, strangers can be valuable as potential acquaintances and because of the indirect effects they have on one’s life. If you are free to flourish, you may produce ideas, goods and services that may prove valuable to me. Perhaps we will trade with each other. For that matter, perhaps we will become friends. And even if we never interact directly, your production is likely to have some positive effect on me; for example, you may invent a product I will use. (See David Kelley, Unrugged Individualism.)
Second, if we live in the same political society, the laws and governing processes that govern you also govern me. In some cases, then, there may be no distinction between protecting your freedom and protecting mine: the same government action would impinge the same way on both of us. In other cases, it may be important for me to stand with you because the principle behind a government action that directly harms you and not me would also be likely to support actions harmful to me (and perhaps not you).
This latter is a mode of reasoning that was quite familiar to the Founding Fathers; indeed, the Revolution was largely driven by the recognition that if you accept a government action based on a bad principle because it does not directly affect you or does not affect you too badly, you are liable to find yourself the victim of a different application of the same principle. The tax to which the original tea party responded was not an especially high tax: It was objectionable because it had been laid by Parliament for the purpose of raising revenue, and if Parliament’s authority to levy such taxes were accepted, then (since Americans were not represented in Parliament) there would be no way to stop Parliament from imposing very high taxes on Americans, destroying us in order to protect MPs’ constituents from the burdens of taxation. Likewise, the other 12 colonies rallied around Massachusetts when Britain closed the port of Boston because if Britain could do that to Massachusetts, it could attack any other colony’s economy the same way.
The concept of liberty applies to all people and a vast variety of actions, and it is when we judge our laws by the standard of liberty that the liberty of each of us is most secure. Even if I have no desire to smoke pot, even if I believe (and even if I am right) that smoking pot is objectively morally wrong, if I support rights-violating laws when they do not impede a choice I wish to make, I undermine the political principle on which I need to rely when some aspect of freedom that matters in my own life is at stake. If I want to be free, I must object not only to laws that infringe on my freedom in ways that affect the choices I make, but also to laws that deny me the freedom to do things I would not do anyway and to laws that violate the rights of others and not mine.
Thus each of us has a stake in the liberty of everyone else. Men have an interest in the liberty of women, and women in that of men; straight people in the liberty of gay people, and gay people in that of straight people; et cetera. We even have an interest in the liberty of those who oppose our interests and our freedom, because if there is no right to advocate bad ideas, there is no intellectual freedom. We have these interests because we have an interest in liberty as a principle, and we have an interest in liberty as a principle because it is essential to our own ability to live a flourishing life.
And yet the stake each has in the liberty of others is at one remove from the stake each of us has in his own freedom, and the stake you have in your own freedom to do what you would not do anyway is less than your stake in the freedom to do what you would do. Indeed, it is your own need of your own freedom that, much more clearly and directly than the benefits you derive from others’ flourishing, grounds your interest in a principle of liberty that applies to all.
The unity of the concept of liberty means that libertarians should not disagree on political issues merely because of their traits (other than intellectual ones). But it does not mean that different libertarians may not properly have different priorities because different violations of liberty affect them differently. Every libertarian should draw political energy from the particular need he or she has for the value of liberty.
In defense of "me" libertarianism
Liberty is among the greatest values ever discovered. It is the open door of human flourishing, and once you appreciate that, you want it. Once you recognize that liberty is a condition of a fully human life, you feel infringements of your liberty as wounds to your life — and just as a wound to your arm is more your concern than a wound to my arm, a restraint on your liberty places a greater demand on your attention than a restraint on mine.
In The Disaster of “Me” Libertarianism, James Peron seems to miss this basic point. In the essay, he rails against libertarians who focus on liberty as it applies to them, and particularly against middle-aged, straight, white male libertarians who focus on liberty as it applies to middle-aged, straight, white, males.
Mr. Peron is right that libertarians should be aware of how the principles of liberty apply in other people’s lives as well as their own. And he is quite right to point out that past “golden ages” when the freest people were freer were generally periods when some portion of the population was far more oppressed than anyone is now; we ought to be quite shocked if anyone suggests that an age of slavery was an era of great freedom, even if the people who were freest at the time had legal rights that should have been extended to all but instead were taken from even those who had them.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of any given person, the liberty that is most important, like the life that is most important, is his own. Even among laws that restrict us both the same way, a law that prohibits something you want to do and I do not, impinges on your life more than on mine: for example, those who enjoy marijuana must either give up a form of recreation they like or risk being imprisoned, whereas my recreational choices are not affected by pot prohibition because I have no desire to get high. So if you want to smoke pot, you probably care more about that particular aspect of liberty than I do. Even though we are both equally unfree with respect to smoking pot, the lack of freedom affects your life in a way it does not affect mine.
And the same applies where the law divides us into classes. Minors are deprived of their rights to a greater extent than any group of Americans except the inmates of prisons, jails, and psychiatric hospitals. Every lover of freedom ought to recognize that this is outrageous. But the feeling of outrage is quite properly felt most strongly by those who are thus denied their rights, and after them by those who have personal ties to them (especially minors other than their own children, since much of the control over a minor’s life of which he is deprived is given to his parents). If a minor does not feel the outrage, I would speculate that it is either because he does not recognize that he has the same moral rights as his elders or because his relationship with his parents is such that the restrictions that bind him because of his age rarely chafe.
The reason each person’s liberty is more important to him than anyone else’s is rooted in the nature of value. Value is relational: A value is valuable to, or valued by, a valuer. While things can be objectively valuable — and liberty is! — this does not mean they are valuable without being valuable to someone; it means that the person or people for whom they are valuable have objective reason to value them. That objective reason is rooted in the needs of the valuers’ lives. (See Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics.)
Because liberty is objectively valuable for all humans, a point on which I assume libertarians agree (if they believe in objective value at all) and therefore which I will not defend here, everyone has a reason to value his or her own liberty. The mere fact that liberty is valuable to you, however, no more gives me reason to secure your liberty than that food is valuable to you gives me reason to gives me reason to feed you. In both cases, something needs to be added to tie my interests to yours.
Sometimes, of course, that’s easy: If you’re my friend, I have a general interest in you (and you in me) that warrants looking out for you if I can. But from any given person’s perspective, most people are strangers.
Why then care? There are a number of reasons; I’ll discuss two important categories.
First, strangers can be valuable as potential acquaintances and because of the indirect effects they have on one’s life. If you are free to flourish, you may produce ideas, goods and services that may prove valuable to me. Perhaps we will trade with each other. For that matter, perhaps we will become friends. And even if we never interact directly, your production is likely to have some positive effect on me; for example, you may invent a product I will use. (See David Kelley, Unrugged Individualism.)
Second, if we live in the same political society, the laws and governing processes that govern you also govern me. In some cases, then, there may be no distinction between protecting your freedom and protecting mine: the same government action would impinge the same way on both of us. In other cases, it may be important for me to stand with you because the principle behind a government action that directly harms you and not me would also be likely to support actions harmful to me (and perhaps not you).
This latter is a mode of reasoning that was quite familiar to the Founding Fathers; indeed, the Revolution was largely driven by the recognition that if you accept a government action based on a bad principle because it does not directly affect you or does not affect you too badly, you are liable to find yourself the victim of a different application of the same principle. The tax to which the original tea party responded was not an especially high tax: It was objectionable because it had been laid by Parliament for the purpose of raising revenue, and if Parliament’s authority to levy such taxes were accepted, then (since Americans were not represented in Parliament) there would be no way to stop Parliament from imposing very high taxes on Americans, destroying us in order to protect MPs’ constituents from the burdens of taxation. Likewise, the other 12 colonies rallied around Massachusetts when Britain closed the port of Boston because if Britain could do that to Massachusetts, it could attack any other colony’s economy the same way.
The concept of liberty applies to all people and a vast variety of actions, and it is when we judge our laws by the standard of liberty that the liberty of each of us is most secure. Even if I have no desire to smoke pot, even if I believe (and even if I am right) that smoking pot is objectively morally wrong, if I support rights-violating laws when they do not impede a choice I wish to make, I undermine the political principle on which I need to rely when some aspect of freedom that matters in my own life is at stake. If I want to be free, I must object not only to laws that infringe on my freedom in ways that affect the choices I make, but also to laws that deny me the freedom to do things I would not do anyway and to laws that violate the rights of others and not mine.
Thus each of us has a stake in the liberty of everyone else. Men have an interest in the liberty of women, and women in that of men; straight people in the liberty of gay people, and gay people in that of straight people; et cetera. We even have an interest in the liberty of those who oppose our interests and our freedom, because if there is no right to advocate bad ideas, there is no intellectual freedom. We have these interests because we have an interest in liberty as a principle, and we have an interest in liberty as a principle because it is essential to our own ability to live a flourishing life.
And yet the stake each has in the liberty of others is at one remove from the stake each of us has in his own freedom, and the stake you have in your own freedom to do what you would not do anyway is less than your stake in the freedom to do what you would do. Indeed, it is your own need of your own freedom that, much more clearly and directly than the benefits you derive from others’ flourishing, grounds your interest in a principle of liberty that applies to all.
The unity of the concept of liberty means that libertarians should not disagree on political issues merely because of their traits (other than intellectual ones). But it does not mean that different libertarians may not properly have different priorities because different violations of liberty affect them differently. Every libertarian should draw political energy from the particular need he or she has for the value of liberty.