I like this idea! I'm in print suggesting (in an aside) that deontological libertarians who also think laissez faire leads to good consequences have grounds to suspect they've been guilty of motivated reasoning on the grounds that, as you say here, they believe in a surprising coincidence. (It comes up in this paper, where I'm interested in those sorts of coincidences more generally: https://academic.oup.com/book/39559/chapter-abstract/339427886?redirectedFrom=fulltext ) There I contrasted deontological libertarians with consequentialist libertarians, who I suggested have less reason to worry they've been guilty of motivated reasoning.
But I sort of presupposed that the natural revision would be to rethink the empirical beliefs about the consequences of libertarian policy. It didn't occur to me they could revise the belief that it's a coincidence, but now that you say it that seems exactly right.
I recall reading Rothbard directly, claiming that even if liberty - or “the system of liberty” wording iirc - didn't result in economic growth and instead total poverty, he would still be into it. Kind of a ludicrous position.
Clever piece. One could make a similar, but weaker, argument to show that people who take it for granted that climate change is bad should also be religious believers. If change is bad that means we started with an optimal climate — could that be an accident?
Starting with a benevolent deity, you are left with the problem of why he permitted climate change — but that can be handled, like with the more general problem of pain and evil, as a result of free will.
Getting back to your point, I think some libertarians who believe in the NAP see it as deduced in some way from the nature of what is good for humans, just as Ayn Rand thought she had deduced her version from facts of reality.
To believe that climate change is bad, one doesn't need to believe that we started with an optimal climate. Just that we started with a better climate than the one we're heading towards.
And regardless of whether the future climate is better or worse, humans have adapted to our current climate. There would be costs involved in transitioning to a new climate, even if the new climate is better. It would be a question of whether those costs are too high for the expected benefits.
You could equally claim that I shouldn't be opposed to being forcibly relocated to another part of the world, on the grounds that I shouldn't assume that I was born in the optimum place. I don't believe that I was born in the optimum part of the world, but the costs of relocating are very high (I would have to make new friends, maybe learn new languages and new ways of life), and my situation now is good enough that to be moved to a new location at random would almost certainly be a terrible thing for me.
1. I agree that there are transitional costs. They would be large if average temperature was going up by ten degrees a decade but so far it has gone up by about a tenth of a degree a decade, projected to increase to about two tenths. It's hard to see how change that slow, in a world always changing for other reasons, could be a large cost.
2. I agree that climate change might happen to have a large net negative effect, although I don't see good reasons to expect it to. What I wrote was "people who take it for granted that climate change is bad."
I don’t think climate change doom is a problem on naturalism, because you could argue human evolution and/or civilization flourishing only occurred *as a result of* the optimal climate. So it’s no coincidence.
Except that humans evolved in a particular local climate, initially Africa, not in some global average climate. Civilizations flourished across a range of climates larger than the projected change.
To argue that climate change can be expected to be bad you need to start with an optimal distribution of climates.
Of course, you can still argue for transition costs. And you can still argue that climate change happens to be bad by trying to estimate good and bad effects, but in my view there is too much uncertainty in both to sign the sum. For details:
I've read your post and found it very persuasive. My point was not that human flourishing requires a narrow climate, only that conditional on believing humans require a narrow climate, you don't get much evidence for the existence of God; you could argue that human flourishing/evolution only occurred once the narrow climate obtained on Earth.
PS In Machinery of Freedom you said you could find counterexamples to both the NAP and utilitarianism. Do you believe in Locke-type natural rights? (His ideas about self-ownership, not so much the stuff about land appropriation) Or are you now a utilitarian?
I am not a utlilitarian. I believe that human happiness matters but is not all that matters, that violating rights is bad but not infinitely bad. For the source of my moral beliefs (not the contents) see:
Even if the future climate is not inherently better or worse than the current one, everything is set up for the current one, so you'd expect transition costs to something as likely to be worse as better, so you'd expect climate change to be a net negative, before you looked at more specific evidence.
True. But at warming of a degree or two a century, in a civilization that exists across a many degree range of average temperature, you would not expect that effect to be very large. I did say "similar, but weaker."
I think an even stronger case of this is Vegans. It would be a mighty coincidence that the diet which is best for the environment and least cruel is also the healthiest one, despite being uncommon for most of human history. It’s almost as if some higher power had organized it that way.
Is there a strand of libertarian starting only with the Free-Market Purism assertion, and then instrumentally adopting the NAP for pragmatic or utilitarian reasons? Ie. argue that the NAP is the simplest basic principle to adopt in order to reap the most benefit from the free market. From my naive perspective, not having given it much thought, that’s how I would try to get out of it this if I wanted to be libertarian and not believe in god.
Do libertarians say what it means for us to flourish? I wonder if they think, for example, that rights-protection is constitutive of our flourishing. If that’s true, then of course the an-cap utopia is also where we flourish most.
The sense of flourishing I’m attributing to them is hedonic/desire-satisfaction/material flourishing. They think AnCap would give us the best of these goods.
Interesting. To me at least, the more parsimonious argument is that natural rights are a very useful fiction that is intrinsically incoherent without a god-concept, hence the need to invent him.
If you're trying to find natural rights that are anything more than human convention, what other source could there possibly be besides a postulated god? Natural rights aren't just floating around out there. What kinds of things are they? What compelling force do they have on their own?
Believing in a god doesn't solve that problem. In order to get from "what God commands" to what is good you have to first know that god is good, which requires some preexisting knowledge of moral facts. The all powerful being you have discovered could be the devil, or no more good than the Greek gods, or a moral nihilist with a wicked sense of humor.
I agree, I don’t think it ultimately solves the problem. The Euthyphro dilemma is unavoidable. At best it might make it easier to argue for natural right with God than without, but even that’s debatable. As I see things, they are both fictions (which may still be useful/adaptive nonetheless).
There's no "source" for moral goods. To think there needs to be a source for those goods is a category error, as it assumes they are contingent, concrete truths.
I'm just not sure in which direction, but I suspect (and hope) from freedom (the Original Principle) to efficiency (cope).
That said, the relationship working the other way (free markets are efficient and BECAUSE OF THAT they support the rights/freedom better than any other system) makes much more sense. I don't think it's true, but you could argue [*not a philosopher] that most of human misery including most infringement on rights has its sources in scarcity (and its magnified by our "nature" having evolved in conditions of scarcity) which is not an unreasonable position to take (I mostly agree on the highest society/meta level, with allowances for individual organic defects) then the most efficient economy will asymptotically veer to some ultimate post scarcity future where almost noone would want to infringe on others' rights.
I don't think we're anywhere near, and I'm not sure if it would work (apart from scarcity drives we also have the status stuff which is probably strong enough to be independent) but conceptually it makes more sense than "optimal rights protection just happens to be economically optimal too".
Having previously held such beliefs, I can agree they are definitely "faith-based", and I'll go with motivated reasoning as the explanation while remaining an atheist. Worth noting however is that a number of such libertarians are already theists, but I'm not sure it's a majority.
Good article and this is something I've thought about independently on my own. However, I don't see how this merely applies to Rotbardian libertarianism. It should apply to Michael Huemerian libertarians like me, Bryan Caplan, and David Friedman.
I think David Friedman is a consequentialist libertarian, but he can correct me if I’m wrong.
But you’re right that the argument extends much more broadly, basically to anyone who supports capitalism as an extension of Lockean self-ownership. Locke is basically written into the American constitution/declaration; I think the argument by Amos applies to all George Will-type traditional American conservatives. Maybe that’s why so many of them are also religious!
He's not consequentialist. That's a common misunderstanding (that I used to have). He's a moderate deontologist like Huemer and views Huemer's ethical theory as the best view.
>Rothbardians believe in what seems to be a most incredible coincidence. They think, on the one hand, that our natural rights require anarcho-capitalism2, and maintain, on the other, that this set-up just so happens to be the ideal economic system for human flourishing.
I am not a Rothbardian, but this is not a coincidence. What would be the point of rights, any kinds of rights, if they would not lead to human flourishing? They boil down to "don't do bad stuff to other people" and OF COURSE that leads to flourishing. Random example, committing arson violates rights and is not good for the economy either. Both because it destroys stuff.
No, the argument needs to be presented differently. Like, natural rights prevent the governments to do things that obviously directly lead to human flourishing, such as public education, and it is strange that they think it leads to human flourishing in indirect ways.
>Rothbardians believe in what seems to be a most incredible coincidence. They think, on the one hand, that our natural rights require anarcho-capitalism2, and maintain, on the other, that this set-up just so happens to be the ideal economic system for human flourishing.
If it just so happens that human nature is X , them it can just so happen that Y.is the best economic-political-ethical system..
>But there’s nothing metaphysically necessary about this correlation
Why would there need to.be ? Libertarians are only making a claim.about humans.as the exist..Rand argued that immortal robots would not need ancap.
>Thus, the surprising, near-perfect harmony between our moral rights and optimific social structure
You seem to be assuming that "rights" and "wnat maximises flourishing" are metaphsyically non identical. If two things are identical , harmony is guaranteed.
Of courses the same.consiseration pulls the teeth of the psychophysical harmony argument.
I don’t think there has to be a metaphysical explanation for this, it’s just a combination of A) belief that people tend to flourish when their rights are respected, B) tailoring the set of “rights” to be things a libertarian society ensures. A lot of hardcore lolberts don’t *really* believe in the existence of rights as well, from what I’ve experienced in discussions with them.
>>To an anarcho-capitalist, efficiency issues are not entirely irrelevant. The perspective emanating from this quarter is that if libertarian deontology is undertaken, then prosperity will ensue.
>But there’s nothing metaphysically necessary about this correlation.
I think they would believe that there is (in fact logically necessary). General equilibrium models will show that you reach pareto optimality by using market methods (under certain conditions). Although many libertarians don't like general equilibrium models, I think they can cash out this argument in some other way.
> The psychological laws governing human behaviour could conceivably have been such that anarcho-capitalism—despite being the only system that can protect our rights—was not the optimal system for promoting human flourishing.
This is actually the basis of many critiques against markets, but market proponents tend to be committed to the view that we are rational decision makers, and therefore free markets "work" i.e. are pareto optimal.
> On the hypothesis that Reality is blind, pitiless, and indifferent to human affairs, it’s unbelievably surprising that the optimal system of political organisation just so happens to be one that’s seemingly tailor-made to respect our rights.
It's not at all surprising that if everyone's rights are respected they form a social system that maximizes well-being in some way.
But this is a problem for all moral realists. What explains the surprising pairing of our brain faculties (subject to natural selection) and our ability to perceive moral truths?
There can be many reasons one may believe that humans, left to their own devices, would do better than they would under coercion. God is the dumbest one. Spontaneous order isn't a conspiracy theory - it really does exist, and it's how we run most things. It's a fact of human existence.
I suspect you've over-emphasised the "natural right" aspect of their thinking, here. After all, without a God, there's no robust basis for 'rights'. You could convincingly argue that an atheist that is against slavery is secretly a theist, for instance. It would also be a poor, dishonest argument to make.
This is not to say that libertarians are correct. They fail to account for the many ways in which spontaneous order breaks down, or keeps everyone trapped in a lower-level equilibrium, or has terrible unseen costs.
A valid criticism, then, is that libertarians have flawed premises based on a simplistic interpretation of the world. But that's rather universal, and I daresay, is something this essay is plagued by as well.
I like this idea! I'm in print suggesting (in an aside) that deontological libertarians who also think laissez faire leads to good consequences have grounds to suspect they've been guilty of motivated reasoning on the grounds that, as you say here, they believe in a surprising coincidence. (It comes up in this paper, where I'm interested in those sorts of coincidences more generally: https://academic.oup.com/book/39559/chapter-abstract/339427886?redirectedFrom=fulltext ) There I contrasted deontological libertarians with consequentialist libertarians, who I suggested have less reason to worry they've been guilty of motivated reasoning.
But I sort of presupposed that the natural revision would be to rethink the empirical beliefs about the consequences of libertarian policy. It didn't occur to me they could revise the belief that it's a coincidence, but now that you say it that seems exactly right.
Thanks! I’ll check out your chapter it looks fascinating.
I recall reading Rothbard directly, claiming that even if liberty - or “the system of liberty” wording iirc - didn't result in economic growth and instead total poverty, he would still be into it. Kind of a ludicrous position.
Clever piece. One could make a similar, but weaker, argument to show that people who take it for granted that climate change is bad should also be religious believers. If change is bad that means we started with an optimal climate — could that be an accident?
Starting with a benevolent deity, you are left with the problem of why he permitted climate change — but that can be handled, like with the more general problem of pain and evil, as a result of free will.
Getting back to your point, I think some libertarians who believe in the NAP see it as deduced in some way from the nature of what is good for humans, just as Ayn Rand thought she had deduced her version from facts of reality.
To believe that climate change is bad, one doesn't need to believe that we started with an optimal climate. Just that we started with a better climate than the one we're heading towards.
And regardless of whether the future climate is better or worse, humans have adapted to our current climate. There would be costs involved in transitioning to a new climate, even if the new climate is better. It would be a question of whether those costs are too high for the expected benefits.
You could equally claim that I shouldn't be opposed to being forcibly relocated to another part of the world, on the grounds that I shouldn't assume that I was born in the optimum place. I don't believe that I was born in the optimum part of the world, but the costs of relocating are very high (I would have to make new friends, maybe learn new languages and new ways of life), and my situation now is good enough that to be moved to a new location at random would almost certainly be a terrible thing for me.
1. I agree that there are transitional costs. They would be large if average temperature was going up by ten degrees a decade but so far it has gone up by about a tenth of a degree a decade, projected to increase to about two tenths. It's hard to see how change that slow, in a world always changing for other reasons, could be a large cost.
2. I agree that climate change might happen to have a large net negative effect, although I don't see good reasons to expect it to. What I wrote was "people who take it for granted that climate change is bad."
I don’t think climate change doom is a problem on naturalism, because you could argue human evolution and/or civilization flourishing only occurred *as a result of* the optimal climate. So it’s no coincidence.
Except that humans evolved in a particular local climate, initially Africa, not in some global average climate. Civilizations flourished across a range of climates larger than the projected change.
To argue that climate change can be expected to be bad you need to start with an optimal distribution of climates.
Of course, you can still argue for transition costs. And you can still argue that climate change happens to be bad by trying to estimate good and bad effects, but in my view there is too much uncertainty in both to sign the sum. For details:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/my-first-post-done-again
I've read your post and found it very persuasive. My point was not that human flourishing requires a narrow climate, only that conditional on believing humans require a narrow climate, you don't get much evidence for the existence of God; you could argue that human flourishing/evolution only occurred once the narrow climate obtained on Earth.
PS In Machinery of Freedom you said you could find counterexamples to both the NAP and utilitarianism. Do you believe in Locke-type natural rights? (His ideas about self-ownership, not so much the stuff about land appropriation) Or are you now a utilitarian?
I am not a utlilitarian. I believe that human happiness matters but is not all that matters, that violating rights is bad but not infinitely bad. For the source of my moral beliefs (not the contents) see:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/An%20Argument%20I%20Lost.htm
Even if the future climate is not inherently better or worse than the current one, everything is set up for the current one, so you'd expect transition costs to something as likely to be worse as better, so you'd expect climate change to be a net negative, before you looked at more specific evidence.
True. But at warming of a degree or two a century, in a civilization that exists across a many degree range of average temperature, you would not expect that effect to be very large. I did say "similar, but weaker."
I think an even stronger case of this is Vegans. It would be a mighty coincidence that the diet which is best for the environment and least cruel is also the healthiest one, despite being uncommon for most of human history. It’s almost as if some higher power had organized it that way.
Writing a piece on this now
Is there a strand of libertarian starting only with the Free-Market Purism assertion, and then instrumentally adopting the NAP for pragmatic or utilitarian reasons? Ie. argue that the NAP is the simplest basic principle to adopt in order to reap the most benefit from the free market. From my naive perspective, not having given it much thought, that’s how I would try to get out of it this if I wanted to be libertarian and not believe in god.
Probably, though I’m not aware of it
I didn’t know many other people knew about the invisible hand argument for God. Very esoteric. A+
Do libertarians say what it means for us to flourish? I wonder if they think, for example, that rights-protection is constitutive of our flourishing. If that’s true, then of course the an-cap utopia is also where we flourish most.
The sense of flourishing I’m attributing to them is hedonic/desire-satisfaction/material flourishing. They think AnCap would give us the best of these goods.
Interesting. To me at least, the more parsimonious argument is that natural rights are a very useful fiction that is intrinsically incoherent without a god-concept, hence the need to invent him.
Interesting. What’s the thought behind rights being incoherent without God? I think if those issues as conceptually independent
If you're trying to find natural rights that are anything more than human convention, what other source could there possibly be besides a postulated god? Natural rights aren't just floating around out there. What kinds of things are they? What compelling force do they have on their own?
Believing in a god doesn't solve that problem. In order to get from "what God commands" to what is good you have to first know that god is good, which requires some preexisting knowledge of moral facts. The all powerful being you have discovered could be the devil, or no more good than the Greek gods, or a moral nihilist with a wicked sense of humor.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/faith-vs-reason
I agree, I don’t think it ultimately solves the problem. The Euthyphro dilemma is unavoidable. At best it might make it easier to argue for natural right with God than without, but even that’s debatable. As I see things, they are both fictions (which may still be useful/adaptive nonetheless).
There's no "source" for moral goods. To think there needs to be a source for those goods is a category error, as it assumes they are contingent, concrete truths.
Yes I agree
It's a cope ;)
I'm just not sure in which direction, but I suspect (and hope) from freedom (the Original Principle) to efficiency (cope).
That said, the relationship working the other way (free markets are efficient and BECAUSE OF THAT they support the rights/freedom better than any other system) makes much more sense. I don't think it's true, but you could argue [*not a philosopher] that most of human misery including most infringement on rights has its sources in scarcity (and its magnified by our "nature" having evolved in conditions of scarcity) which is not an unreasonable position to take (I mostly agree on the highest society/meta level, with allowances for individual organic defects) then the most efficient economy will asymptotically veer to some ultimate post scarcity future where almost noone would want to infringe on others' rights.
I don't think we're anywhere near, and I'm not sure if it would work (apart from scarcity drives we also have the status stuff which is probably strong enough to be independent) but conceptually it makes more sense than "optimal rights protection just happens to be economically optimal too".
Having previously held such beliefs, I can agree they are definitely "faith-based", and I'll go with motivated reasoning as the explanation while remaining an atheist. Worth noting however is that a number of such libertarians are already theists, but I'm not sure it's a majority.
Yes, many of them are theists. In fact, Milei is a Theist.
Good article and this is something I've thought about independently on my own. However, I don't see how this merely applies to Rotbardian libertarianism. It should apply to Michael Huemerian libertarians like me, Bryan Caplan, and David Friedman.
I think David Friedman is a consequentialist libertarian, but he can correct me if I’m wrong.
But you’re right that the argument extends much more broadly, basically to anyone who supports capitalism as an extension of Lockean self-ownership. Locke is basically written into the American constitution/declaration; I think the argument by Amos applies to all George Will-type traditional American conservatives. Maybe that’s why so many of them are also religious!
He's not consequentialist. That's a common misunderstanding (that I used to have). He's a moderate deontologist like Huemer and views Huemer's ethical theory as the best view.
>Rothbardians believe in what seems to be a most incredible coincidence. They think, on the one hand, that our natural rights require anarcho-capitalism2, and maintain, on the other, that this set-up just so happens to be the ideal economic system for human flourishing.
I am not a Rothbardian, but this is not a coincidence. What would be the point of rights, any kinds of rights, if they would not lead to human flourishing? They boil down to "don't do bad stuff to other people" and OF COURSE that leads to flourishing. Random example, committing arson violates rights and is not good for the economy either. Both because it destroys stuff.
No, the argument needs to be presented differently. Like, natural rights prevent the governments to do things that obviously directly lead to human flourishing, such as public education, and it is strange that they think it leads to human flourishing in indirect ways.
>Rothbardians believe in what seems to be a most incredible coincidence. They think, on the one hand, that our natural rights require anarcho-capitalism2, and maintain, on the other, that this set-up just so happens to be the ideal economic system for human flourishing.
If it just so happens that human nature is X , them it can just so happen that Y.is the best economic-political-ethical system..
>But there’s nothing metaphysically necessary about this correlation
Why would there need to.be ? Libertarians are only making a claim.about humans.as the exist..Rand argued that immortal robots would not need ancap.
>Thus, the surprising, near-perfect harmony between our moral rights and optimific social structure
You seem to be assuming that "rights" and "wnat maximises flourishing" are metaphsyically non identical. If two things are identical , harmony is guaranteed.
Of courses the same.consiseration pulls the teeth of the psychophysical harmony argument.
I don’t think there has to be a metaphysical explanation for this, it’s just a combination of A) belief that people tend to flourish when their rights are respected, B) tailoring the set of “rights” to be things a libertarian society ensures. A lot of hardcore lolberts don’t *really* believe in the existence of rights as well, from what I’ve experienced in discussions with them.
Sure, but many do think the content of our rights is independent of the consequences of respecting them
This argument only works for them
>>To an anarcho-capitalist, efficiency issues are not entirely irrelevant. The perspective emanating from this quarter is that if libertarian deontology is undertaken, then prosperity will ensue.
>But there’s nothing metaphysically necessary about this correlation.
I think they would believe that there is (in fact logically necessary). General equilibrium models will show that you reach pareto optimality by using market methods (under certain conditions). Although many libertarians don't like general equilibrium models, I think they can cash out this argument in some other way.
> The psychological laws governing human behaviour could conceivably have been such that anarcho-capitalism—despite being the only system that can protect our rights—was not the optimal system for promoting human flourishing.
This is actually the basis of many critiques against markets, but market proponents tend to be committed to the view that we are rational decision makers, and therefore free markets "work" i.e. are pareto optimal.
> On the hypothesis that Reality is blind, pitiless, and indifferent to human affairs, it’s unbelievably surprising that the optimal system of political organisation just so happens to be one that’s seemingly tailor-made to respect our rights.
It's not at all surprising that if everyone's rights are respected they form a social system that maximizes well-being in some way.
But this is a problem for all moral realists. What explains the surprising pairing of our brain faculties (subject to natural selection) and our ability to perceive moral truths?
There can be many reasons one may believe that humans, left to their own devices, would do better than they would under coercion. God is the dumbest one. Spontaneous order isn't a conspiracy theory - it really does exist, and it's how we run most things. It's a fact of human existence.
I suspect you've over-emphasised the "natural right" aspect of their thinking, here. After all, without a God, there's no robust basis for 'rights'. You could convincingly argue that an atheist that is against slavery is secretly a theist, for instance. It would also be a poor, dishonest argument to make.
This is not to say that libertarians are correct. They fail to account for the many ways in which spontaneous order breaks down, or keeps everyone trapped in a lower-level equilibrium, or has terrible unseen costs.
A valid criticism, then, is that libertarians have flawed premises based on a simplistic interpretation of the world. But that's rather universal, and I daresay, is something this essay is plagued by as well.