There Is Almost No Such Thing as Thin Libertarianism
Jason Kuznicki on Nov 20th 2008
That, in a sentence, is my contribution to the ongoing debate between “thick” and “thin” versions of libertarianism. Here’s why I say what I do.
As I understand it, thin libertarianism describes the libertarian project as solely one of defining property rights as precisely as possible, making them pervasive, strong, unencumbered, of clear title, and of easy transferability. To be sure, I agree with all of these aims, and with thin libertarians’ reasons for wanting them. But this is also exactly where thin libertarianism stops, and it is certainly not where I would stop.
Now, in any libertarian world, thick or thin, a man’s home truly is his castle, and this is why libertarians often find that most negative rights can be expressed more simply as variations on the right to property: You have the freedom to worship, because worship is an activity that takes place on your property — not mine, and not the state’s. Yours. You have the freedom to speak and to publish, because these again are also exercises of property rights. And so forth, through all of the negative rights that we may want to exercise.
This, though is the point of divergence: To thin libertarianism, cultural values outside of the basic rights structure do not matter. Set up a proper regime of negative rights, and the thin libertarian’s job is done. Todd Seavey has been championing this position in the last couple of weeks, most recently here.
In thin libertarianism, hating gays is perfectly fine, or at the very least not a significant problem, because gays themselves have all of the same rights that their haters have, and the hated are free to hate right back, largely free of risk, if they so choose. Gays and gay-haters each have their own property, and their own protections, and therefore any potentially anti-social attitudes may be as freely expressed as they are nicely contained. Thin libertarianism argues that a libertarian legal order defangs prejudice, turning it from an exercise of power to a mere delusion. Or, if you will, an alternative lifestyle.
To some extent, this is obviously true. We have politicized the question of creationism in schools, for example, only because so much of American education is state-funded and state-run. Compare this to the entirely non-politicized issue of creationism in churches, and you will immediately notice the difference.
The problem I see here is that thin libertarianism, as described above, wouldn’t last very long. A thin libertarian state inhabited by sufficiently prejudiced people would all but instantaneously transform itself into an extension of their prejudices. Prejudiced people with full negative rights won’t just sit around muttering curses on their chosen outgroups. They will agitate for instantiating prejudice in law. If they are determined enough, they will eventually succeed. Thus, thin libertarianism is possibly very thin indeed: It’s an instantaneous time-slice taken from a rapid fall; you only look like you’re levitating.
The solution as I see it is thick libertarianism. A thick libertarian argues that the continuity of a rights-respecting polity depends on a set of broadly shared cultural values and attitudes, not merely on setting up the proper legal codes and then sitting back and watching the whole thing run. Enough of us have to believe in it — “it” being a social system in which individual differences are respected, and in which individuals have the freedom to pursue their own ends, however unusual or unwise they may seem to us.
Thick libertarianism sees law as an inevitable outgrowth of the attitudes prevalent in a society: Populate a thin libertarian social order with racists, and you will get Apartheid. Populate a thin libertarian social order with tolerant people, and you will get voluntary integration, as individuals pursue their various goals and projects. Just as I fear for the future of a thin libertarian polity inhabited primarily by bigots, I am confident in the future of a thick libertarian polity, in which the laws themselves are extensions of a tolerant, cosmopolitan, live-and-let-live attitude among individuals themselves. Libertarianism can’t endure in a cultural vacuum.
Respect for the property of gays, for example, implies at least some respect for gays themselves, however profound the perceived differences might be. As Locke reminds us, property is an extension of the self. We respect property rights not out of property fetishism, but because your property is the closest thing to you outside of your physical body, and because property rights are therefore human rights. Respect for property rights is laudable, but it is laudable because it is a form of respect for others.
Respect certainly may encompass people whom we find bizarre, and even those whom we find threatening, provided that appropriate social restraints are in place (again, through property) to keep us all in our proper places. This form of respect — respect for autonomy — also opens the way for a vigorous but non-threatening critique of various modes of living. This is why, for example, I can discuss my own homosexuality openly with conservatives, who may censure me for it, even as I censure them for what I see as an unfortunately constrained view of human life. That’s one of the main payoffs of thick libertarianism.
Now, suggesting that we should all adopt a core set of values or attitudes with regard to political culture unfortunately tends to push a lot of people’s buttons. When thick libertarians start talking like this, thin libertarians picture mandatory state-sponsored sensitivity training, hate speech restrictions, and all the other awful PC nonsense of the left. Even events like the entirely voluntary Great American Smokeout tend to set off this reaction, as can be seen by the comment thread over at Reason’s Hit & Run. (Truth be told, I shared an impulse with the first commenter.)
This is deeply unfortunate, as the values at work in thick libertarianism neither need nor even benefit from state action. Religious tolerance and religious liberty came to Europe and America not because of state action, but because of state exhaustion and state breakdown. In many countries, including France and Britain, censorship collapsed in the midst of a revolution: Not the cleanest way to diminish state power, but I’m not going to argue. Learning to live and let live doesn’t come from the state. It comes from the self. The thin libertarian fear of insisting on cultural values and attitudes rests on a non sequitur. Seavey himself suggests as much when he writes,
The more causes for political complaint people believe themselves to have, the more likely a total state becomes. If selling trans fats — or simply calling a woman fat — is deemed an assault on social justice, a Kafkaesque web of petty laws becomes more likely. If such views become commonplace: libertarianism, R.I.P.
He’s right. And that’s just what thick libertarianism seeks to avoid: Let us accept a wide variety of differences voluntarily, or we will be made to accept a particular sameness at the point of a gun. I imagine that someone at some point will complain about the absurdity of a system, like thick libertarianism, that is incapable of guaranteeing the preconditions for its own existence. I’m sorry. Did someone promise you a free lunch?
Filed in The Basement
The Catholic libertarian Edward Faser has similar ideas-that libertarianism per se is neutral and to get one’s favored positions requires extra input. You could read “Self-ownership, abortion and the rights to childern: towards a more conservative libertarianism”.
By the way, Locke (the father of self-ownership concept) explicitly derives self-ownership from there being a Creator-this is from Feser as well.
Bisaal:
Thank you for the recommendations (I’ve already read Locke, however).
Bisaal,
You write that “Locke (the father of self-ownership concept) explicitly derives self-ownership from there being a Creator”.
I doubt this. When Locke talks about God, he emphasizes our being owned by God. When Locke mentions self-ownership, he doesn’t talk about God. Moreover, the latter comes up, I think, only once (in chapter 5 of the 2nd Treatise), and (to harmonize it with the rest of Locke) I suspect it’s more a matter of having a trust in ourselves than having full-fledged ownership of ourselves.
But if you know of a place where Locke connects self-ownership with God, I’d like to see it.
Please see the essay “Are We All Lockeans Now? ”
By Edward Feser at tcsdaily.com
I think your argument is simply renaming the anachist libertarianism (”thin libertarianism”) versus minarchist libertarianism (”thick libertarianism”) debate. I have made such arguments myself on other forums.
I think the anarchist position requires the premise that there is unanimous agreement to the anarchy, and unanimous consent to follow it. Since this is very unlikely, then the minarchist position is the next best, only now you’ve given legitimacy to the devil of coercion by the collective.
Plilosophically, I think the anarchist position is correct, but by taking this position you somehow always seem to end up defending things like segregation.
Keith –
I disagree, at least in practice. For example, I consider myself a thick libertarian, but so does Roderick Long, who is an anarchist. I’m a minarchist, faute de mieux. Other anarchists are thin libertarians, and other minarchists are too.
@Keith:
I disagree entirely. Anarchism (at least market anarchism/Voluntaryism) does not require unanimous agreement – or even majority agreement. In market anarchism or Voluntaryism, unlike in minarchism, there is no coercive monopoly (government), so the only laws are “naturally” occurring “laws” (which would grow out of the omnipresence of private property and self-ownership), enforced by the competing private protection agencies.
Because there is no subjective arbiter, public opinion is not reflected in property protection – attempting to coerce beyond the protection of property would get any agency or court automatically labeled a criminal gang by the rest of the market not only because it is justly so, but because all of the other firms have an economic incentive to do so: they get to take down a competitor. The Market for Liberty by Linda and Morris Tannehill summarizes the process of property protection in anarchism relatively well.
In fact, even a large minority agreement might be unnecessary for Voluntaryism, if the system is established through apolitical means (such as through Agorism, also known as Counter-Economics). Once in such a society, it would take a unanimous – or nearly unanimous – agreement to bring down the Voluntaryist system.
As such, the thin vs. thick libertarian labels don’t even apply to anarchism – anarchism, though a radical form of libertarianism, is an entirely different subject in most respects, and the same strategies and discussions that are perfectly valid for minarchism do not work for anarchism.
Thick/thin lib has nothing to do with Anarchy? Maybe you should tell Rad Geek then, because he’s an Anarchist and he keeps talking about it:
http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/10/03/libertarianism_through/
Rad Geek (a thick libertarian and an anarchist) in effect believes that you aren’t a libertarian at all unless you’re an anarchist, so he’s not the best example. Also, among the authors he cites, I believe that Walter Block is both a thin libertarian and an anarchist. There really seems to be no reliable mapping of the one onto the other in terms of personal identification, and that’s all I was saying.
If you want to argue that for philosophical reasons there should be one, it’s an argument I’d be willing to consider.
I agree that state control and funding creates preconditions for a legalized civil war of interest groups, but I am also concerned about the influence of creationist churches. They are free to exist under a legal system that recongizes freedom of worship, but the cultural consequences of such gross irrationality can be severe — witness the religious cultural right in America.
“The problem I see here is that thin libertarianism, as described above, wouldn’t last very long. A thin libertarian state inhabited by sufficiently prejudiced people would all but instantaneously transform itself into an extension of their prejudices.”
And that is why anarchism doesn’t work. Unless you can force everyone to agree with you or are so centralized as to prevent outside influence then another state will spring up instantly. I would argue that the same is true of minarchism in relation to almost instant rise of corporatism that would surely result
“Enough of us have to believe in it”
And that is why libertarianism will never work on a large scale. On a small scale, say a private island or abandoned oil platform, it would work.
It could never work as an overall governing strategy because humanity is hopelessly pluralist. We are pluralist in our moral attitudes, our political affinities, and our cultural viewpoints.
The belief that we can rewire human nature is just as wrong here as it was when Marx had a similar theory. Is it any word that “marxism of the right” became such a popular epithet?
But societies have varied in how individualist they were. Those founded on purely collectivist principles have all been horrific failures; the most individualist societies have tended to prosper.
Isn’t human nature the state in which we prosper the most? If so, then we are only dimly aware of our nature, but it does exist. We ask not that people be remade into New Libertarian Man or whatever, but simply that they recognize what works and what doesn’t.
I would agree with Dawkins extended phenotype and say that our nature and state of nature is who we are right now as opposed to some future or past idealized state.
Also what works for one country, at one time period, for one culture, and for one area does not instantly mean it is a universal good. So what works is itself an evershifting question. And if we take a step back we have moral pluralism in which even the good is disputed.
My point is that a society built on and/or running on one ideology will never happen save for on a small controlled scale (gated communities, sea-steading, etc.).