Libertarianism (2011)
When I think about certain political issues, there is a tiny libertarian in the back of my head taunting me and giving me room for doubt. That is, from a philosophical point-of-view, libertarianism is quite attractive, as it is simple and easy to apply. For instance, we might wonder with uncertainty as to whether or not a given regulation will have good consequences. For the libertarian, this is inconsequential. If the regulation, say, requires one party to help another party, it is impermissible - simple as that. Since I am not quite sure exactly what I should think of this view, in what follows I shall discuss a particular (possible) problem for libertarianism with the hopes of making some progress on the issue.
‘Libertarianism’, of course, gets used in different ways. So, for my purposes, I shall use the term to refer to a view that is committed to the following principle NO (no obligation): we have no (non-derivative) obligation to help others. (The reason for adding ‘non-derivative’ comes from the fact that the libertarian egoist [e.g. Ayn Rand] might hold that we have an obligation to ourselves to help others when helping others helps ourselves. In such a case, the obligation to others is derived from the obligation to ourselves). NO certainly has some intuitive pull. For instance, imagine that you are about to purchase $100 worth of video games and someone stops you and chides you for not donating that money to Oxfam to help others in circumstances far more dire than yours. In response, you might say that, while it is certainly good to help these people (i.e. it is supererogatory), it isn’t wrong to refrain to do so, as we have no obligation to help people we don’t know across the globe.
While it seems that we might plausibly apply NO to a large number of cases like that from above, there are some hard cases where application of the principle seems counter-intuitive to most - if not downright false. Borrowing from Peter Singer, we might imagine a case where a child is drowning in a pool of water and John is the only person in the area to save them. Saving the child might mean that John’s clothes might get wet, but this is certainly a minor harm. Now, imagine that John refrains from helping the child because he didn’t want to get wet. The child dies and John walks away. Later some people find out what happened and ask him why he let the child die. He justifies his action by appealing NO. This certainly seems wrong to most of us, but there is no inconsistency in applying it in this case.
In order to respond to worries about the above case, the libertarian has a couple of options. First, the libertarian egoist might hold that John should have saved the child, since refraining to do so means that others will be less inclined to help John in the future. So, in this case, one might hold that John has an obligation to himself to help the child. The problem with this response is that is doesn’t quite explain away our intuitions, as we can imagine a similar case where John and the child are the only people on the planet and refraining from helping the child would make no difference to John’s future welfare. In this variation, John has no obligation to himself to help the child and, so, there is nothing wrong with him letting the child die. At this point, then, the only other option is to bite the bullet and hold that, yes, there is nothing wrong with letting the child die.
The above issues are certainly problematic for the libertarian, but they aren’t fatal. There is another problem, however, that I think might be fatal (at least for some ways of construing the application of the view). The problem is the following dilemma: either (A) the libertarian doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of contracts or, if they do, (B) the view becomes watered-down (weak claim) or (C) trivial (strong claim).
(A) is clearly a non-starter and untenable, so I won’t spend any time arguing for why this option doesn’t work.
As for (B), consider a claim that a libertarian might make: the state has no right to require its citizens to pay taxes for the purpose of helping people who cannot help themselves (think Sam Brownback and the closing of the Kansas Neurological Institute). In order to justify this claim, the libertarian might appeal to NO. In response, however, we might respond that the citizens have implicitly consented to the legitimacy of this requirement in a social contract by continuing to live, participate, and enjoy the benefits of the community. In response to this objection, the libertarian might hold that only explicit consent makes a contract legitimate (e.g. explicitly signing an agreement). But this is clearly too strong. If implicit consent isn’t legitimate, then not even the constitution is legitimate (as an aside, I’m pretty sure that talk of consent in the Declaration of Independence is meant to be talk of implicit, not explicit, consent). Indeed, this means that we have no power to enforce many policies like those indicated by “no trespassing: violators will be shot” (if the person trespassing didn’t explicitly agree to be shot, then it is not permissible to do so, if we don’t recognize implicit consent). So, if all of this is right, then the libertarian must accept that we can and do implicitly agree to certain things like taxation, in which case libertarianism seems watered-down.
What about (C)? If the libertarian must accept implicit consent as real consent, does that mean that libertarianism collapses into another view like representative democracy? I am not sure about this. One might argue that the libertarian can’t even object to the bloated federal system of government we have now, since we vote in elections and implicitly accept the consequences. But this might be construing ‘implicit consent’ in such a way that we can never fail to implicitly consent to anything. This seems wrong. So, how do we ensure that citizens may withhold implicit consent? Moving out of the country would certainly be a way for people to do this. Apart from the unfeasibility of this, this would mean that those without the resources to move must accept anything. This seems wrong, too. So, we need a practical way of ensuring that citizens may withhold implicit consent. Federalism might be a good way to do this, but we must recognize that drawing a distinction between federal and state governments is a practical one - not one made in principle. That is, a libertarian who recognizes implicit consent may very well hold that citizens can and do implicitly agree to certain things.