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A good article, but there's a little "getting the cart before the horse" here. Libertarians don't object to morality. They object to State imposed morality. What they react to is conservatives and liberals both attempting to use the organs of the State to impose their own moral codes on society.

Morality isn't the problem; it's that society's traditional moral teachers have abandoned their job and left it to the State. Yes, shame, stigma, or whatever term you want to use is a perfectly good way to control behavior within a libertarian society. But that sense of shame over evil acts must come from the people, not their government.

For example, pornography is immoral. It should not be available in a decent society. But the controls on pornogrpahy ought not come from the State; they should be internal to us all. Were we all raised to believe that it's wrong to view pornography, we'd avoid it for fear of getting caught and shamed. The market for it wouldn't exist. But that moral teaching no longer exists. Instead, we placed the State in the role of the arbiter of morality. And there's the problem. The State has no moral sense. It is an amoral being. It hasn't the ability to see pornography as inherently evil. Thus, it cannot decern a difference between "Debbie Does Dallas" and "Gone With The Wind". In the libertarian society that the author describes, shame allows us to see the difference and to accept one while rejecting the other. But so long as moral opprobrium comes down to us in the form of a State edict, libertarians will resist attempts to impose it.

I agree 100%. I wasn't saying the government should decide what is right and wrong. I was just saying that the article was right in saying that when people don't know right from wrong, the state steps in to clean up the mess. So if you really believe in a libertarian society, your first duty is to work hard to ensure everyone knows right from wrong, so they don't need a big government to control them any more.

For example, pornography is immoral. It should not be available in a decent society. But the controls on pornogrpahy ought not come from the State; they should be internal to us all. Were we all raised to believe that it's wrong to view pornography, we'd avoid it for fear of getting caught and shamed. The market for it wouldn't exist. But that moral teaching no longer exists. Instead, we placed the State in the role of the arbiter of morality. And there's the problem. The State has no moral sense. It is an amoral being. It hasn't the ability to see pornography as inherently evil. Thus, it cannot decern a difference between "Debbie Does Dallas" and "Gone With The Wind". In the libertarian society that the author describes, shame allows us to see the difference and to accept one while rejecting the other. But so long as moral opprobrium comes down to us in the form of a State edict, libertarians will resist attempts to impose it.

I don't understand your point. Neither the Founders nor any of our ancestors exhibited any great difficulty in differentiating a brothel from an opera. There was no flood of pornography in the first 200 years of our nation's culture, the nation's store shelves were devoid of intaglio etchings of people copulating, and yet the laws were so written to discourage it. The flood of pornography came only recently, with the moral-liberal court rulings striking down the age-old obscenity laws. Hence your 'Woe is us, the state is to blame for porn' doesn't really fly.

Or maybe your point is that the laws which provide legal protection to porn should be rescinded so as to allow citizens their right to close down the porn industry.