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Do Libertarians Really "Want a World Without Moral Judgments"?
Reason ^
| 03/22/2013
| Nick Gillespie
Posted on 03/22/2013 8:51:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On March 15 in The New York Times, liberal journalist and author Richard Reeves wrote an op-ed about the new plan in New York City to dramatize the many negative effects of teen pregnancy on girls who give birth before graduating high school and outside of a stable two-parent unit. Billboards and other advertisements around the city, for instance, point out that unwed teen mothers are twice as likely to not finish high school as girls who don't give birth before graduating.
With many smart qualifications, Reeves makes a case for shaming regarding teen pregnancy and other behaviors, and he does it from a liberal POV:
A society purged of shame might sound good in theory. But it would be terrible in practice. We need a sense of shame to live well together. For those with liberal instincts, this is necessarily hard. But it is also necessary.
My issue is less with Reeves' views on public shaming per se and more on an aside he makes about libertarians:
Libertarians might want a world without moral judgments, in which teen pregnancy carries no stigma at all. And paternalists might want the state to enshrine judgments in law perhaps by raising the age of sexual consent or mandating contraception. True liberals, though, believe we can hold one another to moral account without coercion. We must not shy away from shame.
I submit to you that few statements are more wrong than saying "libertarians might want a world without moral judgments." From my vantage point, one of the things to which libertarianism is dedicated is the proliferation of moral judgments by freeing people up to the greatest degree possible to create their own ways of being in the world. To conflate the live and let live ethos at the heart of the classical liberal and libertarian project with an essentially nihilistic dismissal of pluralism and tolerance is a gigantic error. It's like saying that because religious dissenters want to abolish a single state church that they are anti-god.
As the anthropologist Grant McCracken argued in a 1998 Reason story called "The Politics of Plenitude," our world is characterized by a "quickening speciation" of social types and sub-cultures, a liberating reality that is typically mistaken for the end of the world and the end of all morality. McCracken notes that plenitude particularly aggrieves conservatives, because they mistake an urge to escape "a morality" for an attempt to abolish "all morality." He explains:
The right acts as if the many groups thrown off by plenitude harbor an anarchic tendency, that people have become gays, feminists, or Deadheads in order to escape morality. This is not the logic of plenitude. These people have reinvented themselves merely to escape a morality, not all morality. New communities set to work immediately in the creation of new moralities. Chaos does not ensue; convention, even orthodoxy, returns. Liminality is the slingshot that allows new groups to free themselves from the gravitational field of the old moralities they must escape. But liminality is almost never the condition that prevails once this liberation has been accomplished.
courtesy PBSReeves is no conservative. He's a devotee of John Stuart Mill and, I rush to add, has said many positive things about Reason over the years. But his characterization of libertarians as uninterested in moral judgments proceeds from a very conservative - and very profound - misunderstanding of what I think we are all about. This sort of thinking typically emanates from the right - how many of us have had conversations with conservatives who equate ending drug prohibition with a case not simply for occasional use of currently illegal drugs but for an absolute embrace of never-ending intoxication and stupefaction? - but apparently it harbors a home on the left as well. (Go here to read part of a debate I had with Jonah Goldberg a decade ago on the same basic topic).
Shame is certainly not the first thing that most libertarians I know reach for in high-minded policy discussions or less serious conversations. On the narrow question of reducing teen pregnancy - which has in any case reached historic lows over the past decades - it's far from clear the role the sort of public shaming enivisioned by New York authorities will play compared to, say, frank discussions of the harshly reduced opportunities faced by young mothers. Certainly, it may make certain policymakers and politicians feel good, but that is hardly any ground by which to analyze the efficacy of a given policy (to his credit, Reeves calls for a cost-benefit analysis himself).
But it's time to start swatting away random accusations of libertarians as nihilists simply because we don't sign on to every given moralistic agenda that is proposed or enacted in the name of the greater good. No less a buttoned-down character than Friedrich Hayek once wrote that "to live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends." The libertarian commitment to true pluralism and tolerance is not easy to maintain, but it remains exactly the sort of gesture that allows for differing moralities to flourish and, one hopes, new and better ways of living to emerge.
TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: libertarianism; libertarians; morality
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To: Ohioan
101
posted on
03/22/2013 10:57:49 AM PDT
by
Gene Eric
(The Palin Doctrine.)
To: John Valentine
Thankee! I’m surprised I haven’t received any Loserdopian arrows yet...
To: GeronL; Responsibility2nd
There is nothing in the libertarian philosophy where they LIMIT anything to adults. Then I must not be a libertarian.
103
posted on
03/22/2013 11:16:09 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: Responsibility2nd
No, I advocate for the liberty of adults to use drugs if they choose. Do you advocate for the liberty of adults to murder if they choose
No, because murder unlike drug use violates an individual's rights.
You use drugs, or murder or steal and guess what? That affects me and our nation.
The "effect" on the nation of Joe's drug use is not the proper object of government force, since it unlike murder and stealing is an "effect" that violates nobody's rights.
And because you support a law making dope smoking legal, don't be suprised when they pass a law making abortion legal.
Unlike drug use, abortion by definition violates the most basic right of the unborn person.
104
posted on
03/22/2013 11:20:23 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: Responsibility2nd
For years, I've called for a return to a time when all 50 states had Sodomy Laws. When murder of the pre-born was illegal. When you couldn't say works like f--- and s--- on prime time TV. Let me get this straight:
You think that if all 50 states would just re-enact anti-homo laws, and if abortion was banished from the land, and if you couldn't say "f*ck" and "sh*t" on Tee Vee then all of a sudden birds would sing, the economy would explode in an orgy of awesomeness, and the world would proclaim the USA #1 again?
To: ClearCase_guy
Once government is limited in that way (no longer a crutch) then I am all in favor of lifting rules on raising children, taking drugs, etc. Maybe it's OK if "anything goes" -- so long as the person making those decisions is fully responsible for the outcomes. But, in general, I don't see a lot of Libertarians trying to limit government so much on the economic side of things. It's mostly: legalize drugs, open the borders, easy abortion, legal prostitution. Let's do the fun stuff first.
And THEN we'll try to take away the free money and social goodies which allow people to behave in any way they like.
I say that's backwards. It won't work.
I say we do them both* - using one as a justification not to do the other is not a liberty-respecting position.
(*Except "open the borders, easy abortion" - they have nothing to do with true liberty and are in fact antithetical to it.)
106
posted on
03/22/2013 11:24:34 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: PreciousLiberty
Ill leave it to the others reading this to decide who looks foolish. You're going to have to try a lot harder in the foolish department if you want to beat that idiot in a game of looking foolish.
To: Responsibility2nd; TheThirdRuffian; Hemingway's Ghost
For years, I've called for a return to a time when all 50 states had Sodomy Laws. When murder of the pre-born was illegal. So you put mass murder on par with where Bruce puts his pee-pee. Strange "value" system you have there.
108
posted on
03/22/2013 11:30:43 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: JustSayNoToNannies; Responsibility2nd
That affects me and our nation.
The "effect" on the nation of Joe's drug use is not the proper object of government force, since it unlike murder and stealing is an "effect" that violates nobody's rights.
Isn't it amusing how Responsibility2nd employs the same reasoning as the majority in Wickard v. Filburn? I mean, on any conservative litmus test, a love of Wickard v. Filburn has to be first and foremost, no?
To: JustSayNoToNannies
if they just kept it in their bedroom, this would not be an issue, but its in schools being shoved down the throats of kids, its all over TV and they want to punish those who have differing opinions.... hardly “in their bedrooms”
110
posted on
03/22/2013 11:33:09 AM PDT
by
GeronL
(http://asspos.blogspot.com)
To: JustSayNoToNannies
The post did not try to do what you scurrilously accused, but we are learning that to mischaracterize is your modus operendi.
111
posted on
03/22/2013 11:35:39 AM PDT
by
MHGinTN
(Being deceived can be cured.)
To: GeronL
[Responsibility2nd:] For years, I've called for a return to a time when all 50 states had Sodomy Laws. When murder of the pre-born was illegal. So you put mass murder on par with where Bruce puts his pee-pee. Strange "value" system you have there.
if they just kept it in their bedroom, this would not be an issue, but its in schools being shoved down the throats of kids, its all over TV and they want to punish those who have differing opinions.... hardly in their bedrooms
I agree that forced "tolerance" "education" and forced "nondiscrimination" are wrong and should be opposed. Do you agree that sodomy behind bedroom doors should remain none of the government's business?
112
posted on
03/22/2013 11:38:41 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: MHGinTN
For years, I've called for a return to a time when all 50 states had Sodomy Laws. When murder of the pre-born was illegal. So you put mass murder on par with where Bruce puts his pee-pee. Strange "value" system you have there.
The post did not try to do what you scurrilously accused
You're right - it gave top billing and thus higher priority to where Bruce puts his pee-pee.
113
posted on
03/22/2013 11:40:52 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: JustSayNoToNannies
if the government doesn’t know about it, how would it be their business?
114
posted on
03/22/2013 11:41:52 AM PDT
by
GeronL
(http://asspos.blogspot.com)
To: JustSayNoToNannies
Clearly the libertarian position is that those entities should be free to discriminate against or in favor of gay "married" couples, straight couples, interracial couples, singles, or whoever the want - and that there should be no government schools. I would say that is YOUR libertarian position, but there is no more an agreed-upon doctrine of "libertarian" than there is an agreed-upon doctrine of "conservative." Some self-identified libertarians support government enforcement of approval toward homosexuality, just as some self-identified libertarians support the universal abortion license.
115
posted on
03/22/2013 11:45:15 AM PDT
by
Tax-chick
(Now with more LOL and less UNNNGH.)
To: GeronL
[Responsibility2nd:] For years, I've called for a return to a time when all 50 states had Sodomy Laws. When murder of the pre-born was illegal. So you put mass murder on par with where Bruce puts his pee-pee. Strange "value" system you have there.
if they just kept it in their bedroom, this would not be an issue, but its in schools being shoved down the throats of kids, its all over TV and they want to punish those who have differing opinions.... hardly in their bedrooms
I agree that forced "tolerance" "education" and forced "nondiscrimination" are wrong and should be opposed. Do you agree that sodomy behind bedroom doors should remain none of the government's business?
if the government doesnt know about it, how would it be their business?
The sodomy laws Responsibility2nd calls for would make it government's business. Favor or oppose?
116
posted on
03/22/2013 11:45:25 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: Tax-chick
Clearly the libertarian position is that those entities should be free to discriminate against or in favor of gay "married" couples, straight couples, interracial couples, singles, or whoever the want - and that there should be no government schools. I would say that is YOUR libertarian position,
My position - but I don't claim to be a libertarian.
but there is no more an agreed-upon doctrine of "libertarian" than there is an agreed-upon doctrine of "conservative."
True.
Some self-identified libertarians support government enforcement of approval toward homosexuality
Such as?
117
posted on
03/22/2013 11:46:58 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: JustSayNoToNannies
Keep it in the closet and there is no problem
118
posted on
03/22/2013 11:48:50 AM PDT
by
GeronL
(http://asspos.blogspot.com)
To: GeronL
The sodomy laws Responsibility2nd calls for would make it government's business. Favor or oppose? Keep it in the closet and there is no problem
Wrong. The situation that ultimately brought sodomy laws before the USSC was people caught in the act of sodomy when the police executed a warrant on an unrelated matter. And for that matter, nothing prevents authorities from seeking a search warrant on the basis of probable cause to suspect violation of sodomy laws.
Again, do you favor or oppose sodomy laws?
119
posted on
03/22/2013 11:55:05 AM PDT
by
JustSayNoToNannies
("The Lord has removed His judgments against you" - Zep. 3:15)
To: JustSayNoToNannies
David Boaz, author of
Libertarianism: A Primer. He supports both unlimited abortion and enforcement of homosexual "tolerance," as well as special treatment for favored minorities.
He is far from the only one. Our self-proclaimed libertarian on the FR North Carolina Forum is all about "gay marriage" and free abortion, and how dare anyone even mention any moral norms, that's "flaming." These are also the positions of many Libertarian Party candidates for office.
I voted for Libertarians for County Commissioners a couple of times, on the assumption that, if nothing else, they'd be against higher county taxes and some of the idiotic county spending. They didn't win, though.
120
posted on
03/22/2013 11:58:28 AM PDT
by
Tax-chick
(Now with more LOL and less UNNNGH.)
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