Libertarianism and my Sister 2005
Truth is, if there’s a three-year-old piece of writing I’m to be known by, that’s the one I’ll pick. The concept has its wrinkles. It doesn’t even appeal to all libertarians, as the comment threads at Hit & Run and Catallarchy will show. Of course, I said in the first place that it was just one type of libertarianism, so there’s no surprise there.
I’ve greatly enjoyed the running comment thread here, though I hope people will keep things this side of acrimonious. I’m especially pleased to see Scott’s devotion to the topic since I’ve thought it would be a swell thing if this libertarian weblog had a larger libertarian presence in the comments section. And I’m grateful to Doctor Slack for summarizing his objections so concisely. At first I was surprised to see the topic of revenge killings bulk so large in the discussions, but I think the centrality of that fear grows out of the conviction, common to Burkean conservatives and managerialist liberals alike, that the State is all that keeps the ravening hordes from resuming a primordial war of all against all.
I also agree somewhat with Doctor Slack’s argument that
My first problem with this is that there are too many possible interpretations of the “my sister†principle extant on any given issue for it to be as useful a simplifying device as he seems to be hoping for. In particular, it doesn’t provide for a way to reconcile conflicts with opposing “my sister†principles on various issues.
Here’s my response: this is where the democracy comes in.
Many libertarianisms are deeply uncomfortable with democracy, and not without reason. Others imply such a fully formed end-state of power relations that it would seem to leave little for politics to do. I think this is a blind spot. For example the strict minarchist principle that “government’s only legitimate function is to protect citizens from force and fraud” must cope with defining “force” and “fraud.” These seem like two of those “thick,” “vague” concepts like Wilkinson and Yglesias and Sanchez and the Twisty Lumberterians are always on about. They will be, even in a libertarian polity, contested – first, what they comprise, and second, how the government should best protect citizens from them.
Much libertarian theory seems to yearn for an escape from politics, and I don’t blame it. But politics cannot disappear, because power will not disappear, which means questions of how it shall be disposed.
So we need a principle of how politics should be conducted, and my inverse Golden Rule (Do NOT do unto others as you WOULD NOT have done unto you) still seems to me to be a very practical way of bringing home the impact of state power, working under the color of law, on real people. If there are conservatives – or liberals – willing to sell out family members to the cops over cocaine possession or dealership, yes, let them vote with a clear conscience for prohibition. If Doctor Slack is willing to send his sister upriver for letting the loam blow off her Back 40, by all means he should elect representatives who would impose stringent crop rotation regulations.
For the record, I don’t think the “my sister” principle would lead immediately or maybe ever to true minarchy, let alone anarchism. But I think a culture that internalized the perspective would look more libertarian than not. I’ll take my chances.
NEXT: Revenge killings, Master Palaemon and My Sister.
UPDATE: Put in links that should have been in initial published version.
Pingback by Comment Threads and My Sister § Unqualified Offerings —
March 18, 2005 @ 7:26 am
[...] ister” you’ll find them) should feel free to do so here. UPDATE 3/17/05: More above. Maybe we could move comments there? And take cleansing breaths? Posted by J [...]
Comment by Leonard —
March 18, 2005 @ 9:12 am
Seems to me in addition to ju-jitsu on the Golden Rule, made appropriately negative in keeping with liberty, you’re also smuggling in individualism with “my sister”.
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It’s not in particular moral standards which libertarians differ from the masses. Rather, it is in methodological individualism. Almost everyone, liberals and conservatives alike, do not steal. They do not kill. They don’t assault, rape, or even act impolitely in public.
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In short, in their own personal interaction with the world they are nice. They are “my sister” to everyone they know or interact with personally.
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But then it comes to politics, and they vote for their everyone to be dispossessed to pay for their pet peeves, be they welfare, interest on debt, or bombs. They vote for everyone to be oppressed “for their own good” in many ways, even though they’d not personally oppress anybody “for their own good” in the same way.
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“My sister” is an attempt to make politics individual. The problem is, while nobody will personally do mean things to their sister, they quite happily endorse a politics in which mean things are done to everyone.
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They see no conflict in this. They seem to believe that most other people are borderline crazies, only restrained from their mayhem by the Men in Blue. That they know they personally do not need laws to restrain them, is only proof that they are exceptional. (But then, we all know we are exception, don’t we, since we are at the center of the world as we perceive it?) Everyone else – they’re dangerous.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 18, 2005 @ 9:26 am
Hey everybody, Leonard beat the paragraphing problem! Good show!
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Leonard, I agree with much of what you say. But we can agree, yes, that SOME undetermined number of people are menaces?
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Something I meant to work into the main body of the blog post: is the “my sister” principle another version of a Rawlsian veil of ignorance?
Comment by Avram —
March 18, 2005 @ 9:36 am
Y’know, I’ve never been able to see any significant difference between Luke’s version of the Golden Rule (”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and Hillel’s (”What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man”), despite pedantic and nit-picky friends insisting that Hillel’s formulation was somehow superior. Maybe because I see the basic statement as “Behave as you would like others to behave,” and behavior covers both doing unto and not doing unto.
And Wikipedia has a list of versions going back to Middle Kingdom Egypt.
Comment by BrDo —
March 18, 2005 @ 10:53 am
1) Everyone is someone’s sister. Limitations on the law shouldn’t be left up to the lowest common denominator of familial piety. (How many spouses keep a murderer’s secret?)
2) There’s a difference between supporting the drug laws and “selling out” one’s family if they break them. I support most of the pot laws, and my brother is a huge stoner, but I don’t think I’m a hypocrite for not dropping a dime on him. He’s an adult and he can take his own risks and bear his own responsibility.
3) I don’t see the state as keeping the ravening hordes blah blah – rather, there has to be a neutral, cold-blooded arbiter between people’s sisters, even in a Libertarian People’s Paradise. That arbiter is going to, however imperfectly, have to correspond to the will of the people – not when they’re most inflamed, but when they’re most reflective.
Comment by Madeline —
March 18, 2005 @ 12:02 pm
Leonard is a brilliant fellow for beating me to the suggestion of doing paragraph breaks with periods.
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I think it would be unwise (and perhaps facile) of you to draw conclusions about “Burkean conservatives and managerialist liberals” from the weight of revenge-killing posts in previous comment thread, Jim: that thread is, in fact, a polite flame war. “Revenge killing” came up a lot because it was the ostensible subject.
Comment by Scott —
March 18, 2005 @ 6:07 pm
“But then it comes to politics, and they vote for their everyone to be dispossessed to pay for their pet peeves, be they welfare, interest on debt, or bombs. They vote for everyone to be oppressed “for their own good†in many ways, even though they’d not personally oppress anybody “for their own good†in the same way.”
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Would you throw your sister in jail for not paying for Bush’s war?
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The odds of someone turning in a spouse or sibling for murder (revenge killing or not) are probably lower than for turning in a total stranger. Compare those odds to someone turning in their family members for pot and you’ll see the point of the exercise.
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“Everyone is someone’s sister.”
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That’s the point, don’t do to someone else’s sister what you wouldn’t do to your own. Don’t demand govt actions to ‘protect’ you if you don’t want the govt protecting others at your expense. Don’t vote to throw people in jail for something you’d never report a family member for. Don’t vote for govt spending to be paid for by others
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 18, 2005 @ 7:13 pm
Jim , you can’t really claim Scott as evidence of “a larger libertarian presence in the comments”, since he has explicitly disavowed libertarianism. According to him, he is an anarchist. I think the distinction is important, especially when the discussion turns to the chances for “a primordial war of all against all.”
Libertarians are really no different from managerialist liberals or Burkean conservatives where a primordial war of all against all is concerned; all three support taxes, police, a military, a prison system, laws against uncontrolled killing, etc. Libertarians are really just as statist as the other two, they just want a different, and not necessarily smaller, state.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 18, 2005 @ 7:21 pm
BrDo, Ted Kaczynski’s brother turned him in for blowing people up through the mail. Is he better than you, worse than you? Or is it that there’s some qualitative difference between being a pothead and a murderous terrorist that controls the outcomes here?
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Additionally, I think I go wrong by stressing turn in. (I’m not sure how much I did stress this in the original essay, but a lot of readers here and on Hit and Run have taken it as the operating standard.) The question is, On sober reflection, SHOULD your brother be arrested for smoking pot? More importantly, if he resists that arrest, is it okay to kill him? If he survives the arrest process, should your brother be cornholed by some weightlifting lifer day after day for some number of years? I’m not saying you have to be the one to tip the cops, but if someone else does, are you okay with that?
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Those are the questions. It’s certainly one you may answer when you are “most reflective,” which is, perhaps, this very morning.
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I realize you may hate your brother’s guts and secretly or not so secretly want him to suffer. It’s a bug in the “my sister” system, though not necessarily a fatal one.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 18, 2005 @ 7:24 pm
Libertarians are really just as statist as the other two, they just want a different, and not necessarily smaller, state.
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Seems that by this standard I am as militarist as Max Boot too, since I believe in keeping a military around and, where necessary, using it. I think such a standard confuses more than it clarifies.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 18, 2005 @ 7:38 pm
All right, I’ll try to clarify my remark. In terms of “a primordial war or all against all”, the generic-libertarian solution is no different than the liberal or conservative solution — taxes, laws, police. Libertarians favor having a government to protect people from force and fraud, and revenge killing certainly counts as force by anyone’s definition (although there is the interesting side tangent that it may not qualify under the variant version of *initiating* force or fraud.)
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So back to “my sister”. Libertarians claim that they want less government. On the other hand, they favor full governmental enforcement of all non-fraudulent contracts, and no limits on contracts. Contrary to economic history, they insist that monopolies will simply not arise. But I believe that in a libertarian society, you would see just as much imprisonment for minor crimes, and just as much government, as now. But instead of people asking whether you’d send your sister to jail for drug crimes, you’d be asking whether you’d send her to work off her debts in debtor’s prison for cheating the local water monopoly.
Comment by Doctor Slack —
March 18, 2005 @ 7:59 pm
Just to clarify something really quick: the “revenge” stuff in the other thread perhaps gives a misleading impression about my obsession with the topic. Though I picked it as a deliberately contentious example, I do have to admit I wasn’t expecting to spend as much time talking about it as we eventually did.
I do think a culture that internalized your “my sister” concept would be improved by it to an extent, insofar as any political culture could be improved by openness of positions and a reduction in hypocrisy. I just think that’s a very different question from whether or not it’s adequate as an overall way of determining the validity of laws. One thing that is useful about the revenge killing example is that it provides a vivid illustrative case to work through, so I’m looking forward to your post on that. Cheers.
Comment by Scott —
March 18, 2005 @ 8:18 pm
“On the other hand, they favor full governmental enforcement of all non-fraudulent contracts, and no limits on contracts.”
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Contracts are limited by both parties being legally entitled to refuse to sign them. Monopoly happens, and you support the biggest one there is – the govt. If monopolies can’t be trusted, then we can’t trust the govt monopoly on “legitmate force”. Govt is no different than ExxonMobil – both are large organizations of mere mortals, and the more people depend on the govt, the more the govt controls them, and the less they can be said to be controlling the govt. Don’t give the feds any power you wouldn’t trust GM or GE with.
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Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 18, 2005 @ 9:06 pm
Scott, what do you think of Bob Black? I know that many anarchists seem to think that he’s been discredited since the whole opium incident, but I find his writing interesting despite his personal problems. “Your foreman gives you more do-this-or-else orders in a week than the government does in a lifetime.” Does it matter that you are entitled to refuse to sign a particular contract when you must sign *some* contract or perish? Those who insist that you can always refuse to sign are really no different than those who insist that governmental power is not a threat because one can always move to an area with no government.
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At any rate, I certainly don’t think that even a democratic government is good in itself, or trustworthy in itself. I think that it is the best available counterweight to other forms of power, including market power.
Comment by Scott —
March 18, 2005 @ 9:13 pm
I’ve never even heard of Bob Black. Govt gives you “do this or else” orders all the time. Even if you support a given speed limit or sales tax, every drive or purchase involves a “do this or else” order. The govt is simply omnipresent enough to not always have to say it to your face. Every law is a “do this or else” order, given to you every day.
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As far as having to sign some contract or perish, so what? Life gives you finite options so you can restrict another’s options at will? I’m not buying.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 18, 2005 @ 9:40 pm
Scott, every drive or purchase involves a contract, even if they are just as invisible to you as a sales tax, and every contract is also a “do this or else” order, enforced in the end by guns. You can’t avoid making them, you can only choose which ones you want to make within the available range, just as you can choose which local or national government you want to live in.
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As far as “restrict[ing] another’s options”, everything that we do restricts someone else’s options. Even David Friedman — a name that you may be more familiar with, if you’re not with Bob Black — would restrict everybody’s options with his “machinery of freedom”. The question is which kinds of restrictions are legitimate. And that’s a values question, which you can’t simply resolve by a fiat declaration that your values are the only correct ones.
Comment by Scott —
March 18, 2005 @ 9:47 pm
“Scott, every drive or purchase involves a contract, even if they are just as invisible to you as a sales tax, and every contract is also a “do this or else†order, enforced in the end by guns”
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I was responding to a claim that the govt rarely gives people orders. This doesn’t refute my response to that claim.
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“The question is which kinds of restrictions are legitimate. And that’s a values question, which you can’t simply resolve by a fiat declaration that your values are the only correct ones.”
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Expressing my belief that X is right or Y is wrong is not a “fiat declaration that [my] values are the only correct ones”. I, however, am evidently much less willing to make a fiat declaration at gunpoint that my ‘values’ are the only correct ones than the average liberal is.
Comment by BrDo —
March 18, 2005 @ 10:09 pm
I’m glad Ted K’s brother turned Ted in, but there’s no way to tell if I’m better or worse than Ted’s brother until my brother starts killing and I find out about it. Yes, there’s a difference. I think drugs are bad for people and society and should be discouraged. One can support laws in the abstract and regret their consequences in the particular. To avoid drug laws flamewar 101, I wouldn’t turn in my brother for tax evasion either, even though that more clearly hurts everyone. As to prisons/police, to pick a spot more central on a pot-to-murder spectrum, if my brother was stealing cars I would probably turn him in, but I wouldn’t want him to be murdered by the cops or abused in prison. If your sibling was doing something you thought bad enough to call the police, could he/she talk you out of it by saying “Cops are mean and prison is nasty?” Two asides: this whole discussion is the inverse or obverse? of the antiarchist-taunting “Well if you hate the state so much, then the next time your car is stolen, don’t call the cops.” And I’m sure even libertarian restitution happy fun time work camps will have weightlifting lifers.
Comment by Leonard —
March 19, 2005 @ 1:26 am
Jim, I’m an anarchocapitalist. If I believed that there were no bad people at all, I’d be something else – hmm, not sure really what. Perhaps a communist-anarchist.
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It’s a funny sort of question – “what politics would you have if you (counterfactually) believed X”? Varies with X, of course, but not something worth spending a lot of time of, except possibly for an X that millions of people do believe. In this case, though, I don’t think there are many people out there who think that everyone will be nice in any conceivable circumstance. I sure don’t.
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As for the veil of ignorance… well, that’s an interesting question. But no, I don’t think so. Behind Rawls’s veil, if I understand it correctly, you may know abstractly about love, but you won’t actually feel it (because you’re not yet born). Whereas, presumably you do love your sister, for real, right here right now. And of course that is largely the source of the intuitive power of the “my sister” idea: to show people that enforcement of many popular laws is not something we’d wish on someone we love. This makes those who support such laws hypocrits, at least arguably. Enough so , at least, that they might reexamine their support for the laws.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
March 19, 2005 @ 4:26 am
Rich, anarcho-capitalism is a *subset* of libertarianism, not a distinct philosophy. The correct term for the people you’re talking about is “minarchist”. As Leonard said, minarchists and an-caps are related to each other, and distinguished from other political types, by our methodological individualism.
Also, you’re still wrong about minarchists supposedly not being so different from other statists. The difference between
(a) thinking government is a horrible but necessary evil whose powers should thus be limited to a very few spheres
(b) thinking government, as an expression of the General Will, is a positive good and should have plenary power over people’s economic lives and many aspects of their personal lives
is one of kind, not merely of degree.
Note also that plenty of minarchists are willing to include local-government regulation of true natural monopolies (which are in fact *very* rare) among the powers of government. Justifying such regulations is very, very far from justifying anything like the modern plenary State.
Comment by Scott —
March 19, 2005 @ 5:10 am
“I just think that’s a very different question from whether or not it’s adequate as an overall way of determining the validity of laws. One thing that is useful about the revenge killing example is that it provides a vivid illustrative case to work through”
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The problem is you tried to have it both ways. People who are fine w/ revenge killing will be fine w/ it no matter how ’society’ validates laws. The bulk of us who would at the very least understand if sis went to jail for revenge killing would have to deter the others NO MATTER HOW we validate our laws.
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You judge “my sister” by how certain individuals will interpret it, then excuse your beliefs from interpretation by those same people saying they’d be deterred by threats from the majority.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
March 19, 2005 @ 6:59 am
Nicholas, you’re engaging in a false dichotomy between “thinking government is a horrible but necessary evil” and “thinking that government is a positive good and should have plenary power”. Neither one fits liberalism’s general attitude towards government, or my own as described in this thread.
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And I don’t think that anarcho-capitalism is a subset of libertarianism. I think that’s a sort of dodge, designed to increase the size of your political grouping and permit you to switch back and forth between anarchist and libertarian arguments, thereby having your cake (taxes) and eating them too.
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I’ll make the same recommendation to you that I was going to make to Scott (in a comment that I goofed up somehow). You’ve probably read him already, but if you haven’t, I recommend that you read David Friedman’s _Machinery of Freedom_. He’s an anarcho-capitalist, so I would guess that you would like him. Chapters 41-43, in particular, are available at his Web site, and they make many of the comments that I would make much better than I could. Scott’s comments about “economic rights” and yours about “methodological individualism” both would benefit, I think, from a consideration of why Friedman says that arguing out of the principle of minimizing coercion isn’t very convincing.
Comment by Scott —
March 19, 2005 @ 8:29 am
Scott’s comments about “economic rightsâ€
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The only comment I made there is that it’s _possible_ for taxes to be opressively high, even from a democratically elected govt – 51% of the voters can’t tax 49% to the point of taking everything.