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Sidebar: The poll's ethical dilemmas
Epistemology Moral Absolutes, Truth, and Liberty
by Ross Overbeek
The Liberty Poll asks the questions Liberty was founded to answer.
The Liberty Poll statistics are in again, and again I find myself fascinated with the responses readers have made to the six ethical questions posed in the poll. The questions, which I helped formulate in late 1987, appeared in the 1988 Liberty poll, and again in the 1998 and the 2008 Liberty polls. (See box.)
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Ross Overbeek is cofounder of the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes.
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When the first Liberty Poll was run in early 1988, it included the following short statement:
Given the universal moral character of some libertarian precepts, it is not surprising that many are concerned about their implications for human behavior. The Liberty Poll posed six moral problems addressing the issue of whether there are circumstances in which it is morally proper to use force against innocent individuals, which would apparently violate such widely accepted libertarian principles like, "no person has the right to initiate the use of physical force against another human being" or "one should always respect the rights and property of others."
However, there is a great deal more to be said about the origin and motivation for asking these questions.
Why Those Questions?
When I was 15 or 16, I began my lifelong friendship with Bill Bradford. We were in high school, and we were both trying to understand the world. We both read "Man, Economy, and State" by Murray Rothbard and "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand during this period, and they certainly had a major impact on our lives. Reading these books was simply intoxicating. One was a magnificent, carefully crafted introduction to the central ideas in Austrian economics, and the other was simply the best novel I have ever read. The effect on two impressionable youths was pretty intense.
Both Rand and Rothbard had a common characteristic: they wrote uncompromising, articulate defenses of the libertarian position from a natural rights perspective. They presented very similar arguments leading to the assertion that freedom from physical aggressive force was the primary right of each individual. Rather than argue whether or not these formulations of a libertarian position were correct, let me simply recount the intellectual odyssey that Bill and I went through and how it led to the questions appearing in the Liberty Poll.
In the 1960s through the mid-1970s, the number of people discussing and adopting libertarian positions skyrocketed thanks to Ayn Rand's novels. Rand formulated a complete ethical system (which both Bill and I found extremely attractive; Bill eventually migrated from Rand's position, but I still fondly read the old essays). Her political beliefs centered on the nonaggression principle: "no man may initiate the use of physical force against others." Her ideas are best studied in the context of her novels, but she did also write a short summary of her views in a book that hit the newsstands in 1961 — "The Virtue of Selfishness." It was intentionally provocative, but if a person had the time and inclination to follow her arguments, it conveyed a great deal in a very few pages.
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I could not get into the Libertarian Party, since they required applicants to certify belief in the nonaggression principle.
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As two young students reading this stuff, it was immediately obvious to us that, if one believes
1. "No man may initiate the use of physical force against others" and
2. No group of individuals has rights other than those arising out
of the individuals' rights,
then a government may not initiate the use of physical force (defense force was never in question). While Rand defended the concept that governments could support themselves by selling services (enforcement of contracts, and so forth), the real issue centered on what distinguished the concept of government. If an organization offered services like police, a legal system, and defense against foreign aggression, but did so without itself initiating force in the form of taxation, was it really a government? Bill, myself, and many other young libertarians were grappling with these ideas which led to two distinct intellectual camps: those who believed in and supported a minimal state and those who adopted an anarchist position. I will not recount most of the details of the debates that took place, but they were intense, sincere, and fascinating. Bill wrote a remarkable essay that (I believe) was never published, arguing that the state,
by definition, always existed
(as the organization that had the most power in a geographical area), but left undecided how far you could contract it (and how you would support it). Much later in a debate with Charles Murray, David Friedman, and David Boaz (at the 2004 Liberty Editors Conference, published in the Dec. 2004 and Jan. 2005 issues of Liberty) he described his position as follows:
I got into a long discussion of this with Murray Rothbard once. He asked me how I would describe my political philosophy and I said, "Well, it's ultimately statist." And he asked me to describe what it was, and after a long discussion he told me that he thought my position was more or less tantamount to his own. Murray, of course, considered himself to be an anarchist.
The first issue we must address is what do we mean by government. When I use the term, I use a slight variation of the classic Weberian definition: government is that man or combination of men that are capable of enforcing law within a certain geographical area.
The reason that I have such an ambivalent — I prefer to say, subtle — position is that it seems to me to be impossible to dispense with some core of government and still have a peaceful society. What I mean by that is, whether we have people actively engaged in coercion to enforce rules within a society, we still have people who are capable of doing so if so inclined. When you are in a situation where someone is capable of forcing you to do something, the fact that, for the moment, he chooses not to do so or that he shouldn't do so, doesn't make you substantially freer. So I concluded that government is ultimately not dispensable because as long as we have a substantial number of people peacefully interacting, we're going to have a combination of people who can impose their will.
What I want is a system that will minimize the initiation of force against peaceful individuals.
My response to the question of what government should do is what convinced Murray Rothbard that I was virtually an anarchist. I think that everything a conventional government does can be privatized, except for one: a supreme court, that is, a court that has jurisdiction over competing private courts.
In 1973 David Friedman articulated a remarkable defense of anarchism in "The Machinery of Freedom," a book which offered the most successful attack on the minarchist position in my view.
By the mid-1970s, I believe that Bill was actively refining his basic position, and the major influence was the works of Mises. Since high school he had been studying Mises, but it took years to really understand much of what he wrote. As an aside, we both noted that Mises, one of the true intellectual giants of what might be termed classical liberalism, had argued that conscription into the military was in some cases defensible in "Human Action."
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I often railed against what I viewed as thoroughly objectionable nonsense that got into Liberty.
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In any event, as the years rolled on, I went into science; Bill built a business. We would get together and I would complain that I could not get into the Libertarian Party, since they required applicants to certify belief in the nonaggression principle. Bill finally managed to get in without certifying it. Since
1. neither of us believed we could in good conscience certify it,
2. we both were eager to support the basic libertarian platform, and
3. we had spent years thinking about the issue trying to understand what we could seriously defend,
we found the Libertarian Party's insistence that members sign the oath a remarkably destructive position.
Then, the day came when Bill decided to found Liberty. The magazine was to be a place where internal questions and disagreements could be openly aired and discussed. Bill emphatically rejected the idea of somehow presenting just the truth as he saw it. His view that the movement needed internal debate to strengthen its positions led him to publish a wide spectrum of authors. I must admit that I often railed against what I viewed as thoroughly objectionable nonsense that got into Liberty, but over time I have come to understand the wisdom of his position. In any event, when Bill suggested that the magazine publish a poll, I was still upset by the fact that the Libertarian Party would not even let me join and particularly shocked by many of the leading libertarians who defended that policy. Bill and I had posed a number of ethical dilemmas to each other over the years as a tool to help understand what we really believed. Bill suggested we include some, so I formulated a small, representative
set and they appeared in the July 1988 edition of Liberty.
What Is the Point?
The six questions were formulated to provoke thought and uncertainty. Bill and I both felt that, ultimately, both Rand and Rothbard had argued for precise positions that would not stand up under criticism. In such cases, making arguments with complete certainty (and in some cases caustic criticism) was actually counterproductive. There was a need for people to reevaluate, or at least deepen, their grasp of many of the fundamental issues. While philosophic attack and counter-attack was not going to happen with a broad audience, perhaps these questions could lead to more thoughtful exchanges.
The responses to the first Liberty Poll in 1988 from the editors of Liberty were really worth reading. Murray Rothbard gave a very interesting account of key moments in his intellectual development, and then he ended with an interesting analysis of the ethical dilemma faced by the shopping center guard. His comments are still well worth reading, but let me just recount his final shot:
The moral of this story is not that all rights are relative, and that no firm position can be taken. The moral of this story is that everyone's rights are absolute, that pragmatism is inconsistent as well as pernicious, and that everyone is obligated to defend every innocent person's rights: in short that no aggression may ever be waged against an innocent victim regardless of excuse or alibi. And that the putative shopping center guard who shot and killed the hostage was a murderer and should be treated accordingly.
Bill Bradford, writing as Ethan O. Waters, summarized his position:
To me, the most salient finding of the Poll is that libertarian moral thinking is not very rigorous. How else can one understand the fact that 11% believe a parent should be allowed to starve his kid to death, but 39% believe a parent should be allowed to kill his kid by malnutrition? Or explain why only 2% would face death by dropping from the 49th story of a building rather than violate property rights, but fully 22% would face freezing to death in a situation identical in other respects?
Although nearly all libertarians (89%) agree with the non-aggression axiom, a great many are willing to dispense with it when convenient: 47% will risk killing an innocent hostage to save a greater number of people in an emergency, and another 25% will kill the hostage outright if necessary; 89% will trespass to prevent a parent from starving his child for the fun of it; 98% would rather trespass than die in the flagpole question, including 14% who would restrict their trespassing to his flagpole and 84% who would go so far as to enter another's residence; 78% would force their way into an occupied building rather than face freezing to death; 73% would interfere with a neighbor's right to keep and bear arms if those arms are powerful enough.
It is apparent that many of those willing to dispense with the nonaggression axiom have no clear or consistent criterion for deciding when to dispense with it.
A Personal Note
When I consider the ethical situations posed in the Liberty Poll, I feel a great deal less emotion than I felt 20 years ago when we posed them for the first time. It all seems perfectly clear to me now:
1. In the case of the shopping center guard, you shoot through the hostage if necessary; in the case of the parent mistreating the child, you certainly prevent starvation, but you may or may not choose to interrupt the radical diet; in the case of the flagpole, you force entry; in the case of the blizzard, you force entry and it should not be considered aggression by the legal system; and, finally, in the case of the neighbor with an atomic weapon, you take it away from him.
2. It is important now that I have established what I want to achieve with my ethical system, that I work out a consistent set of rules that both leads to those conclusions and (within that constraint) maximizes individual freedom.
I realize how flippant and irresponsible this second point must sound, especially to those who have spent years trying to derive and maintain an ethical system from first principles. All I can say is that when I was young I did spend huge amounts of effort studying these questions. I benefited from exchanges with many wonderful libertarians and read many gifted authors. It is true that I ended up spending most of my creative energies in my later years in science, and I may well have acted imprudently in not spending more effort trying to strengthen my grasp of how social systems should be structured. However, I have come to appreciate efforts to formulate systems that, for the most part, achieve a set of desired ends, but do not pretend to achieve universal justice. That is, I see the merits in carefully considering things like the common law, Hayek's comments, and Richard Epstein's attempts to formulate a set of simple rules that don't need to work perfectly, but do work fairly well
(I have only recently begun to study Epstein's work; I can only say that I wish I had encountered it earlier). Maybe this all means that the libertarian movement and I have drifted apart, but that is not how I see it.
It seems to me to be similar to the situation faced in physics when it was clear that Newton's laws explained a great deal, but that there were a few facts that seemed to clearly contradict what those laws predicted. A great many physicists chose to ignore the discrepancies, believing that the power and accuracy of Newton's insights were beyond question. However, it was out of careful analysis of the anomalies that Einstein was able to formulate the way forward. In a real sense, Einstein's work did not invalidate Newton's, but rather extended it. I believe that these quite rare emergency situations do focus attention on details that challenge the universality of the nonaggression principle. To be blunt, arguing for dropping off flagpoles is silly. It boggles the mind that some libertarians do so while claiming to base their arguments on an egoistic framework.
I believe that we live in a world in which the opportunities for individuals to achieve their potential are dramatically improving, thanks largely to the remarkable spread of capitalism and freedom, that there are still many truths to be clarified, and that intellectual ferment is a good thing. We should seek consistency, but not demand it; what we need to demand is an open, honest search for truth.
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