Also, I am not a “self-indulgent, narcissistic heathen,” I do not “pay lip service to religion,” and I believe it is morally right to be “concerned only with bettering our own lot in life.” I am also not a “Republican without morals,” and I believe that it is immoral for one person to force others to do with their lives what he thinks is right. I do not think it’s right to believe in things without evidence, or to embrace a religion simply because it coincides with your prejudices. (Oh, yeah, you were just kidding. Well, I also think it’s wrong to kid about such things.) One of us, at least, is not a hypocrite.
Update: Mr. Dillard has posted something of a clarification, in which he says that the Volokhs and the Sentitious Crowd and I are exceptions to the general rule of immoral libertarians:
while many Libertarians are thoughtful people who have carefully formed their views within the confines of respectable moral parameters (e.g., Sandefur, [Crescat], and Volokhs), it has been my experience that this is the exception rather than the rule. There is a cruder form of Libertarianism bubbling up from our societal fabric...anchored upon a radical individualism with no moral compass.
But I don’t think this quite squares things. As I wrote to Dillard privately,
Can’t imagine why I’d feel insulted at being repeatedly called immoral by you, without the slightest basis in fact. Your calling me and all libertarians immoral reflects, I think, your persistent misunderstanding—I hope [it] is just a misunderstanding—of libertarianism, which draws a distinction between sins and crimes. Just because we do not believe the state should punish sins does not mean we do not consider those things to be sins. Yet because you draw no such distinction—as is characteristic for a conservative—you think we are immoral for being willing to tolerate others doing wrong (so long as they only do wrong to themselves). Hence your calling us “Republicans without morals,” even though I don’t recall me or the Volokhs or other prominent libertarians saying there was anything good or right or not wrong about, say, drunkenness, or adultery, or cheating on taxes, or whathaveyou. Objectivism, of which I believe I am the most prominent blogging practitoner, imposes a remarkably severe moral code, which has earned us a reputation among many other libertarians as serious killjoys. So I am constantly being called a feckless libertine by one side and a Puritanical gloom-monger by the other, and I am fucking tired of it.
Is this an overreaction? Then make the most of it. But first, some qualifiers. Will Baude has repeatedly declared his belief that morality is entirely subjective, so Dillard’s criticism falls much closer to the target with Baude—a matter on which I have stringently attacked Baude on many occasions. And are there no moral relativists among the conservatives? Second, while there are no doubt many people today—and have always been many people—who act to gratify themselves “with no moral compass,” tarring this as “libertarianism” is at best confusing, and at worst—and most likely—downright intentionally misleading. Take it away, Walter Olson and Tom G. Palmer.
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