Glen Whitman thinks that I’m wrong in laying the blame for the Paul fiasco on the utilitarians in the libertarian community. In fact, he argues, it is the Mises Institute crowd who are more deonotological and moralistic about liberty. I therefore have it backwards.
I disagree, although I understand why he thinks that. I have three answers to it:
1) I was not saying that the loonies are necessarily consequentialists. I was saying that consequentialism is one of the things that will make it very difficult for the libertarian community to remedy this problem. One of the big problems with the utilitarians is that they tend to take to the sidelines when the moralistic arguments are raised. In a clash between the paleo-cons and Objectivists, for example, the consequentialist would wait on the benches eating potato chips because he would consider the whole thing a waste of time. As I see it, that is the abdication of one’s moral responsibility to take part in this fracas. To paraphrase Reagan, I urge libertarians not to be so arrogant as to think that they’re above it all when it comes to the moral argument for liberty.
2) In defense of deontology: we can’t say that a category of argument is wrong because some who use it put the wrong content into it. We wouldn’t, for example, reject syllogistic thinking just because someone crafts a syllogism with incorrect premises. Slaveholders, too, appealed to moral theory to defend their arguments. That doesn’t mean that we are barred from condemning slavery as immoral. The Mises Institute crowd are wrong in the content of their argument, but I don’t think they are wrong in the form of their argument, insofar as they argue that tyranny is wrong (a position which I do not believe they hold, whatever they might claim).
3) My problem isn’t so much with consequentialism per se—obviously consequentialist arguments are an important part of this nutritious breakfast—but with moral and cultural relativism. The Lew Rockwell crowd, whatever their protestations to the contrary (and I don’t think there have been many) are in fact cultural relativists in the same way and for the same reasons that Robert Bork, Russell Kirk, and other allied paleo-cons are moral relativists. For them, morality is determined entirely by culture, which operates on subjective standards. There is no objective right and wrong; if a society “decides” that “it” wants slavery, or whathaveyou, then that is ipso facto morally right. This is just as relativistic as the person who says that morality is entirely a matter of individual choice. The Mises Institute crowd, more educated in market processes, seem to reject this latter view, but embrace the former. Mises himself did so, as I’ve pointed out before: “Everything that serves to preserve the social order is moral,” he wrote. “[E]verything that is detrimental to it is immoral. Accordingly, when we reach the conclusion that an institution is beneficial to society, one can no longer object that it is immoral. There may possibly be a difference of opinion about whether a particular institution is socially beneficial or harmful. But once it has been judged beneficial, one can no longer contend that, for some inexplicable reason, it must be condemned as immoral.” (Note that any dissent from the opinion-maker’s “judge[ment]” is necessarily rendered “inexplicable.”)
It was this (allegedly “scientific”) relativism that lay at the heart of Mises’ version of consequentialism. Since it’s impossible to define an objective ethics, then the science of political economy was left to totaling up the profits and losses instead. Political economists became the accountant who works interchangeably for the mafia or the industrialist—it’s all the same to him. Obviously this argument fits hand-in-glove with the states’-rights notions behind the Rockwellians. And it’s just plain wrong.
(Tom Palmer had a great article on this years ago in Liberty magazine, and it seems to have disappeared from the web. I wonder if we can find it.)
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