There are some libertarians who argue that libertarianism has no conception of the good life; that it is neutral with regard to values and simply draws boundaries around individual choices, but makes no claims about how individuals ought to live.
I have long considered this view so silly and insubstantial (albeit common) that I haven't bothered to discuss it much, but it's now entered my neighborhood of the blogosphere, so a few observations may be warranted. It is, certainly, the single leading handicap of libertarianism in public debate.
First, it is ludicrous to suggest that any politics can exist without a basis in some conception of the good. Every attempt to create a "value free" politics fails, usually by showing that at bottom there is some normative conception about how people ought to live. Today's law and economics scholars, for example, adhere to what they consider a scientifically value-neutral conception of political society, advancing "efficiency" rather than anything like goodness or whathaveyou. But when you look closer, it turns out they are smuggling in a conception of the good: that is, they assume that an increase in "social wealth" is a goal to be pursued through political means. Thus efficiency is a good thing because it promotes the increase of social wealth. Or take Mises, than whom nobody has more rigorously eschewed moralism...and yet who wrote that "Everything that serves to preserve the social order is moral; everything that is detrimental to it is immoral." (A horrifying assertion, by the way). Or take Todd Seavey's argument, which smuggles in a conception of the good: namely, that it is good for individuals to have the freedom to make free choices within the realm of their moral vision--to join whatever cult or following they wish. That it is bad, in other words, to be deprived of that freedom. This conception of autonomy is a conception of the good life, whether you like it or not.
If it were possible to construct a politics that really was entirely devoid of pronouncements about what is good or bad for human life (which it is not), what good would it do? It is often said that if there were some ether or quitnessence that really could not be measured in any way by physical processes, it would have absolutely no relevance to us because it would not be interacting in any way with the world. Likewise, a politics that really was value-neutral would have nothing to say to us as human beings, and would be pointless. What's more, it would be vulnerable to any claims about the good life, no matter how weak, since it is a vision of the good life that all human beings need.
You cannot have a politics of liberty that avoids the issue of what it means to lead a good life, and I will point to one example of this. Note that Mr. Seavey's blog post begins with a photograph of the Amish. Well, there is a reason that the Amish are a religious minority living in a free society, and not the other way around: there is a reason that the Amish never developed a philosophy of classical liberalism. You cannot have an open society without open people, without open individuals. You cannot hope to have a tolerant society without the idea that tolerance serves human needs and is good for human beings.
It was the great achievement of the classical liberals, not that they threw up their hands at the question of the good life, but that they rightly understood that the good life requires freedom. Yes, of course that included a wide realm of autonomy in making moral choices, but such autonomy is the farthest thing from true moral agnosticism. On the contrary, it was the very idea of natural rights--that there are pre-political principles of right and wrong which the state itself must obey in its dealings with us--that was the greatest discovery of the 17th century Whigs who gave birth to libertarianism. It is certainly true that "the great danger for humankind, whether from the Taliban or the communists, has always been the totalizing impulse to turn all social complaints into justifications for political action." But what libertarians discovered was not that these "social complaints" are somehow meaningless or matters of mere personal taste--but that it was the "totalizing impulse" that had to be restrained. Why? Because under that impulse, the good life is not possible.
One final note for clarity. A common fallacy in this area is treating individual rights as primary moral principles. When one conceives of libertarianism as making no claims about the good life, one tends to fall into arguing that respecting individual rights is the whole content of morality in the libertarian vision. One comes to the same silly conclusion as the Wiccans: "harm none, do as you will." Of course, this can give the individual no idea as to how to actually behave, and Den Uyl and Rasmussen have recently demolished it. Their work is highly recommended on this point. Individual rights must be understood within a philosophical hierarchy: they exist to serve an end, but they are not the whole of morality, nor do they substitute for questions about morality. They exist because the pursuit of the good life requires that we abide by certain principles in our treatment of others and that they abide by certain principles in their treatment of us. Individual rights serve human flourishing. And that is why some cultures--those which reject human flourishing as an end to be pursued--have no respect for individual rights. And that is why libertarians cannot be moral relativists.
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