Last week, I posted an argument that I received via e-mail positing that the difference between liberals and libertarians is that liberals adopt a zero-sum morality while libertarians are able to grasp that, in a post-hunter/gatherer society, morality really is positive sum. I promised a longer response than the one I gave there. You thought I’d forgotten, didn’ you? Well, I didn’t. I’m not sure that I’ve done justice to the argument yet, but this is the blogosphere and not academe. Thinking about questions for months on end before writing anything down doesn’t really work so very well. So instead, I’ll give you my (sort of) quick take.

First let me begin by saying that I’m not sure that I buy the argument that the hunter/gatherer world was quite as zero-sum as my e-mailer makes out. Here’s the argument again:

Prior to agriculture, humans were really not producers so much as they were predators. We would hunt animals (and gather plants) that nature provided us, but we were limited to what amount of plants and animals nature provided, and it was never enough for everyone. This was a zero sum world. An animal that I killed and ate represents one less in the forest for you to kill and eat. If you and I were in competing tribes, then we would have been zero sum competitors for the scarce resources available, and your success would have meant my failure and vice versa. Your very existence was a threat to mine.

I worry, though, that this might ignore the fairly significant evidence that nature may actually select for altruism rather than for self-interest. Indeed, much work in Ev Psych seems to show that humans really do cooperate with one another when doing so is to our advantage. That we are uncommonly good at detecting instances of cheating is some evidence that evolution has selected for those who are good at picking out who will cooperate. I fear that the picture of human morality sketched above may not be wholly consistent with what Ev Psych seems to be telling us.

But I’m hardly an expert in this area, so this is, for me at least, a minor quibble. Let’s suppose that this story of zero-sum and positive-sum morality is substantially correct. What then? Well, I’m not sure that it shows what my e-mailer thinks that it shows.

My tentative hypothesis is that the difference between liberals and libertarians relates not so much to our personal preferences, or our upbringings or educations, but to our relationship with the negative sum mentality inside us. The libertarian is somehow able to set it aside. The liberal cannot. I have no explanation for why this would be. (Emphasis added)

It’s that last part that is exactly my sticking point as well. I worry about a comprehensive explanation that concludes that everyone who disagrees with me is inexplicably acting irrationally. It seems to me that what you’re left with at that point is an explanation that doesn’t really explain anything. The assumption has to be that all liberals are simply unable to see past their instinctive, evolved zero-sum morality. Libertarians, however, all have that ability. That seems like an explanation that a Randian might really like. I just know that I don’t want to have to be the guy who tells Brad DeLong that he doesn’t really understand that economics isn’t actually zero-sum. I have a feeling that he understands that point already…probably far better than I do. Perhaps it really is true that a noncognitive explanation such as the one my friend offers is the correct one. I submit, though, that we should move to this sort of noncognitive explanation only if we cannot find a suitable cognitive one. That is, the principle of charity suggests that we call someone irrational only when all possible rational explanations have been exhausted.

So, then, what are the rational explanations? I think that there’s no easy answer to this, in part because there are at least two different kinds of philosophical liberals. The answer to why liberals aren’t libertarians depends on whether we’re talking about deontological liberals (who are by far the majority, at least in philosopical circles) or consequentialist liberals (me, for instance). The first, I’ve already sort of answered here. In a nutshell, the argument is that deontological liberals (e.g., Rothbard or Rand) account only for negative freedom, or freedom from outside coercion. Those who tend toward liberalism argue that real freedom requires that the individual in question be able to make meaningful choices. And that, in turn, requires that certain basic necessities be filled. Liberals argue that the state is the only way to ensure that these sorts of positive freedoms are met for all citizens. The disagreement between deontological liberals and libertarians, in other words, has pretty much nothing to do with economics, per se. Rather, the disagreement lies in what sorts features of individuals are valuable. For deontological libertarians, free markets and only free markets guarantee complete negative freedom for individuals. Any interference with the market is an unjustified intrusion on my negative freedom. For deontological liberals, positive freedoms must also be protected, and doing so requires redistribution of wealth.

I, however, am not a deontological liberal, and I’m not even remotely tempted by deontological libertarianism. I can’t see any good moral justification for limited my concern to negative freedom only, and all of the attempts that I’ve seen to do so rest on deep and astoundingly serious misreadings of Locke and Kant. I am a consequentialist liberal; I want to maximize good consequences, and it seems to me that some redistribution accomplishes that goal. It’s true that I’ll say things that sound like deontological liberalism (e.g., that we ought to protect positive freedoms), but I hold that position because I think that protecting positive freedoms maximizes good consequences. Why? Well, because–contra many libertarians–I think that it’s possible to make some (fairly crude) interpersonal comparisons of utility. My not starving to death brings me more pleasure than your new yacht will bring you. Most certainly my not starving to death brings me more pleasure than you would get from the difference between the 70 ft yacht you buy after paying taxes and the 85 ft yacht you would have bought otherwise. Oh, I’ll admit that it’s possible that you might be such a utility monster that you really do suffer tremendously from your 15-ft-smaller yacht. But ought we really base social policy on such extreme unlikelihoods?

Anyway, there you have it. The quick and dirty version, anyway. Deontologists differ over whether or not to consider positive freedoms. Consequentialists differ over what policies will, over the long run, produce the best set of consequences. It’s a rather boring answer. Certainly it lacks the zing of getting to claim that one side is irrational. I think that such disagreements are perfectly reasonable ones to have. That’s probably why I pay more attention to libertarians than other liberals might. I don’t think that we’re really speaking a different language at all. We just disagree about what parts of the language are most important.

Continuing the recent theme, an e-mailer asks me about the differences between liberals and libertarians. My e-mailer’s suggestion: perhaps the answer is to be found in evolutionary psychology. Here’s the argument in its entirety.

One of the very first attractive selling points of libertarianism to those who are inclined to accept it is its symmetry and consistency with regards to government intervention in the “economic” and “social” spheres. I’m sure you’ve seen the world smallest political quiz and its 3 dimensional political spectrum, mapping out this basic idea.

Anyway, the novice libertarian is prone to see the liberal and conservative sides as blatantly contradictory and absurd on their faces. How can the same government be trusted in one instance but not in another? This apparent contradiction has always been bothersome to me, because it is too blatant a mistake for a reasonable person to make. So either liberals/conservatives are plain unreasonable, or there is an explanation I am not appreciating. One of my goals has been to discover the grounds for drawing a distinction between the economic and social spheres in the minds of liberals (conservatives are another topic for another day).

Here is the argument I find most convincing:

If you believe in evolutionary psychology, then you might find appealing the argument that human beings evolved under zero-sum conditions, and hence are prone to believe they still exist. Not as a reasoned conclusion, but as an instinct.

Prior to agriculture, humans were really not producers so much as they were predators. We would hunt animals (and gather plants) that nature provided us, but we were limited to what amount of plants and animals nature provided, and it was never enough for everyone. This was a zero sum world. An animal that I killed and ate represents one less in the forest for you to kill and eat. If you and I were in competing tribes, then we would have been zero sum competitors for the scarce resources available, and your success would have meant my failure and vice versa. Your very existence was a threat to mine.

And so it is intuitively pleasing to think that, under such conditions, we would evolve to have certain attitudes, perspectives, and responses towards each other consistent with a zero sum reality. Natural selection would demand that humans develop hostility towards and distrust of competing humans. You see this in the wild with any number of other animals. They do not love their own kind, they are locked in a perpetual war with their own kind, a competition for survival.

Now the advent of agriculture changed the rules of the game. The rules in a productive world are different. Now each human, as a potential trading partner, is a potential benefit to me, and not necessarily (or likely) a threat to my existence. Your gain must no longer be my loss and vice versa. In fact, the opposite is true. So long as the two of us are engaged in productive work, your gain is my gain and vice versa. To the extent that we expend our energies in production and trade, it is now a positive sum world between us.

But while the rules changed, the players did not. Positive sum gains made survival all the easier, and natural selection ceased to have much influence on human traits. We never evolved beyond our zero sum mentalities, we never had need to. Negative sum mentalities can still survive and prosper under positive sum rules. You don’t need to understand economics to function within the economy. The zero sum mentality has never been weeded out and it persists to this day.

My tentative hypothesis is that the difference between liberals and libertarians relates not so much to our personal preferences, or our upbringings or educations, but to our relationship with the negative sum mentality inside us. The libertarian is somehow able to set it aside. The liberal cannot. I have no explanation for why this would be.

But assuming I am correct so far, then everything seems to fall into place rather nicely and the initial contradiction I spoke of is cleared up. A zero sum mentality has reason to designate the economic sphere as distinct from the social, and therefore subject to different rules. Enjoyment of the so called “social” freedoms does not imply an injury to somebody else, even in a zero sum world. But enjoyment of economic freedoms does. To the zero sum mentality, all economic activity is potentially injurious of innocent parties. This is quite different indeed.

Egalitarianism is the perfect philosophy for a civilization living in a zero sum world. If we are to be civilized, if we are to elevate humans above mere animals, then we should come to some sort of agreement on fair rules for the distribution of the fixed pie, since unfair rules could mean death to the weak. In a zero sum world, egalitarianism IS the thoughtful, kind, “looking out for the little guy” philosophy it claims to be. Indeed, “survival of the fittest” or “every man for himself” is a pretty heartless and brutal philosophy in a zero sum world, and probably not worth defending, unless we want to scrap civilization altogether and become savages again.

But because we do not live in a zero sum world, egalitarianism is instead the destructive force libertarians know it to be. I don’t need to explain to you the libertarian arguments for why egalitarian policies tend to hurt those they are intended to help. I’m sure you’re familiar.

The zero sum mentality comes equipped with its own zero sum morality. This is the morality that would be proper and appropriate to a zero sum world, the world we once lived in, the world in which we developed our moral instincts. I suggest that while liberals can learn market economics, and understand the positive sum nature of the economy, they cannot shake their zero sum morality. Of course, a zero sum morality is all too often at odds with a positive sum economy, and so we get the modern position of liberals, which I call the “market as a necessary evil” position. No longer socialists, modern liberals understand that the market must be tolerated if society is to avoid utter collapse, but they still find it morally repugnant and look for any opportunity they can to alter its outcomes in ways consistent with the zero sum morality.

As a self-proclaimed Liberal, I ask you what you think the Liberal’s relationship is with the zero sum mentality/morality I’ve described. The Libertarian never ceases to remember that ours is a positive sum world. That fact is always in the front of his mind when dealing with any economic issue. It is a fact relevant to both consequentialist and natural rights defenses of the free market economy, and so the Libertarian will never forget it. Can you say the same for the Liberal? How much thought does a typical Liberal give to the significance of zero sum v positive sum? And of course, if I’ve completely missed the point of Liberalism, if I’m so off base as to render all of this meaningless or moot, please explain.

The question deserves a longer response than I can give right now. I’ll be putting up a separate post in response sometime in the next couple of days. I suppose that my quick reaction would be to say that it’s not clear to me why it would be the case that if we evolved with a zero-sum morality, some of us seem stuck with it while others are able to transcend that morality. That’s a little to Nietzschean for my tastes. I suspect that the biggest difference between liberals and libertarians is going to come down to the claim that liberals hold that there are moral values that are not captured by the functioning of the free market. I’ll try to elaborate on the theme in my longer response.

Am I really a liberal Democrat? That’s the question posed to me recently by a reader of this blog and a regular commentator at Catallarchy, Steve Podraza. I’ll let him speak for himself. In a very nice e-mail to me (which he kindly gave me permission to quote here), Steve submits that:

You insist that you are not a libertarian, but a liberal and a democrat. My own reaction to this is to believe that you are now discovering that you are now and have always been a libertarian, but are suffering some sort of liberal seperation anxiety. Alternatively, you are a libertarian who likes the word “liberal” so much that you insist on defining it to suit you. I just don’t think it is possible for a person to be a true liberal democrat AND be as reasonable and appreciatitve of libertarian and anarchist thought as you are. You can understand us, can speak our language, and I’ve never known a liberal capable of even that.

I’m still not quite sure how to properly answer Steve. I suppose that I can begin by saying that at the very least, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t always a libertarian. I’ve had some leanings (or at least sympathies) in that direction since reading Anarchy, State and Utopia as an undergraduate. I became less convinced that Nozick really had gotten Locke right in graduate school where I was, understandably I suppose, swayed first by John Christman’s and then even more thoroughly by John Simmons’ interpretations of Locke. I was, moreover, strongly persuaded by Simmons’ arguments for philosophical anarchism. I tend to think he is right when he claims that all of the philosophical arguments that one might muster in defence of the moral legitimacy of the state simply fail to work as justifications for any state that actually exists. Thus, if a state is to have any justification at all, it will have to be a pragmatic justification. That is, a state can be justified if and only if it is the best (weak version) or only (strong version) means of bringing about some other states of affairs that we have independent reasons for valuing.

Given my position as a philosophical anarchist, I’m not in principle opposed to minarchy or even to anarcho-capitalism. My objection to both is that the state may well turn out to be the best (or possibly the only) means of bringing about certain kinds of social goods. My very first guest post at Catallarchy, for example, argues in favor of what I called natural rights of recipience. (Those of you who are regular readers will know, of course, that when I use the term “rights” I mean it in a pretty loose sense. I’m still a consequentialist.) That post is pretty clearly being written by a liberal in the modern rather than classical sense.

So I guess that the answer to the first part of Steve’s question is that, no, I’ve not discovered that I always have been a libertarian.

It’s the second part that gives me a bit more pause. Am I now a libertarian? And the answer here is, I don’t know. I agree with libertarians on a whole lot of issues. On the entire range of social issues, I doubt that you’ll find a libertarian who is more radical than I. If you’re looking to go out on a flag-burning, meth-snorting, pornography-reading, cross-dressing, gay-polygamous good time, then you just have yourself a ball. Hell, I don’t care if you want to bang your cousin on primetime television and then ride your motorcycle home at 140 mph without a helmet. They’re your heads; do with them as you please.

On the fiscal issues, I’ve a lot of sympathy for libertarian–or more specifically, marketists–positions. I like free markets. The elitist in me may make fun of Wal-Mart for selling a lot of cheap Chinese plastic crap, but when I go out to buy my groceries later today, guess where I’m gonna get them? I’ll go to Harris Teeter for better quality if I’m going to cook a really nice dinner in place of going out (or better still, when I can convince someone who actually knows what she’s doing to cook a really nice dinner in place of going out). But when it’s just me and Matthew here, I’m gonna do my part to make the heirs of Sam Walton just a little bit richer. Why? Because it’s cheap. I like capitalism. I like the fact that it makes us all rich enough that we can buy all sorts of things that we don’t need. I really like the fact that it’s made us rich enough that we now think of all sorts of extravagances as basic necessities (my wireless phone, my wireless broadband, a shelf full of DVDs, etc.)

So why doesn’t that make me a full-blown libertarian? After all, what I’ve written so far could have been written by most of the people at Catallarchy. And maybe I’ll end up there at some point. But I still hold on to one core insight of liberalism: respect for autonomy means more than just non-interference. I can have all sorts of freedoms from various things, but those freedoms don’t mean a damn thing if I’m too cold/sick/hungry/stupid/isolated to exercise them. And I remain convinced that, at least for right now, the only way to ensure that everyone has the shelter, medicine, food, education, and access needed to enjoy his/her freedom is through some form of redistribution. Insisting that you redistribute part of your wealth is no more a violation of your autonomy than is insisting that you refrain from hitting me in the nose. Both hitting me in the nose and refusing to help those too poor to exercise their freedoms are violations of autonomy.

Notice, though, that my argument here is a consequentialist one. I think that the state should exist and should redistribute wealth because I think that that is the best way of ensuring that everyone’s autonomy is respected. But I realize that there are those who disagree. I also realize how little economics I really understand. I’ve learned both of those things by talking with really smart libertarians. (I suppose that I should get around to learning something from smart conservatives. And I’ll do that just as soon as I meet one. So far, all the smart ones I’ve encountered turn out really to be libertarians.) Over the past year, I’ve found myself going back and rereading my college economics texts. I also read Hayek and Friedman. There is something to be said for the argument that an unfettered market will increase wealth and that the overall increase in wealth will, in the end, help the poor far more than will redistribution now. So I think that I currently find myself somewhere in the middle. Let’s deregulate markets. But I submit that we’re rich enough that giving up some future wealth in order to provide a safety net now isn’t an unreasonable thing to ask.

Does that make me a libertarian? I still don’t know. Some libertarians (Hayek, most famously) argue in favor of a safety net. Maybe the term libertarian is broad enough to capture me. Perhaps I still haven’t said anything all that different from what at least a couple of hardcore libertarians might say. I’m not sure. Ask me in another year.

In the meantime I’ll continue to identify as a liberal. The label fits either way, after all. And I’ll continue to shell out money to the DNC. That’s not because I’m a die-hard Democrat. It’s rather that I find the social conservatism of the Republican Party far more morally repugnant than the socialism of the Democratic Party. There’s also one other point. Republicans have held the White House for 22 of my 34 years. Guess how many of those years the party of fiscal restraint has managed to spend less money than it took in? Zero. (FY 2001 was Clinton’s budget). The Democrats haven’t exactly showered themselves with glory, but a Democratic president did manage the feat 4 out of 12 years.

Until further notice, I’m still a Clintonite neo-liberal.

Okay, so maybe making claims about the future of liberalism is a bit overblown. But I hate thinking of titles, so just deal with it. Wow, there’s a really professional start to a post. It is Memorial Day weekend though, and I’m feeling casual. Or more causal than usual. Didn’t think that was possible, did you? Enough of this. Let’s get to the serious stuff.

So in my last post, I confessed to finding Matt McIntosh’s argument that Mill’s defense of experiments in living ought to commit him to a defense of polycentric law to be pretty plausible. I mentioned there that I had some worries about scaling up; the more that I’ve considered the issue, the stronger those reservations have grown. I think that Matt is on to something, but I’m not fully convinced that the argument Matt offers gets Mill all the way to polycentrism. Since classes are out and I can’t force any of this onto my students, I figured that I’d use this space to think out loud a bit. Bear with me.

First a refresher. The gist of Matt’s argument is to extend the rationale for experiments in living beyond the individual sphere and into the political one. The initial Millian argument, of course, is that individuals are far and away the best judges of their own happiness. Even if sometimes you might plausibly know better than I what would make me happy, you won’t know so very reliably. Indeed, it is unlikely that we will ever really know before the fact that your ideas about what will best serve my interests are better than my ideas. Given the high degree of error, it makes far more sense to allow me to live my own life according to my own ideas. Moreover, it could very well be the case that my own unorthodox way of living my life would actually be better for a lot of people. We won’t know that, however, until at least someone gives it a shot. Thus we as a society ought to tolerate–nay, encourage–various experiments in living. If my experiment turns out to be a failure, well, then I’ve harmed only myself and the rest of society has learned something about how not to live.

Matt then claims that the same rationale can be applied to governments. Political structures do have real world consequences. Sometimes those consequences turn out to be pretty good ones (liberal democracy paired with some form of capitalism has worked out rather nicely in a number of places). Other times those experiments are disastrous (North Korea anyone?). Still, it is hard to know in advance what sorts of structures will work and what sorts won’t. So why not allow experiments in, well, governing as well? Federalism already embodies this principle to a limited extent. Polycentrism simply takes the next logical step; rather than making me move to another state if I don’t like the policies in this one, why not simply let me cancel my existing contracts with my private legal service and sign up with a competitor?

So far, so good. I think (reluctantly) that Matt is correct. Mill’s arguments ought to extend in precisely this way. But that does not entail a full-bore commitment to pluralism, something that Mill, I think, rightly recognizes. Mill does not, as Matt and Brian Doss both note, wholeheartedly embrace pluralism. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that Mill embraces rationalism fully and that the pluralistic elements in Mill’s thinking are constrained entirely by his rationalism. Let’s consider just the basic argument for experiments in living. Yes, it’s true that Mill does defend various experiments. But his arguments for experiments in living, in chapter 3 of OL, already presuppose the basic limitations of the harm principle laid down in chapter 1. That is, I am free to engage in any sort of life that I wish, so long as that sort of life does not itself harm others.

That standard is relatively straightforward when we apply it to individuals. The question, though, is how we ought to scale up that basic restriction when we move from individuals to political structures. What happens when we find some particular political arrangement to be in violation of the harm principle? What, to pick a random example, do we say when one of the private legal services offers sharia law? Fine, one might say. If people voluntarily sign up for a particular view of the law, then what business of mine is it that they do so? And I’ll agree to a certain extent. For the first generation of customers, sharia law is a perfectly legitimate option. But what happens in the second generation? What shall we say about the girls who are treated as second-class citizens, who grow into women unable to act in a way that is fully autonomous? When they remain customers of sharia law (because the very law under which they already live does not allow them any independent voice), have they done so freely? Even if they actually claim to prefer sharia law, can we really believe them at this point?

My basic worry here is the same worry that drives the rationalist branch of liberalism. Taking people’s preferences as we find them ignores the fact that families, cultures, and institutions can be coercive. Yes, states are a threat to individual freedom. Yes, states can be and often are the biggest threats to individual freedom. But I would venture the claim that in our current (fairly free) society, it isn’t the state that is the biggest threat to freedom these days. Indeed, in a democracy, the state merely acts as the instrument that restricts freedom. It is society itself, however, that wields that instrument. Government in a real democracy is not some mysterious bogeyman that sneaks up in the night to steal our freedom. “The Government” consists of a bunch of individuals whom we have elected and whom we can kick out. If our government steals our freedoms, it is only because we ourselves have consented to have it stolen. My freedom to pass the bong during my gay wedding held at the walk-up abortion clinic heated by my own private nuclear reactor and guarded by M-60 wielding Mexicans who can’t speak a single fucking word of English isn’t threatened by some group of rich white guys who have just decided that they don’t like these sorts of things. Rather, the rich white guys vote against all of these sorts of things because the rest of the damn voters don’t like those sorts of things. No, it’s not government that is restricting my freedom. The only army that is a real threat to me is the army of suburbanites with their well-kept lawns, their soccer practices and piano lessons, and their disdain for anything that’s actually, you know, fun.

End of rant.

What all of this means, then, is that Mill’s arguments for what we might call individual pluralism are couched in a specific context. Mill creates a large space for individual experiments in living only because he already assumes the existence of a state that will protect individuals from experiments that violate the harm principle. Polycentrism, however, offers no such protection. My private legal system (together with my private defense agency) will provide me with whatever services that I wish to pay for. What it cannot do, however, is to protect me when my family/community/religion coerces me into signing up for services that oppress me.

So will Mill’s arguments scale up to something like a federalist liberal democracy? You betcha. There is plenty of room for experiments in governing, but there is still a central set of rules that place limits what kinds of experiments are permitted and there is still a central authority to enforce those limits. Polycentrism offers no such safeguards. So while the arguments for experiments in living, considered in isolation, would seem to entail polycentrism, I think that the basic requirements of Mill’s rationalism still commit him to at least some role for a central government. Mill the federalist? Yes. Mill the crazy, drunken anarchist? No, no and no. Well, maybe yes on the first one. He did wait until he was 45 to get laid. And the man called himself a hedonist. Tsk, tsk.