Coercion vs. Consent

In "Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that "there are very few libertarians today for whom consequences are not ultimately the reason why they believe in liberty," while Richard Epstein cheerfully agrees that libertarians are "all consequentialists now." Fortunately, this is not true. I say "fortunately" because consequentialism is philosophically indefensible as a normative theory.

The basic problem with consequentialism is that it recognizes no limit in principle on what can be done to people in order to promote good consequences. Now consequentialists insist that in the vast majority of cases, killing, torturing, or enslavig innocent people is not the best way to get good results. And of course they are right about that. But by the logic of their position the consistent consequentialist (happily a rara avis) must always be open to the possibility that killing, torturing, or enslaving the innocent might be called for under special circumstances, and this recognition necessarily taints the character of even one's ordinary relations to other people. As Immanuel Kant pointed out more than two centuries ago, to subordinate--or even to be prepared to subordinate--one's fellow human beings to some end they do not share is to treat them as slaves, thereby denying both their inherent dignity and one's own.

Many consequentialists will say that they too can accommodate ironclad prohibitions on certain actions, on the grounds that utility will be maximized in the long run if people internalize such prohibitions. This is true, but it misses the point. Once one has internalized an ironclad prohibition, one is by definition no longer a consequentialist. One cannot treat certain values as absolute in practice and still meaningfully deny their absoluteness in theory; a belief that is not allowed to influence one's actions is no real belief. Most consequentialists are morally superior to their theory and, thankfully, pay it only lip service.

David Friedman is quite right to point out, in the same issue, that "concepts such as rights, property, and coercion" are complicated and not always susceptible to clear and easy rules. But this is not an argument for making consequences the sole test of right action. What it does mean is that non-consequentialist moral considerations establish only certain broad parameters, leaving it to consequences, custom, and context to make them more specific.

The parameters are not infinitely broad, however, and I do not see how they could be broad enough to license one group of people, called the government, to reassign title to the fruits of another group's labor at the first group's sole discretion. Hence, even if taxation and eminent domain had good results--which in the long term they rarely do--they would stand condemned on non-consequentialist grounds as slavery and plunder.

Roderick T. Long

Department of Philosophy

Auburn University

Auburn, AL

In the roundtable discussion on the limits of liberty, James Pinkerton laments that libertarianism may be in danger of being regarded as a purely economic philosophy, while public attention shifts to other hot topics. I only wish that were true. Economics is what libertarianism explains best, and we should stick to pushing tax cuts, deregulation, the lowering of trade barriers, and the like.

Focus on the fiscal, my fellow libertarians. The core free-market arguments have never applied to topics like foreign policy, police and courtroom procedures, the definition of marriage, abortion, the cultural effects of immigration, or the nature of addiction as neatly as they do to the everyday buying and selling of widgets (and the everyday interference with widgets by big government). There's no shame in that.

Let the other political factions fight about Iraq, gays, and all those other things. If we don't weigh in loudly on more clear-cut (albeit sometimes boring) issues such as the need to simplify regulations, abolish the Commerce Department, privatize the Post Office, and take an immense are to the budget, we can rest assured no one else will.

Todd Seavey

New York, NY

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