Intuitive Libertarianism

Here, I summarize my ideological development since college.* This was for a book someone put together of biographies of libertarian figures.

[ *Based on: “Intuitive Libertarianism,” pp. 193-8 in Libertarian Autobiographies: Moving Toward Freedom in Today’s World , ed. Jo Ann Cavallo and Walter Block (Palgrave Macmillan 2023). ]

Psychological research finds political orientation to be correlated with broad personality traits, such as agreeableness or extraversion. There are even studies measuring the heritability of political orientation (it’s about 40%). If you’ve interacted with ideologues, you’ve probably noticed some patterns. Perhaps you’ve noticed that people who like to wear ties are more likely to be conservative, while those who enjoy poetry readings are more likely to be socialists. (A good philosophical question is to what extent the correlations between personality and political beliefs ought to undermine our confidence in our own objectivity and ability to identify political truth. But that is a question for another time.)

So perhaps you can understand what I mean when I say that some people are natural-born libertarians. If you’ve spent time in libertarian circles, you’ve probably noticed tastes and traits that are much more prevalent among libertarians than among the general population. Libertarians tend to be more frank and less tactful; more open to breaking social conventions; more interested in working out the logic of abstract systems; more interested in computers, science fiction, and philosophical debate; more committed to principles of rationality; and more interested in monetary systems and economic theory than the general population. In my social media feed, I see messages from the same people critiquing Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Dune and President Joe Biden’s economic policies.

I am one of these natural born libertarians. I have more or less all the traits that are strongly correlated with being a libertarian. Perhaps most importantly, I have little intuitive respect for social hierarchies. I don’t perceive people who are at the top of a social hierarchy as more deserving of respect or entitled to special privileges, compared to, say, my plumber. I have no intuitive sense of why we “have to” obey the law or the commands of the powerful, apart, of course, from fear of these people’s predictable aggression. So one could have predicted that I would have to be a libertarian.

I wasn’t always a libertarian, though. When I entered college at UC Berkeley, I was some sort of socialist. Obviously, the centralized, dictatorial socialism of the Soviet Union was no good. What we needed was a system of small worker cooperatives. I had gotten this idea from some of the nonsense materials that were commonly used in high school debate (for those not familiar with it, high school debate is an extracurricular activity that mainly trains students in stringing together wild-eyed quotes from random ideologues and reading them really fast).

What rescued me from that was mainly Ayn Rand. Three separate people recommended her to me. I started with a passage from Atlas Shrugged (reproduced in For the New Intellectual), which dramatically portrayed what might happen at an automobile factory that adopted the famous Marxist dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” To implement this noble-sounding ideal, one would of course have to assess each person’s abilities, as well as each person’s needs. To make a long story short: Everyone winds up trying to demonstrate how little ability they have (so that little might be demanded of them) and how much need they have (so that much might be given to them). The system breeds resentment, strife, and ultimately economic collapse. Rand’s novel We the Living further demonstrates how socialism destroys people’s moral character.

Though I view Rand as a brilliant novelist, I don’t accept her philosophical system in general. I continue, however, to think her critiques of socialism are among the most powerful and insightful ever written.

So I escaped from socialism and moved toward minimal state libertarianism early in my college career. At first, this seemed the most extreme libertarian position that was defensible. Though all government involved some amount of theft in the form of taxation, I couldn’t see how a society could work without a government to protect against criminals.

As it happened, I was at UC Berkeley at the same time as an economics student named Bryan Caplan (who would later become a famous libertarian economist). Bryan introduced me to the ideas of anarcho-capitalism, mainly through the writings of Murray Rothbard and David Friedman. My initial reaction to the idea of anarchism was “that’s crazy,” accompanied by a half dozen obvious objections. But as each new generation of libertarians quickly discovers, if they have a sufficiently open mind to read the damn books, Rothbard and Friedman have addressed all the obvious objections. After discussing these works with Caplan, I came to the conclusion that a kind of anarchist system was, after all, feasible. So I became an anarcho-capitalist while in college, and I have remained one ever since.

After college, I went to graduate school in philosophy at Rutgers University, which was then the #3 ranked philosophy department in the country (it later rose to #2). Political philosophy wasn’t my main area of interest, nor was it much emphasized at Rutgers. When I decided to become a philosopher, I was aiming, as I wrote in my statement of purpose for grad school, to solve the mind-body problem, the problem of induction, and the problem of skepticism in epistemology. I also had interests in free will, meta-ethics, and other big philosophical issues. I never did make much progress on the mind-body problem, but I eventually developed a theory of induction that I’m fairly happy with and a book-length response to skepticism. That book was based on my PhD dissertation, which defends a direct realist account of our knowledge of the external world.

Upon graduating from Rutgers, I was hired on as an epistemologist in a tenure-track position at the University of Colorado. This was the best job in epistemology advertised that year. I have remained there ever since. For the first several years, including all my pre-tenure period, I focused mainly on epistemology, plus some metaethics. I published my book refuting skepticism in 2001, and my defense of ethical intuitionism in 2005. I did it in that order because I had noticed that the most popular objections to intuitionism were really just general skeptical arguments that, if applied consistently, implied that no one had knowledge of anything whatsoever. So I decided to work out my response to general skepticism first, then move on to the special case of skepticism about ethics. (It’s amazing how many people have absurdly skeptical positions about an enormous variety of things.)

I wrote a few articles on libertarian themes. A philosopher who was covering gun control in a class had remarked to me that it seemed as though there was at most a trivial right at issue, “the right to own a gun.” That prompted me to write “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?”, which sought to demonstrate that this is in fact an important right. Then someone invited me to contribute to a collection of essays on the drug war. So I wrote “America’s Unjust Drug War,” which has since been reprinted in multiple anthologies. Later, I was talking to Bryan Caplan at some libertarian event when he raised the question of what is the most harmful law in the U.S. I suggested drug prohibition. He suggested immigration restrictions, on the ground that there are literally millions of people who would swiftly and drastically improve their lives if only they were allowed to leave the impoverished, oppressed nations they live in and come to the U.S. That prompted me to write “Is There a Right to Immigrate?”, which has since become one of my most cited articles. (Immigration became a hotter issue in the culture wars after I wrote the paper.)

Around 2010, five years after I earned tenure, I decided to write up my general defense of libertarianism. I didn’t entirely agree with the defenses of libertarianism I had heard previously. I accepted the notion of individual rights against force and fraud, but I couldn’t accept the sort of absolutist stance about it that I saw in thinkers such as Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and perhaps Robert Nozick. Any moral consideration, I thought, could be outweighed by sufficiently large consequences; furthermore, I was never sure exactly how the principles of individual rights should be formulated. But I also did not think any of that mattered to the core motivation for libertarianism. I thought people like Rand and Rothbard were selling libertarianism short by portraying it as resting on extremely strong and hence doubtful moral assumptions. Observers were liable to say, “Well, I don’t accept absolute property rights, so I guess I can now ignore the rest of this philosophy.”

I saw libertarianism as resting on a much more modest foundation. To arrive at libertarianism, you need only accept some perfectly moderate, common sense ethical intuitions, of a sort that are widely accepted on all sides of the political spectrum, and apply them consistently to the state. That part in italics marks the real difference between libertarians and non-libertarians. Non-libertarians make special exceptions for the state; libertarians apply the same moral constraints to the state as they apply to everyone else. Non-libertarians don’t generally think, for example, that you or I may go around stealing people’s money to give it to the poor. They don’t think that a church may hire armed guards to kidnap people who are consuming unhealthy substances and lock them in cages. But they think the state may do these things. They think, in short, that the state has a special kind of authority that lets it evade the ethical constraints that apply to private individuals and organizations. So I wrote The Problem of Political Authority, seeking to show that there is in fact no satisfactory basis for this belief in the special moral status of the state.

The book became a hit with libertarians, both within and without the academy. I think it is my best-known work by far (though my work in epistemology and meta-ethics has more citations). I got many new social media friends and followers, and I started to get podcast interview invitations, which accelerated during the pandemic.

A few years later, while looking for some low-hanging intellectual fruit, I turned to legal philosophy. It had long seemed to me that the legal world is dominated by certain baseless and irrational ideas that are nevertheless embraced with near-absolute conviction by many judges, lawyers, and even some scholars – views such as that it is wrong for judges or juries to use their own, independent moral judgement in resolving legal cases. So I wrote Justice Before the Law while on sabbatical in New Orleans. It exposes some of the most egregious injustices in the American legal system, then argues that agents in the legal system – including judges, jurors, and lawyers – should place justice ahead of fidelity to the law.

Around the same time (2018), in view of the long philosophical messages I had been posting on Facebook, and partly due to the worry that at some point Facebook might ban me for my political views, I started a weekly blog, “Fake Nous,” where readers could find my most accessible ideas. My aim was to share interesting thoughts and promote rational thinking. In 2022, I moved the blog to Substack, which resulted in a huge increase in readership.

That summarizes my political philosophical development. I was radicalized in college, so to speak, and I have stuck to the same basic point of view ever since.