How NOT to Argue for Liberty

In an interview with Reason, Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen explains that her defining feature as a candidate is that she’s "both practical and principled.” 

She’s principled because she supports "the Libertarian platform plank for plank.” But she’s practical because she recognizes that it’s not persuasive to just say:

"I'm for liberty and freedom" and that's all. The people who will be [convinced] by liberty and freedom for their own sake are probably already in the party. What we have to do is convince soccer moms, business people, the average person that our ideas will work better.

For example, I don't think it's a good tactic to just say "it's my body I can put whatever I want in it, take whatever drugs I want." We need to explain to Americans this is how that would help you—crime will go down, your kids won't have drug dealers in school [or as neighborhood role models of success]. Who ever heard of a liquor store owner pushing gin on kids in middle school? I want to argue from a practical standpoint, explain to most Americans that I'm not [supporting drug legalization] because I want to use drugs or you do. I want a better, safer America for your kids and one with less violence.

Jorgensen’s perspective is very common within the liberty movement. I recall Milton Friedman, for example, saying that freedom was both desirable for its own sake and had desirable consequences. And even Objectivists will often argue that a particular policy is both moral (it protects rights) and practical (it has good economic consequences).

The belief is that there are two kinds of arguments for liberty: moral arguments that appeal to principles and practical arguments that appeal to consequences. 

But there’s something extremely odd about this way of thinking. The people who make it usually say that they believe in their ideas out of principle—and yet they think other people won’t be convinced by the principle, they’ll only be convinced by practical arguments. 

And so as a communicator you’re in the position of giving arguments disingenuously. “I am so moral that I’m convinced by principled arguments. But you? You riffraff are trapped in your practical concerns, so I guess I’ll dredge up some practical arguments.”

This is inauthentic. One of my core beliefs is that the only arguments you should make for your views are arguments that reflect why you believe what you believe. You persuade others by sharing the ideas that persuaded you.

Once you start throwing out arguments solely in order to appeal to other people, you are no longer persuading: you are manipulating. 

The source of the error

The idea that there are two arguments for liberty reflects a distorted view both of principles and of practicality. 

On the one hand, it treats principles as intrinsically valuable. Liberty isn’t good because it achieves anything desirable in reality. It’s just good in and of itself. 

But once you concede that principles can be intrinsically valuable, then what do you say when a Social Justice egalitarian declares that xe believes equality of outcome is intrinsically valuable? 

On the other hand, this idea robs practicality of any coherent meaning. Obviously what’s “practical” depends on what it is you want to practice. And shouldn’t that be determined by morality? Doesn’t morality set our basic goals and hence the standard for what’s practical? 

For example, if we believe that our moral goal is to serve the Fuhrer, isn’t it practical to “follow orders” to commit genocide? If our moral goal is to eliminate inequality, isn’t it practical to penalize the successful and reward the unsuccessful? If our moral goal is to minimize our impact on the planet, isn’t it practical to discard capitalism and the high-impact society it unleashes?

“No, no, no. You know what we mean by practical, Watkins. We mean things like prosperity, safety, opportunity, health…the things most Americans want.”

To understand what’s going on here requires recognizing that our culture’s conception of morality is built on a deep philosophical division between ideas and reality. This goes back to Plato who believed in two worlds: this world and a higher world of Ideas. Plato’s perspective was inherited by Christianity, which substituted God in Heaven for Plato’s Ideas. 

Morality, on the two worlds view, is not a guide to achieving something in this life, but in the next. To be moral is to pursue the good divorced from your life on Earth. To be practical, then, is to drop moral concerns and do “what works” instead of what “higher reality" commands. 

The Christian view of morality was later secularized into what Ayn Rand called “altruism.” Altruism retained the idea that you have no personal stake in morality—that morality is about serving something greater than your own life on Earth. But instead of serving some ethereal God or Form of the Good, altruism said that morality is about serving other people. 

Our culture is ruled by altruism. Not because people go around constantly placing others above self, but because we accept the altruist framework, which says that moral principles aren’t guides for getting what you want, but commandments telling you to give up what you want. To be practical, to pursue what you want here on Earth…you don’t need principles for that. You just figure out what you want in the moment and chase it. But don’t do that!

Why liberty loses

Notice what this way of thinking implies about liberty. Liberty is either intrinsically valuable—valuable for no reason at all, which as Jorgensen pointed out very few people believe—or it is valuable because it helps people pursue a motley crew of amoral, “practical” desires or whims. 

To put the point more starkly, we can think about it this way. The moral person is one who places the interests of others above himself. The practical person is the person who pursues what he wants regardless of moral concerns. The liberty movement then comes along and says, “Join us so you can pursue what you want regardless of moral concerns.”

I don’t need to tell you what most people will say when they encounter that view. You hear it all the time. “That’s selfish and immoral. We need to rein in greed and selfishness, not encourage it."

Statist views hold the moral high ground precisely because they place morality above practicality. 

You might be thinking, “But don’t statists argue that their policies are practical? Don’t they say that liberty won’t actually lead to prosperity, safety, opportunity, health, etc.?” 

Yes. And people believe them because in the end most of us will not accept that what’s moral can’t work. If it’s moral to serve others, then policies that force us to place others above self have to work. And if they don’t work, if they don’t achieve desirable consequences, well, that wasn’t real socialism, or we just didn’t design the policy exactly the right way, or it was undermined by selfish Republicans or power-lusting Democrats. 

What you can’t do is reverse that process of thinking. You can’t say to people, “Look, markets are moral because, though they unleash immorality, they achieve noble, unselfish ends.” And if you think that can work, you need to explain why it hasn’t for more than 200 years.

How liberty wins

There are not two arguments for liberty: a principled argument and a practical argument. We don’t argue for liberty by saying, “Here’s why it’s moral and now here’s why it’s practical." A compelling argument for liberty is one that provides people with practical principles. 

And that starts with recognizing that liberty is not a value because it lets you do whatever you want. Liberty is a value because it protects your ability to live a moral life.

Plato, Christianity, and altruism all take it for granted that morality is something impersonal and impractical—that it exists to squelch the pursuit of the things that help you as an individual flourish. 

But there’s a different view of morality, one pioneered by Aristotle, which says there’s only one world—this world—and that morality is a set of principles for how to flourish in it. 

On this view, we can’t live well by doing whatever we feel like. We can’t chase after things just because they appeal to us and hope to achieve happiness and success. We need moral guidance on which goals will actually lead to flourishing and on the principled kinds of actions that will lead to the achievement of these goals. 

This Aristotelian approach to morality is the basis of liberty. Liberty is the social system that emerges from the recognition that to flourish, human beings need to be rational: they need to think, use their thinking to produce, and deal with others through rational persuasion and cooperation rather than brute force.

Liberty is good because it allows individuals to be moral, i.e., to be rational, i.e., to flourish here on Earth.

Practical principles in practice

What I’ve laid out is the framework we need to understand why liberty is value. It gives us practical principles for creating a society where individuals can flourish. 

And this in turn suggests how we persuasively argue for pro-liberty policies. 

We don’t say, “Here’s why liberty in healthcare is moral and now here’s why liberty in healthcare is practical.” We don’t say, “Freedom in healthcare is good because the government shouldn’t be able to tell us what to do when it comes to our health. And since that doesn’t persuade you, don’t worry, let me list a bunch of other benefits of freedom in healthcare. Like, it leads to lower prices, and avoids shortages, and encourages innovation, and helps poor people.”

Instead we establish a moral goal—to allow human beings to pursue health so they can flourish—and then explain how freedom protects our ability to pursue health while anti-liberty policies stop us from pursuing our health. 

Notice that this approach completely reframes the healthcare debate. Because the focus is on the individual’s pursuit of health, individual responsibility is front and center. You aren’t treating healthcare as a right that society as a whole must ensure for everyone. You’re treating health as something individuals must actively seek out by earning money, buying insurance, making intelligent decisions, consulting health professionals, etc.

You hold the moral high ground, while the person demanding unearned healthcare at other people’s expense is playing defense. 

The moral/practical approach, by contrast, ends up taking over goals at random from the culture—both goals aimed at flourishing and goals aimed at personal sacrifice. Instead of arguing that freedom will make healthcare affordable and high quality and give the most people the most opportunity to earn the wealth to buy it, you end up twisting yourself into knots trying to pretend that a free society will guarantee everyone all the healthcare they want regardless of their ability to pay. 

A free society doesn’t guarantee that because trying to guarantee that only guarantees that rational individuals won’t be able to pursue health (and everything else) in the best way possible. 

The full implications of this approach to making the case for liberty, and how in detail to apply it, are complex. So keep reading! My point here is just to say that if you find yourself making two arguments for liberty, you know you’re on the wrong path.