Controversy  

What's Right vs. What Works

by Charles Murray, David Friedman, David Boaz, and R.W. Bradford

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Perhaps the most persistent fundamental argument among libertarians has been between those who believe that freedom is a good thing because of its consequences — because it creates a more prosperous or a happier society — and those who believe that freedom is a good thing because it is entailed by objective morality, which instructs us that it is always wrong to initiate physical force or to engage in fraud.

Generally, libertarian thinkers who hold the moralist view are led to anarchism because no government can exist without taxation, which violates the non-aggression imperative. Those libertarian thinkers who hold the consequentialist view are not boxed in quite so tightly, and some see justification for a state with minimal power.

At the Liberty Editors' Conference in Las Vegas on May 15, two panels were held to look at this issue. The first focused on the question of the plausibility of a society without government, and the second on the question of the morality of government and of its anarchist alternative.

The participants were Charles Murray, author of "What It Means to Be a Libertarian"; David Boaz, author of "Libertarianism: A Primer"; David Friedman, author of "The Machinery of Freedom"; and R. W. Bradford, editor of Liberty. Stephen Cox moderated both panels.

A transcript of the first panel was published in the December issue of Liberty. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the second panel.

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Moderator: Here we continue our discussion of liberty and anarchism, with a slightly different emphasis. I've asked Bill Bradford to begin with a brief statement of what we're talking about here.

R.W.Bradford: Ultimately, everybody answers the question: why do you favor liberty? It seems to me that there are basically two answers to this question. One is: I favor liberty because the consequences of liberty are a society in which human beings flourish and maximize their happiness. This answer, I believe, is either explicit or implicit in the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek.

The other position is that liberty is a good thing because human nature is such that we have an obligation to respect the life, liberty, and property of others. This is the position of such influential libertarians as Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. When I first wrote about this view, I called it moralistic. I've since gone to calling it deontological, a considerably more accurate term. But I fear it is too abstruse a term for most people to grapple with.

When I initially proposed this program I called it something like "Deontological Libertarianism vs. Consequentialist Libertarianism," and I figured that title would draw about three people into the room, [laughter] all professional philosophers. So I don't mean to suggest that it's dumbed down one whit when it's changed to "What's Right vs. What Works."

Moderator: Thank you. Charles, would you like to follow up?

Charles Murray: I will say very quickly that I firmly believe that minimal government could work. But I also think that the following is the only way to justify minimal government.

Suppose it turns out — sadly I'm sure it will — that very large segments of the human race are not crazy about freedom as we understand the word. They would like to have freedom in some respects, especially the opportunities that freedom brings. But most people also like security. You can explain all the ways in which their real security would be greater in a free society than by relying on government programs, and all the rest, but many will still want the kind of security that government programs claim to provide. In short, I am pretty sure that even under the best of circumstances, a large number of people in the world will always prefer to live under systems that we would find noxious in terms of their philosophical underpinnings.

That leads to a problem. If it were possible, would it be appropriate to impose a system on people that they do not prefer, just because it is a morally correct system? Especially if the alternative is a system that is morally inferior, but one that leaves me pretty much alone to live my own life as I see fit?

We live in the real world, in the United States of America, where I think you have to make the case for the most minimal government that can still command the support of a majority of the population. Or in other words, you have to be pragmatic and focus on what works as opposed to what the morally appropriate role of government is. If you don't, you're never going to get anywhere.

Moderator: David Boaz?

David Boaz: As I said earlier, I do come at this personally from an a priori and moral point of view. I think it's wrong to initiate force. When I was a kid libertarian, I remember at summer camps and things, libertarians used to say to each other, "Would you support libertarianism even if it meant we would all be poor and racked by social conflict?"

And somehow the correct answer was supposed to be "Yes, yes I would! Liberty though the heavens fall!" And I think that critics of natural rights libertarianism think that's what the natural rights position is. But I think the real position — the real problem with this question — is that there's no real conflict, and if there were a real conflict, we'd have a problem. Murray Rothbard once wrote that it was a happy coincidence that the protection of individual rights leads to the greatest social prosperity, widespread happiness and so on. Even Rothbard, who is probably the most aprioristic libertarian philosopher, only wrote that once.

Jeff Friedman's Critical Review likes to refute that sentence, but I don't think Rothbard meant it that literally. He didn't mean it was a happy coincidence; of course it's not. I do think critics of natural rights libertarianism who want to say, "No, we should talk about consequences, not natural rights or something like that," are saying basically that you think natural rights and the non-aggression axiom are a categorical imperative, and if you believe in that, you're not allowed to have any reliance on anything other than that bare moral principle. And I think that's wrong. In the first place, not all moral principles are categorical imperatives. They're not all principles that must be followed in all circumstances regardless of the consequences. They're rules, they're guides, they're moral principles that you're supposed to follow, and the central reason that you follow them is that they have the best consequences, but they're not something you follow in all circumstances. Liberty once did a poll and one of the questions asked was: if you fell off a 50th floor balcony and you grabbed onto the 30th floor balcony and were hanging on for dear life, and the owner of that apartment came out and said, "Get off my property," [laughter] would you let go? Well, of course you wouldn't let go, you'd be an idiot. And the implication is, well, if you wouldn't let go, then you really don't believe in natural rights. Because if you really believed in property rights, when the guy told you to get off his property, you would. Well, I think that's the difference between a moral principle and a categorical imperative. You're not obligated to do it in emergency situations, in unusual situations. It's a guide for living.

Also, I think it is important to realize that when we make the case for natural rights, even if we may put it in these a priori terms, in extremely moral terms, even if we are inclined to say, "Yes, you bet I would believe it even if those were the consequences," we derive these arguments for natural rights from human nature. We believe they are the rules that are suited to human nature. Nobody would suggest that bees or cows follow a system of natural rights. Now, if we encountered another race, from another planet of rational beings who were much like humans in that regard, then we might very well say they have rights, or at least we should interact with them as if they had rights. But it is because they're suited for human nature, and suited for human nature means suited to the peaceful, prosperous flourishing of human beings, that makes them right for us. And we talk about natural rights, we talk about deriving them morally, we talk about deriving them a priori, but we also ought to look at history, economics, reason, the study of human nature, and all of those in my view lead us to essentially the same conclusion. As I said, we'd have a real problem if we developed an a priori theory and then said, "But gee, history, economics, and reason point us in a different direction. History and economics teach us that central command and control organizations will bring about prosperity on the scale of the U.S., whereas laissez faire will bring about prosperity on the scale of Cuba." Well, then we'd have a real problem to debate here on this panel. But since that's not the case, I think it's sort of a triply redundant system that tells us we can be more confident that we're right, because the evolution of law, history, economics, and reason all lead us to the same conclusions.

Moderator: David Friedman?

David Friedman: I think there are three different questions we're asking. One is, "Why am I a libertarian?"; one is, "How do I explain it to other people?"; and one is, "How do I persuade people?" In trying to figure out why I'm a libertarian, I ask myself how I would feel if I believed that the implication of the pure rights theory, as best I could make it out, was some horribly unattractive set of consequences — if respecting rights completely led to almost everybody being miserable and dying early and all that stuff, whereas if we had just a little bit of violation of rights everything would be fine. The answer is that in that world I would think it a good thing to have a little bit of violation of rights. So I cannot be a pure-rights libertarian, I cannot be somebody who says the only thing I make my decision on is, to what degree do we respect rights.

I then turn the question around and try to imagine what I would do if I had the opportunity to take an action that was clearly, by my moral standards, unjust, immoral, and violated people's rights, but when the dust cleared, the people who had been made happy by it would be made a little bit more happy than the people who were unhappy were made unhappy. On consequentialist grounds, that would be a good thing, so would I do it? And the answer is, of course, no.

So I have to conclude that I cannot be either a pure consequentialist or a pure rights-based libertarian, since either position would lead me to support a change that produced a tiny gain on one scale in exchange for a huge loss on the other. And that's not in fact how I feel.

I have a second problem specifically with the a priori version of rights theory, although there are some related ones with the consequentialist version, and that is that when I try to think through the a priori version it turns out to be much harder than most believers in it think. That realization comes partly from studying law. Categories such as coercion, and ownership, and things of that sort, turn out to be very complicated ideas. It is not at all clear how one initially gets the rights, such as ownership of land and things, that one claims to be entitled to use force to defend. I find that although I have both moral intuitions about how one should act and objectives I would like to achieve, the intellectual tools at my command can do a better job at figuring out how to achieve the objectives than they can in figuring out the implications of the moral intuitions.

We now come to an interesting observation about the objectives, and moral intuitions, that people actually have. When a libertarian argues with a socialist about rights, in my experience, they can never agree about the facts of their hypothetical. The question is something like: does a poor man, if he's hungry, have the right to be fed by a rich man?

In the libertarian's hypothetical, the two men started out perfectly equal, going out into an empty wilderness. The rich guy worked hard and cut down trees and made a farm and grew food and fed himself and his kids, while the poor guy was sitting there lazily, occasionally picking a few wild asparagus stalks to keep himself alive. After all that was done, the poor guy went to the rich guy and said, "Aha! I'm poor, you're rich, we're all equal, support me."

The socialist's version of the hypothetical is a little different. His poor guy worked very hard cutting down trees, clearing things, making a farm. The rich guy then came and swindled him out of all of it, and now he's claiming [laughter] . . . I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not very much.

If that description of the argument is right, it suggests that the libertarian and the socialist have rather similar moral intuitions — not identical, but similar enough so if they really agreed on the facts, one or the other would have a hard time defending his position.

Furthermore, I observe that consequences matter to both sides. I've never met the socialist who says, "We need socialism because it's just. It's true people will be hungry, and be miserable, and die of diseases, and they'd all be happy and healthy and such if we only had capitalism, but capitalism is unjust and it's exploitation, so we need socialism." I have not met that socialist yet.

It looks to me as though the people who say, as I might have said a very long time ago, "I'm in favor of liberty because it's right," wouldn't hold onto that position if they really thought liberty was catastrophically bad in its consequences. And I get the feeling that the socialist who says, "I'm for socialism because it's right," wouldn't hold on to his position if he thought the consequences of his system were catastrophically bad either.

That leads to a final conclusion, a tactical decision I made a long time ago: on the whole, while arguing moral philosophy can be entertaining and occasionally enlightening, you ought to spend most of your time arguing economics and history and such instead, because the chance of persuading other people to agree with you, or their persuading you to agree with them, is a whole lot better.

It is better for two reasons. One is that, on the whole, most people's objectives are pretty similar. They differ, of course, in one important way: I want good things for me and you want good things for you. But when you get beyond that, most of us hope that other people will be well-fed and healthy and all that nice stuff, and most of us really don't like seeing people ordered around, except maybe when we do it. There are, of course, disagreements about the details, but more agreement than disagreement.

If I and the guy I am arguing with have about the same objectives, that eliminates one problem in coming to agreement. In addition, we live in the same real world, we both experience that world. When we make predictions that turn out to be false we can see that we are making a mistake. So there's at least some hope that we can come to some agreement about what the consequences are of real-world alternatives.

If we agree on the consequences and have some mechanism for reaching at least some degree of agreement on what leads to what consequences, there's a hope that one or the other of us can eventually give the other arguments with which he will later persuade himself, and so bring us to agreement. So it seems to me that on the whole, arguing on a consequentialist basis is a more useful way to spend one's time than arguing on an aprioristic basis.

Moderator: Bill?

Bradford: I see David has a list of three items, and I do too. I noticed his have Roman numerals and mine have Arabic numerals. I'm not sure of the consequences of this. [Laughter.] Or the significance.

The first problem I have with rights theory, and the first issue that I think is involved is: Is the logic of rights philosophically rigorous? Now, I won't go into it here, but I'm convinced that rights theory as I read it in Rand and Rothbard — and for what it's worth, I can't find anything in Rothbard that isn't really in Rand, I think Rothbard is more or less derivative of Rand — is not rigorous at all; in fact, it's indefensible.

I had the good fortune, as an undergraduate and a hopped-up Objectivist, to have a professor of philosophy who was an Aristotelian, a neo-Thomist. And we agreed on almost every philosophical issue, we had the same philosophical "base" as Ayn Rand would say, but when it came to the political consequences of this philosophy, we differed considerably.

So, I decided to sit down and write out in rigorous, syllogistic form the derivation of rights. I spent a good deal of time at it, and I came to two conclusions. One, the real thing we're deriving is not rights — what we're deriving is the non-aggression imperative — and two, the derivation was fallacious. I'm not going to go through all the considerations I did, but I suggest that anyone here who is interested in this issue study "The Objectivist Ethics," examine Galt's speech and Rothbard's "The Ethics of Liberty," and try to come up with a rigorous defense, or rigorous derivation of this proposition. I don't think it can be done. If you get it, for God's sake, Liberty would like to publish it — for Rand's sake, I guess. [Laughter.]

At the time, that left me pretty much in the consequentialist camp. That is, I'm for liberty because liberty is good for me and good for people. The problem with this is, that when I finish saying it, that no matter how much I think about it, I'm lying. By that I mean, if we walk out of this casino onto the street, and I see a guy beating up another guy — and I see no reason to think this is defensive or retaliatory — I'm going to conclude that the guy who's beating him up is a bad guy. I think in a very fundamental level, in my gut, that initiating force is almost always wrong. One thing David didn't mention when he was talking about what we call the "flagpole" issue around the office is that was one of several theoretical questions we asked people, and the difference among them was that the consequences of sticking with the nonaggression principle were much higher as you went through the list.

It's sort of like, if you absolutely believe in property rights, you have put up a "No Trespassing" sign and a little girl comes wandering onto your yard chasing a butterfly, do you have a right to blast her away? [Laughter.] My answer is: you don't. I mean, we have these gradations and as we go through them, we need some kind of method of sorting them out. And I don't think that the noninitiation imperative is much more than a starting place.

And here's why: I sorted through Rand's discussion of this really thoroughly, and her basic answer is that it's an absolute imperative except when it isn't, except in situations where it isn't. Well, the whole purpose, at least according to Rand, of why you need a moral rule, is so that when you get in tough issues, you'll have a way of deciding it. Well, if I get in a tough situation, it doesn't help me a bit if she's got this caveat saying that I can abandon it.

This reduces the question of what's a tough situation, what's an emergency, to use the term she used. And that's a question she doesn't address very well. She goes on about metaphysical conditions inappropriate, or abnormal for human life or something like that, but this doesn't really address the issue.

So while I agree with the noninitiation principle, I treat it not as an imperative — although I think many libertarians do treat it as an imperative, as a way of solving virtually any issue — I treat it as a general rule.

Now, I realize this is all a little fuzzy. But I don't see any way to get around the fuzziness. One of the reasons I'm charmed by the institution of juries is that juries offer a practical way of getting around this. I mean, you did something that under ordinary circumstances would be wrong, you have an opportunity to explain to your neighbors why you did something that under ordinary circumstances would be wrong, and if they say, "Gosh, he's sort of got a point there. Maybe it's okay to hold onto the flagpole and not drop and kill yourself, and to actually trespass on this other property owner's property."

I realize this is not a philosophically rigorous answer, but it has appeal to me. For one thing, it doesn't claim to be philosophically rigorous, so it's hard to criticize it for that. More importantly, as a practical way to get through life, it's a very good guide.

Moderator: Let's open up for questions and further discussion. Alec?

Audience member: Like most people here, I more or less used to be of the type that thinks automatically that it's not right. I'll argue that it doesn't work either, but it's not right and that's just undoubted and that's a secure thing to sit on, no matter how rough the ride is, on any issue. But, on further thought, it seems that morality is based on consequentialism, natural rights is based on consequentialism. What's the root of morality? Well, natural rights. But why do we have natural rights? Well, because of our nature. All virtue and value must be directed toward maintaining life and making it better. Well, those seem like consequences of our moral actions, they seem like the reasons we're for those actions in the first place. They are not utilitarian moment by moment, but in the long run, they will work better and let humans prosper and flourish. However, they are consequentialist. You're focusing on the consequence of the concept in your real life. The philosophic evidence of the nature of man determines what action will better lead to consequences like quality of life. What do you think of the idea that consequences actually are at the root of natural rights morality in the first place?

Bradford: At least in my own experience in introspection, that just isn't the case. I mean, I didn't just sit down — I have no memory at any point in my life thinking: the reason that I don't like seeing what I would call crimes, I mean the initiation of force, occur, is because I've analyzed the consequences of it.

There's something much more visceral. That's my own experience. Now maybe other people were smarter when they were little kids, I don't know. But you know, in retrospect, I have to say that I believed that initiation of force was wrong before I ever read Ayn Rand.

Friedman: My views of rights have nothing to do with Rand. As I said, I respect her, but I don't agree with her on lots of things. But the view that one ought to follow those general rules that result in maximizing the happiness of people already has a name. It's called rule utilitarianism. It's one of the variants of classic 19th-century utilitarianism. And as far as I can tell, the kind of talk that one often hears which says, "Well, you can't make this distinction because . . . " really involves defending natural rights as something like rule utilitarianism, and I always find it hard to figure out what's supposed to be the subtle distinction. And if people want to say that, fine, but then they ought to say that they're consequentialists who prefer rules to case-by-case decisions, and I don't see why they want to call themselves natural rights believers except there's a shorthand for a particular conclusion from rule utilitarianism.

Boaz: Who defines what works?

Friedman: You're asking me?

Boaz: Yes.

Friedman: I'm defining it in terms of what outcomes I think are desirable.

Boaz: But we will all have —

Friedman: Utilitarianism strictly speaking defines it in terms of either what maximizes the average happiness of mankind, or what maximizes the total happiness of mankind, again depending on which variant.

Boaz: I'm just wondering how you deal with the routine objection to utilitarianism of any kind, the objection about who gets to be the definer of what works.

Friedman: Well, of course, the way I deal with it in practice, as I thought I already said, was to observe that most people have a very large common element as to what they see as desirable objectives. And that's large enough, since my guess is that anything radically far from what I want would do badly enough in its outcomes so that almost any plausible human set of objectives would prefer the outcome of the institutions I want to the alternative.

Bradford: The extreme case in this is Mises, who argues that his praxeological analysis of society is totally value-neutral, and the economic system that he recommends is one that, generally speaking, fulfills the subjective desires of the people who want prosperity, well-being, and happiness.

But if, for example, you wanted to work out an economic system that instead produces death and destruction, you could design that. He's just not particularly interested himself in designing that kind of system because most people he runs into seem to favor wealth, health, and happiness to disease, destruction, and death. [Laughter.]

Moderator: The gentleman in the back of the room?

Audience member: I wanted to ask the panelists if any of them had read Steven Pinker's new book "The Blank Slate," which is all about human nature, what it is, and what it is not.

Friedman: I haven't read the new Pinker book. I was very favorably impressed by "The Adapted Mind," which is a work on evolutionary psychology. I have an article on economics and evolutionary psychology that is webbed on my web page and coming out in somebody else's book. It is not really about libertarianism at all; it's trying to see whether, if you substitute the evolutionary psychologist's version of rationality for the economist's version, you can explain any of the puzzles that economists have a hard time explaining. I think that evolutionary psychology is a fascinating field, it's one that appeals to economists because the logical structure of evolutionary biology is very much like that of economics, but I haven't read the Pinker book.

Moderator: Charles, is this in your territory?

Murray: The findings in books like Pinker's actually lie behind my remarks earlier. I remember that in my own book on libertarianism, which was published in 1996, I had a sentence to the effect that freedom is as essential to happiness as oxygen is to life. At a dinner party with Irving Kristol — who in fact threw the dinner party for the book, bless his heart, him being a neocon [laughter] — he said that was the silliest sentence in the whole book. I bridled at that, but I guess I would have to say in the years since then, partly because of evolutionary psychology, partly because of the empirical findings in psychology, I have this sinking feeling I was wrong for a large part of the human population. It was a silly sentence after all.

This is going to sound much more pessimistic perhaps than I intend it, but I'll say it and then try to qualify it. There are a lot of people for whom freedom is as necessary to happiness as oxygen is to life. I am one of them, and everybody in this room is one of them, and we need to have a place where we can live and where we can function. But our task is not to convert the whole world to thinking the way we do, because we ain't gonna do it. Our task is to find refuge and sanctuary some place. And that's what makes me, as far as my advocacy goes, a consequentialist. That's separate from my visceral beliefs. Bill, I thought your statement about viscerally being attracted to freedom is absolutely right. I did not come to the conclusion that free societies worked better in a pragmatic sense. I started out with exactly the same kind of assumption about the initiation of force that you did, and I bet everybody in the panel did to some extent.

Moderator: Let me call on the gentleman in the back of the room.

Audience member: When I find myself in discussions like this, it seems to me that everything started with natural rights. Once you write this down, the question always comes around, well, what about more? Why can't I just add more? Why can't I reinterpret this to make it broader? Why can't I do this?

And every time that happens to me, I always wind up saying something like, "Well, you better assume this because if you don't, there will be major consequences."

Friedman: I would say that I don't have to assume rights since I already intuitively believe in them. As I said, I'm neither purely for one form or the other. I'm not inclined to try to get other people to believe in natural rights because I don't have any very good arguments for them, and I try to limit myself to persuading people of things I have good arguments for.

I should say that my critique of Rand — which is based entirely on Galt's speech — is on my webpage, if anybody's curious.

Boaz: The criticism of the idea of adding a Bill of Rights to the Constitution was: if you enumerate the rights of man, it's impossible to enumerate them all, so therefore some will be left out. They tried to deal with that by adding the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Nevertheless, it is an issue. There is one fundamental right, it seems to me, which is the right to take actions, to live your life in the way you choose, so long as you don't interfere in the equal rights of others. Now, there are complications to that statement, but I think that's the one.

And I think it is true that ultimately, the natural rights argument, even in Rand, is a consequentialist argument. It is: these are the rules that are necessary for man to flourish as man qua man. But it's also true, as Bill said, for me, that I viscerally believed it was wrong to hit people and take their stuff before I read the philosophical argument for why it's wrong.

Moderator: Yes, Bruce.

Bruce Ramsey (from the audience): This is a question for Charles Murray. Last summer I attended Jeff Friedman's seminar about libertarian ideas, and one of the arguments we got into was an argument from your book, about liberty and the average person, the common person who just makes a living and struggles. And under a free society, if that person can support a family, do their simple role in life, they have this immense satisfaction of having faced the obstacles and the odds and succeeded. And in a welfare state, all of that is stripped away, and basically that person has achieved nothing that they couldn't have had provided to get them back to zero.

And Friedman called that a very smug or self-satisfied argument and he thought it was ridiculous, and I thought it was convincing. I wanted to ask you, whether you've dealt with an attack on that argument for the record, and whether you have found others who have found it convincing or not convincing.

Murray: Actually, that's the argument that I would say most people intuitively agree with. When I say that somebody may have low income, but if he has worked hard and supported a family, he can get to be 70 years old and look back on who he has been and what he has done and take pride in it — that's a statement that usually moves people who are not libertarian. They look at their own lives, or the lives of their parents, and they know how immensely proud a person can be of those kinds of accomplishments. I'm glad you took my side in your argument with Jeffrey.

Moderator: Yes, the gentleman in the white shirt there.

Audience member: Suppose you have a degree of doubt about whether a particular item is a natural right or not. For example, suppose there's a debate about whether you have a natural right to vacation with pay, to take the occupation of your choice, the kind of things found in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. You have a very considerable disagreement between people about what constitutes a natural right and what doesn't. My question is, if you have some disagreements, what criteria do you use to resolve them?

Boaz: Well, I think it depends partly on where you're having this argument — are you having it on "Crossfire," are you having it at a philosophical seminar, are you having it over the dinner table? — that determines what kind of arguments are appropriate.

I think when an argument like that is put forward, you have to try to analyze, what does it mean to have a right? And the obvious point that we would make in response to those things is: well, you're talking about rights that have to be provided by someone else. The kind of rights I'm talking about — the right to free speech, the right to the property that you have created, the right to make your own decisions and live your own life — we can all equally have those rights. But when you talk about a right to education or a right to health care, then you're saying other people should be required to provide you with that right. And that is not the same order of thing. Now, you can make an argument for it, but it's not the same kind of thing, and there's a problem: it involves taking something from other people, it involves using force against them.

That isn't always persuasive to people, but I think that is the rational distinction. And ultimately, it is our job to persuade enough people of enough of the case for rights that we can in fact live together in a peaceful and prosperous society. And I think we've done a reasonably good job of that. We've talked up here about our visceral reactions; well, I think one of the important points about libertarianism is that most people instinctively live by it. Most people know that what you create is yours, that it is wrong to hit other people and take their stuff, that it is wrong to break your promises, and they live by that. It's only when you complicate it, when you bring in government, that you sort of obscure the issue of who's paying for those prescription drugs, who's paying for that education, that people get confused. But if we can bring people back to the heart of the matter, we can all live together peacefully, and we do. We don't go around taking each other's property in our neighborhood, we don't go around hitting each other. Then you can build from that to the explanation of what rights are, but that doesn't mean that you're always going to convince people.

Moderator: Let's see. Well, Durk, you haven't had a chance yet.

Durk Pearson (from the audience): There's a lot of different ways of deriving things. I got to libertarianism when I was a high school student by studying Norbert Weiner's book on cybernetics. When you apply what he showed about control and communication within complex systems to politics, to the complex systems of society, you see that the socialist nostrums are unworkable.

But there's another way that I think is a very profitable way to libertarianism, and that is game theory in experimental economics. I've written a couple of articles on that in Reason in the past . . . excuse me, Liberty, sorry about that. And I think you can read them and see that it leads inevitably in the direction of a libertarian worldview. There's a lot of publications on game theory and experimental economics being published in Science and Nature, and I don't know whether they're being published in there because the editors understand where these things are leading, or because they're completely oblivious to where these things are leading.

Moderator: Bill?

Bradford: Something that's been talked about by a number of panelists and some people in the audience that I haven't gotten my two cents' worth in, and that's the nature of man.

Moderator: Oh, you have to raise that.

Bradford: I agree that it's very relevant, and my own thinking on this subject has changed a lot over the years. I started out very much with Rand and Aristotle, that man is the rational animal. I have begun to suspect that the salient characteristic of human beings is not their rationality, but their adaptability.

Now, the two issues are not unrelated, I'll agree to that, but I just want to put this out as a notion for people to think about, that it seems remarkable that human beings can live in the wide array of physical environments that they live in. No other animal really lives everywhere from the frozen wind-swept arctic conditions to the hot steamy tropics and every place in between. Man's the only one that manages it, and it's quite a remarkable feat.

Similarly — now, part of the reason he does that is because he's rational, mankind has found ways to protect himself from the environment — secondly, similarly, he's able to survive in a lot of different social environments. It seems remarkable to me that people in Russia survived Stalin. I mean, this is a real tough situation. And when you start looking at varieties of primitive societies, we see such a wide array of cultural arrangements that are truly awful. I think this is something that should be taken into account. Where I think this leads is to the conclusion that all kinds of human societies are plausible and sustainable, which actually more or less coheres with what I've observed in the world, although it's something that libertarians often frequently disagree with, and what we're really talking about is what type of society you'd like to live in.

Moderator: The gentleman in the blue shirt at the very back?

Audience member: This question is for Bradford or Boaz or anyone. What would one think of splitting the natural right theory, so you have necessary natural rights, and sufficient natural rights, and then conditional natural rights.

Bradford: I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Audience member: Well, say, like conditional natural rights, something that would work in principle in a couple situations, but gets to a point where it fails and you have to use something else.

Moderator: David, would you like to take that?

Boaz: That doesn't really sound like a system of natural rights to me, I think natural rights, if they mean anything, are supposed to be rules for action in all normal circumstances. And we've talked a little bit about emergencies — Rand wrote an essay on the ethics of emergencies, Rand said, correctly I think, you don't write your ethics for lifeboat situations because we don't normally live in lifeboats. I personally have gone more years than I care to admit without finding myself hanging on a flagpole on a 50th floor balcony. [Laughter.]

So these rules work in virtually all the circumstances which we will encounter. Now, I kid Bill about these crazy questions about breaking into cabins and things, but there are some more real circumstances; for instance, if I knew that rounding up all the Muslims in the United States would be a way of forestalling a nuclear weapon going off in Chicago, would I do it? Well, I'm not going to give an a priori answer, "No, absolutely never" — if I knew that would prevent the explosion of a nuclear weapon in a major American city, then I think you may be getting into the ethics of emergencies, but that's not the world we normally live in. Rules shouldn't be built on the basis of odd or marginal cases, and so I think that when deciding whether claims are natural rights, they either are or they aren't; I don't think they are going to be necessary or conditional.

Bradford: One of the problems that we have here is that most of our political opponents see emergencies where we don't. [Laughter.] I mean, they don't have to be in a lifeboat to be in an emergency. We suddenly have an unemployment emergency, or we have a homeless emergency, or an energy emergency. That's one of the reasons why I think it's an important task for libertarian thinkers to put a little more energy than we have into defining what constitutes an emergency.

Boaz: Well, I think that's fair, but you know, a phrase that I sometimes use is, just because there are hard cases doesn't mean there aren't easy cases. But here I'm going to say, just because there are easy cases like — look, just because you have less money than Bill Gates, that ain't an emergency — doesn't mean that there aren't also hard cases.

Moderator: Charles, would you like to comment?

Murray: No. [Laughter.]

Moderator: We actually have time for one more, and I want somebody who's new, and it's the gentleman at the very far — yes, you.

Audience member: Why do libertarian policies come across as uncompassionate?

Murray: They come across as uncompassionate because the arguments for them are indirect. If you say you are against children being hungry, and you are in favor of a government program to feed hungry children, you are off the hook. It makes no difference whether you will have fewer or more hungry children after that program than before. At least you can say to yourself that you're trying.

When instead someone like me says that I don't like children to be hungry either, but the way that you have the fewest hungry children is to get rid of all social welfare programs to feed hungry children, I am making a complicated argument. Very few people will stick with you through that argument. So once you say that the operational solution is to get rid of food stamps, the operational solution is to get rid of WIC and the rest of the programs that are supposed to feed hungry children, you have already defined yourself as not caring. Because, then as you go on ahead to say these programs don't really work, they create negative incentives whereby you have more children born into families which can't feed them, etc., etc., other people listen to this and say, "Well, this is just an elaborate rationalization to avoid doing the right thing, which is trying as best you can to feed hungry children."

Moderator: David Friedman.

Friedman: Let me see if I can respond to something closer to the original question about rights, because it seems to me that there are really three interesting categories of rights here.

An example of the first category is that you have a right not to be killed, meaning I have an obligation not to kill you. That is the normal, negative rights, libertarian approach.

An example of the second sort of right, which some libertarians accept but I am reluctant to, is again the right not to be killed, but meaning this time that someone has an obligation to protect you from being killed, to stop anyone else from killing you. If you follow through on the logic of that kind of right you conclude that taxes are justified, because the taxes are being used to pay for the police. You have a right to be protected from crime, and therefore I don't have a right not to contribute to the police.

People don't usually make the argument in that form, but that really is the logic of it. If you say that my right not to be killed means my right to have people stop other people from killing me, that requires positive actions and is a claim against other people, just as my right to eat would be.

The third category is the one you are raising. The first two are both rights that you have against me, your claim that I am obligated to not murder you or to stop him from murdering you. The third category is not a claim that you have against me but an obligation that I recognize that I have to behave in a certain way — an obligation owed as it were to myself, not to you. You have no right to demand that I feed you, but if you are starving and I readily can feed you, I am a bad person if I don't. And I suspect most libertarians believe that. Rand might not admit that she believed that, but I think she did.

Moderator: I'm afraid we don't have time for any further responses. Thank you, everyone.

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