Natural rights and libertarian strategy

Libertarians come in two basic flavors- natural rights libertarians and consequentialist libertarians. The former argue that state actions violate innate human rights; the latter argue that the cost of state actions outweigh the benefits. This blog is of a consequentialist libertarian bent, as you probably know.

We consequentialists get flack sometimes because the basis of our beliefs seems shakier than the firm ground of natural rights. We have to debate data, history, and attempt to forecast the consequences of proposed ideas. And, of course, there's nothing we'd have to change about our core moral beliefs to be something other than libertarians; were Bryan and I to be convinced that some state action would relieve more suffering than it caused, we wouldn't have to undergo any soul-searching to support that action. We consequentialists, even radically anti-state ones like me, are naturally suspect to our natural rights brethren.

But I did not come here to justify my heathen consequentialism or to assault the sensibilities of the natural rights true believers. Let's put aside the existence or nonexistence of natural rights and discuss what arguments will best serve our cause.

Both strands of libertarianism ask you to accept something that can be denied. Bryan and I want you to believe that human beings seek pleasure and avoid pain and that this fact serves as a guide to moral action. The natural rights folks want you to believe that innate in the concept of "human-ness" is self-ownership and by extension a certain set of natural rights- classically, life, liberty, and property. You can deny either, but denying Bryan and I's belief makes you seem sillier than denying natural rights. Indeed, the world is chock full of people who deny the existence of natural rights- turn on C-SPAN and see them assembling in their hundreds and thousands.

Even if natural rights exist, a libertarian argument from consequentialism is far more universal in its applicability than one based on natural rights. A committed statist who claims to hold a belief in natural rights (and, at least in America, most of them do; natural rights are our national religion) will, when confronted with the consequences of that belief for his statism, typically drop natural rights before he'll drop his statism. Try it if you don't believe me.

The problem with the natural rights argument is that denying natural rights is so easy to do. You can make the libertarian case very easily with them, true. It practically makes itself; indeed, one of the seminal works of libertarianism, Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, spends much more time trying to figure out how a state could exist if rights do as well than it does trying to prove that rights call the state into question. But all you have to do to bring Nozick's argument crashing down, or Rothbard's, or any other natural rights libertarian's argument, is say, "natural rights don't exist."Bam, it falls apart. Natural rights libertarianism reminds me of Thomist philosophy- an impressive, majestic, glittering edifice that, alas, rests on one all-too-deniable assumption.

But consequentialism? It's much harder not to sound like an idiot when you're saying, "no, people shouldn't seek to minimize suffering." And even if natural rights exist, that fact remains, just as even if God really is up there, you can still cut Thomists off at the knees by asserting he isn't.

So what I'm saying isn't that the natural rights people should abandon their beliefs; what I'm saying is that they should work with we heretical consequentialists to make the consequentialist case for liberty. Because even if you don't believe anyone has a right to anything, you probably still think pain sucks.