 The question that I'm discussing today is one that probably isn't taken very seriously by a lot of you and it's not entirely clear to me whether you should be taking it seriously. However, libertarianism is an extremely unpopular position, as you all know, and it's regarded as a sort of far-out position. And when you've got a view like that, it seems to me that it's pretty important to hold it for good reasons. And the question that I'm exploring here today is, you know, why should we accept the libertarian view? There are various kinds of answers people give to questions like that, and most of them have a feature which seems to me to really disqualify them. And that feature is, they say, well, it's just a fundamental truth, or it's self-evident or something like that. In the United States Declaration of Independence, it begins by saying, we hold these truths to be self-evident, and it goes on to talk about the creator and things like that. And as soon as you do things like that, you have the problem that, okay, the people who disagree with you think, well, we don't find that self-evident, in fact, we find our position self-evident. And then the question is where you go from there. I hope to supply the right answer to that question today, or at least the outlines of the right answer to that question. Okay, libertarianism is, above all, a claim about rights. It is, in fact, the claim that there's just one basic right, namely a general right to liberty, hence the name libertarianism. In order to give a decent defense of that view, then we first have to say what the view is, and consequently, we need to start at the beginning and say what we mean by a right. Now, I have here one of those academic-looking definitions of this. Let's let the capital letter A stand for any person. And the question is what does it mean to say that the person then question has a right, any right that anybody wants to ascribe to him. Now, to answer that question, we first have to note that when we assert that somebody has a right, we have to name somebody else, and I've put the capital letter B to stand for this other person, which could be other persons, in fact, as we'll see, it's everybody in the end for our purposes, who is such that the first person's right is a right against this second person. And the word against doesn't need to have a combative sound to it. It's in relation to this other person. The most interesting thing about the concept of rights is that the claim that somebody has a right is a claim that there's something about that person. And I've let the capital letter F, which is widely used in philosophical logic for this purpose, as a variable, thank you, standing for that feature, whatever it is, which is such that because it is present, then this other person has certain requirements or duties imposed on him or her. Now, just one other thing to add at this very general level. First, that in general we're talking about, and especially when we get into politics, we're talking about enforceable duties, the kind that you can make the person do, at least in principle, if you need to. And secondly, that when we're talking about rights, then the duties that the people who get duties on account of them have are duties to do something which I will call non-disadvantageous to the person who has the rights. Now, my reason for putting it precisely that way will come out shortly because we next need to distinguish two kinds of rights, which have come to be called in the philosophical trade negative and positive rights. Now, a negative right is so-called because the duties that it imposes on person B are duties not to do something, duties to refrain from doing something, namely from doing whatever would prevent or interfere with the right-holder, that's A, you remember, A's attempts to do the thing that he has a right to do. So, for example, suppose you're claiming that A has a right to walk, okay? Well, in a certain area. Then the claim that A has this right is the claim that other people have to let him walk there, which means they have to not hobble him or trip him up or whatever would make it impossible for him to walk. My friend, Jan Lester, who has a wonderful new book out with a new title, and I can't remember the new title, it's something like Leviathan Unchained, suggests something that I think is very nice here, and that is that the general formula is that you are to refrain from imposing costs on the person who has the right in question. Now, this all contrasts with positive rights, and the difference between them is this. Now, by the way, some of you may be acquainted with the writings of Sir Isaiah Berlin, who I think was among the first to introduce the positive and negative terminology, and I strongly urge you not to read what Berlin says in this subject because it's completely incoherent. Here's a nice, simple, clean way to make this contrast. A has a positive right to do X, means that B is required not only to refrain from interfering with A's doing X, but he actually has to help him, have to assist him in doing X, at least if A can't do it by himself, or, and this is a very, very important addition, or with the purely voluntary assistance of others. Let me give you just an example of the difference made by the difference between positive and negative rights. Consider the right to life, something that we all, I think, would claim to be in favor of. But what is the right to life? In its negative form, the right to life is simply the right not to be murdered, not to have your life taken from you by somebody else. Notice that it's very, very easy to live up to this requirement. In fact, every one of you is living up to it all the time with respect to everybody else in the entire world. I mean, none of us is murdering anybody, and none of us I take it here has murdered anybody ever, and yet it didn't take any effort at all to do this, no problem. But suppose that you claim that somebody has a positive right to life. Well, that means that the duty holder, B, has to not only refrain from murdering A, which is easy, but also might have to save his life if he's in a position to do so. The parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates the difference between the outputs. Here's the guy lying, bleeding to death in the ditch. You walk by, you didn't do it, but if that man has a positive right to life as against you, then you have a duty, which means people could force you to go in and rescue the guy. Now, the importance of the libertarian position is that it denies that there are any fundamental positive rights. Positive rights need to come from positive acts of our own, which enlist our services voluntarily in having this instead of simply being imposed on us as people who believe in positive rights believe that it can be. And that's our cross to bear in a sense. I mean, what we need to do primarily when we talk with other people of other political persuasions is to defend the view that our fundamental general right is a right of liberty, meaning a right imposing only negative rights, I mean duties on other people, rather than a positive draw on their energies and their money and so forth, which is what the tax man and so forth believe. I can make one more distinction here, which is of importance for some purposes, and certainly for ours, and that's the distinction between general rights and special rights. In the case of general rights, A and B are just everybody and anybody. So a general theory of rights, a claim that people in general have rights, is a claim that everybody has this sort of right against everybody else. Whereas special rights are rights that hold between specified parties. For example, if I engage you to plaster a wall, and you've signed the agreement, then I have a right that you come and plaster my wall, and it's a positive right. So in order to fulfill this, you have to actually do something, I enter and owe you $100 for it or whatever, and I'll have the positive duty to do that, having signed the agreement. And that's a right that only holds between me and you, and not between anybody else and anybody else in the whole world. Now, a theory of rights in general is an answer to the question, well what is F, that is what is this property of right holders, such that because they've got that property, it is reasonable to think that everybody else has the duties in question. So what is it about A and of course B, which makes it the case that B owes A the general duties in question. I've added, and which duties, because any theory of rights has to answer that question. Of course, our view about which duties is fairly clear, it's the duty to let the other guy alone, roughly speaking. Now, the proposal that this is a general right on the part of essentially everybody runs into a very, very important problem, which I don't have any slides about, so for a moment I'll turn that off. This problem is the following. If we ask, well, all right, if somebody has a right to liberty, what does he have the right to do? If it's a general right to liberty, it sounds as though he has a right to do anything, anything, whatever. The difficulty with that is that it looks as though it can't be the case that more than one person could have such a right. Consider Salome, who wanted the head of John the Baptist on a plate. Now, if she has the right to do absolutely anything, she has the right to get John the Baptist's head on the platter. But of course, if she's got that right, then John the Baptist doesn't have certain rights, quite obviously. Only one person that seems to have the unlimited right to do absolutely everything. And that is the problem that an idea of Thomas Hobbes has. Early in Leviathan, he proclaimed something called the right of nature. And that is, in effect, the right to do absolutely anything you want to, no matter what it is, and he carefully notes that the implication of this is that every man hath right to everything, including one another's bodies. Well, bad news, because of course, if I have a right to your body, then you don't. And indeed, I mean, slavery is a situation that illustrates this. So the question is, how do we solve this problem of making a right to liberty the sort of thing that everybody can have? An extremely important logical problem. In order to have a decent theory of rights, you should, at a minimum, have a theory that it's at least possible for everybody to obey, for everybody to conform to. And that wouldn't be the case if the right to liberty was literally a right to do absolutely anything you want to. And indeed, as you've seen from the definition at the outset, and I should put that back on here, notice that indeed what a right is basically is something that limits somebody else's liberty. I mean, A's right is a right against somebody else, and that person has duties. There's things that that person cannot do. And that immediately makes it obvious that a general right to liberty has a problem. The question is, how we solve that problem? Well, there is an answer to that question, which I think is a good answer. And one way to put that answer is that we say, okay, well, what we need is to identify a sphere of liberty associated with each person such that within this sphere, that person is the boss and can do anything he or she wants to. Everybody, the emperor of a little tiny or perhaps in some cases not so tiny domain associated with that person. In this way, perhaps, as long as we've got our boundary lines clear, we can then have a general rule saying your duty as a human being is not to cross anybody else's boundary line without the other person's position. That's an image that Bob Nozick uses in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and rather a nice one. Now, we can start with the body here and propose that each person has a negative right to the use of his own body. Notice that this requires a distinction of importance. Words like his or her and these possessives are actually ambiguous. People who think that it's self-evident that we have the right to our own bodies might possibly have fallen afoul of this as an ambiguity because when I talk about John's body, I can either mean the body which is a part of John or connected to John's mind by nature. So if it's my big toe, for example, it's the toe that's connected to the body that's connected to my mind in a natural way in this sense. However, consider a slave society. In a slave society, the masters actually owned the slaves and the slaves didn't own themselves. So although we can talk about the slave's big toe and his left arm and so forth as being parts of him, his in that sense, they're not his in the legal or moral sense. In that society, people thought that morally speaking, masters were properly the owner of slaves and certainly legally speaking, they were. So the point is there's a distinction between what we might call the descriptive sense of possessives and the normative sense. What we want to do now is to make a person's body in the descriptive sense also his or hers in the normative sense. That's what libertarianism does. Now I think it's plausible to propose, along the lines laid down by John Locke, for example, that if we start with this idea that people have a right to themselves, self-ownership, we can also expand this into a right over things in the external world. How do we do this? Well, let's see. We now have another slide here of interest. Now, I'll push it up as we go along here. Now let's talk for a moment about first comers or squatters' rights, if you will, and ask, why should we regard me as owning my body? And on a libertarian view, roughly the answer is this. It's because you got there first. That's why. Now suppose that, let's take the ownership of your body, which you occupy from the start, and which we, in the spirit of our general right to liberty, want to, say, give you absolute ownership of. If we do, then, of course, consider the actions that you perform. Now what is it to own something anyway? My original definition of rights only defined a right to do something. But what is it to have a right to have something? What is it to have a right to own something? And the answer is you have a right to a thing, a right to own something, if and only if you are the person such that if anything is done by anybody with that thing, then you have to approve. So you've got the authority over the thing which you have the general right over. Footnote, I don't know if there's any other, well, I know there's at least one other professional philosopher in this audience and probably a couple more. A lot of people in the trade have been trying to claim that ownership rights are terribly ambiguous and they list all sorts of different specific rights and they claim that ownership is just a congeries of all those rights. They're wrong. All of those rights are examples of this general formula, which is if it's mine, then I get to say what's done with it. Either I can do it myself, of course I approve of myself doing it with the thing if I do it. And if you want to use it, you have to ask me and otherwise you can't. Now, okay. Now consider people owning their own minds and bodies and therefore being the controllers of the actions that involve the use of those minds and bodies and suppose that they move out into the real world somewhere and suppose that the part of the real world they move into is hitherto unoccupied. This, of course, is virtually never the case anymore but presumably it must have been at some times in the past. But suppose anyway that you do literally get there first. So A does X in the absence of B. In that case, suppose that B then comes along. I mean, he's clearly historically second. And when he does, he does what makes A's performing that action more difficult or impossible. We will say that B has interfered with A and that's exactly what the right of liberty on the part of A says he can't do. Now I think that this is basically what we need and all we need to get going with rights of property in external objects. You might say, well, isn't that totally useless because after all there aren't any unoccupied areas or unowned areas today. And there's two kinds of answers you can give to this. One, of course, is that generally speaking, the way you acquire property is by buying it from the guy who had it before or if he's nice having him give it to you or whatever. The point is that there are ways to acquire property other than by being there first. But you have to start somewhere. I mean, if I buy it from somebody or the question of where did he get it? Well, he bought it from somebody or where did he get it, et cetera. And eventually you've got to go to an answer that doesn't involve getting it from somebody else. And that will be the problem of original acquisition as we say, which this is proposed as the general answer to. The other thing I'll say about this, which is really far more important in today's circumstances, consider ideas. Suppose you think something up. Now, thinking something up is not obviously a matter, so to speak, occupying a domain, but make some mental adjustments and you'll see, well, but actually it is. I mean, it's a conceptual domain, rather the domain out there in the real world. You think of this idea. And why is it yours? Why do you have a right to this idea? Because you got there first. Because you thought it up, nobody else did. They want to use this idea fine, but they have to clear it with you. You might, of course, and usually do, and usually are perfectly happy to give them the idea, but other times you might not. You might want to charge for it, and you negotiate, and you get royalties or whatever. But the point is that ideas, which are far more important than anything else today, as we all know, are things which originate in the mind and which do indeed exemplify the process of original acquisition. So against anybody who wants to say, well, this idea is empty, you can assure him that it is not empty at all. Okay, having a general idea now, hopefully, of how the principle of liberty works, let's go back to the question, why? Why should we think that we have this sort of a general right? Now, first, I'm going to tell you the answer in very general sketch form. At the beginning, I mentioned that lots of people would say, well, it's self-evident or obvious, or God told us about it or something like that, none of which answers are, frankly, any good. And the reason that I need any good is this. I take it that in moral philosophy, which is what we're doing here, moral and political philosophy, what we're trying to do is to get other minds, other people who have minds of their own, to see it our way. When we've got a moral theory, what we're trying to do is, so to speak, sell this theory to other people. Why should we want to do anything like that? A moral theory is a theory about what everybody is to do. And it's a theory to the effect that there's someone or a few principles such that everybody is to be subjected to those same principles. How would it be rational to entertain such a principle? Or when is such a principle rational? The only answer that seems to me to be really basically possible is the answer that has come to be called the contractarian answer. And that's associated, of course, with the School of Thought going back at least to Thomas Hobbes and actually to several pages in Plato's Republic as well. It's been alive in one form or another for a long time. But it's the general idea that the rules to govern all of us have to be, in a sense, agreements. And so the suggestion is that we've got the right rule for this purpose when it is rational, given the general natures of the people who are subject to it, which is everybody, rational for all of them to agree to the imposed requirements in question. Now, when we put it that way, of course, we raise another question, which is what is rationality? And again, some people want to build certain moral ideas into the very notion of rationality. And again, as soon as you do that, you've got a circular theory. Because if you define rationality in terms of your moral theory and I define it in terms of my moral theory, then we've gotten nowhere. However, the general notion of rationality has no direct connection with morality. And that's what makes moral philosophy interesting. Now, the most general account of what rationality is, and we're talking about practical reason here, not theoretical reason, is that it's rational for you to do what promotes the interest you've got. Now, notice that people have all sorts of interests. Many theorists of the school have posited that people have sort of basically only one interest, which is an interest in the self. I don't buy that view, and I don't think we need to buy that view, and in fact, I think it would be a big mistake to buy that view. What makes it a mistake to buy the view is that it doesn't seem to be true. I don't know too many things that sure look like counter examples to it. The important thing, however, is to have a theoretical system which is such that it doesn't matter. And that's what I think we've actually got. So, the question is, starting then with an open variable for the sort of interest you've got, would we find reason to zero in on some one kind of general principle of the type that we're talking about here? Now, again, I think in the essentials, the right answer to this question was given by Thomas Hobbes. Even though he had an answer about the state, which is about as wrong as it's possible for an answer to be, I think his moral theory was in the essentials exactly right on the money. Now, we start first with a very important observation that Hobbes made, and that is that all of us are generally vulnerable to others. In particular, he drew out the bottom line of this, which is that as to strength of body, the weakest hath enough to kill the strongest. And that is a generalization seems to me to be obviously true. It doesn't take much strength of body to kill somebody else. And the important thing about killing somebody is that after you've done it, he's dead. And if you're dead, it means that whatever you wanted to do in life, you can't do it anymore, right? So whatever your range of values might be, you better be alive if you want to pursue those, otherwise you can't. And for that reason, death is a kind of common denominator among all of us. I mean, it's a bad thing from anybody's point of view. Footnote, of course, there are a few suicidal people. But one good reason why we can leave them out of account here is that they don't need a right to life after all. So roughly speaking about those exceptions, we say, well, who cares? There are fine points about that that are of some importance. And by the way, I discussed them quite extensively in this other book, Moral Matters, which there are also copies of up there for aficionados. Okay, so first, everybody's generally vulnerable to others. Secondly, all of us, or at least practically all of us, and certainly typical people, are potential beneficiaries of cooperation from others. That is, just as everybody can make life miserable for me, so everybody could, if they wanted to, be helpful. And of course, as a rational agent, I want them not to make life miserable for me, and I do want them to be helpful, if possible. Now, I propose next that it's irrational to accept a net worsening of one's situation at the hands of others. Suppose that you and I are bargaining about something or other, and you propose that I give you $50 and get nothing for it. That looks like an offer that I'm not going to find very attractive, to put it mildly. Any offer that's got that property, is one which we can be sure that a rational individual will refuse to make. Whatever we want, we don't want to be worsened in respect of what we've already got. We want to come out of it ahead, or at least not behind. Now, that's the potential for generating a general right to liberty, as a matter of fact. Now, we add another very important thing, which is point D, that each person is the ultimate judge of what constitutes a benefit to him or herself. Now, this is a very important and much debated point. And firstly, you might readily think that it's false, because you might think, well, look, aren't there dumb people out there who don't know what they're doing? Aren't there people who make mistakes? Aren't there people who want to screw themselves, et cetera? And of course the answer to this is, well, no doubt there are. But so what? Now, the important question is so what here? That is, it isn't the question whether people can make mistakes. We all want to be able to say that we can make mistakes. The question is, though, who's going to be the judge at any given time? I mean, suppose I'm in the course of doing something which you think is a mistake on my part. But of course, since I'm doing it, I don't think it's a mistake at the time. You're going to have to try to persuade me that I'm making a mistake. And if you can't persuade me, then why would it be rational for me to let you correct me in the light of your views about what's good for me instead of mine? And the point is there can't be a good answer to that by definition. If you are right and you persuade me, then I'll do it your way. No problem. But if I think you're wrong, then of course I won't do it your way, and I will regard what you've done to me as an imposition, and I'll be against you doing that, and we won't have agreement. So all we need now, I left something out here in a way, and that is in addition to these being true, people differ. I mean, in a way, that's such an obvious thing that I mean, I've made the mistake of not writing down the obvious here, but I take it that people do differ a whole lot, especially in regard to what they like. They don't in a way differ as much in regard to what they don't like. I mean, we all don't want to die, we don't like pain. There are certain fairly common things, we don't want to starve to death, there are things like that, but as to the things we like, they vary all over the map. Even two people with taste in classical music can have very different tastes as any of us in the attempting to promote concerts are well aware, and so it goes. Now, given that people are very different in this way, and given the point that the ultimate judge in practically speaking has to be the person himself, then we get an important further bit of support, further proposal that the right kind of general principle to adopt in regard to anybody in relation to anybody else is just keep out of my way and just let me do my thing and you do your thing, and if we're going to be helpful to each other, we're going to do this on the basis of agreed arrangements, arrangements that both of us accept, rather than arrangements that somebody else has decided is good for us, and of course nowadays that somebody else is always, is mostly somebody in the government. So notice now, now let's go back to the notion of positive rights. What's wrong with positive rights? Well the answer is that positive rights impose a requirement that you help somebody else, but required benefits from my point of view, worsened my situation. I mean if you say you've got to save this guy's life, whether you want to or not, and it's going to cost me a lot of time and effort or maybe a certain amount of danger, I might very well say yeah, but I don't want to do that, and you say well you've got to anyway, then clearly you have worsened my situation and the question is do I have good reason to accept this? And the answer is basically no. Now of course we can make insurance arrangements. I mean we can say sure you want to help your fellow man, because if you do then he'll help you when you're in tough shape and that's a very good point, but of course if we do that, we'll do it voluntarily won't we? I mean that'll give you reason to do it voluntarily. As a matter of fact there's a general argument that people trying to defend the welfare state and all the other panoplies of the modern state are always bringing out, which is you know look, I mean the things that the government is providing you are things you want anyhow. They are things that are good for you as you can see, so why don't you go along with this program? To which my answer is hey look guys, you're usually advocating this on democratic grounds. And if you are, I mean take the welfare state for example, which is an agreement to have everybody who produces fork over some of his production to people who don't produce without asking them. Now consider the democratic case. If at least 51% of the people will vote for a program like this, one would think it would follow, at least if those people are consistent, that if there were no welfare program, they would be willing to shell out that much to those non-earners. And if they would then of course we wouldn't need the welfare state would we? I wonder why we have to have a welfare state if the basis for it is that it's something that you'd get anyway voluntarily if you had your choice. Well why not just give them their choice and see? They'll never say that will they? Which is very interesting. Now I think that argument by itself is enough to show that the case that most people make for the welfare state, with a view to trying to get it within the umbrella of a sort of general agreed upon social philosophy is simply fraud. And indeed you're going to have a very hard time finding any arguments for much of anything in the way of governmental activity that aren't susceptible to the same problem. So my general proposal then is that starting with the idea that we've got a whole bunch of people with minds of their own and operating reasonably rationally, the principle that it is reasonable to expect everybody to embrace would be the libertarian principle and nothing else. And there I quit.