 Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell. Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Grant Babcock. He's the associate editor of Libertarianism.org. Trevor Burrus. Hello. Aaron Powell. Today we're going to talk about natural rights and then specifically how they relate to radical libertarianism. What are natural rights? Trevor Burrus. Well, so two parts right. There's the rights part and the natural part. So let's start with the rights part. A right basically is there are certain things which other people can't do to you and you can't do to other people by virtue of your possessing a moral agency and personhood. So if we think that it's wrong for me to reach across the table and stab Trevor in the chest with my pen and that the reason that's wrong is because it's disrespectful to Trevor's dignity as a moral agent, right? Because there are things that I could reach across and stab with my pen like a stuffed animal or maybe a fish depending on his conception of fish. Both of those would be pretty creepy to do though. Right. Or if a fish was at the table that would be, or if you just stabbed a stuffed animal here that would be pretty strange. But continue. Right. And we think that that would be wrong again by virtue of something about Trevor that he's a moral agent, that he's a person and I use person in the ethical sense of the word person. So then what makes a right a natural right? Well that would be probably the easiest way to describe it would be to contrast it with something like a civil right. So a civil right would be something like the right to vote. It only makes sense to talk about the right to vote in the context of a democracy where we have privileges that are contingent on that particular political system. And then setting up polling, balloting places or a right to trial by jury for example. And a natural right in contrast is it's a pre-political type of right. So it's the sort of thing where even if there were no polling places, even if the halls of Congress were empty, it would still be wrong for me to steal Trevor's coffee mug. But the voting would be irrelevant. Right. So it's pre-political, but it's also just to clarify post-political in the sense that these rights exist before government and would exist without government, but the argument is they also continue to exist even if there is a government. Correct. The one wrinkle with that is that sometimes social contract theorists will talk about us bargaining away certain natural rights in the social contract. So like I might have a right to basically be a vigilante, right? So if I think I've been injured by Trevor, I have the right to avenge myself upon him or to, you know, if he stole my coffee mug, I could go and take it back myself. Whereas some social contract theorists would say when you enter into political society, you give up that natural right and in exchange you get the political right to be part of the justice system. Now either one of those, we can talk and we have taught on Free Thoughts of Four about whether social contract theory is legitimate or all those things, but you if you're in a social contract system as America theoretically is, or in a state of anarchy that respects rights all the time and I've not been bargained away, but in both of those we're still talking about some sort of rights-based theory of either government legitimacy or maybe non-legitimacy of both based in rights, correct? Correct. And that of course is our tradition and it also seems to me that there aren't many people, and you know the literature better than I do, but who just don't think rights exist. Oh, well there's plenty of people like that, right? So anyone who is a utilitarian, right? I mean, yeah, you're like a strict utilitarian, but those are pretty rare. Well, in the academy. So that's the thing, I'm definitely thinking in terms of the academy because if we're talking about the moral sense that your average human being on the street has, that's really, it's not systematized or formalized in any way. So it wouldn't really make sense to say this guy believes in rights and consistently and this guy doesn't, right? It's going to be a hodgepodge. Do these rights, the ones that you described are you can't do certain things to Trevor. And I wonder just how many times, and this is going to be episode 202, there's been hypothetical violence directed at Trevor. It seems to go that way more than the other. He's just more punchable than you are. Yes, I guess I have the Ted Cruz punchable face. But so you, it's a, these rights are, Trevor has rights by nature of his humanity that are then act as prohibitions, limits on what you're allowed to do, so in Nozick's term they're side constraints. So let's go on side constraints for a minute. So the idea is that I have a sort of sphere of independent action wherein I get to make decisions about how things go, right? And that, well, where's the border to that? Well, the border to that is there are things outside my legitimate realm of control, right? So, is that your rights, is what you're saying? Right. So and, and my right to swing my fist ends at your face. That's almost a little question, Becky, right? So like, well, let's go back to me stabbing you, right? Please, let's do it. Yeah, it's so smiling over there. It can't come up enough. Yeah, so let's say I have a kitchen knife, right? There are lots of things that I get to do with that kitchen knife, right? I get to, you know, prepare a steak with it. I can sharpen it. I can destroy it, melt it down, all these things, right? I get to decide what happens about it. The reason that I can't, you know, decide that what happens to the knife is that it goes into your chest is because now I'm not making decisions just about the knife anymore, right? It's, I'm also making decisions about your chest and its structural cohesion. Does this then mean that natural rights are always and only negative rights, as it's called? So there are prohibitions on what you can do to other people or other people, you know, my rights are things that people may not do to me as opposed to positive rights, which are more like I have an expectation that things, I will receive certain things or things will be done for me. Like there has to be some economic production, which is then, so it sort of depends on what part of the natural rights tradition you're talking about, right? And it also depends on if you're talking about whether it is an enforceable thing or not. So you could argue and libertarians have argued that children have a right to food and shelter from their parents or guardians, right? And that would be an example of a right that they have, you know, by virtue of being what they are, that is pre-political, but it's probably a positive right. The main line of like the liberal tradition, like going back into the Enlightenment and continuing down to us three sitting around the table right now, tends to think that at least when it comes to adults, we're talking about negative rights as being the ones relevant to political questions of enforceability. The libertarians are often associated with rights theory. I think if anyone has a kind of popular conception of libertarianism, it has to do with these very strong assertions of rights. Is that the right conception of libertarianism in your view? In my view, yes. I think that the rights conception is the correct one, but it's not the only way libertarians think about ethics. Here's where we can plug Grant and I are the co-editors of Arguments for Liberty, which you can download for free at libertarians.org, which presents nine different arguments, only one of which is grounded in a strict natural rights conception. Maybe two depending on how you can't count, can't, can't, can't, can't, can't, can't, can't, can't, can't. Is that what we just said? I tried to. Okay, all right. So what sort of questions in this sense getting into the heart of your essay, if you have a robust respect for rights, it gets you to a property liberal order in your conception and they're fairly absolutist. Would that be correct the way you view it? Right. I think that this idea of absolutism is sort of baked into the idea of a right. It's a bright line. It's a bright line in the sand. It's a, this far no further kind of way of thinking about morality. So that gets sort of directly to the question of does that imply radicalism? What do you mean by radicalism? What is radical libertarianism? Right. I mean, I wish someone would tell me in some sense, but we can try. The word radical is thrown around a lot of different ways. In some uses, it's just a pejorative. It means unserious and sort of immature and concerned with extremism for its own sake. I think that's nibbling around the edges of something that's almost correct, which is that when we radicalism is a relative thing, it's relative to some kind of center which is in this context, it would be like the status quo. It would be like how different are my views about how the political order should be compared to how it is and the bigger that gap is, the more radical I am. So that's why you're okay with being called radical in this regard? Right. Because I'm an anarchist. You both know and I guess the audience now does. So is radicalism then synonymous with anarchism or radical libertarianism or can you be a radical libertarian or I guess a natural rights libertarian without taking that all the way to the abolition of the state? So I think there is a distinction to be made here and I'm going to draw on an essay by Murray Rothbard called Do You Hate the State? And he says radical, he means radical in the sense of being in total root and branch opposition to the existing political system and to the state itself, radical in the sense of having integrated intellectual opposition to the state with a gut hatred of its pervasive and organized system of crime and injustice, radical in the sense of a deep commitment to the spirit of liberty and any statism that integrates reason and emotion, heart and soul. And then he goes on and he gives examples of anarchists who he thinks are not radical and minimal state type libertarians who he thinks are radical. So his sort of paradigm case for a anarchist libertarian who he doesn't think is radical is David Friedman who wrote the machinery of freedom around the same time as his book For a New Liberty came out and David Friedman's book is all about the utilitarian case for libertarian anarchism, like the idea that life will be better and more enjoyable and we'll all be wealthier and happier if we get rid of the state. Now in that book, Friedman takes care to say, look, I'm not dismissing rights out of hand, but I think that if, you know, rhetorically speaking, we're trying to convince somebody that it makes sense to make consequentialist utilitarian type arguments. Rothbard doesn't necessarily think he's super serious about that, but that might be a fault of Rothbard rather than Friedman. So who would be a radical minimal, minarchist or minimal state? Well, he gives a great list actually, right? He says, are classical liberal forebears who were genuinely radical, who hated statism in the states of their day with a beautifully integrated passion? The levelers, Patrick Henry, Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, the Jacksonians, Richard Cobbden, and on and on, right? And he says, Tom Paine's radical hatred of the state and statism was and is far more important to the cause of liberty than the fact that he never crossed the divide between laissez-faire and anarchism. So that gets us, I'm trying to parse this out on my head that we're talking about absolutism and rights, and you sort of, these are the inherently absolutist. And one of the things, one of the things, you wrote this essay in response to an essay by our former colleague, Brink Lindsey, who was criticizing natural rights theory. And the main source of his criticism was basically the absolutism of these rights claiming to, like either A, going too far because of the perception of that or they're just going too far or in B, because the absolutism of the rights doesn't solve many questions. But so if we're going to say these rights are absolute, we have these questions about that always come up. And we've talked about, I think 190 episodes ago with Matt Zawolinski, or we talked about signing laser pointers on your house and in pollution and minor little, you know, touching you for a second. Or going back to the knife and Trevor example, because again, like if he's unconscious and, you know, he's choking and you need to cut a hole in his throat to. Right. So on one level, you know, libertarians will say what many people think are quote unquote crazy things by just saying, yes, if you shine a laser pointer on my door, you are violating my rights, rights are absolute. So how do you respond to those kind of characterizations? This is sort of hard to talk about generally. So I'll try to get more concrete with the laser pointer. Right. Like, yeah, if you're shining a laser pointer on my house and I want you to stop doing that, I should be able to ask you to stop doing that. And you should comply. Right. But does that so is that I guess going to that? So does it limit your ability to retaliate or do you have to do rights theory itself tell you how you can react to someone's violations of your rights? Or do you need something else? Right. OK, I see where you're going with this now. Basically, all all rights tell you is is where the line is. It doesn't necessarily tell you what an appropriate response is. Right. You could you could say I believe absolutely in natural rights, but then also have some kind of theory of proportionality. Right. Now Rothbard famously is not really big on this. And actually, I think Locke isn't either. Right. He says if someone is trespassing, then that means that, well, they might, you know, if they're willing to do that, then as far as you know, they're willing to kill you so you can kill them right back. But this, I mean, to put this another way, there's the argument that, you know, if we took these, if rights are absolute and so to take your laser pointer example, like someone shining it on your house, it's, you know, at best or at most a vanishingly small harm to your property. But you can tell them not to when they should comply. That gets us into, was it, was it Zolinsky who wrote the essay on pollution? Pollution, yeah, that you could shut down industry. Yeah, but if we took that seriously and took it to its actual conclusions, we wouldn't be allowed to have industry. Which brings us to his essay. We wouldn't be allowed to drive cars. We wouldn't be allowed to do anything because the pollution or the noise or whatever else would be infringing on people's rights, which would seem to, you know, cast us into pretty impoverished lives. So is that, is that, is getting out of that? Do you bite the bullet on that and say, yes, well, if we were going to just respect everyone's rights, we would have to live as hermits? Or do you say, well, the rights, those aren't really rights violations. Like the rights are more flexible than that. Or do you say those are such de minimis harms that we just, it's like unreasonable to not put up with them. Like, yes, I'm violating your rights, but it's so small that if you get mad and try to stop me, you're overreacting. A few things. So Rothbard famously says, like, no, like smokestacks are aggression, you know, polluting rivers with your, your industrial runoff is aggression. And that, you know, the people who then are, are harmed by, you know, breathing bad air and drinking bad water have cause of action against you. Right. He thinks in a, in a sort of, there's some path dependency here, right. Where we live in a world where the state has basically issued out all these permits saying, you're allowed to emit this much, you know, toxic stuff and you're allowed to emit this much toxic stuff and other people can't, right. And then we've built up this industrial society on that basis. But he's imagining a sort of a different path where the law took a different tack on that and said, you know, pretty strongly no, right. So many of these questions of practicality, right, sort of boil down to, I can't imagine a business model that successfully does X. Therefore, X is impossible. Therefore, your demand for, you know, radical libertarianism is, is kaput. I'm sort of uncompelled by that sort of thing. And part of it is I very seldom see a good faith attempt to even try to think of how it might work. A great example of this is when Ludwig von Mises is, is writing, I think it's in one of the later editions, the human action that came out after Rothbard had sort of started talking about anarchism. Mises is talking about how well, you know, capitalism and freedom and all these things are contingent upon sort of a, a society that has the rule of law and all these things. So therefore to talk about the market producing legal services like courts and police and that sort of thing is a category error. And, you know, the whole, the whole anarchist project is just, doesn't get off the ground. I think that's sort of fairly obviously just a failure of imagination, right. About, and, and a very like excessively narrow view of like what markets are and the applicability of even, even Mises own thinking about human action, right. So getting, getting into some of the criticisms that Brink has made about the natural rights theory, but one of them is, is that the need more than rights. And we kind of touched on it and so maybe I already know your answer, but that we can get back into it, which is we need more than rights to answer some questions that the legal system answers without rights. And if libertarians are going to sort of say, no, no, rights sort of solve the problems of the world when he sort of says we don't need politics, then we're ignoring all these basic facts. So yes, you have a right to property and you can homestead it. But how high above your property do you own and your right doesn't answer it or how, how do you abandon your property? How long do you have to let it go until you abandon it or like sort of in an adverse possession? Since all these questions are not answered by rights. So therefore it seems that rights don't get us too far. There's a lot of play in the joints and it could be a, it could be a rights respecting world generally, but also not very libertarian. Right. I think that's sort of confused on several levels. The, the first is it's mischaracterizing like what's what the work that rights are doing when you're thinking about a libertarian or even, even not, even a non-libertarian political order, right? Like these are side constraints. It doesn't like, it doesn't tell us anything about, you know, what we do inside the edge of the canvas, right? And indeed, there will be like multiple possibilities that are compatible with rights thinking. One of my favorite things, Trevor, that we've talked about in the past is sort of the rituals and signifiers that we, that different societies have used to determine what counts as a transfer of property, where like way, way back in medieval England, if I wanted to buy Aaron's acre of land, we actually both had to go out there. Aaron had to pick up some dirt off the ground and put it in my hand and only livery of season, right? Only, only then was the, was the deal sealed, right? This is one of the few concepts actually where I, I, I think Hans Hoppe's characterization is, is interesting and helpful where he talks about the intersubjectively determinable boundaries, right? Which are sort of necessarily going to be socially contingent, right? There's nothing, there's nothing eternal about going to a land and handing dirt to each other, right? There could be other like sufficient ways of cashing out what a property system in land looks like. And then there are questions that, which don't really have anything to do with rights at all, like which side of the road should everyone drive on, right? Hayek, Hayek talks about the sort of thing a lot when he talks about the law, about there needs to be a uniform convention, but it doesn't really matter much one way or the other what it's about. And like in that case, rights aren't going to drill down nor, nor, nor are they trying to. So, so does that mean that we're, we're okay with these legal, so we have to talk about again, let's say adverse possession or regulations that infringe upon your property of certain, so you can't build buildings super high to obstruct airplanes or, you know, or you don't own all the way to the sky or you would own airplanes as they flew over your house. These all seem absurd, but if you took rights there to the extreme, maybe that's the case. And if we're going to give a concession to, well, you know, socially ordering helps and it matters in the situation, so therefore we can concede that we're going to work in politics to some degree in so far as we're negotiating the terms of what the limits of these rights are as long as we're still keeping honest about protecting the rights themselves that we can play in the joints. So this, this, this politics thing, right, seems, seems to me it's trying to aim at characterizing anyone who says like rights are a serious thing we need to consider. It's trying to say that thereby they're like dodging the hard work of cashing out all these details and which are important, right, to have a functioning society. That strikes me as sort of silly. There's nothing to do with rights or radicalism that is apolitical in that, like the fact that I think that there is a right or a wrong answer to a certain question or even multiple right and multiple wrong answers to a certain question. Nothing about that lets me escape politics, right? I still have to do the work of persuasion and the work of bargaining if you like, right? I think there's also in that critique there's an equivocation on the definition of politics because what, so in those questions that need to be answered, that rights can't answer, that we have to do the rough and tumble of persuasion and compromise and all of that, those would be present even in an anarchist society, right? In a society, like because it's a society and when you're in a society you have to interact with your fellow human beings and you have to figure out how to live together and how to live in beneficial ways and so if politics simply is, it seems like when the critique is well, this natural rights thing is like a, you know, an unjustified rejection of politics, like you think you can escape it. Well, no, if that's what we mean by politics which is simply kind of social persuasion and social interaction and living together in a society, then that politics is very much a part of a strict natural rights and even anarchist society but the equivocation comes in sliding over to politics necessarily means politics of the state. It means, you know, solving like not just the act of trying to figure those questions out but the act of figuring those questions out via the mechanisms of government as an enforcement tool as a system of institutions and it seems to me, and so the thought is like there's almost a false dilemma I think that's being articulated which is look if you, you know, if you say you're rejecting politics then really what you're doing is rejecting, you're rejecting the whole thing. So if I say no, I'm realistic and think we need to have politics that means necessarily we need the institutions of a liberal order, the state, the coercive force of laws and all of that. And so to say, and so we can say like, look it would be unreasonable to reject politics. And so then therefore if you reject government politics, you're being unreasonable whereas you can simply instead say, no, what I'm doing is rejecting the necessity of these particular institutions as an enforcement mechanism for the political and instead I'm going to embrace the political as a different non-governmental system. It reminds me of the cattle farmers of Shasta County, California as one is usually reminded in times like these. This is a book by Robert Ellison called Order Without Law where he analyzes the way cattle farming is done in this relative rural part of California where essentially they've come up with a bunch of rules that are trying to deal with the kind of questions, the practical so to speak questions we're talking about about cattle and when they go out, they let them into the field and the mountains when they're during the winter and then they bring them back in and sometimes they trample on other people's property and sometimes they die or like or there's a conflict of different sorts and they've developed a bunch of rules that you could call political. They've done it through just long-term social interaction and eventually they were ignoring the laws of California that California told them no, these are actually the laws about who has the loss and who is going to have to pay in these situations. They just ignored them and used their own rules and that situation goes to what Aaron was saying is that they figured out these inherently difficult questions. They figured out solutions, at least workable for right now, solutions these questions through methods that are not just endorsing the political in the way that you described it. Right, the other book I'd wanna point out here is Eleanor Ostrom's work about governing the commons as the title and it's about governing the commons, right? How do communities solve tragedy of the common style problems without recourse to a monopoly like Punnishing State? So if we're getting into what a lot of the criticisms here that I think Brink was putting on natural rights libertarianism and of course Brink has been on the show before and he's always welcome back but the criticisms, a lot of them are about strategy which is something we talk about on the show a lot anyway whether or not it's best to proceed from a radical standpoint or to work in the halls of government and something libertarians talk about all the time. But one of the things that Brink argues is that from a standpoint the way the politics is in this country and that we're broadly liberal and that if we're not participating in that discussion and that we're saying we have all these solutions that we don't even need to get involved in those politics then it's not gonna be strategically good for libertarians to stay out of those and to say the things that people really like and really care about possibly such as the welfare state and regulations on safety and health and things like this that they're just not acceptable and we won't come and talk to you we won't come and talk to your political people or try to persuade until you just get rid of that entire thing, the welfare state or whatever that that's just absolutely unreasonable and a good way to guarantee the libertarians won't ever positively affect anything. Well, so there's two things going on there, right? One is that, like I think that Brink thinks that the welfare state is like probably a good idea at least within certain limits, right? Or cashed out in a certain way. And then the second question is, well, suppose then that the libertarian position is that the welfare state's bad, which I think the welfare state's bad and we shouldn't have one. I mean, we shouldn't have the rest of the state either but that's a discussion for later. It strikes me as odd to say that well, we can make progress on this thing if we just pretend that we agree with them on all this other stuff, right? And that talking about the welfare state being bad is preventing us from whatever the laundry list of things it is like criminal justice reform or the tax code or any of these other issues, right? I don't think politics really works that way where, I mean, I guess someone could have a view that's like so repugnant like they're like a white supremacist or something that they become sort of radioactive and you can't work with them on anything. But my feeling is if you want to be respected in serious conversations about politics that look, you just say like, this is what I believe and this is like the strongest good faith argument I can make for that, right? And that doesn't mean you can't then make comparative statements, right? I could say, look, I don't think the government should be involved in education at all but a voucher system might be better than universal public schooling, right? Now, Murray Rothbard famously thought the opposite, right? He thought that vouchers were a step away from the libertarian ideal because you had this functioning private system that was doing things outside the state without very much state oversight or intervention and that by letting the vouchers in, you're letting in state money and therefore state control, right? And you're basically co-opting the private schools into the public ones. That's a strategy discussion though. Right, right. And it's also, it goes to show that you can, even if you're both radicals, you might disagree about incremental steps, right? Or whether a step is in the right direction and whether it's good or bad, whether it's a small step or a big step. I think there's also another, I mean, another false dilemma happening here and another interesting thing happening in this argument that because moderation is maybe more effective in getting policy stuff done in Washington, whether it's easier to get your foot in the door if you are behaving in a moderate fashion or people are moderate relatively. Moderate relatively. And I take issue even with that premise actually, right? But let's just, except for the sake of argument that if you are espousing really radical absolute positions, you're not gonna be listened to, let's just say. But that's getting the causation backwards, right? No, no, but let me just, because I think we'll bracket that issue because I think that there's something else going on here, which is so the move though that seems to be going on is to say because it is, so we could say like, look, you should, you can be like, natural rights radicalism might be right, correct the truth in terms of the way that we should look morally at our interaction with other people with the government, but to always rhetorically go to it might be a failure. And so therefore we should moderate our tone and moderate what we're saying in order to advance in that direction. That's an argument. But it seems like there's another version of the argument that then takes it retroactively to say, and because of that, natural rights itself must be wrong. Like that because moderation is tactically better, the underlying motive of natural rights can't be it's ontologically incorrect. And that doesn't follow from- Right, and I think that that's, I think that where that gets us is you can run into a serious problem where so to analogize this to say the abolition debate, okay? So you might make an argument that, so you could say slavery is absolutely wrong. It's about as repugnant and immoral and act as anyone can engage in. There's, this is a bright line, there's no nuance here, like end of story. But if we are going to end widespread slavery, simply taking up arms and killing slave owners might not do it as quickly and effectively as say operating at the legislative level and trying to persuade the slave, like slave owning- And not also conflate radicalism with advocating violence also. But so you might say like that's a more effective way to get it done faster and safer. Okay, but, and so therefore you should temper your rhetoric slightly when trying to advance this cause. But the problem- Aaron put scare quotes around that because by temper his rhetoric he means hide the ball. But the problem I think is when you then, like I think what's going on here on this natural rights argument is saying then something along lines of not only that what that actually means is that being an absolutist on the issue of slavery itself is wrong. That you know you should take a moderate position on slavery and on the rightness or wrongness of slavery in order to have your rhetoric match your principles. But that seems to me like there's no reason to betray your principles simply because you think a different style of rhetoric is gonna be more effective. Well, let's think about it this way for a minute. Suppose that every libertarian who is more radical than Gary Johnson stops saying anything more or advocating anything more radical than Gary Johnson. What is the effect of this? The effect of this is that Gary Johnson is now the most radical libertarian, right? You think that would be bad for libertarianism? I mean, I think so. And I think it would be tactically bad, right? Because, you know, as much as I get upset when more moderate libertarians point to the radical libertarians and say, look, look, I'm not, you know, I'm not that guy. I'm not that guy. I'm maybe a little nuts, but I'm not Grant Babcock, right? So... I may have done that before, though. So this idea that we need to, you know, the radicals should just be quiet, right? And then everything, all of a sudden, the gates of power will open up to Gary Johnson and he'll be able to, you know, legalize weed and whatever other incremental gain it is, right? I think that's sort of wrongheaded. It's not that, you know, the radicals being there is preventing that, right? So it's true, though, that, yeah, like the U.S. political system is set up where decisions are made, like, by moderates at the margin, right? But that doesn't mean that becoming more moderate and closer to the margin makes you more influential, right? If we want to move where the median voter is, right, you don't do that by moving yourself closer to the existing median, because then the median has changed, right? It also seems somewhat implausible that, to say like, the reason that Gary Johnson's policies, say, are not accepted by the American public or by lawmakers is because there are people more radical than Gary Johnson. I mean, that seems like an odd argument when, in fact, the reason that Gary Johnson's policies are not more popular among American voters and lawmakers is because American voters and lawmakers are not fans of Gary Johnson's policies. Right, no one says, for example, that, like, Hillary Clinton is unelectable because the Socialist Workers Party exists. And that's an interesting point because the radicalism, the libertarians get accused of is something that often irks me because, you know, we're the kind of people if you go on a TV show and you're advocating a principle. And we talked about this, I think it's in the Jamie White episode, the politics in New Zealand episode, although it might have been in conversations outside of that episode. So I apologize if you went to, but we discussed this, he was talking about consensual sexual relationships, like advocating consensual sexual relationships among adults in New Zealand. And he goes on TV and the first thing the person asks him is incest, defend it, which is, which is an interesting, I mean, it's an interesting way of flipping it to us and making us defend, maybe it's the result of defending a rights perspective, is that people want to take you to the extreme and make you defend it. But it's weird. But you would never do this, like, again, it was like, you believe in banning some consensual sexual relationships and then the person comes on TV and you say, banning, making out in a car on lover's lane, defend that, making them defend something extreme, although that might have been actually illegal at some point, but nevertheless. Well, this goes to, there's an interesting unidirectionality to radicalism. So Grant has effectively defined radicalism as the more, there's a baseline, there's the status quo and the further you are from it, the more radical you are. But the way that radical gets used here and the way that radical gets used in Washington, it's only really something that's applied if you move in one direction away from the status quo. So if you are advocating the state not doing things that it's currently doing, doing fewer things, ultimately, if you're an anarchist doing nothing, then that's the spectrum that you're a radical. But if you're on the other side of it and you, like in the banning, making out in cars, if you are just as far from the status quo, but you're instead advocating the state to a whole lot more, what you might, you would say like, well no, you got the economics wrong or you have this cause you haven't figured out, but we don't say like, well that's just kind of silly radicalism to think that we should have single payer healthcare. Even though that's- You're an insane monster to think that. Just as far from the status quo as saying we should have markets in healthcare. And I think that's because there's this, it still is just in the Washington culture and I think this is true even in the, I mean just in the broader culture, that there's something it's just to be opposed to the state doing things is simply uncouth. You know, it's the same as that really silly thing you see from journalists all the time where they'll say like, this was the least productive Congress in 10 years because they didn't pass very many laws. Like the way that we measure the productivity of a government is simply by the number of laws it puts on the books, not the quality of the laws and whatever. And the way we measure the greatness of presidents is by how many people they kill. Yeah, how many wars they fought, but on the radical point too, I think it's important to point out when you do use a robust conception of natural rights going back to this question about radicalism, you can be ahead of the curve. And I always put this out very, especially gay marriage and especially marijuana legalization and drug legalization, that stuff was crazy. And for those libertarians who believe that we have to concede to the popular opinion of the middle and not advocate anything too extreme if that's the actual position, although I'm not sure that's the actual position. I think the actual position is that they think some things are more important rights than other things. But if it's all about rhetoric, we say so in 1985, we shouldn't have been talking about legalizing marijuana because we look like the crazy people on the block who were advocating something that was totally insane and therefore people weren't gonna listen to us. And now of course we have it, it's a pretty popular position, same with gay marriage. And one of the big virtues of that is when you're advocating a natural rights conception of something like consensual sexual relationships is that we never needed to have the discovery of a gay gene or the proof that homosexuality doesn't cause social harm. These kind of things where people say, we wanna legalize homosexuality because we have a study that says it's not harmful to raise children for gay couples or we wanna legalize because we found a gay gene. We didn't need a gay gene to say, no, it's not definitely a crime because of a theory of natural rights. If you have to find a gay gene to protect consensual sexual activity then there better be a BDSM gene or for them to protect their activities. No, that's not how you think about it. It's consensual activity and is that radical? Absolutely, in 1973, which was when the American Psychological Association took homosexuality off of being a mental illness. Right. We've been sort of ragging on this idea that radicalism is bad and I sort of wanna be clear that there is a sense in which that's true. Like there's a kernel of truth, which is that being abrasive and extreme for its own sake is probably a bad thing. There's a 1978 essay by Michael Cloud called The Late Great Libertarian Macho Flash and it's sort of a memoir of- Is this on libertarianism.org? It is not, but maybe it should be. It's sort of a memoir of his experiences tabling, right? Which is a thing that you used to do. You still do that? Yeah, I did it in undergrad. But it's less prevalent now than maybe hanging out on Facebook all the time. But basically he would observe and he included himself in this, people delighting in offending the sensibilities of people less radical than them, right? Where someone would say come up to them and rather than ask them policy question, you know, and it wouldn't even be something like unfair. Like you think toddlers should have tanks, right? Which sure, why not? Recreational nukes for all. But it would be like, it would be something like, oh, you think we shouldn't have social security, right? Tanks by the way are probably far safer in the hands of toddlers than in adults. Because the toddler's not gonna be able to do much with it whereas the adult has the ability and the malice. Speaking of toddlers with tanks, Donald Trump does have tanks currently, so. Yeah, and nukes. And nukes. Whether or not their recreational is up in the air. Yes. But they would ask even these reasonable questions about what about social security, right? And then they would come out like guns blazing, like you wanna enslave me by taking my hours of labor through the income tax and, right? Just the extreme posturing, yes. Right. And that sort of thing is entirely self-serving, right? There's no attempt there being made at persuasion. There's no attempt to say, here's the best case I can come up with for why it's true in a level-headed temperate way that we shouldn't have social security, right? It's done because it makes you feel good. It makes you feel like I'm this cool outsider who's like better than everyone, right? So I think that the core idea here that we keep coming back to then is, and it applies to this natural rights discussion, but it's much broader than that, is that there's a difference between that principle and rhetoric are not the same thing. And that changing rhetoric or saying that the rhetorical style you're using is not effective, is not good, is caustic, is whatever else, is driving people away, is not itself a critique of your underlying moral principles. Right. Well, and I think that it's also saying like, it's not just about rhetoric, right? It's saying that like, look, this principle is not conducive to winning, therefore we should abandon it. As though winning is the goal and not the principle, right? This is one of the things that drive me insane about the whole Trump thing, right? Where people are saying, look, the Libertarian Party is never gonna win, Rand Paul is never gonna win, take whatever, so what Libertarians should do is, find someone who is going to win and support that person, which that's insane to me. Which is exactly the, I mean, if there's an ideology to the Trump voters, it's that. It's like that the only thing that matters is winning in this weirdly defined, I mean, I think that for a lot of Trump voters, the core base, it's that winning is simply making the people we disagree with mad, like that's it. And so as long as we're making them mad, whatever it is, like there's no, it's winning divorced from principle entirely. Right, because the whole reason you want to win is because you have this principle. Because you want to enact the principle or move in the right direction towards it. So if we're then talking about, oh, Libertarians who genuinely think that the welfare state is unconscionable, should stop thinking that because it won't win, right? That's like, I don't care, right? But that's not the point so much. I think that the really interesting thing that we've hit on in this conversation, which I mean, I think it's sort of implicit in a lot of the writings that are, I mean, really it's been a debate in Libertarianism for a long time before it was recently a debate on the website, but that there are some people who think that some rights are more important than other rights or they should be moderated in a certain way. So the question about, and I might be one of these people, like free speech rights, you know, consensual sexual activity, I'm trying to think of what else is listed in your essay here, different types of freedom of association, political involvement, things like this, be pretty absolutist on those things. But then when it comes to something like, you know, we're going to take 10% of your income to help people out who are poor, just like that's, yes, and that's okay, or that's less offensive to me because I think that these economic rights, these rights of property are less absolute than I would argue that free speech rights are, for example. Now it's, the hard part would be justifying that because a lot of things that are criticized about absolute rights, as a point of your essay, you say the absolute rights don't solve all these questions, what about when you have certain dangers or things that don't come up? Well, free speech has all these problems too. And you say, we have freedom and we have security and you say, okay, what about trading secrets or what about giving aid and comfort to the enemy? What about passing out draft dodging literature on World War I? We still have to make these decisions or we can just be absolutists and say yes and you can also yell fire in a crowded theater. Right, so there's a few things going on here, some of which are sort of technical and I may just spout out some citations and then leave it at that. So, rights thinking is, I think it's Nozick who says rights are trumps, right? The idea is if I have a rights claim and you have something that is not a rights claim, my claim wins, right? So if I own the Styrofoam cup, which I am brandishing in the air and you do not own it, but you want it for some reason, like maybe I need that Styrofoam cup to live or something, like I don't know what your story is, but if I have a right of ownership over the cup, that trumps your claim, right? So there's this question of, okay, can rights conflict? And that's a subject of some debate in the literature on rights. There's sort of a few ways you can go, right? If you have a situation where there's multiple sort of types of right, then maybe you're running into these balancing issues. On the other hand, if there's sort of like one overarching thing and then everything else sort of follows from that, right? Or as an instance of, then sort of from the beginning you're set up not to have these conflicts. So if I describe my right to free speech as a ownership right, an ownership of my body, an ownership over this paper in this pen, an ownership over a printing press, right? An ownership over a movie theater, right? Now there's no longer a question of can my right to speech conflict with your right to some other thing, right? Because we're all talking in the same terms, right? And that's sort of the tech Rothbard takes the stuff to read on this about the calm possibility is the word that is used, right? In the literature of the compositability of rights. Can two rights exist at the same time without conflicting? Are they possible together, calm possible? And I- Hillel Steiner's essay on rights, is that what you're gonna say? Well, that's, I was gonna start there, right? That book is very expensive and almost impossible to find. I believe that we can put a link up to Tom Palmer's kind of summation of it. Yeah, well, I was thinking specifically there's an essay in that book, I think, called The Structure of a Set of Composable Rights. It could be, it's just very, I've been looking for that book recently. Okay. And it's like $600. Okay, well, if you're a college student with access to JSTOR, you can get it through there, which is how I got my copy of the essay. The other one is Alan Goehrth, The Basis in Content of Human Rights, and then Kato's own Roger Pallon ordering rights consistently. And Roger's project in that work is he was studying under Goehrth and he took Goehrth's framework and said, like, you're almost there, but the answer you're looking for is libertarian conception of rights and how they work. And I think he argues it fairly compellingly. I wanted to just make a quick point about radicalism. So this could be rights radicalism. It could be libertarian radicalism. It needn't be libertarian anarchist radicalism, but anything where you're pushing, you're sufficiently far from the status quo to be radical. I think that the rejection, one of the problems with the rejection of that on its face of just saying, well, you shouldn't be a radical, which underlies a lot of the critiques of the kind of natural rights radicalism that Grant, that you write about, is that it's, to some extent, it's ahistorical, that you go back and you look at the history of political progress, that the changes that made the world a significantly better, freer, happier place, they're not coming from people who wanted to tinker around the middle. They may, I mean, they may have been enacted in some cases by that, but they're driven by radicals, by people who were thinking way ahead of their time, by people who were making forceful arguments. You read these texts, and they're the texts that today resonate with us, where you can, you read them and you can say, like, this person, you know, maybe they're not ultimately as radical as I am, but these people were really onto something, had incredibly important stuff to say, and their ideas changed the world. And you never say, well, I wish they had just tamped it down a bit. I wish that they hadn't advocated so much radical stuff. I wish that they had stuck more to tinkering around the margins. You say instead, no, I wish if anything that they had been louder, and that more people had listened to them, and that their radicalism had spread faster and further than it had. And so I think that if we see radicalism now as, you know, like the art of the impossible, you know, like why bother with it? We're only gonna tinker around the edges. That's ahistorical in the sense that it's like, this is not, there is absolutely no reason to believe none, to believe now that we have reached the pinnacle of government institutions, that we've reached the pinnacle of human achievement, that we've reached the pinnacle of human freedom, that the world as it is now is the best that we can get. That would be as absurd as thinking that science today has figured everything out, and there will be no more progress. And so if we reject the very idea of radicalism, we reject the people who are making these large claims, we will never, we will halt progress. And so maybe the radicals are wrong. Maybe some of them are wrong, or maybe some of them are right. But in retrospect, future generations will look back on us if we embrace that path and say, boy, I wish those people had been a little more radical. On that point there, and there's this tendency that we see sometimes with libertarians to think that the liberal tradition, the classical liberal tradition starts with John Locke and ends with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and that ever since then we've just sort of been coasting. And that we reached the full implications of the Enlightenment revolution and thinking about man's place in the political order. But there are thinkers in the liberal tradition, like Murray Rothbard, like Lysander Spooner, who have sort of carried the torch forward. And I think it's important that people engage with those thinkers and be challenged by them and argue with them and sort of look towards the horizon rather than back towards the past. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us at www.libertarianism.org.