 I was asked to discuss freedom of morality and justice is of course wide enough to allow me every possibility but I will just go into one aspect of the problem of the relationship between freedom or liberty and morality and that is the diversity of possible societies that may fit the description of liberty and I think there are some problems here which we might fruitfully discuss. Now in saying this I will take a bit different approach and approach is a bit different from what is might be described as libertarian pep talk because I am not going to tell you a lot of wonderful stories about the arrogance and stupidity of legislators and bureaucrats and so on. The problem here is that however amusing these stories may be if you're not directly involved of course dealing with the private sector people also is not always a very pleasant experience. Disasters may happen no matter who is responsible whether or not a bureaucrat or a private sector person. So this is not a talk on private sector good public sector bad it's rather a talk on the kind of liberty which libertarians are advocating or rather the many kinds of liberty they are implicitly advocating and which may they may not even all share that is the point of this discussion is that the libertarian definition of liberty is formal it's a very formal and abstract definition that can be applied in many ways and not all libertarians may like all the ways in which the libertarian definition of liberty can be applied. I like to think of libertarianism as a theory of justice that is as a central part of a political philosophy that is my basic approach. It defines a concept of justice and as such provides a mental scheme for identifying injustice wherever and wherever it occurs that is irrespective of whether it occurs in the so-called private sector or in the so-called government sector or in whatever so-called sector you may like to mention. So it's a perfectly general theory of justice and consequently also of injustice and the thrust of libertarianism in my view is not primarily to roll back the state but to limit injustice and the state is just one instance one form injustice can take but we should not be blind to other forms and of course rolling back the state may not be sufficient to eliminate injustice that may have other causes and other conditions. Now let me state at once that in my opinion a perfectly just world according to the libertarian definition of justice a perfectly just world would be a world without governments or states. In other words the idea of a perfectly libertarian justice is in my view incompatible with the idea of the state even of a minimal state. So I'm not a minimal statist I am a philosophical anarchist. Let me also say that there is no function performed by the state that someone might wish to call useful or that we would like to call useful in a way that could not be performed at least equally well by people or organizations that do not rely on the enforcement of monopolistic privileges or powers of taxation of any kind. So I think whatever the state can do and that is useful can be done better at least equally well outside the context of the state. But to say that is one thing and another thing is to say that at any time or under any real circumstances these other organizations these private alternatives if you want are likely to arise because these things do not happen out of the blue. They have to have some kind of condition some kind of prehistory. The conditions have to be ripe for them to happen. So it is one thing to say that every useful function performed by the state could conceivably be performed better by an organization that does not by its very definition violate the canons of libertarian justice. But it is a completely different thing to say that such organizations may be expected to arise anytime soon. Whether they would arise as soon as the state makes room for them or as soon as the state is forced to make room for them. We have here a difference between a logical proposition and an empirical one. And the big question is are the empirical conditions at any given moment the right ones are they likely to lead to a fruitful and just flowering of liberty. Again let me say that there is as far as I know no convincing logical argument against libertarianism. No reason in logic why a libertarian utopia could not exist. In contrast to say a socialist utopia which has many critics think for instance of Ludwig von Mises have pointed out could only exist if the basic structure of reality was completely different from what it is. Libertarianism one might say is compatible with human nature whereas socialism is not. But human nature is not a kind is not a kind of thing that immediately meets the eye. It is not a first level concept it's rather deep. I call it a rock bottom concept because it points to something that is fairly unchangeable in view of the time span of human history. And that unchanging factor is not always very obvious. What does meet the eye is the shifting sound of different characters and different temperaments. And these are very different things because characters may change in and temperaments may change in fairly short times and subject to fairly obvious conditions social conditions and economic conditions and so on. Human nature on the other hand is always the same as far as any practical proposition is concerned. But with these shifting temperaments and shifting characters you might expect all kinds of different evolutions because of course these things are not just a epiphenomena. They may affect real evolutions. Now I think we may draw the lesson from history that the interplay of such psychological factors as are evident in character and temperament do not that the interplay of these factors does not often result in anything even remotely resembling a libertarian utopia. So there may be a case for saying that libertarianism does not require a revolt against nature but it does require a revolution in the human psychology of character and temperament and in the perception and evaluation of the self and of other people. So within this picture this contrast between human nature and more changing factors. Governments and states are just symptoms and not causes. And also within this picture it is futile to attack the symptoms without dealing with the causes and even more futile to attack one set of symptoms when the same causes work throughout the social fabric. Let me give the opinion that in a sense during the greater part of the Middle Ages Europe was a stateless society despite the fact that there were kings and popes and things like that. For many purposes Europe was a stateless society. But it was not a society where justice reigned supreme. And within that context people looked very often indeed to formal government as a kind of liberating factor. We can generalize this and say that a stateless society is not necessarily a libertarian society. And also that it would be reckless to maintain that at no time in history there may be more individual liberty in a state than in a non-state. So that is because I think we have these deep causes of injustice which may come to the surface either in the form of a state formation or in the form of organizations that are not states yet very much dedicated to the pursuit of injustice. Now I think that the even-handedness with this required in our historical judgment of the state may be supported by what may be a good, may be a bad economic argument. And the argument goes as this. As long as there is a demand for injustice and rewards it brings, people will be willing to supply it. Now economic seems to indicate that under competitive conditions the supply will tend to be greater than under monopolistic conditions. And if that is so, putting up with what is in the final analysis according to libertarian definitions a criminal monopoly might be preferable in some situations to trying to dismantle it and so opening the floodgates, the floodgates of criminal competition. Now this argument whatever it's worth at least supports the statement that libertarians should focus more directly on injustice in all its forms than on whatever the state happens to be doing. For it directs our attention to the demands for injustice, which I think is much more basic than the various forms in which injustice is supplied. Now I believe that in the end the question whether to rely on something called the state or on a multitude of private sector protective agencies as they used to be called to wipe out the supply of injustice is fairly relevant. It is the demand side of the question we should be worrying about. That is we should be tackling the roots of injustice rather than trying to shift from one stand against injustice from one supplier against injustice to another. The great American critic H.L. Menken once said injustice is relatively easy to bear. It is justice that stinks. I think that is a profound observation and why that no libertarian should neglect. Consider this, although on the surface most criticism of libertarianism appears to equate it with the advocacy of a free for all, a doggie dog and the devil take behind most competition. A little probing usually reveals that the main thrust of the criticism runs in precisely the opposite direction. Libertarianism, I think, is rejected by most people as being too restrictive. That is so because it rules out as illegitimate many forms of action which the critics think indispensable. In short libertarianism would restrict the freedom as those people define it would restrict the freedom of action of a large and intellectually and organizationally active part of the population. Call them the elite or the establishment and those who aspire to take its place. And this is, of course, very true. Libertarianism requires a scrupulous and universal respect for every person's right to an autonomous existence, the right to be free. And that is the right to do with one's own what one wills. Liberty for a libertarian is then the supreme political value because it is a value that is restricted only by liberty itself. The liberty of one person is restricted by nothing except the liberty of another. But as things stand to advocate liberty in this sense is to advocate far greater limitations on the freedom of action of most intellectually and organizationally active people than exist at present. Now, of course, libertarian would say that what he wants to limit is not anybody's freedom, but the power of some people over others. But the fact remains that in ordinary discourse many people find it difficult to distinguish between power and freedom. So what the argument that libertarianism is too restrictive amounts to then is the truism that certain projects with which are entirely feasible under present constitutional and political conditions would become possibly entirely unfeasible and at any rate much more costly and difficult to carry out than is the case at present. Thus, there appears to be a great fear among critics of libertarianism that in the libertarian world, they would have to kiss goodbye to any hope they may have of realizing their conception of the good, the good of society, the good of the world, the good of whatever. Now, in a sense, this fear is irrational because with so many rival conceptions of what is good for the world or the neighborhood or whatever doing rounds, the chances for any given person or party to see its own conception realized are very small indeed. But we may consider here that all over the world the most popular lotteries are those where everybody should for statistical reasons expect to lose all the money he or she has put in or will put in with the probability of almost one, but where there is a very small chance of becoming a millionaire at one lucky stroke. Now, presumably people tend to overestimate considerably their own chances of winning big in lotteries, but also in politics. Now, whatever the truth about this psychological disposition, what matters is this, that a non-libertarian political system offers the hope that one may one day reshape the world in one's own image. And the message of libertarianism, on the other hand, is a very harsh one compared to that, because it says if you can't get it without violating anybody else's rights, forget it. However much you want it. And that of course calls for a lot of self-discipline and a lot of self-restraint. Libertarianism is not often proposed as the regime of self-restraint. But I think that is the bottom line of it. To advocate libertarianism is to advocate self-restraint, to constant and unrelenting will, to live by one's own resources, to realize oneself in a manner compatible with the self-realization of others at one's own and nobody else's expense, and to bear the consequences of such a course of action however grave they may happen to be. Now what appears here in this characterization is in fact the heroic ethical assumption of libertarianism. That is the heroic ethical assumption underlying the libertarian political philosophy of individual rights. Let me paraphrase Frank Knight here, the famous American economist. He was talking about the capitalist system, but I think we may paraphrase what he said with respect to libertarianism. So paraphrasing Frank Knight, we may say that for a libertarian, quote, there have come to be two sorts of virtue. The greater virtue is to win, the lesser virtue is to go out and die gracefully after having lost, unquote. But many people appear to be sore losers, whether their losses are counted in terms of frustrated ambitions or in terms of the basic comforts of life. And furthermore, the anguish of the losers is not often softened by the attitudes of the winners, because how many people know how to win gracefully. So the heroic assumption of libertarianism then is that a sufficient number of people will have to come to possess enough self-restraint to demonstrate the lesser virtue of suffering in silence and dying gracefully. If, on the other hand, by breaking the rules of the libertarian game, they can hope to better their condition. So the call for a libertarian polity is, in a sense, a call for people to learn to lose gracefully. Now speaking realistically, it is quite obvious that one's capacity for self-restraint may not survive such a test of adverse conditions. One should not expect too much of it unless there is ample restraint imposed by others. However, according to the libertarian principles, this restraint imposed by others must take the form of defensive measures only. Any lack of self-restraint must be compensated by the desire of other people to stand up for and defend their rights. Now the problem here is that it is often very costly to defend one's rights, especially when the rights that are threatened are not very valuable at the moment and in that particular context. In the sense of economic utility, it may be quite rational not to defend that is to surrender one's rights, even if in the long run and in general this attitude has very bad effects. Now because self-defense is costly, lack of self-restraint is not checked automatically. And that is why the libertarian society is so dependent on the successful inculcation of the virtue of self-restraint. There has to be an awful lot of input in the form of self-restraint. Now we may note here that even a libertarian society does not escape the age-old dilemma of who shall protect us against our protectors, Quiskustodiet Ipsos Custodes. It cannot escape this dilemma unless self-restraint has become so deeply ingrained that there is almost no need for guards and protective agencies. Now those of you who are not convinced of this may ponder the quality of life of one who has determined to stand up for and defend his rights at all costs. To be sure from a certain perspective such a person may appear to be a hero, but from another perspective he is simply a puppet with no control over his own life because he never knows where the next attack, the next threat is going to come from. So as always it has to be on the lookout always for possible threats in us no way to lead an enjoyable life. At least that is what I think. This remark raises what I think is the most important question for libertarian, liberty for what? For libertarian rights define a perfectly coherent concept of liberty but it is a formal concept as I've said that provides absolutely no guidance on what to do with one's liberty that is with one's life. Again let me stress that from the perspective of political theory that is on the level of an abstract in general and completely universal theory of political life, this formal quality of the libertarian definition of liberty is without doubt one of the strongest points. I believe that for this reason alone libertarianism with its formal and consistent definition of human rights based on human nature has made the lasting contribution to philosophy. It has provided I think what amounts to a basic algebra for the moral sciences and this is no small achievement. However let me add, could I have some water? However let me add immediately that it would be a grievous mistake to believe that it is possible to extract from this formal scheme any meaningful practical consequences without bringing to play a great mass of empirical hypotheses which by their very nature are bound to be objects of serious contention even among libertarians themselves. To put this somewhat differently agreement on libertarian principles does not entail agreement on their application. In particular agreement on the principles should lead to agreement on the judgment whether a particular particular society is by and large libertarian but one should not expect it to lead to an agreement on the judgment whether that is a good society. Now it is of course true that the application of abstract principles always gives rise to a host of problems. For example libertarians subscribe to the principle of freedom of speech but they should be aware of the fact that this principle does not protect each and every conceivable speech act. The reason for this is pretty obvious. A speech act may be an integral part of a social action an action involving other persons and in particular it may be an integral part of an action that constitutes or is the cause of an infringement of someone else's rights and this may be so even though an act of speech in and by itself does not and cannot violate anybody's rights except in the case where there was a pre-existing contract contract not to perform that given speech act. Now in other cases where there is no contract and there is no physical infringement of somebody else's domain with involved in the speech act but still I do not think that a libertarian would be prepared to say that the leader of a criminal gang say the Nuremberg tribe trials were mentioned here say Hitler or a mafia don should be allowed to go scot-free merely because he might conceivably be able to prove that he never participated in the execution of his own orders that he merely spoke and cannot be held responsible for the fact that others obeyed him but on the other hand no libertarian would be prepared to say that the mere fact that say some racist bigot writes a pamphlet in which he advocates the expulsion of all dark-skinned immigrants that the mere fact of writing that pamphlet involves him in the action some of his readers might undertake against guest workers so in on the one case we would say the speech act involves the person in in the act and in another case we would say he doesn't so apparently there is a wide and ill defined set of circumstances and relationships to be considered before one can conclude that a given speech act is or is not protected by the principle of free speech this means simply that libertarian principles should be applied wisely but they do not themselves provide an automatic decision procedure for determining which applications are wise and which are not now this is one kind of difficulty in applying principles but there is another kind of problem and it's to that problem that I term the problem arises that arises directly from the very nature of liberty as defined in terms of libertarian rights and to understand this one should note that once actions may affect others in a negative harmful or disagreeable way even if they do not infringe upon their rights now according to libertarian principle every person has the right to do whatever he wills with his own with his own property his own body and he has to do he has the right to do this either individually or in voluntary association with others regardless of its effects on others as long as their rights are not violated it follows immediately from this that in a libertarian society everybody individually and collectively has the right to do and a force theory to threaten to do a whole range of nasty unpleasant disagreeable and harmful things to others provided only again no infringement of somebody's rights is involved now this is perhaps a rather peculiar way of looking at libertarianism is the right to do nasty things to other people but if libertarians do not normally think of their doctrine in these terms that is perhaps too bad because it is an important feature of a libertarian society it means for instance that libertarians uh when renouncing coercion that is the threat to violate somebody's rights when renouncing coercion as a means of social control still have the alternative of social pressure to point to so they can say okay you need coercion to achieve this but in a libertarian society there would be social action social pressure to achieve the same result so you say a libertarian society could not achieve this we would say it can achieve this only it would achieve this without coercion so this ability to apply pressure in the form of threatening to do disagreeable things is very important in a way for a libertarian society we can say that social pressure unlike coercion is consistent with libertarian rights and that social pressure is in fact the functional equivalent of coercion so this renders libertarian doctrine immune to a whole range of criticisms when the aim of the criticism is to say that coercion is necessary or vital or indispensable you can have social pressure so that's a positive side you can use the social pressure coercion equivalents to answer a whole range of line of criticism against libertarianism but on the other hand there is a negative side we have to consider obviously aside from the fact that from the libertarian point of view coercion is always more than just suspect we should recognize that not all instances of coercion are equally bad no matter how great our dedication to principle the use of coercion say by the state will be appreciated differently if it serves a person a purpose with which we agree rather than a purpose with which we do not agree for example you may get terribly excited about the enforcement of zoning laws and not at all about the coercive suppression of video movies depicting the most horrifying forms of treating a lady or a child the fact is coercion can be used for the most diverse purposes but so can social pressure there is no telling in advance just in what ways social pressure will be used what kind of conformity will be the prevailing norm in libertarian society and how much room it will leave for any non-conformity now let me stress again that I am considering at this moment a perfectly libertarian society perfectly libertarian in the formal sense there is no violation of anybody's rights the physical integrity of the person and the property is as sacred as it can be still precisely because it is a libertarian society it has all the possibilities for social pressure I have just mentioned one may be freed then in the formal sense of libertarian theory in the sense that one's libertarian rights are respected and yet feel absolutely tyrannized by one's fellow men and in the end the tyranny may survive the feeling of being tyrannized and what you get is a kind of habitual conformity that has little to do with what we consider leading a free life now this problem the possibility of a libertarian yet tyrannical society was clearly perceived by some of the great classical liberals let me first read a few lines from John Stuart Mill's famous essay on liberty in which he was very anxious to point out the danger of this tyranny by public opinion rather than by the state he wrote among other things that protection therefore against the tyranny of the magistrate he meant the state or the government is not enough there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling against the tendency of society to impose by other means than civil penalties its own ideas and practices and rules of conduct on those who descend from them to feather the development and if possible prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own there is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence and to find that limit and maintain it against encroachment is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism and this team was also present in for instance that other great classical liberal Alexis de Tocqueville who was also very direct on the point he said for instance let me see Alexis de Tocqueville wrote for instance the body is left free but the soul is enslaved or if you will property is left free but the soul is enslaved the master no longer says you shall think as I do or you shall die but he says you are free to think differently from me and to retain your life your property and all that you possess but you are henceforth a stranger among your people you may retain your civil rights but they will be useless to you your fellow creatures will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem they will treat you like an impure being and even those who believe in your in your innocence will abandon you lest they should be shunned in their turn go in peace I have given you your life but it is in existence worse than death these are very hard terms but they point to to a very real problem I think it's not just this literally literally evidence that I would like to point to there is also the historical experience that quite a number of traditional societies are or have been remarkably libertarian in their refusal to use coercion as a means of social order or in social control but at the same time they have been very oppressive because of their ability to pressure people into conformity religious and other forms of social bigotry are indeed awesome forces in the history of mankind but they are not necessarily in conflict with libertarian rights and that is precisely the problem I have been discussing and eventually they may generate a state of mind for which libertarianism becomes simply irrelevant when violence and attacks against person and property literally do have the sanction of the victim to quote from Ayn Rand remember the popular story in this respect of the man who comes to the rescue of a wife being beaten by her husband only to be told by the woman keep out of this this is my husband he has every right to beat me of course if she has the if he has given the permission then on libertarian principle we would say okay he has the right it's too bad but that's the way it is but on the other hand we would like to probe into the conditions from which this consent to being beaten arose and this is also I think a challenge for libertarian people to to find out about the conditions of the un liberty or rather the illiberal uses of liberty if you permit me this small paradox so one danger we have to confront in in our advocacy of liberty is that the people that might become free will be using their liberty to pressure others into a kind of conformity that we no longer associate with liberty and I think this is a very actual problem considering such things as a muslim fundamentalism and moral majorities and other forms of very illiberal movements all over the world where do these these things come from where are they heading and how do they make a stand against them so one answer might be away with social pressure and long live the atomistic society an atomistic society where there is no capacity for generating social action and social pressure but that too may be a an unviable form of a libertarian society because it leaves out I think the means for tackling a number of problems social problems which have to be tackled anyway so my time is up let me conclude if there is any value in the problems I have sketched here or rather in the fact that I have addressed them here it seems to be that for libertarians it would be essential to find a course let's say a moral course an ethical course that would steer a free society between on the one hand the silla of a totally conformist society and on the other hand the heribdis of a completely atomized society without any capacity for social action and for maintaining social standards of behavior of course in many ways these problems may be swept under the rug of for instance a concept like a spontaneous order but it's just the problem that we may not like every order merely because this spontaneous and as libertarians I think that we have we are situated in a rather narrow field in the middle very far from the one pole of of total conformism and on the other hand from the pole of total atomization of society and what we need perhaps is a strategy to define that middle or that that range in the middle so that we can make much more clear to other people why we are libertarians even if from a formal point of view libertarianism does not solve every ethical and practical problem that may arise thank you