Critique on Right-Libertarianism

Potential Problems of Libertarianism
Social and Political Philosophy 
D. Wright

13 December 2010

A Critique on Right-Libertarianism

         Doubts about the viability of right-libertarian societies come from its radical attitudes against institutions that employ egalitarian programs to rectify the unequal distribution of holdings brought on by capitalism. Right-libertarianism takes an astute stance on individual rights and believes that the incomparable preservation of these rights provide a sufficient framework for establishing a theory of justice.

         Their advocation of full self-ownership leads them to reject any force that they perceive to inhibit an individual's negative rights. This concept of self-ownership suggests that people have a right to self-determination in pursuing their individual interests. This causes right-libertarians to oppose conventional political institutions, on the grounds that they violate self-ownership rights through compulsory taxation and mandating other social duties from individuals under the threat of imprisonment or monetary penalties. They believe that it is unjust to let governments override "what people in a particular society believe to be the rights of individuals with respect to other individuals" (Friedman 111).

         The particular beliefs of right-libertarians (and anarchists in general) are discomforting to many because they seem to disregard popular intuitive notions about social justice; especially in what appears to be their huge disinterest in elevating the situation of individuals whom are the economically worst-off. It has become the norm in western societies for people to sympathize (to various degrees) with those groups whom appear to be at a substantial economic disadvantage through no obvious fault of their own. This clash between intuitive justice and the rationality basis for absolute self-ownership has been the sours of extended scholarly debate, although neither side has yet to 'win' the ideological debate.

         This paper aims to examine further the right-libertarian notion of full self-ownership and challenge its discontinuities within political society, under the auspices of left-libertarianism. The main problem with the right-libertarian argument is its astute commitment to enjoining the concepts of moral self-autonomy and political autonomy. This is problematic because the conditions that right-libertarians establish for each of these concepts are mutually exclusive. This essay will first provide background on basic right-libertarian attitudes, followed by a brief discussion on its inconsistencies. It will then consider a right-libertarian response to these inconsistencies, and attempt to justify the left-libertarian's reconciliation of self-ownership rights and political autonomy. 

         The framework from which libertarians have formulated their attitudes on self-ownership and property rights have their roots in the Enlightenment and the political theory of John Locke (Moulin 348). Locke's theories empowered the role of the individual within political societies, and greatly influenced modern liberal philosophy. Besides emphasizing self-ownership and equal rights for all citizens, liberalism advocated that political legitimacy could only come from popular consent. This developed into today's 'social contract' theory. The factions within liberalism are largely based off divergent interpretations of Lockean philosophy. While right-libertarians interpret self-ownership to be absolute and unchanging, left-libertarians believe Locke was willing to concede a portion of these rights in order to function within political communities.

         For right-libertarians, Locke's theory of private property has consistently been used to legitimize their argument for self-ownership. This theory rests is his belief that because we exist, as equals, as the end-result of God's labor, and thus are ultimately His property, we have a moral duty to abstain from actions that would compromise the well-being and preservation of our fellow Man. This implies Locke's belief that because we are God's property, we cannot claim absolute, metaphysical self-ownership. While this religious appeal for incomplete self-possession may not offer the ideal counter argument for the right-libertarian debate, it is significant that Locke admits to Man's subordination to a higher power. It is this misinterpretation of Locke that misleads right-libertarians into endorsing the inseparability of individual rights, even in the name of the public good.

         One key point to examine when in figuring out the proper function of individual autonomy within political societies is Locke's theory of private property acquisition through labor. "Although everything on Earth is initially given in common, Man has an exclusive property in his own person: this no body has a right to but himself" (Locke 19). Locke says that the "labour of his body…are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature…he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property" (Locke 19). Thus, he believes that "that labour put a distinction between them and common" (Locke 19). With this understanding self-ownership and private property rights, we should examine how modern right-libertarians treat Locke's distributive justice.

         Right-libertarian justice is a historical approach because it defines 'justice' as the fair exchange of initial holdings, and the continuance of justice as the continued fair exchange of all property transfers thereafter. Robert Nozick calls this the "Entitlement Theory" of justice (Nozick 359). Its conditions for just holdings are as follows: just acquisition, just transfer, and the rectification of past unjust acquisitions and transfers. Its corollary principle sets a morally arbitrary bound to how far the rectification of past injustice goes. It states that the rectification of justice "needn't be that the foundations underlying desert are themselves deserved, all the way down" (Nozick 225).

         When this logic is applied to property, we see that these negative rights grant individuals the full protection of his property from all nonconsensual seizure. The principle of conduct embedded within the concept of negative rights (and which is also necessary for its success) is the "nonaggression axiom," which implores the adoption of a 'do unto others' moral mentality (Rothbard 23).

         While right-libertarians seem persuasive in saying that self-ownership demands a conception of the 'self' that entails complete, autonomous property rights over themselves and their external possessions, there seems to be something inherently dissociative in this claim. "Surely, if every man has a right to own his own body, and if he must grapple with the material objects of the world in order to survive," then he "the right to own the product he has made, by his energy and effort, a veritable extension of his own personality" (Rothbard 31). Contrastingly, they circumvent the fact the economic theory they employ to promote individual rights carries with it internal mechanisms that more often than not, dissolve these rights of any substantive value. As we will find, the arbitrary distinction made between the inalienability of negative rights and the ability to contract out labor serves to weaken the right-libertarian argument.

         While it protects individuals from violations on their rights to life, liberty, happiness, and (real) property, they willingly concede one's right to the property produced from one's physical labor. They make an exception for labor because their theory heavily relies on using capitalism as a means for people to procure resources and (theoretically) to "choose our life and our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity" (Nozick 334). But since capitalism itself relies on having continuous access to the means of production (i.e. access to resources and human labor), it had to find a way to extract labor in a manner that does not contradict their principles of negative rights.

         It is under the premise of capitalism that forced liberal thinkers like John Locke to change the relationship between property rights and government. This provoked Locke's concession of certain individual rights in the presence of organized society.

         This fundamentally changes the nature of libertarian self-ownership, because now the property rights an individual was purported to have under Locke's 'acquisition through labor' doctrine can no longer be interpreted to mean that the individual is promised full-fledged ownership over those things to which he has annexed his labor.

         We must consider whether or not this understanding of Locke undermine right-libertarian conceptions of absolute self-ownership. I believe that it does, on the grounds that the ability to contract-out one's labor proves the alienability of individual rights, and that the flaw in right-libertarianism is that their attitudes about the moral injustice of conceding "property rights to the state…has little or no theoretical purchase; it becomes "so indeterminate that anything or nothing follows from it" (Patemen 24). This issue materializes during no better time than when both libertarian sides discuss the legitimacy of formal government.

         The argument about the moral justifiability of governments using compulsory taxation brings our discussion back to the question of how right-libertarians ought to treat the concept of self-ownership. As hinted to earlier, the legitimacy of government rests on how one approaches the idea of labor within the scheme of private property rights. Right-libertarians believe that there is some form of inner hierarchy of the "self" which makes infringing on the 'highest' abstract rights (i.e. the right to pursue happiness) more morally detestable than it does to infringe on the 'lower' right to property. If labor can justly be exchanged under voluntary consent, then the issue with permitting the right-libertarian argument stand is that certain capitalist forces demand that businesses keep production costs as low as possible in order to remain competitive. In practice, this creates wage-labor classes that are deprived of the financial means to pursue those civil liberties right-libertarians so adamantly endorse. Because capitalism must regenerate its labor resources, all successive generations after the populous of the 'initial acquisition' will be forced to inherit those holdings which they had no say in acquiring. This suggests that latter generations deserve the results of those exchanges of which they had no opportunity to consent. There is something to be said about the patterning of this unsolicited alienation of rights under the right-libertarian system.

         Right-libertarians might respond to this issue by emphasizing that their ideology is based on their stance against coercive property seizure, and finds the proposed discrepancy between the legitimacy of annexing one's labor, and the illegitimacy of annexing one's rights to life, liberty, and happiness irrelevant to their cause. Their emphasis lies in the "right to his own property without having to suffer aggressive depredation, then he also has the right to...exchange it for the property of others…without interference" (Rothbard 24). They find no issue with arbitrarily alienating one subset of rights for their argumentative convenience.

         The problems with their objection is that it does not do anything to explicate their moral justification in compromising property rights. It is hard to understand how right-libertarians feel comfortable with a theory which not only demonstrates incongruities with the original philosophy that inspired it, but one whose promises of justice dissolve (as has been evidenced by early industrialized societies) fall through after its initial members exit the community. Their Lockean interpretation seems inconsistent with the ends they try to achieve. Eschewing the idea of involuntary labor while accepting the empirical conditions that exacerbate this practice undermines their philosophical purchase; Locke's theory cannot be read to advocate such circumstances, since his theory takes action to address these structural problems, while right-libertarians allow them to remain. If both theories really aim to seek similar end-goals (human flourishment), then right-libertarians would do well to reconcile their attitudes about the alienability of labor and the inalienability of life, liberty, and happiness.

Bibliography

Friedman, David. The Machinery of Freedom. 2nd ed. Open Court: New York, 1989.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Ed. C. B. Macpherson. Hackett: Indianapolis, 1980.

Moulin, Herve, and John Roemer. "Public Ownership of the External World and Private Ownership of Self." Journal of Political Economy. Vol. 97, No. 2. Apr. 1989: 347-367. Nov. 12, 2010. <www.jstor.org>.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Blackwell: Oxford, 1999.

---. "Libertarian Rights." Arguing About Political Philosophy. Ed. Matt Zwolinski. New York: Routledge, 2009. 358-370. 

Pateman, Carole. "Self-Ownership and Property in the Person: Democratization and a Tale of Two Concepts." The Journal of Political Philosophy. Vol. 10, No. 1. 2002: 20-53. Nov. 12, 2010. <www.jstor.org>. 

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