The other day I wrote about what libertarianism is: Thick versus thin. Today, I’d like
to continue the discussion with a consideration of what libertarianism ought to be.
The nature of a discussion like this is fraught with sidebar
considerations about what one hopes to get out of which part of their moral
code. I’d like to start with that, so let me explain what I mean.
I think it’s safe and uncontroversial to say that most of us
don’t have an all-encompassing and airtight moral philosophy underpinning every
thought that they have. Even those who think they do have a hard time living up
to the one that they have, and of those few who attempt to do so to the
greatest extent possible, only a small fraction relate absolutely every thought
that occurs to them back to their moral philosophy. This is probably a good
thing. Someone so obsessed with moral philosophy that they cannot have a normal
thought without related it to their moral code would be mentally unhealthy. We
also encounter a wide array of morally neutral situations all the time, like
choosing which socks to wear and decided whether to step with your right or
your left leg first when walking up a flight of stairs.
In other words, at the extreme end of the spectrum, you have
obsessive people who cannot encounter any stimulus without moralizing it. I
take on assumption that this is bad behavior. On the other extreme, you have
people who refuse to relate anything to any sort of moral code anywhere. These
are uninteresting (and possibly non-existent) cases. In the middle, there is a
whole spectrum of real people who apply one moral code to most of their decisions,
no moral code to some of their decisions, a different moral code to some other
decisions, and in special cases, apply multiple moral codes to a few of their
decisions.
That’s life. That’s what it’s like. While we all strive to
be perfectly philosophically consistent and well-behaved, the truth of the
matter is that no one yet has invented a philosophy so complete and so perfect
that every situation is addressed by it. We humans, being the resourceful
creatures that we are, like to supplement an inevitably incomplete moral
philosophy with something else sometimes, be it a lesson from some other
philosophy, or a good rule of thumb, or a gut instinct, or whatever else it
might be.
I hope you can see where I’m going with this. “Thin”
libertarianism, being the contextually limited set of ideas that it is, works
well as a partial philosophy, a set of recommendations for a limited set of
philosophical questions. If we venture beyond that limited set of questions, we
exhaust the capabilities of “thin” libertarianism, and when we encounter a
problem it can’t address, we must rely on some other philosophy or set of
ideas. By contrast, “thick” libertarianism aims to be a complete set of
philosophical ideas, or at least a more
complete set, capable of answering a wider set of questions.
So, one answer to
the question of what libertarianism should
be is, It depends on how much ethical work you want your libertarianism to
accomplish. For some, libertarianism defines a relationship to government, and
they have other ideas that govern non-governmental spheres of life. For others,
libertarianism is how they approach everything,
and thus they need their libertarianism to cover the ground that might be
covered by, say, a thin libertarian’s religious system.
All that reading for kind of a dumb answer, right? “You get
to choose which kind of libertarianism applies to you!” Of course you do. That’s
not the interesting part. The interesting part is when a thin libertarian and a
thick libertarian reach different conclusions on a given issue, and we then
have to choose which solution is “more libertarian.” That’s what I’ll be
discussing next time.
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