Libertarianism and Biting the Bullet
So Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for Kentucky’s open senate seat and son of Ron, has caught some heat for implying/saying that he wouldn’t have voted for certain provisions of the Civil Rights Act — namely those that restricted “private” behavior of business owners and what not — on basic libertarian grounds that the government has no right telling people who they should associate with.
It’s worth noting that, following Matt Yglesias, that the position that the core provisions of the Civil Rights Act are not in fact good ideas isn’t necessarily racist, it is instead that Paul has “an excess of honesty and ideological rigor” and simply extends basic libertarian principles to the natural conclusion that the government has no right to interfere with private association and business dealings.
But just because Paul — and, at the time, conservatives like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley — came to this conclusion in a different way than, say, Strom Thurmond, doesn’t really exculpate them, it is just really good evidence for why serious libertarianism is a bad political philosophy and leads to abhorrent real-world results. That a fairly simple application of a set of political ideas leads one to conclude that truely entrenched and institutionalized racism is something that the government can’t really do anything about is grounds for rejecting the political philosophy.
A similar dilemma often comes up in moral philosophy. For example, one could argue that Kantian deontology would lead you to the rather absurd conclusion that you shouldn’t lie to a murderer who is asking you where his next victim is; and, on the other hand, simple act utilitarianism might lead you to the absurd conclusion that it is permissible – neigh, mandatory — for a doctor to kill a perfectly health person who came into a hospital so that he could give his organs to five people who needed them. Now, some moral philosophers will simply bite the bullet and insist that the underlying principles and premises are so strong that they still support these apparently absurd conclusions and that our moral intuitions are simply incorrect. But most don’t and instead try to come up with moral systems that roughly align with our very strong intuitions. Most political thinkers do this do. That Rand Paul apparently doesn’t isn’t a sign that he is admirably principled, it is a sign that his principles lead him to oppose the core legislative means of rooting out white supremacy and are thus bad principles.
This seems to endorse a really problematic way of dealing with moral intuition. Doing what Sen calls “case-implication critique” is, you’re right, traditional in political philosophy, but that doesn’t make it valid. If morality is to mean something, it has to represent something outside arbitrarily evolved, or culturally cultivated, intuitions.
Dylan Matthews
May 20, 2010 at 1:20 pm
[...] to spend too much time on this, but Friend of the Blog Matt Zeitlin has the right take on the limits of Rand Paul’s brand of libertarianism: It’s worth noting that, following [...]
Some final thoughts on Rand Paul’s brand of libertarianism - Jamelle Bouie - United States of Jamerica - True/Slant
May 20, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Very well said.
I think to me, the most interesting part of this is that it may not say anything about Mr. Paul as a person, but it speaks volumes to him as a candidate, and to his ideology.
I can’t help but be baffled by a major party Senate candidate who was so ineloquent when asked such a simple question. His father had no such problems enunciating the Libertarian position when asked, even when it was about this specific issue. Libertarianism doesn’t fit Rand as well as it does Ron, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to mix the oil of Libertarianism with the water of Tea Partyism and finding himself unable.
http://bit.ly/baBtbx
Yeggo
May 20, 2010 at 6:15 pm
First of all, you strongly reject unintended consequences with this argument. In the case of murdering someone in a hospital waiting room to harvest his organs, you forget that people will stop going to hospitals if there is a chance they will get murdered. This “dilemma” can be dismissed on consequentialist grounds.
Second, you not only attack the least refined form of a philosophy to refute that philosophy, which is cheating, but you also extrapolate it into a straw man argument, so you’re not really arguing against anything. The only thing that should be dismissed is this post.
Christopher Carr
May 25, 2010 at 7:16 am
1) Do you think that the portion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination by business owners violated the Constitution? (That’s the only part of the Civil Rights Act objected to by Rand Paul.)
2) If you don’t think that portion of the Civil Rights Act violated the Constitution, what part of the Constitution do you think gave Congress the authority to ban discrimination by private business owners?
3) If you agree that the portion of the Civil Rights Act that banned discrimination by private business owners violated the Constitution, do you agree that it should therefore by opposed? (Or do you think that legislation that violates the Constitution can be OK, as long as it’s for a good cause?)
Mark Bahner
May 26, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Kant was a tough-guy. You can always just punch the murderer out.
matt
June 2, 2010 at 6:02 pm