How does classical liberalism differ from modern liberalism?
Classical liberals (now often called libertarians) regard the state as the primary threat to individual freedom and advocate limiting its powers to those necessary to protect basic rights against interference by others. Modern liberals have held that freedom can also be threatened by private economic actors, such as businesses, that exploit workers or dominate governments, and they advocate state action, including economic regulation and provision of social services, to ameliorate conditions (e.g., extreme poverty) that may hamper the exercise of basic rights or undermine individual autonomy. Many also recognize broader rights such as the rights to adequate employment, health care, and education.
https://www.britannica... How-does-classical-liberalism-differ-from-modern-liberalism
Modern liberalism evokes a set of ideals that looks ahead and not behind
Liberalism is the belief that government should step in during certain instances where capitalism fails to produce equality before the law or if capitalism fails to protect the people. This is not a dig at the market economy or capitalism, it’s just that in simplistic terms, the market economy watches out for itself, not the people. Bureaucracy, group-think and red tape cloud the judgement of any system that doesn’t undergo some kind of reformation once in a while. Hence, I purport that one of the over arching differences between liberals and conservatives is how often and under what terms those reformations should happen. The courage to change may be easy for a select few, but for the masses it is near impossible. It takes early adopters and integration over time lest there be panic. A long pull here but, I believe conservatives believe they have a “good bead on things” while liberals believe a person is smart and “people are panicky dumb dangerous animals” that need direction especially in contexts where people find unfair loopholes for self preservation.
Many modern practical examples can be found that showcase where (liberal or not) the government needed to at least provide some outside influence to get the evolutionary ball rolling and protect the people. The auto industry provides a prime example. It can be argued that the advancement of automobile engines went virtually nowhere for fifty years and fuel economy only became an issue when gas prices were high. It wasn’t until the federal goverment stepped in with fleet wide mile per gallon standards that the auto industry even thought about looking into alternate methods to propel automobiles. The same with leaded fuel, which was touted as safe for years by the auto industry until it was proven toxic and banned. The same with federal motor vehicle safety standards that specify the design, construction, performance, and durability requirements for motor vehicles. Auto companies thrived on their own in a capitalist economy, but left unchecked, they didnt necessarily produce products that were “for the good of the people” and hence, federal oversight is born in a specific narrative that doesnt take away freedoms, but rather protects the people. Liberalism is a mindset for forward thinking with the courage to enact change in a society that is afraid of it.
In more macro-political terms the American modern liberal philosophy strongly endorses public spending on programs such as education, health care and welfare. Modern American liberals generally believe that national prosperity requires government management to keep unemployment low, inflation in check and growth high. Liberals believe liberty exists when access to necessities like health care and economic opportunity are available to all and they champion the protection of the environment. We can’t talk about the definition of liberalism without quoting a couple of Americas most famous liberal Presidents:
John F. Kennedy defined a liberal as follows:
If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal”, then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal”.
In 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt defined a liberal party as such:
The liberal party believes that, as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of Government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them. The liberal party insists that the Government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls—to ensure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Conservatives vs. Liberals
What is the difference between conservatives and liberals? In a nutshell, the main difference is conservatives believe in a more limited government and free markets. Conservatives tend to hold true to the ideal that there should be less of a leash on the market economy and conservative policies generally emphasize empowerment of the individual to solve problems. To use my earlier example of the auto industry: Elon Musk would be a hero to conservatives having transformed the auto industry almost single-handedly (power of the individual) (electrification) in a world where the liberal government created that push by enacting multiple movements for automobile efficiency.
The Top 10 Issues Dividing Liberals and Conservatives
The most hotly debated topics between conservatives and liberals are annoyingly easy to find. Here is a rundown of the issues dividing liberals and conservatives in stark straight forward terms:
Abortion
- Liberals – A woman has the right to decide
- Conservatives – Human life begins at conception
Gun control
- Liberals – Additional gun control laws are necessary to stop gun violence
- Conservatives – The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to keep and bear arms
Death penalty
- Liberals – The death penalty should be abolished
- Conservatives – The death penalty is a punishment that fits the crime of murder
Energy
- Liberals – Oil is a depleting resource that’s bad for the environment
- Conservatives – Oil, gas and coal are good. Drill away!
Global warming
- Liberals – Laws are needed because we are destroying the planet
- Conservatives – Proposed laws to reduce carbon emissions will do nothing to help the environment and will cause significant price increases for all. More science please.
Healthcare
- Liberals – We support free or low-cost government controlled health care.
- Conservatives – Free market health care all the way
Immigration
- Liberals – Support legal immigration
- Conservatives – More of an emphasis on securing the borders and immigrants shouldn’t have the same rights as citizens.
Same sex marriage
- Liberals – Yes
- Conservatives – No
Welfare
- Liberals – Support welfare to protect the poor and support equality.
- Conservatives – Encourage people to become self reliant. Short term welfare.
Taxes
- Liberals – Higher taxes (primarily for the wealthy) and a larger government are necessary to address inequity/injustice in society while still letting the market economy thrive
- Conservatives – Support lower taxes so people themselves can spend money, not the government.
Just calling it like I see it. We are open to comments as the world of politics always is! Lets come together in our ideals and fight through our tough times together.
What is Liberalism?
Liberalism is the belief that government should step in during certain instances where capitalism fails to produce equality before the law. This is not a dig at the market economy or capitalism, it’s just that in simplistic terms, the market economy watches out for itself, not the people.
FAQ: What do liberals believe
Liberals believe in generous civil liberties, strong social support systems, and a regulatory government.
While liberals believe civil liberties should be limited when they threaten the safety or well-being of others, they believe that overall, people should be able to choose how they live. However, they also believe the government should regulate businesses and the economy to minimize inequality and maximize the well-being of its citizens. These regulations may lead to a higher tax burden and limits on the free-market economy.
https://randyw11.sg-host.com/what-is-liberalism/
Social Liberalism
Social liberalism is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses social justice and the expansion of civil and political rights. It is economically based on the social market economy and views the common good as harmonious with the individual's freedom. Social liberals overlap with social democrats in accepting economic intervention more than other liberals; its importance is considered auxiliary compared to social democrats. Ideologies that emphasize its economic policy include welfare liberalism, New Deal liberalism in the United States, and Keynesian liberalism. Cultural liberalism is an ideology that highlights its cultural aspects. The world has widely adopted social liberal policies.
Social liberal ideas and parties tend to be considered centre-left, although there are deviations from these positions to both the political left or right. Addressing economic and social issues, such as poverty, welfare, infrastructure, health care, education, and the climate using government intervention, while emphasising individual rights and autonomy are expectations under a social liberal government. In modern political discourse, social liberalism is associated with progressivism, a left-liberalism contrasted to the right-leaning neoliberalism, and combines support for a mixed economy with cultural liberalism. Social liberalism may also refer to American progressive stances on sociocultural issues, such as reproductive rights and same-sex marriage, in contrast with American social conservatism. Cultural liberalism is often referred to as social liberalism because it expresses the social dimension of liberalism; however, it is not the same as the broader political ideology known as social liberalism. In American politics, a social liberal may hold either conservative (economic liberal) or liberal (economic progressive) views on fiscal policy...
Origins - United Kingdom
By the end of the 19th century;
-
Downturns in economic growth challenged
the principles of classical liberalism, -
A growing awareness of poverty and unemployment
present within modern industrial cities, and - The agitation of organised labour...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism
The Difference Between Liberalism and Progressivism
Some background: Economic liberalism has typically focused on using the government’s Treasury as a means to ends, whether those ends are better health care (Medicare/Medicaid), stronger job growth (tax credits) or more robust export businesses (corporate subsidies). The idea is that taxpayer dollars can help individuals afford bare necessities and entice institutions to support the common good.
Economic progressivism, by contrast, has historically trumpeted the government fiat as the best instrument of social change – think food safety, minimum wage and labor laws, and also post-Depression financial rules and enforcement agencies. Progressivism’s central theory is that government, as the nation’s supreme authority, can set parameters channeling capitalism’s profit motive into societal priorities – and preventing that profit motive from spinning out of control.
Looked at this way, liberalism and progressivism once operated in tandem. But regardless of which of the two economic ideologies you particularly favor (if either), three of the recent epoch’s most far-reaching initiatives make clear the former now dominates both parties.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-difference-between-liberalism-and-progressivism
Progessivism - Wikipedia
Progressivism holds that it is possible to improve human societies through political action. As a political movement, progressivism seeks to advance the human condition through social reform based on purported advancements in science, technology, economic development, and social organization. Adherents hold that progressivism has universal application and endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere. Progressivism arose during the Age of Enlightenment out of the belief that civility in Europe was improving due to the application of new empirical knowledge to the governance of society.
In modern political discourse, progressivism gets often associated with social liberalism, a left-leaning type of liberalism, in contrast to the right-leaning neoliberalism, combining support for a mixed economy with cultural liberalism. In the 21st century, a movement that identifies as progressive is "a social or political movement that aims to represent the interests of ordinary people through political change and the support of government actions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism
Modern Liberalism in the United States
Modern liberalism in the United States, often simply referred to in the United States as liberalism, is a form of social liberalism found in American politics. It combines ideas of civil liberty and equality with support for social justice and a well-regulated mixed economy. Modern liberalism generally opposes the interests of corporations, opposes cuts to the social safety net, and supports a role for government in reducing inequality, increasing diversity, providing education, ensuring access to healthcare, regulating economic activity, and protecting the natural environment. This form of liberalism took shape in the 20th century as the voting franchise and other civil rights were extended to a larger class of citizens, most notably among African Americans and women. Major examples of modern liberal policy programs include the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, and the Affordable Care Act.
In the first half of the 20th century, both major American parties had a conservative and a liberal wing. The conservative northern Republicans and Southern Democrats formed the conservative coalition which dominated the Congress in the pre-Civil Rights era. As northern Democrats began to support civil rights and organized labor, white voters and politicians in the formerly "Solid South" became more Republican. Since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has been considered liberal and the Republican Party has been considered conservative. As a group, "liberals" are referred to as left or center-left and "conservatives" as right or center-right. Starting in the 21st century, there has also been a sharp division between liberals who tend to live in denser, more heterogeneous urban areas, conservatives who tend to live in less dense, more homogeneous rural communities, with suburban areas largely split between the two. Since the 2000 election, blue and red have been the party colors of the Democrats and Republicans respectively, in contrast to the use of blue for conservatism and red for socialism in the rest of the Western world.
Overview
The modern liberal philosophy strongly endorses public spending on programs such as education, health care and welfare. Important social issues during the first part of the 21st century include economic inequality (wealth and income), voting rights for minorities, affirmative action, reproductive and other women's rights, support for LGBT rights, and immigration reform. Modern liberalism took shape during the 20th century, with roots in Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal and New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Modern liberals oppose conservatives on most but not all issues. Although historically related to social liberalism and progressivism, the current relationship between liberal and progressive viewpoints is debated. Modern liberalism is typically associated with the Democratic Party while modern conservatism is typically associated with the Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States
Liberalism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2. The Debate Between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’
2.1 Classical Liberalism
Liberal political theory, then, fractures over how to conceive of liberty. In practice, another crucial fault line concerns the moral status of private property and the market order. For classical liberals — ‘old’ liberals — liberty and private property are intimately related. From the eighteenth century to the present day, classical liberals have insisted that an economic system based on private property is uniquely consistent with individual liberty, allowing each to live her life —including employing her labor and her capital — as she sees fit. Indeed, classical liberals and libertarians have often asserted that in some way liberty and property are really the same thing; it has been argued, for example, that all rights, including liberty rights, are forms of property; others have maintained that property is itself a form of freedom (Gaus, 1994; Steiner, 1994). A market order based on private property is thus seen as an embodiment of freedom (Robbins, 1961: 104). Unless people are free to make contracts and sell their labour, save and invest their incomes as they see fit, and free to launch enterprises as they raise the capital, they are not really free.
Classical liberals employ a second argument connecting liberty and private property. Rather than insisting that the freedom to obtain and employ private property is simply one aspect of people’s liberty, this second argument insists that private property effectively protects liberty, and no protection can be effective without private property. Here the idea is that the dispersion of power that results from a free market economy based on private property protects the liberty of subjects against encroachments by the state. As F.A. Hayek argues, “There can be no freedom of press if the instruments of printing are under government control, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly” (1978: 149).
Although classical liberals agree on the fundamental importance of private property to a free society, the classical liberal tradition itself is a spectrum of views, from near-anarchist to those that attribute a significant role to the state in economic and social policy (on this spectrum, see Mack and Gaus, 2004). At the libertarian end of the classical liberal spectrum are views of justified states as legitimate monopolies that may with justice charge for essential rights-protection services: taxation is legitimate if necessary and sufficient for effective protection of liberty and property. Further ‘leftward’ we encounter classical liberal views that allow taxation for public education in particular, and more generally for public goods and social infrastructure. Moving yet further ‘left’, some classical liberal views allow for a modest social minimum.(e.g., Hayek, 1976: 87). Most nineteenth century classical liberal economists endorsed a variety of state policies, encompassing not only the criminal law and enforcement of contracts, but the licensing of professionals, health, safety and fire regulations, banking regulations, commercial infrastructure (roads, harbors and canals) and often encouraged unionization (Gaus, 1983b). Although classical liberalism today often is associated with libertarianism, the broader classical liberal tradition was centrally concerned with bettering the lot of the working class, women, blacks, immigrants, and so on. The aim, as Bentham put it, was to make the poor richer, not the rich poorer (Bentham, 1952 [1795]: vol. 1, 226n). Consequently, classical liberals treat the leveling of wealth and income as outside the purview of legitimate aims of government coercion.
2.2 The ‘New Liberalism’
What has come to be known as ‘new’, ‘revisionist’, ‘welfare state’, or perhaps best, ‘social justice’, liberalism challenges this intimate connection between personal liberty and a private property based market order (Freeden, 1978; Gaus, 1983b; Paul, Miller and Paul, 2007). Three factors help explain the rise of this revisionist theory. First, the new liberalism was clearly taking its own distinctive shape by the early twentieth century, as the ability of a free market to sustain what Lord Beveridge (1944: 96) called a ‘prosperous equilibrium’ was being questioned. Believing that a private property based market tended to be unstable, or could, as Keynes argued (1973 [1936]), get stuck in an equilibrium with high unemployment, new liberals came to doubt, initially on empirical grounds, that classical liberalism was an adequate foundation for a stable, free society. Here the second factor comes into play: just as the new liberals were losing faith in the market, their faith in government as a means of supervising economic life was increasing. This was partly due to the experiences of the First World War, in which government attempts at economic planning seemed to succeed (Dewey, 1929: 551–60); more importantly, this reevaluation of the state was spurred by the democratization of western states, and the conviction that, for the first time, elected officials could truly be, in J.A. Hobson’s phrase ‘representatives of the community’ (1922: 49). As D.G. Ritchie proclaimed:
be it observed that arguments used against ‘government’ action, where the government is entirely or mainly in the hands of a ruling class or caste, exercising wisely or unwisely a paternal or grandmotherly authority — such arguments lose their force just in proportion as the government becomes more and more genuinely the government of the people by the people themselves. (1896: 64)
The third factor underlying the currency of the new liberalism was probably the most fundamental: a growing conviction that, so far from being ‘the guardian of every other right’ (Ely, 1992: 26), property rights foster an unjust inequality of power. They entrench a merely formal equality that in actual practice systematically fails to secure the kind of equal positive liberty that matters on the ground for the working class. This theme is central to what is now called ‘liberalism’ in American politics, combining a strong endorsement of civil and personal liberties with indifference or even hostility to private ownership. The seeds of this newer liberalism can be found in Mill’s On Liberty. Although Mill insisted that the ‘so-called doctrine of Free Trade’ rested on ‘equally solid’ grounds as did the ‘principle of individual liberty’ (1963, vol. 18: 293), he nevertheless insisted that the justifications of personal and economic liberty were distinct. And in his Principles of Political Economy, Mill consistently emphasized that it is an open question whether personal liberty can flourish without private property (1963, vol. 2; 203–210), a view that Rawls was to reassert over a century later (2001: Part IV).
2.3 Liberal Theories of Social Justice
One consequence of Rawls’s great work, A Theory of Justice (1999 [first published in 1971]) is that the ‘new liberalism’ has become focused on developing a theory of social justice. Since the 1960s when Rawls began to publish the elements of his emerging theory, liberal political philosophers have analyzed, and disputed, his famous ‘difference principle’ according to which a just basic structure of society arranges social and economic inequalities such that they are to the greatest advantage of the least well off representative group (1999b:266). For Rawls, the default is not liberty but rather an equal distribution of (basically) income and wealth; only inequalities that best enhance the long-term prospects of the least advantaged are just. As Rawls sees it, the difference principle constitutes a public recognition of the principle of reciprocity: the basic structure is to be arranged such that no social group advances at the cost of another (2001: 122–24). Many followers of Rawls have focused less on the ideal of reciprocity than on the commitment to equality (Dworkin, 2000). Indeed, what was previously called ‘welfare state’ liberalism is now often described as liberal egalitarianism. However, see Jan Narveson’s essay on Hobbes’s seeming defense of the welfare state (in Courtland 2018) for historical reflections on the difference.
And in one way that is especially appropriate: in his later work Rawls insists that welfare-state capitalism does not constitute a just basic structure (2001: 137–38). If some version of capitalism is to be just it must be a ‘property owning democracy’ with a wide diffusion of ownership; a market socialist regime, in Rawls’s view, is more just than welfare-state capitalism (2001: 135-38). Not too surprisingly, classical liberals such as Hayek (1976) insist that the contemporary liberal fixation on ‘the mirage of social justice’ leads modern liberals to ignore the extent to which, as a matter of historical observation, freedom depends on a decentralized market based on private property, the overall results of which are unpredictable.
Thus, Robert Nozick (1974: 160ff) famously classifies Rawls’s difference principle as patterned but not historical: prescribing a distribution while putting no moral weight on who produced the goods being distributed. One stark difference that emerges from this is that Rawlsian liberalism’s theory of justice is a theory about how to distribute the pie while old liberalism’s theory of justice is a theory about how to treat bakers (Schmidtz, 2022).
The problem with patterned principles is that, in Nozick’s words, liberty upsets patterns. “No end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives” (1974: 163). To illustrate, Nozick asks you to imagine that society achieves a pattern of perfect justice by the lights of whatever principle you prefer. Then someone offers Wilt Chamberlain a dollar for the privilege of watching Wilt play basketball. Before we know it, thousands of people are paying Wilt a dollar each, every time Wilt puts on a show. Wilt gets rich. The distribution is no longer equal, and no one complains. Nozick’s question: If justice is a pattern, achievable at a given moment, what happens if you achieve perfection? Must you then prohibit everything—no further consuming, creating, trading, or even giving—so as not to upset the perfect pattern? Notice: Nozick neither argues nor presumes people can do whatever they want with their property. Nozick, recalling the focus on connecting property rights to liberty that animated liberalism in its classical form, notes that if there is anything at all people can do, even if the only thing they are free to do is give a coin to an entertainer, then even that tiniest of liberties will, over time, disturb the favored pattern. Nozick is right that if we focus on time slices, we focus on isolated moments, and take moments too seriously, when what matters is not the pattern of holdings at a moment but the pattern of how people treat each other over time. Even tiny liberties must upset the pattern of a static moment. By the same token, however, there is no reason why liberty must upset an ongoing pattern of fair treatment. A moral principle forbidding racial discrimination, for example, prescribes no particular end-state. Such a principle is what Nozick calls weakly patterned, sensitive to history as well as to pattern, and prescribing an ideal of how people should be treated without prescribing an end-state distribution. It affects the pattern without prescribing a pattern. And if a principle forbidding racial discrimination works its way into a society via cultural progress rather than legal intervention, it need not involve any interference whatsoever. So, although Nozick sometimes speaks as if his critique applies to all patterns, we should take seriously his concession that “weak” patterns are compatible with liberty. Some may promote liberty, depending on how they are introduced and maintained. See Schmidtz (2006: chap.6). For work by modern liberals that resonates with Nozick’s dissection of the dimensions of equality that plausibly can count as liberal, see also Anderson (1999), Young (1990), and Sen (1992).
Accordingly, even granting to Nozick that time-slice principles license immense, constant, intolerable interference with everyday life, there is some reason to doubt that Rawls intended to embrace any such view. In his first article, Rawls said, “we cannot determine the justness of a situation by examining it at a single moment” (1951: 191) Years later, Rawls added, “It is a mistake to focus attention on the varying relative positions of individuals and to require that every change, considered as a single transaction viewed in isolation, be in itself just. It is the arrangement of the basic structure which is to be judged, and judged from a general point of view” (1999b: 76). Thus, to Rawls, basic structure’s job is not to make every transaction work to the working class’s advantage, let alone to the advantage of each member of the class. Rawls was more realistic than that. Instead, it is the trend of a whole society over time that is supposed to benefit the working class as a class. To be sure, Rawls was a kind of egalitarian, but the pattern Rawls meant to endorse was a pattern* of equal status, applying not so much to a distribution as to an ongoing relationship. This is not to say that Nozick’s critique had no point. Nozick showed what an alternative theory might look like, portraying Wilt Chamberlain as a separate person in a more robust sense (unencumbered by nebulous debts to society) than Rawls could countenance. To Nozick, Wilt’s advantages are not what Wilt finds on the table; Wilt’s advantages are what Wilt brings to the table. And respecting what Wilt brings to the table is the exact essence of respecting him as a separate person. In part due to Nozick, today’s egalitarians now acknowledge that any equality worthy of aspiration will focus less on justice as a property of a time-slice distribution and more on how people are treated: how they are rewarded for their contributions and enabled over time to make contributions worth rewarding. (Schmidtz, 2006).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/
*Rights-based-theories or Ideal-pattern-of-distribution theory
Is libertarianism just one of many a rights-based-theories as opposed to ideal-pattern-of-distribution theories?
[Many theories] of distributive justice ...hold that justice consists in finding a distributive outcome that conforms to some ideal pattern of how income and wealth should be distributed. These theories differ about what that ideal pattern is. Some say that income should correspond to contribution, others say that it should correspond to effort or need, and still others say that it should correspond to a more abstract criterion such as the maximization of average utility or the distribution specified by Rawls's difference principle. In an important book published in 1974, Robert Nozick offered a radical challenge to any such "patterned" theory of justice.
In the real world, of course, it is highly unlikely that any society would ever achieve a distribution of income that would perfectly match the ideal pattern stipulated by some philosophical theory of distributive justice. But, just for the sake of argument, suppose that some society somewhere did do just that. This society has achieved a state of perfect justice in distribution, and accordingly each individual in this society is justly entitled to hold the income that he or she holds. Now a disturbing thing happens. Michael Jordan, having retired from professional basketball, offers to play exhibition basketball for the public in exchange for a $2 admission fee. Millions of fans are delighted at the chance to see Jordan play again and consider the admission fee a real bargain. Each of these fans pays for his admission fee out of his own, on our own view, just holdings. But the resultant distribution of wealth, involving the transfer of millions of dollars from the fans to Michael Jordan, violates the perfect pattern of justice that had been achieved. Must we then deny that the fans and Jordan had a right to enter into their mutually satisfying agreement? Must we, in the name of distributive justice, "forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults?"
Any pattern of distribution, once achieved, is likely to be upset by acts of individuals with respect to the dispersement of the income they hold. A harmless gift between lovers would lead from a distribution satisfying the pattern of justice to a distribution not satisfying that pattern. Hence, any patterned theory of justice seems to require an extensive and continuous interference with the liberty of individuals to do with their income what they like. Liberty upsets patterns, and any political philosophy that attempts to realize on earth some ideal pattern of justice will be forced to pervasively interfere with the liberty of individual persons. Libertarian-ism, the political philosophy defended by Nozick, rejects any such interference with individual liberty. It is a political philosophy based on the consistent and inviolable defense of individual liberty as the fundamental principle of all political and social life...
...Rights-Based Theories
In the very first sentence of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick says, "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do." The rights that Nozick claims here are not rights that are created by any government or any human agency. In this sense, they are natural rights, rights that human beings have simply in virtue of their existence as human beings. Among the rights central to Nozick's view is the right to liberty, a right to do what one wants with one's life without interference from government or any other person so long as one's actions do not interfere with the like liberty of others.
Nozick believes that the right to liberty forms a "side constraint" on what governments or other people may do. Suppose there is something the government would like to do that would greatly increase the total happiness of society as a whole but which involves violating my right to liberty. In saying that my right to liberty is a side constraint, No/.ick means that it blocks any such governmental project. My right to liberty may not be violated even if doing so would achieve greater overall happiness. Further, suppose some dictator agrees to release a hundred political prisoners on the grounds that you capture me and turn me over to him to be his prisoner. By capturing me and achieving the release of the hundred political prisoners, you would maximize nonvi-olations of the right to liberty. But by calling the right to liberty a side constraint, Nozick means to prohibit even this. My right to liberty may not be violated even if doing so minimizes total violations of rights to liberty. My right to liberty is, in a sense, an absolute right, not violable for any reason.
This idea of a strong right to liberty, understood as a negative right not to be interfered with that belongs to every normal adult human being and which may not be violated to achieve some other purpose, is fundamental to libertarian political philosophy. For the libertarian, this absolute or near-absolute right to liberty is the cornerstone upon which the edifice of economic, social, and political institutions must be built. In an essay published in 1974, "What Libertarianism Is," the libertarian philosopher John Hospers says, "Every human being has the right to act in accordance with his own choices, unless those actions infringe on the equal liberty of other human beings to act in accordance with their choices." In a later essay with the same title Hospers says that, "The essential ingredient in all this is freedom from coercion by others. This is one's basic and inalienable right." The libertarian philosopher Jan Narveson makes an even stronger claim about the centrality of the right to liberty, saying that "the only relevant consideration in political matters is individual liberty."
Unlike utilitarianism, which makes the right to liberty a means to the end of social happiness, libertarianism conceives of the right to liberty as an independent foundation for political philosophy. It, not the maximization of happiness nor any other end, is the "bottom line" for political philosophy. Further, in conceiving of the right to liberty as inviolable, as a side constraint on all other economic, social, and political institutions, libertarians raise the independently grounded right to liberty above all other considerations. For these reasons, libertarianism is said to be a "rights-based" theory. In this respect, and in its conception of the right to liberty as one belonging to human beings by nature and not by human convention, libertarianism agrees with the older natural-rights tradition and disagrees with utilitarianism.
This shift away from utilitarianism to rights-based theories was characteristic of a broad movement in ethics and political philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. This shift was largely motivated by imagined cases that seemed to show that utilitarian principles led to morally unacceptable conclusions. In chapter 6 we considered the case of the utilitarian surgeon faced with five patients needing transplants and one patient whose organs happened to provide the needed matches for the five needing transplants. Utilitarianism, consistently applied, would seem to require the surgeon to painlessly kill the one in order to harvest organs for the five, thereby maximizing the total amount of happiness in the world, but also grossly violating our sense that such an action would be a morally unacceptable violation of individual rights. Faced with a number of such examples, most philosophers have come to the conclusion that utilitarianism is not tenable as a fundamental theory of morality, and consequently not tenable as the foundation for political philosophy. Though utilitarians have mounted some interesting defenses of their position, most philosophers have felt that these defenses ultimately fail and have turned to rights-based theories or mixed theories as more adequately accounting for our fundamental moral judgments.
As a rights-based theory, libertarianism built upon this shift away from utilitarianism in ethics and political theory. However, libertarianism represents only one current within the wider family of rights-based theories. Rawls's theory of justice, for example, also lies, broadly speaking, within the family of rights-based theories. Utilitarianism is often called a teleological or consequentialist theory. Such theories identify some quality or state of affairs as what is intrinsically good and then define morally right actions as those actions that aim at maximization of this good. In the case of utilitarianism, the good is happiness and right action is action that maximizes happiness. In contrast, Rawls's theory is a deontological theory, one that determines the right-ness or wrongness of an action in terms of the kind of action that it is, and not in terms of the conduciveness of that action to the maximization of some good. Thus, for example, according to Rawls's theory, any suppression of liberty is morally wrong. In this, Rawls too accepts a strong right to liberty. Other political philosophers have also supported the shift from utilitarianism to rights-based theories but do not adopt libertarian positions.
One characteristic of libertarians is that they reject claims to positive rights. We will examine the implications of this position more fully below. Here it suffices to note that the shift from utilitarianism to rights-based theories need not include the rejection of positive rights. -----------Nor need the rights-based theorist agree with the libertarian that negative rights always override other moral and political considerations. For example, the philosopher Michael Freeden presents a complex theory that includes negative rights, positive rights, and considerations of utility. Libertarianism is a particular current within the broader family of postutilitarian rights-based theories. It is, in a sense, a radical rights-based theory, one that challenges much of the fabric of law and practice that has come to govern economic, social, and political life in developed industrial societies. Having seen how libertarianism makes the right to liberty the cornerstone of political philosophy, it is to these radical implications of libertarian theory that we now turn.
The Radical Implications of Libertarian Theory
Libertarians reject all positive rights. At the heart of libertarian theory is the right to liberty that belongs to every normal adult human being. Libertarians understand this right as a negative right, a right not to be interfered with in the conduct of one's life so long as one does not interfere with others in the free conduct of their lives. The libertarian understands this noninterference in terms of the absence of coercion. If I am walking down the street and a tourist from out of town stops me and asks for directions, there is a sense in which the tourist has interfered with me. By stopping me and asking for directions, the tourist interrupts the flow of my life. But I remain free to ignore this request. If I am in a hurry, or lost in thought, or just don't want to be bothered, I am free to go on my way. So far the libertarian has no objection to the actions of the tourist. But were the tourist to grab me by the arm and prevent my moving on, or threaten me with a gun and demand an answer, then the intervention of the tourist takes on a coercive aspect that aims at removing my freedom. It is such coercive intervention that the libertarian sees as interfering with my liberty in a morally objectionable way. Libertarians argue that positive rights inherently involve such coercive interference with liberty. To see why this is so, we must briefly consider the libertarian view of property rights.
To have a right of property in or over some thing is to have the right to use the thing; the right to sell, bequeath, or give away the thing; and the right to prevent others from using the thing. In this way, property rights are often said to be bundles of rights over objects. Now, each of these rights can be understood as involving a right of liberty with respect to the thing. To say that I have a right to use the thing is to say that I am free to use the thing and others may not coercively interfere to prevent me from using it. In the same way, to say that I have the rights to sell, bequeath, and give away the thing, is to say that I have a right of liberty to do these things that prevents others from coercively interfering in my doing so. And, finally, to say that I have a right to prevent others from using the thing is to say that the question of whether or not others may use the thing is one that falls within the domain of my free choice. You may not take my car without my consent. Your use of my car is up to me. It is a matter of my free choice...
Modern Political Philosophy by Richard Hudelson
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Political-Philosophy-Explorations/dp/0765600226/
http://tinyurl.com/ModPolitPhlosophy
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