Man, Economy, and Liberty by Walter Block & Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr

Author:Walter Block & Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [Block, Walter and Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-93355-014-5
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 1988-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Liberty, Politics and Ethics

Rothbard’s second argument is that libertarianism is a political philosophy and not an ethical doctrine. Elsewhere in the same volume in which Rothbard’s essay appears, Tibor Machan takes a similar position. While Rothbard and Machan may both believe that the only plausible defense of liberty can be given from a particular moral theory, libertarianism may be, and has been, defended from a variety of moral perspectives. Advocating libertarianism as a social doctrine in no way implies that one is advocating that individuals become libertines. This point is effective in defusing the conservative’s tendency to equate the libertarian with the libertine. It is also used by Rothbard (and Machan) to show that there is no necessary incompatibility between libertarianism and a concern for virtue. If we accept this argument (as we must), a difficulty arises. If there is no necessary incompatibility between libertarianism and a concern for virtue, then there would appear to be no necessary compatibility either. For since libertarianism as a strictly political doctrine is logically distinct from moral theories which may be concerned with virtue, it seems difficult to draw anything more than a contingent connection between liberty and virtue. Indeed, libertarianism would seem to be best characterized as indifferent to virtue.

The claim about the indifference of libertarianism to virtue ignores my argument that virtue and coercion cannot be connected to each other. Therefore, the relationship between the two is not as contingent as first appearances might suggest. But my argument only presents a necessary or formal connection, not a substantive one. To make the substantive case we need to say something more about the fallacious belief that if something is not directly advocated by a political doctrine, that doctrine must therefore be indifferent to it. I shall refer to this fallacy as the “fallacy of advocacy.” In general the fallacy of advocacy is committed when one assumes that there is a necessary connection between what people say is, will be, or ought to be the case and what actually is, will be, or ought to be the case. Economists, for example, have long known that what people say they believe in or will do has little bearing on how they actually behave. And in political theory, if a doctrine has no explicit provision for state supported welfare it does not follow that believers in that doctrine have no concern or compassion for the poor. Indeed, precisely the opposite might be true—that is, it may be that concern for the poor is precisely what attracts a person to that political theory in the first place.11

The version of the fallacy of advocacy we are dealing with here is the negative side of the fallacy. The failure of libertarianism to explicitly include a place for virtue as a principle of its political conclusions does not, in other words, give one grounds for claiming that libertarianism is indifferent to the issue. One would have to show in addition that there are features of libertarianism which are incompatible with a substantive concern for virtue.

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