This is a good response to a particular, albeit esoteric version of libertarianism. You do neglect a large number (I would argue the strong majority) of libertarians who are consequentialists, such as Milton Friedman, James Buchannan, and Jagdish Bhagwati. You're right to start your story with Nozick, but wrong to end it there.
"mostly women, in forced marriages. Roughly a quarter of these slave are children. This slavery takes place in many forms; one form common in wealthier nations like the US is the exploitation of migrant workers." OK, this assertion on its own, I can accept for now… but wait a second, just before that you said "more than at any other time in human history"
But today's migrant workers (at least in the US, idk about Qatar) aren't subject to the same degree of total control and *literal* (i.e. actual, not metaphorical) institutional violence as black slaves pre-Civil War. If you change the definition of what constitutes slavery, then to be consistent you must at least attempt to estimate how many people in the past met your new definition of slavery: I highly suspect it's a lot more than whatever figures you got for historical slavery, which used old, more literal definitions of slavery.
(2)
Nice rhetoric on Elon Musk being the one ‘oppressed’ by taxes. That is striking and clearly something’s wrong!
At the same time your hypothetical feels like a strawman, not a steel man.
The problem with children mining cobalt is a more general problem with “sweatshop labor”, which is easy to decry but from an armchair it's easy to forget that things are inherently bad.
When you say “Of course no, nobody is pro-starvation”, I think actually you are wrong. I think that unless you propose a better solution, you *are* implicitly pro-starvation, and furthermore I think that’s a very important point.
Someone ‘in the arena’, making some difference, is just not morally comparable to someone on the sidelines.
And please don’t say ‘drawing attention’ is good enough; it rings hollow, because plenty of people have already drawn attention to ‘sweatshop labor’; that’s how it got its moniker. Yet what good have they done beyond that?
I think there’s a general problem where if somebody gets involved - ‘entangled’ - with some inherently messy problem in the real world, they are then seen as culpable for it, even if all they did was make it better. I think this is a point that is largely overlooked and it’s a point expounded beautifully here: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/
(3)
I found it a bit offputting to read “while my co-contributor might not feel like reading books written by people he disagrees with”, because I subscribed specifically because I believe your co-contributor is a careful thinker and a great writer. I, too, choose not to read a vast array of books I “disagree with”, such as books on ancient aliens. Maybe your post could've used further revisions before publication.
I enjoyed many aspects such as the effective rhetoric suggesting the absurdity of thinking Elon Musk oppressed while not his poorest workers.
I agree with you that in practice (libertarians in the US) and in theory (Nozick, for instance) libertarianism doesn’t satisfyingly answer how to repair harms. And I think it’s fine to bring attention to this.
That being said I disagree that your proposal is any good either. As someone who agrees with you that Blacks experienced oppression at the hands of society, I’m not on board with reparations either, because it’s a very complex issue with little clear answers on implementation (this is is elaborated better in other popular articles on the subject, but just to give an example, how can we determine what the wealth of a now-citizen who immigrated from India would’ve been had blacks not been oppressed?)
I’m guessing you’d say doing something is better than nothing. As you write, “Adopting libertarian policy proposals is, at best, like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house riddled with termites. At minimum, before the theory can be implemented in the real world there must be some standard of rectifying the difficult injustices.”
But I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think you first need to eliminate what government is doing wrong that is keeping people down (subtraction) and then get to constructing a limited number of institutions or programs (addition). Maximizing growth (for all people, descendants of the oppressed included) is the best way to get them to a point where they don’t even need government redistributions to get by. Flipping your metaphor on its head, I think doing reparations right now would be a messy coat of paint on top of a messy termite-ridden house. First clean the house (i.e. the fundamentals: dramatically reduce the largesse and distortionary behavior of government) and then maybe consider paint.
Also a policy is never just a policy in isolation. The reason libertarians don’t support using “State to do X” is not just because of the State and not just because of “X” but ALSO because of what “State doing X” does to the State. Too abstract?
Consider regulatory capture. We start by tasking government with regulating industry, which then makes government a very high value target for corporate influence. Or tasking government with drawing school zones, which turns school board meetings into racially-charged contests where different demographics are trying to empower each other. A massive, multi-billion program of redistribution isn’t JUST that program, but also another vehicle for people and politicians to weaponize racial, political, and financial interests. You note that the market produces inequalities, but at least it’s better on average at distributing power across hundreds of millions of people. Employing the state for something vests it all in ONE institution (with legal sanction for violence), which makes it a high-value vessel for people to seize and maneuver how they see fit
On another note, you pre-empt the Thai fishing boats as an indictment of “state power”, but I don’t know that it’s an indictment of “free markets” either. The first thing any libertarian sees when looking at slavery/trafficking is that inmate rights aren’t being respected. Also keep in mind that coerced labor (in various forms) and poverty has been the default across millennia of human history, and it becomes clear that modern capitalism is not the origin of violent coercion and oppressive conditions. And it is most certainly not the driver when it is responsible for lifting millions of people up across the globe over decades.
But your point still remains: sure the libertarian sees that rights aren’t being respected, but what does their theory actually propose to make that happen? Or as you put it, “the theory lacks an adequate method of rectifying injustice”. How to go from the non-ideal to the ideal?
I counter that no one has a great answer to this. Freeing people from violence is insanely difficult due to the nature of violence. We in the US achieved our system of property rights first through intellectual revolution (Enlightenment sweeping through Europe, including Britain) and then military revolution (independence from Britain, new Constitution). Other societies and peoples across history have gotten freer with different stories, usually some other amalgam of cultural-intellectual novelty and violent force. It is a notoriously difficult achievement and not one that anyone can really address.
The best we can do — all of us Westerners typing on our screens, from our armchairs, as you say — is to advocate for as few persons as possible to hold reins of violent power over another, whether government or corporate or both, so that people can do what other people value and be rewarded for that in proportion.
This is a good response to a particular, albeit esoteric version of libertarianism. You do neglect a large number (I would argue the strong majority) of libertarians who are consequentialists, such as Milton Friedman, James Buchannan, and Jagdish Bhagwati. You're right to start your story with Nozick, but wrong to end it there.
deleted and reposted
(1)
"mostly women, in forced marriages. Roughly a quarter of these slave are children. This slavery takes place in many forms; one form common in wealthier nations like the US is the exploitation of migrant workers." OK, this assertion on its own, I can accept for now… but wait a second, just before that you said "more than at any other time in human history"
But today's migrant workers (at least in the US, idk about Qatar) aren't subject to the same degree of total control and *literal* (i.e. actual, not metaphorical) institutional violence as black slaves pre-Civil War. If you change the definition of what constitutes slavery, then to be consistent you must at least attempt to estimate how many people in the past met your new definition of slavery: I highly suspect it's a lot more than whatever figures you got for historical slavery, which used old, more literal definitions of slavery.
(2)
Nice rhetoric on Elon Musk being the one ‘oppressed’ by taxes. That is striking and clearly something’s wrong!
At the same time your hypothetical feels like a strawman, not a steel man.
The problem with children mining cobalt is a more general problem with “sweatshop labor”, which is easy to decry but from an armchair it's easy to forget that things are inherently bad.
When you say “Of course no, nobody is pro-starvation”, I think actually you are wrong. I think that unless you propose a better solution, you *are* implicitly pro-starvation, and furthermore I think that’s a very important point.
Someone ‘in the arena’, making some difference, is just not morally comparable to someone on the sidelines.
And please don’t say ‘drawing attention’ is good enough; it rings hollow, because plenty of people have already drawn attention to ‘sweatshop labor’; that’s how it got its moniker. Yet what good have they done beyond that?
I think there’s a general problem where if somebody gets involved - ‘entangled’ - with some inherently messy problem in the real world, they are then seen as culpable for it, even if all they did was make it better. I think this is a point that is largely overlooked and it’s a point expounded beautifully here: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/
(3)
I found it a bit offputting to read “while my co-contributor might not feel like reading books written by people he disagrees with”, because I subscribed specifically because I believe your co-contributor is a careful thinker and a great writer. I, too, choose not to read a vast array of books I “disagree with”, such as books on ancient aliens. Maybe your post could've used further revisions before publication.
I enjoyed many aspects such as the effective rhetoric suggesting the absurdity of thinking Elon Musk oppressed while not his poorest workers.
I agree with you that in practice (libertarians in the US) and in theory (Nozick, for instance) libertarianism doesn’t satisfyingly answer how to repair harms. And I think it’s fine to bring attention to this.
That being said I disagree that your proposal is any good either. As someone who agrees with you that Blacks experienced oppression at the hands of society, I’m not on board with reparations either, because it’s a very complex issue with little clear answers on implementation (this is is elaborated better in other popular articles on the subject, but just to give an example, how can we determine what the wealth of a now-citizen who immigrated from India would’ve been had blacks not been oppressed?)
I’m guessing you’d say doing something is better than nothing. As you write, “Adopting libertarian policy proposals is, at best, like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house riddled with termites. At minimum, before the theory can be implemented in the real world there must be some standard of rectifying the difficult injustices.”
But I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think you first need to eliminate what government is doing wrong that is keeping people down (subtraction) and then get to constructing a limited number of institutions or programs (addition). Maximizing growth (for all people, descendants of the oppressed included) is the best way to get them to a point where they don’t even need government redistributions to get by. Flipping your metaphor on its head, I think doing reparations right now would be a messy coat of paint on top of a messy termite-ridden house. First clean the house (i.e. the fundamentals: dramatically reduce the largesse and distortionary behavior of government) and then maybe consider paint.
Also a policy is never just a policy in isolation. The reason libertarians don’t support using “State to do X” is not just because of the State and not just because of “X” but ALSO because of what “State doing X” does to the State. Too abstract?
Consider regulatory capture. We start by tasking government with regulating industry, which then makes government a very high value target for corporate influence. Or tasking government with drawing school zones, which turns school board meetings into racially-charged contests where different demographics are trying to empower each other. A massive, multi-billion program of redistribution isn’t JUST that program, but also another vehicle for people and politicians to weaponize racial, political, and financial interests. You note that the market produces inequalities, but at least it’s better on average at distributing power across hundreds of millions of people. Employing the state for something vests it all in ONE institution (with legal sanction for violence), which makes it a high-value vessel for people to seize and maneuver how they see fit
On another note, you pre-empt the Thai fishing boats as an indictment of “state power”, but I don’t know that it’s an indictment of “free markets” either. The first thing any libertarian sees when looking at slavery/trafficking is that inmate rights aren’t being respected. Also keep in mind that coerced labor (in various forms) and poverty has been the default across millennia of human history, and it becomes clear that modern capitalism is not the origin of violent coercion and oppressive conditions. And it is most certainly not the driver when it is responsible for lifting millions of people up across the globe over decades.
But your point still remains: sure the libertarian sees that rights aren’t being respected, but what does their theory actually propose to make that happen? Or as you put it, “the theory lacks an adequate method of rectifying injustice”. How to go from the non-ideal to the ideal?
I counter that no one has a great answer to this. Freeing people from violence is insanely difficult due to the nature of violence. We in the US achieved our system of property rights first through intellectual revolution (Enlightenment sweeping through Europe, including Britain) and then military revolution (independence from Britain, new Constitution). Other societies and peoples across history have gotten freer with different stories, usually some other amalgam of cultural-intellectual novelty and violent force. It is a notoriously difficult achievement and not one that anyone can really address.
The best we can do — all of us Westerners typing on our screens, from our armchairs, as you say — is to advocate for as few persons as possible to hold reins of violent power over another, whether government or corporate or both, so that people can do what other people value and be rewarded for that in proportion.