Musings on the differences between conservativism, liberalism, and libertarianism
Perhaps one benefit of law school that extends beyond adding earning potential to the student for his burgeoning career is that it fosters countless opportunities to develop theories on just about everything. Many of these theories are likely to be duplicative of the work of qualified scholars on things especially pertinent to the legal community--and likewise relatively impertinent to everyone else--things like sovereign immunity and abstention doctrines and standards of review in administrative adjudications. But every now and then I get the impression that I have stumbled onto a bit of inside understanding of something that might be of use to non-lawyers, and perhaps has not been extensively covered by my fellow academics. Perhaps I am wrong, but I figured it was at least worth blogging about.
In researching for my Natural Resources paper, I became very interested in exactly why anyone would bother to conserve anything. Why bother replanting trees after you cut them down? Why bother using alternate methods to strip mining that would reduce lake and riverbed pollution? Why bother preserving natural habitats? If these things weren't regulated to death, does anyone have a good reason to care?
In law school, at least in my relatively conservative/libertarian-leaning law school, there is often a great focus on market approaches to these problems. The free market approach is what you might expect: leave the logging and timber and mineral extraction industries alone, the market will find its own way to check harmful behavior. That is, let's not give in to those hippies who lobby the government for regulations.
But why not? What is wrong with those liberal hippies' views on preservation? Well, isn't it that their views are arbitrary? That is, they are not based on solid empirical data. Sure, they have stats and studies to support their views, but they are never very conclusive--they are always very conjectural. In other words, the hippies are moralists. They don't want to conserve because it makes the most economic sense. No: they would be happy as clams if our economy tanked as long as they could save an endangered something or other.
And aren't most liberals this way? Affirmative action was a moral crusade. It didn't matter if the market were to tank by being forced to assimilate disenfranchised folks into the ranks. Social programs are a huge drain on our economy. Liberals will defend the programs, insisting that they are ultimately good for our economy. But they don't really care. It would help if this were true, of course, because then they could stay in business. But they don't want them there because they are economically beneficial: they want them because they satisfy their moral desire to help people.
And is the moral/normative undercurrent very much different for conservatives? Why do conservatives oppose gay marriage? Is it because this will lead to economic depression? Of course not. It is based on a moral belief. Again, like liberals, conservatives will point to empirical justifications for rejecting the homosexual lifestyle. But they don't really care if their empirical claims are true. Their objection to homosexuality is independent from all of this. They did not study the evidence and come to a reasoned opinion. Their objection is an instictive, normative one.
Liberals are moralists, upholding the good of the majority as the greatest good, and uphold things like tolerance and generosity and goodwill. Conservatives are also moralists, but generally regard the preservation of the individual. They are generally more in favor of self-responsibility, and saving people from, and punishing them for, their vices. Both of these camps regard people as basically evil, defective, that they cannot be expected to carry on without a coercive government--left to their own devices, they would bring themselves back down to the state of nature. Government, ultimately, must be something of a moral, paternalistic body.
Libertarians are quite different. Libertarians think of people as basically good, productive, efficient, that they can carry on by themselves, that they don't need any extrinsic moral guidance, that, left to their own devices, they can effect their own greatness by pursuing their own ends without coercion. Government just exists for basic protections and overcoming basic market failures. This is why Libertarians are most likely to want to leave things to the market, because these are the only kinds of legitimate forces that govern our lives.
Given all this, which is the best paradigm? Should we be moralists or empiricists? Empiricism seems to be the more attractive modern view, the more scientific view. But do we have enough empirical data to live our lives, to supplant all the moral views that we've amassed? At the end of the day, no one really knows how the homosexual subculture will affect society, how rampant resource extraction and pollution will affect our environment. While the moralist might have a useful interim solution (buy a Prius; resist social changes), mustn't the sober empiricist withhold any solution until all the facts are in?
And until then, cannot morals stand in as a placeholder? After all, morals are certainly not always arbitrary; they often stand as useful predictors of best outcomes. The norm that a mother-father parent structure is best for raising children is certainly widely supported by empirical evidence. Premarital sex is denounced by many religions as morally wrong, and empirically we understand that this moral, if followed, would lead to a great reduction in teen pregnancies.
I will offer one example from Leviticus in the Bible. God commanded the ancient Jews to leave their land fallow every seven years. Empirically we now understand that the idea of crop rotation and how this helped sustain the soil. But for the Jews, this practice empirically must have seemed silly, because they got no crops that year. They followed it out of sheer moral obedience. If they supplanted this moral practice with their defectively incomplete empirical understanding, they would have ruined their fields. I thus submit this example as Exhibit A in favor of a conservative approach--resisting models of behavior based on incomplete empirical data, and favoring existing models in general over reactive solutions to social pressures.
In researching for my Natural Resources paper, I became very interested in exactly why anyone would bother to conserve anything. Why bother replanting trees after you cut them down? Why bother using alternate methods to strip mining that would reduce lake and riverbed pollution? Why bother preserving natural habitats? If these things weren't regulated to death, does anyone have a good reason to care?
In law school, at least in my relatively conservative/libertarian-leaning law school, there is often a great focus on market approaches to these problems. The free market approach is what you might expect: leave the logging and timber and mineral extraction industries alone, the market will find its own way to check harmful behavior. That is, let's not give in to those hippies who lobby the government for regulations.
But why not? What is wrong with those liberal hippies' views on preservation? Well, isn't it that their views are arbitrary? That is, they are not based on solid empirical data. Sure, they have stats and studies to support their views, but they are never very conclusive--they are always very conjectural. In other words, the hippies are moralists. They don't want to conserve because it makes the most economic sense. No: they would be happy as clams if our economy tanked as long as they could save an endangered something or other.
And aren't most liberals this way? Affirmative action was a moral crusade. It didn't matter if the market were to tank by being forced to assimilate disenfranchised folks into the ranks. Social programs are a huge drain on our economy. Liberals will defend the programs, insisting that they are ultimately good for our economy. But they don't really care. It would help if this were true, of course, because then they could stay in business. But they don't want them there because they are economically beneficial: they want them because they satisfy their moral desire to help people.
And is the moral/normative undercurrent very much different for conservatives? Why do conservatives oppose gay marriage? Is it because this will lead to economic depression? Of course not. It is based on a moral belief. Again, like liberals, conservatives will point to empirical justifications for rejecting the homosexual lifestyle. But they don't really care if their empirical claims are true. Their objection to homosexuality is independent from all of this. They did not study the evidence and come to a reasoned opinion. Their objection is an instictive, normative one.
Liberals are moralists, upholding the good of the majority as the greatest good, and uphold things like tolerance and generosity and goodwill. Conservatives are also moralists, but generally regard the preservation of the individual. They are generally more in favor of self-responsibility, and saving people from, and punishing them for, their vices. Both of these camps regard people as basically evil, defective, that they cannot be expected to carry on without a coercive government--left to their own devices, they would bring themselves back down to the state of nature. Government, ultimately, must be something of a moral, paternalistic body.
Libertarians are quite different. Libertarians think of people as basically good, productive, efficient, that they can carry on by themselves, that they don't need any extrinsic moral guidance, that, left to their own devices, they can effect their own greatness by pursuing their own ends without coercion. Government just exists for basic protections and overcoming basic market failures. This is why Libertarians are most likely to want to leave things to the market, because these are the only kinds of legitimate forces that govern our lives.
Given all this, which is the best paradigm? Should we be moralists or empiricists? Empiricism seems to be the more attractive modern view, the more scientific view. But do we have enough empirical data to live our lives, to supplant all the moral views that we've amassed? At the end of the day, no one really knows how the homosexual subculture will affect society, how rampant resource extraction and pollution will affect our environment. While the moralist might have a useful interim solution (buy a Prius; resist social changes), mustn't the sober empiricist withhold any solution until all the facts are in?
And until then, cannot morals stand in as a placeholder? After all, morals are certainly not always arbitrary; they often stand as useful predictors of best outcomes. The norm that a mother-father parent structure is best for raising children is certainly widely supported by empirical evidence. Premarital sex is denounced by many religions as morally wrong, and empirically we understand that this moral, if followed, would lead to a great reduction in teen pregnancies.
I will offer one example from Leviticus in the Bible. God commanded the ancient Jews to leave their land fallow every seven years. Empirically we now understand that the idea of crop rotation and how this helped sustain the soil. But for the Jews, this practice empirically must have seemed silly, because they got no crops that year. They followed it out of sheer moral obedience. If they supplanted this moral practice with their defectively incomplete empirical understanding, they would have ruined their fields. I thus submit this example as Exhibit A in favor of a conservative approach--resisting models of behavior based on incomplete empirical data, and favoring existing models in general over reactive solutions to social pressures.
posted by Tim Kowal at 9:16 AM
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