Now, let me introduce Michael Miller. A little bit of creative writing on Mike's part. I welcome all of you to this debate, which is about the foundation of libertarianism. Is it ethics or is it economics? Everybody recognizes the desirability of using both ethical and economic arguments when defending libertarianism. In fact, libertarians are quite fond of pointing out the convergence of the moral and the practical. The libertarian system of private property rights and free exchange is said to be not only the only moral system, the only system that protects individual rights, but also the system that guarantees that all resources go to their most productive use. So there seems to be two great pillars, ethics and economics, in support of libertarianism. All too often, however, I've caught myself and others sliding back and forth when trying to defend libertarianism using one to support the other. While attempting to show that the libertarian system of property rights is, in fact, also the most productive, I have found it quite handy at times to trot out the old system of property rights to determine what is the most productive, socially speaking. On the other hand, if it weren't for certain economic facts, wouldn't many of us or some of us at least reject libertarian property rights as being inconsistent with perhaps a more basic libertarian demand, perhaps one, that each person should own his own life and the full product of his labor? In other words, doesn't economic facts enter into what we believe about property rights? In the event our libertarian ethics and economics independent of one another is one dependent upon the other, our heaven forbid are each dependent upon the other, we need to think about these questions both in order for us to understand our own position and for us to know how best to persuade others of the virtues of liberty. We must be careful to keep conceptually distinct, though, what is the question of what is the theoretical foundation of libertarianism? And on the other hand, what is the best support when trying to persuade somebody in a particular context? So to assist us in all this, we are fortunate to have as our debaters David Friedman and George Smith, who are widely recognized as two of the leading young libertarian thinkers today. David, an economist, will defend the side of economics and George, a philosopher, will defend the side of ethics. There is nothing necessary about that, I suppose. An economist could defend the side of ethics also, but. The format for the debate is as follows. There will be opening statements of 15 minutes each. Then, first rebuttals, 10 minutes each in a cross-questioning period immediately after that, where each one gets a turn to ask questions of the other. Then a second rebuttal and a second round of cross-questioning and then finally a short closing statement by each person. David Friedman will begin, let me introduce him a little. He's an economics, on the economics faculty at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He's been this past year visiting assistant professor of economics at UCLA, the author of The Machinery of Freedom. His writing has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Legal Studies, American Economic Review, the Intercollegiate Review, Reason, and others. And in addition to all this, David has a PhD in physics. David? Is this colored ones at least? Can the colored lights be cut? Thank you. Can everybody hear me? I regard microphones as instruments invented by the devil to distort the human voice. Can you hear me all right from here? Yes. Fine. Let me begin by saying that what this debate was, at least the first time around, I believe, was a debate about what sorts of arguments were most important or most useful in defending libertarianism. There is certainly a sense in which economic arguments without philosophical arguments are logically impossible or useless. You can't talk about what's desirable without talking about what, ultimately, you want. However, if everybody agreed about what you wanted, then you would reduce only the questions of how to get it, which would be economic questions. Let me start by briefly defining what I mean by economics and economic arguments versus philosophy and philosophical arguments. Because I got the impression towards the end of the previous run of this debate that a good deal of what I thought was economics, George thought was philosophy, which led to a certain amount of confusion. Economics deals with questions such as, what will be the consequences of certain laws or certain institutions? And philosophy, or at least the particular part of philosophy that is mostly used by libertarians for making arguments, deals with aughts, with statements such as it is desirable that people be happy or you ought not to steal someone else's property or other questions of that sort. Now, there's a good deal of overlap in these two. And that can be seen by considering one very simple philosophical position, the position called rural utilitarianism, which holds that we ought to act according to that set of rules which maximize the sum total of human happiness. Now, in one sense, you could say that all of what I call economic arguments, which say that if you have private property, people will be happy, for example, are a part of a philosophical argument which the rural utilitarian uses to say we ought to act in certain ways. But I would separate out the philosophical part of the argument, which is what says, for example, you ought to make people happy from the economics which discusses what the consequences of certain acts will be. So that then when I'm saying that we ought to use primarily, not entirely, but primarily economic arguments, I mean we ought to be arguing with people about what are the consequences of certain acts, what are the consequences of certain institutions, how does socialism work, how does capitalism work? Rather than arguing with them primarily about whether taxation is immoral, whether private property is a natural right, and so forth. And my reason is not that I believe that is statements without ought statements can tell you what you should do, obviously they can't, but that I believe that most of the disagreement in the world comes from most of this agreement on things libertarians are interested in, comes from disagreements about how institutions work, about consequences, and only a relatively small part from disagreement about ends. One could see that in the extreme case if I persuaded a socialist that socialism would lead to everybody being poor and miserable and enslaved, and capitalism would lead to everybody being happy and wealthy and wise, we might have many, many remaining disagreements on what was desirable, and yet he would almost certainly be in favor of capitalism. Therefore, even though the statement it is desirable that people be healthy and wealthy and wise, which is a philosophical statement, would be logically necessary for the argument, it would not in practice be necessary. Now, George objected last time, and I'm sorry if this seems like a rerun that it is, second time for me, the third time for him, which I may explain sometime. He objected that I seem to be including an awful lot in economics, and for those of you who are perfectionists, I would say economics is that particular approach to understanding what is, which starts out with the premise that individuals have objectives which they rationally pursue and draws conclusions from that. However, it would take much more than 15 minutes to expand on that subject, so I won't. Part of my evidence that political disagreement stems more from disagreement about is-is-then-oughts comes from the following experience which I have had, and I think many of you have had. A libertarian is arguing with a socialist, and they're arguing about some fundamental moral question, such as whether a capitalist has the right to the profits he gets from his capital. And when discovers after a while that the socialist's idea of the history of the particular hypothetical capitalist is that the socialist got his capital by stealing it from somebody, that is by doing things that the libertarian would regard as stealing it from somebody, whereas the libertarian's idea of the history of his hypothetical capitalist is that he hacked a tract of land out of the jungle while the lazy workers sat by, and now wishes to get some income for the use of his farmland. And that suggests to me that both people have very similar moral intuitions and that each of them is trying to twist his vision of reality in such a way that his moral intuitions will be consistent with the set of institutions that he is in favor of. And I would give his one more rather striking example of that, the way in which Marxists use the term exploitation. Very simply, the Marxist argument goes as follows. All things are produced by the workers, either directly by the workers working or indirectly by the workers building machines called capital, which then helped produce goods. The capitalists consume some of it, therefore the capitalists are exploiting the workers. Now if you think of it, you will notice that there is a hidden libertarian premise in there somewhere, namely that things belong to the people who make them. If the socialists really believe that the right premise was from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, it would follow that the workers were good at working and the capitalists needed Rolls Royces that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with the capitalists receiving profits. And the reason that the socialists are upset about the capitalists receiving profits is that at base, the socialists' moral intuition is very much like yours in mind, namely that ownership somehow comes out of producing. Wrong side of the three by five card, sorry about that. Now I think that, I'm not asserting that there are no disagreements at all, of course. Certainly there are a lot of socialists who think that taking for the rich to give to the poor is a good and meritorious activity and very few libertarians who believe that, although I can think of perhaps one example if I work at it, philosopher I met recently. But the reason that we don't have to argue about the philosophical points, I believe, is that our, George, can you tell them to turn it off? Is that our economic arguments are sufficiently strong that we can reach our conclusions over any of a wide range of views about what is desired. That is to say, since capitalism happens to be the best system for the poor as well as for the rich, since redistribution in practice means taxing the average Californian to support the people who are going to UCLA who will then have high incomes, we can, I think should, argue that whether or not you believe that redistribution is theft, you should be against it. I'm taking redistribution because that's the case where I think the economic argument is weakest and that in many other issues, in the simplest sense, the things we are opposing are bad for all concerned. There is, for instance, a rather elegant argument on the subject of freedom of contract, which shows that if you make laws making it illegal for landlords to write lease contracts in which the tenant can be thrown out on a leak's notice, the consequences to make both landlords and tenants worse off. And this is often, although of course not always true about interferences in the free market. So that I would argue that we don't have to argue about what we ought to want, because first, what people actually do want, although not identical, is fairly similar across people. And second, because our economic arguments are strong enough that the same system which maximizes freedom also, fortunately, maximizes happiness or utility or any of quite a number of other things or comes very close to it. And we can therefore argue, essentially, pick your objective. If it's, there are certainly hypothetical objectives that capitalism is not best for, making people poor, for example. But over any reasonable objectives, ones that say we'll cover 98% of the world's population, we can demonstrate that our system is the one to produce those objectives. Now I think it's fortunate that our economic position is so strong, because unfortunately, our philosophical position is very weak, much weaker than we wish it would work. And I think one way of seeing that is to look at the position that we are, I think, often in and I think often unjustly in. You're arguing with a socialist and the socialist or for that matter, conservative. In fact, maybe the conservative is a better case. And the conservative says, we need a draft. And you say, no, no, the draft is slavery. And he says, yes, we need it to defend ourselves. And you demonstrate to him that we don't need it to defend ourselves.  And before you say that, you want to ask yourself if you agreed with him about the positive questions, about the economic questions. If your only disagreement were moral, would you still be that sure you were against the draft? If you really believed, as you don't, that without a draft the Russians would conquer us and we'd all be slaves, you might start trying to figure out some libertarian excuses for a draft. In general, I think, that we put ourselves in the false position, let me go back to arguing with socialists for a moment, where the socialist really honestly believes that capitalism won't work, that it will lead to enormous inequalities, to misery, to great depressions, to bread lines, to dictatorship, all sorts of horrible things. And he also believes socialism will work.  As a matter of principle, I'm against socialism. And I would be against it even if you were right. Now that's usually a lie. All right, usually the reason we're willing to say that is that we're sure he's wrong. And if he says to us, yeah, but just suppose for a minute that you believe that capitalism led to these horrible things. Then I think we will be in a much harder position. And I'll give you some evidence. And the evidence I'll give you is that there are places where a straightforward application of what we believe to be libertarian principles does lead to horrible results and the result is that none of us believe in them. And we think of complicated excuses for not believing in them. I'll be talking more about that I think tomorrow or Sunday, whenever I'm giving a speech. But the simplest example is that we like to say that you cannot trespass on a person's land without his permission.  Every time I light a match, photons from that match are trespassing on property for 100 miles around. Every time I light a match, little bits of soot are trespassing on land for 20 miles around. And therefore if we really took seriously, sort of a lot of the simple a prioriistic arguments that we sometimes like to make in order to prove things we do believe are true, but we took those things seriously, we would conclude that you couldn't light a match without permission from every landowner within sight. Every landowner with an officially powerful telescope could see your match, thus demonstrating your photons are trespassing on his property. We don't believe that. When these simple, hard and fast arguments lead to conclusions we don't like, somehow we ignore them. And I suggest that that is a good reason why instead of saying to the socialist the reason you ought to agree with us is we're morally right, we ought to say to him the reason you ought to agree with us is that your system leads to results you wouldn't like and we can give you quite a lot of evidence for that, both empirical and theoretical. And our system leads to results you would like and therefore you should be in favor of our system. Now having said that, I don't want to argue that there is no place for philosophy. There are two places for philosophy. One of them is that the philosophers should work at doing a better job than I, from my biased position, believe they have so far done in giving coherent, clear, persuasive explanations of watts and maybe then eventually we will all agree on that and maybe that would help a little. Second, the philosophers can and do serve a useful defensive function in trying to make people willing to consider our ideas by making it plausible that what we want is morally attractive as well as functional and that what they thought they wanted is morally unattractive as well as non-functional and that I think is a useful and valuable function and I've got seven seconds left, so let's do it, just kidding. George Smith lives in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer for the Kato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the St. School, the author of Atheism, The Case Against God. His writing has been published in Reason, Libertarian Review, the Journal of Libertarian Studies and others. He has further intertwined ethics and economics by teaching philosophy at his own free market school and in fact he's the author of a book on private education entitled Education and Liberty, The Separation of School and State, which I am told will elaborate on his article in The Recent Free Texas. Being a firm believer in technology, I really use the microphone here. The subject we're debating here this evening is which is the proper foundation for libertarianism, economics, or ethics. And I think the key word here is foundation. I would be the last to deny the enormously valuable contributions that economics can make and has made to the libertarian case. But I think when we're talking about the proper foundation of libertarianism, we clearly have to decide in favor of ethics being the basis for the libertarian philosophy. Now I'll try to explain a few reasons why I think this is so. First of all, let's consider what's involved in even stating what libertarianism is. Now I don't mean just applying libertarian principles to a particular problem, but I mean if you were to explain to a friend of yours and he said, well, tell me what libertarianism is in 25 words or less. What would you say? Well, I suspect you would say something like, well, libertarians believe that no person should initiate force against another person. Or libertarians believe in a right of self ownership. Or libertarians are against any form of aggression. Regardless of how you state the basic libertarian principle, somewhere in that statement, you're going to have an ought statement, a should statement, or a statement pertaining to rights. And of course, rights have implicit within them ought statements. In other words, you'll have to say something like, people ought not to aggress. So in the very statement of the essence of libertarianism, you are already hip deep in ethics because you are introducing that very important ought, or as philosophers like to call them, normative statements. Now I would suggest to you that there is not similarly implicit within the basic statement of the libertarian philosophy necessarily a particular view of economics. Granted, a view of economics develops out of that basic philosophy, but it's not as essential, that is not as basic to it as is the ethical aspect. So that's the first point I want to make in an attempt to clarify what I mean when I say that ethics is the foundation of libertarianism. Now let me proceed a little bit and try to clarify more in what sense ethics is the foundation. First, we have this notion of rights that practically all libertarians subscribe to in one form or another. You may state it in different ways. You may say that libertarians believe you have a right to life, or you may state it, as I prefer, that every person has the right of self-ownership. But however you state it, you come down to some kind of theory of natural rights. But you see, one could believe in some theory of natural rights and yet not give it top priority in one's philosophy. For example, you might, or some people you know might, if you ask them, do you think people are self-owners? They might say, well, of course I do. Yes, of course. But then when confronted with a particular type of problem, they might decide that there are overriding considerations more important than a person's individual rights. Now, there are many, many historical examples of this. Let me give you one. And I think it illustrates very clearly how there can, in fact, be a conflict between moral arguments and economic arguments. Now, I should mention here that I happen to believe in most cases there are not conflicts, that the two are very compatible. But there can be conflicts between moral and economic arguments. And if those sorts of conflicts should arise, then I maintain that the moral argument should always take precedence. It should take precedence because it's more fundamental. Let me give you the example that I like to use from the 19th century. Libertarians were very involved, as you may know, in the pre-Civil War era with the abolition of slavery. They were at the cutting edge, so to speak, of the abolitionist movement. Individuals like William Lloyd Garrison, Lysander Spooner, Wendell Phillips, and others. Now, their argument was explicitly libertarian. They explicitly argued on the basis of self-ownership. Throughout the abolitionist literature are constant references to self-ownership as the moral objection to slavery. They accused slave owners as being, as they put it, man-stealers because they deprived the slave of that which was properly his own. Namely, his body, his freedom. Now, they developed a very important split in the abolitionist, or not in the abolitionist movement, but the anti-slavery movement, generally. The abolitionists were in favor of an immediate end to slavery, by which they meant as fast as is humanly possible. They argued that there should be no other considerations which override the slave's right to his own life and freedom. There was another group, which became known as the gradualists, who agreed with the abolitionists. They said, well, it's true that slavery is wrong. It's evil. It should be gotten rid of. But they added on eventually. What they argued was that should slavery cease immediately, it would wreak economic havoc on the South in particular, but also on the northern industrial states, which relied very heavily on southern agriculture. So what they did was introduce an argument, an economic argument, trying to show that the immediate abolition of slavery would wreak economic havoc. And therefore, slavery had to be phased out in increments rather than immediately. This was a very important and bitterly fought contest between the two sides. Now, it's important to note how the abolitionists responded to this. They did not necessarily try to argue that the immediate abolition of slavery would not have these terrible economic consequences. What they argued was that this economic sort of argument was irrelevant, because what had to take precedence was the right of the slave to his own liberty. And this was the important argument. Now here, it seems to me, is a very, very clear example that can arise and has arisen in many lesser forms a very clear example of a conflict between a moral and an economic argument. And the abolitionists recognized clearly that the moral argument was the real basis for their philosophy, and therefore that had to be the guiding principle, as indeed I think it has to be the guiding principle for libertarians today. Now, this sort of conflict can arise even today. It's not inconceivable that if you had some old curmudgeon who wanted to hang on to his little plot of land and was by refusing to sell it even at highly exorbitant prices for whatever eccentric reason he might have, this person might be obstructing some sort of super freeway or supermarket or stores or some kind of high-rise development. And it seems to me one could give a fairly convincing economic argument. There's some sort of loss of utility by this old curmudgeon refusing to sell his property. In fact, economists argue that way all the time. But of course libertarians would say the economic consequences of this are irrelevant. Now notice the argument here. It's not whether, in fact, this is economically beneficial or not. What we would say is it doesn't matter whether this old curmudgeon decides to sell his land. It doesn't matter if the consequences are good or bad economically. The point is he has a right to that land. It's none of your business what he does with it. And therefore you can't even bring in the economic consideration in the first place. It's totally irrelevant to this question. Now I'm afraid that the big danger of trying to overthrow as the foundation of libertarianism, trying to overthrow ethics in favor of economics, is that this very sort of thing will happen. Economics will lose its bearing. It will start to hedge and compromise on many, many issues. And it won't have that solid, clear cut, well-defined position that it now has. Now if I had a lot of time, I would go through a lot of historical examples of this kind of thing. Let me just mention one. In 19th century classical liberalism, there was a, which was at that time one of the foremost, I would call it quasi-libertarian movements. One had two distinct schools. One had a natural rights school and one had the utilitarian or the more or less the economic argument school. And the natural rights school were people like Thomas Hodgkin, Herbert Spencer, Auburn, Herbert and others. In the economic utilitarian school, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and others like that. Now eventually the utilitarians won out. But what in fact happened as a result of the economic side winning out, was it destroyed the classical liberal movement, period. In fact, classical liberalism on the utilitarian side paved the way in many respects for the welfare state. This has been verified by many contemporary scholars. Because by using these economic arguments about social utility, social welfare and so forth, what the utilitarians did was set up their opponents. So eventually the socialists and the welfare state people came along and said, well look, we think these things promote social utility. We think the state can actually further social utility and the utilitarians really were bested.   People have certain rights and your government or you personally can't do anything about them in terms of violating them. It's none of your business. So the natural rights people didn't even want these sorts of arguments even entering into the situation. Now you notice what I'm not saying. I'm not saying we shouldn't use economic arguments. Obviously in many cases they're stronger for particular sorts of issues than our ethical arguments. If you're arguing an issue of rent control, I suggest that probably an economic argument might be more convincing. On the other hand there are some arguments which are many arguments that I think ethics is far more suited for. For example, victimless crime laws. If you argue on economic grounds against restricting heroin because it will drive the price up, the Buckley-Eye conservatives will say great, that's what we want. We want it to be hard to get. If you say well, the cost of enforcing it is too expensive, they'll probably say it's a blight on society. No cost is too expensive really. And even if we can't control it completely, at least we can put a lid on it. Now of course the moral argument on victimless crime laws is quite clear. It doesn't matter what the economic consequences are. A person has a right to his or her own body and what he or she decides to put in it is none of your business, basically. So I think we have to take a long hard look, not only at the issues involved, but what the possible consequences are if the natural rights position should be abandoned. Now let me backtrack a little bit and discuss more about the natural rights position because there doesn't seem to be widespread understanding about it. Basically there's nothing mysterious about ethics or ethical theory. What ethicists try to do, and have been trying to do, I think rather successfully for centuries, is to look at human beings and ask themselves, what are the basic facts of human nature that make social life possible or desirable? In other words, as philosophers like to put it, what are the basic aspects of human nature that would lead one to the good life in a social context? Now without going through all the steps of the argument, basically what libertarian philosophers have argued is that freedom to act on the basis of one's own judgment is an indispensable aspect of the good life, that the relationship between your judgment and your happiness and the means you choose to live by, that these are also closely intertwined, that you introduce coercion in between your judgment and your act, to deny you the right to act on the basis of your own judgment, is to act in a way that is profoundly anti-life. In other words, it is to act in a way that contradicts the very essential aspect of human nature that makes human life possible, happiness possible, or the good life, or however you wanna put it. Now this sort of argument can get rather technical, but the thing I'm trying to point out here is there's nothing particularly mysterious about it. I think in some respects, without going into complex philosophical arguments, you can examine it for yourself, and you can understand what philosophers mean when they say that if someone interposes coercion between your judgment and your action, that is if someone forces you in such a way that you cannot act according to your own judgment, that this is something that is fundamentally bad in terms of your own life, that's a fairly clear sort of thing to grasp, and I see nothing hard or difficult about that. And of course it requires elaboration just like any theory does in science or economics or philosophy, but that's the basic idea behind it. And as I said before, and I think this point cannot be emphasized enough, this really is the bearing of libertarianism. And let me just say, and I don't usually like to make predictions, but I think this one can be made quite safely. If for any reason natural rights was thrown out, so to speak, as the foundation of the libertarian philosophy, I would predict without hesitation that the libertarian movement would be dead as a doornail within 10 years, if not sooner. And I mean that quite seriously. Some people when they've heard about this topic that's being debated, they say, what is there to debate? I mean, of course, economics and ethics are both important. I agree. But in terms of the foundation, as I said before, ethics has to take priority. And if it doesn't, I think we will see happen with the modern libertarian movement, what the utilitarians saw happen in the 19th century, what the radical libertarians in America in the late 19th century, when they overthrew natural rights and the movement disintegrated within a few years, they saw it happen as well. And we're gonna see it happen if in fact the moral basis is not there. What we'll see in 10 years probably, if not sooner, as I said, if not an outright disbandment of the libertarian movement, what we'd probably see is a bunch of David Stockman's running around praising people like Ronald Reagan because they like their economic points of view. Now, in other words, the radical edge of libertarianism would be destroyed without that moral certainty and moral foundation to it. And to conclude, and this is more of a pragmatic or a practical point, but I'm sure David will forgive me for arguing the practical side, just as a practical matter, if you're trying to inspire people, if I were to take a poll here today and say how many of you were inspired to libertarianism by some moral ideal, I suspect a good many of you, if not perhaps a majority, would answer that you had been inspired in that way. There is something about the ideal of liberty that's very attractive. I mean, we can think of some American revolutionary holding a flag battered from battle or whatever, struggling along with a flag that says liberty or individual rights on it. It's very difficult to imagine that same revolutionary with a tattered flag that says social efficiency or utility or a cradle optimality on it. People are not going to go to the wall and fight for their ideals if those ideals are no higher than what is considered to be efficient in an economic sense. And let me just conclude with a brief passage which I think captures this fairly well. This is from Alexis de Tocqueville's book The Old Regime and the French Revolution. De Tocqueville being a very important 19th century French writer. De Tocqueville wrote, I do not think that a genuine love of freedom is ever quickened by the prospect of material rewards. Indeed, that prospect is often dubious, anyhow as regards the immediate future. True in the long run, freedom always brings to those who know how to retain it comfort and well-being and often great prosperity. Nevertheless, for the moment, it sometimes tells against amenities of this nature. And there are times indeed when despotism can best ensure a brief enjoyment of them. In fact, those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long. What has made so many men since untold ages stake their all on liberty is its intrinsic glamour, a fascination it has in itself apart from all, quote, practical considerations. The man who asks of freedom, Tocqueville concludes, the man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave. Thank you. George has clearly established the principle that philosophy does have an important function in libertarianism. Its function is providing purple pros and whipping up our passions and letting us all feel good about what we're doing and getting us to die on the battlefields under the black flag and things of that sort. And I think there's some truth to that incidentally even if I make fun of it. I get a little bit of the feeling that George may have bribed whoever wrote the title of this debate because somehow I remember it's being a little different last time around and I thought this was supposed to be a rerun but that's all right. I agree with George that if we were trying to sum up libertarianism in one sentence, which is a rather dangerous thing to do, but that if we were gonna do that we would almost certainly have a sentence with ought in it. But I would also point out that ought means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and that the reason we would all agree on that ought statement or at least agree that it was a approximate way of saying what we believed. The one time I signed such a statement when I joined the Free Libertarian Party of New York, I footnoted it. The reason we would agree is that we had come to similar conclusions about what was desirable from many different starting points about what desirable meant. That some of us would say man ought to own themselves because we believe that only in such a society will people be able to develop their own potentialities and that that's the most important thing. Others would say that only such a society is just. Others would say only in such a society can I privately expect to be happy and I wanna be happy. Others would say many different things so that yes, it would indeed be an ought statement but the agreement would be on the conclusion not on the arguments that got us to there and not in particular on any particular derivation of natural rights. With regard to George's brief summary of the natural rights position, I'm gonna do something that's a little unfair which is to attack an attempt to give a subtle and complicated philosophical position in 30 seconds but I would point out that he did refer to liberty as being indispensable. Now I think he and you would agree that all of us have our rights infringed in various ways at the moment. Most of us also believe that in spite of that our life is better than it could be and a good deal better than death and that suggests the term like indispensable is good oratory with bad thinking and that you really ought in making the arguments to say for the following reasons human freedom is desirable if as seems to be the case I can have human freedom and many other things as well that's certainly good but by saying it is desirable I have not automatically answered the person who tells me yes by giving up a little bit of freedom you can get a great deal of something else nor if I answered the person who tells me as many conservatives would it would indeed be nice to be entirely free but that isn't one of the options on the menu if he will say you insist on being free not to have a draft then you will indeed have a draft but it will be run from Moscow and you don't answer that kind of argument by saying that human freedom is indispensable you answer it by showing you can defend yourself without a draft now I was a little bit puzzled by George's statement about there being conflicts between the philosophical and the economic argument I thought that he understood he certainly seemed to understand what he said earlier that shoulds are philosophical there is no economic argument all by itself which says we should do X there is an economic argument which says if you free the slaves certain things will happen in those cases which I think apply to most issues where the things that would happen if you introduce freedom are things that 98% of the population is in favor of then demonstrating that those things will happen finishes the argument it doesn't mean there is an economic argument for those things sitting out there in a vacuum if the economic argument on slavery demonstrates that if slavery is ended that slave owners will be worse off and slaves will be better off as very likely it would have that is not an economic argument for slavery that merely means that the economic argument in that particular case is not sufficient to tell us whether we should have slavery or not now I think the correct economic argument in that case would have shown that there would be very large benefits to the slaves and relatively small losses to the slave owners and I think that the supposed losses to the people in the north who were consuming southern agricultural goods were wholly fictitious that is that the slaves would have as they did become farmers whether or not they were slaves but in any case I am certainly not saying that it is logically impossible logically impossible to have a case where you have to settle the moral issues to decide what you should do obviously that can't happen I am saying that most of the real world cases we're dealing with are not of that sort and I just don't understand how George can claim that if the economic argument ends up saying it's good for some people and bad for others that that means it shouldn't happen that just means the economic argument hasn't settled the question now I also think that George is making a mistake in economics a very very common mistake in economics but one that he shouldn't make because as a philosopher he understands the difference between rural utilitarianism and case utilitarianism that he's making a very serious mistake with his old curmudgeon who owns a piece of land that the throughway is going through because the economic answer to him is if we have a set of institutions where the way we decide how land is used is that we allow a court or a government to seize land when the court or the government believes that the best value for that land is to have it seized that that set of institutions will vastly diminish economic welfare first because for every one case of an old curmudgeon who is foolishly unwilling to sell his land there will be a thousand cases of land that is really more useful to the guy who owns it which is why he won't sell it but which somebody can persuade some court or some politician that someone else needs more and second because you have a system of that sort very large resources will be spent trying to persuade courts that I am the one who has the best use for that land so that George is making the mistake of confusing economic arguments which say the following institutions should decide who controls with economic arguments which say zap that piece of land should be given to him and the second kind of arguments are just bad economics as Marshall, a very famous economist rather elegantly put it the danger with the system of subsidies is that the managers of firms will stop using their time and energy to manage the firms and start using them to manage the people who give out the subsidies and that is part of economics now I want to end by doing something not quite fair because it's a somewhat new argument but George has heard it before and that is by merely making a simple empirical observation and that is that the economics profession compared to other academic areas is heavily biased towards belief in the free market and that the philosophical profession is not and that this has been true now for 200 years George Stigler wrote an essay a good many years back entitled why economists are conservative and what he meant by conservative then was pro free market you can find innumerable examples from Adam Smith who said that the power to allocate capital to move people hither and yon would be nowhere in more dangerous hands than in the hands of a man who believed himself fit to exercise it to Ricardo who commenting on the welfare system of England at the beginning of the 19th century said the law of gravity is not more certain than that such a system must turn wealth into poverty and confound everything in universal misery through Marshall who I just quoted through modern economists there was a poll published a few years ago a random poll of economists on a whole group of specific issues such as does rent control cause housing shortages do minimum wage laws cause unemployment unskilled workers and so forth with the exception of questions on redistribution you had generally between 90 and 99% support for the right side on those questions in a random sample of economists now redistribution is a harder question and there are good economic arguments against it as well perhaps as good moral arguments but the economists have not done a good enough job there yet some of us are working on it and therefore there are a lot of good economists who still are in favor of government redistribution unfortunately not sure if I have anything else to say except perhaps that Adam Smith based his argument against slavery on economic grounds and that Adam Smith's disciples succeeded in abolishing the slave trade peacefully and furthermore with regard to the example of slavery I would suggest that if you insist on being passionate and if you insist on saying it's not a question of is there something that some way that doesn't hurt anybody too much but only right and wrong you will very often end up killing half a million people which is what the resolution of the slavery issue the way it got resolved did also enslaving most of those people before they were killed that consequently there are tactical as well as fundamental reasons for making economic arguments and that is that the other kind of argument too often ends up saying it's just the good guys or the bad guys and it's clear that the ultimate conclusion is if it's the good guys or the bad guys is the good guys ought to kill the bad guys and unfortunately they think they're the good guys and so some of the results of that are not entirely attractive, thank you I suppose if a poll were taken among philosophers and perhaps there has been one asking how many of you think that murder is wrong and slavery is wrong you might get 100% agreement that those things are wrong even out doing the agreement of the economists doesn't prove anything now I want to spend most of my time discussing David's rather in my mind bizarre notion that everyone kind of agrees about the kind of society we want we just have these kind of technical disagreements about how to get there whenever I hear David say this I'm kind of reminded of a, I had this image in my mind almost like a cartoon of a immigration officer loading a poor Mexican immigrant back on a bus to shipping back to Mexico and as he's loading this guy on the bus he says you know, as David Friedman tells us we both want the same kind of society it's just that I don't want you in it now David being a good economist and a good empiricist and eschewing any sorts of a priori abstract the nature of man kind of arguments that ethicists like I'm curious as to how he got this knowledge that everyone wants the same sort of society he said he talked to a few people and some socialists well okay he's a very gregarious fellow and I'm sure he talks to a lot of people but I'm afraid if we're gonna base a whole philosophy of libertarianism on this we're gonna need more than David's personal conversations with people as we're gonna have it as the foundation now I'm wondering is this some kind of poll he's taken as he interviewed everyone in the world to find out what kind of society they want I doubt it rather seriously I don't know if Gallup has taken that kind of poll I suspect that that kind of poll were taken people would express profound at least on the surface profound disagreements about the kind of society they wanted now what would David then do would he say if that were done would he say well they don't really know what they want or they just aren't expressing it right in other words I'm afraid David would come around just telling these people what they really want in spite of what they say they want so I'm curious as to how he knows this it's a very simple question and a very important one where did he get this information I don't have that information I doubt if many of you have it but David has it and how now if he didn't get it empirically by a poll then what is he doing here some sort of deductive a priori philosophy is he by any chance sneaking in some sort of human nature argument that all human beings by their very nature want a certain type of thing if he is welcome to the camp of philosophy and moral theory because that's basically what he's talking about so we're basically in the same camp if that's the case now as you gather we've as David mentioned we've been through this a few times before but I can't seem to convince David that people really want different kinds of societies and there's not just technical differences about how to get to a certain type of society so this time I prepared in advance and I brought along a few quotations now these are not quotations from just your ordinary man in the street these are fairly influential philosophers and political figures now perhaps David would like to explain how these people really are basically latent libertarians it's just that they're a little messed up about the kind of how to get there the first is from Johann Fichte who is a very important early late 18th century early 19th century German philosopher Victor wrote rational life consists in each person forgetting himself in the species tying up his own life with the life of the whole and sacrificing himself for the sake of the whole and Victor of course went on to say that the state should enforce this our friend and fellow traveler latent libertarian Mussolini put it life is conceived by the fascist is as serious austere religious in all its manifestations the fascist disdains an easy life fascism denies the materialistic conception of happiness and abandons it to the economists of the mid-18th century this means that fascism denies the equation well-being equals happiness which sees in men mere animals content when they feed and fatten thus reducing them to a vegetative existence pure and simple close quote that was Mussolini lying or do we have here a legitimate example of an honest disagreement about not only what the good happiness is but about the kind of society finally another good libertarian you know Hitler wrote the state has to take care that only the healthy to get children the state has to appear as the guardian of a thousand years future in the face of which the wish and the egoism the individual appears as nothing and has to submit he concluded the right of personal freedom steps back in the face of the duty of the preservation of the race close quote the preservation of the race is this just a disagreement about means this is ridiculous this is not a disagreement about means ladies and gentlemen this is a very important different disagreement about ends about social ends about moral principles now i suppose david as if you were sitting down with old adolf might want to argue that the cost of trying to implement this would be too high well i'm afraid there are a lot of people who aren't don't care that much about cost i don't think cost-benefit analysis works well with a lot of people if you've ever talked to a person with strong religious convictions for example which many conservatives have and they think that dot has told them to stamp out sin and therefore lock up all the dope users he doesn't care about cost benefit analysis he would be even willing to suffer some sort of uh... deprivation of his own lifestyle uh... lowering his own lifestyle if you thought he could lock up all the dope addicts i mean you know this from your personal experience i shouldn't have to stand up here and tell it to you and therefore i'm very puzzled as to why anyone would think starting from the premise uh... that everyone wants the same kind of society could in any way form a basis for libertarianism it can't because first of all it's a false premise there are a number of other issues here on by the way it's quite true that with regard to some socialists you do get some kind of agreement about general ends this was pointed out in the nineteenth century by gustav de molinari who is a very important french libertarian he argued that with some socialists you can more or less say look we both want the same thing now i can show you how a better way to get there uh... to some extent ludwig van misis has pointed this out uh... murray rothbard in a very important essay called left and right prospects for liberty talked about the development of socialism in the nineteenth century and he also pointed out that some socialists did indeed want a kind of society that libertarians wouldn't find that bad and there was serious disagreement about means however that works with some socialist it doesn't work with fascist it doesn't work with monarchists it doesn't work with all kinds of political philosophies and to single out one particular sort of political philosophy and and a small portion of socialists at that does not provide a good example or a good enough example to support davis thesis let me uh... since i believe i've used up my time let me just say maybe in a further rebuttal i can get into this more the sorts of objections david brings up about the photon trespass case first of all david's been bringing this up for a long time it gets very aggravated that all of us moral philosophers just don't roll over and play dead as a result of this example uh... i would suggest that david really thinks he has a knockout argument that he should write it up in article form and i can personally guarantee him that any number of moral philosophers will be more than happy to be willing and happy to discuss at length these sorts of examples they are not catastrophic examples there's some problems certainly dealing with like pollution cases where the cutoff point is but they're certainly not catastrophic and david seems unwilling to develop them in any kind of detail to get up here and pronounce that this destroys libertarian moral theory is absurd because he has not shown in any way why libertarian premises do lead to this being a catastrophic consequence that doesn't lead to that i don't believe at least that i know more no moral philosophy does our premises don't require that we accept that kind of absurd case until david provides convincing reasons as to why we should find a troublesome then all i can say is i await an argument on his side thank you very much each one now has five minutes to cross-question the other beginning with david questioning george do you actually believe in the case of the hypothetical mexican that the immigration officer is correct in believing that he is that he and people like him are better off keeping mexicans out yes because he hates mexicans he's better off in the society not say do you in fact believe not can you imagine any views he might hold let's take ye average immigration officer is he better off aside from the fact that he's being paid to do the job what makes you happy has a large deal to do with what you believe is good now if he believes in it why don't we just stand up here what what makes a person happy has a good deal to do with what he believes is good and if a person such as the immigration officer believes that a good society is one absent mexicans that he will be happier in that sense he will be better off yes uh... within a society without mexicans if i understand you correctly you're saying people cannot make mistakes is that right in the sense in which you're using words your happiness depends a good deal your subjective valuations you don't make mistake you don't make mistakes as such in your subjective evaluations suppose the man believes that if mexicans come in the crime rate will go up his income will go down and prices will go up just to take advantage of him otherwise no no no what i'm saying is suppose he believes that and suppose that in fact he's wrong are you saying that by definition he'll be unhappy if the mexicans come in because these things would make him unhappy and he subjectively believes that happen happiness is a very very difficult thing to generalize about you would have to ask the particular individual involved all i've been saying is racists are generally happy when their beliefs are implemented just like we're all generally more happy when our beliefs are implemented doesn't that make sense the Ku Klux Klan is more happy if there are not blacks in their neighborhood than they are if there were blacks in their neighborhood it's a very simple statement that case may be correct however a person who believes that doing certain things has certain consequences will not necessarily be more happy when you do those things if he is wrong about the consequences not necessarily it depends it's highly contextual it's a lot of variations would be involved there's no law of nature that will determine when a person is and is not going to be happy that i agree with you keep saying i claim that people all want the same sort of society and i don't think i have ever said that would you disagree with the proposition that people want roughly the same sorts of results and have large disagreements on the kinds of societies that will produce them that for example the very few political candidates promise people that they will be poor if they vote for these candidates well candidates lie a lot that's right but the way in which they lie suggests an opinion they have about what the voters want to hear isn't that correct i would be willing to concede to you david that most people would say they'd like to be happy that is a fairly non-controversial statement as to what they consider essential to happiness there is enormous and drastic disagreement that is certainly true let us go on let us suppose that a person who supported hitler actually observed the kind of society that you believe nazism would produce say in twenty or thirty years that is to say very poor run by a small click at the top and so forth of the people who supported hitler how large a fraction do you think if they saw what nazism really meant would continue to support him i frankly don't know majority a large fraction you have no opinion knows probably part of you because it seems to me that you are continually confusing disagreement about how a particular society will work i either not see who believes or take mousselini which is a better case because probably you and i agree with the quote you quoted from mousselini that is that happiness in some technical sense is not merely eating enough and having creature comforts and so forth if we take the people who supported mousselini if they were able to actually observe and live in a well-functioning libertarian society or alternatively what mousselini's fascism would have become after a generation or so how many how large a fraction of the supporters of mousselini do you believe would have preferred the actual fascism to the actual capitalism david you're asking me questions that no one can possibly answer you know we all know opinion about them now if you're saying because of fascism being wiped out by war that fascism leads inevitably to war and therefore you're going to be wiped out if you're a fascist then i assume that nobody wants to be wiped out by war that would be one but i can there are many other sorts of examples uh... for example slavery has existed or did exist as an institution for thousands of years in medieval european in in greece rome and so forth this institution went on for for as i said hundreds and thousands of years it didn't seem to for the people who were the slave owners it seemed a perfectly satisfactory and a good sort of system for them they seem quite happy if you read a lot of the letters and literature of slave owners for example in the south they're quite happy with the way things are they don't want to change there's nothing going wrong they're they're well off financially why should they be concerned about anything else uh... by your own standards uh... i'm sorry the whether or not slavery was in fact their interest in fair possible it was the fact that they were happy with what was happening is not by itself evidence an alternative wouldn't have been more attractive i'm trying to distinguish between disagreements about how certain sets of institutions work and disagreements on what people ultimately want and i would agree that there are some disagreements of both sorts but it seems to me that you are continually confusing the two and thus saying what's perfectly true which is that a not see would think that his dream of how not season would work was better than his belief about how capitalism work with the proposition that not see would prefer how not season actually worked those not see so really understood the actual causation involved in implementing fascist philosophy those not see so envision themselves are who were likely to be in the ruling position i'm sure would be quite happy with the situation that is possible how many of them do you think there were you will note that i have continually said that i think you could get very large-scale agreement it is undoubtedly true that there are some sets of institutions in which there are two percent of the population were better off at least for twenty or thirty years then they would be under less if we had him we could have had ham and eggs we had some eggs i mean we can sit here and speculate all night about well if this if that and some this some that you don't know i don't know how many people are going to be happy under fascism this is a ridiculous line of question on the contrary we have observed the workings of many societies we observe what we who is this you and me i have no other people fine i have no right then i had other people in this room have observed what a fair variety of societies turned out to be we observe people who wish to get support who wish to get people to do rebellions for them or vote for them or work for them make certain sorts of promises and we have observed that the societies that radically deviate from capitalism do not deliver on those promises that seems to me to provide some evidence that there is a very large-scale desire for certain objectives final states which those societies can't produce you disagree doesn't that suggest if we were able to persuade everybody that of correct views about positive propositions this set of social institutions will produce this results that that would result in their rejecting most of the things very different i have nothing against that kind of argument in some aspects in some aspects in other words the old that means that's the highest argument of the impossibility of economic population or socialism making a mess of the market orders result trying to have central plan that's a very effective argument and i have nothing i'm not opposed to that kind of argument i don't think that this is the issue under debate here that can provide a foundation that sort of argument is the foundation for libertarianism or that that sort of argument is more fundamental than ethical arguments that that's the issue not whether they're good arguments for whether more fundamental i beg your part first i do not agree that the question of what is more fundamental in any logical sense is either what we're debating about or something which i even know how to define the now he's supposed to be in here uh... let's start can you give me a very and you say that that the moral philosophers are not able to answer these trespass cases to your satisfaction well i would charge that the economist are not able to answer much more fundamental source of questions like why shouldn't you go out and murder someone assuming you're not going to get caught in the secrecy and so forth let's say you're on a desert island with only two of you you're correct i'd like you agree with that can you give it some kind of economic no no certainly not i think one of the reasons why i am not a utilitarian is that my views about what one ought to do do not perfectly coincide with my uh... economic interest is narrowly defined well now now maybe i'm misinterpreting you so you'll have to correct me if i am you claim that position you adopt the economic side of it cannot explain why murder is wrong and yet it can provide a foundation for libertarian philosophy what i claim is that the position i adopt can explain why i should be in favor of laws against murder which is a very different proposition from explaining why murder is wrong that therefore although it cannot answer the question why should i never kill it can answer the question why should i be in favor of living in a society in which people are prevented from killing it cannot pronounce murder wrong that's absolutely correct economics cannot pronounce anything economics can also the point that's right economics can make a proposition of the form if we have a society where if we have a society where murder is forbidden i and most other people will be better off than it assuming we have to have a lot of qualification what i mean by better off i don't mean it in a moral sense have more of the things we would like to have then in a society in which murder is permitted uh... but no i am not claiming i have never claimed that economics provides a substitute for moral philosophy what i claim is that my moral philosophical views our views which i do not believe either you or other libertarian moral philosophers can justify to my satisfaction because every time i've discussed it with somebody who has tried it seems to me that would have you read on the subject what have i read i've read ran stuff i've read nozick stuff and i've argued with lots of people you haven't read mccann or any of the classical works on moral philosophy i've argued with mccann a client or a clientess uh... Aristotle a very long time ago and forgotten most of it some of it some of the client if i stood up here and took a lot of pot shots at economics and you say well what have you read and i said well i read one book by henry haslett uh... i doubt if you find it you probably say well look go read some more talk about i i might say you go read some more talk about i might or might not it would partly depend on whether uh... you had uh... argued with sufficient number of reasonably bright people and found their arguments unconvincing and if you did i would probably be willing to argue with you as opposed to simply telling you to go read some books but look you know as well as i did that any fairly complex economic or philosophical position requires a lot of care and systematic presentation you cannot decide on an important issue simply by having some conversations with people you have to allow a person a chance to develop a thesis over a period of uh... over a long space and try to develop various arguments meet certain objections and so forth now i'm perfectly willing to concede that you may not be personally satisfied by arguments you've had personally with a lot of people but i would say if you want to get up in public and debate this sort of thing you at least owe it to yourself to familiarize yourself with the literature and you have not done that i would have not done that i would be delighted to examine your suggested reading list until that time uh... i repeat that position i'm arguing for is that from economics we can learn enough so that given the differing views people have about philosophical issues given those differing views we can reach widespread though not perfect agreement about desirable institutions now and that as far as i can tell judging by the philosophers and their views as well as by my encounters with them philosophers have not presented a body of arguments which they can persuade each other in the sense in which despite the popular image of the contrary the economists have produced a body of arguments which they can persuade each other would you accept my offer or challenge depending how you look at it to write up your objections to natural rights philosophy so that people like myself can look at your systematic presentation and have a chance to reply systematically rather than having to try and thirty or sixty seconds explain why shining a flashlight on someone's property doesn't constitute a violation of their property rights you know as well as i do that that's more of a debaters trip because it's easy to pause at questions it's very difficult to answer complex questions i i don't quite it's it's an amount to me saying i don't see how you can have interpersonal utility comparison in economics and challenging you in a two-minute rebuttal explain how you can't let me for a moment suggest one reason why i don't think it's a debaters trip and that is that at least when this series of debates started out we were arguing i think about how libertarians ought to persuade people to be libertarians yes but that's not the topic of this day that is true by the way i had nothing to do with the selection of the light i want to make that clear i think it's a better way of wording it frankly but i don't i didn't have nothing to do with it however the debate which i believe i agreed to participate in was a rerun of the last debate and the debate debated was a rerun of the last debate also however i would point out that was regarded the question i at least was debating about if this room is filled with people as i suspect it is at least as other rooms of similar sorts have been who believe they can make straightforward ethical arguments would show it is unethical to do this because and if to those people the line of argument they follow about ownership does it leads two conclusions which they cannot live with and we prefer not to think about such as you can't like to match that i then have given evidence not necessarily that you don't have arguments which are moral philosophical arguments which you could deal with people but that they don't and that therefore their opinion and an opinion that i have encountered unfortunately over and over again that it is perfectly clear that the socialists are wicked or the socialist position is wicked and immoral and that ours is not is an indefensible position that is one that they cannot defend and that therefore they ought to argue it uh... on grounds of consequences rather than on the grounds of principle i also think that if as i have observed uh... the places where you feel that the straightforward arguments don't lead to the conclusions that i that i raise incidentally you're unhappy with the term catastrophic introduced the term catastrophic to these discussions to refer to the consequences of the doctrine that you cannot breathe without permission from everybody on the planet and i suspect you would agree that the consequences of that doctrine are catastrophic i was not a surrogate certain then nor am i asserting now that these arguments imply that there cannot be a philosophy of natural rights they do imply the standard presentation understanding of it as it exists in the libertarian community at large is not adequate and that it should be not you should not be used as a basis for saying the socialist look even if it worked can i get one more question i want to know to ask you directly where do you got this information about everyone wanting however you want to put it the same general kind of society or whatever i didn't say the same kind of society you you stated like you want it like it stated before then you explain to me what you got the information for sure i believe that people's objectives are sufficiently similar that something fairly close to the society that i want is optimal in terms of those differing objectives that's fresh why do you believe it was sufficiently similar in order to answer that there are two propositions in that one of them is a statement of is an economic statement namely capitalism will maximize the following list of things the other is an observation about people named people want some part of that list of things maximize it's the second one you want me to answer i have gotten that partly by talking with lots of people partly by observing as i was saying before what the promises are that people make when they are trying to gain power when they're trying to sell a philosophical position i observe the people who argued for fascism did not say fascism will result in you being pushed around a whole lot and being dirt poor and fighting lots of wars they said quite a number of other things the assertion what i claim to observe is not that people's people's objectives are identical it's certainly not that their views of the ideal society are identical but only that given how much better something reasonably close to less a fair capitalism is to something reasonably distant from it looking at how people act looking at what people who want power promise i conclude that over a range covering an enormous majority of the human race the less a fair capitalism will be very close to the best thing uh... that they could have does that answer you? since everything got started a little bit short we're running a little bit out of time we're going to have each debater give a rebuttal for another five minutes and then we'll have open questions from the audience well i just want to recapitulate a few points here and try to emphasize what i think are the most important aspects of the ethical case and again i hope this is clear by now uh... i really have believe me nothing against economic arguments i use them a lot myself when they're appropriate but as i said at the beginning i think the issue here is how do we represent libertarianism as a general philosophy or attitude support social relationships and as i said in the beginning i think that we have really no choice but to presented as basically a moral philosophy in other words what we're trying to say to people our gut sort of message so to speak to people when we communicate libertarianism is and should be there is a right way to deal with people there is a wrong way to deal with people killing somebody is a wrong way enslaving somebody is a wrong way stealing somebody's money is a wrong way dealing with involuntarily is a right way that seems to me to be the basis of what we're trying to communicate now of course there is the further question can we justify that i happen to think that we can and that we have largely justified those sorts of statements but if we cannot justify it if in fact this is some kind of illusion if we're just kidding ourselves and the natural rights philosophy is after all what jeremy bentham called it nonsense upon stilts then i would say we have no case for libertarianism in other words i don't see that there's an option here suppose the natural rights case is not strong then what would i say that we should adopt economics as a foundation no what i'd say is libertarianism is thereby destroyed there is no case for it if you cannot have some type of with an odd or a should and as david freely admits economics cannot do this then you have no basis for what in any recognizable sense we call the libertarian movement now david may be talking about a movement he would like to see but with regard to the present movement there is no question but that it's roots and it's present manifestations are largely based on ethical and moral arguments that is simply an empirical fact read the literature talk to the people who come to these conventions read the history of libertarianism it has always been and it still is primarily a moral movement as i said if we drop that moral aspect libertarianism as we know it will disintegrate we may have something instead that david might be perfectly happy with but i would suggest that if we lose that moral force uh... to repeat a point i made earlier we will be arguing primarily economic efficiency points and the very important radical social causes such as victimless crime laws those sorts of things will go by the wayside because there are not good economic arguments against those sorts of things uh... our stand on foreign policy will go by the wayside because those are largely moral arguments having to do with interventionism and so forth our position on nuclear warfare all of these things which are very very essential to the libertarian movement today will simply drop out for the most part now maybe david thinks he can come up with some kind of elaborate economic argument as to why there should be not should not be law say against prostitution or why there should not be compulsory schooling laws but i would suggest to you first of all you're not going to build a movement along those arguments even if they're valid and secondly i would suggest that there's a very questionable sense in which those arguments can even said be said to be valid because people's desires their wishes their subjective valuations are so radically different that there's no way you're gonna get the sort of unanimity that david seems to think is necessary and in fact seems to think is actually the case now as i said this is a very crucial issue i i hope that libertarians are not going to start going away from natural rights arguments i will grant that there are some problems in the natural rights philosophy but there are some problems with physics chemistry there are unexplained problems that even the hard sciences can't solve and when you confront those problems you don't overthrow the whole science and say let's take let's get something else what you do is you work within that science and you improve on it you apply it to problems that have not previously been solved so you have an ongoing process of intellectual improvement intellectual progress that's what in fact has been happening for many years now in the area of libertarian moral philosophy there have been some enormously important contributions that have been made and are continuing to be made so let's not just drag out a few problems and say well obviously there's something wrong with libertarian moral philosophy there's something wrong in the sense that there's some unanswered questions that confront any theoretical system economics physics ethics you name it it's got problems thank you very much i think there may be a rather fundamental difference between the way george looks at the universe and the way people understand the world and the way i do and it's a difference i am perhaps attributing to him from things he said too much of the view that i perceive in people like i ran to take one very prominent example one way of looking at the world is as a theorem that is to say there are a few axioms and you build up hopefully with certainty or near certainty and everything rests on a nice firm foundation to use a word that i am less happy with than george's the other is to say that the world is more complicated than that some things you aren't at all sure of some things we agree it's either this or this or this we're not sure which other things we understand pretty well that we're looking at a very complicated picture and we make sense out of this part of it and this part of it and not that part and that i think is the way unfortunately the world at the moment is so that there is one sense in which i agree with george that the foundation of libertarianism is moral philosophy only i would say would be more moral philosophy if it was there that is to say as a matter of simple logic if you are going to prove that a free society is good one of the things you'd have to start out doing is deciding what good is my claim and it's a claim which you can try to satisfy by working through arguments for yourselves thinking about things in your own head is that we don't know enough about what good is to follow that very attractive uh... course of procedure that what we have are a lot of differing views about goodness views which are not wholly different there are very few people who go around believing that torturing babies to death is good but which are not perfectly identical and that if we are lucky enough to be able to show that as the world is constructed uh... certain sorts of social arrangements will be good in terms of many of these differing views of goodness then that is a sensible basis to use to make our arguments now i want to go on to talk very briefly george's comment that stealing someone's money is bad because of course if you put it that way everybody agrees but in the words he's used he's assumed away a whole host of what i think he would agree are difficult and i would suspect our unsolved problems when you say it's his money you already assumed you know how he acquired it well the production of that particular money was done by the u.s. government with a printing press he traded it for goods in producing those goods he used the cooperation of many other people some of that cooperation was gotten voluntarily some of it involuntarily used roads built with tax money for example he used land which he believes is his land although he certainly didn't create it he is involved in a very very complicated interaction with other people and we sum it up by saying it's his money and you shouldn't steal it which means that we assume away the whole set of questions determining what is his and i believe that one could without a great deal of effort construct a lot of different moral philosophical arguments for differing opinions about what is his now i want to go back to this question of agreement in economics versus agreement in philosophy which george sloughed off with what i think i can call in his words a debaters trick it is indeed true that most philosophers agree that murder is bad it is also true that everybody else would agree that murder is bad very nearly and therefore their agreement is no evidence at all of the power of philosophy to compel agreements on things libertarians believe in on the other hand most people do not believe that minimum wage laws cause unemployment most people do not believe that rent controls cause housing shortages most people do not believe that tariffs on japanese goods make americans worse off and an overwhelming majority of economists do believe these things so that the real question if it's really true as george seems to think that philosophy is a science a word he was fond of using or moral philosophy is and that if only people like i knew enough if we only read the right books it would be clear that there were straightforward arguments to libertarian conclusions i'm a little bit curious why all of the professional philosophers haven't read the books i would be disturbed if i found that large majority of professional economists disagreed with most of the core body of economic analysis what i believe to be a science i'm not disturbed they disagree with lots of conclusions but that's because i believe the world is a very complicated place as i said before and i believe the correct economic arguments don't tell you absolutely a hundred percent for certain anarcho capitalism is the way to go they only give you some fairly strong reasons for suspecting that it might be the way to go now if as george seems to think these are all down in the right books it seems to be odd that the only libertarian propositions that's that the philosopher that the libertarian philosophers have persuaded the rest of the philosophers about are those libertarian propositions that they believe to begin with thank you i don't know if i've got time left or not but i'd like to turn over any time i've got left to the questioners i want to hello first of all i want to explain the rest of the schedule for this evening and also what time things are starting tomorrow morning as soon as i finish speaking we're going to conclude the debate with twenty minutes of questions then we're gonna begin our dance party with conversation and music and a light show that will run from ten p.m. to one a.m. now tomorrow morning things start at eight a.m. no longer in this room for the rest of the weekend but upstairs and you go through the main vehicle-pre-restaurant entrance to get to the shoulder's haze room or whatever other rooms are going to be using hey uh... there's uh... one of the microphones have been put out there in the middle of the floor and if anyone has any questions please come up and uh... use the microphone so everyone can hear if you can have a loud voice go right ahead and don't use the microphone for the purpose of trying to decide which way to approach it i came to live during part of the economic side of the train my question is this it seems like philosophically it leads to a dead end take the example of the slaves could you not also argue well these slaveholders it's in law for them to own the slaves but once we emancipate the slaves isn't there other capital stock wasn't created by the work of the slaves and we also steal that so where does it end? yeah we should that's correct so we're left with a philosophical problem where do we draw the line where does it become right to let someone maintain their capital after all from the beginning it was the guy with the big stick who collected the capital so from a philosophical point of view it's morally right for us to redistribute the capital stock and you kind of see fit the issue you raised actually was discussed quite widely among abolitionists the now I'm not denying it there are complex issues arising out of this kind of problem but let me just point out that at least the moral problem the moral approach solves the question of whether there should be slavery it does solve that much which economics doesn't even do but now on to the issue about what about should the slaves be compensated what about the capital the capital was created and so on and so forth the line given by Lysander Spooner which I think was the correct line on that was that in effect the land that the slaves worked should be turned over to them in the form of restitution and there was a plantation and the resources of the plantation should at that point belong to the slaves now in regard to goods actually produced by slave labor you have a similar problem today if you want to talk about a moral problem of say goods produced in by slave labor in the soviet union for example unless there is a way whereby the actual producer of that good can reclaim it and be compensated then in effect that good becomes unknown property the labor of the slave once it got mixed in with a lot of produce and products and so forth went out into the market and was no longer one was no longer able to distinguish this slave made that and this is what belongs to this slave then in effect the homesteader of that good whoever claimed it in other words legitimate buyer of it would be the owner unless there's some way of tracing that particular piece of property back to a particular slave now this is an immensely complex problem but the point I'm raising is I think that there are general guidelines that can be followed to solve those sorts of problems let me point out also and I think this is a problem with david's view of ethics and by the way the reason I mentioned this point about heavy-weight ethics was not because I think all the answers are there I only have to do is read the literature it's because I don't think david has much of a feel for what moral philosophers try to do it and how they operate I'm afraid david has kind of a what I call a moses view of ethics he wants it out in the ten commandments he wants it there where natural law where does it say you can't do this you can't do this you should do this well in a similar way the sort of question you raise I would point out that when you apply general principles of ownership and so forth two highly complex variable concrete situations particular solutions are oftentimes quite difficult to arrive at are we not denying the libertarian principle of ownership for example the textile industry that's located in the southern parts of this state it's it exists primarily because of the textile restrictions without those laws that industry would have exited this country long ago so okay libertarians come to power they say well let's throw out all these these tariff restrictions now what shall we do with those plans they don't belong to the current owners not by your not by any philosophical justification why would they go on with the owners because there's competition is excluded well because they because it's ill-gotten gains they didn't know they didn't create that capital stock it was created by unfair law just as the just as the gains of the slave the slave owner is ill-gotten you've already stated that you're willing to turn over the plantation to the slaves well let's turn those mills over to someone and then where do we stop okay the point is past wrongs are always difficult to rectify whether you use moral standards to do it or whether you use economic standards the same problem can be raised with an economist how do you decide who gets what you know how do you divide up the pie so to speak on economic grounds the point is the difficult problem for anyone to answer my point is that at least ethics can solve very clearly and satisfactorily present moral dilemmas and i am perfectly willing to concede that rectifying past injustices can be a complex issue in some cases it's straightforward in some cases it's not if it's a matter of your land having been stolen uh... ten years ago when you want to get it back there in that case it's pretty clear if it's a matter of having you having to have been forced to help build something and you can't find the person who forced you to do it you want to recover the property that's a much more difficult uh... i'm kind of confused about what the debate's about and i'm hoping that i can uh... kinda understate two things that i think it is happening and ask two questions directed to each individual seems to me that uh... david freedman is arguing that the best way to sell libertarian philosophy is to argue on economic grounds except the person's uh... moral philosophy and then argue to try to get their moral philosophy that the libertarian ideal or the libertarian economic system will reach their moral ideals seems to me that george smith is arguing that the fundamental are the basis of libertarian are the the route of libertarian is is moral philosophy and that without that more philosophy libertarianism would not be a potent force and it uh... i think that both state in my opinion both statements are true but i don't understand why we're arguing each other and the question i'd like to ask is one uh... to david freedman uh... do you believe that libertarianism would be a force without uh... a moral statement behind it and the question i'd like to ask to george smith is if you're arguing with somebody that had maybe not a natural rights conception but they believed it generally that more uh... murder is bad and stealing is wrong would you argue try to argue natural rights or would you make a for instance a minimum wage law or something like that or would you use economic arguments to convince them that libertarianism was right is an essential part of libertarianism but i do not believe that a particular moral argument by which that conclusion is reached is you spoke a moment ago about a group and it seemed a little odd to say that a tree had three roots and yet if i look around might be at libertarianism i observe that there are people who have reached that same conclusion from very very diverse starting points and that therefore while the moral conclusion is a part of the essence of what we call libertarianism i don't think it is true that moral philosophy i.e. some particular theory of where terms like right and wrong come from of why stealing is wrong and so forth is at the root of libertarianism if it is then quite a large fraction of libertarians must be rootless because there is no particular such theory i believe which any sizable fractual which with any large majority of people uh... in any clear sense subscribe just a conclusion they can be a subscribe to yes i i agree to some extent debated across purposes now i took the title of the debate literally the last time we debated the topic was somewhat different and some of the arguments were somewhat different which is the proper foundation for libertarianism not which is the most efficient argument uh... now i would as i mentioned briefly in my original statement i think in in many cases economic arguments are better depending on the person talking to your own particular skills an economist might be much more comfortable with economic arguments a moralist might be more comfortable with moral arguments to give you an example from my very early college days i used to use an argument like you asked a person would you think it would be wrong for you to go up and knock me over the head and take my money and say of course then you say well would it be wrong for you to hire someone to do it and they say of course and then you go on and show how that in effect they're doing that same thing through the government now there you have kind of a if you provide the expression of freedom as kind of argument you're saying we basically we agree on moral grounds and what i'm showing you is merely the consistency involved it's a little different than david's argument it's the same kind of that's perfectly fine whatever argument is best suited to the particular person in problem you're confronting use a moral argument use an economic argument use a religious argument i really don't care uh... how the person gets there uh... that's basically yet but i still think ethics is the philosophical foundation rather than economics and the other questioners i have not so much a question as a critique of dora smith namely i think you've misled people as to the current state of natural rights i think most people who have read the books that you mentioned including most professional philosophers will tell you that natural rights a natural rights theory cannot be based solely on the cannons of logic basic facts about human nature and other empirical evidence they will tell you that there must be a moral premise which is to some extent arbitrary which seems to me not to lay a very good foundation for anything uh... now remember when i talk about philosophers there's a lot natural rights theory and in natural law theory other than the usual contrary of libertarian philosophers and the can these people there go to the thomas like henry beach more than our adler the whole aristotelian tradition you can go back and read thomas equinas there's a lot of good ethics in his summa theologica there's a whole tradition of natural law philosophy so i'm not confining it just to that i will grant you that that sort of thing is out of fashion today it happens to be coming back into fashion judging by the number of books that have recently come out on the subject but it is out of fashion but i think philosophy simply took a wrong turn and it's regrettable but the modern philosophers they're doing natural rights philosophy like nozick and ralph do accept some sort of premise that really isn't well it is more or less arbitrary the one philosopher i can think of who tried to argue solely from logic and basic empirical facts is alan gawar and he simply makes a logical mistake this would involve a technical argument about can you get a normative proposition from descriptive proposition can you get an ought from an is that's it's a classic statement philosophy you cannot derive an ought from an is apparently what philosophers are saying you can't do this it's a fact therefore you ought not to argue that way thereby getting an ought from an is in other words i would point out that i think that there's a there's just a logical we have a lot of oughts that we get from is is all the time and when you point those sorts of oughts out to philosophers they say okay well that's not a more a lot you can't get more lots from his is and they define the whole problem in a in a way that's impossible to solve but but short of giving you a long exposition as to why i think you can get an ought from his all this after rest content with that i'd like to sort of drop the context you both seem to be arguing fundamentally what is the best way to advocate libertarianism and one of you says it isn't necessary to do morality and one of you says if you don't do morality in the long run you're hurting yourself and so on and there's other things but i'd like to talk about something else i think both of you would agree there are some people who have a fundamental moral or whatever view that is totally antithetical to libertarianism that uh... there are some socialist or whatever who won't accept the economic they don't have the same goals they really do want to be poor you know they have a moral view that you everybody ought to be poor and things like that there are very few people like that i don't think i've met more than one but there are some if you meet somebody like that what i want to ask both of you is what can you do because you can't take david's view and say look you accept the same premises so here's the best way to do it you're going about it in the wrong way and you can't take your view and go the philosophy thing because they let's assume it's an intelligent person who's thought about it and he knows all your views on philosophy and he just disagrees with them what in that case with these one out of four billion people or whatever it is the very few perhaps that there are what do you do in that case with a person like that to try and convince them of the error of their ways either one first it's the person of the error of his ways i suppose i would try to find out whether these things he wanted were really means to more fundamental things such as happiness or wisdom or whatever and you might be able to untangle the structure of arguments in such a way that you could show that he was wrong about the connections but ultimately i would have to say that if you meet somebody who fundamentally wants things that are incompatible with capitalism that you then persuade everybody else not to follow them follow that person because they don't fundamentally want those things and if that person tries to use force to prevent capitalism you shoot him it seems to me that ultimately you know if i eventually find a mental disagreement do lead to conflicts of force and that one of the reasons that i want to try to keep as far as possible away from putting the argument in that form is because i don't like to be shooting at people and have people shooting at me well if you i mean you know in the early in the late uh... early medieval period you had kind of a aesthetic ideal of people who go up and sit on holes thirty feet high and let the nancy their flesh in this this is kind of your talk about there have been that sort of they have been that sort of phenomenon throughout history the most you could probably argue depends on what you want to argue personal ethics or social ethics in other words what you want to argue that this is not good for him on a personal level or whether you want to argue with a kind of libertarian case now if he just wants to live a life of poverty you could point out to him that a free society would leave him open that option and he could exercise his moral ideals to the full extent under that kind of society the question arises what if he wants to implement his particular moral ideal and force on everyone else well ultimately you have to uh... use any kind of argument you can i think what this amounts to is a moral disagreement i think you can make the claim that he's morally incorrect which is a philosophical claim if he wants to force everyone to live his particular lifestyle there is the practical problem of can you persuade him personally now that i don't know you have to sit down to you have to find out why he believes what he believes what the premises are of it if there's any sort of moral belief he has that you can get a hook into and try to show that the natural rights philosophy is better way to implement that moral premise there might be any number of ways it's very difficult to answer independent of knowing the particular person you're talking about i want to say one more thing i think it answered and that is suppose you meet somebody who says uh... you are a little green man from uh... alpha centauri and you are here trying to blow up the world and therefore i'm going to try to kill you because of that uh... presumably you deal with him by using force against him how do you describe a person like that i'm a believer in a successive series i wouldn't try to describe it how i think you want me to try to describe it i would say it was crazy i thought that's what you wanted i one of the things that very much influenced my philosophical views was about sixteen years ago losing an argument to isaab relin was arguing that there were some moral views for which you should also describe somebody's that is on very similar grounds to the grounds which would describe you with some positive views and since then my own view of moral philosophy which i am less uncomfortable with than all the other ones i've seen although not all comfortable is it has this judgments on a lot ultimately have the same sort of basis as judgements on is is uh... that the disagreement you observe is of the same sort in the two issue in the two cases therefore in that sense i guess i believe both in natural rights and in some sense in absolutism speaking uh... that is that there are true and false ethical statements well let me just follow up with george there would you go along with what david said that when you do come to the spring wall and they do try to implement it rather than just believing everybody ought to be forced to be poor uh... when it gets down to it do you use force on that my questions addressed today that if i can sort of restate your position it sounds to me like you're arguing that coercion is not a very efficient producers good that uh... most and that people aim at can be achieved uh... more effectively by using other means rather than coercion and it is true that a lot of people who use coercion do so uh... because of the ends that they're aiming at like the thief who uh... is stealing money just to live off uh... but there are people who are used to believe that who treat coercion as a consumption good there are people who lost after power uh... i would i would argue or i would at least entertain the proposition that most murderers uh... or a lot of murderers uh... don't do it because they're aiming at other ends but because they enjoy the actual act and so what i would like to ask you is uh... first of all do you believe that there are significant number of people who think of uh... coercion is a consumption good and uh... the second question is uh... how effective do you think the economic arguments would be against them my guess would be that if you somehow knew all the people who are going to commit murder in the next two years and if you pulled them now on whether murder should be illegal that a great majority of them would say yes murder should be illegal that is to say saying something is a consumption good does not mean that you value it above everything else in the world and i would guess that for most of the people who value coercion as a consumption good the cost of any plausible way of having a society in which they could commit coercion would be very much greater than the value of the good of course from the standpoint of an individual murderer a society in which he could commit murder and nobody else could might be ideal but if he is a reasonable man he will realize that it is very unlikely that he can sell that particular set of institutions to anybody else that therefore that's not one of the options and so the argument i think you could use for most of these people would be that the cost of a set of institutions in which you can coerce is first that you can also be coerced and second that the society as a whole is very much poorer therefore there are lots less of other things you want in addition to coercion now there might well be a few people who would say well that may be true but it's so important to me to be able to coerce i'm willing to take one chance and a million of being the dictator even though if i lose someone else would dictate to me and those people again you could only fight but i think that would be a rather rare case and that the normal case is the murderer who is in favor of laws against murder and even the thief who is in favor of laws against theft after all he wants to have some security in his ill-gotten property okay well let me try and make the problem just a little bit harder i think that murder and theft may be too easy cases let's take the people who i would argue for instance that most conservatives uh... when you get them down to uh... their underlying fundamental beliefs uh... believe in coercion as a consumption good uh... a lot of those people who really uh... who really are disturbed by other people engaging in drug use or sexual practices uh... that they disapprove of fall into that category but let's take the case that that george brought up there are people who are racist okay there are people who who want to live and i've met them you know and and it's very important to them to be able to live in a society where they can exclude people that they disapprove of okay uh... how would you argue with them i suspect that for most of those people it is very very important to be able to exclude people they disapprove of from their neighborhood my only nice to be able to exclude them from their city and not very important to be able to exclude them from their universe and that therefore my answer to them would be that in a libertarian society restrictive covenants will be enforced by the courts if there are any substantial number of people like you there will be lily white districts in which the developer has made it illegal to sell to any black because so your your your answer if i can paraphrase it is that the market would be the most efficient institution at providing bigot uh... racism and uh... providing racism is a funny way of putting it and i think it's i think it is a dangerous mistake to think people who hold these views are mostly holding them for altruistic reasons what i mean is the following you say you would say a conservative is against people doing certain things but then when you start listening to the arguments they use about five percent of it is there being worried about the soul of the person who's doing those things and about ninety five percent is worrying about their kids mugging me after they've been or raping my daughter after being excited by all this pornography and so forth and therefore i would guess though i may be wrong uh... that you would find that the value to them of simply keeping people from reading pornography somewhere where they can't see it in a society where you have laws well enforced so that no rapists get away with committing rape and so forth would not be very high and i think in the case of drug addiction that all you would have to do is to persuade the conservative was almost certainly true that the crime rate from drug addiction would disappear if you've legalized heroin and he would then say all right let those wicked drug addicts destroy themselves with the drugs as long as they leave me alone i think that is the typical though not the universal reaction now one further thing and that is that there is a sense in which i am willing institutionally to put this to the test because as those of you who have read my book the machinery of freedom know i argue that under an anarcho capitalist society the laws would end up reflecting the tastes and desires of the population for market reasons just like automobiles reflect tastes that an anarcho capitalist society would not be by definition libertarian that is it could in fact end up enforcing laws against drug use but that i predict that it would be libertarian because it is my prediction that there are very very few cases where the amount that the bigot is willing to spend in order to take your freedom away is a sizable fraction of the amount you are willing to spend in order to defend it we're pretty much out of time that we have enough time for the two people who were already standing up there doesn't mean what i say won't be true at the uh... original debate that went on in san diego i asked you a question that i'm going to follow up on uh... in the course of dealing with a lot of feminists and feminism is not a libertarian stronghold i come across people whose goals are very well felt out by the equally nebulous term happiness is very nebulous but equally ambiguous term justice and when i told you that justice as defined by them was egalitarianism and was egalitarianism in reference not to everyone being rich but everyone being equal irrespective of whether it was poor or richer and you asked me well in fact had they considered the economic arguments in dealing with people subsequently and asking them that question they have said that even if people were poor that in fact they want justice which is egalitarianism do you figure that there is any way at all to economically approach these people who say and it's a large i find it very predominant in a very large movement that in fact egalitarianism even if it is poor is their goal which is justice i would say the first problem is to find out whether they're lying to you because i think in facing sort of hypothetical questions a lot of us do tell lies sometimes sort of unintentionally and i'm curious is it your impression that any of these people actually believe that equality means making the poor poorer and making the rich even more poorer so to speak i think that they consider that to be that making people richer to be an optimal state however they consider that to be a secondary issue to what they consider to be justice that's not what i'm asking i'm asking are there are there any among this group who not only say if we had to choose we would choose justice over people being better off but who actually but who not only say that but who really believe they do have to choose are there any people there who actually think that their institution that their arrangements will make the people who there who are now oppressed worse off when people come up to me and give me a very systematic approach to their preferences and say this is my preference and are consistent in it and consistently show me why it's a preference i keep their word all right that's what they say all i'm saying is that and i believe it you may be right all i'm saying is one has to distinguish between the let us say the libertarian who says let right be done though the skies fall and is quite sure the skies aren't going to fall well they're doing the same version i understand and and and and the question i'm asking is is it only because they're sure the sky won't fall that they take that position you think not you think that even if some of them did believe that they would make the people they wanted to help worse off they would still be in favor of the equality point out to them the example of soviet russia which is considered by most families to be a far better society than america in terms of their ideal and you can point out to them what that is substantially poor and they will say well yes nevertheless it is just and that is not ideal i would say that would be evidence in that case i would suggest you probably better argue moral philosophy with those people we've had a lot of good questions and a lot of help from both our debaters