Talking about libertarianism...

Ok. Thirty minutes to write my first post, and fifteen to write this lines... when it comes to politics, my inspiration works better.

Recently, I have been busy thinking about several articles which appeared on TCS Daily in 2004. The articles had been brought to my attention by a fellow italian blogger during a discussion about libertarianism and modern liberalism (I mean: rawlsian gulag-less socialism). I don't plan to enter the discussion, for three reasons: I'm only a blogger, I just arrived, and probably I'm also a little bit late...

Anyway, these are the links...

Edward Feser's "The trouble with libertarianism";

Will Wilkinson's "Undestanding political libertarianism";

Edward Feser's "The mith of libertarian neutrality".

Feser original theses were that there is no common core among the thoughts of different libertarian thinkers, and that libertarianism is not morally neutral.

The first thesis can be discarded easily: the author focuses on the unrealistic argument that homosexual marriage may be illegittimate in a libertarian social order (for Feser, natural law libertarian theorists should be against badly assorted family-like institutions: a real libertarian would have said "Is it coercion? No. So it is legitimate!") and on the insolvable problem of abortion (where the human/non-human nature of foetuses is in discussion, so that libertarians tend to keep discussing with no apparent convergence... even though it is unlikely that in a libertarian social order an abortion prohibition would be enforced, or enforceable). Besides, the absence of a common core cannot be derived by the mere fact that there is discussion...

The second thesis is more interesting. My opinion is that Feser and Wilkinson have talked, but they haven't communicated: if by "neutrality" we mean that libertarianism is wertfrei (value-free), as Feser seems to argue, libertarianism is not neutral, and no political ideology can; if we mean that libertarianism limits the use of coercion to defend individuals against aggressions... well, this is so obviously true that it would be difficult to find reasons for discussions...

Libertarianism is not wertfrei: juridical norms are not less normative than ethical judgements. The use of force (which is what law is about) is not less a judgment of value than ethical and aesthetical principles...

But libertarianism does not put any limitations neither on individual aims, nor on the use of individual means... the only judgment of values are about the use of coercion against other people. While it is not possible to state that this position is value-free, it is evident that it is much more decentralized, anti-autorithative, nomocratic (rather than teleocratic) than every form of socialism... marxian, rawlsian and the like.

Enough?