Re: What to call "Econ-Libertarians"?
Seth David Schoen (schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU)
22 Oct 1997 01:28:54 GMT
Robin Hanson writes:
>"Consequential libertarians" would be broader still, describing people who
>like the consquences of liberty. "Utili-'" bothers me because I'm not clear
>that everyone who uses it means to evaluate consequences from the point of
>view of the people effected. "Subjective Utili-" would be clearer, but is
>a bit ponderous.
I think "consequential" or "consequentialist" captures it well. You could
then contrast this with a "nonconsequentalist" or an "intrinsicist" or a
"rightist" libertarian (in the sense of "of or pertaining to rights", not
in the sense of "of or pertaining to the right"). I'd say "per se
libertarian", but people don't like using "per se" as an adjective that way.
Either "non per-se libertarian" or "optimalist libertarian" would then work
for an econo-libertarian, but nobody would have any idea what these meant.
Really, I guess you want to convey the idea of using liberty to achieve
other things, but the clear Latin name for that idea, "utilitarian", went and
got itself a specific technical meaning in philosophy. :-(
I (a nonconsequentialist style libertarian) have long believed (perhaps from
too much conventional wisdom) that thorough, honest consequentialists would
never be libertarians, and I'm trying to write an article about this. On the
other hand, maybe some of your research in economics is helping to disprove
this conventional wisdom!
--
Seth David Schoen L&S '01 (undeclared) / schoen@uclink4.berkeley.edu
Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo
custodi huius urbis, gratia, quod hanc tam taetram, tam horribilem tamque
infestam rei publicae pestem totiens iam effugimus. -- Cicero, in Catilinam I