Re: What to call "Econ-Libertarians"?
Daniel C. Burton (dburton@.berkeley.edu)
22 Oct 1997 04:43:13 GMT
Seth David Schoen <schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
: 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.
A good word for this that I learned in my Polticial Science class is
"deontologist" (from the school of thought called "deontology"). That is
someone who believes that actions should be bound by a certain set of
rules rather than their ultimate consequences. The classic example of a
deontologist doctrine is the Biblical Ten Commandments.
: 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!
On the contrary, it would seem to me that anyone who took the time to
examine the ultimate consequences of government intervention would find
that it invariably steps beyond its original intentions, and ultimately
cannot be restrained to do only what is good for the country and not what
isn't. This is one of the reasons that, even though I think some
government interventions into the economy would be beneficial, I am
nevertheless against them. (Not the only reason -- I try to balance all
the various angles of analysis of issues that I can)
If you look at Harry Browne's book _Why Government Doesn't Work_, almost
all of the arguments presented are consequentialist.