The road from libertarianism By Edward Feser
- Perchè nn sono più un libertario?
- Perchè il libertarismo assume la proprietà di se stessi.
- Ma x un tomistà la realizzazione del sè fa già parte del sè. Impedirla viola il principio base. Io posseggo anche il mio destino di felicità.
- Conclusione: il principio base del libertario nn implica il libertarismo
- Aristotele e Locke sono incompatibili. Legge naturale e diritti naturali sono incompatibili.
- Imho. La definizione tomistica del sè implica una teoria della felicità. Troppo ambiziosa.
- Imho. Il lib. del senso comune postula che l essenza dell io sia la libertà, nn la felicità.
- I have pretty much always been conservative. For about a decade -- from the early 90s to the early 00s -- I was also a libertarian. That is to say, I was a “fusionist”: someone who combines a conservative moral and social philosophy with a libertarian political philosophy.
- For me (and for at least many libertarians) libertarianism is merely a view about the proper bounds of state power, and not a general social, cultural, or moral philosophy.
- A libertarian could say, for example, that using cocaine for recreational purposes is morally wrong but should not be illegal.
- “Anarcho-capitalist”libertarians like David Friedman hold that at least ideally, all governmental functions should be privatized, and some (like Murray Rothbard) would even go so far as to claim that all government is per se unjust. “Minimal state”libertarians like Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand would maintain that some governmental functions (the paradigm examples being national defense, police, and courts of law) are legitimate, but would allow government to do little or nothing beyond this. Writers like F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman represent a somewhat looser form of libertarianism, willing as they are to allow that government might legitimately go a bit beyond the minimal state. (For example, Hayek allowed for a modest social safety net.) Arguments for libertarianism fall into two general categories.
- There are on the one hand what we might call pragmatic or prudential arguments either for the practical superiority...Such arguments might appeal to economic analysis,
- On the other hand there are principled or philosophical arguments to the effect that libertarian policies are more just
- To explain what happened next requires a bit of background. At the core of Nozick’s and Rothbard’s critiques of taxation, and of my own thinking about libertarianism, was the thesis of self-ownership, which holds that each of us is his or her own property,
- Now several libertarian philosophers -- such as Ayn Rand, Tibor Machan, Eric Mack at one stage of his career, and Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl --have tried to ground a libertarian conception of natural rights in Aristotelian moral theory. (A very useful survey of these arguments can be found in Fred Miller’s essay “Neo-Aristotelian Theories of Natural Rights,”
- I thought the conception of natural rights embodied in the thesis of self-ownership -- which I took to be independently plausible and which was the very heart of my own libertarianism -- fit in naturally with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) natural law approach
- I was dead wrong. There are two main problems with the idea of self-ownership -- the “self” part, and the “ownership” part.
- PRIMI DUBBI. Suppose, for example, that you and I are castaways and wash up on some tiny island upon which no human beings have ever trod. You immediately pass out on the beach, while I get to work constructing a bamboo fence whose perimeter happens entirely to enclose your body. Upon waking, you accuse me of imprisoning you and thereby violating your self-ownership rights, and demand to be released. Suppose I then respond as follows: “I have not imprisoned you at all! I’ve simply homesteaded all the land around you -- which you had no right to, since it was virgin territory -- and I’ve built a fence around it, to make sure you don’t come onto my land...that’s not my fault. That’s just your bad luck, sorry. I suppose it would be nice of me to give you some of mine, but at most I’d be unkind rather than unjust if I decide not to do so...I do respect your right of self-ownership, after all!”... io posseggo milto di più del mio corpo materiale...by doing so I have, you might say, respected the letter but not the spirit of the thesis of self-ownership.
- it is a point that any Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theorist has to take very seriously, for two reasons....many of our powers are inherently world-interactive.
- A-T theorists who are open to the idea of natural rights, those rights have themselves a teleological foundation. We have the natural rights we have precisely as a means of safeguarding our ability to flourish as the kinds of beings we are,
- For among our powers and capacities are various moral capacities. And for the Aristotelian, our moral character is initially formed as a matter of acquiring the right habits, in childhood,... To cause a child to fall into bad moral habits is therefore to damage the distinctively moral powers he owns by virtue of being a self-owner.... But that in turn seemed to entail that at least in principle, certain governmental measures to protect children from moral corruption could be justified on self-ownership grounds!
- If you think that public “hate speech” corrupts the youth, then you have grounds in self-ownership for curbing public hate speech by law....That was the main point -- that the thesis of self-ownership on its own simply doesn’t rule out nearly as much as people think it does.
- For what exactly is this “self”to which the thesis makes reference? As I argued in my Social Philosophy and Policy article “Personal Identity and Self-Ownership,”no matter what answer we give -- a Cartesian answer, or a materialist answer of some sort, or a Lockean answer, or an Aristotelian-Thomistic answer -- we will be left with an interpretation of the thesis of self-ownership that has implications most libertarians would be uncomfortable with.
- I thought more carefully about John Locke, who was a defender of the thesis of self-ownership but also someone who denied that our rights were so absolute that we could have a right to commit suicide or to sell ourselves into slavery.
- But then, how absolute should we take property rights to be, and why? That depends on your theory of rights.
- You have to look to the underlying theory of rights to find out -- in which case the thesis of self-ownership isn’t doing a whole lot of work. In my own case, the underlying theory was an A-T natural law theory.
- The point is rather that from A-T natural law theory, there is no way you are going to get the absolute right of self-ownership
- Since Catholic social teaching is grounded in natural law, it is no surprise that I also came to conclude that libertarianism could not be made consistent with that teaching either.
