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Is a Free Society a Multiple Paradigm Ideal?

By Edward W. Younkins

August 13, 2024

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There are various perspectives or frameworks that advocate liberty as the fundamental political norm. These can be viewed as potential paradigms1 that differ with respect to their methodologies and their degrees of persuasiveness regarding the justification of why a free society is best. This essay will begin with a brief presentation of the desired characteristics of a free (or libertarian) society and a listing of several potential candidates for a paradigm of such a society. Six potential candidates for paradigm status will then be presented. We will conclude with consideration of the possible desirability of a multiple paradigm view that may provide a more comprehensive view of the ideal of a free society—ideal in the sense of what principles would apply to a good but attainable society in reality.

 

A Free Society

A free (or libertarian) society can be viewed as a radical reformulation and extension of classical liberalism.

A free (or libertarian) society can be viewed as a radical reformulation and extension of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism accepts some infringements of freedom for public goods such as national defense, infrastructure, and some redistribution of wealth, and supports separation of powers, checks and balances, and representative government to prevent the centralization of power and tyranny. Classical liberalism also tends to be empiricist and pluralistic regarding its approach to morals. Proponents of a free society tend to view government as inherently coercive and therefore argue for an even smaller government (or for no government at all). Libertarians reject the idea of a welfare state and advocate for voluntary charity and free-market solutions to address such issues. Whereas classical liberals accept a small state and agree to some coercive measures and minor infringements on liberty, libertarians espouse staunch commitments to non-aggression and to several key principles. David Boaz (2015) proposed the following principles that libertarians are apt to hold as moral absolutes: (1) individualism, (2) individual rights, (3) spontaneous order, (4) rule of law, (5) limited government, (6) free markets, (7) the virtue of production, (8) natural harmony of interests, and (9) peace. More recently Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi (2023) added (10) private property, (11) skepticism of (political) authority, and (12) negative liberty to the list. Among the philosophical themes or potential paradigms underpinning libertarianism (or what I prefer to call a free society) Eric Mack (2018) identified: (1) the natural rights theme, (2) the cooperation to mutual advantage theme, and (3) the utilitarian theme. I have added three more potential paradigms to this list: (4) left-libertarianism, (5) anarcho-capitalism, and (6) neo-Aristotelian eudaimonism. As we will see, the free society perspective has no one dominant and dogmatic worldview. We will also discover that these camps are not always clear cut as they sometimes overlap and are not all of the same type.

 

The Natural Rights Perspective

Mack views John Locke as the archetypal natural rights theorist.

Under the natural rights perspective, each individual’s natural moral rights must be respected by every other person, group, or institution. Mack views John Locke as the archetypal natural rights theorist. Locke argued that people have natural rights prior to the existence of government and that the rational purpose of government is the protection of individual rights. Locke’s state of nature includes moral elements. He saw a divinely created universe in which people are born free, independent, and equal in the state of nature. Each person owns himself, and society and government are founded when a social contract is entered into. Each person pursues his own happiness, everyone has the same moral standing, and no one should harm another with respect to life, liberty, or possessions.

In Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism individual rights are a moral concept that stems from human nature (and ethical egoism) because freedom is necessary to survive and flourish as a rational human being.

Mack includes the 21st century philosopher, Robert Nozick, under the natural rights perspective. However, Nozick can be viewed as a promoter of basic rights but not necessarily of natural rights. Nozick does endorse the Kantian principle that individuals are ends in themselves and ought not to be treated as mere means. His theory of rights is based on the separateness of persons and on a deontological appeal based on intuition. He suggests reasons for rights but does not provide a justification for rights. He simply assumes the existence of rights and does not try to derive them from the nature of man and the world. Nozick’s ethics of respect is derived from individual rights and condemns using others as means. He switched attention away from the justification of a free society based on the allocative efficiency of the free market and toward a non-utilitarian consideration of the violence that state intervention does to a postulated set of individual rights. He claimed that the state can be justified without recourse to consequential considerations.

In Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism individual rights are a moral concept that stems from human nature (and ethical egoism) because freedom is necessary to survive and flourish as a rational human being. Unlike in Objectivism, in their Individualistic Perfectionism, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl view natural rights as metanormative principles that secure the possibility of self-direction and thus the possibility of moral conduct and human flourishing in a social context. Another contemporary advocate of natural rights is Murray Rothbard whose absolute property rights are based on natural law ethics, the non-aggression principle, the right of self-defense, and anarchistic individualism. He views rights as essential to a liberal social order. A zero-state economist, he sees the state as a vehicle for institutionalized crime.

 

The Cooperation to Mutual Advantage Perspective

This perspective holds that general compliance with principles of justice fosters a cooperative social and economic order that is to the advantage of its members. David Hume’s skepticism and anti-rationalism are a source of contemporary cooperation to mutual advantage theory as well as to consequentialist and utilitarian theory. Holding that the laws of nature are to the benefit of all, Hume calls for extensive protection of both personal and economic freedom. Declaring that essentially selfish individuals lack a natural desire to adhere to the principles of justice, he views these principles as being regulatory by nature. These are obligatory laws that permit people to live well together. Private property, transferring property through mutual consent, and the obligation to keep voluntary agreements are to the wellbeing of all. Both Adam Smith and the contemporary economist, Thomas Sowell, agree with Hume that the justification of a free but constrained society lies in the fact that it serves a social order via social expediency and incentives in the form of rewards and punishments.

In The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek constructs a largely anti-rationalist and cooperation to mutual advantage theory of a free society.

In The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek constructs a largely anti-rationalist and cooperation to mutual advantage theory of a free society. He focuses on the ideas of political economy and justice, rather than on rights. Then, when he writes about rules of just conduct in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, he displays an implicitly rule consequentialist tone and upholds an indirect utilitarian justification while also providing a mutual advantage argument for compliance with the rules. Hayek’s ideas thus can be said to fit into two of Mack’s three proposed themes.

Some renderings of the mutual advantage approach are framed in contractarian terminology. For example, Loren Lomasky’s Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community offers a Humean contractarian defense of moral rights. Lomasky argues for an egoistic rational choice framework because it is rational to adopt a framework of negative individual rights, His Humean theory emphasizes the importance of people being project pursuers. They are partial to the achievement of their personal wellbeing through the pursuit and fulfillment of their life-constituting projects. Lomasky rejects utilitarian argumentation in favor of the prudential rationality of partiality. However, he also claims that individuals have a basic right to a minimum level of assistance. Another contractarian libertarian, James M. Buchanan, favors a positivist political economy and offers a subjectivist rejection of traditional natural law and natural rights. Buchanan, like Jan Narveson, relies on contractarian reasoning in which a libertarian political order would emerge from self-interested agreements for mutual advantage. Buchanan observes that politicians and government bureaucrats experience the same flaws, partiality, and self-interestedness as ordinary human beings.

 

The Utilitarian Perspective

Mack’s third theme is a type of utilitarianism that contends that the greatest happiness must be pursued indirectly via unwavering compliance with particular moral norms. John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism is one of the consequential defenses that Mack discusses. Mill holds that rights must be protected at all times. Mack also considers Herbert Spencer’s greatest happiness principle and law of equal freedom. Skeptical that anyone can know what actions will produce the greatest happiness, he focuses on the general principle called the law of equal freedom which declares that a person’s freedom is restrained only by the equal freedom of others. Utilitarians are dismissive of the pretenses of natural law theorists and place heavy emphasis on the maximization of some social good. Many utilitarians advocate the maximization of aggregate happiness that permits losses for some persons to be offset by gains for other individuals. Rule consequentialists argue that social welfare is optimized by adopting libertarian principles. Compliance with certain constraining moral norms is much the same as the constraining norms advocated by the natural rights and mutual advantage approaches. Utilitarians have been criticized for their failure to take seriously the “separation of persons” as they emphasize benefit to society.

Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises’s views on the desirability of a free society are generally consequentialist, but his rationale is constructed from the epistemology of the regularities of the human mind and the axiom of human action. His utilitarianism as social cooperation is a priori by nature. He deduces the idea that individuals cooperate because work performed under the division of labor is more productive than work done in isolation. Mises views society as the cooperation of individuals, a product of conscious and purposeful behavior. The gains that a free society of social cooperation provides is the basis of its origin, preferability, and persistence of existence. Any interference with the free market is interference with the freedom of human choice and action. Actions, institutions, and laws are correct if they sustain social cooperation, which is a precondition of the flourishing and happiness of individuals within society. According to Mises, a free society requires an institutional framework that identifies and protects individual rights.

Milton Friedman and the Chicago School attempt to demonstrate the superiority of a free society on purely empirical grounds. They attack the errors of statism and the preferability of a free market with very little philosophical discussion with respect to the ethical basis of a free society. They rely on detailed empirical analysis, skepticism, subjectivism, falsificationism, instrumentalism, and the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Friedman’s rule-consequentialism leads him to support private property, freedom to contract, and a constitutionally constrained state.

Then we have David Schmidtz’s pluralist, indirect, rule-consequentialist, utilitarian, libertarian-leaning doctrine that combines four distinct, non-reducible, elements of justice—desert, reciprocity, equality, and need. Unlike ideal theories, his contextual theory of justice is clearly not dominated by a sole, primary, normative factor as Schmidtz views justice as a constellation of somewhat related elements. Jason Brennan is another contemporary proponent of moral pluralism, the idea that morality does not reduce to a unitary good, value, or set of rules.

 

The Left-Libertarian Perspective

Some Bleeding Heart Libertarians would not endorse the left libertarian view that natural resources are owned in common.

Left-Libertarians advocate rights but are concerned with how much individuals can claim with respect to unowned natural resources such as land, water, air, minerals, and so forth. Concerned with distributive justice, they maintain that unappropriated natural resources belong to all persons in some egalitarian fashion. They view the current distribution of such property as unethical and illegitimate because it is based on the frequent and continual historical failures to respect those property rights. Because current property arrangements are unjustified, they call for the individuals who claim rights over natural resources to rectify the situation by making payment to others for the value of these rights. As part of their normative and deontological dedication to justice, they regard state intervention on behalf of certain individuals as the major cause of the economic conditions in society. Despite endorsing rights of self-ownership, they advocate an egalitarian distribution with regard to the division of natural resources. In addition, they emphasize social issues and the potential benefit of the government with respect to racism, feminism, civil rights, organized labor, structural inequality, sexual freedom, democratic legitimacy, the moral value of equality, the potential need for a limited form of redistributive welfare state, and other liberal causes and projects. Many left-libertarians currently call themselves Bleeding Heart Libertarians. However, it should be noted that some Bleeding-Heart Libertarians would not endorse the left libertarian view that natural resources are owned in common. In addition, there can be an overlap and rapport between Bleeding Heart Libertarians and left-wing market anarcho-capitalists.

One exemplar of the left-libertarian perspective and proponent of the deontic character of moral rights, Hillel Steiner, cites the need for redress payments to be made from the parents of better genetically endowed children to the parents of those children who are less well-endowed. He thus cites the obligation to redistribute wealth through a global fund and therefore the need for a limited form of redistributive welfare state.

 

The Anarcho-Capitalist Perspective

Anarcho-capitalists contend that they take the argument of classical liberalism to its logical conclusion and recommend abolition of the state. They either axiomatically assume the inefficiency and/or immorality of all state action, derive that notion from individual rights, rely on ethical intuitionism, or develop that conclusion from the concept of moral parity that says that state agents cannot have a right to act in ways that regular people are not permitted to act. They are highly skeptical of state legitimacy and political authority and argue that there is no moral duty to obey state laws. A number of anarcho-capitalists offer detailed but radical accounts of how a just, stateless society could provide justice and public goods. A private property system would still exist and would be enforced by private defense agencies and/or insurance companies. These agencies would operate in a competitive market and fill the roles of the police and the courts. Advocates of anarchism or anarcho-capitalism include the 19th century thinkers, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker, and the much more recent Murray Rothbard.

 

The Neo-Aristotelian Eudaimonist Perspective

Neo-Aristotelian eudaimonists view the moral life as the flourishing of the individual in terms of perfecting one’s nature thereby attaining a state of eudaimonia. It follows that it is essential to live within a society in which each person’s freedom, negative individual rights, and possibility for individual human flourishing are protected. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl’s Individualistic Perfectionism are examples of this worldview. Whereas Rand viewed rights as normative, Rasmussen and Den Uyl maintain that they are metanormative principles that are necessary for individual moral normativity to operate within a social context. They argue that individual rights to negative liberty make each person’s potential flourishing compossible with the flourishing of others. Human flourishing involves the exercise of one’s practical wisdom in the actualization of one’s human nature. It follows that self-direction is integral to the pursuit of one’s personal flourishing. David L. Norton, Henry B. Veatch, Tibor R. Machan, Fred D. Miller, and Lester Hunt can also be considered to be neo-Aristotelian eudaimonists. Of the six potential paradigms presented in this essay, this is the one that I prefer because I believe it to be foundational and the soul of the ideal of a free society. A free society is the consequence of the natural order of liberty which is based on the ethic of individual flourishing. An Aristotelian self-perfectionist approach to ethics complements the natural right to liberty and together they provide a solid foundation for a free society.

 

Multiparadigm Perspectives

As we have seen, there are differences with respect to the justification of the moral requirement that each individual’s liberty be respected. The variety of foundations that have been advocated have deep origins in the history of political and economic thought. There is not just one doctrine in support of a free or libertarian society but there is a conversation in which many views compete for a hearing. As a result, we may have a multiple paradigm subject with each of several paradigms competing for dominance within that area. Despite this, it is important to understand that no matter how much the perspectives differ in approach and methodology, they converge with respect to the establishment of a free society that is concerned with the control of aggression and the keeping of promises.

There are a number of valuable, but nonetheless incomplete, views that make a case for a free society. However, it may be that the use of any single potential paradigm may produce a too narrow or fragmented perspective to reflect the multifaceted nature of reality. Lacking a sole overarching paradigm, each of several perspectives may yield fresh insights to produce a more comprehensive and encompassing view of the ideal of a free society.

However, one of the consequences of a multiple paradigm approach is a potentially unmanageable proliferation of perspectives. Too many viewpoints would turn the concept of paradigm into a useless tool. Of course, this depends on whether an integration of those viewpoints is possible. Although there are a variety of potential moral foundations that scholars can draw upon for their central moral claim that violations of liberty of liberty-respecting individuals are morally criminal, care must be taken to not mistake mere partial theories for paradigms. Not all knowledge claims are equally valid. After the application of scholarly standards has rejected many potential paradigms, a number of acceptable ones may remain. The true test of a paradigm is whether its inclusion provides a better understanding of the justification of a society in which people refrain from infringing on the freedom of others and cannot be coerced to serve the good of other members.

There tend to be ill-defined boundaries between worldviews making it difficult, if not impossible, to establish where one paradigm leaves off and another one begins. For example, in our discussion of the various potential paradigms we have seen where the ideas of a given scholar can be classified under more than one worldview.

Although there is one reality (or truth), there are a variety of complementary and ostensibly competing theoretical paths to it. Because of the nature of reality, lines between one paradigm and another are blurred and permeable. It also follows that there may be commonalities among worldviews. Knowledge gained from one perspective may be seen to coincide with knowledge obtained from other perspectives. It should not be surprising if we find conjunctions across paradigms because explanations of various types of phenomena existing within the same universe should be connected and consistent with one another.

It follows that a pluralistic, multiple-perspective view may provide a more comprehensive picture and more complete knowledge. Such a view implies the type of methodology employed in Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s dialectical libertarianism which attempts to grasp the full context and to understand the whole through differential vantage points and levels of generality. This approach advocates shifting viewpoints in order to illuminate different aspects and then combining the various perspectives in the full context of what is being studied. Calling for an open system realistic approach to the study of a free society would combine perspectives, promote critical exchange, mutual engagement, pluralism, and toleration.

Synthesists are needed to build links and collaborative unity. There is a need for scholars who would intensify and increase the number of interactions among paradigms, to build upon one another’s work, to cross-fertilize ideas, and to work toward the integration and unity of intellectual frameworks

 

Note

1 A paradigm is a model, symbolic representation, or fundamental image of the subject matter of reality, or some aspect of reality. It is a tool of the intellect that enables people to survive and prosper. A paradigm that parallels and reflects reality helps a person to understand and function in the world. Of course, reality is senior to any paradigm. A paradigm can only approximate reality and needs to be checked against reality. It is impossible to legislate reality. A paradigm should not be reified—it is only a means of organizing knowledge.

A paradigm subsumes, defines, and interrelates theories, methods, and exemplars that exist within it. An exemplar is a piece or body of work that serves as a model for those who work within the paradigm. It is a concrete academic or scholarly achievement which orders or guides research and stands as a standard for future work. Constructing a set of ideas about real-world objects, events, and occurrences could serve as a paradigm for a realistic political and economic system.

 

Recommended Reading

Barry, Norman P. 1987. On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism. New York: St. Martins’s Press.

Boaz, David. 2015. The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Doherty, Brian. 2007. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement. New York: Public Affairs.

Machan, Tibor R. 2006. Libertarianism Defended. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Mack, Eric. 2018. Libertarianism. Cambridge: Polity Books.

Powell, Aaron Ross and Grant Babcock (eds.). 2017. Arguments for Liberty.  Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.

Younkins, Edward W. 2008. Champions of a Free Society: Ideas of Capitalism’s Philosophers and Economists. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Zwolinski, Matt and John Tomasi. 2023. The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

 

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