Libertarianism in its classical form is a radical doctrine. At its core is a belief in strong, virtually absolute property rights for individuals and the absence of enforceable duties to help others, based on some doctrine of self-ownership. Libertarianism also has radical implications. It would entail that large amounts of the activities of the modern state are unjust, in particular any type of social redistribution. Indeed, libertarianism arguably requires us to be anarchists of some kind, and abandon states altogether. (I’m dealing with one strand of libertarianism here, deontological “right”-libertarianism.)
The radicalism of the libertarian project should give you pause if you’re a libertarian. It is a minority position both in the academy, and across the history of political thought. Many thoughtful, clever intellectuals have offered serious objections to libertarianism from both moral and economic perspectives. Furthermore, there have been no real-life implementations of libertarianism, so any belief in libertarianism must rely on lots of empirical stipulations and unreliable guesswork about the real-life nature of such societies. Moreover, from many competing moral views a libertarian society would not merely be a mistake, but a moral disaster, insofar as a such a society would not fulfil crucial duties of justice, e.g., of social redistribution.
So here’s the central question: what type of political society should you advocate if you’re a libertarian who enjoys significant, heavy doubts about whether libertarianism is true? (To be clear, I’m in the opposite position—I consider myself a liberal who enjoys doubts that libertarianism might be true.) An intuitive answer is that you should hedge your bets as a libertarian. Irrelevant of any possible reasons internal to libertarianism to advocate a social welfare net (some have been offered in the literature), you have reasons to favour a minimal safety net supported by forcible taxation because you might be catastrophically wrong in your belief that libertarianism is right.
The same line of argument applies mutatis mutandis to virtually all utopian, radical political theories. All, I suspect, have serious reasons to morally safe-guard their own implementation—that is, to make practical accommodations for the possibility that their theory is wrong. If you’re a socialist, for example, who wishes to radically abandon all kinds of property rights, it should give you pause that most competing views allow for at least a moderate version of such rights, and who see their abandonment as an injustice. But I’ll limit my discussion here to libertarianism specifically.
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