More Libertarian than Anarchy?

“A just society is one where people’s natural rights are respected, and for this reason it requires the consent of those who are subject to any laws that go beyond enforcing protections for people’s natural rights. Without people’s consent, a law or political order is unjust.”—Jessica Flanagan (Politics and Anarchist Ideals)

I have been following, although not closely, the C4SS debates on anarchism and democracy. Although I am sympathetic to the anarchist critique of democracy and understand their objections, I really disagree with their conclusion. The reality is that the conclusion you reach will depend on two things. First, it will depend on your hierarchy of values. Second, it will depend upon your understanding of facts and definitions.

Anarchists tend to place negative liberty towards the top of their hierarchy of values. At the same time, they tend to exclude positive liberty to some extent. I do not mean to suggest that anarchists don't care about positive liberty. They certainly do, but they tend to place it on a lower rung of the ladder of values. Thus, according to anarchists, law ought to be restricted to the protection of natural rights unless the person against whom the positive law will be imposed has explicitly consented.

Furthermore, the concept of “natural rights” is understood by anarchists primarily as entailing non-invasion, non-aggression, and non-coercion. Negative liberty, then, appears to anarchists to be the core of natural rights. Imposition of force, or coercion, is the primary evil. There may be exceptions, but they are not the norm.

A deeper look at the concept of “natural rights” and relevant facts related thereto makes it less clear that the concept actually implies a rigid veneration of negative liberty. There must be a more nuanced balance of positive and negative liberty.

Negative liberty is freedom from external coercion. Positive liberty is the freedom to act. After the abolition of slavery, the freed slave theoretically acquired negative liberty, but that liberty was entirely useless without positive liberty as its corollary. If you free a slave, but the former slave-owner owns all the land and food, then the slave is basically coerced by external forces (although not directly coerced by the former slave-owner), because matters beyond his control will force him to continue to work for the former slave-owner.

As a former anarchist myself, and someone who still identifies as a dialectical libertarian, as all genuine anarchists do (although they might not be familiar with the term), I recognize that anarchists are quite familiar with these concepts. However, I think that a dialectical approach will lead to some sort of “anarchism” that is virtually another variety of democratic socialism. In fact, certain “anarchists, ” like Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, and David Graeber, occupy a grey area between democratic socialism and anarchism.

What are natural rights? I would say that the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are a decent start. Since I have dealt with this topic elsewhere, I will skip over some of the nuance and analysis of the significance of this phrase just to make a few brief observations. Firstly, life is of greater importance than liberty, insofar as liberty is rendered null by its absence. And, further, I would argue that rights are natural only insofar as they are determined by a certain set of values that is natural to humans as members of the species with a shared human nature. We value, first and foremost, well-being. We value this greater than anything else. If we are deprived of well-being and are forced to live a life of constant suffering, we may turn to suicide in order to escape. This shows that life itself is not necessarily the highest value. If we cannot have well-being, some sort of comfort and happiness, then life itself lacks value. We are also willing to sacrifice some degree of liberty for things that ensure our well-being. For instance, I may submit to the will of an employer, sacrificing my liberty somewhat, in order to gain wages that provide me with food, shelter, and some amount of leisure. These things that increase my well-being, then, are valued greater than absolute negative liberty. While the wage labor arrangement limits my negative liberty, it increases my positive liberty, so that I end up being more free than I would be without wages. This is, by the way, no defense of wage slavery. A wage slave is more free than a beggar or a pauper without food and shelter. That does not mean that the arrangement is the best possible arrangement; it merely means that it is not the worst possible situation.

I can also conceive of circumstances in which a violation of consent would be the preferred course of action. If someone is about to be hit by a bus and doesn't realize it, I may forcefully push them out of the way without their consent. This violation of their negative liberty is perfectly acceptable. And the reason why this is acceptable is because negative liberty is only one value among many in a hierarchy of competing values. If a certain act that violates the principle of consent increases that non-consenting person's chances of living a better life, then it may be acceptable to coerce them. This is so much the case that we would generally not refer to such instances of coercion as “coercion” at all.

All of this seems to suggest that perhaps a governmental arrangement wherein everyone is provided with a basic income, health insurance, and protection from and insurance against crime might actually be preferable to a stateless society based on perfect negative liberty and absolute consent. At the same time, negative liberty and consent are still among the values in our hierarchy of values, even though they are not at the top, so our ideal social order ought to be libertarian and democratic as much as it possibly can be without reducing the satisfaction of higher order values like well-being and security.

Whenever a person can be allowed to act freely without that freedom entailing an infringement on another person’s liberty or a significant social reduction of the satisfaction of higher order values, then they ought to be free to do what they want. This means that we ought to have a much freer society. At the same time, rules should be determined in a way that approaches consensus or the consent of the governed as much as possible. Democracy is the only means available for doing that. If we attempt to go the anarchist route of pure consensus and/or free association, then we would have to sacrifice all of the positive liberty entailed in welfare measures like universal basic income, universal health insurance, and such. Thus, an anarchist social order might conceivably be less libertarian than some types of social democracy or democratic socialism.

Furthermore, taxation and redistribution of wealth, insofar as they can increase social well-being (by which I mean the well-being of the individuals within society) are not necessarily unjust. The injustice is in the current way that taxation and redistribution are done. If progressive taxation is used to fund a universal basic income, universal health insurance, along with other things that ultimately increase the well-being of everyone, then perhaps something like a State can be justified. I think a just social order would be very different from the existing one, and it would also be more like an anarchist society than it would be like any existing form of government, but it would still have certain characteristics of the State that would make it less than a pure anarchist society. The ideal social order that we ought to strive for would be a libertarian social democracy.