Why Liberal Libertarians Avoid Social Liberalism

Last week I wrote about how liberals, by focusing exclusively on institutional and value neutrality, cede conversations about ethics to illiberals, and particularly illiberals on the right, with the result that people looking for ethical talk about how to live meaningful lives (e.g., young men) end up finding meaning in reactionary ideologies.

Today I want to offer a hypothesis pointing to why this is—and particularly why libertarians, who often position themselves as the radical wing of liberalism, are so hesitant to talk about liberal values (and virtues) in the cultural and social spheres. Among liberals, this takes the form of a cold neutrality: institutions set base rules that apply to all, but must not make claims about, for instance, the nature of the good life, or the values and perspectives conducive to it. Among libertarians, this takes the form of a focus on the state, and a disinterest (or at least silence) about anything outside of it: the only matter of ethical concern is when it’s permissible to apply coercive force, and so if the application of coercive force isn’t at issue, libertarianism (and, so, libertarians) must say nothing at all.

I think both positions are mistaken. To believe in liberal institutions is to believe that liberal institutions are moral and good, and that means having reasons why they are moral and claims about what it is about a society governed by liberal institutions that is good compared to the alternatives. And those are values claims, and they’re calls for a perspective that asks us to notice the kinds of harm illiberal institutions and societies inflict. Similarly, to believe that coercion is impermissible is to have values pointing to its impermissibility. And those values, if genuinely held and consistently applied, will lead to other conclusions about social behaviors, and our relations to others. You can’t reduce morality to only the question of justified state action, because morality (and ethics) is bigger than the state. And you can’t ignore the bulk ethical questions as they arise in our lives without taking a position that you don’t care about ethics. Which would be unethical.

Ethics Talk as a Doorway to State Control

Thus my theory about why radical liberals and particularly libertarians are so hesitant to talk about social and cultural ethics, or to make claims about the nature and constituent parts of the good life. The first reason picks up where the prior paragraph ended: Libertarians are worried, and with some good reason, that if they do say, “This way of living, or this set of values or preferences, is better than that one,” they’re opening the door to, “And that means the state should intervene.” I say, “with some good reason” because the political conversation is filled with unreflective calls for “Because X is good, the state should mandate X” or “Because Y is bad, the state should prohibit Y.” Libertarians hesitate to open that door by engaging in ethical talk. The urge to wield state power is strong, and we needn’t give people more excuses than they already have.

The trouble with this line of thinking is that it only works in a vacuum. As I argued last week, if you don’t talk about ethics yourself, people who want to hear ethics talk will turn to someone who does. Most people don’t think about politics through the lens of institutions and their rules. They think about politics through the lens of their daily life and the social sphere in which they live it. They want to feel good about the world and their place in it, and want to hear from people discussing the social, cultural, and personal, and giving advice on how to improve them all. By not talking about liberal virtues and liberal perspectives, liberals are leaving it to others to talk about them instead, and that means people who want life advice are turning to illiberals, including social and cultural conservatives, who aren’t just turning them away from liberalism, but offering them values and perspectives that result in greater personal—and social—suffering.

Refusing to talk about ethics also risks (or has already led to, depending on your assessment of the current moment) the collapse of liberalism as a political project. If liberalism loses because liberals wouldn’t take stands on the issues people care about, then society won’t just become a place of illiberal values. It will become a place of illiberal institutions. In other words, neutrality is self-defeating, because ethical neutrality doesn’t allow for vigorous defense of the very values necessary for neutral institutions of the kinds liberals care about to persist. Politics is downstream of ethics, and so liberals must defend liberal ethics, including liberal social and cultural ethics.

Liberal Virtues Challenge Social Conservative Preferences

The second reason libertarians have hesitated to talk about the liberal virtues as an ethical perspective beyond the narrow question of state action is because, for most of the 20th century, libertarians pursued a strategy known as “fusionism,” which saw the libertarian movement consciously, and as a strategic gambit, embedding itself within the political right. As a strategic gambit, fusionism was a mistake. It didn’t result in more liberty, but it did result in a deradicalized libertarianism, and one too often willing to give up libertarian aims in service of right-wing alliances. There was always an incoherence to fusionism, at the philosophical and ideological level, because social (as opposed to personal) conservatism and radical libertarianism are ultimately incompatible. Political liberalism necessarily entails social freedom, and so opposition to social freedom (and the lifestyle and personal identity diversity and dynamism it entails) must eventually lead to opposing political liberalism.

That creates a problem if you’ve embedded yourself among the political right who, by and large, are socially and culturally conservative. To talk about liberal virtues is, thus, to talk about why they are better than reactionary virtues—and that means upsetting reactionary friends. To talk about radical freedom, not just in terms of the absence of state coercion, but in terms of the varieties of behavior and experience and meaning that result from that absence of coercion, is to critique, implicitly or explicitly, the social structures, hierarchies, patterns, and status distributions that were forged or maintained through the wielding of state power. If the liberal virtues are correct, then the good life is found in a perspective of equal dignity and equal respect, including for historically marginalized or oppressed groups and peaceful forms of self-identity. And that means the good life is not found in marginalization, hate, domination, bigotry, the othering of the disfavored, or the demand that historical hierarchies of status and privilege be maintained.

This is, for a great many people, an appealing message. We all want to find meaning, we all recognize that each of us is different and so will find it differently, and most of us appreciate that it is unethical to force a conception of meaning on those who would prefer another. The liberal virtues don’t say, “You’re on your own, come up with your sense of self and your place in the world from scratch.” That’s not an appealing message, because it’s frankly kind of scary. It’s definitely demanding. Instead, the liberal virtues say, “Social institutions, from culture to family to religion and on and on, give you plenty of starting points, and the ones you default to based on circumstance might be the right ones, but you needn’t feel locked in, and you needed stay in an identity or community if it makes you miserable.” That’s much less demanding, much less scary, but still much more appealing to most people than, “The accident of birth compels you to be this, and nothing more.”

Similarly, the liberal virtues critique of conservative preferences isn’t “Give up your conservative preferences.” Rather, it’s to convert social conservatism (a demand that society and the people in it conform to your preferences) to personal conservatism (the choice to live your own life according to your conservative values, while accepting that others might choose to live their lives differently). Taken a step further, the liberal virtues, and a liberal system of ethics, counsel finding joy not just in your own ability to carve out the life that’s best for you, but in the fact that others can do the same for themselves. That perspective isn’t just the right one in terms of treating others as moral equals whose happiness matters as much as your own, but is ethical in the sense of leading to your own happiness and flourishing as well.

But to make this kind of argument, to stake out the case for the liberal virtues as the virtues constitutive of the good life, is to disagree with those who disagree. It is to say that liberalism and conservatism (in its social and cultural forms) aren’t the same thing. Which is okay, because they’re not.

If radical liberals and libertarians are to win the argument for the future, they need to show why radical liberalism or libertarianism are compelling alternatives to illiberalism. And that means showing why the virtues underpinning them speak to the concerns people have—about their own lives and their place in the world and how they can find happiness in both. To refuse to engage in ethics talk, and to refuse to acknowledge that the ethics of political liberalism also entail an ethics of economic, epistemic, and cultural liberalism, and that they entail a personal ethics of virtues and perspective and a conception of the good, is to lose the debate by forfeiting the stage. The liberal virtues are better than those illiberals offer, not just in the political sphere but in the personal and social as well. And they’re better not just because they’re more moral, but because they make us happier. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so.