libertarianism need not and should not be impossibly strict.
Something like the categorical imperative may be what we aim
at, but it is unreasonable to expect that we can implement it per-
fectly tomorrow, or that heads should roll if we don’t. We’ve got
a lot of learning to do before we reach Utopia, and it’s best that
we all move cautiously toward the ideal. Neither Rothbardians
adhering to a deontological nonaggression principle nor their
consequentialist opponents have shed sufficient light here, and
I instead believe that a gradualist deontology is both philosophi-
cally defensible and well-suited to the fallible creatures we are.
One virtue of this approach is that it avoids consequential-
ism’s pretense of knowledge. We can ignore speculative claims
about the emotional states of future people regarding unknown
events a century hence. And we don’t need to say we’re doing
math with their emotions when, plainly, we are not.
Instead, we can just say that putting people in cages (for
example) is detestable thanks to the respect we owe to every
human being. We can hold that individual liberty should never
be denied without an utterly compelling reason. (One such rea-
son may be the danger that the confined person would otherwise
pose to the liberty of others, but criminal justice is a complicated
subject that I don’t have space to address right now.)
A second virtue of deontology lies in how it allo-
cates the burden of proof: When we hold that all
people have a common dignity, and that this
dignity implies a form of generally shared
individual liberty, then the burden of
proof falls on all those who would carve
out exceptions to the rule. They are
obliged to tell us why the exceptions
are justified, and why certain people
really do belong in a cage. For many,
many reasons, this is precisely how
it ought to be.
Reply: Freiman
to Kuznicki
THERE’S NO POINT in denying it: Con-
sequentialists have bullets to bite.
But every moral theorist has bullets to
bite. My view (with apologies to Win-
ston Churchill) is that consequential-
ism is the worst moral theory—except for
all of the others.
Take the case of the YouTube thief.
That consequentialists must
applaud the crowd-pleasing
crime is bad. But far worse is a deontological moral theory that
categorically prohibits petty theft—even if, for instance, it’s
needed to save millions of lives.
Kuznicki writes, “Pace some objectors—including some lib-
ertarians—deontological libertarianism need not and should
not be impossibly strict.” This claim could mean that deontolo-
gists should forgive real-world institutions for being unable to
respect rights 100 percent of the time. Fair enough, but this
reply doesn’t address the real objection—namely, that it’s mor-
ally right to commit a trivial rights violation to, say, fend off the
apocalypse.
The claim that deontologists should not be impossibly strict
could also be taken to mean that it would be wrong to always
stick to deontological principles. Nozick, for instance, suggests
that it could be permissible to violate rights to prevent “cata-
strophic moral horror.” But this wins the battle at the cost of
losing the war. It addresses the problems with deontology by
effectively abandoning deontology. Consider:
Geocentrist: “My model is pretty good at accounting for the
motions of the planets.”
Heliocentrist: “Pretty good, yes, but what about Mars?”Photo: John Locke, John Stuart Mill; Public domain REASON 23