View source for Mike Huben and Taner Edis criticize Jan Narveson's "The Libertarian Idea".

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[[Category:Mike Huben]]
[[Category:Taner Edis]]
[[Category:Jan Narveson]]
[[Category:The Libertarian Idea]]
{{DES | des = In 2001, I had an email exchange with [[Jan Narveson]], where I detailed four major failings of his book/philosophy and appended some criticisms by [[Taner Edis]] (since I had permission to publish them.) | show=}}
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(This text has been extracted from my email to preserve the privacy of other portions of our conversation.  Updates are in brackets.)

== Mike Huben, February 27, 2001 ==

I don't keep an enemies list.  I'm not that sort of person.  However, if I
needed one, I'd only have to search a few minutes to turn up what books
libertarians consider important.  There have been a number of such polls.

And indeed, your book has been referred to me, though not very often.
I long ago bought a copy, and think it starts with four egregious errors.

On your page 44, you define rights in terms of "some property, F... [that]
affords prima facie moral reason". 

In my "Nonsense On Stilts" article<br>
<nowiki>[</nowiki>http://huben.us/wiki/Nonsense_On_Stilts<nowiki>]</nowiki><br>
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/skept/stilts.html or<br>
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/skepticism/6113<br>
I point out a much better, much more specific positivist definition:

<blockquote>... liberty, freedom, and rights are entirely social constructs. (See [http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html A Positive Account of Property Rights].) They exist only because we have social
conventions that enforce them.  A "right" is of the form "A claims a right
to do B with C receiving benefit D and creating a reciprocal obligation for
E to permit this despite incurring cost F because of threatened cost G
produced at cost H from I".</blockquote>

With a clear definition like this, most of your arguments about rights look
rather silly.  Where you construct an apologetics to explain the many
practical exceptions to absolute rights, my definition allows prediction of
exceptions by not starting with absolute rights and providing economic
justifications for the exceptions.

But far more excruciating is your lapse on page 66.  Not even Nozick had the
gall to cite that crank Rothbard to justify property in oneself.  And since
property in oneself is essential to your derivation of other property,
mere assertion of "natural fact" is rather pathetic.  It's difficult to
understand how you treat that in your second section, but I must note that
one cannot contract unless one has some property or right to contract about.

In any event, it turns out that the only thing we basically have to contract
about is our threatened costs to others.  All rights or property we claim are
founded in those threatened costs.  Unfortunately for most further derivations,
this makes rights (including property) strategic, and not absolutes, since
our claimed rights affect our ability to develop threats of costs.  Your
philosophy does not account for such feedback: it is far too simplistic.

This leads to a third error in your analysis, which is the evolutionary
fact that we are competitive.  We seek comparative advantage (which roughly
translates into differential reproduction), not mere wealth.  When we can
terminate a prisoner's dilemma cycle in the course of our defection, we gain
a great comparative advantage.  Thus, there are strategies for prisoner's
dilemma games that are much more complicated than the ones Axelrod discusses
in his book.  He didn't discuss the game where one or more players receive
an opportunity to end the cycle.  In addition, subsequent studies showed that
some strategies that exploit naive opponents outperform tit for tat (there was
a Scientific American article on that.)  Your naive derivation from tit for
tat does little to model the complexity of the real world.

And finally, the commonest error I see in moral philosophy is the presumption
that there is only one correct or dominant morality, rather than perhaps
an ecology.  It's as foolish as presuming that because life is competitive,
one lineage will triumph and displace all other life.  You're guilty of it too.

Now, it's possible that with my hasty and superficial reading of your book,
I've misconstrued your real position.  If so, let me know, and I'll apologize
and discuss your clarified position.  Nothing I hate worse than babbling
about a strawman of my own construction, and I generally try to have somebody
opposed review my arguments before I stand by them.  I'm all too aware of
my fallibility.

I did obtain one informal review of your book by somebody else several years
ago.  Since he offered to let me put it on my site, I've appended it for your
amusement.

== Taner Edis, 28 February 1995 ==

The problem Narveson claims to have solved is essentially one
of arbitrariness in rights -- but the difficulty this poses for
libertarianism can be exaggerated.  Commonly, a moral position is not
so dependent on allegedly foundational issues, though arguments about
them make up a strand in its defense or criticism.  Consider the
Christian analogue: there are conceptual arguments in favor of its
ethics, such as the idea of Natural Moral Law, or the Divine Command
theory and so on.  But the ethic does not rest on such deeply flawed
conceptions alone, it is also regularly defended in a sophisticated
way that embeds it in a tradition expressing moral and "spiritual"
experience.  Debunking philosophical theologians can end up as a
sterile exercise, addressing rationalizations rather than reasons.

Similarly, libertarianism has deep roots in the right wing of
the Enlightenment, and a capitalist culture.  Natural Rights in a
Nozickian sense can be seen as an *expression* of this, rather than
having to be defended as some metaphysical verity.  What Narveson has
done is therefore interesting, but not as important as might be
thought.  If anything, it might obscure telling criticisms of
libertarian morality that makes no reference to problems with rights
based ethics.

That being said, I don't read Narveson as being all that
original among libertarians either.  Friedrich von Hayek's criticism
of the "social engineering state," and reliance on knowledge available
to individuals but not a state is earlier and more important than that
of Narveson, who doesn't do much more than give a more current
philosophical gloss to existing right wing libertarian ideas.
Unsurprisingly, the flaws of his position are not new either: Hayek's
illegitimate dichotomy between a state attempting social engineering
and atomistic individuals operating under conditions of severely
limited and localized knowledge is clearly present.  Human social and
moral options are not as limited as Hayek or Narveson portray.

Now, Libertarianism can and should be faulted for its
exaltation of a lack of moral imagination.  But there is an aspect to
earlier and deeper Libertarian thinkers like Hayek that make them more
respectable than Narveson.  For they have a streak of ethical
pessimism that shows up in the best of conservative thought, a
recognition that though they thought what they advocated was the best
possible or practical, it nevertheless was in certain ways short of
human moral aspirations.  Just as it might be desirable to be
immortal, but more wise to realize that we will die, however
frustrating, perhaps a unrestricted free market is the best even when
it is disastrous, as intervention would be worse.  Narveson, however,
is usually shallower, being one of the more Panglossian thinkers
around outside of prosperity-theologians.  It's bad enough having the
Free Market as a substitute God; there's no reason to pretend that it
will usher in an earthly paradise.


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