Sunday, May 06, 2012

Do Libertarians Believe in Slavery?

Let me first start by clarifying my question in several ways.

First, while it is, to some extent, a rhetorical question designed to point out (one of the many of) the disqualifying-level problems with libertarianism as an ideology, it is also meant, quite sincerely, as a genuine question. Which is to say, assuming that anyone responds to this post*, I'd expect mostly combative responses trying to show why the implication behind my question is wrong. And that's fair. But I'd also be interested in genuine responses, i.e. answers to the question. I'm particularly interested in whether or not any famous libertarian thinkers has addressed this question -- because I suspect they have, and I'd be curious to read it.**

Second, my question is theoretical, not historical. "Libertarians" as such did not exist in antebellum America. It seems clear to me that in any but a question-begging, no-true-Scotsmen sense, libertarians' closest ideological ancestors from that time were defenders rather than opponents of slavery. I'm sure there are lots of counterarguments. But it's not the question I'm asking nor something I want (right at this moment) to explore.

Next, let me clarify a few premises behind my question.

First, it seems to me that one of the key things that distinguish libertarians from anarchists is that they believe that the government ought to enforce contracts. This isn't mentioned quite as much as the maintenance of armed forces and police, but my sense is that it's pretty universally agreed by most miniarchists that enforcement of contracts goes along with those things as proper roles for the state. (If there are libertarians who don't think, in general and on principle, that the state ought to enforce contracts, then let me know -- I'd be interested -- and please mentally amend this entire attempt so that wherever it currently says "libertarians" it reads instead "that subset of libertarians who believe that government ought to enforce contracts".)

Second, it seems to me that one of the key things that distinguish libertarians from liberals is that they don't believe that governments ought to enforce their opinions about what contracts consenting adults ought to make. That's why they're fine with prostitution, for instance: they see it as, in Nozick's memorable phrase, a "capitalist act[] between consenting adults". So while governments ought to enforce contracts, they oughtn't to regulate what contracts ought to be enforced. (Again, where I say "libertarians" here I mean the subset to whom this applies, an identification which seems warranted to me by the fact that (so far as I know) most libertarians will fall into this category.)

Finally, it seems to me that another one of the key things that distinguish libertarians from liberals is that they don't think that the government ought to step in to prevent non-state coercion -- the sort of coercion that comes from desperate poverty, for instance. If they did, they'd believe in alleviating desperate poverty (so that the poor people were not coerced by it), which would mean erecting some sort of a welfare state, which would make them (at least in this respect) liberals, not libertarians. Now, this may be less generally true than the other two premises -- I know that some libertarians believe in a certain level of minimum income which ought to be guaranteed by the state, for instance -- but my sense (and, again, I'd be interested to know if this seems unfair to anyone) is that most libertarians these days are, at best, apathetic about whether such a thing happens -- they don't work on pushing it -- and in fact spend most of their political energies in this area trying to cut back the welfare state and similar things.

So -- with that in mind -- imagine a libertarian utopia. (Where libertarian is defined as agreeing with those premises.) Then imagine a person so desperately poor -- someone starving, say -- that they will do anything to survive. And imagine such a person being offered a contract to submit to slavery for the rest of their life.

It probably wouldn't be called slavery. But it's easy to imagine, in such a world, a contract being drawn up to replicate all but one of the essential features of slavery in its familiar American form. Such a contract would stipulate that it is unbreakable; that the person signing would have to obey their owner in all the ways that slaves had to (live where ordered, do what they were ordered, etc); that they consented (by signing the contract gave future consent) to whippings should they not obey, etc. The only feature of American slavery that wouldn't be replicated would be its inheritability -- since libertarians, presumably, wouldn't think that a person could sign away the rights of their children. But while that feature was a key component of American slavery, I don't think you could argue it's necessary for slavery -- a childless slave is still a slave.***

So: in a libertarian utopia, would such a contract be enforceable? It's an act of capitalism between consenting adults (for libertarian notions of consenting, i.e. of age, not obviously mentally incapacitated, etc., where economic coercion is considered irrelevant.)

If so, it seems all but inevitable that slavery would rapidly appear in a libertarian utopia, and would be a permanent and recurring social feature.

I suspect that any libertarian who grants my premises but still wishes to deny this fact will do so by denying that such a situation will occur, arguing that in a society free of government coercion everything will be good enough that no such dire poverty (lacking other remedy) will emerge. This strikes me as obviously wrong -- do libertarians not believe people, even without government help, make dumb decisions? Get in bad situations? -- but anyone who is wild enough to suggest such a thing is probably unpersuadable.

And, of course, such slavery would really be slavery in the classical sense: the police would track down runaways, since that, after all, would be a breach of contract.

On the other hand, if such a contract would not be enforceable, then it seems to me the purity that is the essential rhetorical appeal of libertarianism ("it's none of your business what I do!") has been thrown away, and all that is left to negotiate is the precise balance of the arguer's liberalism, i.e. precisely how desperate do the circumstances need to be before the government helps, and how horrific does the private contract need to be before it's declared unenforceable? Think about these things long enough and the next thing you know you'll be for a minimum wage and government regulation of working environments... that is, a liberal, at least on these issues. Sure, some ex-libertarians might have different ideas about where to draw the line. But then it's just a question of pragmatic juggling -- no longer a question of grand (and grandly announced) principles.

So? Anyone have any answers?

Do libertarians believe in slavery?

Postscript
: A liberal view on this, incidentally, doesn't seem to me very hard. Speaking personally, on this matter I would quote John Locke:
As justice gives every man a title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair acquisitions of his ancestors descended to him; so charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise: and a man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity, to force him to become his vassal, by with-holding that relief, God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and with a dagger at his throat offer him death or slavery.

-- John Locke, Two Treatises Upon Civil Government
...but it seems to me a libertarian would want to make the former (one's own title to the product of our honest industry) vitiate the latter (others' title to our industry to stave off want). Which means they support slavery.

Or, if not... why not?

Update: Meaning-altering error (meant one word, typed another) fixed.

Update 2: Anyone interested in this blog post should make sure to read the long and fascinating comment left below by philosopher Dan Hicks.

_______________________

* Unlikely, I'll admit: I get very few comments (he said self-pityingly)

** A very quick glance at Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia turned up only the following sentences on the topic:
...The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would. (Other writers disagree.) It also would allow him permanently to commit himself never to enter into such a transaction. (p. 331)
And so far as I can tell, that's it -- a brief reference in a section devoted to unanswered questions. But I might well have missed something. But there you have it: Robert Nozick was pro-slavery.

*** And who would have a child, if they had any choice (although remember they wouldn't) under these circumstances? For that matter, what possible chance would such a child have to be in anything less than desperate circumstances when they attained whatever the age of consent in the society was? (Although, of course, we've already stipulated that our libertarians don't care about non-state -- in particular, economic and social -- coercion. They might well just wave that away -- with perfect consistency, I might add.)

15 comments:

Dan Hicks said...

(Sorry for the length, but I find this a rather interesting problem for libertarianism.)

In a discussion of the `the wholly contented slave' (The Libertarian Idea, 28ff) Jan Narveson seems to think that legitimate slavery is logically possible but so unlikely and abnormal that we don't need to countenance it `as an institution'. Here's a couple relevant paragraphs:

First, there is the matter of how the slave came to be such in the first place. Second, what about the particular means by which his condition is reinforced? .... And about the second, it seems scarcely possible that a person could come to look forward to being beaten whenever she deviated in the slightest from some imposed routine, or for that matter that she would never have any desire so to deviate. What we know of American slavery certainly confirms that those enslaved were intensely aware of their condition and strongly desirous of getting out of it, at least in many of its more onerous aspects. I think we should allow that in logically and perhaps even really possible cases, what we term 'slavery' would not in fact be in violation of the wishes of the agent; but this possibility is insufficient to resuscitate any argument for the legitimacy of it as an institution even on this simple notion [sic] of freedom.

As far as I'm aware, libertarians never consider the possibility you raise, viz., that people in desperate circumstances in libertarian utopia might have to choose between voluntary slavery and starvation. They seem to believe that unregulated capitalism is going to eliminate poverty and desperation, just like it did in the nineteenth century.

It gets worse. In one chapter of Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan Moller Okin gave a brilliant argument that the Lockean `mixing your labor' account of original acquisition implies that mothers own their children (assuming that mothers are freely given the semen and the other resources they need to make the child in the first place). So libertarian utopia is actually a matriarchal dystopia.

The only libertarian response to this that I know of is a piece by Duncan MacIntosh in Liberty, Games, and Contracts. MacIntosh's solution is that the mother may own the child before he (say) becomes a person; but when he becomes a person, his right of self-ownership kicks in and overrides any entitlement she might claim. If this right simply says `every person owns herself or himself' -- and sometimes MacIntosh puts it like this -- then it rules out all slavery, voluntary or otherwise. In his comment on MacIntosh at the end of the same volume, Narveson agrees with MacIntosh's solution.

The problem is that the child ends up appropriating the mother's property -- namely, the child himself -- without her consent. MacIntosh and Narveson both seem to miss Okin's point: His freedoms according to self-ownership are incompatible with her freedoms according to original acquisition, which is supposedly implied by self-ownership. So either self-ownership is inconsistent or it does not imply at least one of the major claims that libertarians think it implies.

Stephen said...

No need to apologize for length when what you're saying is as interesting and relevant as that! That was terrific, thanks.

I actually just read that chapter of Okin recently -- Corey Robin linked to it -- and thought it was the single most devastating critique of Nozick, and libertarianism generally, I'd ever read.

Warren B. said...

Sorry to follow up on a tangent which you expressly said isn't the focus of the article, but I see a lot of straw-man arguments from which you launch into your main argument, and it begins with the following:

"'Libertarians' as such did not exist in antebellum America. It seems clear to me that in any but a question-begging, no-true-Scotsmen sense, libertarians' closest ideological ancestors from that time were defenders rather than opponents of slavery. I'm sure there are lots of counterarguments."

Are you not confusing state's-rights strict Constitutionalists with libertarians? A no-true-Scotsman argument is really the only argument a "true libertarian" can use nowadays, because all sorts of people then (the Confederacy) and now (the Tea Party, Judge Napolitano, the Republican Party in general) are claiming to be pro-liberty while conveniently inserting anti-liberty "traditional values" (then, the desperate need to preserve legislated racism; now, the desperate need to legislate homophobia), as they're blinded to the inconsistency of it because they've lived in that medium of xenophobia for so long.

By setting the table with "libertarians are pro-slavery," the rest of your article is sitting on shaky ground, which I'll go into later when I have more free time, but I'd appreciate if you could address this first.

Anonymous said...

As a black man and quite fascinated by libertarians I have joined them because they are the only party that is trying honour the genie back in the bottle as well as eliminate bribery at the federal level of government.
I have not voted for many of them yet but plan to do so in the near future.
They seem to be a party that is still finding its way and that's a good thing because that means that I am invited to the table in the Democratic party I am taken for granted and the bribes continue to drown my voice.
At least the libertarians believe in jobs and or a free market the Democratic party destroys jobs and or with their two faced ways of governing the country they put us on jail under the three strikes laws and other drug laws thanks Bill Clinton you da man!
Good by Democrats you screwed your selves.

Unknown said...

The main flaw with your hypothetical is that on the liberal side you assume a democratic state where the majority (at the very least) is willing to prohibit slavery (or compel welfare) by force, yet on the libertarian side you are unwilling to similarly assume the society opposes slavery or is charitable.

There are also issues of defining "slavery" and of fungible restitution for violating a "slavery contract", but the bottom line is that we must have the same assumptions on both sides if we are to make a valid comparison.

Historically, you can investigate Lysander Spooner, a libertarian abolitionist who also opposed the Northern use of force against secession because taking away the right of exit would itself be a form of slavery.

Stephen said...

Except, Kevin Edwards, that the point is that libertarianism as a social/political system doesn't provide resources to effect the policy preferences of a population (leaving them little more than pious wishes), whereas liberalism (like other left philosophies) does. As your example of Spooner quite well illustrates.

Unknown said...

Libertarianism can provide the same resources as liberalism, it just requires prior consent, as Nozick mentioned, which is broadly what you need to establish a liberal government anyway.

So, your hypothetical is basically that, in a liberal society with a libertarian government (that for some reason excludes prior agreement on the right of exit even though many libertarians consider that to be a fundamental moral), someone is in such dire straits that they have no alternative but to agree to a grossly oppressive life-long contract.

Not only is that hypothetical contrived, it also should not be confused with American chattel slavery which was generally not based upon mutual consent, nor even upon retribution for crimes such that compelled hard labor (slavery) might be justified.

Indeed, Spooner maintained that there was no explicit consent and that slavery was therefore both immoral under Natural Law and unconstitutional. So, while he would not violently prevent the South's secession, he still advocated numerous pressures and supports to free slaves, including targeted violence against slaveholders if it came to that.

Also consider the economic arguments that slavery isn't efficient in the long run, meaning that it would naturally die out in a free market, since, for example, it reduces incentive for technological advancement and slaves will tend to do the minimum work necessary to avoid punishment.

Stephen said...

Of course chattel slavery is a different thing than this would be — I said as much in the original post. That doesn't mean that other types of slavery aren't slavery, or aren't evil. Chattel slavery was, incidentally, economically efficient — see Ed Baptist's recent brilliant book The Half Has Never Been Told.

It's not remotely contrived to imagine that under economic duress workers would sign grossly oppressive contracts; in actually existing capitalist systems they have done, and do, so all the time. What's contrived is to imagine that each individual worker (which is what Nozick suggests as the only out, not some vaguely Lockean sounding "consent") would sign a lifelong declaration that they won't submit to such a thing. And lacking that, libertarians don't believe in the right of exit from what would be (in a libertarian state) perfectly legal, enforceable contracts. Indeed, they'd send police to enforce the "property rights" of the rich against the desperate — as, in real life, has so often happened.

Unknown said...

Economists disagree on the net effects, but my understanding is that long-term efficiency correlates with how well slaves were treated. Does Baptist argue otherwise?

I agree that the mechanism of an individually signed lifelong declaration is contrived, but it is certainly true that individuals today would overwhelmingly choose to preserve their right of exit and that societies and governments could be voluntarily formed on that basis, thereby effecting the prohibition of slavery.

The basic problem with the liberal approach is: (1) it grants the state the broad power to prohibit any voluntary contract, not just slavery for which there is near universal agreement, and (2) it makes the oppressed worse off because it only reduces their options.

In other words, your hypothetical only works if no one else would make a better offer, which is unlikely in a liberal society. But even if there were no better offers and you prohibited that voluntary slavery contract out of righteous indignation, then you would actually be oppressing the person even more by taking away the best of their bad options.

The same rationale applies even more strongly to the other "oppressive contracts" in capitalist systems that include the right of exit because at any time, they can choose a better option.

Stephen said...

That Economist article isn't bad, but it's dated — note that the latest recommended reading is from 1977. This is a very active area of historical research; Baptist is just part of a very active field. But he's a good place to start.

And I think I have just about reached my patience for debating, abstractly, the virtues of liberalism versus libertarianism. So I'll just note two things: first, in actual history, people have been forced into horrifically oppressive contracts (not slavery per se, but quite horrific) all the time; the idea that someone is going to make a better offer simply hasn't been the case. And second, your point 2 only works if you assume there are no broader implications for the society & the market in eliminating some options; in (again) historical fact, limiting some options changes the economy and ends up giving people more options, not fewer.

Unknown said...

I agree, it's a bit too abstract, especially since libertarianism is practically a meta-framework for states, not a prescription for a single ideal state.

Your last two points also have merit, but they must be balanced against the harm done by prohibiting voluntary agreements and the tendency for them to diminish anyway in absolute terms in a free market. But this level of discussion is also too abstract -- we are just comparing conclusions we've drawn.

In any case, I appreciate your patience and willingness to engage with me on this old thread of yours. You've been thoughtful and cordial. Cheers. :-)

Stephen said...

I appreciate your willingness to discuss these matters thoughtfully and cordially as well. If all political discussions could be so conducted, it would be a better world. All the best.

LiJieLong said...

Excellent post so far. Working my way through it and leaving this comment to bookmark this blog. Stephen Saperstein...

Eucatastrophe, interesting word. The latin and greek nerd in me likes it!

Anonymous said...

Interesting post. Here's another that google turned up, you may be interested in https://gravediggerofcapitalism.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/what-libertarian-freedom-really-is-freedom-for-the-slave-owners/

Anonymous said...

Interesting to me that you either don't think the quoted John Locke passage is against slavery, or don' think that John Locke's philosophical ideas are part of the foundation of Libertarianism. Not sure which it is but wither is bizarre for a serious person.