Virtue: The Libertarian Ethics

Utilitarianism, above all, is an incoherent way of thinking about ethics. For those unfamiliar with the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, but feel keen to read some fairly wordy 20th century British philosophy, read this paper. For those less willing, I will summarise her position on utilitarianism and ethical theory in general.

Anscombe drives a sword through the entirety of post-enlightenment ethical theory, pointing - in essence - to its misguided desire to capture all ethical decisions within either a singular or multiplicity of universal principles. For the Kantians, this boils down to the categorical imperative, which essentially states that an ethical action is one which you would be happy to repeat or have others repeat (i.e. if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander). Anscombe’s criticism is fairly straightforward: how does one go about deciding whether potential action B falls under the same category as prior action A? How does one decide what constitutes a repeat? There are numerous glaring deficiencies in Kant’s ethics, this is simply one of them.

Anscombe’s critique of utilitarianism is equally straightforward. If the utilitarian deems all ethical actions to be those that maximise “utility”, how do we define “utility”? Without an adequate conception of “utility”, it is a universifiable ethical principle completely void of content. John Stuart Mill filled in the gap with “pleasure”, a word that we all understand, but not one from which any of us could construct an objective, universal ethical theory. Alas, all attempts to imbue the word “utility” with meaning have failed to meet the very real challenge of being maximisable and of any relevance to reality. In short, any attempt to give meaning to “utility” robs meaning from somewhere else; for Mill, the term “pleasure” lends its meaning to “utility”. But this is not the basis for action, borrowed meaning! Real words have real meaning in real contexts, “utility” is an invention.

So, what are we left with in terms of ethics? This is an important question to answer for anyone, but especially for the libertarian.

The dilemma for ethics in a libertarian society is that it is often supposed that ethics is the very thing that creates order when none is imposed. This, frankly, is utter rubbish. Necessity is the mother of invention and "ethics" is not a term I am in want of applying to the term "society". In fact, utilitarianism is precisely the opposite of the ethics of libertarianism. Libertarianism is not prescriptive, it does not impose and it certainly does not ask us to maximise utility. Order arises in a pragmatic fashion, based upon human virtues. Just as language arises from the necessity to communicate, ethics arises from the necessity to get along. We must invent ethics as a series of virtues to fit the situations that we encounter; it is contextual, rather than absolute.

Libertarianism, I contend, is not grounded in the assertion of the moral superiority of "liberty" as an absolute ethical principle, but it is instead grounded in something infinitely more pragmatic: it works. It works by allowing us to act according to what we agree upon as being good decisions. We were not flung into a state of nature -- plus a universal ethical principle. We were simply flung into a state of nature! It is up to us to agree upon our values and virtues, just as we agree upon a system for the exchange of goods.