Libertarian Social Justice? Hicks and Horwitz at Friedman 8 [transcription]

How Should Libertarians Respond to the Social Justice Movement? I was in a friendly debate with Dr. Steven Horwitz about this topic, hosted by the Friedman 8 Conference, Australia, July 2020. My opening remarks are transcribed below after moderator John Humphreys’s introduction.

John Humphreys [Moderator]:

I’ve been really looking forward to this one. I think this is going to be a great session. I quite enjoyed putting it together, quite cheekily. I think we have the perfect couple of guests to speak on this topic. And it is a topic that divides the libertarian movement or confuses the libertarian movement. It’s not clear how to respond to the social justice movement, which can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think the next two speakers are very eloquent, perhaps some of the most eloquent explainers of the way they respond to the social justice movement in very different ways, but coming from a position, philosophically and politically, quite similar. Both are great advocates for liberty, great advocates for freedom, and their credentials that can’t be doubted. And yet they look at the social justice movement, see different things and draw different lessons. And we’re going to learn from those lessons here. We’re going to start with I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, but start with Professor Stephen Hicks, who is going to give us his take on how libertarians should respond to the social justice movement. Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Hicks:

I appreciate very much this invitation. And kudos for inviting Steve Horwitz to talk with me about this issue. As you say, he’s a leading voice for liberty and a thoughtful and decent man. Also as you say, this is an issue that we need to sort out.

My approach is to say that when we think about liberty, the free society, and its concomitant elements—markets and so forth—we are starting from a position of society-wide abstraction and thinking of individual human beings, each with their own goals, dreams, and rights. We are devising principles and policies for all of them as individuals. And so we say that people should have certain rights, they should have certain freedoms, we need to have a limited government that is impartial and that doesn’t put people into subordinate and hierarchical groups.

When we come to a particular hard cases—people who are poor, people who are oppressed—in some cases, these are legitimately hard cases, as sometimes people fall into bad luck. In some cases, people are part of groups that have historical grievances. We then have a genuine subset of issues about how our liberty movement should respond to those individuals.

[General principles and special cases]

I think the right way to approach this is to say that freedom is a universal principle, equally and impartially administered by a set of institutions. That is the case that we first and foremost need to make. I have no problem with then saying we are also interested in different individuals and different groups that have different histories and situations—how is freedom going to work out for them?

So in the case of women who have suffered second class citizenship or sexism: if we advocate entrepreneurship and limited government for them, there are detailing issues to be worked out for that particular group. Or what about the rural poor, as opposed to the urban poor? We make sub-cases for freedom, but we always take our universal principles and apply to them to the particular sub-cases.

Take the case of poverty. Our argument is: Give people freedom, and they can work their way out of poverty. Encourage entrepreneurship, and they can use their creativity and resolve to get out of poverty. In many cases, government regulations are the biggest obstacles to stopping people from getting out of poverty. So repeal those regulations. In many cases, there have been unequal rights in legislation, and those have had historical consequences. So get rid of those unequal rights. And for the hardest of all hard cases, we think if we do all of the above, we’re going to create a very prosperous society. And for the genuinely hard cases, being in a prosperous society with lots of wealth, and people being basically good, we will have a robust civil society with lots of philanthropy to deal with those individuals.

I think that’s the right way to approach moral and political philosophy and to make the case for freedom. And to nest our special concerns about particular individuals in circumstances, or even groups that are suffering from certain kinds of circumstances.

Now, to turn to a label like social justice. As our introducers pointed out, it means a lot of things to a lot of people. But it comes down to two or most three standard uses of social justice. I think one of them is confused and two of them are suspect in varying degrees. I want to talk through all that.

[Social justice as emotional lead?]

In one case, when we talk about social justice or we start to think about the poor and the oppressed people, the language that we use is to say that the poor and the oppressed should have a special place in our hearts. And so in making the case for liberty we adopt a rhetorical stance of showing that we are not just abstractly and rationally advocating these principles and just mechanically applying them to the poor. That’s not going to solve the problem of making allies, because we have a rhetorical problem: people think of us as too impersonal and abstract. So if we lead with a more emotional language and say, “We really care about the poor and we really care about the oppressed,” then we’re more likely to get some traction.

At one level, I think that is fine: we need a case for liberty that integrates rational argument with emotional caring. Our reason and our emotion should be integrated.

But if we go in the direction of saying that as a matter of rhetorical strategy or as a matter of principle that we should ask what issues most get our emotions worked up and lead with our emotions, then that’s an inappropriate strategy. The emotion has to be backed up and congruent with rational principle. If we want to say, we are compassionate victims of oppression, then we need first a very good case for why we think that is an injustice, why those individuals have been treated badly. It can’t just be an emotional lead. We need to integrate them, and any movement that prioritizes emotional appeals over logical and rational appeals is inappropriate.

[Making the poor morally special?]

Now, more seriously, we find in political philosophy and morality a long-standing tradition that says: Those who are poor, those who are handicapped, those are who are suffering, have a higher moral standing. And that we should care more about people who are poor to the extent that we make other secondary. And we are willing to change or fudge or adapt our moral principles in dealing with poorer people. John Rawls is perhaps the most famous recent example with his Difference Principle, saying that as a matter of moral principle, whatever we’re going to do socially and politically we have to prioritize the needs of the weak, and whatever policies we design must help the poor, the weak, the disadvantaged, and so on. And I think that is an inappropriate: what we can and should be able to say is: Moral principles apply universally to all people.

There are of course special emotions for people in different circumstances. People who are poor forth our compassion—but at the same time, people who have earned a billion dollars should call forth our admiration. And I think it’s equally inappropriate to say that whatever we’re doing politically, we should prioritize the needs and the advantages of the most rich or most advantaged. It’s the same error.

Or another way: Not to say that we’re putting our thumbs on the scale for the most poor and the most disadvantaged. As moral philosophers we treat human beings as having the same moral capacities, the same moral rights, the same moral obligations, and so on. And that carries over when we do political philosophy. We don’t take people in the polity and put them in different groups and suggest that they have a different standing because of their group membership—whether they’re in different races, different sex or gender groups, or different economic classes. We have a policy of equal rights across the board.

Affirmative action is a good example. That can, of course, be a voluntary program. But it can also be a political program, and political affirmative action, that standard arguments for it do come out of this tradition of saying, here we have people who are in a disadvantaged situation, sometimes it’s because of their economic background, or a history of sexism or a history of racism. So what we need to do in effect is reverse that or tip the scales, and as a matter of policy give preference to those individuals because of their currently disadvantaged to status. And again, as a matter of politics, that’s a disaster.

What we need to say is: We have equal principles of merit and getting what you earn. But yes, we are concerned with people who are struggling as a result of traditional sexism or racism, or whatever. But principles of justice, of freedom, of equal rights, of limited government applied impartially—they work for everybody equally.

[Justice contrasted to social justice]

The labels become very important here. I’m going to say I’m entirely in favor of justice. But I’m entirely unsympathetic to social justice. And we always have to ask, what is the point of adding an adjective to a perfectly good concept. In this case, the adjective “social” is carrying a lot of weight. Some of it is just confusion, some of it baggage, some that is philosophically corrupt. What we mean by justice is: people in a system, and they know ahead what the rules are, and they have freedom of entry. And they can bring their own talents and, to the extent that they create something valuable, they will be economically rewarded or psychologically rewarded with praise and so forth. The idea then is you get what you earn. And that it’s individuals who are doing the producing of the value.

The flip side of that also holds: if you destroy value, or you fail to create value, then as a matter of justice you deserve some sort of censure or some sort of [inaudible]. The point is that justice is tightly tied to the concept of desert, earning productivity and trying to measure those things. And we are interested in individuals as the agents who are engaging in this process.

Now, when we turn to social justice, the adjective becomes important. For some it’s just a matter of saying we need to be thinking more broadly: there are different groups and individuals who fall through the cracks and we have some social-wide obligations to help them out. So then we get into debates about welfare policy, right, and so forth. It’s not just a matter of individual cases in a court, or individual market allocations, it’s more broad, legal principles. And at that point, I think it’s, it’s a bit obscure, but I think it’s fine, as long as we always remember that ultimately, whatever policies we’re coming up with are designed for individuals and we’re not talking about amorphous social groups, and so on.

[Individuals and groups as unit of analysis]

Now, where I think things start to get suspect is built into the history of the movements that have traditionally used social justice as a label. When they talk about social justice, they do start to talk about groups and, from their perspective, groups are more important than individuals. They start to lose sight of individual: they don’t see you as an individual but as a white person or as male, or as member of some class or a rich group or middle class. So the class analysis becomes very important to them. And the argument in the social justice literature always is that these groups have certain rights or entitlements as a matter of principle. We then have group rights substituting for individual rights. And that’s an inappropriate move because it makes justice is a property of groups rather than individuals.

It comes out more explicitly when we object in response: “But these particular individuals in this group, they haven’t done anything to earn this extra privilege or this extra grant that you want to give to them.” Yet the fact of those individuals not having earned is not taken as a criticism because they are part of a group. And if we then also say that the people you’re redistributing from—those individuals did not participate in the injustice. That also doesn’t matter. They have a group obligation in this case.

What we have in both cases in this use of social justice is that it’s about distributing from people who don’t deserve to be redistributed from to individuals who have not yet earned the right. So the concept of earning that’s built into justice goes away. And justice is now collectivized instead of individualized.

I think that is a philosophical gulf that we need to be facing front and square when we are talking about justice. Are we talking about individuals and earning and desert? Or are we talking about groups and we are interested in redistributing to make things more equal? You can’t have it have it both ways. So I want to say: No, we need to stick with justice—social justice is taking us in the wrong direction.

[Social justice as anti-concept]

Now, I think there is another use in some of the literature that I read where social justice is used as an explicit anti concept. What I mean by an anti-concept is a concept that is meant to replace and destroy the original concept that one had in mind. So in this move, we have a concept of justice, but we add social justice, and then eventually we drop out the justice part altogether. And that is what we’re starting to find in some segments of the Social Justice movement—now they want to say it isn’t about justice, it’s about social power. It’s about asserting our moves.

It’s an evolution. We start talking about justice, and a generation later we’re talking about social justice. Then a generation later we’re just talking about social power and dynamics as well. The justice has gone away. And this is consciously strategic by some of the thinkers in this movement.

[Example: privilege]

Take, for example, the concept of privilege that we’re now having lot of debates about. This is part of the overall package. Privilege has a perfectly good meaning. It means a social favor that is granted by someone in a position of authority. Your mom or your dad gives you a privilege of staying up an extra hour past your bedtime, or if you belong to a tennis club they give you the privilege of bringing in a certain number of guests.

But the concept of privilege then was adapted by some segments of the traditional social justice theory literature, and what it was then meant to do was to say that if there is an inequality among people—any advantage that anyone has—is a matter of privilege. That move obliterates many legitimate differences that exist between human beings: sometimes we’re unequal because of natural differences, not because of privileges. Sometimes we are unequal because I worked less hard than you did. You worked hard and smart. I didn’t. That’s not a privilege. Or sometimes it’s a matter of gifts that I received from my parents as opposed to gifts that you receive from your parents.

So instead of saying: “Well, there are 80 qualities and advantages, some of them are natural, some of them are earned, some are social gifts, and some of them are privileges that are being granted. Instead, all of it becomes privilege. The point is that we are obliterating the idea that there are legitimate natural differences, or that there are earned differences, or that there are legitimate gifts that some people can give to others, and so on. And that is intentional on the part of those who are overusing the concept of privilege.

So that’s a subset issue within the broader social justice caravan. So I would say: We need to stick to our very powerful guns. We believe in individuals. We believe in justice. We believe in entrepreneurship. We believe in limited governments. We believe in impartially applied principles. That is how we’re going to do our moral and political philosophy—with special detailing and interest for the cases of those who are in a special difficult situations.

[Strategic alliances]

Now, at the same time—this will be my concluding remark—there’s a strategic issue and I know sometimes when I’m talking with my fellow academics, and as advocates of freedom, liberty, classical liberals, libertarians, Objectivists, we are a beleaguered minority and often we feel that way inside the academy. And particularly those who are doing explicit political philosophy, they will often say, the social justice labeling and vocabulary has swept the field. And unless we adopt the vocabulary, we’re just not going to be paid attention to. And so from that perspective, it’s a tactical adoption of some possibly suspect terminology in order to get a seat at the table, so that you can make your arguments.

Now, I am fine with making tactical accommodations. I am fine with even making strategic alliances with people we have philosophical and political disagreements with. But I do think that whenever we make these alliances, we always have to recognize that they are partial. They’re partial alliances. And we always have to keep our terms and principles very clear. We are intellectuals, we are we are policy makers, we are professors—precision of language is our most important tool. And we can’t surrender that at all.

I’ll end with a hopefully not-too-silly analogy. Suppose we are in the middle of World War Two. And we are Canadians like I am or Americans like Steve or Australians like our hosts. We have a common enemy, we’re fighting the Nazis. And then at a certain point, the Nazis turn on the Soviet Union, their former allies, and they attack them. And then the Soviets come around to us and say, Let’s have an alliance because we have a common enemy in the Nazis. I’d say that’s fine, we do have a common enemy, and maybe it’s a worst enemy. We will have an alliance with the Soviet Union in order to fight this fight. But we’re not going to adopt the Soviet Union’s labeling for what the nature of the fight is. They say: “This is the great proletarian war against the capitalist imperialist oppressors!” We don’t want to go there, even though we are strategic allies.

To come back analogically to social justice: if, at any point, social justice involves a collectivization, and/or a subversion of the idea that in life you really deserve to get what you have earned or what value you have created, and/or it involves redistribution of unearned benefits—then we need to say No. At best, this is a tactical alliance against racists, against sexists, and so forth.

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To hear Dr. Horwitz’s opening remarks and our follow-up exchange, see the full video: How Should Libertarians Respond to the Social Justice Movement?