The libertarian position on liberty as the highest good makes sense if one views humanity according to the libertarian belief that man is a rational, economic animal who acts in his own interest. From that position, people who make bad choices merely need to be corrected when they harm others, and more extreme cases need to be imprisoned for their crimes. But what if man is not rational, but rationalizing? What if man frequently acts against his own interest in truly absurd ways? Can anyone honestly say that from a cost-benefit analysis that regular consumption of most hard drugs makes sense? Given the rampancy of sexual diseases, especially severely damaging and deadly ones, are promiscuity and prostitution rational rather than rutting russian routlette? These are just the tip of the iceberg of the myriad ways in which man proves that he is hardly a being who subordinates himself to raw reason rather than employing reason like any other tool to get what he wants.
Even as an "economic animal," ordinary man is hardly rational. Would any rational being get themselves into several thousand dollars of high interest credit card debt in ordinary situations? It is certainly rational for someone to bankrupt themselves with credit card debt to finance medical operations, but consumer electronics, dining out and other luxuries? Hardly! The entire consumerist culture which encourages people to spend beyond their means, to save little and that despises frugality is irrational, to say nothing of the economic intellectual support behind it.
Reason is nothing more than a tool, and as such, man can no more live by it than he can live by fire, by hammers, by computers or any other tool with which he chooses to enhance his life and surroundings. Being an intellectual tool, he can employ it to the point of perceiving that he is using it to such an extent that it guides his every actions, but that's nothing more than intellectual conceit for it does not guide him so much as exist as a habit. The greatest danger that comes with this fetishization of reason is that it ignores the way that pre-rational desires and inputs affect the rules of logic and thus serve to create subtle blinders. Fetishizing reason has the peculiar habit of ultimately creating the same sort of haughty arrogance and disdain for disagreement that one finds in religious fanatics.
Once it is accepted that man is not truly rational (which is not the same as calling man irrational), and that he often acts against his own interest, there is an instinctive impulse to save him from himself. This is where many Christians go wrong, for man is perfectly capable of choosing right from wrong, but chooses not to in many cases. It is that facet, the choosing to do evil, which is what vexes Christians and which the Christian framework says cannot be changed by force. Preventing someone from getting high will not make them not want to get high (which is, according to Christianity, where the sin is rooted) unless the state is so successful at eradicating intoxication that man simply doesn't know that it is biochemically possible. Such a state would have its own extreme externalities, the very least of which would be wanton abuses of authority.
The trouble that Christians often find themselves in with reason is that they often play up the power of emotion and desire in overpowering reason to the point of making excuses for why someone harmed another. Libertarians (of the secular, cultural sort), likewise, often lack a proper appreciation for the ways that emotion and desire can so thoroughly rob people of reason, principle, etc. that they are closer at times to animals than the sort of hyper-rational being that mainstream libertarianism assumes man may be. A strong example of this is the way that many ambitious people will gladly arm hostile, tyrannical governments with the means to oppress and murder so long as they reap profit and personal luxury. Libertarians will often defend this saying that it is in "their rational, self-interest," but it is ultimately in no one's rational, self-interest to provide ideological governments, the greatest killing machines in human history (as decisively proved in the 20th century), with the means to efficiently carry out their will. That makes no more rational sense than selling weapons to known criminals who live within walking distance of your neighborhood.
Where the two may come together is by accepting the limits of human nature, especially as they relate to emotion and reason, and accept the fact that these limits have little bearing on the question of personal responsibility. A biological tendency or character flaw does not excuse bad, even evil, behavior. Likewise, a culture without limits on human autonomy and which provides no guidance to desire and emotion will feed into the worst traits of humanity by giving them a continuous outlet; if man is to live with reason as a guiding tool, it needs the assistance of a culture which helps his reason control his lower instincts, his emotions and desires. Therefore, as an example, a free society may legally permit him to be promiscuous, but would not socially permit it. The state may not care a whit about how many women he beds, but his male peers would be free to exclude him from business, from church, from every social institution. If nothing in a society controls this behavior, then the behavior will be accepted, and thus there will be more of it, eventually to the point of obsession as it currently is in America where there is neither cultural nor legal restraint and it is everywhere.
Even as an "economic animal," ordinary man is hardly rational. Would any rational being get themselves into several thousand dollars of high interest credit card debt in ordinary situations? It is certainly rational for someone to bankrupt themselves with credit card debt to finance medical operations, but consumer electronics, dining out and other luxuries? Hardly! The entire consumerist culture which encourages people to spend beyond their means, to save little and that despises frugality is irrational, to say nothing of the economic intellectual support behind it.
Reason is nothing more than a tool, and as such, man can no more live by it than he can live by fire, by hammers, by computers or any other tool with which he chooses to enhance his life and surroundings. Being an intellectual tool, he can employ it to the point of perceiving that he is using it to such an extent that it guides his every actions, but that's nothing more than intellectual conceit for it does not guide him so much as exist as a habit. The greatest danger that comes with this fetishization of reason is that it ignores the way that pre-rational desires and inputs affect the rules of logic and thus serve to create subtle blinders. Fetishizing reason has the peculiar habit of ultimately creating the same sort of haughty arrogance and disdain for disagreement that one finds in religious fanatics.
Once it is accepted that man is not truly rational (which is not the same as calling man irrational), and that he often acts against his own interest, there is an instinctive impulse to save him from himself. This is where many Christians go wrong, for man is perfectly capable of choosing right from wrong, but chooses not to in many cases. It is that facet, the choosing to do evil, which is what vexes Christians and which the Christian framework says cannot be changed by force. Preventing someone from getting high will not make them not want to get high (which is, according to Christianity, where the sin is rooted) unless the state is so successful at eradicating intoxication that man simply doesn't know that it is biochemically possible. Such a state would have its own extreme externalities, the very least of which would be wanton abuses of authority.
The trouble that Christians often find themselves in with reason is that they often play up the power of emotion and desire in overpowering reason to the point of making excuses for why someone harmed another. Libertarians (of the secular, cultural sort), likewise, often lack a proper appreciation for the ways that emotion and desire can so thoroughly rob people of reason, principle, etc. that they are closer at times to animals than the sort of hyper-rational being that mainstream libertarianism assumes man may be. A strong example of this is the way that many ambitious people will gladly arm hostile, tyrannical governments with the means to oppress and murder so long as they reap profit and personal luxury. Libertarians will often defend this saying that it is in "their rational, self-interest," but it is ultimately in no one's rational, self-interest to provide ideological governments, the greatest killing machines in human history (as decisively proved in the 20th century), with the means to efficiently carry out their will. That makes no more rational sense than selling weapons to known criminals who live within walking distance of your neighborhood.
Where the two may come together is by accepting the limits of human nature, especially as they relate to emotion and reason, and accept the fact that these limits have little bearing on the question of personal responsibility. A biological tendency or character flaw does not excuse bad, even evil, behavior. Likewise, a culture without limits on human autonomy and which provides no guidance to desire and emotion will feed into the worst traits of humanity by giving them a continuous outlet; if man is to live with reason as a guiding tool, it needs the assistance of a culture which helps his reason control his lower instincts, his emotions and desires. Therefore, as an example, a free society may legally permit him to be promiscuous, but would not socially permit it. The state may not care a whit about how many women he beds, but his male peers would be free to exclude him from business, from church, from every social institution. If nothing in a society controls this behavior, then the behavior will be accepted, and thus there will be more of it, eventually to the point of obsession as it currently is in America where there is neither cultural nor legal restraint and it is everywhere.
Somewhat off-topic, but Merry Christmas. :)
Also, OT, Mike, but merry Christmas to you brother. And Rachel (sp?) too.
The problem, it seems to me, is that the word "freedom" is being used in different ways by libertarians than it has been for most of the Christian tradition.
Christianity has, historically at least, often viewed freedom from the perspective of "freedom from" rather than "freedom to". That is -- freedom from th corruption of the will due to Original Sin, or freedom from the curse of death due to the sin of Adam and so on. Many Christian thinkers would say that the "freedom to commit sin" is actually looking at the matter backwards -- that is, a person who uses his "freedom" to commit sin has simply demonstrated that he is not "truly free" of the impact of Original Sin, and its residue, on his ability to make moral choices -- for a will that is truly free would not -- could not -- make certain moral choices knowing full well that the price for doing so could be eternal death. That is simply not a rational choice (and much more irrational than running of a credit card debt!). This recognition by Christian thought of the reality that human reason, in its corrupted state, can and often will lead to choosing unreason or irrational results leads Christians in general towards a healthy skepticism of any system which absolutizes either (1) the use of human reason as the basis for individual or collective decision making (as in the contemporary secular state) or (2) human freedom (when viewed, as is typical today, in the sense of individual "choice" as to how to act) as an absolute moral good, and a foundational pillar of the social order. Rather, for Christians, freedom is seen as authentic when it is a freedom which frees or liberates the person from the tendency to choose the irrational (for evil is always unreason), rather than a freedom to choose whatever one wants -- the latter has often been viewed by Christian thought as a rather false vision of what true freedom entails.
Moving from that to a vision of the state from the Christian perspective, libertarian ideas are highly problematic at best because they tend to fetishize individual human freedom of action -- a vision of freedom which strikes much of the Christian tradition as false. Rather, the use of the state power to disallow behavior which constitutes an objective moral evil from the perspective of the church has generally been seen as legitimate -- precisely, again, because the "freedom" to commit such actions is a not the kind of freedom that Christianity generally recognizes as a "good". One may object that such a policy of legal coercion away from "bad" exercises of human freedom of action undermines the freedom of action required for a person to embrace Christianity to begin with, or to make moral choices of one's own, but this dramatically overstates that issue. On the one hand, a distinction must be drawn between (1) coercing religious belief and (2) prohibiting objectively evil acts: outlawing abortion, to take a relevant example, is no more an imposition of Christian faith on individuals than is outlawing murder -- it simply extends the laws of murder to cover very young people who, when desired by their parents, are commonly referred to as "babies" even before they are born, and which, when killed during the course of a murder or physical assault of the mother, elicit a stiff penalty. Abortion is an objective moral evil as it involves the killing of innocent baby humans -- the only thing that obscures the clarity of the evil of this action is the smoke screen that has been created in the last several decades by a culture which worships and fetishizes human individual freedom-of-action. And it is precisely the case of abortion which can be used effectively to demonstrate the well-founded Christian skepticism towards freedom-of-action as a human "good" -- in the case of abortion, as in so many other cases, human freedom-of-action, precisely because it is exercised in a context where "freedom-from-evil-corrupting-the-will" has not been achieved, leads to absolute human "bads", and not human "goods". Seeking to outlaw abortion is simply seeking to undo the pernicious effects on the culture of this emphasis on human freedom-of-action as being a high (or even highest) order human "good".
But does this interfere with the individual's human freedom to choose love? No, it doesn't, because the power of the state is not being used specifically to coerce adherence to Christianity as such -- this has happened, of course, at different points in the history of the church, but there's quite a bot of Christian thought which suggests that this kind of "Christianization of the state" is ultimately not the best thing for either the state or the church -- even if a rigidly secular separation of church and state, as envisioned by some contemporary secular radicals, seems similarly extremist. Rather, the freedom-of-action of the individual to respond, individually, to the call of Christ must be preserved -- it being understood that this exercise of human freedom (as I see it -- I am not a Christian of the Calvinist tradition) is permitted by a supreme act of grace motivating the individual and enabling him to overcome his corrupted will and reason and accept the call of Christ. The church would do well to not interfere in that aspect of the soteriological economy, it seems to me, but beyond that, for the church to shy away from encouraging the state to legally prohibit acts which are objectively evil, simply because they are viewed as the proper exercise of human "freedom-of-action", seems wrong-headed to me and flies in the face of the way freedom is normally viewed by Christian thought -- namely as freedom-from-corruption rather than raw freedom-to-act.
And therein is a serious problem for connecting the two worldviews. I would not say that it is insurmountable, but the majority of libertarians view social coercion as tantamount to state coercion. For them to say "fornication is wrong" necessarily implies that "fornication should be disallowed" because deep down inside, they don't believe that you can say that something is morally wrong, but should be legal anyway. It doesn't help matters that many libertarians, like liberals, seek validation for their lifestyles. It doesn't matter to them that a conservative Christian might disapprove vehemently of their choices, but let them choose them anyway; the mere act of saying that they are wrong limits their freedom.
Some thoughts here.