Coercion vs. Consent.

• Author: Long, Roderick T.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

In "Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that "there are very few libertarians today for whom consequences are not ultimately the reason why they believe in liberty," while Richard Epstein cheerfully agrees that libertarians are "all consequentialists now." Fortunately, this is not true. I say "fortunately" because consequentialism is philosophically indefensible as a normative theory.

The basic problem with consequentialism is that it recognizes no limit in principle on what can be done to people in order to promote good consequences. Now consequentialists insist that in the vast majority of cases, killing, torturing, or enslavig innocent people is not the best way to get good results. And of course they are right about that. But by the logic of their position the consistent consequentialist (happily a rara avis) must always be open to the possibility that killing, torturing, or enslaving the innocent might be called for under special circumstances, and this recognition necessarily taints the character of even one's ordinary relations to other people. As Immanuel Kant pointed out more than two centuries ago, to subordinate--or even to be prepared to subordinate--one's fellow human beings to some end they do not share is to treat them as slaves, thereby denying both their inherent dignity and one's own.

Many consequentialists will say that they too can accommodate ironclad prohibitions on certain actions, on the grounds that utility will be maximized in the long run if people internalize such prohibitions. This is true, but it misses the point. Once one has internalized an ironclad prohibition, one is by definition no longer a consequentialist. One cannot treat certain values as absolute in practice and still meaningfully deny their absoluteness in theory; a belief that is not allowed to influence one's actions is no real belief. Most consequentialists are morally superior to their theory and, thankfully, pay it only lip service.

David Friedman is quite right to point out, in the same issue, that "concepts such as rights, property, and coercion" are complicated and not always susceptible to clear and easy rules. But this is not an argument for making consequences the sole test of right action. What it does mean is...