Libertarian vs. Conservative Freedom; Or, the Problem with Secession
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Will Wilkinson has been arguing with Robin Hanson about the rights and duties of parents to inculcate their children into particular beliefs, or not to do so. Will writes: “It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion.” This point underscores an important and perhaps irreconcilable fissure between libertarians and conservatives, namely that the libertarian conception of freedom is pointy and the conservative conception is gunky.
Hang on, let me explain. A pointy topology is one that ultimately decomposes into points — atomic, indivisible regions of zero measure. A gunky topology is one in which every region contains smaller regions of non-zero measure — so decomposition never stops, there’s just more and more finely-grained gunk all the way down.
Now the analogy from topology isn’t perfect, but it is clarifying. When libertarians try to adduce the fundamental bearers of rights and liberties, they look for the smallest atomic and indivisible terminal nodes of a polity — namely, individuals. That’s why, for libertarians, the state is something of a fiction, and while entities larger than individuals may really have rights or liberties — that is, the sentence, “they have rights” is true for some non-individual values of “they” — such rights are completely parasitic on the rights of individuals, and can never contradict or undermine the latter. (more…)