(DOWNLOAD) "News for the Libertarians: The Moral Tradition Already Contains the Libertarian Premises (Twenty-Fourth Federalist Society Student Symposium, Law and Freedom)" by Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: News for the Libertarians: The Moral Tradition Already Contains the Libertarian Premises (Twenty-Fourth Federalist Society Student Symposium, Law and Freedom)
- Author : Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 300 KB
Description
This is a discussion long overdue in our circles, for the libertarian temptation threatens to do for us what the lure of moral relativism and postmodernism has done for liberalism in our own day, which is to render liberalism incoherent. When liberals enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there was no tinge of doubt, at least, on the wrongness of racial discrimination, and liberals had no doubt about the claims of that law to render justice. But liberals in our own day invoke the claims of privacy, while they relentlessly legislate to deny claims of privacy in the management of private corporations, small private businesses, and private clubs. Liberals invoke equality at every turn, but they do not take seriously the notion that "all men are created equal" expresses a genuine moral truth. In other words, they invoke equality, but they can no longer explain what makes equality genuinely good, right, and just. The temptation has been to deny that there are grounds of moral judgment--mainly, I think, to fend off the temptation to cast moral judgments on others through legislation. The main motive, I suspect, among liberals is to insulate themselves from judgments cast on them in their sexual lives, while remaining free to legislate to restrict our private lives in all other respects. That stance of liberals--moralism without morality and the drive to keep legislating--may account for the recoil of libertarians from people with the passion to legislate for others. But many libertarians have been drawn to the same fount of moral skepticism, and that moral relativism threatens our own side with the same incoherence that now afflicts the liberals. My claims here may be condensed in this way before I explain them: The libertarians do not seem to understand that their concerns are already incorporated in the classic understanding of the connection between the logic of morals and the logic of law. To that classic understanding, they run the risk of offering nothing more than a corrosive moral skepticism. For that traditional understanding already contains in its moral logic built-in burdens on people who would legislate casually, with moral pretensions but with no moral substance. The libertarians seem to have missed these anchoring points: that the claims of liberty flow only to those beings we call "moral agents"; that the libertarian argument is irreducibly a moral argument; and that when we understand the genuine moral requirements that attach to the making of laws, we realize that we have lifted the bars for legislation. To understand the moral ground that justifies the law is to make it harder, not easier, for people to legislate.
 "News for the Libertarians: The Moral Tradition Already Contains the Libertarian Premises (Twenty-Fourth Federalist Society Student Symposium, Law and Freedom)" by Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}