“We are all libertarians …” –Dr. Julia Maskivker

Although Nozick’s valiant pincer movement against Rawls is vulnerable to counter-attack (as we saw in my previous post), Nozick is right about two things: (a) liberty matters, and (b) any attempt to achieve equality — whichever metric we use to measure equality — will come at the expense of liberty. To conclude (for now), I would only add the following additional observation: any attempt to achieve a well-ordered society (“law and order”) will also come at the expense of liberty. As a result, the $64 question is, how much liberty are we prepared to give up in order to achieve other worthy goals, such as equality, safety, or “justice”? And more broadly, is the law-liberty dilemma a “soluble” problem?

My tentative conclusion is, no it is not. Everyone (and every group) must decide for itself how much liberty he (or in the case of a group, it) is willing to trade off in exchange for equality, safety, etc., or vice versa, how much equality, safety, etc., one is willing to trade off for liberty. That is the paradox of politics in a nutshell, and as I see it, there is no scientifically “falsifiable” answer (in the Popperian sense) or single solution to this question. It’s all a matter of preferences, or perhaps aesthetics.

And on this note (aesthetics), I like to compare the great minds I have surveyed thus far — Hume and Smith, Locke and Nozick, Rousseau and Rawls — to the “Old Masters” of our Western art tradition. By way of illustration, just as many accomplished artists from different eras — Caravaggio, El Greco, and Gauguin come to mind — have painted the same pivotal moment in the life of Jesus in different ways, the famous “Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane” that took place between the Last Supper and Jesus’s arrest, so too have the great minds of political philosophy presented their own original portraits of liberty.

For Nozick, for example, liberty is the absence of coercion or interference from others, especially the state. For Rawls, it is the first of his two principles of justice: “an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.” And for Rousseau, it is obedience to the general will. Yes, we are all libertarians, but how much? Which of these competing conceptions of liberty is the “right” one? For my part, I am inclined to agree with Nozick. Rousseau’s general will is too dangerous, while Rawls is just a Rousseauian wolf in classical liberal clothing. Nozick’s nightwatchman state is not just the lesser evil; it is my aesthetic ideal.