Vento Sueste: Simpósio do Cato Instute sobre o "Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism"

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Simpósio do Cato Instute sobre o "Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism"

Uma discussão no Cato Unbound sobre o chamado "bleeding-heart libertarianism" (nome roubado aos chamdos "bleeding-heart liberals"), isto, a tentativa de "fusão" entre meios liberais e objectivos tradicionais da esquerda.

Artigo de base:

A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarianism, por Matt Zwolinski e John Tomasi:

Readers of Cato Unbound can probably recite the traditional libertarian philosophical position by heart. That position begins with the axiom that individuals own themselves and their labor. From there, it deduces the right of individuals to acquire property in external resources like land and minerals. These property rights are nearly absolute in their moral weight. Indeed, for the traditional libertarian, respecting property rights is simply all there is to justice. Worries about free speech, discrimination, or the environment are, to the extent that they are legitimate concerns at all, ultimately just issues about property rights. Other purported moral issues—such as questions of social justice—are merely the product of a conceptual confusion. Justice is about respecting individual property rights. To the extent that respect for property leaves some individuals poor and destitute, individuals might be called by a sense of charity and beneficence to respond. But the moral justification of free market institutions is logically independent from any claims about the effects of those institutions on the material holdings of the poor.

This view, or something like it, is often attributed to the giants of twentieth-century libertarianism such as Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.To be sure, there are other libertarians who do not fit this mold so well. Neither Friedrich Hayek nor Milton Friedman, for example, treats property rights as moral absolutes, and both allow some significant role for the state in the provision of a social safety net. But this, many think, just goes to show that these individuals were not fully libertarian (...)

By this standard, much contemporary academic libertarian thought seems hardly libertarian at all. “Neoclassical liberals” such as David Schmidtz, Gerald Gaus, Jason Brennan, Charles Griswold, and Jacob Levy reject the claim that justice is reducible to property rights, reject the idea that property rights are a kind of moral absolute, and embrace ideas that are anathema to the traditional libertarian view, such as positive liberty and, even worse, social justice. If Hayek and Friedman represent weak or imperfect versions of traditional libertarian principles, neoclassical liberals seem to positively betray those principles. (...)

In the remainder of this essay, we will discuss one particular way that neoclassical liberalism has a better grounding in the libertarian intellectual tradition than the libertarianism of Mises, Rand, and Rothbard. It is not the only contrast, but one of the clearest and most important differences between these two schools of libertarian thought has to do with the proper nature of concern for, and obligation to, the working poor. On this issue, the neoclassical liberal position is that the fate of the class who labor at the lowest end of the pay scale under capitalism is an essential element in the moral justification of that system. And this position, we will argue, has a far more solid grounding in the libertarian intellectual tradition than the justificatory indifference to which the postwar libertarians are committed. Libertarians have long linked the fate of the working poor under capitalism to the justice of capitalism itself. Sometimes this has been done out of a kind of religious conviction; sometimes as part of a pluralistic moral philosophy that takes considerations of need and sufficiency to have significant moral weight; and sometimes out of a more general commitment to institutions that serve the interests of all persons. (...)