Rothbard on Utiltarianism and Natural Rights

I have learnt for the most part not to bother with Major Freedom. He is great comic relief. But from experience I know better than to argue with him. It goes on and on and then Sumner holds it against me as well as Major for leaving 200 comments.

Major's latest broadside on utilitarianism, though, is sort of interesting. He quotes the radical libertarian Murray Rothbard.

I'm convinced Major has some sort of chemical imbalance. He leaves in this long quote with no break in the paragraphs or spaces.

I will quote him here, but take it upon myself to break up the paragraphs to make it a little more palatable to read.

“The same (non-utilitarian) mentality that leads to bigotry, also leads to the path of crony capitalism, not utilitarian neoliberalism.”

"Sumner, you don’t seem to grasp utilitarianism much do you? Utilitarianism leads to bigotry and crony capitalism. As utilitarianism only values what is good for “most people”, rather than the individual, that ethic requires whoever enforces it to select, that is, discriminate against, that is, become bigoted towards, a subset of the population of individuals on the basis of some shared common characteristic(s)."

"The first, and most important [change], occurring in the early to mid-nineteenth century, was the abandonment of the philosophy of natural rights, and its replacement by technocratic utilitarianism. Instead of liberty grounded on the imperative morality of each individual’s right to person and property, that is, instead of liberty being sought primarily on the basis of right and justice, utilitarianism preferred liberty as generally the best way to achieve a vaguely defined general welfare or common good. There were two grave consequences of this shift from natural rights to utilitarianism."

"First, the purity of the goal, the consistency of the principle, was inevitably shattered. For whereas the natural-rights libertarian seeking morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure principle, the utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient. And since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will become easy for the utilitarian in his cool calculus of cost and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case, and thus to give principle away. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to the Benthamite utilitarians in England: beginning with ad hoc libertarianism and laissez-faire, they found it ever easier to slide further and further into statism. An example was the drive for an “efficient” and therefore strong civil service and executive power, an efficiency that took precedence, indeed replaced, any concept of justice or right."

"Second, and equally important, it is rare indeed ever to find a utilitarian who is also radical, who burns for immediate abolition of evil and coercion. Utilitarians, with their devotion to expediency, almost inevitably oppose any sort of upsetting or radical change. There have been no utilitarian revolutionaries. Hence, utilitarians are never immediate abolitionists. The abolitionist is such because he wishes to eliminate wrong and injustice as rapidly as possible. In choosing this goal, there is no room for cool, ad hoc weighing of cost and benefit."

"Hence, the classical liberal utilitarians abandoned radicalism and became mere gradualist reformers. But in becoming reformers, they also put themselves inevitably into the position of advisers and efficiency experts to the State. In other words, they inevitably came to abandon libertarian principle as well as a principled libertarian strategy."

"The utilitarians wound up as apologists for the existing order, for the status quo, and hence were all too open to the charge by socialists and progressive corporatists that they were mere narrow-minded and conservative opponents of any and all change. Thus, starting as radicals and revolutionaries, as the polar opposites of conservatives, the classical liberals wound up as the image of the thing they had fought."

"This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us. Thus, in the early days of economic thought, utilitarianism captured free-market economics with the influence of Bentham and Ricardo, and this influence is today fully as strong as ever."

"Current free-market economics is all too rife with appeals to gradualism; with scorn for ethics, justice, and consistent principle; and with a willingness to abandon free-market principles at the drop of a cost-benefit hat. Hence, current free-market economics is generally envisioned by intellectuals as merely apologetics for a slightly modified status quo, and all too often such charges are correct."

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31800#comment-847041

Here is another link Major left for more on utilitarianism and 'natural rights.'

https://mises.org/library/utilitarian-free-market-economics

While I've taken the liberty of splitting Major's paragraphs when you see his source, you realize that he was the one to bundle the whole thing up anyway. It's perfectly readable on this Mises site.

The trouble with utilitarianism according to Rothbard was that it's not pure enough to carry the libertarian banner. For me this is no problem as I'm not a libertarian.

I'm no fan of such purity. Indeed, what was interesting in one of my old skirmishes with Major is that he revealed that he used to be a Marxist.

Why is this not at all surprising? He went from being fanatically anti capitalist to being fanatically pro capitalist.

It's also interesting: according to Rothbard the golden age of natural right was during the age of absolute monarchy.

Under absolute monarchy, natural rights were respected. Rothbard sounds like Herman S. Hoppe.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_5?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=herman+hoppe&sprefix=air+m%2Caps%2C153