Personal Responsibility or, The Ex-Libertarian
Had an interesting conversation with my neighbor the other day. I haven't talked to the guy very much, but it had been pointed out to me in the past that he's a die-hard libertarian. Now, knowing that isn't enough to size the guy up, really, because there are lots of different flavors of libertarian. Still, I knew it would be an interesting conversation to a point, if things got down to politics at all. Which, of course, they always do.

He's an interesting guy, actually--a study in blind spots and apparent contradictions--though I may have been projecting. He is a really devout libertarian, to the point that he is angry that his taxes help pay for the public education of other peoples' children and such. He believes in getting rid of all gun laws. That sort of thing. And yet, he was for a very long time a member of the machinists' union, a strong union. Presumably he gained quite a bit from being part of that union (in a good way, to me...but to him? hard to tell).

We argued for a while about particulars, but then I tried to delve into his underlying conception of reality. For him, he repeated again and again, it all comes down to individual, personal responsibility. When I tried to get him to elaborate on that, of course, it was difficult for him to say why he believed that, and what it meant, exactly. But he did think it means that, no matter what situation you are born into, it's your responsibility to create your life, and nobody else's.

It's tough to argue agains positions that are this (in my mind) incoherent. Or at least it's tough to know where to start. I talked a lot about it being a black-or-white fallacy to think that responsibility (whatever we decide it means, exactly) for an act is either all mine or all "the world's". I wasn't able to get it across to him--when I talked about the way we are connected, he said that I was suffering from guilt about what I owed people. He might be right, as far as that goes, but that isn't the whole picture, by far.

Later on, I realized that I should have brought out my old staple I use against uber-libertarians when they go into the hyper-individuality shpeil: What about family? Parents, brothers, sisters and kids make poor libertarians, in part because of the often explicity connectedness that they find in their lives. But I also thought about this:

The idea of a person being completely, utterly responsible for everything that happens to her doesn't even make sense, logically. This is what I wished I had asked him:
--Are you responsible for everything you do?
A: Yep.
--Then you are responsible for what you do to other people?
A: Yep.
--So if you smack somebody else upside the head, who is responsible?

Now, he might respond that he was responsible for doing it and the other guy was responsible for getting hit--but I think that's dodgy, of course. The more clear answer (I think) is that both are responsible, to varying degrees, and those degrees might change depending on how we frame the situation (i.e. if I am goading him on to hit me, maybe I'm more responsible). The point being that it just doesn't make sense, in a world full of other agents, that I am the only one responsible, all the time, for whatever happens to me--because then the same can't be said for any agents that interact with other agents.

I'm really sure that would have convinced him. He would have said, "Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than the fact-avoiding bs that I'm spouting!"

Or not.

Still, Linus gets it:

Filed under:Comics as Life, Philosophy and
Politics