Callous Reflections By Bryan Caplan

Like Jason Brennan, I think that truly “callous” libertarians are few and far between. But I keep thinking about reasons for the misperception. I already mentioned two. Libertarians are relatively unafraid to…

1. Make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. 2. Point out the powerful link between poverty and irresponsible behavior.

But wait, there’s more. Libertarians are also prone to:

3. Emphasize the distinction between relative and absolute poverty – and point out the fact that “the poor” in the First World are rich by world and historic standards. Libertarians often chuckle about the obesity of the American “poor” – and the percentage with cable t.v.

4. Dwell on the trade-off between helping relatively poor Americans and absolutely poor foreigners. Hyperactive sympathy for our unsuccessful countrymen is a powerful rationalization for indifference and malevolence toward people from other countries. Some libertarians therefore take a standard against it.

5. Ask questions like, “If there shouldn’t be a legal responsibility to support the parents who gave you life, why should there be a legal responsibility to support complete strangers?”

The reason why people call libertarians “callous,” then, is that they’re asking awkward questions instead of kowtowing to the people that mainstream intellectuals say they should feel sorry for. What’s the solution? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that we should keep asking our awkward questions until we get some decent answers.

P.S. I’m flying to Italy tonight. You probably won’t hear from me again until March 21. Ciao.

P.P.S. In a reply to my earlier remarks on the deserving/undeserving poor distinction, Matt Zwolinski writes:

But the mere fact that there is a valid moral distinction to be made

does not entail that we want our public policies to make it. It is,

after all, difficult to discern between the deserving and the

undeserving – maybe especially for governments, but for private

charities too. And any measures we take to diminish the likelihood of

false positives – people getting welfare who don’t deserve it – will

probably increase the likelihood of false negatives – people not

getting welfare who should. Most plausible systems of morality, I

should think, will hold the latter consequence to be much more

troubling than the former.

That sounds reasonable at first. But when charity in involuntary, these “false positives” seem much more morally troubling. As I once wrote in reply to David Balan: