Postmodernism challenges our notions of what the twin tools of reason and empirical observation can accomplish. It also challenges the idea of a universal, clearly demonstrable, and binding morality. In this regard, postmodernism might be an issue for libertarians, who frequently view ourselves as heirs to the Enlightenment, which is often understood as claiming to establish all of these.

Postmodernism upends moral theories by situating them in social contexts, or as a person’s point of view. It argues that either deontology, or consequentialism, or virtue ethics–any all‐​encompassing theory of moral truth and obligation–is yet another set of metanarratives. Libertarians base their politics on universal ethical claims as well as social science, and so this problem is a significant one. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to fully address this challenge in proper depth, but I’d like to suggest a few important ideas.

One point to consider is that morality, even if real and objective in some limited sense, is both more difficult and far more pluralistic than it may appear. We can’t identify liberty as a strict absolute that always acts as our directive on moral questions, because figuring out the right thing to do and how to treat people correctly is really hard. It’s just as hard as, if not harder than, any of the scientific, cultural, and religious questions people ask. Thus, we should strive to identify liberty as an extremely important value within a larger discourse about what our moral intuitions say. These intuitions will point to many things as being significant, and identifying how best to evaluate them, and weigh them off against each other is a complex task. On this view, the endless libertarian conversation about rights and consequences is an eristic squabble between competing metanarratives that tend to overemphasize different pieces of the larger ethical puzzle.

However, a postmodern approach should push us to recognize that moral pluralism is itself a narrative about the nature of ethics. Although a postmodern approach makes ethical claims highly contingent, I do think it is possible to endorse an ethical framework through a process of asking, “What does this accomplish?”. When we consider any approach to morality, we can evaluate to what extent it is critical and self‐​reflective, and whether it resolves important dilemmas of value and action that other approaches do not. No moral theory will be able to pierce the veil of human subjectivity, but a worthy theory should give us reason to believe that it has gotten closer to the truth than competitors. In this regard, intuition‐​guided pluralism is, by its nature, focused on the limitations we face in identifying moral truths, and emphasizes the diversity of value commitments and ways of seeing moral obligations, aspects which are lacking from its alternatives.

Additionally, postmodernism gives us reason to see ethics as constructivist. Meta‐​ethical constructivism argues that morality does not exist as a truth independent from the human communities in which it exists. However, that does not make morality relative or nonobjective. Instead, we need to ask what morality is for. Morality is a way of responding to the question of how to live with and act towards other people. It asks us to identify how best to recognize the concerns and requirements of interaction that the facts about humans demand. People care about how they and others are engaged with and share a common moral sense that allows our cares and concerns to be intelligible to others. Moral values are not mere preferences, but feelings with prescriptions and arguments interwoven about what we owe and are owed.

As David Schmidtz argues, moral theories are maps. Morality is a “territory” all humans share but they find different “right” paths through that territory in different legitimate ways. Importantly, as Charles Taylor points out, the horizon of our normative vision helps us to define that which is important, but also to see how others see differently. Recognizing that morality is a discourse, a way of talking and thinking about how to behave and how to treat one another, should point us towards being more tolerant. It should motivate us to work hard in giving each other compelling reasons to value things in alternative ways. We need to treat our interlocutors as reflective agents capable of weighing values in a reasonable fashion, and our differing commitments need not leave us at an impasse; they often help us to arrive at places of agreement, or at least understanding. K.A Appiah argues that recognizing difference can help us to learn and think more deeply about our values, while Gerald Gaus suggests that undergoing some degree of civil strife better enables cooperation. In this regard, perhaps moral knowledge, like many other kinds, relies on processes of discovery and evolution.

Additionally, postmodernism presents a challenge to the high esteem in which many libertarians hold reason and modern science. Libertarians see ourselves as defenders of modernity and scientific progress, of economic growth and innovation, all views which would seem to be in conflict with postmodernism. Max Weber famously argued that modernity is distinguished by “disenchantment,” the view that “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation”. For Weber, to be a modern is to believe in the idea that reason, applied to calculation, measurement, and empirical observation, is the best way to unpack and decode the facts about the world. This contrasts with the premodern era of religion, in which tradition and mysticism were primary sources for truth. Weber paired this claim about modern thinking with one about modern institutions. In his essay on politics, Weber distinguished between three types of authority. There is traditional authority, which rests on past history and habitual norms; charismatic authority, based on heroism and leadership qualities along with special claims to knowledge or divine revelation; and legal‐​rational authority, based on organizational compliance and expertise and claims to legitimacy under a set of general rules. Modern life is characterized by legal‐​rational authority. Our institutional frameworks mirror our mental frameworks, abandoning tradition and religion for secular systems of procedure and technical ability.

These aspects of modernism all seem like ideas that libertarians would endorse. A dedication to science and to institutions based on rules and not people are common libertarian commitments. After all, libertarians use social science heavily in defense of their preferred policies and institutions, especially (though not exclusively) economics. They also strongly defend ideas like the rule of law and the importance of expertise in making policy.

However, I argue that these aspects of modernity, while often extremely valuable, have a dark side, one which libertarians are especially well‐​equipped to recognize. Weber himself argued that modern political and social institutions have the danger of being locked into what he called an “iron cage.” This describes the phenomenon of institutions turning more and more to processes of technical efficiency conducted through bureaucracy, standardization, and “rationalization”—actions based on abstract calculation rather than the individual imbuing of meaning. The institutions become bound or trapped by their reliance on the “rationalistic” procedures upon which they were founded and by which they are sustained. Agencies are frequently constrained in deviating from the logic of technocratic social control which underlies them.

Weber’s notion of the iron cage connects directly to critiques of state action offered by thinkers that libertarians appreciate and champion. These include Austrian economists and social theorists like Ludwig von Mises, F.A Hayek, Don Lavoie, and the Austrian‐​school affiliated philosopher Michael Polanyi. It also includes Scottish Enlightenment philosophers like Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson. What all these thinkers have in common is a strong recognition that while reason and empirical observation are extremely powerful, they also have severe limitations. We should be extremely humble about what we think we know and understand. People simply do not have the ability to easily systematize and direct complex systems using the tools of measurement and calculation.

Complex systems frequently function well because they accommodate and take seriously that people have limited cognitive capacities, and that we navigate the world by imbuing our lives and decisions with meaning. In contrast with the narrative of scientific planning, the track record of human progress and freedom has been built on individuals making subjective interpretations of their world in a heavily decentralized fashion, guided by very general “rules of the game” and by restrained governing institutions. This cumulative and emergent process is successful precisely because it limits the power of technocrats to “scientifically” control individuals. This is the argument we find in the Austrian critiques of central planning, in the ideas of the knowledge problem and spontaneous order, and in defenses of prices, private property and free exchange. We likewise find it in Smith’s invisible hand metaphor and his critique of the “man of the system,” who falsely believes he has sufficient knowledge and ability to plan out and direct the activities of millions of others according to his design.

Furthermore, works such as James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State demonstrate the ways in which the “iron cage” has led to domestic tyrannies and social disaster, wrapped in the guise of better policy. In cases ranging from economic development to foreign policy, expert theories and attempts at engineering social outcomes from the top down have wrecked whole countries and regions. This is a function of what Roger Koppl labels “expert failure,” a relative of the better‐​known concepts of market and government failure. Likewise, work by Michel Foucault and others amply demonstrates the massive harms done by imposing society’s supposedly “scientific” will on individuals who are different from the mainstream. Casey Given has aptly observed that the state itself is a metanarrative, one cloaked in romanticism and capable of incredible destruction.

Thus, libertarians, like postmodernists, are rightly skeptical of certain approaches to science, particularly versions which make totalizing epistemological claims. Libertarians and classical liberals have also made important contributions in how to think about and do science that mirror postmodern critiques. We recognize that truth claims, as both Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn argued, are not independent of the individuals and the communities that make them, particularly those with power. Science cannot be a wholly neutral enterprise. Or as Thomas Nagel puts it, there is no such thing as the “view from nowhere.”

Overall, I think that postmodernism is an extremely important perspective, one from which libertarians can learn a great deal, and reciprocally, one to which we can make great contributions. Rather than being afraid of the claim that we can’t easily access objective truth, we should embrace it, and take our limitations seriously. It’s by recognizing our limits that we can have greater confidence in our attempts at truly making a better world, and a society that is more prosperous, more rights‐​respecting, more inclusive, more open, more diverse, and more free.