The Moral Case for Freedom Is the Practical Case for Freedom
The division of human life into the moral and the practical is of recent vintage.
Sheldon Richman | December 29, 2013
If I say that a government activity — “public” schooling, perhaps, or the war on selected drug merchants and users — helps turn the inner cities into hellholes and otherwise makes people’s lives miserable, is that a moral objection or a practical (utilitarian or generally consequentialist) objection?
Some libertarians are inclined to say it’s a utilitarian objection, but I’ve long been uncomfortable with this answer. For one thing, valid or not, utilitarianism is a moral theory, so utilitarian objections cannot be excluded from the realm of moral propositions.
Leaving that aside, we must inquire whether libertarian concerns are really divisible into a concern with duties (deontology) , say, regarding individual rights and a concern with practical consequences. This is an unfortunate feature of many libertarians’ thinking, but it’s not confined to libertarians. In this bifurcated view of the human world, there is a list of moral dos and don’ts that are not directly related to “practical” matters, specifically, the conditions under which human beings can prosper. That strikes me as odd, if for no other reason than that in this view the “moral” side appears to outrank the “practical” side: Success is nice, but the ethical test has priority. Some libertarians often say they would favor freedom even if it did not promote good things like prosperity because people have a right to freedom that is unrelated to its consequences. (Of course, they don’t believe that freedom could have bad consequences. But is that just a happy coincidence? More on this below.)
https://reason.com/archives/2013/12/29/the-moral-case-for-freedom-is-the-practi