Roderick T. Long

Roderick T. Long is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, President of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society, and a Senior Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He received his philosophical training at Harvard (A.B. 1985) and Cornell (Ph.D. 1992) and has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan. Among his books are, Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand (2000) and Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action (forthcoming from Routledge) ...

[Spencer] is inexplicably condemned as favoring the "law of the jungle" ... As Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long writes,

The textbook summary is absurd, of course. Far from being a proponent of "might makes right," Spencer wrote that the "desire to command is essentially a barbarous desire" because it "implies an appeal to force," which is "inconsistent with the first law of morality" and "radically wrong." While Spencer opposed tax-funded welfare programs, he strongly supported voluntary charity, and indeed devoted ten chapters of his Principles of Ethics to a discussion of the duty of "positive beneficence."

Roderick Long has something to say on this matter:

In real life, one rarely finds members of either camp [deontologist and consequentialist] relying solely on a single set of considerations. It is a rare moral or political polemic indeed that does not include both consequentialist and deontological arguments. ... Whatever they may say officially, most consequentialists would be deeply disturbed to discover that their favoured policies slighted human dignity, and most deontologists would be deeply disturbed to discover that their favoured policies had disastrous consequences.

[Long] writes, "By 'responsibility' I mean ... more than mere causal responsibility, in the sense invoked when we say that the acid was responsible for the corrosion of the metal, or that an asteroid was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Judgments of causation are, of course, essential to the working of any legal system. But there is a narrower sense of responsibility, having to do with positive considerations of knowledge and control, as well as normative considerations of praiseworthiness, blameworthiness, and obligation; and it is responsibility in this sense that I maintain is legally irrelevant."

Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long points out that the principle lex iniusta non est lex — an unjust law is not a law —

was once, and indeed for over two millennia, the dominant position in western philosophy of law... This doctrine was upheld by Socrates, Plato, and Xenophon, by the Stoics and by Cicero, by Augustine and Aquinas, and by Blackstone as well. The traditional idea was that law must be distinguished from mere force by its authority, and that nothing unjust could have genuine authority. ["Inside and Outside Spooner's Jurisprudence" ...]

[A]s Roderick Long points out, there's a problem: "It has often been claimed that indirect utilitarianism is unstable, and must collapse either into direct utilitarianism on the one hand or into 'rules fetishism' on the other." ... Long writes,

Most people are unlikely to find the deontological case for a given course of action compelling so long as they believe it would have terrible consequences; likewise, they are equally unlikely to find the consequentialist case compelling so long as they believe that the action violates human dignity, or equality, or liberty.

[B]oth sides of the artificial moral-practical divide need each other ... [Roderick] Long adds, because

In real life, one rarely finds members of either camp relying solely on a single set of considerations. It is a rare moral or political polemic indeed that does not include both consequentialist and deontological arguments. ... Whatever they may say officially, most consequentialists would be deeply disturbed to discover that their favoured policies slighted human dignity, and most deontologists would be deeply disturbed to discover that their favoured policies had disastrous consequences.

[E]udaimonism, ... Roderick Long writes, "means that virtues like prudence and benevolence play a role in determining the content of justice, but also—via a process of mutual adjustment—that justice plays a role in determining the content of virtues like prudence and benevolence." ... [T]he libertarian principle ... establishes the most fundamental equality of all persons ... : what Long calls equality of authority ... Long traces out a key implication of this idea: "Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police."

The ruling elite and its court intellectuals solemnly speak of the need to balance liberty and security ... But they don't want a real public discussion ... But even this concedes too much, because there is no balance to be struck ... As libertarian philosopher Roderick Long wrote,

What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with—by anyone, be they our own government, other nations' governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security? You can't trade off freedom against security because they're exactly the same thing.

Roderick Long made a similar point on his blog, The Austro-Athenian Empire:

In the wake of the recent NSA revelations, there's increased talk about the need to "balance" freedom against security. I even see people recycling Larry Niven's law that freedom + security = a constant.
Nonsense. What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with—by anyone, be they our own government, other nations' governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security?
You can't trade off freedom against security because they're exactly the same thing.

As Roderick Long formulates the Principle of Proportion: "If S violates O's boundary, O (or O's agent) has the right to invade S's boundary in whatever way is necessary to end S's violation of O's boundary, so long as O's (or O' agent's) invasion of S's boundary is not disproportionate to the seriousness of S's violation of O's boundary." (Also see Long's "The Irrelevance of Responsibility".) ... Roderick Long wrote in private correspondence, "Master and slave are interdefined; so are parent and child. It's not circular because we can define the whole relationship."

Does that mean [Rothbard] was wrong to call [the nonagression axiom] an axiom? Not according to Roderick Long:

Another objection ... focuses on the term "axiom," which is sometimes taken to imply that the prohibition of aggression enjoys a special epistemic status ... While some proponents of the prohibition do indeed claim such a status for it, many do not ... [T]here is a broader sense of "axiom" in which a foundational presupposition of a given system of thought counts as an axiom within that system of thought ... even if it rests on some deeper justification outside that system ...

As Roderick Long wrote in his 2006 Rothbard Memorial Lecture:

We might compare the alliance between government and big business to the alliance between church and state in the Middle Ages. Of course it's in the interest of both parties to maintain the alliance—but ... each side would like to be the dominant partner, so it's no surprise that the history of such alliances will often look like a history of conflict and antipathy, as each side struggles to get the upper hand. But this struggle must be read against a common background framework of cooperation to maintain the system of control.

Roderick Long tackles this problem in his extended essay "Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand". What Long shows ... is that Rand's notion of self-interest ... in her nonfiction essays is too flimsy to support the libertarian prohibition on aggression ... [He] shows that Rand's explicit writings on ethics are a tangle of at least three different and inconsistent defenses for the [NAP] ... Long adds, "To violate the rights of others, then, is to lessen one's humanity ... To trample on the rights of others is never in our self-interest, because well-being cannot [quoting Aristotle] 'come about for those who rob and use force.'"

The Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long recently touched on this subject ... Long's purpose was to explore the political and other implications of what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called the "rule-following paradox." We know rule-following when we see it ... but what is it? It is neither words in one's mind or on paper (or parchment) that compel certain behavior, nor physical motions, which could be consistent with many different rules. Rather, it's a kind of purposeful human action ... in a particular context that cannot be reduced to either a mental state nor a series of motions.

Roderick Long explains,

Those who see government power and corporate power as being in conflict, and those who seem them as being in cahoots, each have a point. The alliance ... is like the partnership between church and state in the Middle Ages: each one wants to be the dominant partner ... The main difference between "left-wing" and "right-wing" versions of statism ... is that the former generally seek to shift the balance a bit farther in favour of the state (i.e., toward state-socialism) while the latter generally seek to shift the balance a bit farther in favour of corporatism ...

In his 1819 essay "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns," Benjamin Constant argued that the ancient Greco-​Roman conception of liberty was primarily concerned with the freedom to participate in the collective decisions of the state ... Athenian playwrights like Aristophanes lampooned the city's political leaders upon the public stage, assailed Athenian foreign policy, and satirized the gods too. Athenian commitment to being free to live as one pleases may have had its limits, but the idea was there, and it was implemented to an impressive extent.

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a novelist-philosopher who outlined a comprehensive philosophy, including an epistemology and a theory of art, in her novels and essays. ... The Fountainhead brought Rand international fame, and Atlas Shrugged (1957) sealed this fame. By 1958, Rand's novels, increasingly philosophical, had won her ideas a sufficiently devoted following for her to form, in association with psychologist Nathaniel Branden (with whom she later broke), an official 'Objectivist' philosophical movement, complete with journals and lecture courses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Massachusetts native, was one of the founders of Transcendentalism, a philosophical, literary, and cultural movement that stressed spiritual oneness with nature, reliance on inner experience, and rejection of social conformity. Other prominent Transcendentalists included Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau ... he favored "free trade with all the world without toll or custom-houses" and was skeptical of the practicability of top-down, governmentally imposed solutions to social problems ... individualist anarchists ... who sought to achieve socialist ends by free-market means, found Emerson a congenial spirit.

Aristotle believes that most of his fellow Greeks are mistaken about the nature of the human good, identifying it with wealth or power rather than with virtuous activity. ... Aristotle's theories have been seen as a mere transcription of existing mores only because modern scholars have mistakenly read Aristotle's outlook back into the mores that he is in fact criticizing. ... But a careful reading of his works shows that Aristotle was keenly aware of, and bitterly opposed to, the centralizing political trends of his day.

The morality of warfare is an issue that has long divided libertarians. The spectrum of libertarian opinion on the subject ranges all the way from Leonard Peikoff, who defends the use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets, to Robert LeFevre, who denied the legitimacy of all violence, even in self-defense ... From a libertarian point of view, an interventionist foreign policy is a dead end, both on deontological and on consequentialist grounds; libertarians must continue to be economic and cultural internationalists, but political and military isolationists.

I want to talk about some of the main objections that have been given to libertarian anarchism and my attempts to answer them. But before I start ..., there is no point in trying to answer objections to a view unless you have given some positive reason to hold the view in the first place ...
But, if we assume that [protection agencies] formed the cartel out of their own economic self-interest, then [that] is precisely what leads to the undermining because it's in their interest to deal with the person, just as it's always in your interest to engage in mutually beneficial trade.

Posterity's debt to the great civilizations of antiquity is enormous, but this legacy can hardly be regarded as consistently libertarian ... Athenian society had many libertarian aspects. Its economic and intellectual freedom attracted merchants and philosophers from all over the Greek world ... Cicero saw Roman law as an embodiment of the universal Natural Law of the Stoics and described the state's proper function as defense of property ... it can be argued that the Christian emphasis on the sacred value of the individual soul laid the foundation for the development of theories of individual rights.

Last week Michael Lind asked a silly question ("The question libertarians just can't answer"): if libertarianism is so great, why hasn't any country tried it? The question is silly because the libertarian answer is obvious: Libertarianism is great for ordinary people, but not for the power elites that control countries ... The regulations against which Tea Partiers rail are mainly secondary regulations, the belt over the bones ... A better question we might ask Lind and Dionne: if the intrusive state is so great, why does it need to retain its clients by force, rather than letting them peacefully opt out?

Twenty-eight years ago a Harvard philosophy professor named Robert Nozick did something unthinkable in polite intellectual society: he published a book defending libertarianism. In 1974 libertarian ideas had virtually no presence within the academic establishment ... Robert Nozick died on January 23, 2002, after a long battle with cancer. But the impact of his most famous book continues to grow ... [T]hese days, [philosopher Jonathan] Wolff laments, he all too often encounters a third view: "that, broadly speaking, Nozick is right." Thank you, Robert Nozick.