Reason and Liberty

No, not the two magazines. The connection. In my view being moral and libertarian is completely reasonable. Careful application of reason is both necessary and sufficient to justify libertarianism. This is our starting point. We have a rational, justifiable set of politico-ethical beliefs. Certainly, we don’t want to say libertarianism is irrational.

So when we talk about the interrelationship between politics and atheism or religion, the question is simply: which is rational, supported by reason, compatible with the reasons underlying libertarianism?

No doubt the leftist/libertine sort of atheism, at least, suffers from irrationalism. Many of these types do reject God not because of carefully developed, sincere reasoning, but for ulterior motives or rejection of Authority. I.e., they do not like the idea that someone might know more than them, or that there might be immutable standards of right and wrong to which they objectively should conform. So they stamp their feet like little brats and reject it. This is indeed irrational–it is believing something to be the case because one wants it to be true (or not), rather than because there are good reasons for it.

But the juvenile rejection of authority is not, I believe, the only path to atheism. There are quite rational bases for it too. To the extent it is the more rational position, it of course has to be compatible with libertarianism, which is also supported by reason.

When it comes to religion, there is certainly an irrational element there, to say the least. But if you analyze, say, certain careful Christian reasoning (I am thinking of Catholic reasoning such as the “No Rational Basis” section of this article), there is more careful reasoning there than even the paleo-atheist, perhaps influenced too much by Rand’s religion-hostility, might suspect. At the least, as Rothbard recognized, the moral teachings and natural authority and cultural importance of religion should not be hostilely rejected out of hand, as is many atheists’ habit.

Whether non-religiously-hostile atheism, or well-grounded religious views, is more compatible with reason, is a separate question (and not really a political one). But in my view, reason and rationality is the standard that must be used to decide the question of which is more compatible with libertarianism. (And I don’t see how someone can deny this without falling into contradiction: to deny it is to employ some reason and to admit the efficacy of reason; so it would be simply self-contradictory to use reason in an attempt to show that reason is not the applicable standard.)

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12:33 pm on December 3, 2003