It's not easy to give an exact, non-controverisal description of the rights that libertarians say we have. The phrase "individual rights" evokes a picture that is very rough, but is adequate for the present purpose. But there's a further issue: although it is clear that libertarians like individual rights, it's less clear what that means. Consider a familiar type of case: Suppose you could raise a bunch of taxes, fund a large army, invade Burma, and replace its current government with one that is more friendly to individual rights. If you're a typical libertarian, you think raising those taxes would violate some individual rights. But (assume that) overthrowing the government of Burma would prevent many more (and more egregious) violations of individual rights. Does that positive trade-off make it OK to invade Burma on your citizens' dime?
No, according to (what we can call) dirty-hands libertarianism. Dirty-hands libertarianism says that one must never violate individual rights, even if doing so will prevent a very large number of rights-violations from occurring. As many have noticed, it's not obvious that we can make such a view respectable. It seems as though the dirty-hands libertarian doesn't really care about whether individual rights are violated; what she really cares about is whether she herself violates any individual rights. This kind of self-centeredness seems objectionable -- it seems to involve an undue emphasis on keeping one's own hands clean of rights-violations.
There's more to say about this objection and I think there are interesting replies to it. But if the libertarian is moved by it, she might switch to another view, which we can call rights-promotion libertarianism. On this view, one should simply try to make the overall number of individual rights-violations as small as possible. Sometimes that means refraining from violating individual rights oneself; but sometimes, e.g. in the Burma case, rights-promotion libertarianism calls for violating rights in order to prevent a larger number of rights-violations.
At minimum, rights-promotion libertarianism needs some tweaking. For example, it seems as though a good rights-promotion libertarian shouldn't reproduce, since your kids' rights are bound to be violated now and then, and you can prevent all that simply by not having them in the first place. This is probably an unwelcome implication; and there are other similar issues that come up. But maybe these sorts of problems aren't huge -- maybe they can be avoided by fiddling with the view, e.g. by saying that the rights of merely potential persons don't count (or count in a different way than the rights of actual persons), or whatever.
But I think the view has some deeper problems. Rights-promotion libertarianism looks like a version of maximizing consequentialism. But to produce a version of maximizing consequentialism equivalent to rights-promotion libertarianism, you'd have to think that (a) violation of individual rights is the only thing that is non-instrumentally bad, and (b) nothing whatsoever is non-instrumentally good. This is a weird and improbable view. You could get around this by abandoning the maximizing-consequentialist framework, and say that there is an obligation to minimize rights-violations even when doing so fails to maximize overall value. But then I think you'll have a hard time making sense of the view. On this view, you may violate others' rights in order to do one type of good (i.e. prevent rights-violations) but not in order to do any other type of good (e.g. feed the poor). This seems arbitrary.
So I suspect that if you think it's permissible to violate rights in order to ensure that fewer rights are violated, you're going to have trouble explaining why it's not permissible to violate rights in order to, say, bring about lots of pleasure, or satisfy intense desires, etc. But I think all genuine libertarians must be able to say (and explain why) it's not permissible to violate rights just to secure those sorts of values. So it seems to me that if you want to be a genuine libertarian, you probably have to be a dirty-hands libertarian, and just do your best to handle the problems facing that view.
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