I commonly hear this complaint against us libertarians. We are too impractical because we insist on dogmatically following our own principles. Far better, our critics say, is it to take a case-by-case basis.

This post is for them. Please note, I am not addressing people whose principles differ from ours. This post is only addressed to those who say that it is more pragmatic to take up things on a “case to case” basis. It is my intention to prove you wrong. If you feel that my description of your views oversimplifies the issue, please accept my apologies and read on. The actual post will make amends.

Is your approach really case by case?
Next time you are approaching something on a “case-by-case” basis, ask yourself, “Why is it that I am taking this decision in this case?”

Let’s take a specific case. There’s this post by Gopi. His preference is that what a person does in his house ought to be his business. Now let’s say that this works for eating (case 1). But what if he beats his wife in his house (case 2)?

Ask yourself, why you think that a person has the liberty to do what he wants in case 1 but not case 2? The obvious answer is that in case 1, the person is not harming anyone, but in case 2, he is. Can this distinction be used to state general principles? Perhaps we can. We can say that “A person has a right to do what he wants in his house provided he does not cause harm to others.”

So do we have a principle we can use? Not yet. The way to test this principle is to see how it works against other cases. What about a man smoking in his house? What if his wife doesn’t mind the smoking? Should we amend the rule to “does not cause harm to others without their consent?”

Wait a minute, wouldn’t that mean that beating his wife with her consent (probably under duress) would be okay? So perhaps we should have a principle to distinguish between “harm” as in “beating” and “harm” as in “smoking”? Perhaps, perhaps not. My intention here was to draw attention to a process by which general rules can be drawn from special cases. Does this process make sense? Is it possible to keep looking at examples, refine the rules more and more, so that we have a set of principles that will apply in every situation? I can think of three reasons why this process should not work.

1. I and you might have differing preferences and differing priorities. Of course, few people will argue that a man’s right to his home should extend to beating his wife inside it. But reasonable people will disagree over whether a man should have a right to smoke inside his house (and thereby cause inconvenience to the wife, though she may not complain). So even though I and you go through the same process, we may still end up with different sets of principles, and we may end up disagreeing over what rules to run society by.
2. We may differ over how general the rules should be. You might say; “You libertarians speak at an extremely high levels of abstraction. You talk of things like ‘human rights’, ‘property rights’ and such. We aren’t saying that there shouldn’t be any principles at all. We do want rules. But we want them at a much greater level of detail.”
3. If all your reactions are emotional responses, then yes, you will find it difficult to give any reasons for them. Every case will be different for you, because it will only depend on what you feel about it.

Well, the rest of the post was supposed to answer that, but this has already gotten too long, so I’ll split it up. But here is the other headings that I had already written to give a flavour of what I was about to say.

• You are not the one deciding on every case
• You need to know in advance what is right and what is wrong
• The more concrete the rule, the greater the discretionary powers
• The more abstract the rule, the less scope for conflicts
• People use principles when it suits them – Principles matter
• The law-making powers of the government need to be constrained too.