Buckley’s Mix

Fair Governance IV

Posted February 22, 2009, 08:02 ET Comments Off

In previous posts I argued that the state is justified in restricting a person’s liberty to prevent him from harming other people. I also said that one could harm others through one’s example, with bad behavior rubbing off on others. I called restrictions on liberty prompted by this concern social perfectionism. I also rejected Mill’s argument that any attempt to ground laws on social prefectionism must lead to tyranny. That simply doesn’t describe Western states, all of which have adopted social perfectionism as a justification for various laws. Finally, I offered the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a benign form of social perfectionism, and suggested that very few people would today seek to repeal it on libertarian grounds.

That looks rather like a ringing endorsement of social perfectionism. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The problem is that, in approving social perfectionism, we don’t get to approve only the benign forms of it. If the state is justified in enacting laws to promote a vision of racial justice, that would include not only the 1964 Act, but all of the previous pernicious laws aimed at subjugating blacks, such as the Jim Crow laws. All in all, state neutrality about race over history would have better served blacks.

Category: Paternalism
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