Sunday, May 23, 2010
For libertarians, to the extent that there is something that can be called a defense of segregation, it is generally argued for on the more "impartial" grounds of property rights. The arguement generally goes something like this: despite the fact that we may be personally opposed to segregation, it is justified insofar as it is a manifestation of the right of property owners to exclude who they want from their property. Thus, in principle, it is legally permissible for both home owners and buisiness owners to adopt a policy of segregation (whether it be racial, religious, or whatever). The alternative is "forced association", which is unlibertarian.
At least at the surface level, it appears impossible for any libertarian to disagree with this. By the very least, a libertarian qua libertarian cannot condone politically institutionalized integration in the sense of a universalized legal obligation to be inclusive towards certain groups. But I think that once one gets more specific about what we are really talking about, complications emerge. For one thing, the libertarian qua libertarian must at a minimum be equally opposed to politically institutionalized segregation, and the kind of segregation that existed en mass before the civil rights movement most certainly wasn't simply a matter of the property rights of citizens. It was a matter of state law and land.
One route in which certain claims to legitimate segregation can be questioned is from the perspective of justified property titles in the first place. We could start with the most obvious case. If one doesn't recognize the state itself as having a legitimate title, then the state can not have a right to discriminate. This delegitimizes all segregation relative to state-controlled land. We could go further than this too. To the extent that the state upholds "private" titles that aren't legitimate, then a right to discriminate is delegitimized in those cases as well. This level of analysis (justified title) by itself already begins to whittle away at the tenability of certain property-based justifications for segregation, although it does not cover all bases.
There is also some ambiguity more generally in the position supporting property rights. The home is often used as an analogy to demonstrate the normalcy of such levels of exclusion, but this feels like a false analogy when we are talking about something much more systematic or at larger scales such as an entire community. The larger the land mass that is being talked about is, and the more disconnected the property claim in question is from use, the more that this defense seems ridiculous and devolves into institutional segregation anyways. It becomes a defense of "covenants" (which, in this case, is little more than a code word for community-wide laws) that require every owner in a community to be exclusive in a particular way. In short, we end up with something rather state-like.
We could go further than this. Why is "free association" necessarily relative to something territorial? Indeed, there seems to be some tension here between the restrictions of absolutely respecting territorial boundaries and upholding people's personal freedom. In theory, territorialist notions of property rights (coupled with the expansion of territorial claims in a scarce world) can amount to a defense of excluding someone from the possibility of having any rights at all, since you effectively have to either own land or be invited on to someone else's land in order to occupy a given space and associate freely. This gets us into much more general questions, but it does relate to segregation: there is good reason for believing that a rigidly territorially segregated society is inherently unfree.
One of the last ditch efforts that some libertarians make to defend segregation is essentially to proclaim that it is the natural order for people to separate, as something that will inherently happen to a significant degree due to the innate tendencies of groups. I believe this position to be philosophically indefensible. Not only does it begin to cross over into the positive beliefs of certain types of racists, but it is based on bankrupt notion of "human nature" and a tunnel-visioned level of analysis that is only capable of seeing the matter through the lens of things like biology and biological metaphors. It is essentially "innatism" applied to a particular segment of human experience and then extrapolated to the level of a general natural law.
There is more that I can say about this, but this functions as a rough outline of some of the reasons I have for thinking that libertarians should be anti-segregation, not just as an optional personal preference on the side but as a logically connected part of a libertarian social philosophy.
Posted by Brainpolice at 5:11 PM
Labels: Discrimination, Human Nature, Libertarianism, Political Theory, Propertarianism, Property Rights, racism, Segregation
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