Word Finder - libertarians

definition

One who advocates liberty, either generally or in relation to a specific issue.

example

civil libertarian

definition

A believer in a political doctrine that emphasizes individual liberty and a lack of governmental regulation, intervention, and oversight both in matters of the economy (‘free market’) and in personal behavior where no one’s rights are being violated or threatened; also, a ‘classical liberal’, akin to an ‘anarcho-capitalist’.

definition

A left-libertarian, an antiauthoritarian believer in both individual freedom and social justice (social equality and mutual aid), such as a social anarchist.

definition

A believer in the freedom of thinking beings to choose their own destiny, i.e. a believer in free will as opposed to those who believe the future is predetermined.

Moreover, many of the arguments by which the position of rigid libertarians of the older school has been proved untenable.

I also associated with people who were proud to be called libertarians.

It has been held in various forms. In its extreme form it maintains that the individual is absolutely free to chose this or that action indifferently (the liberum arbitrium indifferentiae), but most libertarians admit that acquired tendencies, environment and the like, exercise control in a greater or less degree.

Although he denies liberty to the will in this sense - indeed, strictly speaking, neither liberty nor necessity, he says, is properly applied to the will, " for the will itself is not an agent that has a will " - he nevertheless insists that the subject willing is a free moral agent, and argues that without the determinate connexion between volition and motive which he asserts and the libertarians deny, moral agency would be impossible.

The great advance of biological knowledge in recent times though it has in no sense created a new problem (men have always been aware of the importance of racial or hereditary physical qualities in their influence upon human conduct) has certainly rendered the existence of complete individual freedom (in the sense in which it was advocated by older libertarians) in the highest degree unlikely.

But the contribution made by psychology to the solution of the problem has taken the form not so much of a direct reinforcement of the arguments of either of the opponent systems, as of a searching criticism of the false assumptions concerning conative processes and the phenomena of choice common alike to determinists and libertarians.

But, nevertheless, the new light thrown upon the unity of the self and the more careful and accurate scrutiny made by recent psychologists of the phenomena of decision have rendered it no longer possible either for determinists to deny the fact of choice (whatever be their theory as to its nature) or for libertarians to regard the self or the will as isolated from and unaffected by other mental constituents and antecedents, and hence, by an appeal to wholly fictitious entities, to prove the truth of freedom.

If, how ever, it be argued by libertarians that no explanation is possible of the manner in which the self or the will makes its decisions and inclines to this motive or to that, while they still assert the independent existence of the self or will, then they are undoubtedly open to the retort of their opponents that upon such a theory no rational explanation of conduct will be possible.

Moreover, in a certain sense the very feelings of remorse and penitence which are the chief weapons in the libertarians' armoury testify to the truth of the determinists' contention.

So long as libertarians contend that what alone possesses moral value is unmotived choice, acts of will of which no explanation can be given save the arbitrary fiat of individual selves at the moment of decision, it is not difficult for determinists to exhibit the absurdities to which their arguments lead.

David Hoile and others have given valid reasons for suggesting that the Levelers were the political antecedents of present day Libertarians.

This is, I suggest, to be denounced by all English libertarians.

Clearly, even civil libertarians have been sucked into the Da Vinci cult.

For many libertarians, there is no room for doubt.

For the record, I suppose my opinion of Margaret Thatcher must be close to that of many other libertarians.

There were the free market libertarians, the traditionalist conservatives, the middle way social democrats, the social authoritarians.

Now there are libertarians demanding a total free market, the moderates have become blue Social Democrats.

It has always been maintained by convinced libertarians that without a belief in the freedom of the will morality becomes unmeaning (see Determinism).

It can easily be shown that men do as a matter of fact attach moral adjectives to environment, temperamental tendencies, natural endowments, instinctive desires, in a word to all or most of those forces moulding character, from which, according to libertarians, the individual's freedom of choice should be clearly distinguished and separated, and to which it can be and is frequently opposed.

Now there are libertarians demanding a total free market, the moderates have become blue social democrats.

What is possibly not so obvious is the extent to which libertarians have themselves been guilty of a similar fallacy.