do you want a belly laugh after reading the word "easements"?

A very interesting debate in Reason about the pros and cons of extending Libertarian philosophy from exclusively political freedoms to include cultural freedoms as well.

Kerry Howley takes the expansive position; Todd Seavey takes the restrictive position; and Daniel McCarthy operates somewhere in the middle. I'm going to reproduce excerpts from Howley's response to Seavey and McCarthy since I think that gives the best overview of the tensions in their arguments...

Culture, Not Just Government, Restricts Liberty

Earlier I suggested that not all threats to liberty are threats from the state, that power is distributed throughout society by nature, accident, and convention....

My co-discussants conceive of a world in which human beings spring from their mothers’ wombs fully equipped with the psychological armor required for individualism, at which point they choose among an array of possible lives....

Missing from Todd Seavey’s and Daniel McCarthy’s responses is an acknowledgement that human beings acquire a respect for individual rights and a consciousness of their individuality. We aren’t born knowing that prosperity flows from property rights; indeed, it’s somewhat counterintuitive. And we aren’t born knowing that it’s dangerous to defer unthinkingly to your peers.

Our choices are rather more constrained than Seavey and McCarthy allow, and cultural pressure is one notable limitation. Resistance to this pressure is a developed skill, if it is developed at all. Clearly some are never given the tools to do anything but acquiesce. A pluralistic society requires a delicate balance between the freedom to raise children in whatever manner you please and some assurance that growing human beings will encounter conditions under which individuals may act as individuals and come to exercise freedom in a meaningful way....

Specifics are messier, darkened by the reality of trade-offs and fraught with the vulnerability of young minds. An Afghan kid who never gets the chance to go to school—not because the state prohibits it, but because her culture does...“Tough Luck,” says Seavey. “That’s called ‘other people exercising their freedom,’ not “people oppressing you.’ ” But if we care about choice, perhaps we should care about encouraging the capacity to choose.

Seavey’s libertarian can have no complaint, qua libertarian, so long as property rights, conceived along the lines of a certain kind of idiosyncratic libertarian theory, are observed....

Seavey worries that libertarianism will be even less popular if we point out the confluence between it and other philosophical leanings. This is silly....

Perhaps it would be instructive to consider a hypothetical conversation between Seavey and a potential libertarian.

Potential Libertarian: What’s libertarianism?

Seavey: A philosophy of freedom and property rights.

Potential Libertarian: Oh, right. Freedom like civil rights?

Seavey: No, not that kind of freedom.

Potential Libertarian: Oh. Freedom like the freedom to be openly gay?

Seavey: No. That has nothing to do with liberty.

Potential Libertarian: Oh. Um…

Seavey: Let’s talk about easements!

Daniel McCarthy’s erudite critique outlines some ambiguities over which libertarians have always argued—the many, differing conceptions of tolerance, aggression, and property rights. He is right to claim that “libertarians should not demand that everyone subscribe to the same idea of liberty,” but it is a mistake to assume that given the inevitability of disagreements, any consensus is impossible and undesirable....Sometimes an appeal to the impossibility of agreement is merely an excuse for quiescence....