People have rights. Those rights provide me with powerful reasons to refrain from treating them in certain ways. The problem is that there are other reasons to act — genuine, moral ones — that can conflict with the requirements of the moral law. That's what makes me a pluralist.

The project of liberalism — of which libertarianism is one variant — is to explain the relationship between the reasons of right, as rooted in the moral law, with the reasons of the good, as articulated in the various, defensible conceptions of the good found in western society.

Why respect the rights of others (e.g. to think and believe what they wish), even when this means they'll be living worse lives, as judged by your conception of the good?

This is why consequentialist arguments seem indispensable to me. I may not be able to explain why, in each and every case of conflict, the right ought to trump the good.

But if I can explain to you why putting peoples' rights prior to any view of the good, including yours, would, in the long run, best advance your conception of the good, as well as mine, (and Jones', and Smith's, etc.) then I've got a decent argument in favor of libertarianism that doesn't require someone to take on board natural rights or Kantian metaphysics as a starting point.

I think the insights of public choice economics can provide groundwork for such a case. But you have to do it in roughly consequentialist terms (Gerry Gaus calls this a "constrained teleological justification" in one of his books; Jan Narveson would likely view it as essentially a contractarian kind of argument.)

Notice that the argument doesn't require much in the way of interpersonal comparison. Give the people in Rawls' original position access to public choice, and they're likely to acknowledge that, almost no matter what conception of the good they hold, it won't be well served by a meddling state bureaucracy.

Best,

Terrence

Your utter rejection of utilitarianism confuses me. We can't directly measure our respective utility, but surely the fact that you have a dog and I have cats reveals something about the relationship between our utility functions for pets? And given this revealed preference, we can construct a social mechanism—the free market—to improve social utility even if we can't directly measure it.

Like the unacoder, I regard the Night Watchman State a good goal, but I'll settle for less as long as we can make it better than it is now. For example, while deontology and utilitarianism can be in conflict, I believe our current system has many features which are repugnant to both—rent control, ethanol subsidies, the war on drugs.

I'm even willing to sneak in a little redistribution by way of Rawls and regulation by way of Leitzel's robustness criteria.