Should Is Not Must

I said a mild thing on the internet and got a response sized for a war crime. The mild thing was that I have never understood pulling out a laptop on a flight, that anything I do on a laptop I can do on my phone, and that at most you should be watching a movie up there, not answering email. Throwaway opinion. Pet peeve. And in the pile-on that followed came a reply that has stuck with me, because it names a confusion I have been bumping into my whole life. It said, more or less, that there is literally “libertarian” in my name, so I should mind my own business and let people enjoy their flight however they want.

Sit with the shape of that for a second. The man collapsed two completely different things into one, and almost everybody does it. There is the set of things I think you should do, and there is the set of things I think you should be forced to do, and between those two sets lies the entire moral universe. Libertarianism is a theory about the second set, and only the second set. It is an answer to one narrow question: when is it legitimate to point a gun at a peaceful person, the state being just a gun with paperwork. The libertarian answer is, almost never. That is the whole of it. It says nothing, not one word, about the first set. I am as free as anyone alive to have opinions about how you ought to live, because an opinion is not a gun.

The trouble is that “should” is a slippery little word doing two jobs. When I say you should not run spreadsheets at 35,000 feet, I mean it the way I mean you should not marry that guy, or should not put ketchup on a good steak. It is my judgment, offered up, and you are entirely free to tell me to get lost. That is the whole nature of advice: it leaves you exactly as free as it found you. The other “should,” the one libertarianism actually cares about, is the one with a penalty chained to it. You should buckle the belt or pay the fine. You should not put that in your body or you go to a cell. Only that second “should” involves force, and only that second one is any of my philosophy’s business. My critic heard the first kind and answered as though I had proposed the second.

And look at the self-defeating shape of what he did. He reached for my own principles to tell me to shut up. But the freedom to hold an opinion and say it out loud is not some awkward exception to libertarianism. It is close to the center of it. Take the state off the table as a tool for fixing other people, which is the one thing a libertarian actually wants to do, and what are you left with to change anybody’s mind? Persuasion. Judgment. Advice. The raised eyebrow. Talking to each other. A free society runs on more of that, not less, because it has voluntarily given up the baton. So a libertarian is the last person on earth you should be telling to keep his opinions to himself. Opinions are the civilized replacement for the law. Telling me to stop having them in the name of freedom is like telling a pacifist to stop using words.

Now let me give the other side its due, because it has a sliver of a point and I would rather concede it than pretend it away. There is a real and tiresome species of person, libertarian or otherwise, who cannot say he prefers his phone without implying that your laptop is a character flaw. If the complaint had been that I was being a bit of a busybody about other people’s tray tables, then fine, guilty, it was a snide little opinion about a pet peeve and I will not knight it. But that is not what was said. What was said is that having the opinion at all was a betrayal of my stated principles, and that is the confusion worth a whole post, because it is everywhere now.

We have lost the middle. A huge share of people can no longer hear “I think that is unwise” as anything other than “I think that should be banned,” because the only two settings they have left are permitted and prohibited, and the enormous space between them, the realm of the voluntary and the social and the persuadable, has gone dark. Everything is politics now, so every opinion is read as a proposed policy. Say you dislike something and you will be answered as if you had introduced a bill.

That collapse is bad for freedom, not good for it, which is the real irony of being told to pipe down in liberty’s name. The space those people cannot see is the exact space that freedom lives in. A free society is one where most of how we lean on each other happens down in that realm of opinion and example and voluntary pressure, precisely so that it does not have to happen up at the level of law. Flatten “you shouldn’t” into “there oughta be a law” and you have not defended anyone’s liberty. You have taught them that the only way to have a preference about another person’s conduct is to legislate it, which is about the most illiberal lesson there is.

I hold myself to the same line, because libertarians smudge it too. It is easy to dress a personal taste up as a principle, or to moralize in a tone that quietly assumes the law should come around to my side. So the discipline runs both directions: say plainly when you are giving advice and when you are describing a right, and never let the first masquerade as the second. I think laptops on planes are a small self-inflicted misery. I would also defend to the last your legal right to bury your entire tray under them. Those are two different sentences, and a free person has to be able to hold both in his head at once.

So no. Having “libertarian” in my name does not mean I have to approve of what you do, or stay quiet about it, or pretend I have no view on your in-flight spreadsheet. It means one thing and one thing only: I will never call on the state to stop you. Everything short of that, the judging and the recommending and the eye-rolling and the unsolicited advice, is not a violation of my principles. It is what is left of a civilization that has promised not to use force. I get to keep all of it, and so do you, and that trade is the whole deal. Should is not must. And a man is allowed to say should.