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A review by rotorguy64
Defendiendo Lo Indefendible by Óliver Serrano Gil, Walter Block, Murray N. Rothbard
3.0
In Defending the Undefendable, Walter Block takes on the laudable task of defending libertarianism from moral panic and sentimentalism. Arguments like: Without the state, who will kick prostitutes off the streets? What about loan sharks or evil landlords? That kind of thing. Blocks counter-argumentation in this book, as per the title, is to show the good sides of things like loan sharking and blackmail. Sometimes, he's very compelling, as when he says that the reason why loan sharks demand such high interest rates is because they give loans to high-risk clients. Always, his perspectives are at least worth taking in, whether you ultimately find them convincing or not. The very least he does is stop people in their tracks who want to condemn business practices on a moral whim.
That said, I don't always find him convincing, and I don't agree with all his conclusions. His argument for blackmail, namely that it is better than gossipping in that it gives the prospective victim the choice to prevent the embarassing truth from spreading, does not hold if you look at the finality of both actions. Say you blackmail someone with the fact of him having a homosexual affair. What this usually demonstrates is that you are willing to harm a homosexual with outing him, but that you don't believe homosexuals ought to be outed. There is a clear normative contradiction in this, and actions that you cannot take without entering a normative contradiction cannot be morally right. Whether these should be prohibited is another question, but at the very least it means libertarians should portray them as an evil to be tolerated, not a morally positive action.
It is the same with prostitution, drug dealing, and other such evils. People are repulsed by them for a reason. That we cannot prohibit these things effectively does not mean we should defend them. I think most libertarians these days know this. Conceeding that libertarianism won't solve every ill there is in society will make it less attractive if you're in the habit of comparing political blueprints, but not when you have grown to accept the facts that people are imperfect, that the world is imperfect, and that we have no other choice but to tolerate this state of affairs. Knowing that I won't be forced to subsidize or engage in immorality is enough to make libertarianism attractive to me.
This book, then, is definitely worth picking up, but it should neither be your first nor your last step on your libertarian journey.
That said, I don't always find him convincing, and I don't agree with all his conclusions. His argument for blackmail, namely that it is better than gossipping in that it gives the prospective victim the choice to prevent the embarassing truth from spreading, does not hold if you look at the finality of both actions. Say you blackmail someone with the fact of him having a homosexual affair. What this usually demonstrates is that you are willing to harm a homosexual with outing him, but that you don't believe homosexuals ought to be outed. There is a clear normative contradiction in this, and actions that you cannot take without entering a normative contradiction cannot be morally right. Whether these should be prohibited is another question, but at the very least it means libertarians should portray them as an evil to be tolerated, not a morally positive action.
It is the same with prostitution, drug dealing, and other such evils. People are repulsed by them for a reason. That we cannot prohibit these things effectively does not mean we should defend them. I think most libertarians these days know this. Conceeding that libertarianism won't solve every ill there is in society will make it less attractive if you're in the habit of comparing political blueprints, but not when you have grown to accept the facts that people are imperfect, that the world is imperfect, and that we have no other choice but to tolerate this state of affairs. Knowing that I won't be forced to subsidize or engage in immorality is enough to make libertarianism attractive to me.
This book, then, is definitely worth picking up, but it should neither be your first nor your last step on your libertarian journey.