What do you think of this famous lecture by Chandran Kukatas?

Sergey Sushinsky

There is one, but rather significant, incorrect assumption in the text. In both of the social models being considered, there is some kind of absolute impersonal external enforcer who imposes this model. In the Federation, it is forbidden to help without being asked, and some external force suppresses all such attempts; in the Union, it is forbidden to restrict another’s freedom even in the smallest way, and some external force, again, suppresses all such attempts.

But in reality, there is no external impersonal force; all rules are established and enforced by the people themselves. In the Federation of Freedom, a person can intrude upon someone else’s territory and free slaves there, and to those who want to challenge him for violating others’ borders, he can present what he discovered within those borders. In the Union of Freedom, a person can tie up an epileptic, and to the person who demands they be untied, demonstrate a video recording of the previous seizure.

Of course, common sense does not have to triumph in absolutely all cases; it is enough that there is no “external stupid lex” who doesn’t care about common sense, but only wants the law to prevail.

It is clear that Kukatas, speaking of hypothetical libertarian orders, effectively reduced everything to an analogy with the US Civil War, where one side defended the rights of states to establish their own laws, and the other defended the need for everyone to adhere to a single standard of freedom. Kukatas himself took the position of the conditional South in this conflict, which is, in fact, the main provocative message of the lecture.