Libertarians are, sociologically, much more likely to be sceptical of COVID lockdowns than most people. Often their arguments appeal to government curtailment of freedom and the economic and social costs of lockdowns. But libertarianism is really about rights, not weighing up costs and benefits: it says that people may do what they want, provided they don’t violate the rights of others, such as rights to life, liberty and property. The government may step in and coercively and forcibly prevent people from violating the rights of others. For instance, the police may stop me from going on a murderous rampage by locking me up.
The concern that governments have not done a proper cost-benefit analysis on lockdown policies is an interesting one, but cost-benefit analysis is in large part irrelevant to libertarianism. What then, does libertarianism imply about lockdowns?
Let’s first think about what risk individuals impose on others through going to the shops or going to work. If I have covid and pass it on to someone else, I impose around a 1 in 200 chance of death on them, higher if they are over 50 or already ill. Let’s say that given prevalence in my area, there is a 1 in 500 chance that I have covid, and a 50% chance that I spread it to someone else on the tube. The chance I kill someone on a given day is therefore 1 in 200,000 if I get the tube to and from work. If I get the tube every work day in a year, the chance that I kill someone over the course of the year is around 1 in 400.
What would a libertarian say about this? Two things to resolve first are: (1) what level of risk is unacceptable (2) whether others on the tube have implicitly accepted the risk by getting the tube.
What’s the risk threshold?
(1) is, I think, impossible to answer in a principled way because it requires us to put some kind of value or weight on a right. This would be very like saying how good the right is, but nonconsequentialism steadfastly avoids answering that kind of question. The justification for rights in nonconsequentialist philosophy looks like this:
? ⇒ right to bodily security
On consequentialism, the justification looks like this:
Social welfare ⇒ right to bodily security
Utilitarianism can fairly straightforwardly deal with cases of risk by quantifying the badness of an outcome and weighting according to the probability that we realise it. On rights-based theories it is quite unclear what justifies people’s rights and it is therefore very difficult to say about how important a given right is. As a result, we cannot get a clear answer by weighting outcomes according to their probability, so we cannot get a clear answer about what level of risk is unacceptable. This is a very big flaw of nonconsequentialist theories, like libertarianism.
Anyway, imposing a 1 in 400 chance of dying on someone else looks far too high. Imposing a 1 in 200,000 risk of death on someone roughly quintuples their daily risk of dying. Is this an unacceptable level of risk? It is hard to say. I’m not sure what the risk of killing someone via drink driving is, but it is plausibly in the 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 200,000 ballpark, and libertarians think it is ok to ban drink driving. Michael Huemer, a great libertarian philosopher, argues that playing Russian Roulette with unwilling victims counts as aggression, and calls for a coercive response. That’s true even if you imagine a gun with a million chambers, so that the probability of shooting someone is only 1/1,000,000.
Acceptance of risk
Now, what about the point that others have implicitly accepted the risk by getting on the tube, and so have forfeited their right to life if they die. One counter-argument is that drivers know that they accept some risk of being killed by dangerous driving, but we should still prevent dangerous driving. Anyone who goes out on the street knows there is a risk of being mugged, but we should still prevent muggings.
A difference here might be that everyone on the tube is in the same position with respect to the risk they impose on others, so this is a bit like everyone agreeing to get involved in a destruction derby, which does not call for state interference, according to libertarianism.
There are two problems with this as an argument against lockdowns. Firstly, there are externalities from widespread community transmission of covid. If lots of people get the tube, this increases community transmission of covid, which makes it more likely that people who are trying to avoid the risk will die. For instance, it increases the risk that old people will get it on the way to the shops or that the virus will get into care homes, or that people visiting their parents will inadvertently kill them. Thus, symmetry between individuals is not present here. This is more like a case in which everyone agrees to engage in a destruction derby, but the cars sometimes career off the track and kill unsuspecting pedestrians.
This point speaks in favour of lockdowns, from a libertarian point of view, just as it speaks in favour of the regulation of the destruction derby. To reiterate, the point that the benefits of the regulation might not be worth the costs is to a large extent beside the point – what matters is the evident risk that people’s basic rights will be violated.
Secondly, covid seems more like the drunk driver case than the destruction derby case. In the drunk driver case, no-one argues that we should not prohibit drunk driving merely because other drivers use the roads knowing that there is some chance of there being drunk drivers. In the destruction derby case, people choose to accept the risk and they have ample opportunities not to participate. With covid, there are some people who use the tube to go to work and are otherwise cautious and there are some people who use the tube to go to the pub and so expose the more cautious people to much greater risk than they would prefer.
Libertarianism therefore seems to imply that it would be ok to close pubs, restaurants and clubs in order to protect the people who have ventured out but are taking lower risks. In the same way, we should prevent drink driving to protect the rights of ordinary motorists. Again, from a libertarian point of view, the issue is not whether the economic or mental health costs are worth it, it is whether people’s right not to be aggressed against have been violated.
Conclusion
The true implications of libertarianism for pandemic policy seem likely very different to how they have been interpreted by real world libertarians.