link to original reddit post by /u/thisistheperfectname
TL;DR I know this is pretty long, so I bolded a few main points in case you would rather just get the summarized version of my thoughts.
Provocative title aside, I do have a genuine concern. I fear that our own community of freedom-lovers has succumbed to one of the pitfalls of our opponents. In a world where we have already elevated ourselves above the plights of our ancestors, where predation and the like are no longer meaningful threats, we had other ideas to keep us focused and improving. Maybe they were religious in nature, or maybe they were motivated by nationalism or clan loyalties or the like. These have become eroded over time, and the only replacement with any potency that we have in the West today is the inclination not to produce harm.
How to accomplish this is, in broad strokes, a question we have already answered. We have the correct moral approach that you shall not harm another except in response to harm visited or threatened upon you. This is the NAP summarized. Let’s not confuse this with an answer to all questions, though; it has a purpose that it serves well, and it does little else. Adherence to the NAP is sufficient to make you able to function within a libertarian framework, and it is nearly sufficient to make you a moral person in most other moral frameworks, but it is not sufficient to make you virtuous, capable, or demonstrative of an attractive model of being for others to emulate.
Where such a model of being is concerned, the propensity to avoid harm comes with additional baggage. Where the only potent structure by which we can appraise actions is harm avoidance, pleasure, seen as the opposite of harm, becomes something to seek in excess of other benefits. Running away from harm is necessarily running towards pleasure if a given harm cannot be demonstrated to ward off a greater negative. Why not sit on your couch all day and binge Friends while eating an entire daily caloric intake of potato chips if such behavior’s negatives are rendered moot by societal approval? We live in a strange moment where the dominant culture would rather chastise one who calls out vice than one who is enslaved by it. See the joke that is “fat studies” if you need proof of that.
I caution that, absent any meaning outside hedonism, the philosophy that promises the most material goods, whether or not those are actually delivered, will win out. The state continues to grow off the backs of people who fail to realize that becoming nothing more than a check-cashing machine that subsists off Uncle Sam’s poisoned generosity is a debasement of self. Have you lived if you have built nothing of yourself and your talents? Those who want eternal UBI and an encyclopedic knowledge of Netflix’s catalog think so.
As touched on before, we have the correct framework by which we can consider an action to be an objective evil, and we have also correctly diagnosed the greatest violators of that principal to be governments. Why do we lose? It’s simple – we cannot offer checks from the treasury or other means to sate your envy for you. We rightly decry all kinds of evils, but we don’t bribe. We should offer something else, then. Bribe people with their own self-improvement by showing that mastery of self comes with the freedom to master self – remove envy instead of satisfying it. When in debate with those who want to grow the state, we are quick to point to the atrocities of the 20th century, and there is good reason for it. Still, we should not spend all our efforts worrying about the world of Stalin, and put some concern to the world of WALL-E.
We should all be making better people of ourselves in every area that we can, and we should stigmatize those who debase themselves. Unfortunately, this often does not manifest in reality, as recent Libertarian Party conventions demonstrate. The leftists routinely conflate the idea that one should not be prohibited from doing something with the idea that one should be celebrated for doing it, but how much better are we? The libertarian and the virtue ethicist should become one. The maximization of personal freedom is not the enemy of the cultivation of virtue, as the state rewards vice and deprives one of the means to improve himself. Freedom for the self is freedom for the self to improve. Become better people ourselves and we show it.