Hello all.
Although the term 'Social Libertarian' seems to have fallen out of use, it still I think represents an important strand of thought amongst many both in or sympathetic to the Alt-Right. I think it fell out of use because it was too open to the charge that liberty claims contingent on the property of others (e.g. Twitter) are positive liberty claims, and not negative liberty claims i.e. freedom to speak on someone else's platform, rather than freedom from aggression, having spoken freely without aggressing on someone's property rights.
There was an interesting article on LinkedIn about Airbnb making customers agree to non-discriminatory policies - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/airbnb-just-coughed-up-nasty-hairball-tony-chapman. The upshot of it appears to be, it's perfectly fine, in his opinion, to sign the agreement with the intention of continuing to discriminate in contravention of the agreement. In other words, he thinks that your right to discriminate can be extended to commit fraud and violate the property rights of others - he has other methods of securing accomodation or hosting others for money, but he feels he has the right to use Airbnb.
Others, like Milo for example, will grudgingly admit that Twitter kinda sorta has the right to ban him - even if he thinks it's a terrible decision and that curbs on free speech are bad. But I don't think you can really see his view of what 'free speech' actually is as compatible with YAD theory. To him, if a property owner decides to 'no platform' you, for whatever reason, this is a curb on liberty.
I think what I'm trying to say is that although there is a continuum of opinion amongst social libertarians on the matter, it seems to be fairly obvious that the narrative is pushing certain type of positive rights claims as being a fundamentally a moral issue, and not just an issue of aesthetics.
Now these positive rights do often somewhat resemble negative liberty claims, but they do essentially demand coercion and so are pretty fundamentally different from a pure libertarian perspective in my view. I am interested in hearing if people think this leap in thinking can be justified, and if so, how. I see a few options:
a) Deny the moral claims of social libertarians, perhaps admitting that the issue has weight as an aesthetics issue
b) State that positive rights claims have a moral weight, but that they remain very much secondary to negative liberty (private property rights).
c) State that positive liberty rights can, in certain situations, trump negative liberty rights - perhaps when they involve practical realisation of negative liberty rights.
It seems to be that Social Libertarianism is pretty much c), but perhaps there are different views. It also seems to me that the 'brokers' like Twitter and Airbnb are potentially test cases for DROs - the functions they perform do not necessarily replicate or replace services that have often been performed by government, but they do essentially act as brokers. Social Libertarians seem to think that such brokers have moral obligations which they are contravening; is this perhaps a realisation that DROs wouldn't necessarily behave as we might expect, and the notion that you can just form your DRO/Twitter/Airbnb ignorant of structural reality? Is social libertarianism in fact a libertarianism that got mugged by reality and finally worked out what structural freedom is?
I'm interested in your views. Thank you.