Morality and legality

Last week I had dinner with Alex Singleton of Liberty Log so I took a look at what he’d been saying there, and found this:

One American reader of this site recently disagreed with something I wrote about American foreign policy. He wrote: “It’s interesting to have foreigners telling us Americans what WE ought to do. Why don’t you confine your efforts to mobilizing the British military to do your international crusading for you?” Well, the reason is that I don’t want to. In a free society, individuals are free to express their viewpoints as often as they want. Clearly, there are times when it is best not to voice an opinion (especially when in the company of people whose fists don’t value negative rights!), and individuals should also be free not to take any notice of opinions expressed, but there is nothing inherently immoral from a libertarian standpoint in telling others what to do.

Ah but there might very well be. It all depends what you tells them. Libertarianism says that Alex should be legally allowed to say what he wants, but not that anything he says is therefore morally right or even excusable.

This distinction constantly gets blurred. Phoners-in to the radio shows I’m sometimes on routinely glide from the claim that something is wicked to the claim that therefore it should be illegal, no further argument being regarded by them as necessary. Insisting on this distinction, as I always try to do, is central to libertarianism, not some merely incidental nitpick.

This distinction applies also to my somewhat frivolous potato crisps dilemma. Commenters reassured me that I don’t have to like, or even morally defend, everything that I nevertheless think capitalists should be legally free to do. Quite right.

My worry, however, is that Walkers Crisps are straying – I agree only a very small step – beyond mere tastelessness into the realms of compulsion. If the children that Walkers are aiming their crisp adverts at were totally free to ignore them, fine. The trouble is that Walkers are doing their business not just with the children directly, but with their school as a whole. The children are unfree. I agree, they’re not very unfree (not when it comes to ignoring adverts), and I don’t actually believe that Walkers and the schools in question should be forbidden to do this kind of deal, just jeered at. Nevertheless, somewhere between selling crisps to rather unfree children and selling poison gas to Adolf Hitler, a line gets crossed. To take more up-to-date examples, if someone is selling armaments to Mugabe or to Al-Qaeda, would “but I’m just a capitalist doing business” count as a complete defence in our eyes? Clearly not.