On Living in an Unjust and Imperfect World

by Stephan Kinsella on April 2, 2025

A friend on an email discussion list had a long post starting with:

It strikes me that humanity is by and large trapped in a false dilemma where we have to choose between an all-powerful egotistical dictator and an all-powerful soulless bureaucracy. In the mean it boils down to the Soviet Union versus Hitler.

Person A: Hitler was really bad because he killed millions of innocent people.
Person B: The Soviet Union was worse because it killed even more innocent people.

I didn’t read the rest but chimed in with this:

I think ultimately–I have only read your first few words–you are sensing that we live in a world of scarcity—limited means, limited goods, limited power. This means that it is difficult to life, because there is only so much to go around and because we don’t have perfect knowledge of the future or even the present. This means you can’t always get what you want.

This is an omnipresent fact of reality, even for an animal or Crusoe alone on an island.

In society it gets more complicated. More actors means we have a richer array of choices and means available–we get to live with others, which makes us happier as we are social (no offense, some asocial libertarian hermits) and we get to trade and benefit from the division of labor (no offense libertarians growing chickens). But it also means in addition to natural threats and challenges–a form or manifestation of scarcity–these other humans have free will or at least choice and they also might want to use some of your means which means there is the possibility of conflict.

The fact or possibility of conflict can never be completely solved since people have choice, just as you can never overcome scarcity or incomplete causal and factual knowledge and uncertainty about the future. It’s the way life is, and has to be.

In addition to the normal technical problems of scarcity and successful action in the face of scarcity we face the additional challenge of other social actors choosing attempt to use means we are using/possessing. Because of our evolved social nature, empathy and so on, norms naturally emerge such as property rights, rules, laws, ethics, that attempt to make one’s possession of and ability to use a means/resource more certain by reducing the likelihood others will choose to use your stuff without your permission.

This seems to work pretty well even though it can never stop all aggression/crime. It stops it enough for it to be worth having, just as the existence of money solves enough of the problems of barter (the double coincidence of wants and the inability to calculate and compare among heterogenous projects and goods) for money to be worth having even though money is never perfect and comes with its own costs. Like money, norms are a practical institution. It’s not perfect but then life never is; it doesn’t need to be perfect, and in fact cannot be perfect given human choice. Ethics or morals also cannot be perfect because most personal morals are difficult to personally live up to; but still they can inspire and guide, and be aspirational.

Likewise any real institution such as a legal or political system will always fall short of some ideal just as and for the same reasons that rights can be violated: because norms are prescriptive, not descriptive, factual causal laws like gravity that cannot be “disobeyed”, and thus can be disregarded and “violated”; ¹ and just as our actions can never be guaranteed to be successful because of the scarce nature of the world, because of our incomplete knowledge of causal laws and facts about the world, and because the future is uncertain, and, in society, because there are other actors who can interfere with our use of scarce means and give rise to conflict.

Given all this it is childish to think life is some binary like “humanity is by and large trapped in a false dilemma where we have to choose between an all-powerful egotistical dictator and an all-powerful soulless bureaucracy. In the mean it boils down to the Soviet Union versus Hitler.” No one would think to put it this way unless they did not understand the difference between fact and value, causal laws and ethical norms, description and prescription. Unless one thinks like an activist. ²

The point of liberty thinking is to understand all this and to use it practically to develop an understanding of society and of one’s place in it and how to guide one’s own life if and to the extent one wants to live morally and to succeed in a world with these extra social challenges; and to us in what kind of institutions and laws and norms we ethically and morally advocate and support. But just as there are no guaranteed profits, and no guarantee of successful action–because we live in a world of scarcity, of incomplete knowledge, and facing an uncertain future–there are no guarantees in terms of justice either. All we can do is the best we can do. And that is enough–it has to be enough.

From this perspective we can be realistic, practical, idealistic, ethical, all together, and we can realize that in any society there will be challenges and scarcity and also injustice, and we can assess and criticize the existing system in comparison to our ideal, without deluding ourselves as to the difference or descending in pessimism and defeatism lots of activists unfortunately do when they wake up and realize their magic spells don’t usually work–because people have free will and there is a difference between causal and normative laws. Ultimately this Protestant-magical-activist mentality ³ leads to confusion and disillusionment. And to waystation libertarians, whom I loathe.

So really all you are doing is whining about the way things are. But then I only read about a sentence or so before I decided to cut you short and just launch into my views.