The Moral Dimension

It is tempting and easy to regard Buchanan as a moral nihilist who finds no place in his intellectual system for absolute moral values and absolute moral obligations, who has as little time for God as he does for philosopher-rulers, who assigns hardly any importance to evolution and none at all to natural rights. It is certainly the case that more than one commentator has complained that the model is ethically under-determined, focusing as it does on voluntary agreement and absence of coercion and little else. Norman Barry, for instance, who reflects that Buchanan’s ‘procedural liberalism’ appears to him to be deficient in ‘some background morality that would define and validate just procedures’1 and who concludes that the approach is capable of generating outcomes which many observers would regard as absurd and unacceptable: it ‘allows slavery to masquerade as freedom and theft to constitute a title of property’.2 Or Scott Gordon, who expresses his concern that the centrality of revealed preference compels the system illegitimately to derive ought-ness from is-ness and who warns that contracting emanates purely from self-interest, rendering agreement per se ‘without any input of moral consideration’:3 ‘It seems to me that Buchanan is striving to commit what G.E. Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy”: deriving moral principles without the aid of any moral premise … The attempt cannot succeed.’4