Enforcing Virtue

Muy interesante, de Reason. Yo personalmente estoy convencido de que la libertad incluye fundamentalmente la libertad de equivocarnos en nuestras elecciones:

Is social stigma a threat to liberty, or is it liberty in action?

It's the debate that won't die: the endless face-off between conservatives and libertarians over the tension between liberty and morality. In his foreword to the 1998 anthology Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate-much of it composed of essays from the 1950s and '60s-editor George W. Carey described it as the main fault line dividing the two philosophies.

In Carey's words, conservatives "believe that shared values, morals, and standards, along with accepted traditions, are necessary for the order and stability of society" and that some restrictions on individual freedom, including censorship, may be needed to preserve this social cohesion. Most libertarians, he continued, share the conservatives' alarm about the "erosion of both public and private virtues" but regard individual liberty as the highest value and free choice as the prerequisite for true virtue.

So far, so good. But beyond rejecting moral enforcement by government, what is the libertarian view of moral and cultural standards upheld by a voluntary social consensus? Some conservatives accuse libertarians of treating all shared values or conventions with contempt.