by Kevin Scott Bjornson

Libertarianism begins with a simple proposition: no person should initiate force against another. While many arguments have been offered for this principle, I believe the strongest foundation arises from a humanistic understanding of human nature and from an ancient Greco-Roman method for discovering principles common to humanity.

By humanism I do not mean atheism. Atheism concerns what one does not believe. Humanism, as I use the term, concerns what one affirms about human nature and human potential. Human beings possess a distinctive nature and capacities whose fuller development constitutes human flourishing. Aristotle described man as a rational animal. Human life therefore involves not only what we are, but what we can become.

Humanity is an ideal toward which we may continuously advance without ever fully arriving. Just as a mathematical curve may approach an asymptote without reaching its ultimate limit, individuals and societies may advance toward greater wisdom, justice, and cooperation without achieving perfection. Progress is possible, but never guaranteed.

The language of morality reflects this reality. Words such as “should,” “ought,” and “better” refer to movement toward some goal. A ship can only be judged to be on course if a destination exists. Likewise, human action can only be judged as better or worse if there is some conception of human flourishing toward which we strive. Therefore, the “ought” may be understood as arising from the ideal possibilities inherent within the “is.”

Human beings survive and prosper largely through reason, communication, and voluntary cooperation. Unlike many animals, we can persuade rather than merely dominate. We exchange information, make agreements, divide labor, and learn from one another. Civilization itself is the cumulative result of countless acts of voluntary cooperation extending across generations.

Force has a different character. Persuasion expands knowledge because it allows competing ideas to be tested. Force suppresses that process by replacing reason with compulsion. A person may be compelled to obey, but he cannot be compelled to genuinely understand or agree.

This distinction helps explain why societies founded primarily upon coercion often stagnate while societies allowing greater freedom tend to innovate and grow. Human advancement depends upon the free exercise of reason, inquiry, and voluntary exchange.

The liberty principle therefore follows naturally from the requirements of human flourishing. If people are to reason, persuade, create, and cooperate, they must enjoy substantial control over their own lives. The initiation of force disrupts these processes. Defensive or retaliatory force may be justified as a response to aggression, but initiated force places one person’s will above another’s agency.

The argument can be approached from another direction as well. Every person who enters a discussion implicitly relies upon control of his own mind and body. To argue is to attempt persuasion rather than coercion. The act of engaging in reasoned discourse therefore presupposes a degree of self-direction. In this sense, liberty is embedded within the practice of rational communication itself. Similarly, meaningful communication presupposes observation, since language conveys information about reality as the participants perceive it.

Yet liberty is not merely an abstract philosophical concept. Throughout history, societies have experimented with different arrangements of power. Some have concentrated authority in kings, priests, bureaucracies, parties, or military rulers. Others have allowed wider spheres of voluntary action.

No society has achieved perfect liberty. Nor should history be viewed as a simple story of inevitable progress. Nevertheless, history does provide evidence that freer societies have generally been more adaptable, more innovative, and more capable of correcting their own mistakes than societies governed primarily through centralized command.

How might such conclusions be reached without relying upon abstract speculation alone? Here the Greco-Roman concept of Jus Gentium, or the “Law of Nations”, becomes important.

If human beings share a common nature, we should expect at least some common principles to emerge from their experience. These principles need not be universally obeyed, nor perfectly understood. Yet recurring patterns across cultures and generations may provide clues concerning the conditions under which human beings flourish and cooperate most successfully.

Roman jurists confronted a practical problem. Different peoples possessed different customs, traditions, and local laws. Rather than assuming one tribe’s practices were universally correct, they sought principles that appeared repeatedly across many jurisdictions. By comparing legal systems and extracting their common elements, they attempted to identify principles rooted in human experience itself. These common elements constitute a true common law in the archetypal sense: principles of criminal justice discovered through comparison among jurisdictions rather than imposed by any single jurisdiction.

Because social outcomes cannot always be predicted beforehand, competing jurisdictions provide opportunities for experimentation, comparison, and learning. Successful practices can thus be discovered through experience rather than merely asserted through ideology.

Rather than beginning with ideology and imposing it upon society, one may examine the accumulated experience of many peoples across time. When certain principles repeatedly emerge in different cultures, languages, and institutions, they deserve careful consideration. Such principles may not be infallible, but they provide a valuable guide through analysis of observations. Thus rationality and observation are fused into a unitary whole (in the Aristotelian sense).

Property rights, voluntary exchange, reciprocity, contract, self-defense, and limitations on arbitrary power appear with remarkable persistence across civilizations. They are not merely local traditions. They reflect recurring solutions to common human problems.

Liberty therefore need not be viewed as a mysterious “natural” right descending from heaven nor as an arbitrary social convention invented by modern political movements. It can be understood as a practical consequence of what human beings are: rational, social creatures who prosper most fully through persuasion, cooperation, and voluntary exchange.

Humanism identifies the goal. History provides evidence. Comparative legal experience supplies a method. Together they point toward the same conclusion.

The pursuit of truth is a process of discovery rather than decree. Because knowledge is incomplete and human experience diverse, no authority can reliably determine all answers in advance. Liberty therefore serves not merely as a protection against tyranny but as a means of learning. Through free inquiry, voluntary cooperation, and comparison among competing institutions, individuals and societies may better distinguish what promotes human flourishing from what does not.

No generation begins with perfect knowledge, nor can any generation expect to end with it. Each inherits customs, institutions, and ideas from the past, tests them against experience, and passes them on revised or discarded. Liberty matters because it preserves this process of discovery. It allows error to be corrected, insight to be shared, and human flourishing to be pursued without requiring that any person or institution be regarded as infallible.