ABSTRACT
Egalitarian' is sometimes used to evoke reader's most pervasive common feature. But like all labels in political philosophy, including 'libertarian', 'egalitarian' threatens to be either parodic or soporific. The best way to make clear the importance of learning from libertarianism is to make the target of instruction political as well as philosophical. This chapter describes important lessons that philosophical social democrats should learn from libertarians. Libertarians have demolished the foundations in fairness for social democracy that philosophical social democrats have tried to construct. Social democrats seek to use the state to help some people by means that require taking from others. Impartial political concern is, similarly, supportive of, not in tension with, other rights and liberties, including those that both libertarians and social democrats seek to protect. Social democrats are not Marxists. They believe that some form of capitalism is preferable to any feasible form of noncapitalism.
