I submit to you that few statements are more wrong than saying “libertarians might want a world without moral judgments.” From my vantage point, one of the things to which libertarianism is dedicated is the proliferation of moral judgments by freeing people up to the greatest degree possible to create their own ways of being in the world. To conflate the live and let live ethos at the heart of the classical liberal and libertarian project with an essentially nihilistic dismissal of pluralism and tolerance is a gigantic error. It’s like saying that because religious dissenters want to abolish a single state church that they are anti-god.

As the anthropologist Grant McCracken argued in a 1998 Reason story called “The Politics of Plenitude,” our world is characterized by a “quickening speciation” of social types and sub-cultures, a liberating reality that is typically mistaken for the end of the world and the end of all morality. McCracken notes that plenitude particularly aggrieves conservatives, because they mistake an urge to escape “a morality” for an attempt to abolish “all morality.”