What is the best ethical framework upon which to hang the case for liberty? The libertarian debate over this question has long been cast as a contest between natural rights and utilitarianism.

Murray N. Rothbard championed the natural rights position, most thoroughly in his 1982 book The Ethics of Liberty. And, in his 1978 preface to Ludwig von Mises’s The Clash of Group Interests and Other Essays, Rothbard criticized his mentor’s utilitarianism.

Mises, for his part, wrote in his 1944 book Human Action that:

“…the teachings of utilitarian philosophy and classical economics have nothing at all to do with the doctrine of natural right. With them the only point that matters is social utility.”

And Henry Hazlitt, another student of Mises, drew on his teacher’s work to make a sophisticated case for “rule utilitarianism” in his 1964 book The Foundations of Morality.

Personally, I subscribe to what I regard as mutually compatible versions of both natural rights and utilitarianism. I consider Lockean self-ownership and private property rights to be “natural” in the sense that upholding those rights is the ethic that best accords with human nature and thus virtually always yields the greatest utility for all parties involved, as defined by the subjective preferences of those individuals.

Yet, as a Christian, I also believe in a theological basis for liberty. Many would consider that to be at odds with my embrace of natural rights and utilitarianism, both of which are considered secular doctrines. But, to me, all three perspectives are mutually consistent and interrelated.

I agree with the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” I believe God endowed us with those rights by giving us the human nature according to which certain rights are “natural” in the “utilitarian” sense I explained above.

Moreover, a major part of that nature is the distinctly human gift of reason, which we can use to discover our natural rights through philosophy, as political philosophers like John Locke and Rothbard did.

We can also use our reason to discover economic principles, as economists like Adam Smith and Mises did. The immutable laws of economics are also inherent in the God-given nature of man and the God-created world of scarcity in which man finds himself. And economics sheds light on how upholding man’s God-given natural rights leads to the alleviation of that scarcity and bestows upon mankind the blessings of general prosperity (i.e., utility). Liberty yields human flourishing by engendering the mind-bogglingly vast and complex cooperation of the market economy, which Leonard E. Read called miraculous in his 1958 essay “I, Pencil” and Frédéric Bastiat characterized as part of God’s grand natural order in his 1850 book Economic Harmonies. On the flipside, economics also reveals how violating man’s God-given natural rights incurs the curses of economic chaos and mass poverty (i.e., aggravated scarcity and disutility).

I believe the Author of Creation also inscribed a basically libertarian moral code in us by filling our hearts with moral sentiments that cry out against violent aggression and tyranny. And long before we were able to philosophically figure out liberty, the Lord graced us with miraculous moral revelations, including direct commandments against murder (a violation of self-ownership) and theft (a violation of property rights). Finally, God even personally modeled morality for mankind when He lived among us as Jesus Christ, the perfect man, preaching love, justice, and peace.

Many think natural rights, famously dismissed by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham as “nonsense on stilts,” lack firm enough grounding to support liberty. Others consider utilitarianism to be a “weak reed,” as Rothbard put it, for libertarians to lean on. Still others believe speaking of God makes it more difficult to preach the gospel of freedom. I disagree with all three camps. When advocating liberty, there is nothing wrong with citing rights, utility, or religion. As I see it, liberty is simultaneously natural, practical, and divine.

This article was originally featured at Dan Sanchez’s Substack and is republished with permission.