You were casting unfairly casting your political opponents not just as wrong, but as morally reprehensible.

Right - and the interesting thing is, I had no idea that I was doing it, and in fact was trying to do the opposite. I did my best to take extreme viewpoints like "eating meat is like committing genocide" and "everyone should be converted or they'll go to hell" and attempted to portray them as psychologically no different from any other belief. But although I think I did okay with that, an uncharitable and exaggerated strawman still managed to slip in earlier on.

For the most part, I think it's just about the general ingroup-outgroup tendency in humans, and the desire to look down on any outgroups. But as for that bias slipping into my writing, even when I was explicitly trying to avoid it - that seems to have more to do with the way that most of our thought and behavior is built on subconscious systems, with conscious thought only playing a small role. Or to use Jonathan Haidt's analogy, the conscious mind is the rider of an elephant:

'm holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn't have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I'm no match for him.

...The controlled system [can be] seen as an advisor. It's a rider placed on the elephant's back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see farther into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will...

...The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system. The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings. But they don't always work together well.

That elephant is very eager to pick up on all sorts of connotations and biases from its social environment, and if we spend a lot of time in an environment where a specific group (conservatives, say) frequently gets bashed, then we'll start to imitate that behavior ourselves - automatically and almost as a reflex, and sometimes even when we think that we're doing the exact opposite.

It is a pity that this kind of a bias hasn't really been discussed much on LW. Probably because the original sequences drew most heavily upon cognitive psychology and math, whereas this kind of bias has been mostly explored in social psychology and the humanities.

I think this would be a genuine cause for concern, not because I don't think that people should be able to enter whatever relationships please them in principle, but because in practice I'm concerned about people being coerced into signing contracts harmful to themselves. Not sure where I'd draw the line exactly; this is probably a Hard Problem.

Well, there you go. Any restriction on freedom of contract can be rationalized as preventing something "harmful," one way or another.

And it's not a hard problem at all. It is in fact very simple: when people like something for ideological reasons, they will use the libertarian argument to support its legality, and when they dislike something ideologically, they will invent rationalizations for why the libertarian argument doesn't apply in this particular case. The only exceptions are actual libertarians, for whom the libertarian argument itself carries ideological weight, but they are an insignificant fringe minority. For everyone else, the libertarian argument is just a useful rhetorical tool to be employed and recognized only when it produces favorable conclusions.

In particular, when it comes to marriage, outside of the aforementioned libertarian fringe, there is a total and unanimous agreement that marriage is not a contract whose terms can be set freely, but rather an institution that is entered voluntarily, but whose terms are dictated (and can be changed at any subsequent time) by the state. (Even the prenuptial agreements allow only very limited and uncertain flexibility.) Therefore, when I hear a libertarian argument applied to marriage, I conclude that there are only two possibilities:

1. The speaker is an honest libertarian. However, this means either that he doesn't realize how wildly radical the implications of the libertarian position are, or that he actually supports these wild radical implications. (Suppose for example that a couple voluntarily sign a marriage contract stipulating death penalty, or even just flogging, for adultery. How can one oppose the enforcement of this contract without renouncing the libertarian principle?)

2. The speaker has an ideological vision of what the society should look like, and in particular, what the government-dictated universal terms of marriage should be (both with regards to the institution of marriage itself and its tremendous implications on all the other social institutions). He uses the libertarian argument because its implications happen to coincide with his ideological position in this particular situation, but he would never accept a libertarian argument in any other situation in which it would imply something disfavored by his ideology.

because in practice I'm concerned about people being coerced into signing contracts harmful to themselves. Not sure where I'd draw the line exactly; this is probably a Hard Problem.

Agreed.

Speaking personally, I'm also concerned about people willingly signing contracts harmful to themselves without coercion (since I don't believe that people are always correct, or even definitive, about what harms them). I'm also concerned about people willingly signing contracts that benefit them but are harmful to third parties far out of proportion to that benefit. In some cases I'm even concerned about people willingly signing contracts that benefit them proportionally to the harm they cause third parties.

As you say, it's a Hard Problem.

But, sure, within the context of a framework that avoids the more egregious harms, I'm all in favor of allowing people to do things in ways that suit them, including agreeing to binding contracts if that's what they want to do.

What sort of examples can you bring up of custom marital contracts that would make people scream in horror? My guess is that people would generally feel queasy about allowing legal enforcement of what looks like slavish or abusive relationships. I think this would be a genuine cause for concern, not because I don't think that people should be able to enter whatever relationships please them in principle, but because in practice I'm concerned about people being coerced into signing contracts harmful to themselves. Not sure where I'd draw the line exactly; this is probably a Hard Problem.

Remember that "enforcing contracts" could mean two things. It could mean that the government steps in and makes the parties do what they said they would - it keeps whipping them until they follow through. It could also mean punishing the parties for damage done on the other end when they breach the contract. For example, in a world in which prostitution is legal, X proposes to pay Y for sex. Y accepts. X hands over the money. Y refuses to have sex with X. The horrific version of this is the government comes in and "enforces" the contract... by holding down Y and, well, yeah. The alternative is the government comes in, sees that Y has taken money from X by fraud, and punishes Y the same way it would punish any other thief. The second option is, I think, both more intuitive and less massively disturbing.

The larger the transfer of rights, the more it demands of the state to enforce it. You cannot have maximal contracts maximally enforced by a minimal state.

I disagree about this. There is a stable equilibrium in which the state is known to be fast, effective, reliable, and uncompromising in enforcing the rules, and in which transgressions are consequently extremely rare (and swiftly punished when they occur), so that the resources devoted to judiciary and law enforcement can be very small. Such an equilibrium in which little enforcement effort is necessary in practice is possible with contracts too, not just with criminal law.

(In fact, large resources devoted to law enforcement are usually a sign of the state's weakness, not strength. They indicate widespread law-breaking, which in turn indicates that a lot of people are in a position where it seems like they can get away with it -- and the state is, for whatever reason, incapable of making law enforcement more effective and pushing things towards the above described equilibrium, and instead responds by throwing more resources into the existing ineffective system.)

Contracts are very rarely enforced, in the literal sense of forcing the parties to carry out their promises. (Joining the army is the only common exception.)

That's not completely true. Specific performance orders are given by courts in other kinds of cases too, typically when the contract is about something unique, i.e. when the exact same thing can't be obtained elsewhere, like a piece of land or an artwork. (In other cases, such an order wouldn't be in the plaintiff's interest anyway, since the defendant would presumably provide the worst quality work/goods he could get away with.)

To some degree, you can even stipulate specific performance in case of breach, although I have no idea to what degree this is enforceable in different jurisdictions.

On the other hand, regarding this:

That a contract literally transfers the rights stated in the contract from one person to another is in fact not what a contract is, at least in Western society. [...] In ordinary, non-libertarian states, all you risk by failing to perform on a contract is your assets and reputation. Your rights in your person are generally not transferable by any contract. That they should be seems a strange thing for a libertarian to be arguing for.

This is basically a question of definition. If you insist on using the name "contract" only for those contracts that are enforceable in today's Western societies, fair enough. However, the following must be taken into account:

1. The limitation that your rights in your person are not transferable by contract is just one example of the limitations I was mentioning. This limitation didn't exist (or was far weaker) even historically in Western societies, let alone in others.

2. This limitation, while seemingly reducing to a simple statement, is by no means straightforward when you consider its implications in practice. For example, what exact types of marriage contracts would be implicitly disallowed by it? Trying to answer that question leads immediately to deep ideological clashes.

3. This limitation, even under the broadest interpretation, is by no means the only one that exists in modern Western societies, both with regards to marriage and all other voluntary arrangements.

4. Finally, however you turn it, this limitation is ultimately a limitation on freedom. If I'm forbidden to sell my car, this diminishes my rights in my car; similarly, if I'm forbidden to sell myself into slavery, this diminishes my rights in my person. This conclusion is very unpleasant for libertarians, but the fact is that a libertarian must make some sort of unprincipled exception to libertarian principles to disallow slavery contracts. (There is a very well written article titled "The Libertarian Case for Slavery," which was intended as satire, but there's absolutely nothing in it, save for the sneer in its last sentence, that is not perfectly logical and valid reasoning from libertarian principles.)

(Of course, it may be that for game-theoretic reasons, such limitations on freedom ultimately increase total freedom by some reasonable measure -- "freedom may be freedom to capitulate," as Schelling says. But once you admit exceptions to libertarian principles on these grounds, the slope is very slippery and steep.)

Yes, that is an excellent point.