Aaron Ross Powell | Free Thoughts Blog

Virtue ethics–which I introduced in my last post–is an approach to moral philosophy that starts with good lives and good character instead of right action. Given the power of the state has over the environment in which we live and the rules we live by, virtue ethics has quite a lot to say about politics.

Let’s start by reviewing terms. (I went over all of these in much more detail in my first post on virtue ethics, so if you need more of a refresher, that’s the place to go.)

Virtue ethics is about how to be good people and how to lead good lives. A life is good when it fulfills its purpose, its “telos.” The telos of human life is eudaimonia, or flourishing.

In order to fulfill our telos, we need three things. First, we need virtues of character. Second, we need the practical wisdom to act well when motivated by those virtues. Third, we need enough goods (resources, health, education, etc.) to have the opportunity and capacity to develop virtues of character and practical wisdom.

So how do we apply those–telos, virtues of character, practical wisdom, and goods–to the state?

Without society, of course, there is no state. If we all lived as hermits, we wouldn’t need a state, nor would we really need one if our only contact with each other came in tiny groups. A state becomes necessary–so the argument goes–when enough of us interact regularly that we need (or would benefit from) some form of imposed order. (What order we want imposed may, of course, be limited to just protection of our rights.)

In other words, if we want a state, we want it because we think it will make society better. Thus the telos of the state is a well-functioning society: one that increases our ability to achieve eudaimonia. It’s a society that, by being a part of it, each of us has a better chance of living a good life than we would elsewhere.

There are two senses in which we might think about the telos of the state. First, if we create a state at all, we create it to fulfill some purpose–just like any other tool. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a hammer is to pound nails. The telos of the state is what we made it to accomplish: a well-functioning society.

Yet “the state” doesn’t exist as a thing in itself. Instead it’s a collection of people authorized to behave in certain ways and with certain authority over the rest of us. So the second way to think about the state’s telos is to look at those people. A doctor is a human, and so has the telos of humans generally: achieving eudaimonia. But “doctor” is also a profession with a purpose of its own: promoting health. Thus the telos of a doctor, when he or she acts in her capacity as a doctor, is health. The profession of doctor brings its own set of situational virtues that don’t necessarily apply outside of doctoring.

Agents of the state, then, have the telos of their profession, which will be closely tied–if not identical–to the telos of the broader state-as-tool. These virtues govern what it means to be a good politician, a good bureaucrat, a good public servant, and so on.

This second sense of the state’s telos addresses a potential concern raised by methodological individualism. This is the claim that social phenomena are nothing but the aggregate actions of individuals, and it’s a position libertarians generally accept. Thus to talk about “the state” having virtues or a purpose or needs would seem to violate methodological individualism. But if we instead talk about the telos of those agents vested with the authority of the state, then we’re talking only about individuals, and so avoid the violation.

Still, I think it’s probably easier and clearer to just talk about the state’s virtues and the state’s goals, and just assume that what we really mean is the virtues and goals of those individual agents.

Okay, so now our state-as-virtue-ethical-entity has a telos. It exists to enable the well-functioning society. To fulfill that purpose, it needs to act in accord with the virtues, do so with practical wisdom, and have the goods needed for both.

The state’s “virtues” will be those traits crucial to the well-functioning society. Justice is an obvious one. A state that is not motivated by justice and does not seek to create justice in the world will not be a good state. But justice isn’t alone here. A good state will also be fair. It will respect its citizens. And so on.

But even if the “state” has a virtuous character (i.e., all the people who make decisions about what it’ll do are of right character), it will also need the practical wisdom to take right action (i.e., action that is actually in accord with the virtues). As I’ll discuss two posts from now, understanding practical wisdom as it applies to state action is one way to approach Hayek’s knowledge problem. Even if the state has the proper motivations, it lacks the knowledge–and thus the wisdom–to realize its goals. No matter how virtuous economic planners are, they lack sufficient information to adequately plan an economy. A socialist state can never possess practical wisdom.

Finally, a state needs whatever goods are required to act in accord with the virtues that apply to it and with the aim of achieving its telos. For example, if one of the state’s proper duties is the provision of police and courts, then it will need some way to pay for them. Otherwise, it won’t attain (that portion of) its telos.

All this leaves many questions on the table. What does it mean to say a society improves our chances of eudaimonia? What sorts of virtues should motivate the state? How far should the state go in guaranteeing the flourishing of its members? How many goods should it give us, and of what kind? How does a state act out of practical wisdom, and how is practical wisdom different for a state than it is for its members? And does seeing the state from this virtue ethical perspective support libertarianism?

I’ll take a look at those next time.

George H. Smith has written a new book. For readers of Libertarianism.org, this is welcome news indeed. With his weekly “Excursions in the History of Libertarian Thought,” George shows off his enormous knowledge of intellectual history, and teaches all of us a great deal.

If you enjoy “Excursions,” think of The System of Liberty as a marthon session. George has arranged the book around conflicts within classical liberalism. This allows him to do what we strive for here at Libertarianism.org: show the libertarian intellectual tradition not as a monolithic single “school,” but as a big tent of ideas with significant overlap, but not total agreement. But, George notes,

Although much of this book deals with the internal problems of classical liberalism, and although I believe that liberals failed to resolve some of these problems, my sympathies with this school of thought will quickly become apparent to readers. In their search for answers to difficult questions, the classical liberals may not have been successful in every respect. But they did have many successes, both theoretical and practical, in their effort to justify and explain individual freedom, and we owe them an incalculable debt for many of the freedoms we enjoy today.

The System of Liberty explores natural rights and utilitarianism, anarchism, state sovereignty and self-sovereignty, positive versus negative liberty, the role of the state in education, charges of “social atomism” and “social Darwinism,” and methodological individualism. And it does so with George’s typical clarity and voluminous knowledge of the literature.

If you’re a regular read of “Excursions,” you owe it to yourself to check out The System of Liberty, too. Nobody does the history of political thought quite like George H. Smith.

The New Yorker has an article on the revival of anarchism, and it’s pretty good. While focusing mostly on the ideology of the Occupy Wall Street movement, author Kelefa Sanneh does manage to work in some nice references to more libertarian forms of anarchism, such as the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard.

While the essay contains some history–including the debate between Karl Marx on one side and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin on the other–most of it focuses on the work of David Graeber, an anthropologist, prominent Occupy member, and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Graeber represents the most visible form of anarchism today, and one that’s decidedly non-libertarian. That is too bad, because so much of the anger Graeber-style anarchists have for the current system fits nicely within critiques of statism and corporatism made by both anarchist and mainstream libertarians.

Like many in the Occupy movement, Graeber does not seem to think much about “how things will work if we get our way.” The state’s bad, these anarchists say. So are markets. Coercion is terrible, as well as money and debt. And even voluntary leadership roles aren’t any good. All we’re left with are prohibitions: “no parties, no leaders, no demands,” as Sanneh puts it.

And that’s the problem with the sort of anti-market anarchism Graeber represents. While much, if not most, of his criticism of the state and big business hits the mark, this sort of anarchism offers us no meaningful, practical alternative. Society, if it is to operate at any scale, demands organization and coordination. One way to do this is via some entity that “upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order,” as Max Weber put it. We call that the state.

Or it can be done–and these two need not be mutually exclusive–via emergent orders. People naturally fall into groups, naturally develop decision-making processes, and naturally settle on systems of exchange. We call this the market, and it’s what you get when you let folks interact freely and respect their innate sense of “mine” and “thine.” (An innate sense Graeber seems to lack, Sanneh tells us: “Like many anarchists, Graeber doesn’t think property damage is violence.”)

Graeber would have us banish both the state and markets. In part, these Occupy anarchists believe that, without the state to prop it up, the market would naturally fade away as people no longer felt compelled to participate. They say that the natural state of man is socialism, and it is only statism that makes capitalism possible.

But these anarchists also want to speed the market–and, in fact, civil society–on to an early death. Graeber “proposed a grand debt cancellation, to remind the world that debt is merely a promise–that is, a plan, and one that can be changed.” Here we see the Occupy-style anarchists eager to throw the moral baby out with the capitalist bathwater. Debt is a promise, and “keep your promises” is one of our most baseline moral rules. What’s more, we keep promises not just because doing so is right or virtuous, but because if we don’t, then people will come to assume we won’t. And if this happens throughout a society–if debts are routinely cancelled, for instance–then parties won’t be willing to risk future agreements. A society lacking the expectation that we’ll keep our promises is a society destined for failure.

Toward the end, Sanneh brings up the other kind of anarchism, the libertarian kind, represented by Murray Rothbard.

Rothbard was an anarchist, but also a capitalist. “True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism,” he once said, and he sometimes referred to himself by means of a seven-syllable honorific: “anarcho-capitalist.” Graeber thinks that governments treat their citizens “like children,” and that, when governments disappear, people will behave differently. Anarcho-capitalists, on the contrary, believe that, without government, people will behave more or less the same: we will be just as creative or greedy or competent as we are now, only freer. Instead of imagining a world without drastic inequality, anarcho-capitalists imagine a world where people and their property are secured by private defense agencies, which are paid to keep the peace. Graeber doesn’t consider anarcho-capitalists to be true anarchists; no doubt the feeling is mutual.

It’s of course worth pointing out here that many pro-market anarchists believe that, in the absence of state involvement in the economy, and without business being able to turn to government to protect them from competition, income inequality would dramatically decline under anarchism. It wouldn’t go away entirely, because liberty upsets patterns, but it also likely wouldn’t be “drastic,” especially if we consider the enormous benefits markets bring to the world’s poorest residents.

The difference between Graeber and Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists is that the latter have baked into their philosophy a respect for lifestyle pluralism. Rothbard certainly assumes that, in the absence of a state, we’d still have markets–even global ones. He’s probably right. But Rothbardian anarchism would allow for the legitimacy of alternative choices–provided, of course, they are choices and the not violently enforced preferences of “leaders.” Rothbard says we all have rights and as long as we respect those, anything goes.

The philosopher Robert Nozick called this a framework for utopia, and it’s a powerfully moving vision. All of us can choose the sorts of lives we want to lead, and live them without the threat of coercion, provided we afford the same right to everyone else. Many of us will choose market capitalism–perhaps because it so clearly works better at enriching us than other systems–but we don’t have to. Graeber’s utopia–“a kind of decentralized socialism, with decisions made by a patchwork of local assemblies and cooperatives”–can exist peacefully alongside Rothbard’s capitalism. That’s what anarcho-capitalism tells us it offers. Not a utopia, but a utopia of utopias.

Graeber, on the other hand, wants his vision for all. Any choice we might make to live differently is simply illegitimate. How Graeber would enforce his vision? Would he ban “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” to use Nozick’s phrase? It is unclear. But if he’s serious about it, he’ll eventually have to resort to violence–and likely a monopoly on violence. And then we’re right back to Weber’s “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” In other words, we’re right back to the state. In this sense, the anarcho-capitalists are right: the Occupy anarchists aren’t really anarchists at all.

But, then, neither are most libertarians. Anarchism is certainly one kind of libertarianism, but then Nozick wasn’t an anarchist, nor was Hayek, nor Friedman, nor Locke, nor Rand. Still, even for the many libertarians–and non-libertarians–who reject anarchism as a political goal worth aiming for, the philosophy of anarchism has value. An anarchist stance (a true anarchist stance) takes no aspect of the state for granted. Every last bit must be justified.

This flips the typical approach to thinking about the state and puts us back in the shoes of enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes who thought any state had to be justified. Now, most people take the existence of the state–usually a rather big state–as the default position. It’s then up to anyone who wants to shrink it–even if they don’t want to shrink it to nothing–to argue for each reduction. Anarchism says that freedom, the absence of coercion, is the default, and that anyone wanting to introduce state coercion must present arguments for why it’s better than the alternative. And they must do this at every step of the way.

What separates anarchist libertarians from non-anarchist libertarians is that the latter believe there are some steps the state can successfully clear. What unites both groups is the belief that the current state has taken far more steps than it legitimately should have.

This next piece in my series on arguments for libertarianism looks at virtue ethics. Which presents something of a problem. Most of the ways to justify a libertarian state begin with a moral philosophy and then extend it to politics. This was the case with the last three installments on Robert Nozick. Nozick takes the idea of basic rights already familiar to most of us and asks what sort of state they allow. Similarly, consequentialist libertarianism–where I’ll likely turn next–draws on another familiar moral philosophy: what’s right is whatever produces the best results.

But unless you’ve studied moral philosophy, it’s unlikely you’ve even heard of virtue ethics. And, unless you’ve studied virtue ethics, it’s unlikely you have much of a sense of what it’s all about. This is in large part because virtue ethics looks almost nothing like other schools in its basic approach to addressing moral issues.

Which all means I probably can’t assume the kind of background knowledge I did with Nozick or I will with consequentialism. And that means first writing a post introducing virtue ethics, before moving on to what it’s all got to do with libertarianism. Before undertaking that task, however, it’s important to be clear about something. Just as “consequentialism” isn’t a single, agreed upon moral theory but rather a name for a category of theories often in disagreement, virtue ethics is a school of thought, with multiple, often conflicting forms. In what follows, I do my best to stick to the areas of agreement and paint with broad strokes, avoiding the niggling–and for now, unnecessary–details.[1]

Let’s start with the biggest difference between virtue ethics and other schools of moral philosophy. Typically, the key question of morality is “What’s the right action?” For consequentialists, the answer is whichever choice produces the best results. They’ll differ on what “results” means, though typically they’ll say it has to do with “the most happiness” or “the least pain.”

Deontologists hold that the right action is whichever conforms to proper rules or duties. While the content of those duties varies among deontologists, most libertarians align them with natural rights. Thus the morally right action is the one that doesn’t violate another person’s rights. Any action violating rights constitutes a moral wrong.

Libertarians will recognize this divide. On the consequentialist side, you have people like Ludwig von Mises and David Friedman, who argue that free markets just work better than the alternatives. On the deontological side, we find Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick, grounding their libertarianism in fundamental human rights. Writes Nozick, “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).”

Virtue ethicists think they’re all starting with the wrong question. Rather than “What is the right action?,” we should ask “What is a good (i.e., virtuous) person?”

A good person is a person living a good life by the standards we share because of our common humanity. In other words, what’s a good life for humans is not the same as a good life for cats or a good life for tulips. We have a nature, and that nature defines the contours of the good life, just as our nature defines the contours of good nutrition.

But does this mean there’s really only one sort of good life? That we can’t reasonably disagree about what makes a life good? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that two lives, both equally good, may look rather different in their details. A good life lived by an urban business woman isn’t much like a good life lived by a member of the Amish. And clearly we don’t want to say that only the Amish live good lives or only cosmopolitan city dwellers do.

But at the same time, enormous commonalities exist between good lives of any sort. To have a good life is to be loving and be loved. It is to pursue–and one hopes, achieve–meaningful accomplishments. It is to be fair and honest and kind. No one really believes otherwise. Would any of us defend as “good” a life without love, without accomplishments? One filled with dishonesty and animosity? A life of violence and insecurity? Certainly not.

It is that sort of good life, defined in broad universals, that virtue ethics is all about. It’s the sort of life we’re talking about when we say, “He’s a good man.” We all know what that means.

The ancient greek philosopher Aristotle, whose writings inspire and inform most modern virtue ethical thinking, called this good life one of “eudaimonia.” While often translated as happiness, the term more precisely means something like “human flourishing.” Eudaimonia isn’t found in a moment but rather in a lifetime. Only at the end of our lives can we be sure we’ve achieved it, as it takes into account the life as a whole. Eudaimonia is the well-lived life. Thus we can be on the path to it even at those times when we are immediately unhappy, as those temporary bouts of displeasure can have effects that enrich and improve our lives as a whole.

Our purpose as humans is to find eudaimonia. (And this isn’t just a purpose, but a strong desire. Who, after all, wants to lead a bad life?) The way we assure our lives will be good is to possess virtues and to make choices in accord with them. In order to achieve eudaimonia–to live well–we need access to goods and we need to possess virtue.

Goods are things like food, shelter, clothing, books, health, education, and so on. Without them, we won’t have the resources necessary to let us cultivate virtue. Clearly this is one of the points by which virtue ethics can lead to libertarianism. For free markets represent the best way humanity’s found for delivering goods. Thus if goods are necessary for virtuousness, which is necessary for eudaimonia, then a system of markets will be preferable to one without.

Next, we need virtues of character. These we’re all familiar with: compassion, courage, hope, integrity, honesty, benevolence, and so on. They can be thought of as both skills and dispositions. We have to fully understand the content of the virtue, which is why virtue ethics places such emphasis on moral education. We must also be disposed to act in accord with the virtue. I may understand benevolence, but unless I’m inclined to act in accord with it, I’m not myself benevolent.

Finally, we need the virtue of practical wisdom. This is the skill of understanding what virtues apply to a situation and how to act in such a way as to manifest them. Practical wisdom is the trait of being morally wise. Without it, I may act out of a sense of benevolence, but my actions could do harm to those I intend to help, and so I won’t truly be benevolent. Thus practical wisdom is a necessary component of–or prerequisite to–all the virtues.

Thus a virtuous person is one who has learned about and fully internalized all of the virtues. They have become a key part of who he is, such that his actions are always motivated by them. And he has the practical wisdom necessary to ensure that his motivations and his actions are in line.

Really being virtuous means we don’t try to behave morality, because if we have to try–if our urges tell us to do something else–then we haven’t properly internalized the virtues. Instead, we aim to be virtuous people and, when we are, one of the results will be morally right action. Here again we see an important connection between virtue ethics and libertarianism. Virtue is a character trait, not a command. It is something we must achieve ourselves (though certainly with help from others), not something that can be forced upon us by the state. The state may provide part of the framework that enables us to achieve virtuousness, but it cannot (and so should not try to) make us virtuous.

Taking morally right actions isn’t why one cultivates virtue, of course. Rather one cultivates virtue because being virtuous is just what it means to achieve eudaimonia. The virtuous life is the good life.

With all this in mind, we can finally answer the question of moral action. To act well when faced with a moral dilemma is to do whatever a virtuous person would characteristically do in a similar situation. A fully virtuous person possesses all the virtues, as well as the practical wisdom to act well. We say “act well” instead of “right action” because virtue ethics acknowledges that not all dilemmas have a right answer. Two virtuous people, in the same circumstances, could take different actions, while both acting in accord with the virtues.

Notice that this formulation is not a recipe for acting morally but, rather, a means to evaluate the morality of an action. If presented with a moral dilemma, we shouldn’t ask, “What would a virtuous person do in this situation.” Rather, we should act in accord with what our own virtue tell us to do. Thus a person lacking virtue will not be able to behave virtuously–though he can still stumble upon the right moral action by accident.

In one sense, this means virtue ethics isn’t as clear a path to right moral action as the alternatives. You can’t just apply a rule and get a result. Rather, virtue ethics says, “Let us start by enabling people to develop kindness, honesty, prudence, caring, and so on. Then we we can trust those virtuous people to act well.” In fact, the acting well will simply be whatever choices those virtuous people make.

It’s possible to argue that much of the wisdom of consequentialism and deontology can find a place within a virtue ethical framework. A virtuous person will care about the consequences of his actions and he will act in ways that respect the autonomy of others. We cannot achieve eudaimonia by actively and consistently doing harm, nor can we achieve it by treating our fellow humans as means instead of ends.[2]

And all of this has profound implications for the state, a topic I’ll turn to next time.

During his recent diatribe against libertarians Bill Maher said, “Libertarians also hate Medicare and Social Security and there are problems with those programs but here’s the thing: It beats stepping over lepers and watching human skeletons shit in the river and I also like not seeing those things.”

Libertarians hear this sort of thing a lot. “You don’t think there should be limits on campaign spending? Then you must want corporations to buy elections!” Or, “You’re opposed to public schooling? What, you think all our children should just stay ignorant?”

We call this a false dilemma, a well-known logical fallacy. A person commits it when he limits the available choices in an argument too much. You can pick between A or B, he says, when in fact there’s an option C (and D, E, and F), as well. For Maher, either we keep Medicare and Society Security or we allow horrific poverty.

The false dilemma’s a logical fallacy for good reason and so by itself is never a good argument against, well, anything. But that doesn’t mean we should just ignore it. Instead, once we’ve noticed how many people employ false dilemmas against libertarian proposals, we should take a moment to ask why.

I submit that the false dilemma’s prevalence results in part from the way many libertarians talk about, and argue for, their political views.

If you have no reason to think options exist beyond just A and B, then if you hear someone arguing strongly against A, it’s not stupid to assume he’s either in favor of B or at least prefers B to A. So if you aren’t aware of any ways to prevent destitution besides Social Security, and you hear a libertarian arguing strongly against the morality of Society Security, then it’s rather likely you’ll conclude that he either wants destitution for the poor or at least would rather see the poor destitute than suffer the moral harm of Social Security.

Libertarians bear some of the blame for this. Quite often when choosing our rhetoric, we have a tendency to focus on “not A” instead of saying, “B’s not good either, so let’s instead do C.” For example, folks on the left are less likely to attack us with false dilemmas if we focus not so exclusively on the rights violations inherent in paying for Social Security, but instead point out that Social Security doesn’t work all that well or efficiently if the goal is to prevent destitution, and then offer better alternatives.

This “not A” tendency could result from the simple fact that offering alternatives means having persuasive alternatives in mind. And while they’re myriad, not all of us have the time or inclination to learn them. Call it a kind of rational ignorance in political debate. Far easier to just apply a single principle, a “universal acid” as Daniel Dennett calls it.

But we’re often also motivated by a desire to maintain our principles. Principles are good, of course. That libertarians say we value freedom and mean it is a crucial difference between us and conservatives and progressives. On the other hand, we need to recognize that non-libertarians don’t accept our core principles. If they did, they wouldn’t be non-libertarians. So if our goal is not just to be right, but to be persuasive, then starting with common ground can be rather more effective. Yes, we take a principled stand against the state coercion behind Social Security, but we also don’t want people to suffer from rampant poverty. In fact, much of what’s appealing about libertarianism is that it’s a genuine path to both: we can be free and prosperous. We shouldn’t water down our libertarianism but we should pay attention to when leading with the argument from prosperity—and using it as a way to then persuade on the issue of freedom—can be more effective than making only the argument from freedom.

Bill Maher’s fulmination just shows that the way we express our ideas is often as important for their persuasiveness as the ideas themselves.

Though I shouldn’t, I still find it surprising that so many people claim to be motivated by love and beneficence and then express enthusiasm for the federal government. I don’t mean enthusiasm for the daily workings of Washington—its corruption, infighting, and general incompetence—but rather enthusiasm for the concept of the federal government as the solution to America’s problems, if only it could be made to work properly.

This love affair with the idea of the state is what baffles me most about non-libertarians. Arguments about data I understand. Disputes about whether free markets or heavy regulations produce better results I can get. But at some deep level, I simply don’t see how someone can look at one group of people telling another group of people what to do—and backing it up with threats of force—and say, “Therein lies utopia.”

Libertarians draw on a wealth of arguments for liberty or against state action. We have moral arguments grounded in natural rights, consequentialism, and virtue. We have economic arguments about the efficiency of markets. But for me, prior to those is an attitude about government. I mean “prior to” not in the sense of “having higher value.” The moral arguments in favor of libertarianism are both crucial and compelling. No, what I mean by attitude being prior to philosophy is that my general disposition—finding something in my gut wrong with the claim by some of a right to rule—informs and influences my thinking. It would be dishonest of me to claim otherwise. To borrow a phrase from critical theory, my distaste for exercises of power is “always already” present in my philosophy.

That’s why I’m deeply troubled by the willingness I see from so many on both the left and the right to embrace the state as an agent for social change. Like them, I believe strongly that beneficence is a virtue, one we ought to behave in accord with. Yet from that antecedent, libertarians and non-libertarians arrive at rather different views of the state’s proper role.

In my experience, the non-libertarian’s thinking process goes something like this: “I am a person motivated by beneficence to improve the lives of my fellow human beings. While this means I ought to behave kindly to those I know in my day to day life and help them when I am able, such personal acts remain terribly limited in scope. Doing good means doing good not just for my family and friends, but for humanity. As but one person, I’m incapable of such grand effect. Therefore, I should work with others in order to amplify my efforts. And if we really want to make large scale positive changes, and have those changes stick, we need to work through the government. The private sector simply isn’t up to the task.”

I can get behind all of that, but for the last two sentences. Large-scale, long-term positive change happens all the time without guidance by states. Markets enormously improve the lives of those with access to them, and especially improve the lives of the poorest and least powerful.

Those last two sentences also reflect the disturbing belief that government is the apotheosis of “people working together.” In reality, governments are precisely the opposite. Rather than working together through the state, we work against each other. If everyone agrees we ought to pay for support of the arts, for example, then there will be no need for a government program paying for the arts. Private actors—who, after all, agree the arts need support—will provide that support themselves, and do so voluntarily. (And, as my colleague David Boaz points out, we do voluntarily support the arts to an enormous degree.) We only “need” the when not everyone agrees, and when some people feel they have a right to force compliance from those who disagree.

One reason the state looks like such an appealing avenue for such action—as opposed to, say, one-on-one intimidation—is that using the state to coerce others costs the voters so little. If you don’t do what I want you to do, and I vote for a law to make you, enforcement of that law gets done by someone else. I don’t have to risk my own safety or take up my own time compelling you.

But perhaps more important, using the state as the means of coercing others removes moral costs. We don’t see the coercion our votes lead to, and so the weight of moral responsibility for the state’s actions feels less. There’s safety in numbers and safety in distance. It’s not me breaking up families over immigration rules or locking people away for minor offenses. No, it’s the state—it’s us—and I’m just going along with it.

At The Atlantic yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf told the story of John Horner, a 46-year old father of three who, with no history of criminal behavior, is now spending 25 years in prison for selling $1,800 worth of prescription pain pills. Reading about Horner and thinking about his children breaks your heart. No virtuous person would ever do what the state of Florida did to John Horner.

To put it more bluntly, what’s been done to Horner and his kids by the state is evil. Claims about just obeying the letter of the law don’t make it any less evil. There’s no excuse for this monstrous behavior, and yet people—including those who could directly make a difference—go along with it because that’s what the state does.

The libertarian attitude—seeing the state not as some special kind of institution outside of the normal moral framework but as just another group of people—exposes the error in thinking acts become less immoral the further we are from their consequences. By reframing the state, libertarians can do considerable good, even if our particular policy preferences are rarely or never adopted.

The state is not “us.” Rather, it’s a group of us, acting (sometimes) on the orders of a larger group of us, and using force to compel another group of us to do things they don’t want to do. We need a state because there are some people who would do awful things if given the opportunity, and because when awful things are done, the perpetrators need to be coerced into compensating the victims. But we should never lose sight of what the state is, and never let utopian thinking about “government as ‘us’” cloud our moral standards to such a degree that we shrug at—or, worse, encourage—outright evils.

Beneficence means we should strive, individually and together, to make the world a better place. But beneficence does its best work—and is, in fact, only truly beneficence—when it happens outside of a framework of coercion, violence, and force.