Free Thoughts Blog

We come at last to the final of the five major theories of political obligation. I’ve looked at consent, gratitude (in two parts), fair play (again in two parts), and associations. Last up is natural duty, which holds that certain (kinds of) people or institutions may rule us not because of anything we did or anything they did specifically for each of us but because of characteristics they happen to have. In other words, the ruler or state (assuming it possesses necessary traits) may demand our obedience and we simply have a duty to comply.

As was the case with the other theories, natural duty can take more than one form. In this post, I’ll look at whether we might have a duty to obey the law because doing so is the only way to fulfill another moral duty. For example, in an ideal utilitarian system we might find ourselves politically obligated because a legitimate state maximizes utility. The state has the characteristic of maximizing utility, in other words. We’re better off having a government we all obey than not–and each of us has a moral duty to do what best supports the better-off-ness of the world.

This initially seems pretty persuasive. If utilitarianism (or some other form of consequentialism) is right and if obeying the law leads to good consequences, then it necessarily follows that we’re morally bound to obey the law. Few of us feel it’s morally right to actively make things worse, after all.

I’ll leave the first if–whether consequentialism/utilitarianism is right–alone. I’m not convinced it is, but we can proceed without getting into that because even if morality flows only from the outcome of actions, political obligation doesn’t necessarily follow.

Clearly having just any state doesn’t maximize utility. We can easily imagine downright awful states that, if they existed, would make us worse off than having no state at all. Likewise, it may well be the case that the state claiming authority over me right now, perhaps because I happen to live within its borders, is worse from a utilitarian standpoint than the state next door. So why should I obey the former and not the latter?

Also, clearly not everything even reasonably beneficent states do makes us better off. Utilitarianism might lead me to a duty to support publicly-funded education, but am I obligated to support the war on drugs, too?

This leads to two questions about the utilitarian account, neither of which has a clear answer. First, how do we know what laws, when obeyed, will create the best consequences? After all, that’s what much, if not most, political debate deals with. Maybe by obeying this law, whatever it happens to be, I’m making the world worse than if I disobeyed.

Second, in light of how fleeting certainty is on matters of utility, who gets to decide? Why does whoever happens to claim power right now get to override my judgment about utility maximization with his own? He might have been elected to that role by some political process, but what if I didn’t consent to that? Because if it turns out I’m right about what maximizes utility and the elected ruler isn’t, then following him won’t just harm me and others–it’ll also be morally wrong.

There’s an even bigger problem, however. Remember that what we’re looking for in this series is political obligation, not moral obligation. That we have moral obligations is, I hope, uncontroversial. A political obligation is something we’re duty bound to do not because doing so is morally right but because these state tells us to. Using my standard example, murder is a moral wrong, not because it’s against the law, but because it’s morally wrong to commit murder. Thus the prohibition on murder isn’t, strictly speaking, a political obligation–even if by following it I’m “obeying” the law.

Thus if the utilitarian account says that we should do certain things the state tells us to because doing them would maximize utility, then we have a moral duty to do those things even in the absence of the state. It’s not clear, then, how the utilitarian account is even, at its root, an argument for political obligation.

Next time I’ll turn to the other contemporary form of the argument from natural duty: the duty to support just institutions.

Karen Klein is, as I’m sure you’ve all heard, the Greece, New York bus monitor who, after video of her being cruelly bullied made it onto the internet, reaped a windfall of emotional support from people all over the world.

She’s getting windfall profits, too. Someone on the crowdsourced funding site Indiegogo launched a campaign to send Klein on the “vacation of a lifetime.” With 29 days to go, Klein’s well on her way to much more—a lifetime of vacations. The campaign, as I write this, has collected $542,009, and more is pouring in at a rapid clip.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it warms my voluntaryist heart to see people, without government coercion, giving to support a complete stranger. This is the sort of giving I think we’d see more of if the state weren’t crowding it out.

But then came this. A well-meaning supporter of Klein’s, feeling like she should get every penny donated to her and believing—erroneously, it turns out—that the government would tax away a large chunk of her windfall, set up a petition to have President Obama “use his executive power to grant Karen Klein a waiver of all income taxes and any other federal taxes that would apply to the funds being donated to her through this fund.”

Of course, Obama doesn’t possess such an executive power and the small gifts aggregating to Klein’s enormous reward aren’t taxed anyway. But the very fact that this petition existed, that it garnered 7,624 signatures before ending, and most strikingly the motivations supporters articulated for signing it all add up to an awesome display of cognitive dissonance.

Jairo Navarrete says she signed because Klein “deserves every penny.” Ashley O’Brien says, “I do not believe that Karen should have to pay taxes on this money, it is being donated to her for very good reason and she deserves ever [sic] single cent of it.” And so on. “Deserves” shows up constantly throughout the comments.

Which is awfully weird. Here are thousands of people basically making the argument that if earnings are deserved, they shouldn’t be taxed—which implies that if earnings are (legitimately) taxed, they aren’t deserved.

I assume nearly every petitioner earns a paycheck somehow, out of which the government takes some cut in taxes. Does this mean all these people feel their own earnings are undeserved? How are we to distinguish between deserved and undeserved profits?

Shannon Kaopuiki, another signer, hints at an possible answer. “People are wanting to help Karen so she should be able to get every last cent,” Kaopuiki writes. “She deserves all the money that people want to give her.”

So deserved earnings are those that people wanted to give you. That I can get behind. In fact, it’s roughly the foundational theory of the free market economy. Sellers offer up their goods and services and buyers, wanting those goods or services more than they want the amount of money equal to their price, voluntarily hand over cash for them. A mutually beneficial exchange occurs.

Except a great many folks out there don’t think the profits arising from voluntary transactions are deserved—at least not if “deserved” means in part that the government shouldn’t collect taxes on them. “He deserves all the money that people want to give him,” wasn’t the typical response to Eduardo Saverin, after all.

And this is strange because, when we get down to it, it seems that perhaps capitalists deserve their earnings more than Klein does. What happened to her was awful and it’s wonderful that people want to help her out. But she didn’t give those people anything in return for the $542,009 (and growing!) she’s gonna get. Business men and women, on the other hand, don’t just have their earnings voluntarily given to them. They also gave something voluntarily back in return. Further, because the buyers were willing to give their money to the sellers, the buyers must have valued what the sellers gave them even more than they valued the given-over money.

Maybe I’m reading cognitive dissonance into a situation entirely lacking it, though. Maybe the sentiment being expressed in the Karen Klein petition is, rather, that all deserved earnings shouldn’t be taxed and that almost all of us deserve our earnings. If that’s true—if that’s what so many people believe—then the future’s looking a lot more libertarian than I thought.

Following a prompt from Matt Zwolinski, I’m reading Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, with a long, appreciative introduction by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. This post will look at Hoppe’s introduction, which Matt also addresses here. Three things stood out for me:

I. Rothbard/Nozick

Hoppe begins by contrasting Rothbard and Robert Nozick. Nozick, he suggests, was a relative success in the academy because readers can take his philosophy as being somewhat less than deadly earnest. Nozick offered libertarianism not as a revolutionary credo, but as a series of clever brain teasers:

Rothbard was above all a systematic thinker… In distinct contrast, Nozick was a modern unsystematic, associationist, or even impressionistic thinker, and his prose was difficult and unclear… Nozick’s method rather made for interest and excitement of a particular kind. [His] book was a series of dozens of disparate or loosely jointed arguments, conjectures, puzzles, counterexamples, experiments, paradoxes, surprising turns, startling twists, intellectual flashes, and philosophical razzle-dazzle, and thus required only short and intermittent attention of its reader… Despite his politically incorrect conclusions, Nozick’s libertarianism was deemed respectable by the academic masses and elicited countless comments and replies, because it was methodologically non-committal; that is, Nozick did not claim that his libertarian conclusions proved anything. Even though one would think that ethics is — and must be — an eminently practical intellectual subject, Nozick did not claim that his ethical “explorations” had any practical implications. [xxii-xxiv]

In the academy, the only politics you’re expected to have in earnest is leftist politics. But you’re always allowed to be ironic or playful, and that’s where Nozick comes in. It’s also valuable in the academy to signal that you are able to consider differing worldviews. But to do so, you’ll need a few of these tokens on hand. Even if what an academic means by “consider differing worldviews” is somewhat less than what an ordinary person would.

There are other possible explanations for the difference in reception between Rothbard and Nozick, but I think this one more or less works. You can play with Nozick’s ideas. He comes right out and asks you to. Rothbard doesn’t play. He challenges you to throw out everything you’ve ever believed; he claims that he’s found the right answers, and that you have not. This is annoying to the typical academic, who tends to believe that he had gotten past that mode of argument by the second year of grad school at the latest.

Is there room for both approaches, even setting aside their theoretical merits? I’m inclined to say yes. For the brave, budding libertarian academic, Nozick is a lifeline. You can write about him, and thus about libertarian ideas, and still seem at least a bit respectable — because, ironically, you’re taken less seriously. But that still means more libertarian academics in the future, and that means we’re winning.

II. Subsidiarity and Property

Although I mostly agree with Hoppe about Rothbard and Nozick, I disagree with some parts of the following:

It would be anti-libertarian.. to appeal to the United Nations to order the breakup of the taxi-monopoly in Houston, or to the U.S. government to order Utah to abolish its state-certification requirement for teachers, because in doing so one would have illegitimately granted these state agencies jurisdiction over property that they plainly do not own (but others do).

It would definitely be anti-libertarian to do these things. But not for the reason Hoppe suggests.

I’m fairly sure the United Nations doesn’t own any taxis in Houston. But that’s not the reason the U.N. lacks authority over Houston’s taxi business. (Consider: If the U.N. did own a taxi or two, would it be allowed to set policy? Of course not. Not even if it owned all of them.)

The reason the U.N. can’t properly act here has little to do with property and everything to do with the rule of law. In a constitutionally governed polity, laws are made only according to fixed, public, preexisting rules. The rules for how to make laws in the city of Houston are in Houston’s charter, in the Texas state constitution, and in the American federal constitution. They don’t permit the U.N. to make any laws in Houston, and that should settle the matter.

Things are much the same with the federal government and Utah’s school system. Indeed, the federal government actually does own 57.4% of the land in Utah, but it still rightfully has 0% of jurisdiction over education in Utah. That’s because the U.S. Constitution is silent about education. The federal government’s property holdings are irrelevant.

Hoppe also writes that a “second-best solution” is to favor local governments over central ones. But why should this be? He doesn’t explain. It’s possible that he can’t, because proximity doesn’t do anything to establish a person’s title to property. And if nearby individuals don’t get title, then nearby governments don’t either. I agree that there are many reasons to fear a world government, but the fact that a world government wouldn’t own your property in a meaningful enough sense to legitimate its actions isn’t one of them. My guess is that that a world government would soon enough declare that it owned your property, after which, practically speaking, it would. Then you’d be down your property as well as your argument.

Now, as a matter of fact I do favor subsidiarity, just for a different set of reasons: Local governments are a bit less likely to botch knowledge problems. They are less likely to be co-opted by distant special interests. And if and when they fail, they won’t take the whole nation or the whole world down with them. These are all good things, but none of them to my mind trumps individual liberty, and if a more distant government restrains the unlibertarian impulses of a nearby government, I’m okay with that, as long as it’s within the enumerated powers of the distant government to do so. Any port in a storm.

III. Left and Right

Hoppe addresses one other issue that I’d like to mention here, namely Rothbard’s late-in-life insistence on cultural conservatism as a pillar of his own libertarian thought.

Libertarianism is often said to have two wings, culturally liberal and culturally conservative. Rothbard backed the conservatives, a choice I don’t personally share despite my deep respect for him. The two wings have no necessary connection to America’s major political parties, and my personal advice to libertarians is to avoid them both. We would do best to stand on our own two feet, offer good ideas, and encourage anyone at all to take them up. But even as we do so, a division of outlook remains.

Although the two wings support many of the same policy prescriptions, they bring to the table different tactics and expectations. The cultural conservatives are betting that the introduction or re-introduction of conservative mores will lead to a prosperous, propertarian free-market society with minimal government. The cultural liberals note that free markets very often undermine tradition, and they’re happy about it. They hope to watch the freed market do more of the same in the future, and they encourage a welcoming attitude toward cultural change as a way of making the market more palatable. Markets will bring rapid cultural change; the only question is how we feel about it. And if we want the market’s prosperity, we’d better be ready for its upheavals.

Both wings agree that markets will bring material prosperity. But what should we do with that prosperity? Is there some chance of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs? If so, can we describe that danger? Here again there are disagreements.

Conservatives fear a cycle: Good mores bring free markets; free markets bring opulence; opulence brings decadence; decadence destroys good mores; the free market falls; the society withers… until someone hits upon good mores once again.

Liberals also fear a cycle: Markets produce vigorous cultural change; conservatives fear vigorous cultural change; to stop it, conservatives will eventually turn upon and dismantle the market. Society stagnates… until someone hits upon the free market idea once again.

Of course, they might both be right to a degree. Tyler Cowen suggests that reviving older values and attitudes won’t restrain the growth of government; after all, people with old-time values were precisely the ones who not so long ago abandoned classical liberalism in favor of modern statist liberalism. And while I may welcome the culturally innovative effects of the market, I also don’t know at all what the future will bring. Markets disrupt all kinds of things, and possibly even themselves under some conditions.

Our trek through the major theories of political obligation continues as we now move on to the association account.

It’s probably easiest to think of association theory as the “We’re all Americans” version of obligation. If you live in the United States, you’re an American, meaning you’re part of this thing called America, which is both the collection of all citizens and bigger than all of us. And being an American means respecting and obeying America’s institutions, including its laws.

This sets association apart from the other theories we’ve looked at. With fair play and gratitude, for instance, political obligations arise because of something we’ve done—whether accepting benefits or voluntarily participating in a cooperative scheme. With association, the obligations flow from who we are. Association theorists thus often draw parallels between country and family. As a father, I have obligations toward my daughter not because of some agreement we entered into or because I gained in some way from her. I have obligations to her because I am her father. Association simply applies this same sort of thinking to the state. Having political obligations is just part of what it means to be a member of the community. Given that our membership isn’t something most of us chose (we were instead born into it), our political obligations don’t flow from our choices, either.

This account depends on a number of assumptions, none of them particularly plausible. First, we very likely do have obligations arising from our role in our families, among our friends, or even in our very local community. But it’s not at all clear that the state is an association of a kind with those others. I don’t have a relationship with most Americans—let alone with Congress, the President, and the administrative agencies—that in any way parallels the relationship I have with my wife, my daughter, my parents, my friends, and my neighbors. In fact, when the state does try to act as if such a relationship exists (take Michelle Obama’s call that we all sign a father’s day card for her husband), it comes off as almost creepy.

Second, if political obligations flow entirely from community standards (“You’re an American, and Americans support their government.”) then it seems they bind us to the state no matter how bad it is. We might luck into a state that’s reasonably just, but we might just as easily have found ourselves politically obligated to turn over our peers to Stalin or to send Jews to the gas chambers. If the response is that of course you can’t be politically obligated to do that, then we’ve introduced moral standards outside of the association—and why can’t those moral standards include a prohibition on being obligated to a state involuntarily? It seems that, no matter what, we want some way to become unobligated to obey the state if the state grows bad enough. And this opting out shouldn’t be limited to “Love it or leave it.” For why, if the government behaves sufficiently unjustly so as to lose my obedience, should I also be forced to abandon my (true) community of my family, friends, and neighbors?

I don’t want to completely dismiss the strong feeling many of us have that we are, in fact, obligated to obey our government and that those obligations arise from it being the government of our country. The association theory matches quite well the unstated reasoning that leads most citizens to respect the will of the state. But those feelings by themselves don’t settle the issue. We might, after all, be mistaken in our emotion. And, at the very least, we want to leave open the option to back out of our obligations should the government change sufficiently that it no longer represents the America we’re a part of.

I’ll close with this passage from a paper by A. John Simmons, our most important contemporary philosopher of political obligation.

Absent any compelling argument for general political obligations (of the sort to which traditional theorists aspired), and absent any compelling argument for the independent binding power of local rules requiring obedience and support (of the sort to which proponents of the normative independence thesis aspire), it seems plausible to dismiss as a kind of false consciousness our feelings of obligation toward our countries of birth or residence. Of course we identify ourselves with “our” countries, “our” governments, and “our” fellow citizens. We have typically been taught from birth to do so, have typically spent our lives in a particular political culture, have been identified with a particular community by those outside our own (for purposes of praise or blame, say), and have associated with and become used to our own ways. That I might feel shame or pride at the acts of my countrymen (or that I might vote in elections and obey the law) is hardly surprising under these conditions. But none of this identification (along with its accompanying feelings of obligation) none of these ways of speaking and acting-seems, considered by itself, in any way inconsistent with denying that we are morally bound by political obligations to our countries of residence.

The appearance of authority must never be mistaken for the real thing.

For too long, libertarians have been characterized as Scrooges who believe that the wealthy and the poor both merit their stations in life. Should we be encouraging such spurious arguments by raising the unnecessary and morally charged idea of merit as a justification for free markets?

I think not, but Bryan Caplan is again making excellent, meritorious points against my anti-meritocratic views. In this short response I hope to clarify a few distinctions as to what I think our debate is actually about.

First, as I see it, the following questions are at issue:

1. How strong is the correlation between success and merit?
2. If the correlation is strong enough, should this be raised as a reason to believe in free markets?

If the answer to question 2 is “no”—that is, that the issue of merit should not be raised by free-market advocates—then this could be for two reasons: 1) because the question of merit is incidental to the case for free markets, or 2) because bringing up merit is bad rhetoric for libertarians who wish to be convincing.

As I argued in my last post, I believe there is a strong correlation between success and merit, but a less strong one between “failure” and merit. I believed this when I wrote my initial post, and I still believe it. Nevertheless, I still think that, for both reasons 1 and 2, merit arguments should be generally avoided in making the case for free markets.

Bryan asks, if the question of merit is incidental to the case for free markets, then “[d]oesn’t the same hold for prosperity, tolerance, culture, and all the other good stuff that libertarianism is supposed to deliver?”

No. First of all, prosperity, tolerance, and culture are not morally charged, individualized assessments. Saying that “the free market delivers prosperity” as a general observation is very different from saying “the free market delivers prosperity to those who merit it.” The same is true for the abstract concepts of tolerance and culture. It is a virtue of the free market that it will tend to deliver prosperity, tolerance, and culture regardless whether the individual recipients are meritorious.

This dovetails into Bryan’s question about whether merit has essentially nothing to do with my belief in free markets: “If you looked at the world and saw nothing but lazy, drunken idiots making money hand-over-fist while hard-working, sober geniuses begged for spare change, wouldn’t that bother you?” Yes, I would be upset, but this would not affect my belief in free markets as long as the reason that those lazy idiots were making money hand-over-fist was that they were creating mutual gains from trade through a system of just exchanges.

Which brings me to my final point: Perhaps we should clarify the difference, if any, between merit and desert. To me, merit carries far more moralistic weight. It implies things about the quality of your character, facts about your history, and the state of the world around you. Desert, however, is far less morally weighty. I am prepared to say—in the vein of Nozick’s entitlement theory—that a series of just and consensual exchanges creating mutual benefits from trade is sufficient for the resulting gains to be “deserved.” Whether it is sufficient for the gains to be merited, however, that’s an open question.

This addresses Bryan’s excellent observation that rhetoric opposing free markets is often awash with arguments from merit, and that maybe we shouldn’t use the same critiques of free markets as our opponents. Bryan writes, “What do revolutionary socialists tell the have-nots to stoke the fires of alienation and resentment? That successful people earned what they’ve got, fair and square? Or that success is all a matter of chance?”

Countering this rhetoric is important, but we do not need the concept of merit to do it. We only need to point out that a free society based on general, universally applicable rules does not concern itself with such obscure and unwieldy concepts as merit. Instead, we only ask whether a person’s accumulated gains from trade derived from just and consensual exchanges—that is, that they are “deserved” in a minimally normative sense. Even raising the morally weighty issue of merit opens the door to the idea that such considerations are relevant to the case for the free market. They aren’t.

Does it matter whether the free market rewards merit? Should libertarians argue to skeptics that free markets reward merit? Over at the Library of Economics and Liberty, Bryan Caplan has responded to my post, Bad Arguments for Libertarianism: Merit. Bryan’s post also has links to a fascinating exchange on the same subject between him and Shikha Dalmia (here, here, here, and here), as well as a Cato Unbound essay by Roderick Long and Bryan’s response.  

Bryan’s critiques give me a welcome occasion to expand on my original post, which contains many philosophical holes. Originally, I wrote:

If merit comes from striving, effort, or overcoming adversity, then a free market works to diminish the amount of meritorious action in order to increase productivity. Efficiency is preferred over toil. If holes need to be dug, then they should be dug in the most efficient manner possible, not in the most meritorious manner. Digging a hole is hard work, and digging a hole with only one arm is even harder work, but it would be odd if we determined the value of hole-digging based on these considerations.

Bryan responds:

Simple answer: All else equal, the efficient use of resources is meritorious.  This is hardly an eccentric Objectivist invention.  Common-sense morality praises people who use their time wisely, who save for a rainy day, and who calmly weigh their options instead of running around like chickens with their heads cut off.  Of course these aren’t the only things that common-sense morality praises, but they are on the list.

In short, Bryan argues that “the correlation between market success and merit is imperfect, [but] still fairly high.” Great success can come to the lucky and lazy, but they tend to be the exceptions rather than the rule.

I agree. I respect those people who have risen to the top, and I understand that very few of them got there through pure luck. Even for those imbued with natural intelligence and other advantages of birth, success doesn’t just happen.

But the correlation between merit and success is less exact for those who are not successful—that is, there are many people who have worked very hard, have been unlucky, and are not successful. I’m thinking of undiscovered bands, brilliant entry-level workers who had apathetic mentors, and would-be superstar executives who simply didn’t have the right friends. There are also countless people who put in years of good, hard work at companies that eventually failed and who are now over-50 and struggling to find a job in a horrible economy.

But whatever the relationship is between success and merit, it is not integral to the case for the free market, and, if pushed too strongly, it may in fact be harmful to libertarian arguments. The intent of my original post was not only to ask whether libertarians lead with our chins if we decide to include merit in our pro-market rhetoric, but also to ask whether the relationship between markets and merit is a reason we should believe in free markets.    

For me, merit has essentially nothing to do with why I believe in free markets. Insofar as market success imperfectly correlates to what I believe is meritorious, I regard it as almost a coincidence.

Let’s look at some related counterfactuals:

1. If everything that Bryan pointed to was false—if only a smattering of those who are successful could be described as meritorious under any definition of the word—would there still be a convincing case for the free market?
2. If someone had an idiosyncratic view of merit—perhaps that “invisible hand” motives are an immoral using of others’ needs and wants to fulfill selfish desires—should that person still believe in the free market?

Yes and yes.

Admittedly, it may be a tougher sell, but even in the face of such obstinacy a successful case for the free market can be made based on the Hayekian/Austrian argument against central planning and the concept of individual rights. These arguments have the added virtue of being both less subjective than opinions about merit and less potentially demeaning to those who, right or wrong, feel cheated by the market.

Depending on your moral philosophy, opinions about merit may not be entirely subjective, but they do come quite close to being merely matters of taste. Many criticisms of free markets ultimately derive from such matters of taste: for example, the idea that the market is not adequately rewarding some characteristic—such as the ability to create innovative and boundary-pushing music rather than bubble-gum pop hits—to the degree that is deserved. Academics, in particular, are susceptible to this wrong-headed thinking about markets, particularly when it comes to whether the market adequately rewards academics. My recent review of Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets highlights many of Sandel’s preferences masquerading as political theory.

By using arguments based on merit, libertarians open themselves to arguments based on matters of taste. This is true whether or not Bryan’s observation that the “All else equal, the efficient use of resources is meritorious” is just a “matter of taste.” If the fact that markets tend to reward hard work and high skill is a reason to believe in markets, then anyone who doesn’t value hard work or high skill can disagree with markets for the same reason. These people may not be as uncommon as Bryan supposes. Many movements in twentieth-century art and music were based on a conscious rejection of skill, practice, and many other meritorious virtues traditionally associated with quality art. While the market may not adequately reward such art according to the subjective standards of merit held by the practitioners, those artists can still believe in the market because it fosters the productivity that allows them to exist at all.