Free Thoughts Blog

Last time I looked at the natural duty to obey the state because of what obedience gets us. This time I want to address another form the theory of natural duty can take: A general duty to obey just institutions.

In times past, this often mean the divine right of kings. God ordained that this person is the ruler and who are we to argue with or disobey God? Few argue that anymore, though. Instead, we’ve replaced the “right to rule” with the “duty to be ruled.” If a given institution processes certain characteristics, we have a moral duty to obey the commands it gives us.

After fair play, natural duty is, for instance, John Rawls’s preferred theory. Rawls admits that we can’t have a duty to obey the state unless we did something to create that duty (so fair play, consent, or another affirmative act). However, each of us has a general moral duty of justice. We much each behave justly, just as we must each keep promises, not steal, not murder, and so on. So far, there’s little to disagree with. It’s the next move, however, where Rawls raises natural duty–and where the controversy comes. That moral duty of justice, he writes, “requires us to support and to comply with just institutions that exist and apply to us.”

What this means is that if we find ourselves within the claimed jurisdiction of just institutions (within the borders of the United States, say) then our pre-political moral duty of justice compels us to support those institutions. In this case, “not obeying” is seen as a form of “not supporting,” and so we thus have a moral duty to obey.

Variations on this include a duty of non-interference. After all, just because something is good, it isn’t immediately clear I have a duty to support it. If I have a moral duty to be kind, for example, I don’t automatically have a moral duty to support your acts of kindness. But, if your acts of kindness are genuinely kind, then I probably should refrain from interfering with them. This is William A. Edmundson’s argument in “Legitimate Authority without Political Obligation.” He writes,

There may be no general, even prima facie, duty to obey the laws of a state, not even those of a just state; but there is a general prima facie duty not to interfere with the bonafide administration of the laws of a just state.

The way this gets us to something indistinguishable from political obligation is in the conclusion that non-interference includes going along with any punishment the state gives you as a result of you “interfering” with the administration of its laws by not obeying its commands. If I violate the state’s law, by not allowing myself to be sent to jail, I’m “interfer[ing] with the bonafide administration of the laws of a just state.” In this way, Edmundson’s “non-interference” and Rawls’s “support” mean pretty much the same thing: If institutions are just, you have a duty to do what they tell you to.

In assessing these arguments, let’s grant a large portion of them up front. Namely, we’ll assume that these institutions seeking our obedience are, in fact, just. It’s a capitulation I’ve made before in this series and it’s done to keep from having to repeat over and over a particular kind of libertarian counter argument. If it’s true that we never, under any circumstances, have a duty to obey an unjust state (we needn’t ever obey the Nazis, for instance), then for every argument for political obligation, the anarcho-capitalist libertarian can response, “Whatever. No state is ever just.” That may be true. But the point of these series is to show, in part, that even if we grant the justness of a state, the arguments for obligation still don’t work.

Okay, so our imaginary state is perfectly just–or just enough that whatever injustice it displays isn’t enough to entirely undermine its claims to authority. How far does natural duty then get us?

In both the Rawls and Edmundson versions, the old issue of particularity again potentially messes things up. Let’s say that only the United States is just. This would mean, of course, that those of us living within the U.S. have a duty to obey–but it would also mean that everyone living outside the has the same duty. And that doesn’t seem right.

It gets even weirder if more than one government can (rightly) claim to be just. If the natural duty account is accurate, and I have a duty to obey just insitutions, then I might find myself having to obey more than one goverment. We can quite easily imagine a situation where the (just) nation of Canada decides that it will exercise authority over North Dakota, which until now has been exclusively part of the (just) nation of the United States. Especially if Canada is more just than the U.S. the natural duty theory would seem to say that residents of North Dakota ought to obey (support, not interfere with) Canada–if they can’t just obey both.

Obviously, the U.S. government won’t go for that and will claim that, regardless of Canada’s claim to greater justice, North Dakota belongs to the United States. But governments are just collections of people, after all, each (presumably) with a moral duty of justice, a duty which includes supporting/not-interfering with just institutions. So natural duty here would mean that the members of the United States government ought to, in this case, obey Canada’s laws, and not their own.

Some have argued that there’s a special relationship between a nation and “its” people, such that Canada is always more just in relation to people geographically within its borders than any other country, while being less just for citizens of non-Canadian nations. Canada is, after all, uniquely aware of the needs of Canadians in a way that Mexico isn’t.

But again, this seems odd. A resident of northern North Dakota might justifiably feel he has more in common with residents of southern Manitoba than he does with the legislators 1,500 miles away in Washington, D.C.

Further, one thing all states claim as part of their authority is the right to prevent new nations from arising within their borders. I can’t start a new country in my neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia and say I now only have a duty to obey it–even if it happens to be more just and attuned to my needs than the United States. But why not?

Let’s go back to Rawls. Our natural duty of justice, he wrote, “requires us to support and to comply with just institutions that exist and apply to us.” I’ve emphasized two of the more troubling words. Because justice isn’t binary. An institution–a state–isn’t either “just” or “unjust.” Every reasonably good, existing institution contains a bit of both.

Now of course I can’t “comply with” a non-existing institution, but I can support one. That’s what America’s founding generation did when they rebelled (i.e., failed to comply with) from Great Britain to support a new institution–the (eventual) United States of America.

As should be clear, despite any initial appeal it may have, the natural duty account of political obligation fairs no better than the other four major theories.

Chapters 1 and 2 of Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty are about man’s nature. Rothbard writes:

In natural-law philosophy… reason is not bound, as it is in modern post-Humean philosophy, to be a mere slave to the passions, confined to cranking out the discovery of the means to arbitrarily chosen ends. For the ends themselves are selected by the use of reason; and “right reason” dictates to man his proper ends as well as the means for their attainment. (p 7)

The good is the fulfillment of man’s potential, with man understood to be the rational animal—the one who survives and flourishes based on the use of reason and its application to the problems that confront him. The good life is a reasoned, examined life; evil consists of neglecting or denying reason, or of thwarting it in the self or others.

Many, of course, deny that mankind has a nature. The implication here is obvious: without a nature, all claims of a normative natural law would be void. The problem with such denials, as Rothbard notes, is that their propoents so often end either by contradicting themselves or by employing something suspiciously like natural law anyway.

I found Rothbard a bit laconic on this point, but I think I see where he was headed. The trouble with denying that man has a nature is that it runs into problems in the area known as argumentation ethics: The act of advancing an argument is a speech act that all by itself implies that the arguer believes certain things. If the content of the argument contradicts these things, the arguer has a problem.

Suppose some creature asserts that man has no nature. We need not and possibly should not call this creature a man, because his own theory suggests that he can’t be an instance of a type that doesn’t exist.

It might not be unreasonable to ask him, though, why he believes that “man” has no nature. And when the creature offers propositions in support of his conclusion, we readily recognize that he has attempted what philosophers call an argument. Perhaps sadly for him, we are also forced to conclude that he is a member of mankind after all. His argument to the contrary is self-defeating.

That’s because argument is a thing that man—the rational animal—does pretty well, and that nothing else does particularly well at all. Even offering a flawed argument isn’t the sort of thing we expect from puppies or toasters. (In my experience, people who say that computers can argue have not usually spent much time around the ones that purport to do so.)

The act of arguing even semi-cogently against the existence of human nature is itself a manifestation of the thing that the argument attempts to deny. And the act of proposing this argument to the rest of us would be nonsensical without an expectation that we might evaluate it—favorably, the arguer hopes—according to standards of rationality congruent with those found in the arguer’s own mind.

If we can do that, we would appear to share a nature, an essential point of commonality that motivates us in similar ways. Man’s nature is to reason about the world, whether well or badly, and to act according to the plans his reason suggests.

The next topic in The Ethics of Liberty is self-ownership, which also forms a part of man’s nature. I’ll cover it in the next post in this series.

Kurt Andersen has an odd Independence Day op-ed at the New York Times, deploring the spread of freedom in modern America. Now you might think that six days after the Supreme Court upheld a government takeover of health care is an odd time to worry about excessive freedom. Still, as I’ve written in the past, we do indeed see some libertarian trends in our modern world. Andersen begins:

THIS spring I was on a panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. An audience member asked a question: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time? [And, ahem, with the federal budget having risen only from $118 billion in 1965 to $3,795 billion in 2012.]

There was a long pause. People shrugged and sighed. I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everybody in the room.

What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.

Well, he has a point. There is a connection between greater freedom for women and gays and “rock ‘n’ roll” and greater freedom for entrepreneurs. And people have been complaining about moves in the direction of freedom since, well, since Kurt Andersen and I were young. And indeed earlier.

In 1973 the British journalist Samuel Brittan wrote a brilliant essay titled “Capitalism and the Permissive Society,” which is included in his book by that name and in The Libertarian Reader. He noted that in recent decades the advocates of personal freedom and of economic freedom have often found themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum, with supporters of economic liberty lining up with Republicans or the British Conservative party and those who defend civil liberties and personal freedom becoming Democrats or Labour party supporters. In the 18th and 19th centuries no such distinction was made, and those who favored freedom — both personal and economic — were found in the liberal movement. The logical connection among various liberties remains, however, and in that essay Brittan argued that “competitive capitalism is the biggest single force acting on the side of what it is fashionable to call ‘permissiveness,’ but what was once known as personal liberty.” He pointed out that although capitalists and the young people of the Sixties regarded each other as the enemy, both the market economy and the “counterculture” were based on the idea of “doing your own thing.”

Since that time, a spirit that is at once libertarian and simply indifferent to government has developed in America. As Mark Lilla wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1998, few political analysts have come to terms with the fact that the Sixties and the Eighties happened in the same generation. Many of the same people were involved in the antiwar movement or the counterculture in the 1960s, the personal liberation and self-help movements of the 1970s, and the entrepreneurial upsurge of the 1980s. All those phenomena pointed toward the weakening of traditional authority structures and an increase in individualism and self-reliance.

Similarly, Brink Lindsey described a “libertarian consensus that mixes the social freedom of the left with the economic freedom of the right” in his book, The Age of Abundance.

Where Andersen goes wrong, of course, is in deploring these outcroppings of freedom in American life. When people take seriously the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he calls it “self-gratification” and “every man for himself.” He writes:

But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.

Another way to put it is that we insist on our right to pursue happiness in our own ways, whether for each of us that means enjoying a career outside the home, marrying the person you love, reading what you want, smoking what you want, building a business, or keeping the money you earn.

Americans who actually appreciate the Declaration of Independence call it self-reliance, minding your own business, staying out of unnecessary wars, and raising everyone’s standard of living by pursuing your own profit. Andersen is sort of right: “For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors,” freedom is desired. And freedom works.

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.