Scott Alexander, The Non-Libertarian FAQ (critique conséquentialiste du libéralisme)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/#moral_issues

D. Moral Issues
The Argument: Moral actions are those which do not initiate force and which respect people’s natural rights. Government is entirely on force, making it fundamentally immoral. Taxation is essentially theft, and dictating the conditions under which people may work (or not work) via regulation is essentially slavery. Many government programs violate people’s rights, especially their right to property, and so should be opposed as fundamentally immoral regardless of whether or not they “work”.
The Counterargument: Moral systems based only on avoiding force and respecting rights are incomplete, inelegant, counterintuitive, and usually riddled with logical fallacies. A more sophisticated moral system, consequentialism, generates the principles of natural rights and non-initiation of violence as heuristics that can be used to solve coordination problems, but also details under what situations such heuristics no longer apply. Many cases of government intervention are such situations, and so may be moral.
12. Moral Systems
12.1: Freedom is incredibly important to human happiness, a precondition for human virtue, and a value almost everyone holds dear. People who have it die to protect it, and people who don’t have it cross oceans or lead revolutions in order to gain it. But government policies all infringe upon freedom. How can you possibly support this?
Freedom is one good among many, albeit an especially important one.
In addition to freedom, we value things like happiness, health, prosperity, friends, family, love, knowledge, art, and justice. Sometimes we have to trade off one of these goods against another. For example, a witness who has seen her brother commit a crime may have to decide between family and justice when deciding whether to testify. A student who likes both music and biology may have to decide between art and knowledge when choosing a career. A food-lover who becomes overweight may have to decide between happiness and health when deciding whether to start a diet.
People sometimes act as if there is some hierarchy to these goods, such that Good A always trumps Good B. But in practice people don’t act this way. For example, someone might say “Friendship is worth more than any amount of money to me.” But she might continue working a job to gain money, instead of quitting in order to spend more time with her friends. And if you offered her $10 million to miss a friend’s birthday party, it’s a rare person indeed who would say no.
In reality, people value these goods the same way they value every good in a market economy: in comparison with other goods. If you get the option to spend more time with your friends at the cost of some amount of money, you’ll either take it or leave it. We can then work backward from your choice to determine how much you really value friendship relative to money. Just as we can learn how much you value steel by learning how many tons of steel we can trade for how many barrels of oil, how many heads of cabbages, or (most commonly) how many dollars, so we can learn how much you value friendship by seeing when you prefer it to opportunities to make money, or see great works of art, or stay healthy, or become famous.
Freedom is a good much like these other goods. Because it is so important to human happiness and virtue, we can expect people to value it very highly.
But they do not value it infinitely highly. Anyone who valued freedom from government regulation infinitely highly would move to whichever state has the most lax regulations (Montana? New Hampshire?), or go live on a platform in the middle of the ocean where there is no government, or donate literally all their money to libertarian charities or candidates on the tiny chance that it would effect a change.
Most people do not do so, and we understand why. People do not move to Montana because they value aspects of their life in non-Montana places – like their friends and families and nice high paying jobs and not getting eaten by bears – more than they value the small amount of extra freedom they could gain in Montana. Most people do not live on a platform in the middle of the ocean because they value aspects of living on land – like being around other people and being safe – more than they value the rather large amount of extra freedom the platform would give them. And most people do not donate literally all their money to libertarian charities because they like having money for other things.
So we value freedom a finite amount. There are trade-offs of a certain amount of freedom for a certain amount of other goods that we already accept. It may be that there are other such trade-offs we would also accept, if we were offered them.
For example, suppose the government is considering a regulation to ban dumping mercury into the local river. This is a trade-off: I lose a certain amount of freedom in exchange for a certain amount of health. In particular, I lose the freedom to dump mercury into the river in exchange for the health benefits of not drinking poisoned water.
But I don’t really care that much about the freedom to dump mercury into the river, and I care a lot about the health benefits of not drinking poisoned water. So this seems like a pretty good trade-off.
And this generalizes to an answer to the original question. I completely agree freedom is an extremely important good, maybe the most important. I don’t agree it’s an infinitely important good, so I’m willing to consider trade-offs that sacrifice a small amount of freedom for a large amount of something else I consider valuable. Even the simplest laws, like laws against stealing, are of this nature (I trade my “freedom” to steal, which I don’t care much about, in exchange for all the advantages of an economic system based on private property).
The arguments above are all attempts to show that some of the trade-offs proposed in modern politics are worthwhile: they give us enough other goods to justify losing a relatively insignificant “freedom” like the freedom to dump mercury into the river.
12.1.1: But didn’t Benjamin Franklin say that those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither?
No, he said that those who would trade essential liberty for temporary security deserved neither. Dumping mercury into the river hardly seems like essential liberty. And when Franklin was at the Constitutional Convention he agreed to replace the minimal government of the Articles of Confederation with a much stronger centralized government just like everyone else.
12.2: Taxation is theft. And when the government forces you to work under their rules, for the amount of money they say you can earn, that’s slavery. Surely you’re not in favor of theft and slavery.
Consider the argument “How can we have a holiday celebrating Martin Luther King? After all, he was a criminal!”
Technically, Martin Luther King was a criminal, in that he broke some laws against public protests that the racist South had quickly enacted to get rid of him. It’s why he famously spent time in Birmingham Jail.
And although “criminal” is a very negative-sounding and emotionally charged word, in this case we have to step back from our immediate emotional reaction and notice that the ways in which Martin Luther King was a criminal don’t make him a worse person.
A philosopher might say we’re equivocating between two meanings of “criminal”, one meaning of “person who breaks the law”, and another meaning of “horrible evil person.” Just because King satisfies the first meaning (he broke the law) doesn’t mean he has to satisfy the second (be horrible and evil).
Or consider the similar argument: “Ayn Rand fled the totalitarian Soviet Union to look for freedom in America. That makes her a traitor!” Should we go around shouting at Objectivists “How can you admire Ayn Rand when she was a dirty rotten traitor“?
No. Once again, although “traitor” normally has an automatic negative connotation, we should avoid instantly judging things by the words we can apply to them, and start looking at whether the negative feelings are deserved.
Or once again the philosopher would say we should avoid equivocating between “traitor” meaning “someone who switches sides from one country to an opposing country” and “horrible evil untrustworthy person.”
Our language contains a lot of words like these which package a description with a moral judgment. For example, “murderer” (think of pacifists screaming it at soldiers, who do fit the technical definition “someone who kills someone else”), “greedy” (all corporations are “greedy” if you mean they would very much like to have more money, but politicians talking about “greedy corporations” manage to transform it into something else entirely) and of course that old stand-by “infidel”, which sounds like sufficient reason to hate a member of another religion, when in fact it simply means a member of another religion. It’s a stupid, cheap trick unworthy of anyone interested in serious rational discussion.
And calling taxation “theft” is exactly the same sort of trick. What’s theft? It’s taking something without permission. So it’s true that taxation is theft, but if you just mean it involves taking without permission, then everyone from Lew Rockwell up to the head of the IRS already accepts that as a given.
This only sounds like an argument because the person who uses it is hoping people will let their automatic negative reaction to theft override their emotions, hoping they will equivocate from theft as “taking without permission” to “theft as a terrible act worthy only of criminals”.
Real arguments aren’t about what words you can apply to things and how nasty they sound, real arguments about what good or bad consequences those things produce.
12.3: Government actions tend to involve the initiation of force against innocent people. Isn’t that morally wrong?
Why should it be morally wrong?
12.3.1: Because the initiation of force always has bad consequences, like ruining the economy or making people unhappy.
Sometimes it does. Other times it has good consequences.
Take cases like the fish farming, boycott, and charity scenarios above. There the use of force to solve the coordination problem meets an extraordinarily strict set of criteria: not only does it benefit the group as a whole, not only does it benefit every single individual in the group, but every single individual in the group knows that it benefits them and endorses that benefit (eg would vote for it).
In other cases, such as the retirement savings example above, the use of force meets only a less strict set of criteria: it benefits the group as a whole, it benefits every single individual in the group, but not every individual in the group necessarily knows that it benefits them or endorses that benefit. These are the cases libertarians might call “paternalism”.
Still more cases satisfy an even looser criterion. They benefit the group as a whole, but they might not benefit every single individual in the group, and might harm some of them. These are the cases that libertarians might call “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.
All three of these sets of cases belie the idea that the use of force must on net have bad consequences.
12.3.2: Okay, maybe it’s wrong because some moral theory that’s not about consequences tells me it’s wrong.
If your moral theory doesn’t involve any consequences, why follow it? It seems sort of like an arbitrary collection of rules you like.
The Jews believe that God has commanded them not to murder. They also believe God has commanded them not to start fires on Saturdays. Jews who lose their belief in God usually continue not to murder, but stop worrying about whether or not they light fires on Saturdays. Likewise, evangelical Christians believe stealing is a sin, and that homosexuality is also a sin. If they de-convert and become atheists, most of them will still oppose stealing, but most will stop worrying about homosexuality. Why?
Killing and stealing both have bad consequences; in fact, that seems to be the essence of why they’re wrong. Fires on Saturday and homosexuality don’t hurt anybody else, but killing and stealing do.
Why are consequences to other people seems such a specially relevant category? The argument is actually itself pretty libertarian. I can do whatever I want with my own life, which includes following religious or personal taboos. Other people can do whatever they want with their own lives too. The stuff that matters – the stuff where we have to draw a line in the sand and say “Nope, this is moral and this is immoral, doesn’t matter what you think” is because it has some consequence in the real world like hurting other people.
12.3.2.1: I was always taught that the essence of morality was the Principle of Non-Aggression: no one should ever initiate force, except in self-defense. What exactly is wrong with this theory?
At least two things. First, once you disentangle it from the respect it gets as the Traditional Culturally Approved Ground Of Morality, the actual rational arguments for it as a principle are surprisingly weak. Second, in order to do anything practical with it you need such a mass of exceptions and counter-exceptions and stretches that one starts to wonder whether it’s doing any philosophical work at all; it becomes a convenient hook upon which to hang our pre-existing prejudices rather than a useful principle for solving novel moral dilemmas.
12.3.2.1.1: What do you mean by saying that the rational arguments for the Principle of Non-Aggression are weak?
There are dozens of slightly different versions of these arguments, and I don’t want to get into all of them here, so I’ll concentrate on the most common.
Some people try to derive the Principle of Non-Aggression from self-ownership. But this is circular reasoning: the form of “private property” you need to own anything, including your self/body, is a very complicated concept and one that requires some form of morality in order to justify; you can’t use your idea of private property as a justification for morality. Although it’s obvious that in some sense you are your body, there’s no way to go from here to “And therefore the proper philosophical relationship between you and your body is the concept of property exactly as it existed in the 17th century British legal system.”
This also falls afoul of the famous is-ought dichotomy, the insight that just because something is true doesn’t mean it should be true. Just because we notice some factual relationship between yourself and your body doesn’t mean that relationship between yourself and your body is good or important or needs to be protected in laws. We might eventually decide it should be (and hopefully we will!) but we need to have other values in order to come to that decision; we can’t use the decision as a basis for our values.
The self-ownership argument then goes from this questionable assumption to other even more questionable ones. If you use your body to pick fruit, that fruit becomes yours, even though you didn’t make it. If you use your body to land on Tristan de Cunha and plant a flag there and maybe pick some coconuts, that makes Tristan de Cunha and everything on your property and that of your heirs forever, even though you definitely didn’t make the island. And if someone else lands on Tristan de Cunha the day after you, you by right control every facet of their life on the island and they have to do whatever you say or else leave. There are good arguments for why some of these things make economic sense, but they’re all practical arguments, not moral ones positing a necessary relationship.
Oddly enough, although apparently your having a body does license you to declare yourself Duke of Tristan de Cunha, it doesn’t license you to use your fist to punch your enemy in the gut, or use your legs to walk across a forest someone else has said they claim, even though your ability to move your hand rapidly in the direction of your enemy’s abdomen, or your feet along a forest path, seems like a much more fundamental application of your body than taking over an island.
All of these rules about claiming islands and not punching people you don’t like and so on are potentially good rules, but trying to derive them just from the fact that you have a body starts to seem a bit hokey.
12.3.2.1.2: What do you mean by saying that the Non-Aggression Principle requires so many exceptions and counter-exceptions that it becomes useless except as a hook upon which to hang prejudices we from other sources?
First, the principle only even slightly makes sense by defining “force” in a weird way. The NAP’s definition of “force” includes walking into your neighbor’s unlocked garden when your neighbor isn’t home and picking one of her apples. It includes signing a contract promising to deliver a barrel of potatoes, but then not delivering the potatoes when the time comes. Once again, I agree these are bad things that we need rules against. But it takes quite an imagination to classify them under “force”, or as deriving from the fact that you have a body. This is a good start to explaining what I mean when I say that people claim that they’re using the very simple-sounding “no initiation of force” principle but are actually following a more complicated and less justified “no things that seem bad to me even though I can’t explain why”.
Second, even most libertarians agree it can be moral to initiate force in certain settings. For example, if the country is under threat from a foreign invader or from internal criminals, most libertarians agree that it is moral to levy a small amount of taxation to support an army or police force that restores order. Again, this is a very good idea – but also a blatant violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. When libertarians accept the initiation of force to levy taxes for the police, but protest that initiating force is always wrong when someone tries to levy taxes for welfare programs, it reinforces my worry that the Non-Aggression Principle is something people claim to follow while actually following their own “no things that seem bad to me even though I can’t explain why, but things that seem good to me are okay” principle.
(I acknowledge that some libertarians take a stand against taxes for the military and the police. I admire their consistency even while I think their proposed policies would be a disaster.)
Third, when push comes to shove the Non-Aggression Principle just isn’t strong enough to solve hard problems. It usually results in a bunch of people claiming conflicting rights and judges just having to go with whatever seems intuitively best to them.
For example, a person has the right to live where he or she wants, because he or she has “a right to personal self-determination”. Unless that person is a child, in which case the child has to live where his or her parents say, because…um…the parents have “a right to their child” that trumps the child’s “right to personal self-determination”. But what if the parents are evil and abusive and lock the child in a fetid closet with no food for two weeks? Then maybe the authorities can take the child away because…um…the child’s “right to decent conditions” trumps the parents’ “right to their child” even though the latter trumps the child’s “right to personal self-determination”? Or maybe they can’t, because there shouldn’t even be authorities of that sort? Hard to tell.
Another example. I can build an ugly shed on my property, because I have a “right to control my property”, even though the sight of the shed leaves my property and irritates my neighbor; my neighbor has no “right not to be irritated”. Maybe I can build a ten million decibel noise-making machine on my property, but maybe not, because the noise will leave my property and disturbs neighbor; my “right to control my property” might or might not trump my neighbor’s “right not to be disturbed”, even though disturbed and irritated are synonyms. I definitely can’t detonate a nuclear warhead on my property, because the blast wave will leave my property and incinerates my neighbor, and my neighbor apparently does have a “right not to be incinerated”.
If you’ve ever seen people working within our current moral system trying to solve issues like these, you quickly realize that not only are they making it up as they go along based on a series of ad hoc rules, but they’re so used to doing so that they no longer realize that this is undesirable or a shoddy way to handle ethics.
12.4: Is there a better option than the Non-Aggression Principle?
Yes. It’s consequentialism, the principle that it is moral to do whatever has, on net, the best consequences. This is about equivalent to saying “to do whatever makes the world a better place”. It’s the principle we’ve been using implicitly throughout this FAQ and the principle most people use implicitly throughout their lives.
It’s also the principle that drives capitalism, where people are able to create incredible businesses and innovations because they are trying to do whatever has the best financial consequences for themselves. Consequentialism just takes that insight and says that instead of just doing it with money, let’s do it with everything we value.
12.4.1: Best consequences according to whom?
Well, if you’re the one making the moral decision, then best consequences according to you. All it’s saying is that your morality should be a reflection of your value system and your belief in a better world. Your job as a moral agent is to try to make the world a better place by whatever your definition of “better place” might be.
Sticking to the capitalism analogy, consumerism “tells you” (not that you need to be told) to get whatever goods you value most. Consequentialism does the same, but tells you to try to get the collection of abstract moral goods you value the most.
But remember our discussion of trade-offs above. Most people value many different moral goods, and you are no exception. If you’re trying to make the world a better place, you should be thinking about your relative valuation of all these goods and what trade-offs you are willing to make.
12.4.2: Best consequences for me, or best consequences for everyone?
Again, this is your decision. If you’re completely selfish, then consequentialism tells you to seek out the best consequences for yourself. This probably wouldn’t mean being a libertarian – thankless activism for an unpopular political position is really a terrible way to go about looking out for Number One. It would probably mean cheating off the government – either in the form of welfare abuse if you’re poor and lazy, or in the form of crony capitalism if you’re rich and ambitious. As icing on the cake, make sure to become a sanctimonious and hypocritical liberal, as it’s a great way to become popular and get invited to all the fancy parties.
But if you care about people other than yourself, consequentialism tells you to seek out the best consequences for the people you care about (which could be anything from your family to your country to the world). This could involve political activism, and it could even involve political activism in favor of libertarianism if you think it’s the best system of government.
Alternately, it could justify trying to start a government, if there’s no government yet and you think a world with government would be better for the people you care about than one without it.
Most of the rest of this section will be assuming you do in fact care for other people at least a little.
12.4.3: Since many people probably want different things and care about different people, don’t we end out in a huge war of all against all until either everyone is dead or one guy is dictator?
Would that be a good consequence? If not, people who try to promote good consequences and make the world a better place would try to avoid it.
Because this world of violence and competition is so obviously a bad consequence, any consequentialist who gives it a moment’s thought agrees not to start a huge war of all against all that ends with everyone dead or one guy as dictator by binding themselves by moral rules whenever binding themselves by those moral rules seems like it would have good consequences or make the world a better place; see Section 13 for more.
12.4.4: Doesn’t that sound a lot like “the ends justify the means”? Wouldn’t it lead to decadence, slavery, or some other dystopia?
Once again, if you consider dictatorship, slavery, and dystopia to be bad consequences, then by definition following this rule is the best way to avoid doing that.
The rule isn’t “do whatever sounds like it would have the best consequences if you have an IQ of 20 and refuse to think about it for even five seconds”, it’s “do what would actually have the best consequences. Sometimes this involves admitting human ignorance and fallibility and not pursuing every hare-brained idea that comes into your head.
12.4.5: Okay, okay, I understand that if people did what actually had good consequences it would have good consequences, but I worry that if people do what they think has good consequences, it will lead to violence and dictatorship and dystopia and all those other things you mentioned above.
Yes, I agree this is an important distinction. There are two uses for a moral system. The first is to define what morality is. The second is to give people a useful tool for choosing what to do in moral dilemmas. I am arguing that consequentialism does the first. I don’t think it does the second right out of the box.
To try a metaphor, doctors sometimes have two ways of defining disease; the gold standard and the clinical standard. The gold standard is the “perfect” test for the disease; for example, in Alzheimer’s disease, it’s to autopsy the brain after the person has died and see if it has certain features under the microscope. Obviously you can’t autopsy a person who’s still alive, so when doctors are actually trying to diagnose Alzheimer’s they use a more practical method, like how well the person does on a memory test.
Right now I’m arguing that consequentialism is the gold standard for morality: it’s the purest, most sophisticated explanation of what morality actually is. At the same time, it might be a terrible idea to make your everyday decisions based on it, just as it’s a terrible idea to diagnose Alzheimer’s with an autopsy in someone who’s still alive.
However, once we know that consequentialism is the gold standard for morality, we can start designing our clinical standards by trying to figure out which “clinical standard” for morality will produce the best consequences. See Section 13 for more.
12.4.6: I still am not completely on board with consequentialism, or I’m not sure I understand it.
For more information on consequentialism, see the sister document to this FAQ, the Consequentialism FAQ.
13. Rights and Heuristics
13.1: Is there a moral justification for rights, like the right to free speech or the right to property?
Yes. Rights are the “clinical standard” for morality, the one we use to make our everyday decisions after we acknowledge that pure consequentialism might not lead to the best consequences when used by fallible humans.
In this conception, rights are conclusions rather than premises. They are heuristics (heuristic = a rule-of-thumb that usually but not always works) for remembering what sorts of things usually have good or bad consequences, a distillation of moral wisdom that is often more trustworthy than morally fallible humans.
For example, trying to tell people what religions they can or can’t follow almost always has bad consequences. At best, people are miserable because they’re being forced to follow a faith they don’t believe in. At worst, they resist and then you get Inquisitions and Holy Wars and everyone ends up dead. Restriction of religion causing bad consequences is sufficiently predictable that we generalize it into a hard and fast rule, and call that rule something like the “right to freedom of religion”.
Other things like banning criticism of the government, trying to prevent people from owning guns, and seizing people’s property willy-nilly also work like this, so we call those “rights” too.
13.2: So if you think that violating rights will have good consequences, then it’s totally okay, right?
It’s not quite so simple. Rights are not just codifications of the insight that certain actions lead to bad consequences, they’re codifications of the insight that certain actions lead to bad consequences in ways that people consistently fail to predict or appreciate.
All throughout history, various despots and princes have thought “You know, the last hundred times someone tried to restrict freedom of religion, it went badly. Luckily, my religion happens to be the One True Religion, and I’m totally sure of this, and everyone else will eventually realize this and fall in line, so my plan to restrict freedom of religion will work great!”
Every revolution starts with an optimist who says “All previous attempts to kill a bunch of people and seize control of the state have failed to produce a utopia, but luckily my plan is much better and we’re totally going to get to utopia this time.” Or, as Huxley put it: “Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists and there we are – there we are – in the Golden Future.”
So another way to put it is that rights don’t just say “Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences”, but also “Doing X has been observed to have bad consequences, even when smart people are quite certain it will have good consequences.”
13.3: Then even though you got to rights by a different route than the libertarians, it sounds like you agree with them that they’re inalienable.
It’s not as simple as that either. Every so often, the conventional wisdom is wrong. So many lunatics and crackpots spent their lives trying to turn lead into gold that it became a classic metaphor for a foolish wild goose chase. The rule “stop trying to transmute elements into each other, it never works” was no doubt a good and wise rule. If more would-be alchemists had trusted this conventional wisdom, and fewer had thought “No, even though everyone else has failed, I will be the one to discover transmutation”, it would have prevented a lot of wasted lives.
…and then we discovered nuclear physics, which is all about transmuting elements into one another, and which works very well and is a vital source of power. And yes, nuclear physicists at Berkeley successfully used a giant particle accelerator to turn lead into gold, although it only works a few atoms at a time and isn’t commercially viable.
The point is, the heuristic that you shouldn’t waste your life studying transmutation was a good one and very well-justified at the time, but if we had elevated it into a timeless and unbreakable principle, we never would have been able to abandon it after we learned more about nuclear physics and trying to transmute things was no longer so foolish.
Rights are a warning sign that we should not naively expect breaking them to have good consequences. In order to claim even the possibility of good consequences from violating a right, we need to be at least as far away from the actions they were meant to prevent as nuclear physics is to alchemy.
13.3.1: Can you give an example of a chain of reasoning where some government violation of a right is so radically different from the situation that led the right to exist in the first place?
Let’s take for example the right that probably dominates discussions between libertarians and non-libertarians: the right to property. On the individual scale, taking someone else’s property makes them very unhappy, as you know if you’ve ever had your bike stolen. On the larger scale, abandoning belief in private property has disastrous results for an entire society, as the experiences of China and the Soviet Union proved so conclusively. So it’s safe to say there’s a right to private property.
Is it ever acceptable to violate that right? In the classic novel Les Miserables, Jean Valjean’s family is trapped in bitter poverty in 19th century France, and his nephew is slowly starving to death. Jean steals a loaf of bread from a rich man who has more than enough, in order to save his nephew’s life. This is a classic moral dilemma: is theft acceptable in this instance?
We can argue both sides. A proponent might say that the good consequences to Jean and his family were very great – his nephew’s life was saved – and the bad consequences to the rich man were comparatively small – he probably has so much food that he didn’t even miss it, and if he did he could just send his servant to the bakery to get another one. So on net the theft led to good consequences.
The other side would be that once we let people decide whether or not to steal things, we are on a slippery slope. What if we move from 19th century France to 21st century America, and I’m not exactly starving to death but I really want a PlayStation? And my rich neighbor owns like five PlayStations and there’s no reason he couldn’t just go to the store and buy another. Is it morally acceptable for me to steal one of his PlayStations? The same argument that applied in Jean Valjean’s case above seems to suggest that it is – but it’s easy to see how we go from there to everyone stealing everyone’s stuff, private property becoming impossible, and civilization collapsing. That doesn’t sound like a very good consequence at all.
If everyone violates moral heuristics whenever they personally think it’s a good idea, civilization collapses. If no one ever violates moral heuristics, Jean Valjean’s nephew starves to death for the sake of a piece of bread the rich man never would have missed.
We need to bind society by moral heuristics, but also have some procedure in place so that we can suspend them in cases where we’re exceptionally sure of ourselves without civilization instantly collapsing. Ideally, this procedure should include lots of checks and balances, to make sure no one person can act on her own accord. It should reflect the opinions of the majority of people in society, either directly or indirectly. It should have access to the best minds available, who can predict whether violating a heuristic will be worth the risk in this particular case.
Thus far, the human race’s best solution to this problem has been governments. Governments provide a method to systematically violate heuristics in a particular area where it is necessary to do so without leading to the complete collapse of civilization.
If there was no government, I, in Jean Valjean’s situation, absolutely would steal that loaf of bread to save my nephew’s life. Since there is a government, the government can set a certain constant amount of theft per year, distribute the theft fairly among people whom it knows can bear the burden, and then feed starving children and do other nice things. The ethical question of “is it ethical for me to steal/kill/stab in this instance?” goes away, and society can be peaceful and stable.
13.3.2: So you’re saying that you think in this case violating the right will have good consequences. But you just agreed that even when people think this, violating the right usually has bad consequences.
Yes, I admit it’s complicated. But we have to have some procedures for violating moral heuristics, or else we can’t tax to support a police force, we can’t fight wars, we can’t lie to a murderer who asks us where our friend is so he can go kill her when he finds her, and so on.
The standard I find most reasonable is when it’s universalizable and it avoids the issue that caused us to develop the heuristic in the first place.
By universalizable, I mean that it’s more complicated than me just deciding “Okay, I’m going to steal from this guy now”. There has to be an agreed-upon procedure where everyone gets input, and we need to have verified empirically that this procedure usually leads to good results.
And is has to avoid the issue that caused us to develop the heuristic. In the case of stealing, this is that theft makes property impossible or at least impractical, no one bothers doing work because it will all be stolen from them anyway, and so civilization collapses.
In the case of theft, taxation requires authorization by a process that most of us endorse (the government set up by the Constitution) and into which we all get some input via representative democracy. It doesn’t cause civilization to collapse because it only takes a small and extremely predictable amount from each person. And it’s been empirically verified to work: as I argued above, countries with higher tax rates like Scandinavia actually are nicer places to live than countries with lower tax rates like the United States. So we’ve successfully side-stepped the insight that stealing usually has bad consequences, even though we recognize that the insight remains true.
13.4: Governments will inevitably make mistakes when deciding when to violate moral heuristics. Those mistakes will cost money and even lives.
And the policy of never, ever doing anything will never be a mistake?
It’s very easy for governments to make devastating mistakes. For example, many people believe the US government’s War in Iraq did little more than devastate the country, kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and replace Saddam with a weak government unable to stand up to extremist ayatollahs.
But the other solution – never intervening in a foreign country at all – didn’t work so well either. Just look at Holocaust-era Germany, or 1990s Rwanda.
Why, exactly, should moral questions be simple?
There is a certain tradition that the moral course of action is something anyone, from the high priest unto the youngest child, can find simply by looking deep in his heart. Anyone who does not find it in his heart is welcome to check the nearest Giant Stone Tablet, upon which are written infallible rules that can guide him through any situation. Intelligence has nothing to do with it. It should be blindingly obvious, and anyone who claims it has a smidgen of difficulty or vagueness is probably an agent of the Dark Lord, trying to seduce you from the True Path with his lies.
And so it is tempting to want to have some really easy principle like “Never get involved in a foreign war” and say it can never lead you wrong. It makes you feel all good and warm and fuzzy and moral and not at all like those evil people who don’t have strong principles. But real life isn’t that simple. If you get involved in the wrong foreign war, millions of people die. And if you don’t get involved in the right foreign war, millions of people also die.
So you need to have good judgment if you want to save lives and do the right thing. You can’t get a perfect score in morality simply by abdicating all responsibility. Part of the difficult questions that all of us non-libertarians have been working on is how to get a government that’s good at answering those sorts of questions correctly.
13.5: No, there’s a difference. When you enter a foreign war, you’re killing lots of people. When you don’t enter a foreign war, people may die, but it’s not your job to save them. The government’s job is only to protect people and property from force, not to protect people from the general unfairness of life.
Who died and made you the guy who decides what the government’s job is? Or, less facetiously: on what rational grounds are you making that decision?
Currently, several trillion dollars are being spent to prevent terrorism. This seems to fall within the area of what libertarians would consider a legitimate duty of government, since terrorists are people who initiate force and threaten our safety and the government needs to stop this. However, terrorists only kill an average of a few dozen Americans per year.
Much less money is being spent on preventing cardiovascular disease, even though cardiovascular disease kills 800,000 Americans per year.
Let us say, as seems plausible, that the government can choose to spend its money either on fighting terrorists, or on fighting CVD. And let us say that by spending its money on fighting terrorists, it saves 40 lives, and by spending the same amount of money on fighting CVD, it saves 40,000 lives.
All of these lives, presumably, are equally valuable. So there is literally no benefit to spending the money on fighting terrorism rather than CVD. All you are doing is throwing away 39,960 lives on an obscure matter of principle. It’s not even a good principle – it’s the principle of wanting to always use heuristics even when they clearly don’t apply because it sounds more elegant.
There’s a reason this is so tempting. It’s called the Bad Guy Bias, and it’s an evolutionarily programmed flaw in human thinking. People care much more about the same amount of pain when it’s inflicted by humans than when it’s inflicted by nature. Psychologists can and have replicated this in the lab, along with a bunch of other little irrationalities in human cognition. It’s not anything to be ashamed of; everyone’s got it. But it’s not something to celebrate and raise to the level of a philosophical principle either.
13.6: Stop calling principles like “don’t initiate force” heuristics! These aren’t some kind of good idea that works in a few cases. These are the very principles of government and morality , and it’s literally impossible for them to guide you wrong!
Let me give you a sketch of one possible way that a libertarian perfect world that followed all of the appropriate rules to the letter could end up as a horrible dystopia. There are others, but this one seems most black-and-white.
Imagine a terrible pandemic, the Amazon Death Flu, strikes the world. The Death Flu is 100% fatal. Luckily, one guy, Bob, comes up with a medicine that suppresses (but does not outright cure) the Death Flu. It’s a bit difficult to get the manufacturing process right, but cheap enough once you know how to do it. Anyone who takes the medicine at least once a month will be fine. Go more than a month without the medicine, and you die.
In a previous version of this FAQ, Bob patented the medicine, and then I got a constant stream of emails saying (some) libertarians don’t believe in patents. Okay. Let’s say that Bob doesn’t patent the medicine, but it’s complicated to reverse engineer, and it would definitely take more than a month. This will become important later.
Right now Bob is the sole producer of this medicine, and everyone in the world needs to have a dose within a month or they’ll die. Bob knows he can charge whatever he wants for the medicine, so he goes all out. He makes anyone who wants the cure pay one hundred percent of their current net worth, plus agree to serve him and do anything he says. He also makes them sign a contract promising that while they are receiving the medicine, they will not attempt to discover their own cure for the Death Flu, or go into business against him. Because this is a libertarian perfect world, everyone keeps their contracts.
A few people don’t want to sign their lives away to slavery, and refuse to sign the contract. These people receive no medicine and die. Some people try to invent a competing medicine. Bob, who by now has made a huge amount of money, makes life difficult for them and bribes biologists not to work with them. They’re unable to make a competing medicine within a month, and die. The rest of the world promises to do whatever Bob says. They end up working as peons for a new ruling class dominated by Bob and his friends.
If anyone speaks a word against Bob, they are told that Bob’s company no longer wants to do business with them, and denied the medicine. People are encouraged to inform on their friends and families, with the promise of otherwise unavailable luxury goods as a reward. To further cement his power, Bob restricts education to the children of his friends and strongest supporters, and bans the media, which he now controls, from reporting on any stories that cast him in a negative light.
When Bob dies, he hands over control of the medicine factory to his son, who continues his policies. The world is plunged into a Dark Age where no one except Bob and a few of his friends have any rights, material goods, or freedom. Depending on how sadistic Bob’s and his descendants are, you may make this world arbitrarily hellish while still keeping perfect adherence to libertarian principles.
Compare this to a similar world that followed a less libertarian model. Once again, the Amazon Death Flu strikes. Once again, Bob invents a cure. The government thanks him, pays him a princely sum as compensation for putting his cure into the public domain, opens up a medicine factory, and distributes free medicine to everyone. Bob has become rich, the Amazon Death Flu has been conquered, and everyone is free and happy.
13.6.1: This is a ridiculously unlikely story with no relevance to the real world.
I admit this particular situation is more a reductio ad absurdum than something I expect to actually occur the moment people start taking libertarianism seriously, but I disagree that it isn’t relevant.
The arguments that libertarianism will protect our values and not collapse into an oppressive plutocracy require certain assumptions: there are lots of competing companies, zero transaction costs, zero start-up costs, everyone has complete information, everyone has free choice whether or not to buy any particular good, everyone behaves rationally, et cetera. The Amazon Death Flu starts by assuming the opposite of all of these assumptions: there is only one company, there are prohibitive start-up costs, a particular good absolutely has to be bought, et cetera.
The Amazon Death Flu world, with its assumptions, is not the world we live in. But neither is the libertarian world. Reality lies somewhere between the “capitalism is perfect” of the one, and the “capitalism leads to hellish misery” of the other.
There’s no Amazon Death Flu, but there are things like hunger, thirst, unemployment, normal diseases, and homelessness. In order to escape these problems, we need things provided by other people or corporations. This is fine and as it should be, and as long as there’s a healthy free market with lots of alternatives, in most cases these other people or corporations will serve our needs and society’s needs while getting rich themselves, just like libertarians hope.
But this is a contingent fact about the world, and one that can sometimes be wrong. We can’t just assume that the heuristic “never initiate force” will always turn out well.
13.7: The government doesn’t need to violate moral heuristics. In the absence of government programs, private charity would make up the difference.
Find some poor people in a country without government-funded welfare, and ask how that’s working out for them.
Private charity from the First World hasn’t prevented the Rwandans, Ethiopians, or Haitians from dying of malnutrition or easily preventable disease.
It’s possible that this is just because we First Worlders place more importance on our own countrymen than on foreigners, and if Americans were dying of malnutrition or easily preventable disease, patriotism would make us help them.
The US government currently spends about $800 billion on welfare-type programs for US citizens. Americans give a total of $300 billion to charity per year.
Let’s assume that private charity is twice as efficient as the government (in reality, it’s probably much less, since the government has economies of scale, but libertarians like assumptions like this and I might as well indulge them).
Let’s also assume that only half of charity goes to meaningful efforts to help poor American citizens. The other half would be things like churches, the arts, and foreign countries.
Nowadays, a total of $550 billion (adjusted, govt+private) goes to real charity (800b*1/2+300b*1/2). If the government were to stop all welfare programs, this number would fall to $150 billion (adjusted). Private citizens would need to make up the shortfall of $400 billion to keep charity at its current (woefully low) level. Let’s assume that people, realizing this, start donating a greater proportion (66%) of their charity to the American poor instead of to other causes. That means people need to increase their charity to about $830 billion ([400b + 150b]/.66).
Right now, 25% is a normal middle-class tax rate. Let’s assume the government stopped all welfare programs and limited itself to defense, policing, and overhead. There are a lot of different opinions about what is and isn’t in the federal budget, but my research suggests that would cut it by about half, to lower tax rates to 12.5%.
So, we’re in the unhappy situation of needing people to almost triple the amount they give to charity even though they have only 12.5% more money. The real situation is much worse than this, because if the government stopped all programs except military and police, people would need to pay for education, road maintenance, and so on out of their own pocket.
My calculations are full of assumptions, of course. But the important thing is, I’ve never seen libertarians even try to do calculations. They just assume that private citizens would make up the shortfall. This is the difference between millions of people leading decent lives or starving to death, and people just figure it will work out without checking, because the free market is always a Good Thing.
That’s not reason, even if you read it on www.reason.com. That’s faith.
13.8: People stupid enough to make bad decisions deserve the consequences of their actions. If government bans them from making stupid decisions, it’s just preventing them from getting what they deserve.
One of my favorite essays, Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided, provides a much better critique of this argument than I could. It starts by discussing a hypothetical in which the government stopped regulating the safety of medicines. Some quack markets sulfuric acid as medicine, and a “poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children” falls for it, drinks it, and dies.
If you were really in that situation, would you really laugh, say “Haha, serves her right” and go back to what you were doing? Or would it be a tragedy even though she “got what she deserved”?
The article ends by saying:
Saying ‘People who buy dangerous products deserve to get hurt!’ is not tough-minded. It is a way of refusing to live in an unfair universe. Real tough-mindedness is saying, ‘Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death, and no, that mother of 5 children didn’t deserve it, but we’re going to keep the shops open anyway because we did this cost-benefit calculation.’…I don’t think that when someone makes a stupid choice and dies, this is a cause for celebration. I count it as a tragedy. It is not always helping people, to save them from the consequences of their own actions; but I draw a moral line at capital punishment. If you’re dead, you can’t learn from your mistakes.
Read also about the just-world fallacy. “Making a virtue out of necessity” shouldn’t go as far as celebrating deaths if it makes your political beliefs more tenable.