On Leviathan and Public Reason: A Reply to Chartier

So I've been having a discussion with Dr. Chartier over at the LiberaLaw blog about the role of the sovereign as a source of public reason in Hobbes' political philosophy, in response to an interesting post in which he discussed how a Hobbesian account might be consistent with market anarchism. Because I am a horribly verbose person, I wrote more in response to Dr. Chartier's last comments than the comments system would allow, and I am therefore posting my thoughts here. Hopefully this is of some interest to someone!

In order to understand this, it would probably be a good idea to read Dr. Chartier's post and the comments that have already been published on it, particularly this one (since this post is directly a response to that comment).

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If I understand correctly, Hobbes sees the sovereign as existing to settle conflicts. In Dr. Chartier's post and comments, he's seemed to somewhat equated this to a notion of "preserving civil peace." And to an extent, this makes sense. With property disputes, for example, what the sovereign is being asked to do is to merely uphold some exogenous system of justice: the sovereign is just acting to make sure we maintain a peaceful environment, where we get our idea of "civil peace" from somewhere else.

But to Hobbes, this will treat too much as settled. He would likely want to say that we may disagree on what it is that even constitutes "civil peace." One person might have a desire to see all homosexuals put to death. Another person might have a desire to see his homosexual compatriots protected from this fate, and is willing to fight to defend them. Another person might want to see the bigoted guy put in the stockades for being such a jerk. Hobbes thinks that this kind of conflict is a serious problem. In the absence of any external norms and institutions to tell us who is right and who will get their way, and in the absence of any enforceable agreement between them, Hobbes thinks that the three people in our story will have no reasonable choice but to prepare for violence. So long as each relies on his private reason, they will be condemned to a state of war.

The liberal solution to this problem is the one which gives us the notion of "civil peace" that I imagine Dr. Chartier has in mind: this approach typically seeks to independently define some conception of right-of-way, so that we have a way of adjudicating disputes according to these independent norms. But Hobbes doesn't have this machinery in his system. He could say that there may be no standard of right-of-way that each of the three people in our story would accept if each relied on his private reason. The system of rights and duties that will appeal to the bigot will be seen as oppressive by the defender of the homosexuals, and vice versa. And even if they could strike an agreement, there's no guarantee that some new issue won't arise in the future to drive them apart. The only way for them to avoid the state of war, Hobbes thinks, would be to give some third party the authority to choose what constitutes the appropriate conception of "civil peace" that will underpin their society.

The problem with the limits Dr. Chartier seems to want to place on the sovereign, I think, is that it seems to be in conflict with Hobbes' desire that the sovereign have the authority to decide basically everything about how a society is going to function. If this authority is denied in areas where there could potentially be legitimate disagreements between people, then Hobbes is going to worry that conflicts will arise, where each side believes that his own private reasons are the right reasons. Hobbes wants to eliminate this possibility by giving the sovereign absolute authority to decide what's right and fair.

But all of this is drilling way further into Hobbes than I think Dr. Chartier was seeking to do. If all he wants to take from Hobbes is the idea that a government is necessary to adjudicate disputes, then none of these issues are going to be a big deal. In this case it seems to me that he's actually moving away from the substance of Hobbes' argument and actually moving closer to the sort of thing Locke was saying in chapter 9 of the Second Treatise. As Locke writes:

Thus mankind, notwithstanding all the privileges of the state of nature, being but in an ill condition, while they remain in it, are quickly driven into society. Hence it comes to pass, that we seldom find any number of men live any time together in this state. The inconveniencies that they are therein exposed to, by the irregular and uncertain exercise of the power every man has of punishing the transgressions of others, make them take sanctuary under the established laws of government, and therein seek the preservation of their property. It is this makes them so willingly give up every one his single power of punishing, to be exercised by such alone, as shall be appointed to it amongst them; and by such rules as the community, or those authorized by them to that purpose, shall agree on. And in this we have the original right and rise of both the legislative and executive power, as well as of the governments and societies themselves.

If Dr. Chartier is considering this sort of approach to thinking about government, then yes: I agree that it don't establish a whole lot about exactly what a government is supposed to do or how big it needs to be. As long as it addresses the "inconveniencies" of the state of nature, any system of government will seem to do, and insofar as a stateless, decentralized, or pluralistic system can address them, that would be fine too. But this shouldn't surprise us: this Lockean position is what underpins a great deal of the modern libertarian tradition, including Rothbard's market anarchism and Nozick's decentralized, pluralistic vision of Utopia. I should add, though, that it also shouldn't surprise us to find that we're led to conclusions very different from those that Hobbes professed.

Interesting Things to Watch

Howdy, y'all. I just figured I should direct your attention to two conversations that have caught my interest recently, and which may be interesting to some of you as well.

Over at the Austro-Athenian Empire blog, Dr. Long has posted a discussion of the proper definition of "socialism," entitled "POOTMOP Redux!" (after an older post, "Pootmop!," in which he discussed private ownership of the means of production -- p.o.o.t.m.o.p.). If you want some background on the post, read Kevin Carson's initial contribution to the discussion, "Socialism: A Perfectly Good Word Rehabilitated," and Stephen Kinsella's response, "The New Libertarianism: Anti-Capitalistic and Socialist." I should point out for the time-starved, however, that Dr. Long's post is probably just fine on its own.

I've posted a fair amount in the comments section of the post, and Neverfox of Instead of a Blog has jumped in as well. Of interest as well may be Dr. Chartier's thoughtful contribution on the LiberaLaw blog, "Socialism Revisited," as well as Brainpolice's commentary on the Polycentric Order blog, "Anarchist and Socialist Semantics and Historicity (Or, Why Does Stephan Kinsella Act As If Individualist Anarchism Never Existed? Redux)."

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The other interesting conversation going on at the moment is a new chapter in the debate over state involvement in marriage, this time with a post on the ThinkMarkets blog by Dr. Rizzo, "What Should Be The State’s Role In Marriage?." The time scale for this discussion is a bit longer than that for the previous one. For me, it started with an overconfident post on this blog last year, now-amusingly entitled, "Open and Shut: Should Same-Sex Marriage Be Legal?" In it, I argued that the state should get out of marriage entirely in order to avoid a choice between discrimination and offending religious groups who I took to have some legitimate claim to the institution of "marriage." (That post, incidentally, marked the one and only time that this blog has ever been linked to on The Huffington Post. Go figure.)

A few months later, Dr. Koppl posted his own discussion of the issue over at the ThinkMarkets blog, "Ideas Have Consequences," in which he argued that gay marriage should be legalized. In the comments section of that post, we had what I found to be an incredibly productive conversation in which he convinced me that the religious groups in question really did not have the kind of claim to the institution of marriage that I had attributed to them, and that having a legal understanding of "marriage" was quite valuable. I accordingly posted a follow-up on this blog in which I conceded the argument to Dr. Koppl, entitled, "Roger Koppl Is Right About Gay Marriage."

Dr. Rizzo's point intriguingly takes up the banner for the sort of position I initially defended, arguing that the government ought to get out of defining marriage altogether. In the comments section, I tried to draw attention to the conversation that had already taken place on the blog earlier this year, and eventually Dr. Koppl himself arrived on the scene to defend his position again. Gene Callahan of Crash Landing, the (now willfully abandoned!) Morality Debate, chance meetings at AIER, etc., has also joined in the discussion. This should be good!

The Yin and the Yang: An Approach to Publicizing Broadly Libertarian Ideas

I had an idea today for a new way that one might go about spreading some of our (well, at least my) ideas to the public. The idea is to use the familiar imagine of the Taijitu -- the yin yang symbol -- to offer a nuanced articulation of difficult concepts that sometimes end up being articulated sloppily with other approaches. The concept of yin yang is that mutually opposing forces can be seen as interconnected and even as interdependent, so that each gives form and substance to the other. I can immediately think of two examples of how this approach would be useful:

Unity and Separateness

On one hand, we need unity in order to have things like property rights, right-of-way conventions, procedural rules, and arguably collectivized programs where burden-sharing is important to us. On the other hand, we need separateness in order to plan and lead our own separate lives according to our own values and goals. But sometimes our best successes as communities come from living and letting live, and sometimes our best successes as individuals come from putting aside our own interests and being good neighbors. When we understand unity in the light of separateness, and separateness in the light of unity, we can achieve each more fully than we could if we pursued either on its own.

Knowledge and Ignorance

We know a tremendous amount about the world in which we live, and our knowledge can enable us to do wonderful things. But one of the most important things that we know is just how ignorant we are. A little bit of knowledge can be an extremely dangerous thing, and sometimes the wisest action is to admit that we not know for sure what would be best. Sometimes when we allow for an open-ended result, we find out that we end up with something better than we would have been able to design ourselves.

These are just two examples, and both are clearly in need of development. But I'm finding this way of thinking to be very satisfying and elegant; you pose two seemingly conflicting values against each other and show how each helps give the other its shape. And I think that as a vehicle for getting people to think about complicated philosophical issues that are integral to the advancement of liberty (like the knowledge problem, reasonable pluralism, the separateness of persons, the nirvana fallacy, etc.), it might be helpful to use this tool to explain things in a way that can resonate with anyone. Plus, I think it opens the door for a libertarianism or liberalism that is softer, more understanding, and more reflective than the kinds of views that so often come from our camp. Leave it to the notoriously wishy-washy, hand-wavy guy to come up with something like this...but I like it.

Redistribution and Organizations

[Update: I rewrote the piece so that it would actually be readable by financial people, and have replaced the earlier version of this post with the even more overly-simplistic (and not even necessarily historically accurate) version that appears below.]

Today my boss came in to work with a smile on his face, telling me he had a project for me. This is the result of that project. It draws a lot on this previous post, and admittedly oversimplifies some of the issues at hand. I didn't mean it to be a thorough examination of the issue, but I figure it might be somewhat interesting to some of you folks. So here it is:

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Introduction

[My boss] asks, “Is it consistent to think that wealth should be redistributed from rich individuals to poor individuals, but not from rich organizations to poor organizations?” To answer this question, I will explore the reasons that one might advocate redistribution from wealthy individuals to poor individuals, and then ask whether those reasons apply to organizations as well. In doing so, I will not address important objections to wealth redistribution policies, and so this discussion should not be seen as a defense of implementing them. The goal here will only be to establish whether someone who accepts the legitimacy of redistributions from wealthy individuals to poor individuals would be committed to being in favor of those arrangements between organizations as well.

Why Do We Care About the Distribution of Wealth?

Typically, redistribution of wealth is justified on the basis of empowering the poor. This seems simple enough. But if we are to try to apply this thinking to other areas, it will be important to understand how the argument for redistribution is supposed to work, and what moral problem the redistributive policy is supposed to fix. I will therefore offer a brief overview of where the argument for redistribution comes from, and how it responds to some of the ideas that have underpinned our society from its birth.

Our society is built on the foundations of classical liberal philosophy, which is itself built on the idea that we should treat freedom as a value in itself. It is second nature to think of the ideal America as a “free country” dedicated to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These are values that are taken directly from the classical liberal movement, and which still form the backbone of our worldview today. But why should we (and why did the classical liberals) care about freedom? Today’s political discourse has turned liberty into a buzzword, and has masked the connection between exaltation of liberty and the ideas that motivate redistributive policies. So in order to understand why redistribution is not just a matter of expedience or charity to its intellectual defenders, but is rather a matter of principle in their eyes, I will start out by setting the record straight on this issue.

Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson and the other liberal thinkers of their time observed that human societies are elaborate and dynamic systems, and that no individual (or group of individuals) could effectively design and operate a complex society according to a rational plan. The problem of society was, according to these thinkers, too complex for any mind to solve. Accordingly, the liberals postulated that successful societies would need to rely on mechanisms like the market system to produce “spontaneous” order – that is, to allow individuals to live together peacefully and productively without a comprehensive plan of action. A spontaneous system of producing social order would allow societies to function without all-knowing, benevolent rulers who would produce order and prosperity in accordance with their divine insights. And this was particularly important to the liberal thinkers, as it was painfully apparent to them that such rulers were generally not forthcoming, and attempts to produce a rational order in their absence were universal failures. The market system, then, could substitute for the benevolent and all-knowing ruler, producing prosperity and order as if by an invisible hand.

But the classical liberal defense of freedom extended beyond the simple idea that freedom tends to produce desirable social systems. The liberals argued not only that freedom promotes prosperity, but also that freedom is an essential component of human well-being. People, according to the liberals, can only realize themselves as individuals in an environment in which they are free to design their own lives, make their own choices, and live according to their own plans. And we still generally believe this today, which is why we care to live not only in a wealthy country or an advanced country, but also in a free country.

It was through the desire for mechanisms for spontaneous ordering and the belief in the importance of self-determination that the classical liberals came to be advocates for institutions of private property. By securing our possessions, property rights enable us to plan our separate lives without having to fear the arbitrary authority and incursions of other citizens or government agents. The classical liberals recognized that our lives are built in the outside world, and not just within ourselves, and that we therefore need security in our property in order to live full, meaningful lives. Property rights also set rules that allow us to interact in peaceful and productive ways without the need for social planning and all-knowing, benevolent rulers.

But a number of different groups of thinkers saw a flaw in the classical liberal argument defending individuals’ rights to their property. If property rights are a core element of liberty, and individuals need liberty in order to live good lives, then what about the people who do not have any property? Critics of the classical liberal position pointed out that the property-less, talent-less individual may have liberty in the sense of being free from the incursions of others, but she sure didn’t have much leeway to live her life according to her own desires or to be the master of her own fate. The impoverished man faces a choice between submitting to labor for someone else on one hand, or death by starvation or exposure on the other. Only in a technical, abstract sense could someone in such a situation be called “free.” And this, the critics held, was unfair.

The argument for redistribution, then, is that by redistributing wealth to those without access to it, we ensure liberty for all members of society, and not just those who can empower themselves through luck, talent, or the generosity of their benefactors. Such a policy, it is held, takes full consideration of everyone’s interests and needs in order to foster the conditions under which all individuals can pursue their own happiness, free (to some extent) from the concerns which might lead us to object to the circumstances faced by the property-less proletarian.

Empowerment and Organizations

When [my boss] asks about the potential for extending this line of thinking to organizations, it should be more or less clear at this point what he has in mind. Like individuals, organizations can have or lack the resources necessary to pursue their own goals. As is the case with individuals, a wealthy organization has more than enough resources available to it to meet its basic needs, and accordingly has more of a say in its fate than an organization which struggles simply to remain in operation. As we have seen, it is out of a desire to provide for the effective freedom of all individuals that the advocates of redistribution seek to transfer resources to those who lack property of their own. But does arguing this way commit them to the position that “needy” organizations should also be empowered in order to promote their abilities to plan their own “lives”?

In order to answer this question, it will help to ask why it is that liberty is morally important in the first place. The classical liberals thought that freedom was valuable because it could produce spontaneous social order and because it was a component of human wellbeing. But why should we attribute moral significance to order and wellbeing?

According to one very simplistic view, moral concern is built on the idea of promoting the interests of entities that have “goods of their own.” Each of us clearly has a good of his own, and our interests are promoted by living in orderly, peaceful, and prosperous societies in which we can pursue our own happiness. And similarly, our interests are promoted by having access to resources that enable us to make freer choices. But organizations can have “goods of their own” too. A University does well when it is able to sustain a thriving academic community, play an important role in its community, and operate with a strong budget. A corporation does well when it is able to generate income for its stakeholders, or when it successfully expands its operations into a new market. And in order for organizations to pursue their interests, they need access to resources just like individuals do. So if it is for the good of individuals that we enact empowering redistributive policies, then it seems like a similar line of thinking could lead us to advocate empowering organizations.

But one might object that moral concern should not attach simply to anything with a good of its own. We might notice that where we actually experience our own goods, organizations (that is, conceived of separately from the people who make up the organizations) do not. Whether or not a person’s interests are promoted actually makes a difference to that person. But except in a metaphorical sense, an organization is not the sort of thing to which something can make a difference. And this seems like a very important distinction.

To be sure, the individuals who compose the organization and who are impacted by its success have an active interest in its wellbeing. However, it is critical to notice that the interests of the individuals who make up an organization are not the same as the interests of the organization itself. If we are going to empower an organization because of the organization’s interests, then we need to separate the organization’s interests from the interests of the individuals from the organization. And if we deny that an organization’s separate interests can be morally significant because organizations cannot experience their own goods, then it appears that we would want to reject the analogy between the moral significance of an individual’s need for empowerment and an organization’s need for the same.

One might still want to argue that empowerment of poor organizations should be justified not on the basis of the organization’s own need for liberty, but rather on some need possessed by the individuals constituting the organization or by those with a stake in the organization’s performance. That is, by empowering organizations, we can indirectly empower individuals. And because we care about individual empowerment, we might be able to achieve our goals through the empowerment of organizations. But notice that this would not be an extension of the ethical argument in favor of empowering individuals to cover organizations. Rather, it would simply be an alternative way to carry out the redistribution called for by the original argument.

Ultimately, I am not convinced that we can coherently extend the moral concern which motivates redistribution to empower individuals to cover needy organizations. This can perhaps be supported best by comparing the way that we think about the death of an organization for lack of resources to the way that we would think of an individual’s death due to the same causes. When organizations fail or struggle, it seems like our proper concern should be focused on the individuals whose lives are worsened or constrained by those processes, and not on the organizations themselves which fail to live up to some constructed conception of their good. Accordingly, where redistribution is to be justified in order to empower those in need, I think it should be individuals to whom resources are allocated, and not organizations.

A Tentative Plan for an Overly Ambitious Climate Change Project

Anyone who's been following my work will know that a main focus of my research is global climate change, viewed from an ethical and political perspective. In this post, I want to sketch out where I'd like to go with that research and how I'd like to compose a complete product. These will only be sketches, and only working sketches at that; I imagine things will change rather dramatically as I move forward. But hopefully they'll help me to organize my thoughts. And if anyone out there is interested in helping me work on some of this stuff, I'd really love to know. It would be amazing to be able to finish this project for a dissertation, but I don't know if that will be possible if I have to do this all alone... Anyway, here it is (as usual, the mainstream scientific standpoint is taken as a premise for the first parts):

1. Collective Action Problems and Coercion

Climate change is a problem that, on its surface, seems to fit right into the model of a public goods problem. People acting on their own independent interests are collectively producing something that appears to be bad. If we were to desire to prevent this bad thing from coming about, we would either need to alter the set of incentives facing the relevant agents (in this case, basically everyone) so that they would adjust their behavior, or perhaps we would need to take steps to mitigate the effects of their actions.

When we talk about an appropriate response to climate change, however, we don't have in mind a sort of Buchananite consensus-building endeavor in which we try to get everyone to agree to a system that would uncontroversially represent an improvement over the current one. Rather, we intend to coerce people -- that is, to influence them to follow plans besides their own by force if necessary -- in order to bring about the desired outcomes.

But we can't just go around coercing people whenever we think we could bring about "better" social outcomes by doing so -- we need some justification for infringing upon individuals' rights to self-determination. Accordingly, this section would attempt to sketch the kinds of reasons that one might offer in defense of an infringement of someone's right to self-determination, all focusing on duties held by the individual whose rights are being infringed.

I will discuss self-defense briefly, acknowledging Roderick Long's contributions in thinking about dealing with climate change from this paradigm, but ultimately conclude that it doesn't make much sense to approach the issue of climate change in this way. I will therefore sketch out two alternative sources of duties which might help us to justify coercion: the duty to show appropriate respect for others' rights and the duty to attempt to mitigate tragic or catastrophic consequences. The next two sections will be elaborations of these issues.

2. Climate Change as an Infringement Upon Rights

This section will draw heavily on my paper, "Justice and Climate Change: Towards a Libertarian Analysis," which will be coming out in The Independent Review in the Fall. It will outline the foundations of a duty to respect others' rights, and explore the ways in which we might think of climate change as infringing upon rights. I will build upon my earlier paper to address some of the issues that were left undiscussed there.

One way in which I will go beyond that paper in this section will be to discuss the question of whether these infringements upon rights would constitute rights-violations. I will predicate this discussion on the premise (which I will challenge in Section 4) that individuals who contribute to global climate change are responsible for the rights-infringements, and search for ways that those individuals might try to defend their actions. The purpose of this discussion will not be to reach any definitive conclusions, but rather to give us a starting point for thinking about these questions in Section 4 when we try to pin down exactly what individuals are responsible for, and how we should think of their duties in light of such an analysis.

3. When Are Consequences Correlative?

This section draws its inspiration from the concept of correlations between duties and rights, observing that some intuitively plausible kinds of duties don't seem to correlate with rights. Some of these duties which are non-correlative with rights seem to make reference to things that we owe to ourselves or to ideals to which we are committed. But others seem to have to do with our duty to promote "the good," or at least refrain from promoting "the bad" or destroying "the good."

In this section, I will attempt to approach the impacts of climate change from this sort of consequentialist perspective, trying to decide when consequences correlate with duties to act in certain ways. I will initially focus on impacts on groups of humans and on cultures, but I will attempt to expand my discussion to incorporate a consequentialist theory of environmental ethics. Much like in the previous section, my discussion in this section will be structured so as to rely on a set of carefully chosen suppositions about individuals' responsibility for bringing about these consequences that will be challenged in Section 4, but not in a way that makes the discussion here useless. Again, the purpose of the discussion here will be to create a starting point for the analysis in Section 4.

4. Collective Responsibility and Individual Duties

This section will bring into focus the emergent nature of the climate change problem, and attempt to engage the literature on collective responsibility in order to understand how we should approach this problem. I will focus particularly on Virginia Held's discussion of the responsibility of "random collections" to organize themselves to address faults corresponding to non-distributive predicates like "caused global climate change." I will draw attention to Held's reservations about the choice of a proper decision-making procedure and search for a resolution to this problem in the literature relating to the selection among sets of alternatives that are impartially reasonable to prefer to inaction.

I will also use this section to directly engage the idea of the social provision of public goods, wondering whether we can think of the ideas presented in this section as justifying or demanding this practice, or if we should rather treat the discussion here as suggesting serious limitations on the extent to which we should be looking to social decision-making mechanisms to fulfill this capacity. I will attempt to show that in certain situations, the line of thinking introduced here can be used to support social measures aimed at providing public goods without relying on perfectionist ideas. But I will also show how these arguments do not establish the sort of paradigm that perfectionists would want, and that my view cannot therefore be seen as a reconciliation between liberalism and perfectionism.

5. Justifying the Enforcement of Duties

In this section I will discuss the jump from the idea that individuals have certain duties (as discussed in the previous sections) to the idea that we could be justified in coercing these individuals to act in the manner prescribed by their duty. I will need to explore the sorts of considerations which justify the enforcement of duties and use them to try to distinguish cases where intervention is justified from those where it is not. Here I will flesh out the questions introduced in Section 4 relating to reasonable pluralism and impartiality, expanding my discussion to cover all duties. I will also explore a dialectical approach to thinking about the justice of coercive enforcement of duties. This section will set the stage for Section 6 and Section 7 by arguing that certain kinds of answers to the questions posed in those questions would make coercion unacceptable.

6. Centralized Policy-Making in a World of Reasonable Pluralism

This section will explore the foundations of political authority outside of voluntary associations. I'm really not sure how I want to approach this section, but a coherent place to start seems to be with the philosophy of Joseph Raz. I'm very much over my head in even trying to imagine what sorts of things I'll want to discuss in this section, but it does seem like I'll have to address this issue. I guess this is what grad school will be for! Hopefully by the time it's ready to actually start writing this, I'll have done a whole bunch of work on the issues raised by this section and will have something worthwhile to say.

7. Finding an Appropriate Role for Uncertainty

Everything that will have been said to this point in the project will have been predicated on the idea that global climate change is undeniably happening in the way forecasted by the IPCC. This section will question this premise and introduce some of the uncertainties involved in the mainstream scientific analysis. It will also introduce the concept of storyline uncertainty and discuss the degree to which we can be comfortable with our predictions about the future.

I will then try to think about how uncertainty should play into our thinking about this issue. I will discuss the precautionary principle and the principles of procedural justice which are enshrined in our current legal system, as well as concerns about the burden placed on victims by standards of proof. I'm not entirely sure where I'll want to go with this, but I think I'm attracted to the idea of some kind of middle ground. I'm not sure, though, so don't hold me to it!

8. Pulling It All Together

In this final section I will attempt to put together all of the pieces discussed in the previous sections in order to compose a coherent answer to the question of how we should think about the justification for a coercive and centralized policy aimed at addressing global climate change. I will highlight areas where I think that reasonable people might find room for disagreement, and where I think my discussion here could be expanded or improved. I will also voice any doubts I have about my conclusions and attempt to identify some avenues for rejecting them. Finally, to the extent that I can do so coherently, I will offer some closing thoughts about the ways that my arguments might be engaged by the policymaking community and the general public.

Left-Libertarianism Is Not Communism: A Reply to Joel Davis

It appears that over at Reddit.com, a fellow going by sblinn decided to share one of my previous posts on resource-egalitarian left-libertarianism with the rest of the Reddit community.  So a big thank you goes out to sblinn for checking out my work and posting it over there!  I received some criticism, though, in the comments section of the listing by someone named Joel Davis, who appears to be a communist [edit: later in the comments thread, Joel claims not to be one, so I'm not entirely sure what to make of the fact that he defends points he calls communist throughout his reply...].  Joel clearly put a lot of time and effort into his comments, and so I wanted to try to think about some of his points here.

First, Joel wonders:

Isn't "property" itself a system? Can't we solve this "problem" by just choosing not to enforce property, thus securing egalitarian conditions through a net decrease in coercive authority?

I do agree that property -- or more specifically, any society's set of conventions for recognizing claims to possessions and adjudicating disputes arising over those claims -- is a system of social organization, and that such a system could be dispensed with if a society so chose.   And I can see why Joel would conceive of such a move as involving a net decrease in coercive authority.  After all, by abandoning a set of social conventions for dealing with property claims, we would seem to dissolve the mechanisms by which those conventions were enforced, and also the mechanisms by which those kinds of conventions were formed in the first place.  And that seems like a curtailment of a certain kind of authority.

But it's less clear to me why Joel thinks that such a move would bring us closer to egalitarian ideals.  It seems like in the absence of a property system, there would either arise a set of social relationships that were substantially similar to a sort of property system, except without any unifying set of conventions (since that would seem to be a property system itself), or else there would be a system in which claims over possessions were not widely recognized and protected.  

In the former case, we seem to wind up right where we started.  I don't see why having a pluralistic system of property rights would militate against inequality any more than a more universal system of property rights would.  To defend this, one would only need to point out that whatever possession-respecting manner in which some members of a pluralistic society related to each other with egalitarian results could simply be practiced on a society-wide scale.  And by doing so, we could coherently claim to have instituted a sort of property system, though it would likely need to be different than the sort of property system we generally see in practice today.

In the latter case, where there is no generally accepted set of cultural institutions regarding possessions, and where individuals have not created a similar -- though pluralistic -- system to put in the place of one, it would seem like the only remaining alternative would be to not recognize claims to property at all (since doing so would seem to involve one of the two possibilities already discussed).  But such a system would be anarchy in the pejorative sense of the word.  People would simply do whatever they wanted with other people's property -- remember, if they restrained themselves from this, we would be dealing of an example of the sort discussed in the previous paragraph.  If this would bring about egalitarian consequences, it would only be in the sense of mutual destruction.  But more likely, egalitarians would be angered to find that the strongest could exercise their power over the weakest, generating a different sort of inequality, but inequality nonetheless.

So I really can't see why Joel would think that the abandonment of property altogether would tend towards egalitarian goals.  It must be noted here that I have spoken of property in a broad sense, and many people have historically talked about the elimination of capitalistic standards of property as if they were talking about dispensing with property altogether.  But presumably, there would still be a desire to kick trespassers out of one's house in the communist utopia, and to have the trespasser seen as the morally faulty party in such a scenario.  And one simply can't make sense of this besides through an appeal to something like a right relating to one's own house, which would be a sort of property right.  A property right of a different kind, to be sure, than the one which enables the capitalist to bequeath access and title to the means of production to his children, but a property right nonetheless.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the latter sort of system would not be something that left-libertarians would want to endorse, at least as far as I can discern.  Most left-libertarians seem to be in favor of property rights of some kind, though they might be open to the second sort of set-up in which there is no property system as such, but rather a kind of pluralistic, decentralized approach to dealing with these rights.  And the reason it makes sense that left-libertarians favor these rights is that left-libertarians believe in self-ownership partly because they want people to have the freedom to "do what they want with their own."  Hence Peter Vallentyne began his entry on Libertarianism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy with the claim that "Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves and have moral powers to acquire property rights in external things under certain conditions." So in summary, I agree that one can abandon a property system if one wants, but I don't see why this would tend to encourage equality, and unless the alternative to a property system were substantially like a property system, I don't think a left-libertarian would want to endorse it (remember, my post was about left-libertarians, and so might not respond to other sorts of views).

Joel's next substantive point is this:

It (obviously) doesn't follow that just because there will be some inequality that we need to endorse a system of property as it exists today.

And this is undoubtedly true. I certainly didn't mean to suggest in anything that I said that the only alternative to the left-libertarian views I challenged in my other post involved a wholesale endorsement of today's property norms.  Even the most right-wing libertarian views don't entail that.  So to the extent to which my previous post suggested anything like this, I apologize for the confusion.

The point I had been trying to make starts with the claim that with an egalitarian initial allocation of resources, differences in luck, effort, and ability would eventually bring it about that some individuals would end up with more than others.  This would not be the case because of any defect in the initial distribution's fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, but rather because it would simply be impossible to engineer an egalitarian distribution such that the tendencies towards movements away from equality would be preempted indefinitely.  This is not a point that I introduced, and is accepted by both right-libertarians like Nozick and egalitarians like Cohen.  I didn't think it particularly necessary to defend it in depth because...well...very few people disagree with it.  But I again apologize if I didn't articulate the point as clearly as I might have.

This is important in the context of our discussion of left-libertarianism because the reason that the left-libertarian wants the egalitarian distribution of resources in the first place is because she wants there to be equality without the kinds of coercive redistributions that I and others have claimed would be necessary to preserve equality, even with an egalitarian initial distribution.  That the left-libertarians in question want this can be easily evidenced by Michael Otsuka's somewhat recent choice to name his excellent book Libertarianism Without Inequality, and I think you'd be rather hard pressed to find one of these people who would disagree with that characterization.  Accordingly, my argument is that if it isn't true that an egalitarian initial distribution would ensure equality over the long term, then the left-libertarian argument would essentially just be an objection to the mere fact that there was not an egalitarian intial distribution -- that is, that a society did not have the right kind of history.

Joel's next point is:

...if [by "self-ownership"] you mean control of your body, then most communists would agree with that as a human right. If you mean it (as is often the cause) already-bundled with private property, then they would disagree, but only for the propertarian aspects. If "property" isn't legitimate in the first place, then denial of it can't be an infringement on self-ownership. Just like a person who dies can't claim that the still living "stole time" from him. The time wasn't his, he has no natural or moral claim to it, and he's just being an obstinate spook.

The problem here is that what communists think is entirely beside the point.  A left-libertarian is not a communist, and vice-versa.  So it may be true that one can save self-ownership by making it purely formal, as Joel suggests, but this option is not open to the left-libertarian, and so this point is a non-sequitar.

This applies to a number of Joel's next points, which I will not address here.  The problem appears to be that Joel thinks that I was trying to engage with communists, when I simply was not.  The article was about a very particular approach to political philosophy, and I think I made that very clear.

A point that I will address, however, stemmed from my claim that there would not be any objectively acceptable way to implement the left-libertarians' principles even if we accepted them at face value.  Joel responded that all moral codes suffer from the same problem of non-objectivity.  But I think that Joel misunderstood my point.  I didn't mean that the left-libertarians' moral principles were not objectively true, and that this was a problem for them.  If I had argued this, then Joel's criticism would be a good one.  

But my argument was that even if we grant the left-libertarians their point, and accept that what one needs to do is perform an egalitarian distribution of resources that ensures that everyone gets their fair share, the left-libertarian would have no way to carry out such a plan.  It simply doesn't make sense.  Accordingly, they'd need to construct a somewhat ad hoc system to approximate their ideal.  And this would be fine except for the fact that their approach to political philosophy is a rationalist one, and not an instrumentalist one.  This, I think, creates a tension for their view, since on one hand they seem to want to set the conditions that would allow for an impartially legitimate society, but on the other hand it wouldn't be strictly possible to determine how to set those conditions.  That seems like it's a problem to me.

I guess having gone through this, all I can say is that I don't really know what Joel was trying to accomplish here.  He very rightly showed that my critique of left-libertarianism is not a very critique of communism, and basically tried to show that my points of contention with the former view can be avoided by taking a position incompatible with that view.  And in some cases, I haven't disagreed.  But I don't really 

[Hmm...I'm not sure what happened here, but it looks like the end of this post got chopped off. Oops!]

Some Hayekian Bathroom Reading: A Reply to Farrell

Yesterday over at the Crooked Timber blog, Henry Farrell wrote a post about an idea introduced by an airline executive which would have forced passengers to pay for their use of airplane toilets. He uses this example as a dig against we zany libertarians:

I’ve always thought that the social expectations associated with Ryanair flights are a microcosm for a certain kind of gung-ho libertarian ideal of market society, in which every possible social interaction is conducted through the cash nexus (if Michael O’Leary thought he could get away with charging you for the attendants’ smiles, he would). There are some quite clear efficiency benefits to this – externalities are internalized, and if you are determined just to travel (and to carefully work around their ways of squeezing you for extra cash) their flights are very cheap indeed. But you can also expect that they will charge you for everything that they possibly can, and take full advantage of every bargaining asymmetry going.

I agree that this sort of thing is unattractive, which is why I wouldn't expect that many airlines would get away with it for very long (though in the mean time it would be a source of irritation, and I would think it reasonable if they were required to disclose their policy very explicitly to potential customers in order to avoid legal ambiguity). Charge toilets might be a more efficient policy if allocating toilet use were at issue, but when your business depends on customer satisfaction, it seems dubious to me that the few dollars you would make per flight by charging for bathroom access would justify alienating and frustrating an enormous majority of your customers.

In any case, though, what we gung ho libertarians favor is letting people have the choice to try new things. As Farrell rightly points out, maybe there are some people out there who want to travel at the lowest possible expense, and are willing to put themselves in situations where they may be forced to pay out the nose for any amenities they wish to consume. We certainly wouldn't want to ban anyone from serving these odd folks. The issue gets complicated when access to the airline industry and to flight routes are restricted by another set of government policies, thereby reducing the opportunity for competition and making it so airlines have a privileged position in negotiating with their customers. But it still seems like no one is forcing you to fly with Ryanair, and what people should do is to choose the airline with policies they support (or are willing to accommodate for some other convenience or benefit).

The upshot of organizing society that way is that you never know what may come from toll toilets. Maybe people learn to accept paying for toilets, and that makes it possible for some entrepreneurial airlines to offer separate premium bathroom services (much like how when airlines started charging extra for food, the food got way better). The current incentive structure encourages airlines to go for the bare minimum. Maybe the best policy would be to charge for the nice bathrooms and have free ones that are poorly maintained. Maybe the best policy would be to only have nice bathrooms, charge for them, and brag about how your charge toilets are better than the other guy's charge toilets. I don't know.

And obviously, this isn't just about airplane toilets. The (good) libertarian argument was never that whatever happens in the market is desirable, or that we should never lament the elimination of services that we all enjoy. I would personally rather have free airline toilets, and I would gravitate flying on an airline that didn't fleece me at every available opportunity (perhaps even if I ended up paying more in the end!). But by legally prohibiting people from trying alternative policies, we entrench current tastes and prejudices and prohibit people from trying new things which may open up possibilities we haven't thought of before.

So while I join Farrell in finding the Ryanair suggestion to be unattractive and ridiculous, I don't think I would support the prohibition of such a policy which he seems to favor. If anything, that's because I would want to see competitors advertising with "Fly British Air. We don't make you pay to use the bathroom like those tits at Ryanair. Seriously, who makes their customers pay to use the bathroom on the airplane? What is this, France?"

Walter Block on Sexism: Straddling the Line Between Thin Libertarianism and Vulgar Libertarianism

Introduction

Dmitry Chernikov left a comment on an earlier post directing my attention to an essay by Dr. Walter Block which basically just railed on several thinkers with whom I identify for various reasons. The essay appears to be a work in progress, as Dr. Block's typically clear and thorough writing style is conspicuously absent, but as the main points seem to be there, I think it would be fair to critique them. The essay covers a wide array of topics and it would not do to address them all here. I will focus here, therefore, on Dr. Block's response to Dr. Roderick Long on the issue of feminism.

In piece cited in the essay, Long's main point is built on the idea that treating women differently than men simply because they're women fails to give them their due, and that where we can see sexism embodied in wage structures, we should decry it. He engages an objection to this view which he attributes to Austrian economists and particularly Block himself, which is that the free market naturally ensures that women are not mistreated, since their wages would naturally be brought into line with their marginal productivity by the workings of the market process.

Long argues that in spite of the equilibrating tendency of the marketplace to bring wages into line with workers' marginal productivity, we cannot say with any degree of certainty that prevailing wages at any particular time will actually satisfy that equilibrium condition (e.g., because of imperfect knowledge, lack of entrepreneurial actions, etc.). Accordingly, even if employers were solely dedicated to maximizing monetary profit, there would be no guarantee that wages would equal workers' marginal productivity.

He then argues that on top of this, there are many reasons to believe that employers are not perfectly rational monetary-profit-maximizers, acting on influences like prejudices, presumptions, etc. So even if the market were providing an incentive through the profit motive to bring workers' wages into line with their marginal productivity, other factors could be providing a skewing counterweight that would make markets tend towards unfair wages for women.

So essentially, Long is saying that it simply isn't true that the free market naturally ensures that women are paid their fair wages, and that in fact we have good reason to believe that women are not being paid fairly. Therefore, he concludes that one can't create problems for the claim that there are sexist wage structures, and that they should be condemned, by arguing that the market naturally eliminates sexist wage structures.

Block offers no less than nine objections to this argument, which I perceive to take three basic forms: 1) Long's economic arguments are incoherent and there is evidence that he happens to be wrong; 2) The wage structures to which Dr. Long objects are not coercive, and therefore are not unjust and have nothing to do with libertarianism; and 3) There is no reason to object to people paying women differently than men, or to cultural institutions that demean women. I will discuss each of these objections in turn.

I. Are the economic issues discussed by Long dealt with improperly?

Block's first question is:

But why would there be a bias in the market such that entrepreneurship necessarily results in lower female wages in disequilibrium? Why not wages higher than MRP when the market is not in its equilibrium or evenly rotating state? Long, let alone not furnishing us with an answer to this absolutely crucial implicit claim of his, does not even seem to recognize that there is a need to do so.

In passing, I should note that budding young philosophers out there should be aware of what's about to happen here. Block has engaged in some very clear PhilosophyFTW!! If he is wrong -- and I think he is -- then this will be embarrassing for him, whereas if he had been nice about his objection, it would be totally okay for him to be mistaken. So here's the tip: If you're going to argue that someone made a very obvious mistake, don't be a jerk about it.

And here's Long furnishing us with just such an answer, quoted from Block's own paper:

Even if women are not generally less productive than men...there might still be a widespread presumption on the part of employers that they are, and in light of the difficulty of determining the productivity of specific individuals, this presumption would not be easily falisified, thus making any wage gap based on such a presumption more difficult for market forces to whittle away.

And:

But there is no reason to rule out the possibility of deliberate, profit-disregarding discrimination either. Discrimination can be a consumption good for managers, and this good can be treated as part of the manager's salary-and-benefits package; any costs to the company arising from the manager's discriminatory practices can thus be viewed as sheer payroll costs. Maybe some managers order fancy wood paneling for their offices, and other managers pay women less for reasons of sexist; if the former sort of behaviour can survive the market test, why not the latter?

Now, Block disagrees with the attribution of the wage gap to these phenomena, but that doesn't mean that Long does too. Clearly, Long believes that the answer to the question of why the wage gap favors men (even when productivity differences are taken into account) lies in some combination of unfortunate social stereotypes and sexism. Not only does Long apparently recognize that one would need to explain this, but he basically devotes 2 paragraphs of a 9 paragraph argument to doing so. So I don't think that Block's criticism is on the mark here.

Block's next piece of evidence that Long's economic reasoning is bad is to point out that lesbians apparently make more money than straight women. The article Block cites is no longer at the linked location, but I would have to wonder...aren't there a lot fewer lesbian housewives and stay at home moms? And is it impossible that lesbians -- who have often had difficult, character-building upbringings -- are typically more productive than straight women? I'm not saying that this isn't evidence against Long's point, but it seems like more needs to be said.

Block moves on to suggest that Long is on a slippery slope that will commit him to suggesting that minimum wage laws are not all bad. But Long specifically said that he didn't necessarily support government intervention, and concluded his argument with the claim that the wage gap is:

...no reason to gripe about 'market failure.' Such failure is merely our failure. Instead, we need to fight the power - peacefully, but not quietly.

So Block seems to miss the mark here as well.

Block's next point is that Long's argument sounds like the "cluster of error" of Austrian Business Cycle theory, and:

...as we know from our study of business cycles, any such conglomeration of error cannot long endure without continued statist interference with markets. It would be dissipated by the market's profits and loss weeding out process.

Now, anyone who's been paying attention will realize that Block has objected to Long's critique of a particular argument by simply reiterating that argument. Accordingly, the best response would be to simply reiterate Long's critique: A) The market's "profits and loss weeding out process" is a process and can be hampered by a number of factors which appear to be at work in this instance (e.g., entrenched prejudice, a lack of clear information about the marginal productivity of individual workers); and B) There are other examples of unprofitable business strategies that have survived the market test (e.g., fancy wood paneling in managers' offices), and the market is not a perfect mechanism for weeding these strategies out. I would beg the question if I suggested that this rebuttal wins the point for Long, but it is at least clear that Long has a response which this particular objection does not preempt. So again, Block somewhat misses the mark.

Block's final objection to Long's economic arguments is that he simply doesn't believe that sexism operates in the way that Long suggests: he thinks that sexism may actually benefit women where it does occur. He suggests that:

...when it comes to pay, my own informal assessment is that it works mainly in the direction not of increasing the pay gap between men and women. Rather, it is all in the direction of paying attractive women a beauty premium.

He goes on to suggest that:

...if they [men's tastes] are in opposition to anyone, it is to other males who are seen as competition.

Now I don't have the empirical evidence to go to battle on this point. So it will have to suffice to say that it seems very unlikely to me that the underlying productivity difference between women and men is being underrepresented by the existing wage gap because hot women are being paid more than their labor is worth. I mean think about it: Long is saying, "Women make 75% as much as men for the same work," and Block is saying, "And lucky them! They'd be making even less if they weren't so damned cute!" Ummm...somehow that seems...just...no. I could be wrong to think that negative sexism plays a more significant role than positive sexism, but...well...I just don't think I am.

For one thing, many beautiful women will tell you that it can be difficult to be taken seriously for top positions as an attractive woman because many managers believe that beautiful women have only gotten to where they are on the basis of their looks. Beauty premiums, then, may well be counterbalanced somewhat by beauty handicaps. And even if beauty premiums really did outweigh the lower wages generated by demeaning sexism, that wouldn't mean that we should call the whole thing a wash. Surely Long would object to sexism in the workplace even if it didn't show up in aggregate wage statistics.

II. Is sexism an issue on which libertarians should opine?

This brings us to the next kind of objection that Block raises to Long's argument, which is that sexism embodied in wage structures and social conventions is not coercive, and therefore is not an appropriate domain for libertarian inquiry. Block writes:

Of course, there are other problems [besides coercive violence] that libertarians are involved in combatting: bad breath, the heartbreak of psoriasis, losing chess games, cancer, the list goes on and on. But here, libertarians who do so are not acting qua libertarians. This is a distinction that is crucial for a clear understanding of this philosophy.

This objection is an instantiation of Dr. Block's longstanding argument against so-called "thick" libertarianism, a view which holds that libertarians ought to be concerned not only with matters involving coercive violence, but also a wide range of other issues which are in one way or another connected with their views on coercion. Block's argument is that these other issues are certainly important and worthy of discussion, but they have nothing to do with libertarianism, per se. Libertarianism, according to Block, is a philosophical view which is directly concerned with opposing coercive violence, and that's pretty much it.

Now, at first glance, this would seem to be an argument about semantics. If it's really such a big deal for libertarians to talk about other issues "while wearing their libertarian hats," then for the sake of discussion, Dr. Long could just say, "Fine. I'm not talking about sexism as a libertarian. I'm talking about it as a feminist who happens to be a libertarian as well." But more substantively it seems like we should ask why Dr. Block is objecting to the use of the term "libertarianism" in talking about things like sexism, and try to decide whether there's really a deep difference between, say, being a libertarian and being a feminist.

What Dr. Block seems to have in mind is that libertarianism is, at its core, built around the concept of "justice," where justice is defined as turning on the legitimacy of initiation of coercive force. This seems to me like a naked move to entrench the non-aggression principle in a piece of terminology by warping the normal meaning of justice to conveniently allow for a clean distinction between coercive and peaceful behaviors to be labelled "unjust" and "just," respectively. But no matter; that's how Dr. Block seems to want to use the term, and we can grant it. On this view, then, we should notice that the fact that something is "just" need not mean that it is desirable, aesthetically pleasing, reflective of what people deserve, impartial, or even morally acceptable. It just means that no one has "thrown any punches" yet in a way to which we object, and therefore there cannot have been any injustice.

If we define libertarianism as a school of thought focusing on "justice" as defined above, then we will be led to the position advocated by Dr. Block:

Why is this [inequality in wages for equivalent work] unjust is this unjust from a libertarian perspective? It is not.

That is not to say that individuals who are libertarians have no business objecting to these inequalities. To reiterate Block's point, quoted above:

Of course, there are other problems that libertarians are involved in combating: bad breath, the heartbreak of psoriasis, losing chess games, cancer, the list goes on and on. But, here, libertarians who do so are not acting qua libertarians.

The point is, these things are objectionable for reasons which have nothing to do with justice, as defined above. Therefore, they have nothing to do with libertarianism, which is a philosophy that deals only with justice.

I think that this view is mistaken. To see why, we should note that in the above, I did not say anything about what position libertarians actually take on positions of justice (as I defined it); I only said that Block's view limits libertarianism to matters of so-called "justice." If my familiarity with Dr. Block's views serves me correctly, I believe that he would want to say that the libertarian view of justice has something to do with the non-aggression principle, such that initiating coercive violence is "unjust," and anything else is "just." Since I don't believe that the non-aggression principle is correct, and I want to be charitable to the libertarian position (particularly since I consider myself to be a libertarian), I will rephrase this position to say that the initiation of coercive force is prima facie unjust, and that (to the extent that we accept the definition of "justice" with which we are working here) anything that does not involve an illegitimate initiation of coercive force is just (for a discussion of this view, check out this post). If I'm wrong, and the non-aggression principle is true, then we can simply say that only illegitimate initiations of coercive force are unjust, but all such initiations are unjust. In other words, coercion is prima facie wrong, and there are no considerations which would cause us to find it legitimate. The way I've phrased it, we just get to include more views under the umbrella of "libertarianism" (most importantly, mine).

But libertarianism would be an empty shell of a position if it were simply a vague claim that "If and only if a view has only to do with the initiation of coercive force and views it as at least prima facie wrong, then it is a libertarian view." It would seem to behoove us as libertarians to say that a part of libertarian philosophy has to do with explaining why people should hold that kind of view. That is, it should explain why we should care so much about the initiation of coercive force, and why we are generally disposed to object to it as a matter of principle.

Now a complication arises here because (again if I correctly recall his views), Dr. Block believes that the initiation of force is unjust as a matter of undisputable logical fact. His view, following in the tradition of libertarian thinkers like Dr. Hoppe, is that one cannot advocate, condone, or engage in the use of coercive force without committing oneself to a contradictory position. The only position that one can reasonably defend, according to this view, is the libertarian view that the initiation of coercive force is incorrect. The reason that this is a complication is that for reasons I have discussed here and here, I think that this position is flat wrong (as was brought to my attention after writing those pieces, Dr. Bob Murphy and non-quite-Dr. Gene Callahan made some similar arguments as well). It is simply not true that any other position besides the non-aggression principle is incoherent.

But other libertarian views, including the one to which Dr. Long ascribes as well as the one to which I ascribe, resist coercion because of a fundamental belief that each of us is a valuable individual with his or her own life to lead. We suggest that it would therefore be disrespectful and unbecoming of us to force others to live according to plans that are not their own or to destructively interfere with their ability to pursue theirs. We see ourselves as having moral significance, and we acknowledge that the things that make us important also make others important. It is out of this deep appreciation and respect for individuals -- and the separateness of individuals' unique lives -- that we demand justification from those who would interfere with their neighbors' lives (or condemn them out of hand, for those libertarians accepting the non-aggression principle).

If we accept that something like this is at the root of the libertarian position on the issue of justice (still within our provisional definition), then it seems reasonable to say that an inherent part of libertarianism is an attitude of respect for individuals. And it is for this reason that I believe Dr. Block to be in error. If libertarianism is built upon a foundation of respect for others, then it would seem that libertarians would be committed to opposing any view which contradicts that paradigm of respect. And what Long is doing in leveling this argument is contending that sexism against women is indeed at odds with a view which sees all people as worthy of respect, as it is built upon subordination and dehumanization. So by incorporating feminism into libertarian philosophy, Long seems to be contending that feminism represents the position which follows from the consistent application of the ideas that make coherent the libertarian position on so-called "justice". In my opinion, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a libertarian to be saying qua libertarian.

So what, then, of Block's point that:

Of course, there are other problems that libertarians are involved in combating: bad breath, the heartbreak of psoriasis, losing chess games, cancer, the list goes on and on. But, here, libertarians who do so are not acting qua libertarians.

This point seems intuitively right (except for the part about losing chess games; surely Block doesn't think that the world would be a better place if all chess games ended in stalemates). But whereas there is a reasonably strong connection between the ethical underpinnings of libertarian political philosophy and feminism, there is no such connection with bad breath, psoriasis, or cancer. The analogy simply doesn't work, and for reasons that I believe vindicate Long.

III. There is nothing wrong with sexist wage structures or demeaning social conventions

There is a third sort of objection appearing throughout Block's argument which basically suggests that beyond being a non-libertarian issue, Long's objections speak to a problem that isn't a problem. In doing this, I believe Block skirts the line between merely "thin" libertarianism and "vulgar" libertarianism.

The term "vulgar libertarianism" can best be understood by going back to our distinction between "just" and "unjust" from earlier, which defined as "just" anything that doesn't involve illegitimate coercion. Recall that we said that just because something is "just" by this definition does not mean that it is good, or even morally acceptable. Vulgar libertarian views, we will say, function essentially as "capitalist apologetics" by jumping to the conclusion that because something does not involve the illegitimate use of coercive force, it is not objectionable. The vulgar libertarian is the sort of thinker who, when presented with a lamentation about the outcomes generated by a free society, automatically reacts by saying, "Oh, but here's why that outcome isn't lamentable at all!" The vulgar libertarian, for example, might put down Dr. Block's Defending the Undefendable and proceed to argue that actually, the man who cheats on his girlfriend with a prostitute is doing nothing wrong, since no one has been coerced and the transaction was actually beneficial to both parties. Or that all poor people deserve to be poor, since they haven't produced anything for society that others have found to be worth paying any more to obtain. Or that the pervert who seduces the child is blameless, as both parties are simply doing what they want to be doing.

Let me be clear: I do not believe that Dr. Block is a vulgar libertarian. It is because I do not believe this that I am even making the argument that his views here seem to border on vulgar libertarianism. If Block were a vulgar libertarian, it would surely do little good to show that his arguments indeed sound like those that a vulgar libertarian might make.

So what in Block's paper am I talking about? Block first writes:

Perhaps most important, we must hark back to the biblical story where people are paid different amounts of money for doing precisely the same job; or what is the same thing, the same compensation for doing very different amounts of work...These disparities can be interpreted as a differential gift giving. That is, the employer pays everyone equally for equal productivity, but then makes a freely given donation to some but not to others.

For those not familiar with the story, there's a story in Matthew 20 about a vineyard owner who hires a group of workers to work at his vineyard, promising them a fair wage. Later in the day, he sees another group of workers who have not found any work for the day, and hires them to come help as well. At the end of the day, he pays all of the workers equally, to the consternation of the workers who had worked all day. Block's implication is captured by the differentially-paying vineyard owner in Matthew 20:13-16:

Friend, I am not treating you unfairly. Didn't you agree with me to work for the standard wage? Take what is yours and go. I want to give to this last man the same as I gave to you. Am I not permitted to do what I want with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?

The first thing that one should notice is that in the vineyard parable, all of the workers were paid at least the "standard wage." A controversy might be raised, then, about whether the parable would apply to situations where capitalists were levering their advantaged position in negotiating with applicants to drive their wages below "fair" levels, which is presumably what Long thinks is going on when women are paid "unfairly." But even broaching the subject of "fair" wages opens up a can of worms all on its own, and the issue here is about sexism, not some form of wage egalitarianism.

The more substantive point is that when we consider the action of the vineyard owner, we see that he has acted out of generosity towards the late-coming workers. In the story, the reason for the generosity is not suggested to be some sort of prejudice against the early-coming workers, nor is the account stated in terms of some kind of malice, scorn, dismissiveness, or ill-will towards the early-comers. If these factors were involved in the story, then presumably Dr. Long would be uncomfortable with this example as well.

It seems pretty clear to me that when employers pay their male employees disproportionately higher wages, they are not doing so out of the generosity that the vineyard owner showed towards the workers who had not been able to find work. For that reason, I think that the analogy somewhat fails, though it is a valuable insight that unequal treatment does not necessarily have to objectionable. It's unequal treatment because of prejudice or sexism that should draw the ire of feminist, not unequal treatment as such.

Hopefully it will be clear, then, why I find this argument to be at risk of vulgarity. The feminist complains that sexist or prejudiced employers treat women badly by paying them less, and Block responds with an example of seemingly legitimate differential pay, with the implication that sexist and prejudiced employees are in the clear on its weight. In doing so, he conveniently defends the status quo and the employer, while comparing the feminists to grumbling and envious characters in a well-known story. But as the principle of charity compels us to assume that Dr. Block didn't perceive the disanalogy we discussed above, and did not intend vulgarity, we must keep in mind that we are not trying to argue that Dr. Block is a vulgar libertarian, but only that this particular position seems like it is wrong for reasons that are reminiscent of the vulgar paradigm.

Dr. Block's next point is entwined with the "thin" libertarian view discussed in the previous section:

...Long is going to have to decide whether his primary allegiance lies with feminism or libertarianism. This author does indeed touch on one aspect of this when he discusses the possibility that the wage gap between males and females might be due to in effect employer consumption [sic]: paying males more than females just for the sheer joy of doing so. If so, is this not the employer's right? And if so, from whence springs any possible libertarian objection to the wage gap?

That this argument borders on vulgarity can be seen by examining the first sentence. Remember, Block's argument for "thin" libertarianism is that the kinds of issues that concern the feminist here have nothing to do with libertarianism, and that the libertarian cannot talk about them qua libertarian. But why, then, would Dr. Long have to choose between these positions? If these are issues which really have nothing to do with libertarianism, then one should be able to be a libertarian while holding substantively any view on the issues that concern the feminist in this instance.

What seems to be going on here, as evidenced by the accommodating tone that Dr. Block takes in talking about "paying males more than females just for the sheer joy of doing so" is that Dr. Block has gone beyond his "thin" libertarianism in favor of a "thick"-er view in the opposite direction. That is, it's not just that sexism is not violent, and therefore is not "unjust," but rather, it seems like Block is flirting with saying that there is nothing wrong with sexism. But this is not thin libertarianism. It is vulgar libertarianism.

This sort of thing vaguely seems to reappear when Dr. Block writes:

What is this business of criticizing the freely made decisions of women to stay home and take care of babies? It matters not one whit that this is done "on moral grounds (or) prudential grounds." The libertarian qua libertarian simply has no business in criticizing "women's (choice of) greater responsibility for household work." It is no business of the libertarian, none whatsoever, to "combat" the "sexism" implicit in "the cultural expectations that lead women to assume such responsibility."

I don't want to get involved in saying something like "Well no, he didn't say that there is nothing wrong with these cultural expectations, but don't you think that's what he meant?!" But I do want to point out that if this argument is intended to promote "thin" libertarianism and not "vulgar" libertarianism, it seems like one would expect some kind of qualification along the lines of, "Of course, none of this is to say that these cultural norms should be embraced or even countenanced silently. They are simply not within the providence of libertarian discussion." And yet not only is such a disclaimer not offered, but what is written seems like it could be easily interpreted as an argument that "criticizing the freely made decisions of women to stay at home and take care of babies" "on moral grounds (or) prudential grounds" would be misguided, even if done from outside the realm of libertarian theory. Such an interpretation would be vulgar, even though it is not at all entailed by what Block actually says, and I think offers another example of Dr. Block straddling the line between thin and vulgar libertarianism, even if it does not technically cross it.

Conclusion

Having evaluated all three kinds of objection raised by Block to Long's discussion, and found each of them somewhat wanting, I think that a few closing words are in order. It will surprise no one to discover that I sided with Dr. Long in this argument before reading Dr. Block's piece, and therefore my response must be taken in that light. Further, there is no reason to expect that Dr. Block would have nothing to say to the points that I have raised here; this debate has been going on for a very long time, and presumably Dr. Block has heard most of the objections that can be offered against his position. Accordingly, it may well be that my points here have missed their mark.

That being said, I do think that I have raised some important questions here about Dr. Block's position and arguments, and that my analysis was both thorough and fair. Dr. Long's arguments cannot, I think, be dismissed as easily as Dr. Block's piece makes it sound.

Hopefully this has been as valuable and interesting for you to read as it was for me to write!

On the "Other" Kind of Left-Libertarianism

Update: See the bottom of this post for further discussion.

So earlier today I wrote a post about why consider myself a left-libertarian if I disagree with the views of some of the most prominent thinkers who call themselves left-libertarians, and a fellow named Dan Waxman asked:

I'd be interested to know your rationale for rejecting the Steiner/Otsuka/Vallentyne style left-libertarianism (i.e. self-ownership coupled with a very stringently egalitarian proviso regarding the initial acquisition of external worldly resources).

I feel as though temperamentally I am in a similar position to you - I also have a problem with oppression and mistreatment, and I think that in a libertarian society - including (especially?) the ones which reject common world ownership - these evils would be far less common. But I don't think I have worked out a satisfactory answer to my own conflicted intuitions about the initial acquisition of property, and, to be perfectly honest, I don't think it helps that the literature is notably thin on actual *arguments* either way. At most we get a bald assertion that the earth is originally unowned from Nozick and co, then we get people like Cohen and Otsuka complaining that this assertion is 'blithe,' without putting forward any argument whatsoever for their alternative! So like I said, I'd be interested to know your thoughts, especially if you've come to some kind of stable reflective equilibrium on the issue

I think that's a great question, and want to take the opportunity to post a few thoughts in rejection of the resource-egalitarian liberarian point of view (though in actuality, it is not a single point of view; these objections may variously miss the mark when applied to specific views which preempt them). I might try to flesh these objections out a little bit in a future post (or series of posts), but for now I just want to put them out there. If they don't make sense, I'll be happy to try to clarify. I'm going to put off for now the task of trying to justify a particular alternative view of property rights, and confine this post to attacking this view. Without further ado:

1) Freedom disrupts patterns. The point of an egalitarian distribution would be to secure liberty for all, but it seems clear that any kind of real, effective liberty would produce inequality. In order to maintain equality, constant coercive redistribution would be needed. If the resource-left-libertarian is truly committed to liberty and effective self-ownership, then she must countenance the inequality that would result even if there was at one point an egalitarian distribution of resources. This was Cohen's argument in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality. But if the resource-egalitarian libertarian is comfortable with this, then her position seems to reduce to some claim that the thing that's wrong with our property regime is merely that it doesn't have the right sort of history. Is this a reasonable basis for a political philosophy? Is the problem with our society really just that a hundred years ago, things weren't alotted equally? I just don't think there's anything there.

2) Society is not like a situation where everyone comes to a negotiating table to claim their fair share, or where we all move away from a starting point to pursue our individual lives. The system of resource ownership is a dynamic and evolving system, with new participants coming and going all the time and different allocations of resources every day. If we wanted to ensure that everyone got a particular share of natural resources (regardless of what rule is used to determine what kind of share it would be), and we refused to engage in coercive redistribution (as this would seem to impinge upon effective self-ownership), we would seemingly need to have coercive enforcement of use limits. But these measures would require us to make projections about the future which we simply cannot make, and to make assumptions about the availability of natural resources which can't be based on anything besides speculation. The resource-egalitarian libertarians want this to be a rationalistic framework, but there's simply no objective way to do anything like this. Do we save a bunch of the gold for future generations? How much? Are we sure that someday people won't be able to make gold out of other stuff, making our non-use unnecessary?

3) Value and wellbeing do not come from access to natural resources. The value of natural resources is subjective, changes over time with different circumstances, and is not directly related to the value of the things that are made with those resources. Treating them like a commodity with timeless value doesn't make sense. And if they lack this special kind of status, then it's not clear why we should focus our entire political theory on them as if a proper way of dealing with them would fix all of our problems.

4) The original objection to the appropriation of the natural commons was based on the idea that natural resources provided the means for production. In today's society, the means of production are increasingly detached from natural resources. The lack of access to the means of production is not a lack of access to natural resources, and most people complaining about the former would look at you pretty strangely if you "solved their problem" by dealing with the latter. If lack of access to the means of production is a problem, then the solution will not be found in an egalitarian resource distribution.

There are probably other reasons I could offer in favor of rejecting this view, but I think those four will do for now. Hopefully that helps! [Note: I apologize for the sloppiness of this post; I wrote it right after I finished work...can you tell? If something is confusing in an interesting way, please let me know.]

Update:

Please see Joel Davis' critique of this post, as well as my reply.

Why Do I Call Myself a Left-Libertarian?

I received a very fair comment on my previous post, "On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process," from an anonymous reader, asking:

Reading this post, I am quite baffled why you name your blogspot libertarian-left.blogspot.com. How can you say that you work in the Left Libertarian tradition, when in this post you completely reject the ideas of all the most famous Left-Libertarians including Henry George and Steiner and Otsuka and Vallentyne? How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework? I cannot find aything leftist about your ideas. Exactly what distinguishes your beliefs from Right-Libertarianism pure and simple?

I thought it might be worthwhile to give that question a thorough answer, since I anticipate that it may come up again, and others might find this answer interesting.

There is definitely a tension within the world of libertarian thought regarding the meaning of the term, "left-libertarianism." One school of thought identifying itself as left-libertarian describes its ideas as upholding the libertarian conception of self-ownership while insisting that a just society would distribute worldly resources according to some egalitarian principle. This is the tradition into which writers like George, Steiner, Otsuka, and Vallentyne fall. As you rightly notice, I am clearly not a part of this camp [Update: I discuss this position in this post].

The other interpretation of the term "left-libertarian" has been offered by Roderick Long, building on Rothbard's (and later Samuel Konkin's) idea that libertarianism is more naturally allied with the political left than with the right. Dr. Long gives a really good explanation of his views in this interview. And as you might have gleaned from my description of this site on the sidebar, I basically agree with his approach.

I've been very conflicted about using the term "left-libertarian" to describe myself, as it's unquestionably true that the first meaning is more widely acknowledged and used today, and I'm not a big fan of inherently confusing terminology. But I'll offer two points in my defense. The first is simply that I chose the name for my website before realizing how deeply I disagreed with the folks in the Steiner camp, and the status quo has thus become somewhat entrenched.

But secondly, and more substantively, I don't think that left-libertarianism of the Steiner mold has much to do with leftism, except to the extent that it has something to do with egalitarianism and, in some sense, it views a non-egalitarian property regime as oppressive. The bread and butter of the left, I think, has always been to root out oppression and mistreatment in society and demand its rectification. And that has been my concern as well, as I search for different ways to think about the respect to which people are due and build ideas about living together that try to embody that respect.

Now, an important part of the commenter's question was this:

How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework?

This, I think, is a somewhat unfair reading of my earlier post. In the last section of that post, I wrote:

Perhaps it is the case that, as individuals who appreciate each other's value and moral worth, we owe it to each other to lend a helping hand in times of need. And if we did not lift a finger when others were facing crisis, that we would be failing to uphold our duties as morally responsible people. To say this implies no injustice in the market system which brings about unfortunate outcomes, nor does it imply that somehow we need to find some point in the past to serve as a "source" of injustice. Rather, we can think of distributive injustice as a recognition that in a community or society where so many live free of need, there are individuals among us who struggle to survive, without so much as a helping hand from their neighbors.

Of course, the mere existence of need and want surely cannot entail the presence of injustice. The same respect for the value of life which commands us to care about our neighbors also commands us to recognize the importance of living our own lives according to our own goals and desires. Earlier, we noted an idea from F.A. Hayek that coercion is evil because it "eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another." We suggested that the tragic need which drives individuals into exploitative labor relationships is evil for this reason as well. But we must now acknowledge that the attitude which places on the successful individual the burden of caring after the world's needy is evil for exactly the same reason (I discussed this in a previous post). Addressing one evil through the introduction of another seems like a questionable way to proceed. But it does not seem that either extreme -- ignoring the suffering of others or sacrificing oneself for the good of those in need -- is the correct one. What is needed is a balance between the two.

In saying this, I had hoped to address what I felt to be some of the important and relevant concerns that people on the left might have had in response to my argument. And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that other leftist concerns (e.g., about the proper social response to inequality, oppression, lack of opportunity, etc.) "cannot be incorporated into my libertarian framework."

My point was that these concerns cannot coherently be levelled as a moral objection to the market process itself. It was my hope to convey that a just society would not simply accept the often arbitrary, sometimes lamentable, and always sub-utopian products of the market process, insensitively brushing the unpleasant bits under the rug. The market process, I think, is just, and cannot be condemned wholesale because of its inherent potential to generate undesirable outcomes for some people. But I think that there is more to living together than the market process, and that the concerns of the left are valid reasons for searching for solutions outside of the typical consumeristic market paradigm. That, I think, is where the "left" in my "left-libertarianism" comes through.