Me From the Past!

So I was just alerted to the online availability of a brief presentation I gave at FEE's Young Scholars Colloquium last year, and I figured it would be worth posting here. I should note that the presentation was basically a response to not having enough student presentations to fill the time and needing one of the interns to jump in to eat space, so I don't pretend that anything particularly groundbreaking was said.

But without further ado, here's the link. My talk starts at 12:30, and discusses pollution taxes. In it, I make the claim that there are pollution taxes, and I'm not actually sure that's true...can anyone think of an example? That aside, I think it's pretty decent presentation, and I hope you all enjoy it!

My climate change presentation from this year's seminar will hopefully be coming online relatively soon -- and with video! -- so look forward to that...

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.

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!]

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.

On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process

This turned into a long, long post. But I really like it a lot, so hopefully you will too!

Introduction

This post started out as not much more than a stream of thought. But I'm pretty happy with where it went, so here's an introduction to help you figure out what the heck is going on. In this post, I wanted to explore the idea of distributive justice, basically just to get a handle on how I felt about it. I started by hammering out a few thoughts on the simple fact that we're not actually talking about the justice of an act of distribution, which has led some thinkers to reject distributive justice. In that section, I offer some reasons for thinking distributive justice can still make sense without an actual distributive act. I then consider what I take to be the most obvious objection to my argument, which comes from Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In the process of thinking about distributive justice through the lens of Nozick's argument, I end up rejecting Nozick's position, but I nevertheless arrive at a conclusion that I think might be unpalateable to most proponents of conceptions of distributive justice. I then offer some closing thoughts about why I think we can satisfy the desires of those who hold these views without depending on the idea of distributive injustice. Because I basically wrote this off-the-cuff, there might be a little less organization than normal, but I hope it will still be readable enough to get through.

Distributive Justice Without Distribution

The concept of distributive justice is an interesting one. After all, social resources are never actually distributed. So what can distributive justice mean when resources are never distributed? Some thinkers are quick to say, "nothing." But notice that there is more sense of the word "distribution". There is the sense where we take a distribution to be an outcome of an act of distribution, but there is also the sense of a statistical distribution. If the word "distributive" in "distributive justice" is to be understood coherently, I contend that it will need to be the statistical sense of "distribution" which informs our understanding of the term.

But how can a statistical distribution be just or unjust? After all, our normal conceptions of justice tend to apply between individual human beings, not vague statistical aggregates. Imagine a man who, after his ship struck a reef and sank, managed to swim to safety on a small, uninhabited island. Surely he would be at the far low end of the distribution of social outcomes. But could he coherently get upset at the reef for wronging him? At the island for being unjustly hospitable? At the cosmos for not preventing the shipwreck from happening in the first place? I don't think so. It seems important in thinking about justice that the problem be one where people could coherently have had a say in determining the outcome.

So injustice needs to involve people somehow, but does it need to be the result of human design? In "The Atavism of Social Justice," Hayek writes (58):

Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individuals supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individuals might conduct themselves as justly as possible, but as the results for separate individuals would be neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state of affairs could neither be called just nor unjust.

Surely it is true that each individual's fate in our spontaneously organizing society is not the intended outcome of the market process. And it also seems true that in most cases, no one would have been able to foresee exactly how things were going to turn out for each individual over any considerable time scale. Accordingly, we might think that Hayek is right to say that we cannot consider the outcome of a market process to be unjust. The outcomes of the dynamic market process are simply not within our control, and when thinking about its products, we might say that (to take a line from George Reisman [13]) "the proper way to regard them is as the equivalent of acts of nature."

But in Progress and Poverty, Henry George notes (7):

...just as...a community realizes the conditions which all civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the scale of material progress--just as closer settlement and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization of labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population--so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The "tramp" comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of "material progress" as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of the college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.

If George is right to note that the same forces which promote progress in society also explain the emergence of poverty, then it will be a seemingly hollow position to argue that the undesirable outcomes produced by spontaneous ordering mechanisms are unforeseeable and unintended. Surely we could not predict or intend that each individual consequence were going to occur, nor could we foresee exactly who would be affected, and how and when. But we could nevertheless predict with relative certainty that someone would be affected by the dark side of the market process. Consider this observation from Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (59-60):

Yes, we should keep an eye on Joe Smith. He has been thrown out of a job by the new machine. Perhaps he can soon get another job, even a better one. But perhaps, also, he has devoted many years of his life to acquiring and improving a special skill for which the market no longer has any use. He has lost this investment in himself, in his old skill, just as his former employer, perhaps, has lost his investment in old machines or processes suddenly rendered obsolete. He was a skilled workman, and paid as a skilled workman. Now he has become overnight an unskilled workman again, and can hope, for the present, only for the wages of an unskilled workman, because the one skill he had is no longer needed. We cannot and must not forget Joe Smith. His is one of the personal tragedies that, as we shall see, are incident to nearly all industrial and economic progress.

It seems to me that it is for this reason -- that is, it is because we can foresee that there will be undesirable consequences in a free market society, even if we can not foresee exactly what they will be -- that it can make sense to talk about distributive justice at all (I am here taking the opposite position as I did in this earlier post). As I discussed before, we cannot coherently do so if we have in mind an act of distributing, as no such act ever occurs. But to the extent that conceptions of justice apply to human conduct, and to the extent that a free market system is one way in which humans can conduct themselves in a social setting, it seems fair to think that we might be able to criticize the foreseeable statistical outcomes of the market process and ask whether something ought to be (or ought to have been done) about them.

But Wait! A Challenger!

Now in saying this, I will immediately be faced with an important objection, captured by Robert Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (161):

If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn't D2 also just?

In other words, it's important to notice that when we lament any of the outcomes of spontaneous free-market organization, we lament circumstances which seem to arise without anyone doing anything that we could coherently point to as having been wrong, or wicked. The problematic outcomes are typically either emergent, or the consequences of people doing things that we generally think they have every right to do (where there is blatant mistreatment, we generally wouldn't think of the problem as being one of distributive injustice).

So does that mean that the outcomes are just? There are three ways to dispute Nozick's argument: a) to argue that the starting point at which people find themselves in a market society is not actually just, b) to argue that what arises from a just initial position from just steps is not necessarily just, and c) to argue that, contrary to intuition, the consequences of market organization do not necessarily arise from just steps. I will consider each in turn.

What Makes a Starting Point Just?

In thinking about Nozick's D1, we will encounter two very different issues, which we will need to separate in order to proceed sensible. The first issue is whether any starting point in our market society can be legitimately pointed to as being, or having been, just. But the second issue, which is somewhat more important for our purposes, is whether the problems which are contained in the idea of "distributive injustice" are the products of unjust starting points -- that is, whether it would be helpful in disputing Nozick's conclusion to pursue this kind of argument. Because I think that the answer to the second issue is "No," I will only have a few words to say about the first issue, even though it is certainly worthy of a much more thorough discussion.

So is there a "just" starting point from which we can think of a market society as having proceeded? Clearly there is nothing that is literally a starting point which is relevant to our purposes. The free market is an organic, constantly evolving ecosystem of human activity. It started when people started working together (or more accurately, when primates or their predecessors started working together), and continues on until now. It has been characterized through its history by countless injustices, atrocities, and oppressions. These past wrongs have so thoroughly influenced the current state of the system that it would be incoherent to talk about "reversing the damage" that they caused. The people who are alive today would not even exist if history had not proceeded the way that it did.

So our starting point, no matter where we arbitrarily place it, will not represent a perfectly "just" starting point. But does that matter? To an extent, yes. But also, to an extent, no. As David Schmidtz writes in his book, Elements of Justice (212):

Dwelling too much on the past is wrong for the same reason that ignoring the past altogether is wrong: Excess in either direction reduces stability in transactions, thus making it harder to go forward in peace. A routine title search when buying a house (to verify that the seller's holding of the deed is in fact uncontested) is one thing; going back as many centuries as the land has been occupied is another.

But some will not object to our modern starting point because of mistreatment in the past, but rather because of the structure of the society in which we begin. Such a perspective is characteristic of the left-libertarians in the Steiner/Otsuka/Vallentyne mold, where the idea is that non-man made natural resources ought to be initially distributed according to an egalitarian principle.

It's here, however, that I want to pull the plug on this conversation, because as G.A. Cohen points out in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (105):

I believe...that no such constitution is to be discovered: no egalitarian rule regarding external resources alone will, together with self-ownership, deliver equality of outcome, except, as in the case of joint ownership, at an unacceptable sacrifice of autonomy. There is a tendency in self-ownership to produce inequality, and the only way to nullify that tendency (without expressly abridging self-ownership) is through a regime over external resources which is so rigid that it excludes exercise of independent rights over oneself.

In other words, the problems which concern those focused on distributive justice do not find their roots in the starting point from which social evolution proceeds. Lamentable market outcomes are not simply the outcomes of unjust or unequal initial distribution, or of historical injustice and oppression. Rather, they are a product of that evolution itself. So it will do the proponent of distributive justice no good to focus on this aspect of Nozick's argument. Accordingly, I will move on to the next avenue of objection.

Do Just Steps Preserve Justice?

The next way to object to Nozick's argument is to contend that something that arises as the result of just steps is not necessarily just, even if we don't want to object to the initial set of conditions. On its face, it seems pretty uncontroversial to say that if there's no problem with an initial condition, and all of the changes from that initial condition were perfectly legitimate and just, then we don't really have grounds for calling the outcome "unjust." We may lament them -- as Hazlitt above lamented the fate of the workman who was displaced by the machine -- but we may not have reason to say that the outcome is unjust. Perhaps it is merely unfortunate. This is the intuition which Nozick seeks to capture, and does.

But consider this: In his essay, "The Institution of Property," David Schmidtz suggests:

Note a difference between justifying institutions that regulate appropriation and justifying particular acts of appropriation. Think of original appropriation as a game and of particular acts of appropriation as moves within the game. Even if the game is justified, a given move within the game may have nothing to recommend it. Indeed, we could say (for argument's sake) that any act of appropriation will seem arbitrary when viewed in isolation, and some will seem unconscionable. Even so, there can be compelling reasons to have an institutional framework that recognizes property claims on the basis of moves that would carry no weight in an institutional vacuum.

If a game can be justified even though individual moves, when taken in isolation, might not seem justified, then why couldn't we say that a game can be unjustified even if none of its moves seem problematic? I see no reason why not.

And this seems like exactly the kind of objection that is being raised by the proponents of distributive justice. That is, the problem with the market order is not that it is characterized by unjust moves, but rather that it is supposedly an unjust game -- it is a game which generates consequences that are unacceptable, even if none of the players do anything wrong at any particular time. In other words, the allegation is that market orders generate emergent injustices.

But do they really? Is it somehow unjust of us, as participants in a market order, to "play the game" that we do? Some libertarians and free-market thinkers will point out that all it means to "play the game" of market organization is to relate to each other in a purely voluntry way. By this conception, it would seem unreasonable to think of participating in a market order as contributing to injustice. After all, in a system of purely voluntary interactions, one individual's wealth is not gotten at the expense of anyone else's interests. No one, then, is made worse off in any way to which they do not assent. It might here be noted that a state of poverty is the natural state of man, and that it is wealth that is the surprising anomaly. Accordingly, we might think of the alleged "injustice" of capitalism as simply the product of some individuals being "left behind" by the rising tide of progress.

Taking this point of view, we might come to the conclusion that a free-market order is not unjust. People who "play the game" are participating in a process which generates wealth for those who are successful, and which simply leaves the unsuccessful in their original state. We might lament the fact that we don't all win, but we would be hard-pressed to contend that this inherent inequality of outcomes is unjust. By this view, capitalism is a game which individuals play at their own peril, if they so choose; it is a system which allows each individual to do things the way that she thinks is best, on the condition that she respects others' right to do the same. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (2):

This is what the modern concept of freedom means. Every adult is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is not forced to live according to the plan of a planning authority enforcing its unique plan by the police, i.e., the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. What restricts the individual's freedom is not other people's violence or threat of violence, but the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production. It is obvious that man's discretion to shape his own fate can never trespass the limits drawn by what are called the laws of nature.

But G.A. Cohen disagrees with this way of looking at things, arguing in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality that within a market society, a property-less proletarian "must either sell his labour power to a capitalist or die" (100), and accordingly "lacks self-ownership, in an effective sense" (ibid). Cohen is seizing upon the idea that if the choice is between voluntarily living according to someone else's plans at unfavorable terms on one hand, and starving to death or dying of exposure on the other, the sense in which one is free to choose one's own fate is "merely formal" (ibid; italics original).

This point can be more fully appreciated by calling on a definition from F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (19):

By "coercion" we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another. Except in the sense of choosing the lesser evil in a situation forced on him by another, he is unable either to use his own intelligence or knowledge or to follow his own aims or beliefs. Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

Now, Cohen would not want to say that an individual employer forces a worker into his service -- that is clearly untrue. But he would likely want to contend that the market system, with its institutions of private property and endemic inequality, effectively coerces the proletarian with its choice between death and an emiserated survival by the grace of some exploiter. It is precisely because coercion is evil, by this point of view, that the so-called "free-market" system is unjust.

But if we are to condemn the system in which the proletarian is allegedly coerced, we must consider how the system supposedly brings about this state of affairs. Surely the objection to a market order is not raised to demand rectification for the fate of the person who led himself to financial ruin through bad decisions and poor judgment. Though we may lament such an outcome, it seems clear that we would not want to cite this sort of thing as an injustice. The critic of the market system is most plausible when targetting her objections at circumstances like the one discussed by Hazlitt above, where workers are displaced by the perpetual churning of the marketplace, or circumstances in which individuals are born into unfortunate lifestyles through an inherited lack of access to capital resources. We shall therefore examine each of these indictments in turn.

The destruction of existing order by dynamic market processes is indeed an inherent characteristic of a healthy market process. And it is therefore true that individuals may, as a result of this so-called "creative destruction" (to steal Schumpeter's term), find themselves in a position where they are effectively coerced by force of circumstances into a sort of proletarian existence. But I think that a good case can be made for the idea that this is simply a risk of participating in the market process. That is, it is surely a lamentable feature of that process that some people end up on the losing side, but I am unsure how we would justify calling this an unjust feature of the market. As F.A. Hayek writes in his essay, "Individualism: True and False" (21-22):

...if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice and that in consequence he be rewarded, not according to the goodness or badness of his intentions, but solely on the basis of the value of the results to others.

Perhaps I will need to think about this some more, but I can't see any reason for thinking about this sort of thing as anything more than an unfortunate characteristic of the market system.

More concerning, I think, is the state of affairs faced by the proletarian who is born into his situation -- forced by the nature of his upbringing into a sort of "wage slavery." The free-market proponent can undoubtedly point to a number of examples of such cases where through hard work, talent, and a little bit luck led the individual to a prosperous life. The critic can undoubtedly point to a larger number of such examples where no such thing took place. The point that the free-market critic makes in citing such examples is not that injustice cannot be overcome, as the free-market proponent's counterargument may often make it appear. Rather, the point is that such circumstances are unjust regardless of whether or not they can be overcome.

But how do these circumstances come about? The private property system itself seems like a popular target, given that the most obvious reason for the proletarian's state of affairs is her lack of access to the resources which would empower her to take better control of her life in order to direct it to her own ends, and the most apparent reason why she does not have access to those resources is a coercive set of institutions which will stop her if she tries to use them. As G.A. Cohen observes in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (55-56):

The banal truth is, if the state prevents me from doing something that I want to do, then it places a restriction on my freedom. Suppose, then, that I want to perform an action which involves a legally prohibited use of your property. I want, let us say, to pitch a tent in your large back garden, perhaps just in order to annoy you, or perhaps for the more substantial reason that I have nowhere to live and no land of my own, but I have got hold of a tent, legitimately or otherwise. If I now try to do this thing that I want to do, the chances are that the state will intervene on your behalf. If it does, I shall suffer a constraint on my freedom. The same goes, of course, for all unpermitted use of a piece of private property by those who do not own it, and there are always those who do not own it, since 'private ownership by one person presupposes non-ownership on the part of other persons.

But is the problem really that we have a society in which there are rules delineating who has the right of way with respect to the use of specific objects? As David Schmidtz writes in his book, Elements of Justice (157):

We cannot live together without rules that secure our possessions, thereby enabling us to plan our separate lives.

Even Karl Marx, in his essay on "Estranged Labour," allows that material possessions are critical to one's ability to find fulfillment and to shape one's own identity. Marx writes:

It is...in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.

The problem with the market system, it seems, is not that it is characterized by property rules. Rather, the problem appears to be that the proletarian doesn't have property, and is therefore not able to pursue the self-defining ends which both libertarians and non-libertarians prize. In other words, the alleged "injustice" of the market system is not that there is property, but rather that the proletarian doesn't have any.

The critic of the market system must therefore build his case on the idea that the injustice caused by the market system is in bringing it about that the proletarian is born into poverty. But this is where the case crumbles. The case crumbles because it is decidedly not the fault of the market system that the proletarian is born into poverty. Rather, it is the fault of the proletarian's parents that she is born into poverty. Neither the market system nor its propertied participants can be blamed for the fact that the proletarian was put into a position where she had to choose between being a wage-slave and dying. The fact that the proletarian did not simply show up on the scene, but was rather brought to the scene by her parents, seems to absolve "the system" of guilt for the proletarian's position, at least in my mind.

Now there are two ways that I can imagine someone objecting to this conclusion. The first would be to pointedly ask, "Are you seriously saying that poor people shouldn't have children?," and then to rattle off a list of reasons why I am a heartless, evil jerk. To this I would respond that if it is true that it is an injustice for someone to have to live a life of wage slavery, and if it is further true that a parent can foresee that by having a child, she will be condemning him to a life of emiserated labor, in which he will be unable to pursue his own fulfillment, then perhaps that is what I am saying. But I would qualify this claim with the important point that even poor parents can prepare their children for an active and fulfilling role in society by raising them well, and would therefore be responsible for no injustice in having a child. My only claim is that if we find an individual whose life we wish to declare an injustice because of his upbringing and the circumstances of his birth, then it would seem odd to place the blame elsewhere than on the individuals who were directly responsible for that upbringing and birth.

The second kind of response I can imagine would be to insist that the system can be blamed for the state of the parents (or the parents' parents, and so on) because of some past injustice which explains the cycle of poverty in the midst of which we find our proletarian. And while that response is perhaps a legitimate one, I would have to point the responder back to the previous section for my reply.

So, then, it seems to me that in declaring a distribution to be unjust, one cannot blame the market system itself, or the society which participates in that system, for unjustly "playing the game." The game, it seems to me, is not at fault for alleged distributive injustices.

At this point we should pause and retrace our steps. The problem with which we are here concerned starts with Robert Nozick's claim that any outcome which arises through just steps from a just initial starting point is itself just. We were concerned because this claim is at odds with the concept of distributive justice, which suggests that some of the outcomes of market processes are disturbing for intuitively moral reasons. We first asked whether we could save our intuitions by rejecting Nozick's implication that the market process has a just starting point, but concluded that this would not help our argument. In this section, we objected to the idea that just steps preserve justice, pointing out that a system of institutions can itself be unjust. We then considered whether or not the market system is itself an unjust system, and concluded that in the cases where we might intuitively want to identify distributive injustice, we cannot coherently blame the market system for unjustly bringing about those outcomes. Accordingly, rejecting this part of Nozick's argument will not help us to defend our intuitions about distributive injustice.

At the outset of our discussion, we said that there were going to be three steps in our examination, which leaves one left: the claim that the outcomes to which we object do not actually arise from a just initial starting position through just steps. But because we have objected to the structure of Nozick's argument, it will be irrelevant for us to explore this question -- we have seen that just steps do not necessarily preserve justice, and that it is irrelevant whether an initial starting point is in some sense "just." But we can rephrase the issue in light of the conclusions that we have drawn so far.

Ought We Really to Rely Upon the Market Process to Ensure Desirable Outcomes?

We will therefore ask: Even if we do not wish to take exception to some past state of affairs from which our current circumstances evolved, and even if we do not wish to claim that the market system itself is somehow an "unjust game," is it really true that we have no reason to object to the social process by which people have ended up in undesirable circumstances? Another (I think) equivalent way to think about this question is, if it is the case that undesirable outcomes arise for certain individuals purely through the normal workings of the market process (to which we do not want to object), and if those undesirable outcomes are allowed to stand, will it necessarily be the case that everyone has a claim to moral blamelessness?

In his essay, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Peter Singer writes:

...if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

In the example, we are not supposed to assume that the individual walking past the pond has put the child in the pond. No crime is supposed to have produced the child's unfortunate circumstances. And further, it is by no systemic injustice of the complex web of social interrelationships that the child is drowning. Yet if we simply watched the child drown, would that not seem wrong?

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.

With this realization, we can declare our analysis to be complete. I think I'm happy with this conclusion. Thanks for reading along!

What Does It Mean to Empower a Person's Life?: The Beginning of a Reply to Lapidus

Over at the University and State blog, I've started having a discussion with David Lapidus (a fellow contributor to the site) about the proper role of economic policy. David is a smart guy and an economist, but comes from a very different end of the spectrum from me. Because this blog is dedicated to bridging gaps between views and taking other perspectives into consideration, I'd like to discuss a few of the ideas that David has brought to the table. Hopefully in doing so, we will be able to see whether one or both of us is somehow wrong (because our views are inconsistent, or because we are taking improper account of certain facts), whether we have to agree to disagree, or whether we were actually on the same side all along.

In this post, I'd like to address something that David said in his comments to me, which I think reflects something that a lot of people think:

I believe that a government intervention in the economy should empower our lives or get out of our lives. I want to see the largest possible creation and accurate communication of value in the economy. In some areas of our capitalist economy the private sector does this best, while in others, the government does a better job.

In thinking about this idea, it will be important to ask ourselves several questions. Exactly what would it mean for the government to empower our lives? Can a government entity do this effectively and in a way that we would find morally acceptable? If so, is the federal government the best entity to carry out this task? I began writing this post intending to answer all of these questions, but it's quickly becoming clear to me that this is a pretty enormous project. Accordingly, this post will answer only the first question.

What does it mean to empower a person's life?

Generally, when we're thinking of empowerment, we have in mind the capacity to do things which are important to our flourishing and prosperity as individuals. Most simply, we identify empowerment with liberty. As Isaiah Berlin famously pointed out, there are two ways to think about liberty: a positive sense and a negative sense. In the negative sense, liberty is the freedom from obstacles, barriers, or interferences. In the positive sense, liberty is the presence of a capacity to do something.

Approaching liberty strictly in the negative sense (as many libertarians do), one might come to the conclusion that the best way for the government (or any other social decision-making entity) to respect the value of liberty would be to involve itself as little as possible in the affairs of individuals. But there are some problems with this view. Perhaps the most obvious is that in a world entirely free of barriers, anyone could do anything they wanted to anyone else. Surely this would not be desirable. In their everyday affairs, individuals need to have some conception of a "right of way" for the use and control of worldly objects (including themselves). This is generally embodied in some conception of "rights"; these are barriers which enable us to establish "mine," "yours," and "ours," as well as procedures for adjudicating disputes. These barriers need not be established or administered by governments, and historically, many of them were not the products of government intervention. But nevertheless, they represent areas where we acknowledge a need for limitations on our negative liberty in order to live together peacefully, respectfully, and productively.

But thinking about liberty from the negative perspective can lead us to an important insight: in actively imposing constraints on others, we need to have justification for what we're doing. In most liberal traditions, individuals are viewed as having a basic right to self-determination; we can constrain this right, but only with good reason. The need to find a way to live together can be a good reason, but it is not necessarily always a good reason. Some anarchists would be quick to point out that you don't necessarily need to live with me peacefully; we can go our separate ways and agree to disagree on the appropriate way to order society. In some ways, our modern state system embodies this idea on a global scale. Perhaps a society caring more about liberty would extend this notion to intra-state affairs. But the idea to take away from this is that most people accept the broad notion of a right to self-determination, and that an important part of this idea is that we need a good reason to constrain this right in others.

This focus on reasons for infringing on one's negative liberties leads immediately to the other conception of liberty: the positive one. Many would point out that negative liberty is well and good, but we need to acknowledge that the reason we care about not being constrained or interfered with is that we want to do stuff. Most libertarians would focus on the fact that we want to live our own lives without being subordinated to the will of others. Social norms which coordinate interaction through the recognition of rights and boundaries allows us to pursue those plans on our own, without harming others and without appealing to them for permission. As Mark Pennington notes in his essay, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism":

Market processes allow contradictory ideas to be tested simultaneously against one another without the need for majority approval. Employing the exit option enables individuals who dissent from the majority to follow their own ideas without impinging on the ability of those who support the majority opinion to follow theirs.

On the basis of insights like this, some hard-libertarians (to steal Arneson's terminology and accompanying scepticism) insist that these rules for interaction are the only sort of infringements on negative liberty that can be coherently justified by any view seeking to empower people. They reason that these boundaries help us to think about the treatment that others are due within a social context; we don't murder each other, take each other's stuff, or interfere with each other's business because to do so would be to disrespect the reasonably uncontroversial right to self-determination which we discussed above. Because of their fixation on negative liberty, they immediately construe any further infringement on negative liberty as an attack on liberty, broadly conceived. If we think about liberty and empowerment in this way, we would almost undeniably arrive at the conclusion that empowering people means setting and enforcing rules of social interaction which allow people to make their own plans and pursue their own ends without interference or subjugation.

But as Gerald Cohen points out in his book, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, "...the propertyless proletarian who cannot use means of production without a capitalist's leave suffers a lack of effective self-ownership" (94). The crude libertarian account seemingly leaves out an important component of positive freedom: the possession of the means for pursuing one's dreams. By insisting on adherence to socially defined right-of-way conventions, we allow for the possibility (and, if the world around us is any evidence, the probability) that a great many people would end up in pretty rough shape.

As a number of libertarians have pointed out over the years (perhaps most famously and memorably, Milton Friedman), there are a number of reasons why we might expect that a society which did a better job of protecting negative liberties would end up producing better consequences for the least well-off (though as productivity and ingenuity decreases the costs of tapping foreign markets, the "least well-off" shift from being poor Americans to the very much poorer citizens of other countries, often with unfortunate consequences for those poor Americans). As Ludwig von Mises noted in his book, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow:

There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.

But there's nothing about setting the rules of social interaction which necessarily and irrevocably requires that there be no people with vastly unequal access to the means necessary to pursuing a variety of lifestyles which are only open to those with a substantial command of social resources. And to the extent that empowerment has to do with our opportunities, such a lack of access would represent a lack of empowerment.

It must be noted in passing that this is not the same thing as a disempowerment; one person's poverty is not necessarily caused by others. As F.A. Hayek noted in his essay, "The Atavism of Social Justice":

...there can be no distributive justice where no one distributes. Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individuals supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individuals might conduct themselves as justly as possible, but as the results for separate individuals would be neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state of affairs could neither be called just nor unjust.

However, it may nevertheless be argued that an opportunity for empowerment exists to the extent that the government can deliver resources more those who have not been empowered by the market process, and who have an effective lack of positive liberty in light of their social position. Because as liberals, we generally like expansions of liberty, I think it's fair to say that if we ignore how it is that the government goes about empowering those individuals, we can relatively uncontroversially say that the empowerment itself is a good thing (setting aside, for the sake of discussion, objections from those who believe that the expansion of liberty is not necessarily such a good thing -- h/t Gregory Rader from a while ago).

I'm going to stop on this point for now, but I'm already working on the next part, focusing on whether the government could effectively empower people in this way without offending our moral sensibilities. When I've finished with that (rapidly ballooning) project, I'll post it as a followup (here).

Who Said Anything About Legitimacy?: A Long-Winded Reply to Brainpolice and Michael

Over on the Polycentric Order blog, Brainpolice has written up a response to my post rejecting the simple argument that taxation is theft. In the comments section of that earlier post, a fellow identifying himself as "Michaek" (which I assume to be a typo-ed "Michael") also left some remarks in disagreement with my arguments. I wanted to offer some thoughts on what both had to say, and will do so in this post. There are a number of themes running through the commenters' responses, and I will do my best to isolate them and address them separately. They are: a) There is a double standard problem in supposing that government officials can justify doing things which no ordinary person would be justified in doing; b) My goal is to offer a blanket justification for the State; c) I do not offer a coherent account of why a government should have any claim to its territory; and d) By arguing that the government has some claim to its territory, I am presupposing that the government is a legitimate institution without offering a compelling reason for thinking this.

I. There is a double standard problem in supposing that government officials can justify doing things which no ordinary person would be justified in doing

Brainpolice started his reply with the idea that our commonsense moral beliefs would lead us to condemn many of the kinds of things done by state agents if they were done by ordinary citizens. But as collective decision making power is centralized and expanded, people come to embrace a double standard between themselves and state officials. This leads them to condone actions on the part of state officials which they would decry if performed by ordinary citizens. Brainpolice therefore explains that the libertarian position is that state officials do not gain new rights as a result of their positions, and that if these rights are to be ascribed to them, the burden of proof should be on those who are invoking new rights, and not on those who simply insist that our commonsense ethical beliefs be universally applied. He writes:

...given certain nearly universal social norms (such as the shunning of murder, theft, arson, rape and kidnapping), if one wants to be consistant with those norms then one must aknowledge the degree to which the state contradicts those norms...

Now, one possible response is discussed by Lester Hunt in his essay, "Why the State Needs to be Justified":

Of course, someone might say, there is a sense in which our intuitive, pre-theoretical use of our moral ideas clashes with our intuitive, pre-theoretical application of our political ideas. When I think about myself, my next-door neighbor, or my uncle Harry, I think that, whenever any one of us promotes his or her goals by using coercion against someone who is not bothering anybody, we are doing wrong. When I think about a tax collector or an immigration official, I think pre-reflectively that they are right to go after the tax-evader and the Mexican immigrant, even though the tax evader and the Mexican are not bothering anybody. I think of the immigration official as if they were on a different plane from me, from my neighbor, from my uncle Harry. But why isn’t each way of thinking perfectly okay, on its own plane?

Like Hunt, I do not accept this kind of argument. So up front, here it is: I acknowledge that in many instances, the agents of the state do things which are completely impermissible by any coherent moral standard. The fact that they often get a pass simply because of their position is inexcusable. I don't think anything I said in my earlier post suggests that I believe that government officials deserve different kinds of treatment, but it bears repeating that moral standards are based on treating people the way that they deserve, and they don't deserve anything less when the person on the other end is wearing a uniform.

II. My goal is to provide a blanket justification for the State

This next point appears in both commenters' counterarguments, and focuses on the idea that I'm somehow trying to offer a blanket justification for "the State" or "a State." But there's an important point to be made here: I'm not trying to "prove" that any State is legitimate. What I'm saying is that in communities where the central decision-making apparatus is widely embraced, and where libertarians have moved into those communities by their own volition, it's not clear that they have a very strong case to back up their claims that they are being robbed through taxes.

Things would be very different, I think, if the members of a community generally did not approve of its government apparatus, and wanted to dissolve it. In such a situation, I think it would be reasonable for the community to ask for separation from the overarching State system, and I think that it would be appropriate for the State to grant that separation. I think it's incompatible with the attitude of respect for others' individuality and a full recognition of the fact of reasonable pluralism to seek to control of groups of others who do not want to be associated with you. In the same way, it would be inappropriate for the State to want to follow an individual out into the forest and to demand continued participation in the face of dissent, as I suggested in my original post.

But as Brainpolice points out:

...the "love it or leave it" argument is an epic fail because it presumes the legitimacy of the territorial dominion to begin with. It does nothing to explain why the state has such an arbitrary claim and why the individual must leave the state's dominion rather than the state leaving the individual's dominion.

If I think that the State should allow communities to secede without leaving their established locations, and that the justification for this applies equally to individuals, then it would remain to be explained why I don't think that individuals should be able to secede from their communities without leaving their existing land property. And on this I concede, if an individual wanted to secede from her community, it would be inappropriate for the community to demand that she stay involved, or leave the town. However, it's important to acknowledge what this would entail. The community, I think, would be perfectly justified in insisting that their new territorial boundaries be respected, and that the seceding individual confine herself to her own property. So if someone wanted to separate from the community and to live on her own without leaving her land, the community would ostensibly be justified in confining her there. It seems much more reasonable to think that a person would be best suited by simply leaving, and trading her land to someone who would like to be a part of the community.

III. I do not offer any coherent account of why a government should have any claim to its territory

But on what basis can centrally ordered communities justify their collectivistic existences in the first place? Brainpolice argues that:

...one must put foreward at least something resembling a theory or meta-theory of property in order to examine and explain the state's territorial claim and the individual's claim, and one must put foreward a theory of how states form (and not just some mythical fantasy). How did the state really acquire all this land, or didn't it? How would and individual or group manage to acquire an entire country? Endless absurdities arise in the attempt to legitimize this territorial claim.

Is it so absurd, though, to suppose that in an incorporated town or city which was established by charter (as, it is my impression, most towns and cities are), and which is populated by people who freely acknowledge their membership in their community, that the method of governance explicitly set out in the charter by which the community was established is an acceptable way for the community to administrate its affairs? It sounds like what Brainpolice is looking for is a theory of legitimate original appropriation which would allow a town or city to be considered the just holder of its territory. But as others have pointed out, there is no bulletproof theory of legitimate original appropriation for individuals, much less groups. The specific form taken by a society's institutions ultimately must be defined by the way that people choose to live together in a given community or region. Property rights give us a tool for determining who gets the right of way with regard to the use of certain resources. They allow us to say, "This belongs to me, so leave it alone." But they also allow us to say, "This is ours, and this is how it is to be used." As David Schmidtz writes in his essay, "The Institution of Property":

Private property...is the preeminent vehicle for turning negative sum commons into positive sum property regimes. However, it is not the only way. Evidently, it is not always the best way, either. Public property is ubiquitous, and it is not only rapacious governments and mad ideologues who create it. Sometimes it evolves spontaneously as a response to real problems, enabling people to remove a resource from an unregulated commons and collectively take responsibility for its management.

It seems reasonable to me that in the case of a chartered town or city, there is a pretty clear social convention which says that when the town or city was incorporated by its original settlers, the territory on which the settlement existed was to be administered as a municipality. And that's how the people who have lived in that territory ever since have chosen to live together. Surely, as I alluded to in my earlier post, there are good reasons to question whether this is really a wise way to do things. But that doesn't eliminate the fact that it's the dominant form of social organization in our present society. And once a set of institutions becomes generally accepted as the way things are done, then that's just that. There's no mysterious "social contract," to be sure, but rather a strong and widely accepted "social convention,"established by the community's first settlers and passed down to its current constituents. It's much the same principle that says that even though in America, a lot of the land people currently live on was violently expropriated from the Native Americans, today's society is governed by a set of conventions which recognize the current holders of that land as having a rightful claim to it, and that's the end of the discussion. It's just the way things are done.

IV. By arguing that the government has some claim to its territory, I am presupposing that the government is a legitimate institution without offering a compelling reason for thinking this

It's here that Michael's main objection comes to the fore:

The way I see it, the "love it or leave it" argument is circular: if we're trying to prove the legitimacy of the State, we cannot simply assume it to be legitimate. In asserting that libertarians must leave if they don't like the government, statists are assuming that the State's claim to territory is legitimate; but this is exactly what they have to prove!

So why am I starting with the idea that governments are legitimate institutions? Precisely because most people think that they are. I ask my readers to keep in mind that I'm a libertarian, and certainly don't think that the way that most societies are run is appropriate. But a whole lot of people out there think that they live in a perfectly healthy society, and that their existing institutions are just fine. Why, then, would we want to fundamentally disturb their lives by forcing them to swallow our particular brand of freedom? Ultimately, the sense in which someone is free is at least partly impacted by what he is free to do. And for a lot of people, the best use of their freedom would be to get on with their lives and not have to deal with the radical social change that would be precipitated by the dissolution of the state. To the extent that people are generally happy with the way things are, the status quo is an acceptable way to run things.

It's when people insist that everyone live the way that they want to live that I start to object. But that goes both ways! Libertarians who insist that loyal citizens must disband their governments are in a lot of ways just as bad as the statists to whom they're responding. Statists should feel no need to control the way that libertarians want to live their lives, and so if libertarians want to go establish a community somewhere according to their own ideals, that should be totally fine -- we shouldn't have to move to Somalia to do it. But libertarians also shouldn't want to control the way that statists live their lives. If the statists want to have centrally organized communities, where rents are collected in order to sponsor public programs, they should be able to do that.

So hopefully this extremely lengthy response has been helpful and thought-provoking. If not, sorry for putting you through it. I look forward to any further comments anyone may have!