If You Don't Like It, Should You Git Out?: A Reply to Fedako

Update: Please see the bottom of this post for further discussion

In his article, "Ethics and the Holidays," Jim Fedako makes a point that should be familiar to any libertarian worth her salt:

...when I advocate for the state to force my neighbor to pay for my desires, I am advocating for nothing less than theft. While I am not toting the gun, my well-armed partner, the state, is.

We've all heard it before, and we'll undoubtedly hear it again. But there's something about the whole "Taxation is theft!" thing that makes me uneasy. I mean, don't get me wrong: I think there's something very fishy about the way that societies around the world are presently organized, and I think that if we really sat down and asked ourselves how we really wanted to live with each other, we'd come up with an answer that would look a lot different than what we currently have. But there's something about simple "proofs" of our current order's evil nature that makes me uncomfortable. So in this post, I want to explore the idea that maybe things aren't as simple as the "Taxation is theft!" crowd seems to believe. I've touched on this issue before in this post and this post, but I wanted to give it a little more thorough a treatment here so I can either be done thinking about it or give myself reason to believe that I don't know what I'm talking about.

First, why might somebody think that taxation is theft? The answer is pretty simple. It's pretty safe bet that at no point in the past did any government official ever do anything productive with your land property on behalf of the government. It's also pretty certain that when your land property was incorporated into the United States government's territory, no one came over to the then-owner and said, "Hey there; would you like to sign your land over to the new State?" (That is, assuming that anyone even owned that land at the time.) The same thing is probably true of the land on which your workplace is located, and the land on which your firm's customers are located, and the land on which your suppliers are located, and so on and so forth. Aside from its declaration of sovereignty over all of that land, some might note that there is basically nothing that the government has done to generate any sort of claim to ownership of any of it.

And yet, when you get your pay check from work, you and your employer are expected to set aside a portion of your earnings to be sent to your overlords. The same thing happens when you buy something from someone else, when someone gives something to you, when you sell an ownership stake in a company, etc. If you refuse to do these things, you'll hear about it -- politely at first, and then a little more firmly, and so on until the next thing you know, you're sitting in jail for tax evasion and your relatives are ashamed that you would dare to be such a corrupt and unsavory fellow. On what grounds? Because the government claims the role of sovereign, and you'd better pay up. That sounds a lot like theft.

But we libertarians have grown accustomed to a pretty standard response: If you don't like it, then you should giiiit out! There are a number of replies to this assertion, but I want to look a little more closely at the intuition behind it, and ask, if I don't like it, should I really git out?

The first thing to notice about the "If you don't like it, you should git out!" line of thinking is that it seems to imply that you are voluntarily "in" some sort of group, and you are free to leave if you want. Usually, when we are told to git out for not liking something, it's because we're part of some organization or collection of people who are comfortable with the terms of their association, and don't want that status quo to be upset by some dissenter in the minority. Basically, the idea is, "Well we like things just the way they are, so if you want to do something different, go do it with someone else." This is the same line of thinking that leads people to confront anarcho-capitalists with the view that "If the State is so horrible, why don't you go move to Somalia?" Thieving or not, a number of people seem quite happy with their governments, and don't want their lives fundamentally altered by some overzealous social reformer trying to ram a particular conception of freedom down their throats.

In stark contrast, the "Taxation is theft!" line of thinking is predicated on the idea that your being "in" your current set of circumstances is very much not a product of your free choice. Government, it is supposed, has been forced upon you -- you are the victim of a hostile takeover! -- and in demanding to be rid of taxes, you are simply asking to be given back what was yours in the first place.

But is this really a fair appraisal of the way things actually happened? It seems to me that there is some serious room for doubt. Most of us do not live on land that was owned by our families since the establishment of the United States (or whatever country we live in). Somewhere along the line, we or someone who came before us purchased a piece of property which had been incorporated into the State, knowing full well that in doing so, we were entering into a set of arrangements with our local, state, and federal government. Between the original settlement of the land hundreds of years ago and the time we bought it (or our parents or benefactors did), there was almost certainly some expropriation, but it typically did not happen to us (or, typically, anyone we can point a finger at). In an important sense, then, we "came to the harm."

The proponent of the "Taxation is theft!" mindset may note, however, that even if everyone "came to" their relationship with the government, it nevertheless does not have a legitimate existence; its territorial claims are almost universally rooted in tacit submission at gunpoint, and so we ought to throw off the shackles of State servitude and build our future on the basis of voluntary associations. Not only is the State an illegitimate entity, they could argue, but it is the institutionalization of the violence of the many against the few. An enlightened and reasonable society would recognize that the State is evil -- a stationary bandit -- and cut it off at the roots.

But then we remember that life isn't necessarily about living in a theoretically ideal society. Jim Fedako opens his article with a perfect illustration:

It had to be the time of year. How else can I explain it? Regardless, there I sat in an inner-city recreation center, enjoying a children's holiday program when this thought disturbed the performance: I do not mind my tax dollars paying for this.

The reality is that for most Americans, this sentiment is not a strange exception. People are proud of their local public schools, professional sports teams, and state universities, though they pay out the nose for them whether or not they ever make use of their services; they laud the highway system and electricity infrastructure that is built and maintained for them with subpar quality and at exorbitant expense; they celebrate their homeless shelters and low-income housing, even if they sometimes actually perpetuate or exacerbate the very problems they were meant to solve; they take comfort in their state-run prisons, in spite of the astronomical recidivism rate, unconscionable inmate conditions, and incredible expenses; they feel safe because they know that they are protected by their police force and military, even though the majority of people targeted by both groups are innocent of harming anyone. They don't want to live in a grand social experiment; they want to live the way that they're used to living. A case could be made for their being sheep-like in some ways, but the fact remains that if you take a sheep out of its pasture, it's still a sheep.

What's more, if asked how they would want to associate with each other if granted their freedom from the government, most would probably describe a set of social institutions very much like the ones they already know. So here's a question to consider: if most people would probably voluntarily form the kinds of communities they already live in if given the choice, are we so doctrinaire as to force them to go through the hassle of actually doing that? Can't we just let them keep the institutions they already have? If we don't like it, might it not actually be best to git out?

I think the answer would be a little more clear if gitting out were easier. As it stands, gitting out doesn't simply mean going off and finding an empty space in which to set up shop, out of the way of other groups. Let's say I moved into the forest somewhere with a few like-minded people and started up a community where we could live the way that we chose to. Presumably, that would be "gitting out" in the relevant sense. But if they wanted to, government officials could show up at the gates of my new community and demand to know when we were planning on paying taxes for all the transactions going on in our town. And heaven forbid we should start trading with the outside world!

If gitting out meant that I had to find an unoccupied space where I could live without bothering anyone, I think it's fair to say that if I live in a town where most people like their existing system of governance, then if I don't like it, I should git out. But if it meant that I would have to buy a plane ticket to Somalia, then I think it's pretty fair to cry foul. Why, the ardent libertarian asks, is it fair for the State to follow my into the forest and demand that I pay it taxes, even if I want no part in it?

And it's here that the crux of the issue comes back into focus: the "statist" would respond that it's because I live "in the State's territory." In our story, I just went out into the uninhabited forest and built a new life for myself where I was not materially impacting anyone. As a Lockean might say, I enclosed unowned land out of the commons by incorporating it into my plans and goals, where no one was using it in any appreciable sense before. So on what grounds does the State have a legitimate claim to the land I just settled?

Now, I'm generally hesitant to invoke Locke because I think that the vocabulary of the Lockean homesteading framework is often too clumsy to capture the nuances of plausible conceptions of property. But this seems like it's a paradigm case of Lockean engrossment -- that is, of someone staking a claim to a part of the commons that they cannot use for any productive end. In this case, we are implicitly saying that the State has claimed an ownership title to all of the land within a particular area, even though the agents and members of the State association have not so much as seen large swaths of that land (especially if we limit ourselves to living people associated with the State), never mind put them to productive use. As John Simmons writes in his essay "On the Territorial Rights of States":

...the spirit of Locke's theory of property is, I think, consistent with allowing that modest common holdings of land can be legitimated by the exclusive use of the commons by society's members for gathering, recreation, or shared activities, independent of any "common consent" to this that other societies may have given. What the spirit of Locke's account condemns--rightly, I think--is the familiar practice of states' declaring as the common property of their members (perhaps on the grounds of their "manifest destiny") vast and unused spaces, simply to facilitate defense or future settlement and expansion.

Of course, I don't expect any arguments to be won by appeal to something Locke or Simmons said. But I do think that it's important to consider whether it's really appropriate for those who consider themselves part of, say, the United States to want to follow dissenters into the forest and demand that they pay "their share" of taxes, or else ship off to Somalia. If a group of people didn't like the way that their society was organized, and sought to independently make a new life for themselves more in line with their own ideals, wouldn't it be sort of unbecoming to insist on having an active say in the way they did things, or to demand that they continue to contribute to the causes that we believed were important but that perhaps they rejected? Wouldn't it be sort of fair to compare something like that to the United States trying to tell Canada what to do, or demanding that its citizens pay taxes to the American government? I think the reasonable and civil thing to do would be to agree to part ways peacefully, and to seek interactions on mutually beneficial terms while keeping our hands to ourselves.

So in closing, it will be useful to wrap up what's been said so far. First, I pointed out that the "Taxation is theft!" case is kind of weak when we acknowledge that people voluntarily bought the land on which they live, and knew that it had been incorporated into the State before they bought it. I further suggested that because most people living in centrally ordered communities are perfectly happy with their social arrangements, and because destroying those arrangements would likely disrupt their lives in really undesirable ways, it might be best for dissenters to try to find their own way without demanding that everyone else change on their behalf. But finally, I argued that if people want to do that, then they should be allowed to without having the other members of the State following them and demanding that they still participate in State affairs and be subject to the State's rulings. In making these points, I hope that I have shown why the extremely simple way in which the issue of taxation was addressed in Fedako's article was inadequate, and that a more reflective stance would both acknowledge the importance and legitimacy of the centrally-funded children's program he was enjoying, and insist that while those who don't like it should git out, it's important that really we let them do that if they choose to.

Update:

Please see Brainpolice's response to this post on the Polycentric Order blog, and my reply here.

When It Comes to the Environment, Why Discount?: A Reply to Carden

I apologize in advance for the quote-bombing in this post, but a) I find that footnotes don't mix well with blog posts; b) I wanted to make sure that the references were preserved so that people can go back later and check out some of the sources that helped guide my reasoning here; and c) I didn't feel like putting in the effort necessary to polish this into a finished piece -- it's late. Maybe I'll revise it later. But without further ado:

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In his article, "Should We Be Recycling Paper or Building Battlestar Galactica?," Art Carden asks:

If environmental stewardship obligates us to be mindful of future generations in making our day-to-day decisions, what should we do? Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and try to find ways to build something like the Battlestar Galactica so the species will be preserved?

To answer this question, Carden turns to the issue of how future conditions should be compared to conditions today -- that is, how the future should be discounted against the present. He explains that "Questions about 'the world we are leaving for our children' and complaints about the alleged short-sightedness of present generations are ultimately claims that we are discounting the future inappropriately," and so the appropriate social discount rate becomes the focus of his analysis.

Carden is correct to point out that different approaches to discounting the future can have very significant consequences on the way we evaluate different sets of outcomes. In their essay, "Uncertain Discount Rates in Climate Policy Analysis," Richard Newell and William Pizer discuss a range of plausible discount rates which could be applied in forming climate change policy. They note that "Looking 400 years into the future, the plausible 2-7% range of discount rates has a corresponding difference in discounted values of 200 million-to-1. And there is little justification for narrowing our range..." Stephen Gardiner builds on this idea in his essay, "Ethics and Global Climate Change," pointing out that when the rate used to discount future events is positive, "all but the most catastrophic costs disappear after a number of decades, and even these become minimal over very long time periods." Carden himself is aware of this difficulty, acknowledging that on the other hand, using too low of a discount rate will force us to recognize that "at some point, the sun will die out and the planet we are so concerned about protecting will someday be no more, all else equal."

Further complicating this issue is the fact of radical uncertainty surrounding predictions about the future, especially when discussing people's values. In order to properly discount future events, we would need to know what those future events would be. But in their essay, "Carbon Dioxide and Intergenerational Choice," Ralph d'Arge, William Schulze, and David Brookshire suggest that even if we forget about the difficulties faced in predicting the physical outcomes of our actions:

...given changing lifestyles, substantial future shifts in technologies, and probabilities of drastic world political-social events, any quantitative measures of benefits or costs in 100 years are not subject to better than 2-4 orders of magnitude accuracy, and may even switch sign...

Thomas Schelling drives this point home in his essay, "Climate Change: The Uncertainties, the Certainties, and What They Imply About Action":

...what will the world be like in 50, 75, or 100 years when climate change may become acute? Think back seventy-five years: what was the world like, compared with now? Will the world be as different from now in seventy-five years as it is now from seventy-five years ago? How would we, seventy-five years ago, have predicted the consequences of climate change in today's world, and who are the "we" who might have predicted those consequences?

Accordingly, John Broome writes in his book, Counting the Cost of Global Warming, "Cost-benefit analysis, when faced with uncertainties as big as these, would simply be self-deception." So at this point, you might be ready to throw your hands up in frustration and demand to know why we should even bother thinking about this at all, since anything we come up with will likely be ad hoc and speculative. And that would be a good question: why should we be thinking about this in the first place?

Let's return to the point that got us started on this whole subject: Carden wrote, "Questions about 'the world we are leaving for our children' and complaints about the alleged short-sightedness of present generations are ultimately claims that we are discounting the future inappropriately." But is it true that questions about the world we leave behind ultimately reduce to questions about the appropriate way to discount the future?

Some people don't think so. In his essay, "Environmental Risk, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics," Kristian Ekeli argues that "To discount the future implies that current interests and preferences count for more than those of future generations." Accordingly, Newell and Pizer note that "Many economists...have argued that it is ethically indefensible to discount the utility (i.e., well-being) of future generations--although this does not imply a zero discount rate for their consumption..." So by asking how exactly we should discount, we seem to ignore the important idea that it might not be appropriate to even approach this question in terms of discounting. If we really care about the condition of our descendents, it seems unclear why we would think of their well-being as being inherently less important than ours. But if we do not discount the future, then are we committed, as Carden seems to suggest, to the view that we should begin preparing to save our species from the end of the world?

I say, not so fast. It will be immediately apparent upon reflection that Carden's approach to this issue is blatantly utilitarian. The idea seems to be that the appropriate task of the social critic is to evaluate a society's decisions against the benchmark of aggregate well-being in order to determine whether or not people are doing what's best for everyone. But as David Schmidtz points out in his book, Elements of Justice, sometimes we get better outcomes when we don't actively aim to engineer a utilitarian ideal. Schmidtz writes:

A reflective consequentialist morality is not about one versus five. It is not even about costs versus benefits. It is about how we need to live in order to be glad we are neighbors. It's about getting on with our lives in way [sic] that complements rather than hinders our neighbors' efforts to get on with their own.

So even if we adopt a utilitarian mindset, it is not clear that the appropriate way to approach the issue of environmental destruction is to try to calculate the costs and benefits of alternative social policies. As we noted above, we are faced with serious uncertainty at every turn -- it could even turn out that by acting to promote wellbeing by being more focused on the well-being of future people, we would actually make them worse off. For example, imagine if in the industrial revolution, people were prohibited from burning coal to avoid causing mercury pollution. Our fish would be safer to eat, our natural environment would be healthier, and many of our children would avoid being harmed by toxic exposure to the metal, but I imagine that few would argue that on the whole, the policy would have been for the best.

Perhaps, then, the best way to provide for the future would be to focus on the world we live in today. There are plenty of things that we can do to make the world a better place: search for a cure for AIDS, learn to live in peace with one another, and yes, even develop an appreciation and respect for the natural world. As Aldo Leopold wrote in his book, A Sand County Almanac:

Only those able to see the pageant of evolution can be expected to value its theater, the wilderness, or its outstanding achievement, the grizzly. But if education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

If we turn our focus to making our world a better place for today, the society we pass on to future generations will make for a much better place to live for our posterity as well. And I think that's something we can all agree to promote.

That being said, I have left an important issue unaddressed: Is environmental destruction unjust? An important objection to the utilitarian approach to looking at the world which we have used thus far is that it fails to take proper account of the seperateness of persons. If by acting in a particular way with respect to the non-human environment, we treat others (whether today or in the future) in a manner contrary to an attitude of appropriate respect for their value as individuals, then we must think long and hard about our actions. As Robert Nozick writes in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, "...there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives."

I cannot give the question of whether environmental destruction or degradation is unjust the attention that it deserves here, largely because I have not entirely settled the issue in my own mind. But I think that it will suffice for now to suggest that if we are to discuss environmental destruction and degradation from an ethical point of view, it will not do to approach the issue from the standpoint of utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. We must acknowledge that we do not always have the power to consciously shape the future in accordance with our desires, and that sometimes, the greatest successes in living together come from letting people get on with their own lives. If we are to find reason for conscious and organized action in response to environmental damage, it seems to me that an attribution of injustice would be the appropriate way forward. And so I think that while Carden's attempt to grapple with this issue was admirable, I have to conclude that he sort of missed the boat.

Some Thoughts on the Limits of Austrian Analysis

I posted this on the LvMI forum, and figured it might be relevant to some of y'all, so I'm reposting it here. This is in response to a fellow going by nazgulnarsil suggesting that critiques of Austrian methodology stem from disputes about the purposefulness of human action. It also ties in to a conversation that I had with Peter Leeson over the summer and meant to develop on this blog, so I'm glad I'm finally getting to say something about it. Without further ado:

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The way I see it, it's sort of like this: It's not that action isn't purposeful; if we define an "action" as involving deliberation, choice, and execution, then it's true that action is purposeful. This is true because of the way we've defined "action;" it's an analytical truth. But some people (myself included) would point out that not everything we do involves deliberation, choice, and execution. The most obvious examples are reflexive or conditioned behaviours: when you strike my knee, my leg shoots up; when I sneeze, my hand automatically darts to cover my mouth; when someone asks me how I am, I rarely think before responding, "I'm doing alright." If I don't deliberatively choose to do these things, then the Austrian logic falls apart; it's no longer true a priori that I purposefully did them, or that I believed that doing what I did was for the best. One may be able to argue that I didn't actively restrain myself from doing those things, but the Austrian claims don't apply to unintentional ommissions, they apply to actions.

The same sort of problem presents itself in other areas: Austrian analyses are correct, but they sometimes don't apply. For another example, if a business actively chooses to not hire an additional employee, it can be presumed that they didn't believe that doing so would be profitable; in their eyes, the marginal cost of the employee would be larger than her marginal product. But if the business never considers hiring a new employee, we can't say anything.

Austrians could argue (and often have to me) that economics can't be concerned with anything besides actions; we simply can't say anything useful about non-purposeful behavior. And that may be true. But it does limit our ability to look at the real world and arrive at any conclusions: concepts like "demonstrated preference," for example, can be seen to be troublesome when we don't understand exactly what was deliberately chosen (or what people thought they were deliberately choosing), and the all-too-typical Austrian tendency to look at market processes with satisfaction can be seen to be wanting for the kind of entrepreneurial perspective that the Austrians themselves pioneered. To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that Austrians don't possess the tools to think properly about these things; they clearly do. Mises, Hayek, and Kirzner were the ones who introduced me to these problems, and the more perceptive Austrians are well aware of them. But as I noted in a previous blog post, these factors inherently limit the capacity of Austrian theories to be applied to real-world events. We often simply cannot know that the phenomena we observe warrant the descriptive terms used by Austrian analyses, and if we can't correctly apply those descriptors, the cogent a priori analysis flatly does not follow.

Moderate Holism and Methodological Individualism: Towards a Reconciliation

As someone with some contact with the Austrian economics community, I've often been involved in discussions about methodological individualism (often taking a "Me vs. Everyone Else" format). This issue came up again for me in glancing over Walter Block's essay, "On Robert Nozick's 'On Austrian Methodology,'" and I figured it might be worth trying to write up a post to spell out my take on this issue.

Basically, my issue with methodological individualism has been that if it's presented in a way that makes it plausible, it ends up sounding a whole lot like moderate holism. Here's what I mean:

Moderate holism, as I understand it, is the view that there are group phenomena, but that those group phenomena are the consequences of the activities of their components. So for example, when hockey players work together as a team, one cannot readily interpret their actions without making reference to the group phenomenon of the hockey game. The left defenseman holds the puck behind the net, waiting for a line change, then makes a crisp first pass up the ice to the center streaking across the red line. Confronted by the opposing team's "back-checking forwards as he crosses the blue line, he makes a drop pass to a pinching right defenseman, who fires the puck towards the net. The opposing goalie makes a sloppy kick save, sending the rebound into the slot, where the left wing is waiting -- an easy tap in goal. The red light goes on, the crowd cheers, and the goal horn blasts...it's all completely familiar (to us hockey fans, that is -- the rest of you can take a hike). But what we see in a hockey game is only comprehensible by understanding the social context in which the actions take place.

One might imagine someone who had never been exposed to sports before asking, "But why does everyone cheer when that black disk goes into that mesh enclosure?" or "Why did that man just skate into that other man and knock him over?" The answer would essentially be, "Because they're playing hockey." But when we explain hockey to someone, we don't talk about the individual players' biographies or the reasons why a bunch of people like to pay money to watch other people skate around wearing special clothes in a big building with a frozen lake inside. We make reference to a set of conventions that, in an important sense, are separate from the individuals who act out those conventions at any particular time. We say, "Hockey is a game where people form two teams and try to score points by putting a black disk in the other team's net. Many people who watch hockey a lot choose a team to root for from a group of teams called the National Hockey League, and care very much about the performance of their team relative to other teams in the league."

In order to attack this point of view, the methodological individualist might argue that actually, hockey can and should be understood as simply the sum of all individual events that embody the conventions of the game of hockey, as understood through reference to the points of view of each individual actor involved in the social situation. In other words, that when we make reference to the social convention of hockey, we're really just using lazy verbal shorthand for the collection of individual instances of events understood by participants to be "hockey games." Such a response, though, would need to answer to the fact that we understand what it means to be "playing hockey incorrectly." And we don't mean by this that someone else's way of playing hockey does not match our own. It embodies a belief in hockey as an "objective" set of conventions which is not open to the kind of pluralism that an individualistic theory would seem to have to accommodate. I'm not sure what could be said about this. Maybe there's a good response, though; if so, I'd love to hear it.

Another problem arises from the fact that it is comprehensible to talk about "the good of the team," as apart from the good of each individual player. For example, it could be that there's a badly performing hockey team that isn't going to make the playoffs. At the end of the season, the players all might very strongly desire to save their sense of dignity by playing as hard as they can, winning a few extra games before they start their summer break. But perhaps by doing so, they raise their team's position in the standings, meaning that the team doesn't get as good of a draft pick. Everyone on the team could be made better off by this, but the team might suffer anyway. Again, I don't know how one would respond to this problem.

The other way that the methodological individualist could respond would be to insist that actually, the existence of inherently social phenomena like hockey is perfectly compatible with methodological individualism. This seems to be the approach implicit in Block's discussion (though it's not clear to me that this is the case); he seems to found methodological individualism on the idea that only individuals act, and there is no "group mind" which controls group phenomena. Given that there's nothing that happens in hockey besides the things that are brought about by the individuals who are involved, someone like Block might point out that "See? There's no group-anything going on; there are just people in there!"

But as I understand the position, moderate holists don't need to suppose the existence of a "group mind" at all, and many of them (if not most or all) don't do anything of the sort. I mean, even Marx was content with the notion that "...circumstances are changed by men..." and presumably the methodological individualist would not want to claim Marx as part of her team (I don't say that because I have a problem with Marx; it's just that if Marx is a methodological individualist, then methodological individualism is a blatant misnomer). So as I see it, the plausible methodological individualist is actually holding a position which is pretty much identical to moderate holism. And because moderate holism explicitly accommodates social phenomena, and because methodological individualism is widely held to refer to a position which is incompatible with moderate holism, I don't see any reason for people to identify themselves that way.

So why do they do it? My theory is that it comes from being influenced by people like Mises, who were reacting to radical holists who did believe in the existence of a "group mind" (like Hegel). But since Mises wrote, philosophy has progressed, and I think it's become pretty clear that methodological individualism wasn't quite an appropriate way to look at the world (though not really because people like Mises were wrong; radical holism is still ridiculous, and for the reasons that the early methodological individualists understood). I think that if pressed, someone like Mises would have agreed that a completely reductionist way of understanding social phenomena is not appropriate. So I hope that the descendents of the methodological individualists can do the same.

Some Stillborn Ruminations on Procedural Justice in a Pluralistic Society

Anyone who pays attention to this blog (that is to say, probably none of you) will be aware that I've been having some trouble thinking about the legitimacy of enforcing justice in light of reasonable pluralism. The problem is basically this: Even if we ignore existing disagreement about the precisely correct principles of justice (which could conceivably be the product of such principles' nonexistence), I take it that there is no objectively legitimate procedure for enforcing justice such that no one could reasonably disagree with the legitimacy of having those procedures imposed upon them. (Rothbard disagreed on page 208 of Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, but since he didn't actually offer an argument...whatever.)

In his essay, "Liberal Neutrality: A Compelling and Radical Principle," Gerald Gaus suggests that legitimizing coercion requires impartial justificatory reasons -- reasons that it would be unreasonable not to accept as justifying the act in question. I agree. But if there is reasonable pluralism about procedural justice, then it's conceivable that the mere descriptive features of a set of procedures would fail to serve as impartial justification for the imposition of those procedures on someone. That is, if I hadn't personally agreed to abide by a certain set of procedures, and I didn't accept the legitimacy of those procedures (and I were being reasonable about my disagreement), then how could others justify imposing those procedures on me? In the absence of reasonable pluralism, this problem could be avoided by designing a procedure with the "correct" features, which would impartially justify imposing the procedure on people. But if people can reasonably disagree about what would be procedurally legitimate, then it might be impossible to design a system that could be impartially imposed on people.

This leads to an obvious problem. In order to have a functioning society, it seems important that there be a way to legitimately enforce justice by imposing impartial procedures on people who do things like commit crimes or destroy other people's property. As even anarcho-capitalist thinkers allow, purely voluntary settlement of disputes will not always be up to the task of ensuring that justice is served. For example, in For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray Rothbard writes:

Even if purely voluntary arbitration is sufficient for commercial disputes...what of frankly criminal activities: the mugger, the rapist, the bank robber? In these cases, it must be admitted that ostracism would probably not be sufficient--even though it would also include, we must remember, refusal of private street owners to allow such criminals in their areas. For the criminal cases, then, courts and legal enforcement become necessary.

Rothbard's understanding of libertarian ethics is not one that I share, but the points at which I depart from Rothbard in practice are typically places where Rothbard is dogmatically opposed to using force, even when I don't think it would be disrespectful of the user of force to do so (in theory, we disagree more fundamentally, but often arrive at the same conclusions). Accordingly, if Rothbard can find a plausible solution to this problem within his more rigid ethical paradigm, it will likely satisfy my requirements as well. So what does he say?

Rothbard envisions that in a society without a centrally imposed set of procedures, individuals would ostensibly maintain a membership with a court organization to help them to settle their disputes. In the event that criminal charges were brought against an individual, the court of the plaintiff party could hold a trial, and if the defendant were found guilty, she would have the opportunity to go to her own court and ask for a second opinion. If her own voluntarily selected procedure resulted in a proclamation of innocence, the two court services could seek a third opinion from an "appeals" court. Rothbard immediately acknowledges the infinite regression he's building, and points out:

But suppose Brown [the defendant] insists on another appeals judge, and yet another? Couldn't he escape judgment by appealing ad infinitum? Obviously, in any society legal proceedings cannot continue indefinitely; there must be some cutoff point.

So basically, Rothbard's answer is, "Well yea, but don't be ridiculous." And to a point, I accept that reply, but it doesn't actually address the question we're posing here. However, even though Rothbard doesn't really solve the problem with which we're grappling, he does provide an important insight: someone who's being accused of a crime needs to have in mind some procedure for establishing his innocence; to simply refuse to participate in the justice system would be unreasonable. That Rothbard takes this for granted is telling.

But to be honest, I was going to make a point about this that I'm no longer comfortable with. So I guess I'll just leave this as it is for now, and maybe come back to the issue later once I've had time to think about it some more.