This is my first of two responses to Matt Zwolinski’s critique of the moral egalitarian thesis, focusing on his claim that the theory suggests that welfare and taxation are illegitimate. Is this true? My answer is no, it is not.
I say “not really” because it depends on whether one is an absolutist deontologist – someone who thinks that there are certain rights/duties that are always and everywhere forbidden to be violated, regardless of the circumstances. If you think that the violation of property rights or theft can never be justified, no matter what, then the thesis of moral equality forces the conclusions that Zwolinski points to. But absolutist deontology leads to some apparently absurd dilemmas. Here are a few ideas for testing, nothing real for me, to show what I mean.
- Let’s say you’re on the balcony of your 20 story condo, when all of a sudden, the railing you’re leaning on moves and you fall to the ground. Luckily, he manages to grab the flagpole hanging from the balcony of the 15th story condo. You start to shimmy your way to the balcony to pull yourself up, when the owner of that condo arrives, and forbids you from using any of his property. Because of your requests, he refuses to give you permission to climb onto his porch and out of his condo, and demands that you remove your pole from his flagpole immediately – this is, in fact, his property.
- He lives in a country house on a one acre plot. One day, I buy all the land within a hundred yards of where your property line ends, so that your home is now effectively contained within a hundred yard bubble of my property. I assure you that I will respect your property and I will not lay a finger on what is yours, but I insist that you do the same and furthermore, I insist that you do not have permission to set foot on my property. To do so would be trespassing on my property, for which I will retaliate. You can’t walk to work or get any things or food without crossing into my place.
- Your child is starving, and the only way you can choose is to steal bread to save your child’s life, or to let him starve. (State that no other options are available – one or the other.)
If someone is a deontologist absolutist who holds property rights always and everywhere inviolable, they are forced that the right answer in these situations is to let go of the flagpole and drop their death, stay locked in their house and die of hunger, and let their child die rather than steal bread. If those are indeed your conclusions, this is your off-ramp to exit this discussion, because nothing I say after this will make you back down. But for the rest of the 99.9% of us, it seems obvious that in these situations, you have a reason to get into a condo, cross the country, and take bread to save your child’s life. This does not mean that doing these things is not a violation of rights – it means that sometimes the violation of rights can be justified.
All of this is accepted by prominent defenders of Zwolinski’s moral equality thesis. Michael Huemer, a representative of anarcho-capitalism, has no problem admitting this. For example, he wrote: “Compare this case: Jean Valjean stole bread to feed his sister’s children. Imagine if the children are hungry. It does not follow from this that he did not really steal the bread. So, the next thing is that the theft was justified.” Because of this, Huemer he says the idea that “taxation is justified even if it is theft” is a “perfectly understandable idea.” Huemer also allows that “stealing to provide for the public welfare may be justified.”
Now, let’s put the moral parity thesis back into practice. Since people are not allowed to participate in the violation of rights in these situations, by moral moderation the government will do it again it should be forgiven if it behaves in the same way. If I have a reason to take the bread to prevent little Marvin from starving to death, then the welfare system that gives Marvin the bread would be justified by the theory of moral equivalence. The concern Zwolinski expresses comes from absolutism, not moral equality.
This is related to another objection raised by Zwolinski about the theory of moral equality – how one should act in relation to children. Zwolinski says that if you “try, as the moral parity thesis does, to build a political philosophy on small-scale examples of adults interacting with each other, then you will end up wondering what to say about children.” . They don’t fit the model, so your theory ends up treating them as some kind of weird weird case. “
But this seems baseless to me. The moral egalitarian thesis, as I understand it, does not mean that we should build a “political philosophy on micro-level examples of how adults interact.” The moral parity thesis simply states that government agents do not receive special immunity simply because they are government agents. That leaves the question of the specific content of moral obligations completely open, and how those obligations are acquired. You can believe in moral equality without believing that all moral obligations must be based on “small-scale examples about the adults with whom you interact.” One can believe that there are special duties and responsibilities when children are involved – I certainly do – but that is entirely consistent with the moral equality thesis.
To be fair, there are thinkers in the liberal culture who are worse about children than Zwolinski says. Murray Rothbard concluded that children should be free to run away from home as soon as they are old enough to do so, and that parents cannot be forced to feed or care for their children because that would violate the parent’s absolute right to care for them. ownership. But this flaw in Rothbard’s reasoning is the result of his inconsistency, not moral equivalency.
Let me add another point that can be made in favor of the welfare state that one can express. In cases where stealing may be justified in order to, say, feed starving children, there may be practical (rather than moral) benefits to feeding those children through something like a government welfare program rather than using people who commit acts of justified theft. If Billy the Baker finds someone trying to steal a loaf of bread, he can apparently have reason to try to stop that person, or hand him over to the police. But he doesn’t immediately know that the potential thief is Jean Valjean personified, or someone who can easily buy bread but doesn’t want to pay. A well-run program can remove this uncertainty, because if people can prevent their children from going hungry by entering this program, there is no need to steal from Billy, so Billy can be sure that whoever he catches trying to steal bread from him is imitating. wrongly and can be properly stopped.
Other considerations can be raised. While Jean Valjean may be justified in stealing to feed his sister’s starving children, the cost of that crime will fall on someone else. Opened who Should those costs fall accordingly? It doesn’t seem like anyone would choose that for you. Valjean may steal from Billy the Baker, but there is no specific reason why Billy should bear the cost of the theft more than anyone else. And if Billy runs his bakery in a part of town with a lot of people in Valjean’s shoes, he may find himself burdened with this crime in a way that Carl’s Croissant Shop in a wealthy and well-guarded part of town has never seen. If someone has reason to engage in an action that will inevitably impose costs on someone else, but at the same time there is no particular “other person” on whom this cost should properly fall, then everyone who shares the costs prevents anyone from being unfairly burdened. an unjustified burden from these thieves (fixed).
Now, I can think of the counters to the above arguments, and the answers to those, and the counter-answers respectively. But my point is that contrary to what Zwolinski says, one can accept the theory of moral equality and accept that, say, taxation or welfare can be justified.
However, this does not mean that the moral equality thesis does not have strong implications. Even if one could justify taxation and welfare based on moral equity, the range of programs that can be justified in this way is very small compared to the scope of what government actually does. A program to feed starving orphans can be justified. But taking hundreds of millions of dollars a year to support the artistic interests of the wealthy through the National Endowment for the Arts certainly does not remove this bar. And it’s not to support and thus encouraging the construction of houses in areas with high risk of floods and other natural disasters. So in that sense, Zwolinski is right that most of the government’s behavior is justified by the moral equality thesis – but not in the cases he seems to be talking about.
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