Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

by Will Wilkinson on May 29, 2008

Crispin Sartwell writes:

do me a favor?: cut and paste this everywhere. it’s a…marketing ploy. but it’s sincere.

A Philosophical Challenge

My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State argues that

(1) The political state or government rests on force and coercion.
(2) Force and coercion are always wrong if they can’t be morally justified. (That is, the use of force is wrong if it lacks a moral justification.)
(3) The arguments for the moral legitimacy of state - for example those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas - are unsound.
(4) Hence, state power has not been shown to be morally defensible.
Until you show me otherwise, I conclude that government power is in every case illegitimate.

Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are pitiful. They are embarrassments to the Western intellectual tradition.

So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.

If you can’t, I insist that you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.

Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an irrational cultist.

We’re all anarchists now, baby, until further notice.

I may agree with Sartwell about legitimacy, depending on what he means by it. But I detect a missing premise or two. For example, that in the absence of a decent argument for the legitimacy of state power, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism. Aren’t you rationally obliged to accept the social system that does best relative to the values you care about? So what if human flourishing, not legitimacy, is your greatest concern. You can still accept that all states are illegitimate. But suppose the path to the best feasible anarchy leaves people worse off in terms of flourishing than in the best illegitimate states. It seems, in that case, you would be rationally obliged to support states that do better for people than anarchy, despite their illegitimacy. In which case, it would be irrational cultlike behavior to endorse anarchy just because it is not illegitimate.

Now, some people would say that doing better for people than the relevant non-state alternatives is all it means to say government is legitimate or coercion is justified in the relevant sense, but I don’t think so. It seems perfectly coherent to me to say both that an instance or pattern of coercion is morally unjustified and that it leaves its victims better off than they would be in the nearest anarchist possible worlds. In that case, you just have to choose between flourishing and legitimacy.

I think moral and political philosophers have a bad tendency to make all normative vocabulary line up. So you can retrofit all moral language so that “justified” just means “best for flourishing.” But I think that we in fact have multiple conventional moral vocabularies that are orthogonal to one another, which relate messily, and sometime incoherently. In the absence of a revisionist account of moral terms that gets them all to march in a single direction, you just have to accept that sometimes its best (according to one conventional moral conception) to do the wrong thing (according to another conventional moral conception) and there is nothing internal to reason or morality, as such, to tell you which conception generally carries overriding force.

Anyway… The point is: Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because “If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible” is a false premise. The existence of a moral justification, in terms of flourishing, say, doesn’t entail final moral justification, since there is no fact of the matter about the final authoritative moral vocabulary. And the language of “legitimacy” may have its own internal logic that is at some level indifferent to flourishing. So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.

Note: I am not sure whether I agree with myself.

Viewing 42 Comments

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    Ah, the conflict between justice and consequentialism rears its ugly head once again ;)
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    I am (as I'm sure you are) a libertarian in large part because I think these two axes (justifiable as in non-coercion vs. maximum happiness) are very closely aligned. It should be viewed as an empirical question how close they get or can get to each other, including whether they actually can lie together - whether government can be minimized to zero without losing any of those essential public goods or without a serious loss to some significant part of society. I almost agree with Sartwell: it remains to be seen (to me) if any of government is necessary, and so I would support any effort to reduce it, carefully. But if it gets to a point where we just can't get rid of some government function without serious negative consequences, then so be it.
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    One problem with having multiple moral vocabularies is that in case of conflict among vocabularies, the final decision might be random.

    This is reminding me of voting: If many people have different opinions about what to do, what do you do?

    Or in this case: if you give credence to multiple moral theories, and they prescribe different actions, what do you do?

    There is no "perfect" voting, just as there is no "perfect" way to merge simultaneously believed yet incompatible moral theories.

    Maybe the best I can do is to give each moral theory some weight (according to how strongly I believe it), and give preference to the actions that don't really strongly clash with any of my moral theories.

    When there is a really strong clash, I have a tough decision. And my decision often feeds back into the "weight" that I will give each moral theory next time around. If I decide in favor of X this time, I probably tend to let the weight for X grow a bit stronger.

    People like Crispin are trying to create the appearance of a really strong clash. "X or Y, what's it going to be, can't be both??!!!" Is that helpful?

    Will makes an eloquent defense of value pluralism. While I don't share his exact weights (and thus don't call myself a libertarian), I think that's the way to go given where we are in human history.

    Someday we may really really understand what makes us satisfied, and be able to use a very precise metric to help us with our decisions. Since we are not there, some diversity of moral conceptions is good. It helps us to not get "stuck" trying to maximize some overly simple metric that cannot fully capture the complex underpinnings of human satisfaction.
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    This sounds strangely familiar to my ears.
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    Matt, Except what you say is a lot clearer!
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    The moral justification is utilitarian.

    Where is the empirical evidence my rights and safety are better secured under anarchism?

    Sweden vs. (the artist formerly known as) Somalia. No contest.
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    Where is the empirical evidence for the justification of utilitarianism?
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    So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.

    If we allow this, can one also say that robbery and murder by "civilians", committed in no sense defensively, might also be defensible? Or is the point of this post to say that "Yes, the state (or more precisely the flawed individuals that comprise it) is simply a completely different beast, wherein these acts of robbery and violence, if not continued massively on a regular basis but only upon the establishment of a state, are not necessarily morally indefensible if they aim at human "flourishing"?

    So, even assuming the idea of "flourishing" is more important than legitimacy, where is the legitimacy in restricting competing entities in the attempt to provide said flourishing? Either initially or currently. That would seem to be the argument to make precisely if one upholds value pluralism and multiple "moral vocabularies".
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    As for Sweden vs. Somalia, I'd argue the case for Sweden lies more in its culture than its statism. Combine bad culture with bad state and you get trouble. In the case of Somalia, Peter Leeson's research suggests that it was actually better off under anarchy. Perhaps an anarchic Sweden would be ideal..
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    "Sweden vs. (the artist formerly known as) Somalia. No contest."

    Free State Iceland vs. Nazi Germany. No contest. Hell, Somalia vs. Pol Pot's Cambodia. No contest. I could go on all day.

    Cherry-picking is a double edged sword.
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    Somalia: Better Off Stateless

    Somalia wasn't a pleasant place without a state, but it wasn't great with one either. It became better than many other sub-saharan African states. To me the real argument against anarchism is that government is inevitable.
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    I'm not totally familiar with all of the moral justifications that Sartwell purports to demolish, nor the fiendishly clever argumentation that he (purportedly) employs to do so; however, are we asking the wrong question?

    If the main line of argumentation runs: "force without consent is wrong, and force with consent be no force at all", as I assume, then are we really objecting to the State, or are we objecting to our inability to consent to the State?

    If a man walks into your house and hands you 1 kg. of solid platinum and then demands (at gunpoint) that you pay $5, then that transaction is morally illegitimate. The objection isn't to the trade of Pt for $ in general (those are excellent terms!) but to your lack of choice in the matter.

    We clearly have the same relationship with the State as you do with the platinum-bequeathing villain. It seems to me that the argument against State coercion isn't an argument against the trading of total autonomy for certain protections, rights, and social services. To make an argument [b] for anarchism [/b] you'd need to show how consenting, collective trade in rights and property (a la, the State) is [b] always [/b] wrong regardless of how much the participants favor it.

    Arguments against coercion seem to point towards an opt-out model of citizenship which is distinct from anarchy. Upon adulthood, you'd have the choice to either opt-in to the social contract and become a citizen, or opt-out and become 'outlaw' in the most original sense of the term.

    The pre-Christian Icelanders reserved this as sort of punishment. People could be sentenced to skoggangur (literally "outlaw") and were placed outside the legal norms of Icelandic society. Viking people being, well, Vikings, you can guess that this usually didn't work out well for the outlaws- they could murder and steal with impunity, but all others could steal and murder them without the slightest consequence and indeed received considerable bragging rights for the act.

    I heartily endorse an opt-in/opt-out citizenship model.No one should have to suffer the burdens of the State without consent. But I fail to see how arguments against coercion disallow consenting citizens to make certain transactions involving their rights and property. Of course, I haven't read Sartwell's book.

    Would that we lived in a world where Sartwell could, with a stroke of a pen in a notary's office, sign away all of the burdens and benefits of the State. If that happy day ever dawns, remember, I have dibs on his car.
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    hey thanks for putting it up! ok here's the anti-consequentialist/utilitarian argument in the book: we define the state as a group of people with a (fairly) effective monopoly of force. now, this force can be used for good, wherein we all flourish (or it could be...), but once you have constituted such a force, you are always potentially its victim; it is, by definition, effectively irresistible. it is an always-full reservoir of utilitarian disaster. when it mobilizes for war or genocide, the flourishing is over. and it always might, even if it doesn't. even if you thought the u.s. gov was helping us all flourish, no human institution but government could have developed atomic weaponry: you need forced taxation and a patriotic science bureaucracy. so though some of sort of flourish, the means by which we do so can be turned to the extinction of the species.
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    crispin,

    does it matter to your argument that atomic weaponry has already been developed?
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    Crispin, No one doubts people can fare poorly under states. But some of states seem pretty good! Does Switzerland regularly dip from the well of utilitarian disaster? Don't people there do really well? Is there really a feasible alternative anarchist scheme that the Swiss could get to from here that would leave them better off?

    Are you a George Kateb fan? Me too!
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    "The arguments for the moral legitimacy of state - for example those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas - are unsound."

    Gee, that's not a very big assumption, is it?

    As for myself, believing in government by consent of the people, the basic moral argument is that the preservation of civil and human rights is a social enterprise. Anarchy cannot preserve civil rights at all, having no organized authority or mechanism to do so. There is certainly a fair debate to be had on the level of organization or the power that the state mechanism should have (one reason cherry pickings like "Nazi Germany" and "Pol Pot's Cambodia" are far less convincing than "Sweden" is that Sweden's is far more representative of self-govenrment). However, there is a relatively simple argument that, morally, anarchy provides greater opportunity for unjustified government to rise to power than does an organized, representative government using the minimal amount of "coercion."

    One of the great problems with such too-clever-by-half philosophical arguments like these is that they don't truly function in the real world. The only way an uncoercive state of anarchy could exist for long is if everyone agrees to respect each others rights. That such respect has not been accomplised in human history, even with some level of organization and coercion (over those who would run roughshod over the defenseless in such a system), makes the argument very much akin to angels and the heads of pins.

    It's certainly fair to observe that organized, "coercive" governments have failed to reach a state of civil harmony, as far as individual rights go, but it's folly to pretend that in the real world any state of anarchy could come as close as these systems have. One must also argue this from a global perspective. Cherry-picking the ad-hoc example of some small, fairly harmonious collective that managed to avoid organized government for a time is stealing a base. Those naturally get swallowed up, either by oppresive forms of government or the representative ones, the latter being a far better compromise.
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    Anarchy isn't possible in the world we live in. Sure you could get rid of the Civil Govt. in theory. However, there is always Order in Disorder, so the Vacuum would just be filled by the Mafioso and/or military strongmen.

    To not understand the basic fact that anarchy/Libertarianism pressuposes a Rational/sinless world and we obviously do not live in such a world makes your support of such.....Irrational.
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    TGGP,

    Great Somalia link. The selected comparison drew some serious attention here, but I was mainly being glib.

    For the most part I believe social organization comes from the bottom up, so an anarchist Sweden would in my opinion be a comparatively ordered society, just as East Germany was relatively functional compared to other Communist states. Both societies are filled with cooperative and capable individuals.

    An anarchist society would function relatively well where the people themselves work, cooperate and organize spontaneously to a high degree (e.g. Japan; see Kristof on Kobe earthquake), and where threat from organized external violence is low; most likely due to the beneficence of a great state military power, as in the modern world, or from geographic isolation from others, as with the older Iceland. (unsustainable and externally predicated conditions)

    But even with these conditions, such a society still would not live as well, or as fairly as under state government.
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    ok you gotta check out the book! anarchy no more supposes a sinless world than does statism, since both are run by people. that is: say people are evil. would a good solution be: let's give some of them guns, handcuffs, jails etc and see what happens?
    but anarchy is impossible in the sense that the state is a snowball: it has increased the pervasiveness of its authority since it was established, and cannot be stopped. so, putting it mildly, we're fucked.
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    Sartwell's assumptions avoid the nasty fact that human beings inherently will organize themselves into a society of some sort. The question isn't are states legitimate; it's what is the best way for such a society to organize itself. (What 'best way' is, is of course open to debate). Not having the biggest club in the neighborhood, the best way for me involves restricting others ability to use force to coerce me; we then proceed quickly down the path of the society (state) monopolizing the use of force as best it can. You can change the label but the situation will exist in any society.
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    no i think people always create a society, and that there are always power differences. i just want to minimize coercion.
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