What If There Is No Authority?
Here, I explain my basic argument for libertarianism.*
1. Three Libertarian Premises
Libertarianism rests on three premises:
The Presumption Against Coercion. Roughly, it’s wrong to coerce people without a good reason.
I intend this to include using or threatening force against people, taking their property, damaging their property, and similar actions that would generally be regarded as rights violations by an individual against another individual (whether or not they are commonly called “coercion” in ordinary speech).
The “good reasons” are basically those recognized by common sense morality (e.g., consent, self-defense, defense of innocent third parties, extreme consequences).
The Coercive Nature of Law. Almost all government policies and actions are coercive. Laws are enforced by threats of violence against disobeyers. Most government actions are things that would be viewed as rights violations if done by an individual.
Skepticism of Authority. No state has genuine authority.
Authority is a hypothesized moral property that would give the state a special entitlement to force others to obey their will, in circumstances and for reasons that would not justify coercion by ordinary, private agents.
These premises imply that most government policies and actions are wrongful. The ones that might be permissible are only the ones that libertarians accept (the activities of “the minimal state”).
I intend premise 1 to be just common sense morality—the things that you normally regard as wrongful treatment of individuals by other individuals are, indeed, wrongful. Though some people reject common sense morality, the great majority of people accept it, so this is not a major source of resistance to libertarianism.
Premise 2 is also hardly controversial. People often forget that law is coercive, but hardly anyone, after thinking about it, denies that the things the state does would be viewed as impermissible rights-violations if done by private agents. So this also is not a major source of resistance to libertarianism.
The main source of resistance is premise 3: most people think the state has authority, which exempts them from the moral constraints that apply to the rest of us.
My case for premise 3 points to the failure of attempts to justify political authority. (See: The authority of democracy, The TV contract.) Nearly everyone seems to agree that some account is needed of what grounds the state’s authority. But most people can quickly see the problems with each account of this, and few think they have a good account. The best explanation for this situation is that the state does not in fact have authority; we just think that it does due to certain psychological biases (see: The Psychology of Authority).
2. Implications of No Authority
How does this lead to libertarian policy views? The main thing about libertarians is that we reject a huge range of government actions that other people support. Schematically, the libertarian anti-authority argument goes like this:
Policy P is the sort of action that would be wrong if done by any private agent.
The state lacks authority.
So P is also wrong when done by the state.
Let’s see some examples.
a. Prostitution & Legal Moralism
Say you hear that two of your neighbors recently had sex, and that neighbor A paid neighbor B $200 for it. You find this “immoral,” so you go over to B’s house and kidnap B at gunpoint, then lock her in a cage in your basement for the next six months. What would we think of this?
Obviously, you’re a dangerous lunatic and a horrible person (in this hypothetical). Whatever you think of A’s and B’s transaction, you have no right to kidnap either of them.
Since there is no political authority, that is also how we should view the government when they do the same thing. This conclusion extends to other instances of “legal moralism,” where some behavior is outlawed because it is supposedly “immoral” despite not violating anyone’s rights.
b. Drugs & Paternalism
Say you hear that one of your neighbors has been ingesting substances for recreational purposes that you deem unhealthful. You think he might make his own life worse by doing this. So you go over to the neighbor’s house and kidnap him at gunpoint, then lock him in your basement for the next year to teach him a lesson.
Again, this is horrible and clearly something you have no right to do. It is similarly horrible for the state to do this.
The conclusion extends to other forms of “legal paternalism,” where the state restricts your behavior for your own good.
c. Rent-Seeking
Many people advocate laws that use the power of the state to direct money to themselves at the expense of society. We call this “rent seeking.” Special interest groups are good at getting such laws passed by hiring lobbyists, making campaign contributions, etc. The most naked example is subsidies, whereby the government just directly takes money from the rest of society to give it to particular companies. There are many other laws that do similar things, but more indirectly.
Suppose you have a friend who has done some favors for you, so you decide to rob your neighbors to give the money to your friend. Obviously, that’s wrong. It’s still wrong, by the way, even if you think your friend is genuinely doing good things for society and deserves more money. This is like what the government does with subsidies and other rent-seeking laws.
d. Social Welfare
Say you have a charity that helps the poor. You decide that you’re not getting enough voluntary contributions, so you decide to just steal money from your neighbors to use for your charity. This seems wrong. That’s like government social welfare programs.
There are many more examples; you can fill in the details. Basically every libertarian position can be explained in this way.
3. Does This Entail Anarchism?
a. Rights Protection
Does this argumentative strategy prove too much? Does it lead to rejecting all government actions whatsoever?
No, it only supports the rejection of actions that would require appeals to “authority” to justify. If you’re just enforcing people’s natural rights, you don’t have to claim any special moral status placing yourself above others. If someone is violating other people’s rights, it is permissible for any other individual to use force to stop that person. It is therefore also permissible for the state to do that. This is why the actions of the minimal state to protect individual rights would be justified.
b. What About Monopolization?
Suppose that’s right. Why would it be permissible for the state to monopolize the service of protecting rights by force? I.e., why can they prohibit other agents from doing the same thing they’re doing?
Anarcho-capitalists (including myself) think it’s fine to have multiple, competing rights-protection agencies operating in the same society. Whether and how that works is beyond the scope of this post. Here, let’s just explain what conventional (minimal-state) libertarians think.
Minimal state libertarians generally believe that to have such competing agencies would lead to a breakdown of social order and a Hobbesian war of all against all.
In common sense morality, one of the widely accepted “good enough” reasons for coercing someone is that the act of coercion is necessary to prevent some vastly worse consequence. So, if the statists are correct about the consequences of having competing protection agencies, that would justify using coercion to prevent those consequences. This does not require an appeal to “authority”.
This is how you get to minimal-state libertarianism. The dispute between minimal-state libertarians and anarchists is an empirical, factual dispute about the consequences of a system of competing protection agencies.
c. What About Taxation?
Libertarians are known to say that taxation is theft. But it seems that it would be impossible to run even a minimal state without taxation. So how could minimal-state libertarianism be coherent?
See the above rationale again. If taxation is necessary to prevent a complete breakdown of social order, then taxation would be justified (but only the minimum necessary amount).
It might not be necessary, though. Perhaps the state could finance itself through fees for its rights-protection services. If the services were good and not unreasonably expensive, there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t work.
4. This Is the Best Argument for Libertarianism
Other people have made cases for libertarianism, but they’re not as good as mine.
Some of them appeal to very strong, perhaps even absolutist, conceptions of rights. E.g., Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick. Problem: Absolute deontology is false. Also, it is widely rejected, so this is not a persuasive approach.
Some people (Ayn Rand) appeal to ethical egoism. Problem: That is obviously false and also almost universally rejected. The prospects for convincing someone of libertarianism by first convincing them that morality is all about being selfish are dim.
Some people (Jan Narveson) appeal to a version of social contract theory. Problem: Again, false and unpersuasive.
Some people appeal to economic arguments about the efficiency of free markets, etc. Problem: Actually, those arguments are basically right. However, it’s open to people to claim that some other value, such as equality, outweighs efficiency. Also, it is often difficult to get people to understand the economic arguments.
The anti-authority argument avoids these problems by starting from common sense morality. Once you explain the problem of authority, it shifts the burden to the statist to explain why they think the state has this special kind of authority. Most people can be brought to quickly realize that they don’t have a good answer to that.
[* Based on: The Problem of Political Authority (2013), part I. ]
This argument is great and compelling, especially in the abstract. But I think its consequentialist exceptions, which are exactly what make it so strong, prove too much.
Once you allow that coercion can be justified by the kinds of reasons you name — consent, self-defense, defense of innocent third parties, and extreme consequences — it seems hard to exclude other consequences that, on a common-sense moral level, have at least prima facie comparable weight to the harms of coercion.
Take your own animal welfare case, which I find to be utterly convincing. A relatively trivial human benefit, the pleasure of eating a certain food, cannot justify enormous suffering imposed on animals. But then something similar seems to apply within human society. If a comfortable taxpayer loses some discretionary income (a slower path to a second home, less luxury consumption, a smaller investment account), while that money prevents homelessness, hunger, untreated illness, or severe deprivation for someone else, those seem like candidates for the same kind of extreme-consequences reasoning. It is not obvious that the coercive burden outweighs the welfare gain. Often it seems obvious in the other direction, assuming, realistically, that people will not all coordinate charitably at once and nullify the need for coercive taxation.
I know the reply may be empirical: capitalism and markets do more for the poor than badly designed welfare programs. Maybe so. I’m not trying to settle that here. But then we should just ask which interventions actually work, not screen off redistribution as presumptively impermissible. If some welfare spending is wasteful or perverse, obviously that counts against those programs, but it doesn’t count against the whole moral category.
Even keeping the analysis intra-American, I don’t think the gains are minor. Yes, poor Americans are not usually suffering the worst deprivations on earth. But America still contains a lot of serious, life-shaping misery: housing insecurity, medical unaffordability, bad nutrition, family instability, atomization, deaths of despair, and exhaustion from never standing on firm ground. Reducing that suffering may be more than just a small welfare bump: it might make better lives possible, more stable families, stronger communities, more agency, more dignity, more room for higher goods.
So I’m left feeling that the consequentialism in the argument makes it underpowered as an argument against coercion per se. It destroys political-authority mysticism, and it rightly shifts the burden of justification for coercion. But I think that burden can often be met, no? It seems pretty commonsensical, at least to me, that it is met in some welfare-state cases. Is it really so obvious that Nordic-style capitalism is a libertarian’s moral nightmare? If so, do libertarians perhaps give a disproportionate amount of moral weight to freedom from coercion versus the alleviation of severe, life-structuring deprivation? But now I fear I’m starting to show my utilitarian hand. :)
You’ve said that the disagreement between minimal statists and an-caps is purely empirical. However, is it not also ethical? For instance, wouldn’t common sense morality also indicate that it would be immoral to kidnap and put a murderer in a cage for the rest of their life? Or kidnap a thief and put them in a cage for a year? Wouldn’t most people say this is immoral - or is this because they would consider it vigilantism? Why can’t the same arguments be applied to policies that minimal statists also support?