1 Introduction
Toward a New England Libertarianism
Libertarianism is the widely reviled idea that we should use reason and persuasion to accomplish our distributive aims. Only reason and persuasion. According to the libertarian, it is wrong to utilize threats or violence in the form of statesponsored coercion, however sublimated by bureaucratic routine, in order to redistribute property that we have an antecedent claim to. Aiding the worse off or promoting economic equality may be worthy aims, but these are endeavors we should persuade our fellow citizens to join, not mandates to be enforced by the state. Promoting these goals at the end of a pitchfork, whether ours or our representatives’, is a moral mistake according to the libertarian.
Talk of threats and violence may seem overblown. What is at issue is generally redistribution through taxation, and what’s so bad about voters democratically deciding on laws that require us to fill in certain tax forms once a year? The forms are boring but hardly violent. But threats and violence are in play whenever the state issues its demands. When the state mails us the forms requesting our money, it is not asking nicely; the demands of the state are backed by force. And when voters decide on laws that culminate in demands from the state, they are deciding to compel those around them to do their bidding, again with the implicit threat of force. In fact, the reason that threats and violence seem so far removed from the process of peacefully debating laws and filling in forms is in part that these threats are so successful: it is only when threats are unpersuasive that one must employ violence. Of course, many people agree with the state’s demands and are happy to cooperate—I don’t wish to exaggerate the coercive element. But the bureaucratic routine shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the state and, by extension, democratic majorities aren’t asking nicely.
Libertarians of all stripes are skeptical of encroachments by the state, but the “New England” version I propose to defend is distinctive in two respects. First, libertarianism is often grounded in an uncompromising approach to individual rights, which others absolutely must not infringe. By contrast, in my account libertarianism emerges from everyday moral beliefs we have about when we are permitted to shift our burdens onto others. In fact, my account intentionally downplays the role of rights, and is motivated by doubts about what we may demand of others, rather than outrage about what others demand of us. As I will argue, if we recognize even modest strictures on making others worse off to improve our lot, if we acknowledge even defeasible claims to ownership, we quickly run into a form of libertarianism. This is because it
turns out to be very hard to justify permanently transferring our misfortunes to others in the way an expansive welfare state requires. One goal of this book, then, is to defend a version of libertarianism that rests on modest premises about burden-shifting. Because this view is inspired by the spirit of selfreliance in figures like Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville, I think of it as having a New England cast.
A second distinctive feature of this book is that it ranges widely across history, economics, and politics, as well as philosophy. I have cast my net widely in order to take up such questions as the transmission of wealth across generations, reparations for slavery, and the politics of political correctness. The reasons for this are partly substantive and partly methodological. Substantively, our responses to complex philosophical arguments move both forwards and backwards—from accepted premises to accepted conclusions, as well as from rejected conclusions to rejected premises. Even if the moral arguments I make about burden-shifting were initially persuasive, we would reject them if they seemed to have absurd implications when projected onto the world at large. If libertarians seem to ignore the fact that many who are poor are so through no fault of their own, or that rich countries got rich in the course of an incredibly violent history, they will hardly be persuasive on the basis of tidy syllogisms alone. Political theories are inevitably assessed in light of a much broader picture of the world and how it works, and philosophers ignore such pictures at their peril.
Another reason for casting the net wide is methodological. Anglophone political philosophy has—with some notable exceptions—become an increasingly arid and insular field, disconnected from economics, history, and politics. (Of course, in part this just reflects a broader trend toward parochial specialization.) Academic Marxists write books that ignore the triumphs of the market economies; libertarians write books that ignore the vast injustices that accompanied the era of economic growth. It is noteworthy, for instance, that works discussing the Marxist theory of history rarely mention the past in contrast to Marx’s own practice.1 I want to resist this narrow approach. Quite apart from the substantive conclusions I reach, I hope to reconnect with an earlier tradition of philosophers practicing political economy who wallowed in the murk of history and weren’t afraid of the occasional fact or figure. (Imagine John Stuart Mill or Karl Marx without a little murk!) Accordingly, the later parts of the book don’t directly defend libertarianism, narrowly construed as resistance to the welfare state, but champion a more broadly classical liberal perspective that emphasizes limited government, free markets, and the system of private property, in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith.2 My hope is that this broader perspective both creates a more hospitable environment for assessing libertarianism, and helps us reconnect with the earlier approach to political economy.
At the end of this introduction I offer a more detailed preview, but first let me try to motivate what I am calling the New England approach a bit more.
n The Speech
Imagine calling a town hall meeting and delivering the following speech:
My dear assembled citizens: I know most of us are strangers, but of late I have fallen on hard times through no fault of my own, by sheer bad luck. My savings are low, and I don’t have friends or family to help. Now as you know, I’ve previously asked for help from you as private citizens, as a matter of charity. But unfortunately that hasn’t been sufficient. Thus, I’m here now to insist that you (yes you, Emma, and you, John) owe me assistance as a matter of justice. It is a deep violation if you don’t work additional hours, take fewer vacations if need be, live in a smaller house, or send your kids to a worse school, in order to help me. Failing to do so is no less an injustice than failing to pay your debts.
Moreover, calling this an injustice means that it’s not enough that you comply with your obligations by working on my behalf. No, I insist that you help me to force your fellow citizens to assist me. It doesn’t matter if these others say to you that they need the money for their own purposes, that they prefer worthier causes, or if they’re just hard-hearted and don’t care. To the extent you care about justice, you must help me to force these others to assist me whether they wish to or not, since that is what is owed me in light of my recent bad luck.
Could you bring yourself to make this speech? The essence of the dispute between moral libertarians and anti-libertarians is that libertarians think that they could not in good conscience make this speech, and neither would they be persuaded by others making it. And in their view, a redistributive welfare state is simply the speech put into action and writ large through taxes and transfers. Later on we will consider some of the complexities of global capitalism and modern property regimes, but I believe that the important disputes about economic justice largely boil down to this speech.
I don’t want to wade too deeply into the philosophical issues the speech raises yet, but we can at least anticipate a few immediate reactions. Inevitably it will be said that to the extent the speech bothers us it is because of its rhetorical flourishes, various pragmatic features, its name-calling and first-personal gusto, or because the speaker seems presumptuous, or otherwise annoys us. Compare, then, a similar speech advancing a different substantive claim:
My dear assembled citizens: of late, some of you have been stealing my money. I’m here now to insist that you (yes you, Emma, and you, John) give it back. This means that you owe me thousands of dollars which you stole. It’s a deep violation if you don’t work additional hours, take fewer vacations if need be, live in a smaller house, or send your kids to a worse school, in order to pay me back what you stole. Failing to do so is no less an injustice than failing to pay your debts.
Moreover, calling this an injustice means that it’s not enough that you comply with your obligations by working on my behalf to repay me what you’ve stolen. No, I insist
that you help me to force the thieves among you to pay restitution. It doesn’t matter if these thieves say to you that they need the money for their own purposes, that they prefer worthier causes, or that they’re just hard-hearted and don’t care. To the extent you care about justice, you must help me to force these others to repay me what they stole.
No one is likely to be embarrassed by this variant. Even if we are shy and uncomfortable about confronting others in public speeches, there is nothing strange about the idea of giving such a speech, or about someone giving it. To the extent there is a problem with the first speech it lies not in its manner but its substance.
Another reaction is to dismiss the relevance of the speech. Just because that speech isn’t the way to make the speaker’s case doesn’t mean that there isn’t a case to be made. We can envision a range of speeches marshaling various considerations that vary in their effectiveness, and picking out just one of them and knocking it down doesn’t prove anything. Moreover, the speech focuses our attention on face-to-face moral arguments with other individuals, whereas what is at issue with redistribution nowadays is the design of social institutions intended to benefit and coordinate the lives of millions; we may be skeptical about how much light the former can shed on the latter. But any speech making the same substantive point will share the same core features. All of them will announce that it is an injustice not to remedy the speaker’s bad luck—not just a kindness to be sought by persuasion—and all of them will suggest that the speaker may use threats and violence to make sure this happens. Any speech incorporating these elements is likely to bother us to the extent that we are bothered by the original, unless it introduces quite powerful assumptions that will need to be defended in their own right. And while it’s true that the design of social institutions produces some unique complications, it should at the very least give us pause if we are advocating social institutions that enshrine a moral logic we reject in face-to-face encounters.
Even if we do feel uncomfortable making the speech, it is a further question why we should resist other people making such appeals. But before coming to that, I want to insist that, perhaps contrary to other presentations of classical liberal ideas, the core impulse isn’t outrage about being asked to give; it is in the first instance a bewilderment at the suggestion that we are entitled to demand. The impulse moves through the table of conjugation: I couldn’t issue such a demand; on reflection it would be outrageous of you to make such a demand of them; and so it becomes clear that they shouldn’t make such a demand of us. Libertarianism is in this respect connected to the old New England tradition of Emerson and Thoreau (and more broadly to writers like Hawthorne and Melville), who didn’t stress classical liberal political views, but who were preoccupied with self-reliance and with the moral—even spiritual—importance of the separateness of persons and the way our burdens are our own to bear. The inspiration here is Walden, not Atlas Shrugged. The independence these New Englanders advocated tended to be
intellectual (“envy is ignorance . . . imitation is suicide”), but Thoreau’s hut by the pond was material enough, as were the enterprise and ingenuity of the traders he so admired, and he did of course insist that “that government governs best which governs least.”3 It would be a farcical self-reliance that urged fierce originality and remonstrated with us to preserve our “vital heat” as dearly as possible to preserve independence of thought—and then made the speech above, or advocated a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Neither seems compatible with a certain humility about our relationship to those around us. According to the New Englanders, those to whom we would issue the relevant demands possess an awesome authority (and responsibility) over themselves.
This kind of talk is always liable to suspicion—easy for the rich and privileged to talk of self-reliance. But Thoreau was not rich. He lived under subsistence conditions much of the time, and there is no suggestion that he expected others to enable him to achieve even those.4 And many of the most able expositors of New Englander attitudes have been precisely those fighting various forms of exclusion, notably Thoreau the abolitionist once more, and feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
[T]here is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. . . . Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?5
Neither Stanton nor Thoreau is defending libertarian ideals per se, but both put their finger on the sense in which an appreciation of the independent moral personality of others should fill us with fear and trembling when it comes to asserting control over them, as in our imagined speech. And both register the ways in which this point of view can be liberating. Expansive assertions of state or social authority will go badly wrong from time to time, and circumscribing it will often prove prophylactic. In fact, it is striking that a number of non–New Englanders fighting for recognition have emphasized personal and moral independence—the gap between us, so to speak—notably Virginia Woolf in books like The Waves This will only strike us as paradoxical if we neglect Stanton’s point that refusing to see each other as fully separate personalities is ultimately a threat, especially to those whose independence it has historically proven convenient to neglect. There is admittedly a romantic streak in some of these writers that is partly a matter of temperament, and Thoreau’s survivalist program for economic independence is ill-suited to our times. We can perhaps all discover “whole new continents and worlds within” us; we cannot all live in a hut by a lake like Thoreau.6 But reflecting on why we might feel uncomfortable about making the speech to our townsfolk reveals an argument that goes beyond temperament or romantic yearnings for solitude. For in issuing the demands in the speech, we are insisting that those around us are required to take up our burdens, and in
insisting that they use force to compel one another to remedy our misfortunes, we are attempting to shift our burdens onto others by force. This, I believe, is the fundamental source of the misgivings some of us will have about the speech. Insisting on the right to improve our position at the cost of other people, by threats or violence if need be, is the moral mistake that animates this version of libertarianism. And this mistake is ultimately the same in the first and the third person; unfair burden-shifting is wrong whether I do it to others or they do it to me. Making sense of this claim is the central task of the first part of this book.
This New England approach doesn’t particularly emphasize freedom, it is worth noting. In some formulations, libertarianism is supposed to be the outlook engendered by a deep reverence for liberty—as the name might suggest—as if those who cared more deeply about some other value would have grounds to demur. On this picture, different people attach different weights to various political values or ideals, and those who recognize how important liberty is are drawn to libertarianism, while those attracted to equality or fraternity (etc.) head elsewhere. But this picture is confused. The disagreement between libertarians and their antagonists is not over how much values like freedom or equality matter, but over whether it is permissible for the state to use force to promote these values in various ways. To see this, notice that libertarians and their opponents may in fact agree that equality or fraternity is of great importance; they could join forces and work tirelessly on behalf of some such value, provided these contributions were voluntary. As long as anti-libertarians focus merely on how much they care about equality, or how terrible poverty is, or on their vision of a better world, they have made no progress at all in identifying a point of disagreement. The disagreement only arises once the value in question is placed within the ambit of the state and its coercive apparatus. As long as equality and fraternity are the outcome of voluntary appeals, of reason and persuasion, there is no need for dispute. Nor is there any need to settle whether happy “communitarian” values should triumph over the base “atomism” of the libertarians. The question isn’t whether to view ourselves as lonely islands or amiable communities, but whether the state should create the relevant community by compulsory means; we can all agree that marriage is a blessed state while insisting that it emerge voluntarily. We would avoid a world of confusion, in other words, if only those arguing for the state promoting some value would add the rider, “. . . and I favor the use of threats and violence to promote this value if need be.” The focus on burden-shifting captures this crucial point. What matters isn’t the relative importance of negative liberties as against other political values, but whether it is permissible for the state to compel the transfer of burdens in the manner of an expansive welfare state.
A legal analogy may help here. In the American judicial system, the Supreme Court may rule on whether laws conform to the Constitution, and this determination is independent of the substantive merits of the law in question. However, issue-partisans find this fact almost impossible to keep in mind. Thus, one finds impassioned praise or else denunciation for decisions based on whether those
decisions favor the substantive positions of the partisans, without even a pretense of concern for what the Constitution in fact says (according to their favored method of interpretation—I’m not trying to make a point about hermeneutics). In theory, there ought to be a gap between one’s substantive position on abortion, or capital punishment, or gun control, or flag burning, or campaign spending, and what the Constitution says about these things, which would create the possibility of painful tensions—“I support abortion, but must concede that the Constitution contains no right to abortion”; “I support unlimited campaign spending by corporations, but deny that the Constitution carves out such a right.”
The fact that one so rarely encounters partisans of issues tormented by constitutional barriers to their side prevailing indicates that in practice we are reluctant to acknowledge the distinction between substantive values and legal process—a depressing sign of how powerful motivated reasoning is. (A good test of our intellectual honesty is how often we experience this kind of torment.)
Just so, when it comes to political philosophy and what the state should be doing, the issue shouldn’t be our substantive concerns, but rather what kinds of things we should be using threats and violence to compel those around us to do. People can agree about the morality of abortion or campaign finance while disagreeing about the higher-order question of their constitutional status, and so too people should be able to agree about the moral significance of equality or poverty while disagreeing about the kinds of threats or coercion that may be employed to address them, which is to say, whether the state should be involved. And just as conflating substantive moral opinions with distinctively juridical questions tends to eat away at the rule of law, as respect for the impartial legal order comes to be replaced with outrage at losing the substantive battle, so conflating social values with the proper objects of state enforcement eventually undermines respect for the state, and ultimately for politics as an organizing principle.
n Preview
My case for the classical liberal view unfolds in four parts.
The first, on property, offers a reassessment of the libertarian argument against the redistributive welfare state and in favor of respecting private property. Because that argument draws on moral premises, I begin by considering the relationship between morality and the state. Collectives like the state may not treat us in ways that individuals never could, and yet, says the libertarian, the welfare state proposes to do just that through its redistributive policies. I then argue that resistance to redistribution need not be rooted in an obsession with individual rights, as has been often supposed, but can rather appeal to humdrum beliefs most of us share—particularly beliefs about burden-shifting.
But arguments against redistribution don’t amount to much if we don’t take private property seriously in the first place. Accordingly, I develop a theory of
property, again grounded in our everyday moral beliefs, in this case concerning when we get to claim control over some asset. My theory takes as its inspiration
John Locke’s account of property, but also tries to update it. And whereas Locke focused on “mixing our labor,” I show that this is just a special case of the many things we can do to strengthen a moral claim to control over an asset. On this view, property is a moral phenomenon, not just a legal or political category, and constrains the state just as moral claims against harm or arbitrary detention do. I also examine the extent to which treatments of property by philosophers have tended to remain rooted in Locke’s 17th-century agrarian paradigm, which is now obsolete. Economic activity in developed countries largely revolves around services, and many redistributive arguments that made sense in an agrarian context make little sense in a service economy.
Finally, I consider the objection that redistribution is just morally required aid in disguise. Against this, I point out several reasons why we might have softhearted attitudes toward aid, while rejecting the state as its facilitator. Helping the needy is a noble cause, but one we should pursue with reason and persuasion, not state-sanctioned coercion.
Part II takes up a series of interrelated questions about markets that the discussion of property raises. These include what kinds of market exchanges we should promote or forbid, and the role that luck plays in the transmission of wealth in a free market system. These questions are important because the classical liberal view tends to leave more outcomes to the market. For this reason, I emphasize the ways in which markets enable people to improve their positions, even and especially when poorly positioned to begin with. I also try to draw some sober conclusions about which opportunities luck cuts off and leaves open to us. The picture I offer is a complex one, in which some evidence indicates that luck plays a far from trivial role in social outcomes—for instance, by the persistence of status across generations—but in which choice still opens the way to a decent life for almost everyone in developed countries. I also argue that considerations of luck don’t lend themselves to egalitarian views without powerful background assumptions.
From another point of view, skepticism about markets can center on doubts about whether they and the economic growth they foster make us happy. Some research suggests that economic growth doesn’t do much for average happiness, even if out-earning our neighbors gives us a boost. Reflection makes clear that this will inevitably be true in the future and may be true at present, raising the question of why we should care so much about growth and commercial life. I try to answer this question by comparing it to a parallel question about disability, which produces a similar disconnect between how observers rate our objective welfare and how happy we feel. In both cases the lesson I draw is that there is more to life—even the parts that concern only us—than happiness. I round out Part II by pointing out that markets don’t just matter for normative reasons, but have an epistemic significance as well. In fact, the signals that markets send us,
especially about popularity and incentives, constitute valuable evidence that should inform our choices, but which is generally overlooked.
As I described earlier, the point in taking up these issues is not so much to incrementally advance a narrow libertarian argument, but to consider the broader intellectual framework we bring to bear in thinking about such an argument. The classical liberal perspective that champions free markets and limited government no longer comes naturally to most people, and so it’s worth stepping back a bit for a wider view, in order to give libertarian doubts about redistribution a fair hearing. Additionally, working through these questions gives us an opportunity to reconnect with political economy as a method, and lets us forge connections with other disciplines working on problems political philosophers care about.
Part III turns to history. Philosophers have generally neglected important themes like the “Great Divergence” between countries with high and low growth trajectories over the past few centuries, as well as research into how various capitalist and socialist forms of economic organization have fared. I argue that over the long haul, things have worked out pretty well under capitalism, especially for the worse off. Economic growth has done more good for the world than all of the acts of beneficence ever performed. And the vast disparities we see between the global rich and poor mostly reflect inevitable differences in the onset of economic growth, not injustices. Exponential economic growth was never going to occur simultaneously everywhere, and what we observe mostly just reflects that fact. But libertarians for their part have tended to neglect correctives to the past which might be warranted by the theory of reparations. I agree that reparations are warranted, but I also try to show their natural limits, and to explain why such claims fade over time, and not just due to apathy or status quo bias. More generally, I try in Part III to show that thinking about economic justice in terms that are informed by history can pay dividends. Theories of reparations, for example, are often developed with little discussion of the actual past, but sometimes the details of history make a difference to how we react to such theories.
Finally, Part IV develops two themes at the intersection of political theory and practice. One concerns the concept of political correctness and its bearing on public discourse of the sort this book participates in; the other relates to the utopian character of classical liberal ideas, which may now seem a bit out of their time. The first theme is relevant because there is often a certain politically incorrect quality to libertarian discussions of topics like poverty, work, and reparations. However, my goal is not to dismiss politically correct norms and taboos. In fact, I try to explain the good reasons we have to introduce barriers in our public discourse against ideas that might threaten some people’s public status. My goal is rather to show that these norms come with real costs and consequently set up dilemmas we should acknowledge. The point about utopianism is important in turn because the welfare state isn’t going anywhere, making resistance to it seem quixotic. I thus conclude the book by trying to show how libertarians can object to the present regime as
unjust while advocating slow, conservative reform rather than radical change. If I could press a button and bring about the libertarian revolution tomorrow, I would not press it. Instead, I would try to slowly persuade people to see things my way.
All this is plenty—perhaps too much—to discuss in one book, and yet I should also concede how much is being left out of this reassessment of classical liberal ideas.7 For one, I generally ignore challenges to libertarianism emanating from those who want even less of a state than libertarians do— philosophical anarchists. (Thoreau hopes for a government one day that governs “not at all”— once men are prepared for it.) Their views are important too, but explaining why a state is permissible at all will occupy us only incidentally (I do sketch a proposal in chapter 5). I also ignore the many noneconomic causes that libertarians have sometimes taken up, like free speech, gay marriage, and drug legalization. This is the fun part of libertarianism and requires little heroism to defend. Many disagree with such policies, but few think their sponsors cruel or ungenerous, while resistance to the welfare state and programs intended to foster economic equality evoke precisely that response. (Telling your students or colleagues you favor drug-sentencing reform evokes murmuring approval; telling them you oppose wealth transfers— for broadly similar reasons— evokes stunned silence.) Misunderstandings of libertarian views about the welfare state strike me as far more acute than misunderstandings of libertarian views about drug legalization. For this reason I will be concentrating on the no-fun-at-all controversies surrounding distributive justice.
n Part one
2 Morality and the State
Morality constrains the state, or at least it should. This is true of how the state treats outsiders, but even more true of how it treats its own. It was a central insight of what Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” in which philosophers like Plato and Confucius first advanced ideas about the relationship between the state and broadly moral concepts like justice or the mandate of heaven. 1 Small wonder: the states they observed were increasingly strong, to the point that their exercise of power could transform an entire region like the Mediterranean or East Asia, and attempts to bind state-sanctioned force by moral means had become a topic of public discussion, as in historians like Thucydides and a little later Sima Qian.2 Later epochs have continually rediscovered the Axial insight, as Aquinas, Locke, and the American framers testify in their diverse ways. Indeed, one suspects that the Axial thinkers were themselves systematizing ideas that far preceded them— ideas glimpsed, perhaps, in codes like those of Hammurabi and Ur-Nammu. (Even Sumerian potentates evidently felt the need to advertise the moral quality of their rule, that they “established justice in the land.”)3 The idea that morality constrains the state can seem naive from a certain postmodernist perspective—a prelude in B-flat major in the age of Cage. But the morality involved need not be parochial, and it can, I believe, draw on widely shared beliefs. And in the end there is no real alternative for explaining why we resist imperialism or arbitrary detention. The exercise of collective power inevitably elicits moral demands for its restraint.
n Which Morality?
Since morality constrains the state, what we believe about morality affects what we think the state may and may not do. For this reason, it is customary to begin discussions of justice by considering the seemingly fundamental divide among moralities, between utilitarian theories and those called deontic, after the Greek term for duty, deon. Utilitarian theories tell us to do whatever will produce the best (net) consequences. Deontic theories tell us that there is a fundamental duty to respect certain rights people are endowed with, for example not to be exploited for the sake of the greater good, or those featuring in the Ten Commandments. In the stereotyped disputes that follow, utilitarians are supposed to allow for such things as executing the innocent to appease a mob if that brings about the greater good, while rule-worshipping deontologists supposedly won’t lie even to save a life. This deep-sounding distinction tends to wobble, however, as soon as we enter into details. What turns out to be important for political philosophy aren’t the
theoretical differences among moral theories, but the practical differences for how we may treat one another, which often turn out to be surprisingly few.
There are several reasons utilitarians may end up recognizing rights or something pretty close as a matter of practice. Writers like John Stuart Mill take rules, not individual acts, as the target for promoting good outcomes, which means they will often end up agreeing with their deontic rivals. Executing the innocent won’t make for a good general rule, however tempting in carefully cooked-up thought experiments. Other utilitarians openly mimic deontic features of our folk morality by co-opting them into the class of consequences that get counted. It’s easy to make utilitarianism have crazy implications if all we attend to is whether an act maximizes human happiness; it’s harder if we announce that not getting what you deserve and being exploited are bad consequences that matter in their own right.4 And some utilitarians have given elaborate arguments for why even simple forms of utilitarianism often turn out to be self-effacing, like the Cheshire cat. This can be because they just think that, surprisingly, utilitarianism ends up validating the folk wisdom of their age, as when Jeremy Bentham offered elaborate arguments in the 18th century to show that men should have the final say in marriage. Alternatively, in the 19th century Henry Sidgwick argued more systematically that departing from folk morality will tend to threaten moral observance in a society, so that even those who know better should generally stick to the conventions of the times—Victorian sexual mores and all.5
Conversely, deontic theories emphasizing the need to respect people’s rights initially sound as if they have an absolutist, anti-utilitarian cast. And sometimes they do—Kant famously thought it better not to lie to a murderer asking you about his target’s whereabouts. (At least your hands stay clean.) But here, too, things are less clear than they seem. In fact, on the modest theory of rights that I advance in the next chapter, rights aren’t insuperable; when enough is at stake, and the right is weak enough, sometimes people get to harm us for the greater good. What’s important on this view is acknowledging that there is a threshold that must be reached before such infringements become acceptable. This sounds a lot like some versions of rule utilitarianism. Of course, philosophers will still care about what the deeper basis for superficially similar moral views is, and it would be a mistake to dismiss such further probing as idle. (Cynics might think of William James’s exasperated pragmatism on hearing disputes about whether a man chasing a squirrel around a tree circles the squirrel.)6 Different moralities can still disagree about the reasons they offer for their prescriptions, and these reasons matter. In my view it would be a deep mistake, for instance, to respect someone’s right against being raped just because such a rule generally tends to make people happier—this would disastrously mistake the nature of the moral relationship we bear to others.
Moreover, there may remain structurally unbridgeable chasms between utilitarians and their enemies. Part of the charm (or horror) of thinking in deontic terms is that we specifically embrace the worse of two possible outcomes,
and
State n 15 if doing so is the only way for us to avoid doing certain things we have a duty to abstain from. If two innocents will be tortured unless I torture just one innocent (perhaps by torturing a terrorist’s little girl—his only weak point), I may demur because the girl has a right I may not infringe. It has often been pointed out that this demurral will be difficult to mimic within a utilitarian theory, since the whole point is to promote the overall good.7 Since utilitarianism doesn’t care about what I do, but only about the end result, it is hard to see how it can accommodate any reluctance we may have to harm some for the sake of preventing others from suffering even more. In fact, the strength of utilitarianism is that it can capture the other side of our conflicted feelings in such cases—the sense that it’s crazy to follow a morality that tells us to allow more of the very bad stuff it tells us to abstain from, seemingly just so that we can avoid doing it ourselves. That is its charm. Perhaps some complicated form of rule utilitarianism can bridge even this gap without collapsing in on itself. (Torturing one to prevent two more torturings may itself produce terrible side effects as a general rule.) Or perhaps not. What is important for our purposes is just that many divergent moral theories converge on similar results in practice, on many occasions. Since our interest is in political theory here, not the nature of morality, we can take an ecumenical approach. We can just ignore the deep question about the nature of morality and make assumptions only at the superficial level of practical prescriptions. In that spirit, I propose simply to assume that the common-sense picture of morality’s structure is on target, for the most part, including its various deontic features. 8 I will assume, in other words, that sometimes we can’t do things to people that would promote the overall good because doing so would exploit them or infringe their rights. I will assume that people deserve certain things in virtue of what they have done in the past and that we do wrong in ignoring desert. I will assume that we have a right to favor those we love, so that we do right lavishing our rotten kids with Christmas presents that could go to the needy instead, and that we may own televisions and cars rather than giving it all away. Just because your money would do the neighbors a bit more good than it would do you doesn’t mean that I may steal it and give it to them. At the very least, some very high bar would need to be met to justify such an act. Just because you would generate more happiness by giving money away than spending it on your kids or on yourself doesn’t mean that you have to. These beliefs seem to be widely shared, making them useful assumptions. But although I will borrow the deontic trappings of folk morality and talk of “rights” and “desert,” I don’t intend to rule out some utilitarian (or any other) basis for these notions, and readers are welcome to replace them with their preferred equivalents—whether utilitarian, religious, or otherwise. What matters, again, is only that we can agree that in practice morality bars such things as harming or stealing from people for the sake of some marginally better outcome. This means recognizing that people have something structurally equivalent to individual rights, and that morality
has a superficially deontic cast, but only in a very weak form, and with complete agnosticism about the underlying basis of this practical stance. Since many utilitarians have spent their lives trying to demonstrate the utilitarian basis of common-sense morality, presumably they at least would accept this ecumenical proposal.
But some will reject it. In particular, some utilitarians deny that there exist anything like individual rights, even construed in weak, non-absolute form, even as a matter of practice. They likewise deny that it is okay to favor our kids or to own frivolous luxury goods like televisions. They insist, rather, that each act we perform really should be judged on whether it promotes the best overall consequences, and they think that in practice this will have counterintuitive implications out of step with common-sense or folk morality. We can call this revisionist utilitarianism to distinguish it from ecumenical varieties that in practice have implications similar to our everyday beliefs. Peter Singer appears to be a representative of this camp.9 We were able to take an irenic approach toward ecumenical views since our interest lies only in the practical upshot for questions about distributive justice. But revisionist utilitarianism would have very strong and distinctive implications for distributive justice (and everything else). This is because of two ways in which revisionist utilitarianism diverges from folk morality and the rights and duties the latter seems to recognize.10 In the one direction, revisionist utilitarianism rejects any constraints on our actions apart from maximizing the good. Revisionist utilitarianism doesn’t even recognize a threshold that we must pass before pressing on toward the better outcome. As long as it’s true that the world would be a better place if I steal your money and give to others, I may steal your money. So revisionist utilitarianism doesn’t recognize any constraints on my actions following from duties to observe people’s rights.
On the other hand, folk morality suggests that we aren’t subject to a requirement to relentlessly pursue the good at our own expense. We should be reasonably generous in emergencies, but aren’t obligated to sell all we own to help distant strangers. We have the option to sell, but we don’t have to. To put it another way, most people think there is such a thing as going above and beyond the call of duty. This category—“the supererogatory” in the philosopher’s argot—would just cease to exist if we took revisionist utilitarianism seriously. For if it was always wrong to do anything that failed to make the world a better place overall, then we would never have the option to buy subwoofers instead of giving to charity, or lie in bed on Sunday instead of working at the soup kitchen, and so doing the reverse wouldn’t mean going above and beyond. So revisionist utilitarianism is both too permissive by the standards of common-sense morality, and too demanding. Too permissive since it lets us steal our neighbors’ stuff, at least in theory, and too demanding since it makes us sacrifice ourselves at every turn.
“But I have an ingenious way of reconciling utilitarianism to common sense!” someone will say. Then we’re back to the ecumenical proposal.
Having delineated an important moral theory that would completely upend our thinking about distributive justice, I now want to argue for aggressively ignoring it. Instead of trying to refute utilitarianism, as many political philosophers have undertaken, I will simply make clear my (unproven) assumption that the revisionist variety is mistaken, and that the ecumenical varieties can be taken on board. If I am wrong about this and it turns out that we should be executing the innocent to appease the mob, or selling our children’s Christmas presents, then much of what I have to say will be mistaken. But then, if such things turn out to be true, being wrong about distributive justice will be the least of our worries.
There are two main reasons for this cowardly approach. Ironically, one is that utilitarianism really is a profound and important thesis, one that deserves its own book or books. It amounts to the project of seeing people from a detached, impartial point of view, and of rejecting any attempt to hedge for the fact that I will be the one doing this thing to someone else, or that it is my life that will go worse if I engage in self-sacrifice. This project would mean seeing ourselves less as agents with a personal perspective, and more as conduits for bringing about optimal states of affairs. That idea is too profound to dismiss casually in a few pages, as political philosophers are wont to do, in the rush to get to questions of justice. It would be as if we tackled a controversial theory of the French Revolution by first refuting skepticism about the external world. John Rawls, for instance, emphasizes that classical utilitarianism may, in theory, ignore the unequal distribution of goods for the sake of generating a greater overall quantity.11 But it’s a simple enough variation to announce that radical inequalities in distribution are undesirable consequences in their own right, or that under anything like realworld conditions the opposite is more likely. (That is, exacerbating inequalities is likely to produce less overall happiness or other good consequences, not more.) Only those already unsympathetic to utilitarianism are likely to be swayed by Rawls’s brief observations. Those who begin their political philosophy by defending the morality of rights don’t so much preach to the choir as exorcize the elect.
This doesn’t yet explain helping ourselves to a deontic version of morality. Granting that assumptions must be made, why choose one way or the other? The deeper reason for ignoring revisionist utilitarianism is that I don’t think most of us could live with it. This may seem surprising: there are actual utilitarians out there, walking about, so how hard can it really be to live with their views? But it’s telling that few utilitarians exhibit much utilitarianism. By this I don’t intend the childish ad hominem often raised against those calling for more aid to the poor and the like. Peter Singer, for instances, modestly concedes, “I don’t think my indulgences can be justified. I know that I’m very far from being a saint. I should spend less on myself and give away more of what I earn.”12 This amounts to successfully living with utilitarianism in the sense that we should care about.
Living with a view doesn’t require fully implementing it. The significant question of whether we can live with an ideal like secular humanism or Marxism or Christianity isn’t whether we fall short of the ideal; it’s whether we can bring ourselves fully to accept the ideal in the first place, I submit. The real question for the aspiring Christian isn’t, “Can you be sure you’ll avoid sinning?” It is rather, “Can you bring yourself to accept that there is such a thing as sin and a need for redemption from it?” And in this sense, I doubt that we can bring ourselves fully to accept the utilitarian ideal. The problem isn’t superficial weakness; the problem is a profound incompatibility between utilitarianism and what we are. If there were a button that said, “Implement utilitarianism!” that would (somehow) set in motion steps that would compel us to comply with its dictates, thus removing the difficulty of constant choice, I don’t think many of us, on reflection, could bring ourselves to push it.
Challenges to living with utilitarianism tend to focus on what I called options—the option we think we normally have to flout the overall good when we rather sleep in, or buy a subwoofer instead of donating to charity. But what really cuts ice are constraints on our actions. Singer and others emphasize that they can accept that they do not, as utilitarians, have the option to loaf about when they could help others, however much they fall short. But what is really hard about living with utilitarianism isn’t self-sacrifice but other-sacrifice, paradoxically enough. This wouldn’t be so if we were purely self-interested, but we aren’t, and the prospect of exploiting others for the greater good thus terrifies us.
Of course, it’s rare that harming innocents will produce much good, but it’s easy enough to come up with cases:
Grandma: Grandma is a kindly soul who has saved up tens of thousands of dollars in cash over the years. One fine day you see her stashing it away under her mattress, and come to think that with just a little nudge you could cause her to fall and most probably die. You could then take her money, which others don’t know about, and redistribute it to those more worthy, saving many lives in the process. No one will ever know. Left to her own devices, Grandma would probably live a few more years, and her money would be discovered by her unworthy heirs who would blow it on fancy cars and vacations. Liberated from primitive deontic impulses by a recent college philosophy course, you silently say your goodbyes and prepare to send Grandma into the beyond.
If this seems too outré to take seriously, we can try this instead:
Child: Your son earns a good living as a doctor but is careless with some of his finances. You sometimes help him out by organizing his receipts and invoices. One day you have the opportunity to divert $1,000 from his funds to a charity where the money will do more good; neither he nor anyone else will ever notice the difference, besides the beneficiaries. You decide to steal your child’s money and promote the overall good.
Recall that we’ve already set aside ecumenical views that side with deontic morality in practice. So it’s no use to protest that the true utilitarian theory has some
esoteric feature that lets us ignore the case, say because we should only follow rules with good consequences, and killing those around us to reduce hunger would have terrible consequences overall. The only views left on the table at this point are precisely those that are willing to contemplate that, at least in some circumstances, rubbing out Grandma and stealing from our children is the right thing to do. The problem, then, is that most people don’t seem able to accept even that they ought to aspire to such behavior, let alone engage in it. Exploiting those we love isn’t an ideal we fail to attain, it’s the very antipode of the ideals themselves. Just consider contexts in which we are specifically seeking to articulate them, as when we instruct our children. Do revisionist utilitarians sit down their sons and daughters and implore them to steal from their friends when it is possible to do so undetected and to divert the money to famine relief? There are many books by revisionist utilitarians telling us that we ought to do more to live up to the demands of morality through self-sacrifice; the fact that there are so few urging us to engage in more other-sacrifice would be surprising if revisionists really could take their philosophy seriously in practice.
It may seem as if I am trying to argue from the fact that you cannot kill your grandmother to the falsehood of utilitarianism. But that would be the kind of lame attack that I was lamenting earlier; my point is not that these histrionic vignettes in any way refute or even count against utilitarianism. All they really do is dramatize the nature of the utilitarian commitments, and emphasizing commitments isn’t much of a counterargument. The point is rather that it doesn’t make sense to initiate a debate about social organization on the basis of assumptions few if any of us can live with. Being unable to live with a view, even aspirationally, doesn’t mean that it’s false, but given that we aren’t going to get to the bottom of the matter here and now, it’s a reason to assume the opposite for purposes of the discussion. Again, it would be folly to open a book about the French Revolution by first refuting skepticism about the external world. This is so even if the interest of the former depends on the falsehood of the latter. (If I’m a brain in a vat being fed delusory sensory impulses, then who cares about Robespierre?) But if we persuade ourselves that we could not even take skepticism seriously as something to aspire to, then it is best assumed false for purposes of such a book. The underlying rationale for this is that the goal of inquiry is either practice, or belief, or both, and that goal will be frustrated if our inquiry rests on assumptions we cannot take seriously as the basis for action or a premise for further reasoning and belief. (In appendix A I argue that we can reconcile the existence of utilitarians with their doctrine being unlivable by appealing to common cases of self-deception.)
Stalwarts may scoff at my faint-heartedness: why on earth shouldn’t we face up to whatever the truth is and find a way to live with it? If an infallible angel announces revisionist utilitarianism to be true, what else could we do but add it to all the other “unthinkables” that have turned out to be true—Darwinism, the Milgram experiment, and the like? Some will indeed see things this way, and so it cannot be said that no one is capable of living with utilitarianism in the sense
