Political philosophy – Double Aspect

A Squalid Policy

The UK Home Secretary wants to ban homeless people’s tents

The Financial Times’s Peter Foster and Lucy Fisher report on plans by the UK’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman to crack down on those who are called “rough sleepers” on this side of the pond, or simply homeless people on the other. They would be banned from sleeping in ― and charities that help them would be banned from distributing ― tents. The report quotes predictable and understandable criticisms of this on the merits, but I would like to make a different point about Ms Braverman’s plan: namely, that it is yet another example of a policy that seeks to nudge people by “crapping on them”, to use the language of that noted political philosopher Emmanuel Macron.

To be a bit more specific, unlike most laws ― good or bad, smart or stupid ―, which appeal to either the moral sense or the self-interest of the people who are supposed to comply with them (or, frequently enough, to both), some operate by triggering emotional responses, from exasperation, to disgust, to fear. I have written about this a number of times.

First, in the context of Canada’s prostitution legislation and, also, of prohibitions on flavoured tobacco products. I argued that, while the former is often roundly (and I think rightly) condemned and the latter broadly accepted and indeed welcomed,

[i]n both cases, the government (and advocates urging it on) seek to deter a behaviour that prevailing morality finds reprehensible (the sale of sex, the use of tobacco) not by prohibiting it, but by subjecting those who engage in it to the heavy pressure of their own negative emotions (fear, disgust).

Something similar is at work in the widespread prohibitions on “human smuggling” ― that is, unlike human trafficking, is the transportation of consenting, indeed willing, persons across borders they are prohibited from crossing. The effect of these bans is to raise the cost of the smugglers’ services: not just the pecuniary cost of course, but also the riskiness and the exploitativeness. As a result,

[w]e say that we welcome refugees, but actually we put barriers that not only make it difficult for them to come, but ensure that those who make the attempt are more likely to suffer or even die. That this barriers are invisible makes it worse. Ostensibly we protect vulnerable people from exploitation. In reality … we create incentives for the smugglers to exploit them.

Anti-smuggling laws work similarly to prostitution legislation that follows the “Nordic model”, as Canada’s now does:

Only one side of the consensual transaction, the one allegedly exploiting the other, is criminalized (in the case of smuggling, the supply; in the case of sex work, the demand), but the putative victim is endangered, and probably also stigmatized, as a result. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that, as with sex work and other activities considered reprehensible, regulations that ostensibly protect people from their ill-effects are actually meant to scare or disgust them out of engaging in these activities; or at least that, even if this is not the intent, the supporters of such laws really do not mind if they this effect.

And then there was the pandemic policy of Mr. Macron ― and of many others, in fairness to him, though few have been as explicit about their reasoning. Faced with the reluctance of a relatively small but determined bunch of anti-social idiots to get vaccinated against the plague, the French president propounded the following doctrine:

The unvaccinated, I very much want to crap on them. And so we’ll keep on doing it, to the end. That’s the strategy. … [I]t is only a very small minority that is refractory. … How do we reduce them? We reduce them, sorry to say it this way, by crapping on them even more. … I’m not going to put them in prison; I will not forcibly vaccinate them. And so we have to tell them: … you will not be able to eat out, you won’t be able to get a coffee, you won’t be able to go to the theatre, you won’t be able to go to the movies. (Translation mine)

As I wrote here,

To crap on people, Macron-style, is not quite like telling them that they ought to live in fear, as Canadian law used to tell and still tells prostitutes. It’s not even quite like physically disgusting them, as it does with smokers. But the way in which regulation that aims to crap on them acts is not that different from regulation that acts through fear or disgust.

Ms Braverman’s plans, to return to them, are not as subtle as Mr. Macron’s. They quite transparently enlist fear, cold, and squalor. Rough sleeping, she believes, is a “lifestyle choice”, and the choice needs to be painful to be unattractive, so she is willing to inflict pain. As I wrote in my first post on this topic, the one about sex work and cigarettes, ― though I am less tentative now than I was then ― “this approach is wrong, whether in the case of sex work, abortion, or smoking” ― or rough sleeping:

As Jeremy Waldron’s work on the Rule of Law and human dignity emphasizes, law normally tries ― and ought to try ― to treat those subject to it as human beings, endowed with dignity and capacity for rational choice. It does not, and ought not to, treat them as objects or beasts who need to be prodded around. Regulatory schemes that rely on visceral negative emotions such as fear, disgust, or shame seem to me to come close to doing that. To be sure, law often relies on a certain fear of negative consequences of non-compliance with its substantive or formal requirements (whether punishment, liability, invalidity or unenforceability, etc.). But, for one thing, it seems to me that, although the difference is difficult to put into words, the nature of this fear is not the same, and not as disturbing. Perhaps more importantly, and more clearly, the unpleasant consequences of non-compliance are something the law explicitly tells people to avoid. There is no manipulation going on. They are also produced by the legal system itself ― by the judges who announce them, by the prison wardens and bailiffs who enforce them, and so on, not by external factors for the law purports not to take responsibility.

All this applies, I think. I only add two side points about Ms Braverman’s plan for crapping on rough sleepers.

First, she says she “want[s] to stop … those who cause nuisance and distress to other people by pitching tents in public spaces, aggressively begging, stealing, taking drugs, littering, and blighting our communities”. Pretty much all of these things can be and are criminalized quite independently of the possession and distribution of tents, and many of them should be criminalized. The question, perhaps especially acute in this country at present, is whether the police are willing to enforce the law. But adding to the list of laws that need to be enforced does not help address the problem.

And second, legalize housing. Just legalize housing already, instead of criminalizing tents. How’s that for a less squalid policy?

Consequences

Are demands that speech not be punished just a childish attempt to escape consequences?

A recent piece by Max Fawcett in the National Observer invokes a number of common tropes about freedom of expression. One, which I address here, is that when people are punished for what they have said or written, they have “not been denied that right. But neither [have they] been excused from the potential consequences associated with exercising it”. The implication is that it is just as absurd ― perhaps childish ― to try to escape punishment for one’s words as it is to escape the consequences of one’s actions.

The context of Mr. Fawcett’s piece is a dispute between Jordan Peterson and the Ontario College of Psychologists, which ― like pretty much everything else Dr. Peterson-related ― I don’t care about. But this response to all manner of speech-related controversies is widespread. It is, in these terms, particularly favoured on the social justice-minded left: see, for instance, the comments of a man whom the BBC describes as engaged in “publicly shaming” people for real or perceived transgressions against progressive propriety and “ultimately getting the people ‘cancelled'”: “These times of doing whatever you want without consequences are over”, the BBC quotes him as saying. But, as Cathy Young points out just today in The Bulwark, the political right, especially in the United States, is also quite willing to visit retribution on those who say and write things it doesn’t like, even as it poses as a defender of free speech.

Why is the claim that punishment for the expression of ideas is just “consequences” and, as such, must be accepted by any reasonable adult wrong? Because the whole point of freedom ― of any freedom, not only freedom of expression or speech, but also freedom of religion, of assembly, or association for example ― is precisely freedom from certain kinds of consequences. And it is only, I think, with freedom of expression that anyone would dispute this. Imagine saying “you’re free to go to Church on Sunday, but you must accept the consequence of being fined for it”; or, “you’re free to form a union, but you must accept that you’ll be jailed if you do”. This is arrant nonsense, and everyone will instantly recognize that it is just that. The freedom of expression is no different: it is also, of course, an immunity from at least some kind of consequences attaching to its exercise.

Now, the real issue ― and again, this is true of freedoms other than that of expression ― is what consequences, imposed by whom, are off-limits. At one end of the spectrum, almost everyone agrees that it’s wrong for government to jail people for what they say, at least in most circumstances; it’s wrong to fine people for going to this or that house of worship, or to beat them up for holding a peaceful protest in a public square. At the other end, contrary to the caricature prevalent in social-justice circles, very few people, if anyone really, think that pure criticism is a forbidden consequence for speech. Again, other freedoms are mostly similar, though there is, it seems to me, a tendency in some quarters to view any criticism of (some) religious beliefs as categorically wrong; indeed, there is a perplexing overlap between the people who believe this and those who argue that even state-imposed or -backed punishment for speech is just “consequences”.

The difficult questions, when it comes to expression, are of two main sorts. First, what are the exceptions to the general principle that the state should not punish people for what they say? I don’t think anyone who accepts the legitimacy of the state denies that there are some exceptions. Fraud is committed through speech or writing, for example. But there are issues on which reasonable people disagree in good faith; hate speech is a classic example. I’m inclined to say, though, that this category of hard questions is actually a comparatively narrow one.

The bigger and perhaps more socially provocative one has to do with the vast middle part of the spectrum between state-imposed punishment on the one hand and pure criticism on the other. Does an employer have the right to fire an employees for their politics? Can a social media platform censor a story it considers to be disinformation, or indeed ban a user inclined to share such stories? Should people be able, not just to criticise someone who they think has crossed a line that should not be crossed in polite society, but to seek to get them fired from their job? How about doxxing them?

What makes these questions even more fraught is that each of them, in truth, is at least two questions, if not more. Does an employer have a legal right to fire an ideological dissident? Does an employer have a moral right to do it? And, perhaps, even if there is a moral right, should a good employer forbear from exercising it? And so on. Far too many people confuse the legal and moral issues, or think that the law should precisely track (their) morality, but here as elsewhere there may be perfectly good reasons for law and morality to diverge.

This is the stuff the “culture war” about freedom of expression is largely about; the legal debates, less so, but increasingly in the last few years. There are genuinely difficult questions there. Questions about line-drawing, for example, such as when, if ever, what would be perfectly legitimate criticism coming from one person becomes a morally reprehensible pile-on when engaged in by a large group. Questions about clashing rights, such as those that arise in relation to employers or social media, who have expressive interests of their own to set up against those of employees and users. Questions about the nature and relevance, or not, of market competition and monopoly. And no doubt many others.

When such difficult questions are debated, as they should be, nobody is served by amalgam, clichés, and misdirection. The tired claim that punishment for speech at the hands of the state ― or for that matter at the hands of an online mob ― is just “consequences” is all of these things. Yes, of course a punishment is a consequence, but if we believe in freedom of expression at all, we are committed to the principle that not every consequence that can be visited on a person for what he or she says or writes is just. What we want to know is what consequences are just, and when. Let’s talk about that.

I will try to address a particular set of questions related to this, also based on Mr. Fawcett’s piece ― specifically, on his claim that “[t]here is nothing unjust or illiberal about professional organizations enforcing codes of conduct for their members” ― in a separate post. Stay tuned.

The Good Government Trilemma

If you like big government, be prepared to sacrifice democracy or accountability

What is the respective role of democratic and other means of holding a government to account in a well-ordered polity? In one way or another, this question is the subject of live―and lively―debates in many (perhaps all?) democratic societies. In Canada, it manifests itself especially in controversies about the use of the Charter’s “notwithstanding clause”; in the UK, about the role of judicial review (especially of ministerial decision-making) and the Human Rights Act 1998.

At the risk of generalizing, my impression is that these debates tend to present themselves as clashes between the values of, for lack of better terms, democratic government and accountable government. One side thinks that the important thing is that elected officials get to run the show as they think best, subject to eventually being booted out by the voters. The other thinks that what matters is that the government be kept in check and made to answer for its actions on an ongoing basis, through some mix of elections, judicial supervision, and other accountability mechanisms, either internal to the government (such as ombudsmen and auditors) or external (NGOs and media).

To be clear, the democracy camp does care about accountability ― especially, that provided, or at least thought to be provided, by regular elections. For its part, the accountability side doesn’t deny the value of democracy, though it might argue that it’s a mistake to think of democracy in purely electoral terms. But there is, or so people think, a tradeoff between a focus on democracy, which calls for limiting the ability of non-electoral accountability mechanisms, especially the courts, to interfere with the work of government, and that on accountability, which requires these mechanisms to get in the government’s way with some regularity.

However, I think that the debate framed in this way is incomplete. It ignores a third factor that needs to be taken into account: the size of the government in question. This tends to go unnoticed because, whatever relative values they attach to democracy and accountability, virtually all participants in the debate are committed to keeping government big, by which I mean (substantially) bigger than a classical liberal nightwatchman state, let alone a Nozickian minimal state. I’m not sure quite where the boundary of big government lies, but I am sure that all governments in democratic states in 2022 (and for all I know the non-democratic ones as well) are on the big government side of it.

I would suggest that the apparent need to trade off between democracy and accountability is in fact only special case of what I will, again for lack of a better term, call the good governance trilemma. Of democracy, accountability, and big government, you can have two ― if you do things well; many polities won’t get two, or indeed even one ― but you cannot have all three. It is possible to satisfy the trilemma by choosing fractions ― a dose of democracy, a measure of accountability, a government not quite as big as one might dream of ― but the total cannot go above two, and it will certainly never go anywhere near three. You can’t have it all.

How does the trilemma work? Let’s start, as most people do, with big government a given. A government so big it takes scores of ― or, in the UK’s case, close to a hundred ― ministers of various sorts (or, in the US, agency heads) to run itself, to say nothing of the tens or hundreds of thousands of civil servants. This, of course, is not a Kornbluthian dystopia, but our present reality. A citizen who wanted to keep track of what the government is getting up to at a rate of, say, half an hour per minister per week would have a full-time job on his or her hands. And for at least some departments (think treasury or foreign affairs, for example, but there almost certainly many many others), half an hour per week hardly seems like it would be anywhere near enough to know what’s going on. Never mind ordinary citizens: even members of Parliament would struggle mightily to keep the tabs on the administration by virtue of its sheer size, to say nothing of the partisan and career incentives weighing on backbenchers, and of government obstructionism vis-à-vis the opposition.

Realistically, voters are in no position to keep such a government accountable (a point that Ilya Somin makes in Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter). This is why taking big government as a given, as most people today do, leaves you with a necessary trade-off between democracy and accountability. If such a government it is going to be accountable for more than an infinitesimal fraction of its innumerable decisions and actions, it will have to be made accountable to, or at least through, non-democratic or indeed counter-majoritarian institutions: courts, tribunals, ombudsmen, NGOs, and journalists. Alternatively, a big government can be made answerable to voters alone, with no judicial and other interference. But then it would be foolish to expect it to answer for even fairly major screw-ups, let alone the small-scale indignities a large administration visits on those subject to it every day that ends in-y ― not because it’s necessarily evil or even especially incompetent, let alone corrupt; but because it is run by fallible human beings. And these human beings, too, are the more likely to be pressed for time or out of their depth the more tasks the administration has been given.

If, however, one were willing to sacrifice government size, one could at least hope for a government held accountable primarily through electoral means. For one thing, as the government does less, there is simply less for courts and other non-democratic accountability mechanisms to sink their teeth into. (I have written about this here: if, for instance, government didn’t take it upon itself to regulate who can enter the country, we wouldn’t be debating the merits of judicial review of immigration decisions, which are a big annoyance to the UK government in particular.) But, less cynically, if government only does a few things, it is easier for citizens to keep track of those few things, and the odds of their using their vote to reward things done well and punish things done badly improve. Admittedly, I personally would not be all that optimistic about the degree of the improvement; but there ought to be some. By trading away government size, one could get more accountability and democracy, because democracy would be (more) sufficient to ensure accountability.

At the risk of making this post even more off-the-wall, I will add that a (very) small government system would make it possible to improve the quality of democracy and accountability further in another way. As Bastiat points out in The Law, so long as the government sticks to protecting people’s natural rights instead of being an expedient through which everyone hopes to live at the expense of everyone else, it doesn’t matter all that much whether suffrage is universal or equal: “If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?” Some form of epistocracy, or at least a minimal test of political knowledge, could be applied without causing the same problems it must under a big government. And a more knowledgeable electorate would likely be better at holding the government to account.

Of course, I don’t expect many people to share my interest in radically smaller government. Fair enough. But I think that it would be good if they recognized the reality of the trilemma I’ve outlined in this post. Its cause ― the difficulty for voters and even their representatives to keep track of a large administration ― should not be a matter of partisan controversy. It’s a reality that needs to be acknoweldged and responded to, whatever values will inform each person’s response.

And, as I said above, the possible solutions to the trilemma are not all-or-nothing matters. Government size, obviously, is not a binary choice. A government that withdraws from some areas of activity, or abjures some forms of regulation, could be more amenable to political accountability and less in need of non-democratic accountability at least to that extent. Conversely, a government that expands in some new direction may require the creation of entirely new accountability mechanisms to address this specific development. All this should be borne in mind even if the boot of big government as I have (sort of) defined it here remains firmly planted on our faces, and other body parts, forever.

Glad to Be Unhappy

Some people in liberal societies are unhappy. But what exactly does this tell us?

Ross Douthat has made an interesting observation on Twitter a couple of days ago: “The biggest challenge for liberalism is the genuine unhappiness of a lot of people under the conditions of liberalism.” I’m not sure that this is right ― liberalism might be facing greater challenges now ― but let’s assume that it is. The implications of this claim are worth thinking through; they might be rather different than many, Mr. Douthat perhaps among them, might assume.

First, at the risk of being tart, if the biggest challenge a philosophy is facing is that its application makes people unhappy, that’s not such a bad problem to have. The application of most political philosophies makes an awful lot of people not just unhappy, but dead. If the worst liberalism can do to you is make you miserable ― as opposed to immiserated, like socialism, whether of left-wing or or of right-wing varieties ― that’s actually a point in favour of liberalism.

Second, we have to ask why people are unhappy about living “under conditions of liberalism”. Mr. Douthat seems to point to people annoyed at being bossed around by technocrats and to those developing harmful addictions, perhaps due to a lack of attachments and meaning in their lives. But these things are by no means peculiar problems of liberalism. Socialist systems are also dominated by technocrats; in militarized or religious authoritarian systems, the social scientists and planners are replaced by generals or priests, who boss people around just as much. And while illiberal societies may foster the social bonds that will help some people relate to their fellows, they will destroy others ― typically, those running across the boundaries of class, race, and country.

To say that people are unhappy “under conditions of liberalism” is to point to a correlation, not a causal relationship. And it is not clear that a causal relationship could fairly be established at all. As I have noted in a previous discussion of liberalism here, “critics of liberalism are often confused, or obfuscating, about its nature: it is a political, not a moral, philosophy; a theory of how political power should be organized, not of how to live a good life”. Nor does it tell people how to be happy; only that they have an inalienable right to try. It is hardly a fair criticism of liberalism that it does not achieve something that it does not attempt.

Besides, when reflecting on the real or alleged failings of liberalism, one should keep in mind the ills of its alternatives. If some people struggle in the open liberal society, others would chafe under the oppressive restrictions of an illiberal one. There is a seen-and-unseen issue here: living “under conditions of liberalism” we see those whom they do not suit. We do not see as clearly those who could thrive under no other “conditions”―indeed, those whom the masters of an illiberal society would seek to eliminate.

The people who aspired to command illiberal societies are, indeed, another group that is unhappy under liberalism. So long as liberal institutions hold, they are unable to impose their own preferences on society, either because they can’t get them democratically enacted or because these preferences, however popular, are incompatible with liberal freedoms enshrined in binding constitutions. But I don’t think that their unhappiness should count for much. Those who would rule others by censorship, manipulation, or force deserve no sympathy from those whom they would rule.

A consideration of alternatives to liberalism also brings us to the third point I wish to make in response to Mr. Douthat. Liberal societies are the only ones in which unhappiness at the state of society and indeed at life, the universe, and everything can really be expressed. This is so for two reasons, one of which is obvious, and the other less so.

The obvious one in any but the liberal societies, unhappiness with the established order ― again, not just the established political order, but also the established order of things more broadly ― is treated not merely as an intellectual challenge but as a heresy, a thoughtcrime, or a form of treason to the nation. In illiberal societies, by contrast, expressions of disaffection are actually suppressed ― and, often, the person expressing such unhappiness is suppressed (or at least forced to repent or “re-educated”) along with his or her ideas. By contrast, illiberal societies might make room for private sorrows, but only within an overall worldview that says that, at a high enough level of abstraction, things are just as they ought to be.

I should note here that some unserious people affect to think that discontent with the existing state of affairs cannot be freely expressed in modern-day liberal societies. These societies are certainly not flawless ― not least thanks to the pressure of their illiberal members. But such claims are nonetheless preposterous. One sign of this is that they tend to be freely made on the same social media platforms that are supposed to be suppressing dissent against liberalism. Meanwhile, in Canada, what is by all accounts a very disruptive political protest is ongoing blocks away from the seat of government, with minimal police reaction.

The subtler yet more fundamental reason why liberalism uniquely enables not only the expression but perhaps the very existence of unhappiness with the world is that to become unhappy one has to be able to develop a personal scale of values against which the world fails to measure up. If one’s values are the same as everyone’s, as illiberal societies tend to make them, they will integrate the answers to any concerns with the world supplied by the prevailing ideology. If one has no genuine values to speak of at all ― as is the case for the average citizen, and especially for the politicized one, under totalitarianism, as Hayek pointed out ― one has no means to critique the world.

One writer who understood this essential relationship between freedom and unhappiness is Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He wrote that (I translate from the French, which itself is a translation from the original Czech, so… not ideal) “communism, fascism, all occupations and all invasions hide a more fundamental and universal evil; its image was the parade of people who march, arms raised, shouting the same syllables in unison”. People can only be made to march in this way by what Kundera calls the kitsch ― the “aesthetic ideal” of “a world in which shit is denied and where all act as if it did not exist”, which can sustain “categorical agreement with being”. Under liberalism,

where many currents [of thought] exist and the influence of one cancels or limits that of the others one can just about escape the inquisition of the kitsch. … But where one political movement holds all power, one finds oneself at once in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

There,

All that breaks with kitsch is banished: any manifestation of individualism (for any dissonance is like a slap in the face of the smiling brotherhood), any scepticism (for he who begins by doubting the smallest detail will end doubt doubting life as such), irony (because in the realm of kitsch, everything must be taken seriously.

The open existence of unhappiness ― it’s not being packed away to “the gulag [which] can be understood as the septic tank into which totalitarian kitsch casts is rubbish” ― is only possible in a free society. It is not so much a challenge for liberalism as its crowning achievement. We should be glad to be unhappy. It means we are free.

Killing for Laws

People get killed when laws are enforced. How should this bear on our thinking about the laws’ legitimacy?

There is too much law. Considering that people in the business of keeping track of it cannot even tell how much of it there is, I don’t think this claim is reasonably open to dispute. But what laws should we get rid of? One seemingly attractive answer is: all those we are not willing to kill to enforce. It’s a great rhetorical weapon against laws: while we’re probably willing to resort to violence to stop violence, the boundaries of permissible law shrink very, very fast beyond that. But on further reflection I think this is not the right way to think about the issue.

Conor Friedersdorf quoted Stephen Carter’s statement of this view in a short piece in The Atlantic some years ago. (I haven’t tracked down the source of the quotation, though I haven’t looked very hard.) Professor Carter wrote:

[E]ven a breach of contract requires a judicial remedy; and if the breacher will not pay damages, the sheriff will sequester his house and goods; and if he resists the forced sale of his property, the sheriff might have to shoot him.

This is by no means an argument against having laws. It is an argument for a degree of humility as we choose which of the many things we may not like to make illegal. … The statute or regulation we like best carries the same risk that some violator will die at the hands of a law enforcement officer who will go too far.

David Henderson picked this up in a recent post on EconLog, which is how I came across this particular statement of the “willingness to kill” test for the appropriateness of law. Professor Henderson suggests that you

[t]hink about all the laws and regulations you want. Then think about whether you want the government to be willing to kill people if those who disobey escalate their disobedience. … Then ask yourself if that affects your thinking about any of the laws that you previously said you wanted. Laws that make gasoline cans almost useless? Laws that say you can’t have more than a certain volume of water per minute coming out of your shower head? Laws against using marijuana? Laws against growing marijuana?

Like I said above, the suggestion seems to be that we shouldn’t have such laws ― not just as a matter of policy, but that it is immoral to have such laws and to expose people to the risk of death at the hands of law enforcement for disobeying them. And, to repeat, I’m not convinced.

Part of the reason why was given shortly after Mr. Friedersdorf’s piece appeared by Joe Carter at the Acton Institute’s blog. Mr. Carter referred to Frédéric Bastiat’s argument that resort to law, and to force in enforcing it, is legitimate when, but only when, an individual would be justified in using force to assert his or her natural rights (i.e. life, liberty, and property). The law is a collective substitute for individual self-defence or self-help. Now, just as an individual will sometimes be justified in using force, but not deadly force, in protecting his or her rights, so the law’s intervention may be justified only to a degree. But an individual does no wrong if the accidental consequences of an application of force in self-defence exceed what would have been a priori justified in the circumstances. (Mr. Carter gives the example of a person struggling with a thief who falls and breaks his neck. It would have been wrong to kill the thief intentionally, but the person is not blameworthy for the accident, even though it would not have occurred had they not defended their property.) And this too applies to the law: “Intentionality”, says Mr. Carter, “carries a lot of weight in such scenarios, whether the force is being applied by me or by the Sheriff”.

I think this is mostly right, but I would add a couple of qualifications or nuances. First, I’d sharpen Mr. Carter’s argument a bit. In the example he gives, it’s not only the case that the person who struggles to keep his or her property and in the process accidentally causes the thief to die is blameless. It’s also that the thief is actually wrong ― not just to commit the theft in the first place, but also, additionally and separately, wrong to persist in it and to struggle to hang on to unjustly acquired goods. Similarly, at least if assume that the enforcement of some laws is justified, and further that it is sometimes just (more on this presently), then at least in some subset of cases “escalating disobedience” is actually wrong. The thinkers and practitioners of civil disobedience ― Thoreau, King ― warned against it. So it’s not obvious that we should have special solicitude for the person who escalates disobedience ― at least in some (significant) number of cases.

This brings me to the second qualification to Mr. Carter’s argument. He concludes by writing that “the problem is not the violence” which sometimes accompanies the enforcement of the law, but “the injustice” of far too many laws. But we have been painfully reminded, over the last few years, that too often “the violence” is indeed a problem. Even if the underlying law is just, it can nonetheless be enforced unjustly, in ways that make it impossible to analogize the suffering caused in the process to an accident of no real moral significance, let alone something the law-breaker is to blame for. Far too often, law enforcement resorts to lies, intimidation, excessive actual or threatened violence and deprivation of rights. These problems can be and too often are compounded by prejudice, notably racial prejudice. Also far too often, moreover, law enforcement agencies and agents are unaccountable for these wrongs.

This is precisely why the “willingness to kill” argument, although not strictly valid, is intuitively appealing. At the very least, it draws our attention to the costs that our preference for and belief in the legitimacy of laws imposes on others (and sometimes, though rarely, on us). It also draws our attention to the fact that, our world being rather imperfect, these costs will be rather higher than ideal theory or even analogies to improbable accidents suggest, and unjustly so. And again the injustice is often compounded by the fact these costs weigh heavier on some groups of people than on others ― on the excluded, on the deviant, on the different. We can and should try to reform the system by which our laws are enforced to lessen the disparity, but we can and should also reform the legal system as a whole to reduce the cost of its enforcement for everyone, in recognition of the fact that injustice equally distributed does not cease being injustice.

Lastly, and despite the foregoing, I’ll add that, much as I love Bastiat, there is at least one kind of laws that are, I think, justified but do not fit the strictures of his definition: namely, laws that solve coordination problems. The classic example is the rule as to which side of the road people should drive on. I don’t think that such laws can easily be explained in terms of defence of natural rights; no one person has a right to dictate to another where to go. But such laws serve to make it easier for everyone to enjoy their freedom around other human beings and increase opportunities for peaceful collaboration. They are legitimate if any laws ever are, and even anarchists would want to devise (non-state) mechanisms for enforcing ― coercively if need be ― equivalent rules. It would of course be quite wrong to punish driving on the wrong side of the road by death, and we wouldn’t want anyone to to be killed for breaking this rule, even though it is very useful and not very onerous. But that doesn’t mean that there ought to be no rule about what said of the road to drive on, even if in some small proportion of cases rule-breakers who escalate their disobedience ― say by trying to drive away at high speed when the police attempt to stop them ― will end up dead.

With these qualifications, I think that the “willingness to kill” argument doesn’t quite work, but it draws our attention to some real issues. The concerns that make it appealing to some people are not decisive for or against a particular law, or even for or against a particular theory of legitimacy. But they should at least weigh on us when thinking both about individual laws and about theories of legitimacy, and make us prefer there to be less law rather than more, other things being equal.

Tous mes emmerdements

L’État peut-il obtenir l’obéissance des citoyens en les « emmerdant » ?

Quand les gens ne font pas ce que l’État voudrait qu’ils fassent, comment faire en sorte qu’ils changent d’idée et se mettent au pas? On peut interdire ou ordonner, amende ou prison à l’appui. On peut viser le portefeuille et imposer une « taxe pigouvienne » sur une activité ou un bien auquel on voudrait qu’ils renoncent en partie sinon entièrement, la pollution ou l’alcool étant des exemples classiques. Ou encore, on peut les dépiter, les dégoûter. Les emmerder, selon le vocable recherché d’Emmanuel Macron, président de la République française.

Je cite un reportage de l’AFP repris par La Presse :

« Les non-vaccinés, j’ai très envie de les emmerder. Et donc on va continuer de le faire, jusqu’au bout. C’est ça, la stratégie », déclare sans ambages le chef de l’État.

« La quasi-totalité des gens, plus de 90 %, ont adhéré » à la vaccination et « c’est une toute petite minorité qui est réfractaire », ajoute-t-il.

« Celle-là, comment on la réduit ? On la réduit, pardon de le dire, comme ça, en l’emmerdant encore davantage. […]

« Je ne vais pas les mettre en prison, je ne vais pas les vacciner de force. Et donc, il faut leur dire : à partir du 15 janvier, vous ne pourrez plus aller au restau, vous ne pourrez plus prendre un canon, vous ne pourrez plus aller boire un café, vous ne pourrez plus aller au théâtre, vous ne pourrez plus aller au ciné… », explique le chef de l’État.

En sus du vocabulaire, l’idée frappe. Que l’État aimerait que les gens se fassent vacciner et, ainsi, se protègent et réduisent la pression sur le système de santé, ça se comprend. Que l’État soit réticent à mettre les récalcitrants en prison, peut-être aussi ; il y en a trop, et on ne veut pas créer les martyrs pour la télévision. Soit. Que l’État se sente à court de moyens, donc, on peut aussi le comprendre. Mais n’empêche, l’État peut-il ― du point de vue de la moralité politique ― emmerder les gens?

Je me suis déjà posé une question semblable ici, au sujet notamment de la prostitution et de la lutte anti-tabac, deux domaines où on cherche à décourager les gens en leur faisant peur et en les dégoûtant, sans pour autant interdire. Voici ce que j’écrivais alors (je traduis) :

J’ai tendance à croire que cette façon de faire est injuste […]. Comme Jeremy Waldron le souligne dans ses travaux sur la primauté du droit et la dignité humaine, le droit cherche normalement ― et devrait chercher ― à traiter ses sujets comme des être humaines, doués de dignité et d’une capacité à faire des choix rationnels. Il ne les prend pas et ne devrait pas les prendre pour des objets ou des bêtes qui ne répondent qu’à la force. Or, il me semble que c’est justement à cela que s’apparente la règlementation qui produit des effets à coup d’émotions négatives viscérales comme la peur, le dégoût ou la honte.

Bien entendu, le droit compte souvent sur une certaine crainte des conséquences négatives de la désobéissance à ses exigences […]. Cependant, il me semble que, même s’il est difficile d’exprimer cette différence, la nature de cette crainte n’est pas la même et n’est pas aussi troublante. Quoi qu’il en soit, ce qui est plus important et plus clair, c’est que le droit prévient explicitement les gens des conséquences fâcheuses de la désobéissance. Il ne s’agit pas de manipulation. Ces conséquences sont l’oeuvre du système juridique lui-même ― des juges qui les annonces, des huissiers et des gardiens de prisons qui les mettent en oeuvre, et ainsi de suite ― et non des facteurs externes dont le droit se déresponsabilise.

Emmerder les gens à la mode Macron, ce n’est pas tout à fait comme leur dire qu’ils devraient vivre dans la peur, comme le droit canadien disait et dit toujours aux prostituées. Ce n’est même pas tout à fait comme les dégoûter physiquement, comme il le fait avec les fumeurs. Mais le mode d’action d’une réglementation qui vise à emmerder n’est pas si différent de celui d’une réglementation qui agit par la peur ou le dégoût.

M. Macron dit que « “l’immense faute morale des antivax” est de “saper ce qu’est la solidité d’une nation” ». Peut-être. (Que les antivax soient en faute morale, j’en conviens. Ce que c’est que « la solidité d’une nation », je n’en ai pas la moindre idée.) Or, un dirigeant qui veut « emmerder » des citoyens commet donc lui même une faute qui fait en sorte qu’il est mal placé pour faire la morale à qui que ce soit.

The Public Good Trap

Why thinking that the public good is the measure of law and politics is a mistake

The rhetoric of public good has always been part of legal discourse; even scholars who are, one might think, hard-boiled legal positivists are surprisingly sympathetic to the idea that law inherently serves the public interest, as are, of course, the positivists’ critics and opponents. Mark Elliott and Robert Thomas capture this sentiment in their textbook Public Law, which I have just finished reading as I prepare to teach in the United Kingdom starting next month. Professors Elliott and Thomas write:

In a democracy, citizens elect a government to protect, advance, and serve the public interest. In normative terms, democratic governance presupposes that government acts as the servant—rather than the master—of the people. There are two dimensions to this notion that good governance means (among other things) governing in the public interest. The positive dimension is that government should make decisions that advance the public good. … Governing in the public interest has a second, negative dimension. Government must not act in a self-interested manner. (Ca. 401; paragraph breaks removed; emphasis in the original)

I suspect that most people, of all kinds of political and ideological persuasions would view this as correct and indeed uncontroversial. But for my part I do not, and indeed I think that the things that Professors Elliott and Thomas themselves say, and the examples they use, expose the difficulties with this argument.

Two things, though, before I go further. First, to be very clear, I do not mean to pick on Professors Elliott and Thomas. I just happened to be reading their book (and I might have more to say about it soon), and thought that it was representative of what strikes me as a pervasive problem with the way people think and talk about these issues. And second, I think that Professors Elliott and Thomas are right to say, just before the passage quoted above, that “[g]overnments have no legitimate interests of their own, and nor, when acting in their official capacities, do the individuals who lead and work in governments”. This might be a more controversial thing to say than the claim that government must serve the public interest, but if it is true it must, then I don’t think there is any room for a raison d’État independent of the public interest.

But what about the main claim? Why wouldn’t governments need to work in the public interest? How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Well, consider what Professors Elliott and Thomas also say by way of explaining the “positive dimension” of the public interest:

The public good is a highly contestable notion. Concepts such as good governance and the public good are not objective yardsticks against which the legitimacy of governmental action can be determined. … In a democracy, the ultimate question is not whether the government is acting in an objectively correct way (whatever that might mean); rather, it is whether it is governing in a manner that is regarded as broadly acceptable by the public. Elections are the pre-eminent means of doing this. … There are [in addition] a number of different ways that enable or require government to take account of the views and wishes of the people: the need to obtain parliamentary approval of legislative proposals; submission to scrutiny by Parliament, the media, courts, tribunals, and ombudsmen; and public participation in government decision-making (eg by consulting with the public). (Ca. 401)

So: citizens elect governments to serve the public interest, but we can’t actually tell what the public interest is, and the only measure we have is the outcomes of elections and other processes, largely (except, arguably, for scrutiny by courts and tribunals) political ones too. And when you start factoring in political ignorance, the role of special interests in non-electoral accountability mechanisms (and, to a lesser extent, in elections too), the difficulty of interpreting electoral outcomes… the idea that any of it has anything to do with a discernable set of parameters we might usefully describe as the public interest disappears like a snowflake in a blizzard.

The example Professors Elliott and Thomas give makes my case, not theirs. According to them,

it is a relatively uncontentious proposition that, when using public resources—especially public money—government should, so far as possible, seek to attain value for money. Government is largely funded by the public through taxation. Accordingly, the public can, in turn, rightfully expect that government should not waste its money. (Ca. 401)

I think it’s true that, if you just start asking people in the street whether government should “seek to attain value for money”, they will say that of course it should. The trouble is that, if you start asking some follow-up questions, it will quickly turn out that people don’t really mean it. Many people believe, for instance, that government should only, or at least preferentially, do business with suppliers from its own country. The entire point of such policies, of course, is to override the concern for getting value for public money ― they wouldn’t be necessary otherwise. Others (or perhaps the same people) believe that governments should allow, and perhaps even encourage, their employees to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Again, the point of such policies is to override the preference for value for money: unionized labour is definitionally more expensive than its non-unionized counterpart.

For my purposes here, it doesn’t matter that such preferences are wrongheaded, although they certainly are. What matters is that, wrong though they are, people hold such preferences. As a result, even something as seemingly uncontroversial as the idea that government should get the best bang for the taxpayer buck turns out not to be consistent with how many people understand the public interest ― in the polling booth. In words, they will keep complaining about government inefficiency. In other words, it’s not just that different people and different groups can’t agree on what the public good is and we have no way of extracting any real meaning from the procedures they use to resolve their disagreements; it’s also that a single individual is quite likely not to have any sort of workable view of what the public interest is or requires.

For similar reasons, the “negative dimension” of the public good as articulated by Professors Elliott and Thomas fares no better. They argue that “it would be improper for an elected public body—whether the UK central government, a devolved government, or a local authority—to elevate political gain above the public good”. (Ca. 401; emphasis in the original) But if there is no such thing as the public good, objectively understood, then how can we sensibly claim that a public authority is elevating political gain above this non-existent yardstick? Worse, if the public good is to be assessed based in part on electoral outcomes, then doesn’t it follow that the pursuit of electoral success and the pursuit of the public good are one and the same?

What follows from this? Some would say that we should accept revelation and authority as our guides to the meaning of the common good, as a solution to the empty proceduralism of which they would no doubt see the argument of Professors Elliott and Thomas as representative. But such people have no means of persuading anyone who does not already trust their revelation and their authorities. Many of them recognize this and have given up on persuasion entirely. Like Lenin, they think that a revolutionary vanguard would be warranted in imposing their vision on the rest of us.

If we are disinclined to Leninism, I would suggest that we should shift our expectations and ambitions, for politics, for public law, and indeed for law tout court. Instead of looking to them to produce or uphold the public good, we ought to focus on how they can protect private rights, as the US Declaration of Independence suggests.

This is not an unambitious vision for politics and law, by the way. It is difficult enough to agree on a list of such rights that public institutions can and should enforce, and to work out the mechanisms for enforcing them without compromising other rights in the process. What is, for instance, the extent of property rights? Should it be defined entirely through the political process or should we make property rights judicially enforceable? If we set up police forces to (among other things) protect property, how do we prevent them from engaging in unjustified violence? Those are difficult enough questions, and the pursuit of even more intractable ones under the banner of the public good largely detracts us from paying attention to them.

Common Factionalism

The political rhetoric of the common good is poorly disguised factionalism, which the thinkers in whose name it is being advanced would have abhorred

The idea that law and politics should be organized around the principle of the “common good” is in the air on the political right. The left, of course, has had its versions of it for a long time. Both co-blogger Mark Mancini and I have written about “common good” arguments about legal issues, specifically the administrative state (Mark), constitutional law (me), and the Charter’s “notwithstanding clause” (also me), and found them severely wanting. A couple of recent newspaper articles give us an idea of what the “common good” philosophy looks like in practical politics.

On the northern side of the world’s longest closed border, Ginny Roth, writing in the National Post, identifies the Conservative platform in the late and lamented election with “a rich tradition of common-good conservatism that looks more like Edmund Burke than John Locke”. The master idea of this “new conservatism” (wait, is it new or richly traditional? never mind) is that “Conservatives must be positioned to build on the coalition of voters that will support it in this election by correctly identifying what appealed to them about the leader, the party and the platform”. Less blandly, “the left must not have a monopoly on populist politics”. The right should imitate the left, and in doing so advance the policies favoured, or assumed to be favoured, by “coalitions of voters who think the opposite of what the cocktail party goers do”.

The same ideas, if that’s what they are, are to be found south of the aforementioned border in Josh Hammer’s column in Newsweek. (Mr. Hammer, it is worth noting, is one of if not the closest thing the “common good” movement has to a leader. He is also, apparently, a research fellow with an outfit called the Edmund Burke Foundation.) Mr. Hammer defends bans on private businesses requiring their employees or customers to be vaccinated against the present plague. In doing so, he claims to take the side of “common-good-inspired figures” against “the more adamantly classical liberal, libertarian-inspired pundits and politicians who believe the quintessence of sound governance is simply permitting individuals and private entities to do what they wish”. Mr. Hammer “explains” that “[v]accine mandates will be a convenient fig leaf for a ruling class already gung-ho at the possibility of precluding conservatives from the full panoply of in-person public life”. (Why is that the defenders of tradition so often struggle with their native tongue?) This “wokeist ruling class” must be stopped by a “prudential use of state power to secure the deplorables’ basic way of life”.

With apologies to H.L. Mencken, “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” seems to be an excellent description of common good conservatism, as propounded by Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer. The common people are entitled to get their way, and to have the state’s coercive force used to ensure that they get their way. And no need to ask whether their preferences are consonant with some objective standards of morality, or the teachings of experts ― be it in economics, in epidemiology, or what have you. The beliefs of the common people are entitled to prevail because they are their beliefs, not because they are right.

Of course, it’s only the common people, that is, the right kind of people, that are entitled to have their way. The woke cocktail-swilling pundits and politicians are not. Even entrepreneurs, whom the conservatives of yesteryear lionized, must take their orders from those who do not drink cocktails. In other words, what Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer are promoting under the name of the common good is the view that the aim of politics is to give effect to the wishes of

a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

This is James Madison’s famous definition of faction, in Federalist No. 10. Ms. Roth might not have, but Mr. Hammer, who affects to be a constitutional sage as well as a political visionary, presumably has read the Federalist Papers. He’s read them, and has evidently concluded that he is cleverer than Madison, who feared faction as the seed of tyranny, civil strife, and destruction, and looked for ways to limit its ill-effects.

Madison saw the remedy in “[a] republic, … a government in which the scheme of representation takes place”. A “republic”, so understood, would

refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.

Not so for Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer. Not for them the refining and enlargement of public views by representatives. (It’s the cocktails, don’t you know?) The people themselves, and more precisely the “deplorables”, the ones whose views are the opposite of refined and enlarged, who must govern, and officials are to take their marching orders from them.

Poor Edmund Burke is spinning in his grave. His single most famous idea is doubtless the argument he advanced in his “Speech to the Electors of Bristol”, which deserves to be quoted at length here:

Certainly … it ought to be the happiness and glory of a Representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any sett of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

My worthy Colleague says, his Will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If Government were a matter of Will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But Government and Legislation are matters of reason and judgement, and not of inclination; and, what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one sett of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

The populism masquerading as “common good” conservatism being peddled by Ms. Roth and Mr. Hammer is the opposite not only of John Locke’s ideas and James Madison’s, but also of the deeply held views of the great man they dishonour by pretending to admire him.

I should note that there a more purely intellectual and, not coincidentally, intellectually respectable version of the “common good” thought. For the reasons some of which I set out more fully in my earlier posts, I don’t find it compelling. But, at its best, it does involve an honest reflection on the good of the community rather than window-dressing for factionalism. Michael Foran speaks from this perspective when he tweets that “[t]he Common Good shouldn’t be used as the new phrase for whatever political position one happens to already hold. A claim that X is in the common good needs to explain how X is both genuinely good and genuinely common in its goodness.”

As it happens, Adrian Vermeule (among others) has recently shared his thoughts on vaccine mandates with Bari Weiss, and they are not at all in line with Mr. Hammer’s. Along with much sniping at libertarians (does he think Mr. Hammer is one?), he argues that “the vaccine mandate is analogous in principle to … crisis measures” such as wartime conscription or the destruction of property to stop a fire: “[o]ur health, our lives and our prosperity, are intertwined in ways that make it entirely legitimate to enforce precautions against lethal disease — even upon objectors”.

The point is not really that Professor Vermeule is right (which I’m inclined to think he is, albeit not quite for the reasons he advances), and Mr. Hammer is wrong. It’s not even that their disagreement exposes the vacuity of the common good as a standard against which to measure policy (though it at least points in that direction). For my present purposes, it’s that the partisan version of the “common good” ideology, which Mr. Hammer and Ms. Roth represent, has next to nothing to do with its more cerebral namesake exemplified by Professor Vermeule’s comments to Ms Weiss. In its partisan incarnation, common good talk is nothing more than a fig-leaf meant to hide ― none too well, mind you ― the narcissism and cultural resentment that its promoters impute to a part of the electorate.

Tanstaafl

What do a libertarian society and its laws look like? Thoughts on Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

I have recently ― and, needless to say, very belatedly, for a self-proclaimed science-fiction fan ― read Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. I had been put off of Heinlein by Isaac Asimov’s somewhat harsh take on him in his memoir, I. Asimov, just as I’ve been forever put off Sartre by Boris Vian’s portrayal of him as Jean-Sol Partre. No regrets so far as Sartre is concerned, but I am glad I got over my aversion to Heinlein. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is an interesting book. Interesting enough, from a legal perspective, that I think it deserves a post here.

In a nutshell, the story is a retelling of the American Revolution, but set on the Moon, a.k.a. Luna, in 2075-76. The lunar population is oppressed by the Authority that supposedly runs the place on behalf of the Earth’s governing “Federated Nations”, but is mostly content to just plunder it by banning free trade and underpaying for the sole export ― grain (hydroponically grown) ― and overcharging for imports. Otherwise, the “Loonies”, most of whom are either transported convicts ― some actual criminals, others political undesirables ― or descendants of convicts, are largely left to their own devices, and become resentful of the Authority’s interference and exploitation. When the Authority tries to put an end to low-level grumbling, things quickly get out of control. Thanks to their courage, self-reliance, and the good fortune of having a fearsomely brilliant self-aware computer (I suppose we would now say AI) on their side, the rebels prevail, though not without considerable loss in the end.

The interest of such a book is, of course, primarily in its representation of a society very different from ours. (I am deliberately echoing the title of David Friedman’s Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, to which I will return.) The difference has little to do with technology ― indeed, on that front, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is just one of the many examples of science fiction Golden Age’s writers’ utter failure to anticipate the advances in computing and telecommunications that have occurred in the last 35 or so years. Heinlein’s Luna is a place of fixed (should one say moonline?) phones! What does make it different from 1960s and 2020s, Earth is its having had to adapt to an unforgiving environment, the virtual impossibility for its inhabitants to return “Earthside” where they are crushed by gravity, their lack and suspicion of organized government, and the sex imbalance that one might expect in a penal colony.

Heinlein’s lunar society is a libertarian one, and it is very odd, and unsettling in some ways ― seemingly high prevalence of illiteracy and very early marriages among others. In other ways, though, it is far ahead not only of the time of the book’s publication (1966) but even of ours, especially in its absolute intolerance of what we today might refer to as #MeToo abuses ― touching a woman without her consent, in however minor a fashion, might get a male Loonie “eliminated” at the nearest airlock. (The ready acceptance of the death penalty is another unsettling aspect of the place.) And while Heinlein’s vocabulary sometimes is antiquated, and he does fall into some annoying tropes more in tune with his times than ours, there is no question that his Loonies also have no time for, and indeed no concept of, racial bigotry ― though I suspect that they’d have no time for latter-day progressive identity politics too.

One might wonder, of course, whether Heinlein’s social prognostication is any more lucid than the technological sort. Perhaps a more or less anarchical society with a sex ratio severely out of whack will actually be a hell hole, not the creative and resilient if also deeply weird kind of place The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts. But you know what? People with more conventional views get their fairy tales told to them by gaggles of politicians at every election campaign. If that has a value, then so does libertarian science-fiction. At least, we’re not about to get a Prime Minister Heinlein imposing his views on the rest of us just because we hated him a little less than the other guy. And the fundamental maxim of lunar libertarianism ― there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, or tanstaafl for short ― is something that we would all do we well to keep in mind.

Still, I do want to pick a fight with Heinlein on one thing: his views of law and perhaps adjudication. The latter, like most everything else in Luna, is done privately, and often as a matter of improvisation. A citizen is simply asked to “go judge” and accepts, for a fee of course ― tanstaafl ― paid equally by both parties to the dispute. A few make this something like a part-time occupation, but there is no professional judiciary, just as there are no lawyers. And there are no laws. The protagonist speaks derisively of

an earthowrm [who] expects to find a law, a printed law, for every circumstance. Even have laws for private matters such as contracts. Really. If a man’s word isn’t any good, who would contract with him? Doesn’t he have reputation?

He adds that, instead of “printed laws”, Loonies

[h]ave customs [that] aren’t written and aren’t enforced ― or could say they are self-enforcing because are simply way things have to be, conditions being what they are. Could say our customs are natural laws because are way people have to behave to stay alive.

(Note that the lack of articles and pronouns in the quotations isn’t a typo or an accident: the Loonies’ English has a bit of a Russian accent. I wonder if non-Russian speakers will find it annoying, but it is mostly well done and I was rather impressed.)

Heinlein’s protagonist has a good understanding of natural law: see, for example, Randy Barnett’s explanation of natural law as a set of principles such that “[i]f we want persons to be able to pursue happiness while living in society with each other, then they had best adopt and respect a social structure that reflects these principles”. (657; emphasis removed) But he doesn’t seem to understand something that actual natural lawyers have always recognized: the natural law principles aren’t enough. To be useful, at least in a large-scale society, they need to be implemented and given relatively specific shape, which is what “printed”, or at least positive, laws are for. Natural law principles might lead us to the conclusion that we must make up for the losses we negligently cause, but not necessarily tell us what counts as negligent, or how to assess the compensation. Reputation can work to secure the performance of contracts among people who know one another, but it is of less help when we deal with strangers, nor does it necessarily assist us in figuring out what to do about a bargain that has been upended by a change of circumstances.

All that is not to say that the laws must necessarily be the work of a legislature or some other centralized, governmental institution. Perhaps, but that case must be made separately. As Bastiat pointed out in The Law, it is wrong to think that if something is not provided by the state it will not be provided at all, and this may well be as much of a mistake in relation to laws themselves as to other things. Perhaps laws can be efficiently supplied by institutions involved in a competitive marketplace ― indeed, it might not be too much of a stretch to say that the early development of the common law by royal courts competing with other kinds of courts looked a bit like that, though to be sure it wasn’t exactly a free market.

Conversely, though, thinking that there ought to be no state, or a minimal state, or a state that doesn’t seek to monopolize the law, doesn’t mean that one can do without laws ― or without lawyers and professional judges. Even among those of the “legal systems very different from ours” Professor Friedman describes that are not state-based, many rely on professionals for adjudication and sometimes legal representation. It is tempting to think, as Heinlein’s protagonist seems to think, that lawyers and professional judges are only a drain on society, but they ― like all other specialists ― are only a manifestation of the division of labour. If laws are necessary, and they are, and complicated, and they are too, then it is more efficient to let them be handled by people who specialize in this. On this point, Heinlein, or at least his character, fails to apply their own cardinal rule: one cannot have the benefits of a sophisticated legal system without some inconvenience: tanstaafl.

This critique notwithstanding, I do think that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is an interesting and worthwhile attempt to think through the working of a libertarian society and its (inevitable?) conflict with a statist neighbour. It might come short in dealing with any number of specific aspects of these problems, but the attempt is hardly less valuable despite this. So let me conclude by quoting the appeal of another of the principal characters to the lunar constitutional convention ― it is one that we would do well to take seriously in our own thinking about constitutions:

[I]n writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies … no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation … no involuntary taxation. … What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing.

Mere Liberalism

A response to a common caricature of liberal beliefs

There is a rhetorical trope in contemporary critiques of liberalism and libertarianism, especially those coming from the political right, that holds it for fundamentally flawed because it conceives of individuals as “atomized”, isolated, a- or even anti-social creatures moved by no higher emotion than crass self-interest. We have even hosted one critic who made this argument as a guest on this blog.

A recent post on Law and Liberty, in which Luma Simms “reviews” Ilya Somin’s book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, encapsulates this argument very neatly. I put “review” in scare quotes because, as Professor Somin points out, it misrepresents his book. But the exact same caricature is used to attack not only Professor Somin’s work, but liberalism and libertarianism more broadly; nor is it used by Mrs. Simms alone. So I think that a general response is warranted.

Mrs. Simms writes, summarizing the worldview that ― according to her ― underpins Professor Somin’s arguments in favour of greater freedom of movement and of personal choice more generally:

Man is a rational being; his actions are based on individual choice, guided only by reason; his judgement must be independent, free of any compulsion (including obligations and constraints that come from family, country, or culture); if he acts with others it is by his choice alone; he must live by his own achievements, for his own happiness and self-interest; he has no moral duty to others. As such, man must have the political freedom to follow his self-interest to achieve his happiness. It is autonomous individualism through and through.

As a summary of the liberal worldview ― and, to repeat, many critics of liberalism use descriptions like this one in just this way ― every one of these statements is grossly exaggerated or outright false.

“Man is a rational being“

Liberalism ― and for that matter conservatism or socialism ― does presuppose a measure of rationality in human beings. There would be no point in advocating for, say, freedom of speech, the Rule of Law, or democracy if human beings weren’t rational in the sense of thinking, making and carrying out plans, responding to incentives, and seeking to act on their (physical and social) environment in ways calculated to produce consequences.

But liberalism doesn’t require or depend on complete rationality. Liberals and libertarians can acknowledge failures of rationality: Bryan Caplan is no less of a libertarian for having explored at length The Myth of the Rational Voter. Liberals and libertarians can recognize that human beings are emotional, too. Love of freedom is an emotion, and no less than love of God or love of hearth and home.

“His actions are based on individual choice, guided only by reason“

As I have just noted, liberals and libertarians know that human beings can emotional or irrational. Needless to say they also know that their choices are constrained and their actions are shaped by the circumstances ― familial, economic, cultural, environmental ― in which they find themselves. Perhaps Mrs. Simms means that liberals want, as a normative matter, to create a state of affairs where humans are free to act exactly as they choose; but they do not. On the contrary, liberals respect property rights and the autonomy of individuals, families, and voluntary associations (including businesses, churches, NGOs, etc.), which means that they will uphold private arrangements that may diminish individuals’ choices.

Now, there are difficult questions that liberals and libertarians can struggle with about private choices that radically deny individual autonomy: self-enslavement is perhaps a silly example best left to philosophy seminars, but, say, parents who refuse to provide a minimum of education or healthcare to their children are a grim reality. But of course liberals recognize that interference with the freedom of some to secure some core of autonomy to others is still interference.

“His judgement must be independent, free of any compulsion (including obligations and constraints that come from family, country, or culture)“

I don’t think that any liberal or libertarian believes this. Yes, liberalism values independent judgment; yes, liberalism wants individuals to be free from legal compulsions of their judgment: hence its insistence on freedoms of conscience, thought, opinion, and so on. If this is what Mrs. Simms derides as liberalism’s rejection of “obligations and constraints that come from … country”, there’s something to the charge. If the critics of liberalism want “country” to introduce indoctrination and state ideology, let them say that clearly; better yet, let them spell out what they are going to indoctrinate us in (beyond platitudes about the common good), and give us a chance to decide whether we want to drink their particular kool-aid.

But as for other kinds of duties and compulsions, not only do liberals not reject them ― on the contrary, leading liberal thinkers have specifically insisted that the point of freedom is to have the ability to do one’s duty, as one sees it. Hence Lord Acton’s definition of “liberty”, in The History of Freedom, as “the assurance that every man will be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion” (3). Hence Hayek writing, in The Road to Serfdom, that

[r]esponsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.

Liberals regard obligations to family and friends, to God if one so believes, and even to country and “culture”, whatever that might be, as matters of conscience. The claim they reject such obligations is preposterous calumny. What they reject is the claim of “authority and majorities, custom and opinion” to interfere with an individual’s conscience to impose obligations of this sort when they are not felt.

“If he acts with others it is by his choice alone“

Again, it’s a bit difficult to say whether this is supposed to represent what liberals believe is the case or what liberals believe ought to be the case. But neither representation is accurate. Liberals neither deny the existence of social ties, such as those of kin, in which individual autonomy is far from complete, nor wish to abolish them. Liberals also do not deny nor, except for anarchist libertarians, wish to rid themselves entirely of collective political action, which is also involuntary as to many individuals who are forced to go along with the decisions of the authorities.

Liberals do want to provide exit opportunities for people who may find themselves bound by social ties that are or become abusive. They also want to limit the ability of majorities to impose on dissidents through the political process. But they want to do these things precisely because they recognize that human beings belong to groups, associations, and communities which they have not freely chosen and because they have no wish to abolish such groups, associations, and communities.

“He must live by his own achievements, for his own happiness and self-interest“

I don’t know many, if any, flesh-and-blood liberals or even libertarians who believe this. It sounds like a paraphrase of Randian objectivism, but I must confess that I’ve never read Rand, so I don’t know if it’s an accurate representation of her views. What I think I can assert with a good deal of confidence is that these views, if indeed she held them, are not at all representative. There just isn’t anything in classical liberalism or (non-Randian?) libertarianism that says that people must be navel-gazers, hedonists, and egotists.

To be sure, liberals acknowledge the fact that human beings are generally pretty self-interested. They have their altruistic impulses too, but they are often selfish. Liberalism’s response is to try to channel self-interest through institutions that can turn it to the greater good. The market is one such institution, as Adam Smith explained by pointing out, famously, that “[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. And liberals try to use politics in this way too: hence Madison’s insistence that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”.

But, to repeat, none of that precludes or condemns altruism. In trying to channel selfish behaviour for the benefit of society, liberalism certainly does not say that unselfish behaviour should somehow be disapproved of. What liberalism does insist on is that there are limits ― depending on one’s version of liberalism, perhaps very stringent limits ― on the degree to which people can be coerced into acting and living for the sake of others. But liberalism has a better opinion of human nature than those theories that apparently say that human beings will be navel-gazing hedonistic egotists (or, all manner of other unedifying things, as other critics of liberalism claim) unless forced to be virtuous by the government. (Liberalism asks: how is government going to be more virtuous than the governed?)

“He has no moral duty to others“

I won’t repeat what I’ve already said about Lord Acton’s and Hayek’s championing of freedom as the space in which individuals can understand and discharge their obligations ― not one where they have none. Let me, instead, remind you of the Lockean argument for the state. In a nutshell: individuals have inherent natural rights and a moral duty to respect the rights of others; unfortunately, left to their own devices, they are not very good at complying with this duty even when they earnestly try; an authority that can clarify the scope of individual rights and corresponding duties, and impartially adjudicate allegations of breach is necessary. A concern with moral duty is that at the foundation of liberal politics.

Again, what liberals deny, with greater or lesser vigour depending on their preferred flavour of liberalism or libertarianism, is the claim of the state to create moral duties incumbent on those subjects to their jurisdiction. If they subscribe to the doctrine of natural rights, they will say, with Jefferson, that governments are instituted in order to secure these rights, and that, therefore, the creation of duties not tending to secure natural rights is beyond their just powers. But it does not follow, and liberals do not believe, that moral duties to others cannot arise otherwise than through the state.

Let me make just two additional points. One, which follows directly from the foregoing is that critics of liberalism are often confused, or obfuscating, about its nature: it is a political, not a moral, philosophy; a theory of how political power should be organized, not of how to live a good life. Liberal political institutions (understood broadly, to include things like constitutions, laws, and courts) serve to preserve the space in which individuals ― either alone or in community with others ― seek to live a good life, as they understand it. Some liberal thinkers such as Adam Smith or even, to an extent, Lord Acton, had ideas about the good life. Being a liberal doesn’t mean taking no interest in moral questions. It only means renouncing the imposition of one’s own answers to such questions by force on others whose answers might be quite different.

The second point I’ll make here is that while I have responded to a critique of liberalism coming from the right, this critique would need only minimal adjustments to its language to be embraced by the illiberal left. The view that liberalism is nothing more than a smokescreen for egoism and selfishness is a staple of socialist doctrines going back a century and a half. The criticism of liberalism as denying social ties, and the limitations that community and belonging impose on individuals might seem newer. Indeed, many right-wing critics of liberalism are convinced that it is no different from socialism in this regard. But real-life socialist regimes were actually quite nationalistic themselves. More importantly in 2021, the ascending left considers human beings to be largely shaped by their intersecting identities, and bound by the resulting sums of privilege and oppression. They use a different vocabulary from the one that appeals to the right-wingers, but their message, and their critique of liberalism, is much the same. And, of course, it is wrong for much the same reasons.

Left and right alike criticise liberalism for its commitment to respecting the autonomy of individuals in ordering their own moral universe, based on their understanding of their place in the world and their relationships with family, community, and perhaps God. They think they can do better: give people a purpose in life and a morality which, left alone, they sometimes fail to find. But there is, and can be, no agreement on an all-encompassing morality that is not imposed by force, and as difficult as it may be to find one’s purpose without coercion, it is more difficult still to accept a purpose imposed on us by others. The others, after all, are still our fellows, albeit that an accident of birth, or the privilege of education, or the fortune of an election, or the force of a coup has elevated them to a higher social ― not moral ― station.

Thus the illiberal right and left alike are doomed to failure in their quest for a better world. As Hayek wrote, they have “nothing to put in … place” of the individualist, liberal virtues ― “independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors”. In their place, they can only make a “demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to do what is collectively decided to be good”. And because they know that they cannot persuade people to abandon liberalism with such demands, they try to caricature and defame it. Do not believe them.