Comments Elsewhere

Genius,

Serendipitously enough, I do make and sell pizza for a living.

However, you are dropping two essential parts of my statement when you describe the way I pay my bills as “living off the labor of others.”

First, to drag out an old saw, while it is true that I treat other people’s labor as a means to my ends, I do not treat them as a means only. The fact that (as you note) the exchange is reciprocal means that I am exchanging the fruits of my labor for the fruits of many other people’s labor (in various roundabout arrangements). This is not adequately described as “living off someone else’s labor,” at least not in the sense that I was using that phrase. To live off someone’s labor does not mean to cooperate with them for mutual benefit; it means to use the fruits of their labor and give them nothing in return for it.

But, secondly, and more importantly, the exchange involved is not only reciprocal, but also voluntary. There are ways to live off the labor of others, in the sense that I used the phrase, without violating libertarian norms: trust-fund babies are an example, provided that the sources of their inherited wealth were legitimate to begin with. But I made the issues of coercion and consent quite explicit in my remarks. Rights are enforceable claims; if you had a positive right to live off someone’s labor then you would have the right to force her to work for your own profit, against her will. But nobody has such a right. You have no right to do that yourself, and you have no right to authorize the government to do it for you. The fruits of another person’s labor are not yours to give.

As for “rules” and “results,” I am a virtue ethicist, so I think that the dichotomy is misleading at best. (I think that forcing others to work for the profit of yourself or others is a form of slavery, and slavery is one expression of the vice of injustice. The content of that vice informs the rules of conduct you should follow, and also informs what could count as a good consequence. (If some given set of results involves enslaving another human being, then they are ipso facto bad results, consequences that are not worth effecting.)

But whatever the exact form of your moral theory, I take the illegitimacy of slavery to be one of the starting-points of ethical philosophy: it is part of the data that a good ethical must explain, not some theoretical point that can be revised or tossed out for the sake of some other consideration. If your ethical theory could legitimize slavery, then your theory needs to be chucked out. Sorry.