A little bird tells me that Roderick’s discussion with Bidinotto will not be in this book because an expanded version of it is forthcoming in an anthology on the anarchy-minarchy debate from Ashgate Press.

“Saying that one is an anarchist is so alienating to the vast majority of people …”

Oh, but I like the fact that calling yourself an “anarchist” alienates the vast majority of people.

I don’t have anything in particular against the general run of humanity. And I don’t think being off-putting is desirable in itself. But I do have a goal — undermining the material, intellectual, and cultural power of the State — which demands some big changes in the way people look at the world and at their fellow people. I think those goals are better promoting by challenging people’s preconceptions than by pandering to them.

If you’re worried about popular associations, then it seems like you’re being selective in singling out “anarchy” for its “association with mayhem” and “association with various socialist movements”. You (and Bob LeFevre) made up your own meaning for the word “Autarchy,” but it has another established historical usage, which is synonymous with “autocracy,” i.e. direct personal rule in an absolutist tyranny. In economics there is also the doctrine of “autarky,” i.e. radical protectionism. If you’re going to worry about problematic associations, then you can hardly overlook the associations that “autarchy” carries when you make the comparison.

Great. What better way to honor the life and accomplishments of a libertarian intellectual than by picking an arbitrary date for tax-raising, universal-insurance-mandating government windbags to sing his praises and talk about his influence?

Richard,

I don’t think that consequentialists have “a broader conception of their moral mission” than people who urge the objection I suggested in (ii). There’s nothing in such a position that would rule out trying to maximize the net global quantity of some good (pleasure, happiness, virtue, human flourishing, whatever). If you believe that philanthropy is a virtue (as I do) then that’s one of the things that is included in the “personal demands of ethics” that I mentioned. What it does do is subject your philanthropic projects to certain boundary conditions: whatever good you try to effect in the world has to be consistent with, yes, keeping your hands clean, as it were. So the point isn’t that you shouldn’t try to promote everybody’s well-being (however specified); it’s that you have to concern yourself with some other things, too, and so can’t set about doing it by any means necessary.

There’s a bunch of other stuff to say, but I have to run off to work shortly. Hopefully I’ll be able to come back to it later.

Richard,

Different libertarians have different views about utilitarian calculation. Many libertarians, especially those who focus a great deal of attention of economics, are in fact philosophical utilitarians, and make utilitarian arguments for libertarianism. I happen to think that they are wrong about that but they are certainly out there.

Libertarians who are opposed to utilitarian calculation, and who criticize it as “collectivist,” may be criticizing any of several related but distinct things, since “collectivism” is a cluster concept that has several related but distinct applications. Classical utilitarianism is individualist in some senses and collectivist in others.

Speaking for myself, I think there are at least two ways in which classical utilitarianism can be described as objectionably “collectivist.”

(i) The first is indeed related to the standard sacrifice cases that you discuss here. But I think your statement of the case in terms of balancing “interests” obscures the real issue. Libertarians who object to utilitarian calculation aren’t entering the debate over whether or not Bob’s “interests” can ever be jointly outweighed by Alice’s, Ted’s, Norah’s, etc. in moral deliberations. It has to do with whether certain kinds of “interests” can ever outweigh certain other kinds of “interests.” In particular, whether the benefit that Alice, Ted, Norah, etc. can get by forcibly seizing some natural good that rightfully belongs to Bob, can outweigh the violation of Bob’s individual liberty of person and property. (Or, more tendentiously, the violation of Bob’s right to control his own labor and enjoy the fruits of it.) Principled individualist libertarians (1) deny that the one kind of benefit outweighs the other[*], and (2) argue that the the reason has to do with qualitative distinction between the kinds of benefit and harm, not just a quantitative difference in the amount or the reliability or whatever of utility.

[*] I’ve left it open as to whether the first condition is supposed to be a universal statement or a statement of typical conditions, because different libertarians differ on this point, depending on how absolutist they are and on their views on emergency situations.

That’s very far from being a crazy position to take, even for a committed utilitarian. Lots of utilitarians have wanted to make qualitative and not merely quantitative distinctions between different kinds of benefit and harm. As well they should. (Here’s a case: suppose you were deliberating whether to rape a child on live television, and that the broadcast would only be played for convicted pedophiles. Presumably the victim would endure suffering from the rape and the audience would get some small pornographic thrill from watching. If all you can do here is run a simple quantitative comparison of total suffering to total enjoyment, then whether or not you should rape the child becomes a matter of whether or not the audience is large enough that the sum of all the small thrills adds up to more than the total suffering inflicted on the victim. And for any non-zero level of thrill that audience members might get, there must be some hypothetical audience which would be large enough to justify raping the child.) I take it that this sort of worry is why many utilitarians have been inclined towards making at least some qualitative distinctions between different kinds of benefits and harms. Also why many of the attempts that have been made (e.g. weighting the calculation so as to take the distribution and not just the net global total of utility into account) have tended to try to bake in some limitations on how badly any individual person can get treated for the profit of other individual people.

Of course, you might agree with the principle of having some limitations on how individuals can be treated in order to maximize total net utility, but reject the claim that the right limitations to have line up with the limitations suggested by libertarian rights theory. Libertarians will argue that other baselines for treatment of individuals don’t guarantee enough respect for their individuality, or the integrity of each person’s one and only life. That’s a substantive argument to be had elsewhere, but I think that the libertarian position here is certainly intelligible.

(ii) The second doesn’t actually have anything directly to do with sacrifice cases, although I think it explains why many people think that certain sorts of sacrifice cases are morally acceptable, when in fact they are not. To wit, utilitarianism methodologically begins with the idea that the object of ethical deliberation is maximization of global good. I think this is mistaken: the object of ethical deliberation is something much more personal, viz. the best way to live. So my worry here is not whether or not utilitarianism is “collectivist” in its treatment of moral patients, but rather whether or not it is individualist in its treatment of moral agents.

Thus, for example, utilitarians (including both non-libertarians and some utilitarian libertarians) claim that there are cases where you can justifiably coerce Bob in order to stop a greater or a worse degree of coercion against Alice, Ted, Norah, etc. I think this is a fundamental mistake: the first task you should set yourself to is not keeping down the total amount of injustice going around, but rather not being unjust. Swallowing the personal demands of ethics up into some global mission to maximize net good ends up doing violence to the individuality of the moral agent. (As you may have noticed, it’s won’t take a very long segue to get from here to Bernard Williams’s objections against utilitarianism. So how you feel about those may determine how you feel about the concern here. But whether it’s right or it’s wrong, again, I hardly think it’s a stupid or unintelligible position.)

sailorman:

I think there’s a lot of non-overlap (not everything illegal is immoral, and not everything legal is moral, and so on…) but to a large degree, don’t you think that laws reflect society’s attempt to codify morality?

Not really, for two different reasons. First, because the province of law is more narrow than the province of morality. (Not everything that’s widely considered wrong can or ought to be legally punishable. For example, it’s widely considered wrong to stiff a delivery worker on a tip if you have the money and there was nothing wrong with the delivery. But it isn’t, and certainly shouldn’t be, either civilly or criminally actionable. That’s just not the government’s job.) Secondly, because “societies” don’t make laws in the first place; governments do. Provided that the people in government come from roughly the same culture as the private citizens, there will tend to be some overlap between what the people in government and what the people out of government widely consider right or wrong. But if the internal culture of the government is skewed towards certain views, or if the people who enter the government tend to be skewed towards specific sub-cultures within the larger culture, then you can expect that skew to be reflected in a similar skew between the laws that are in place and the laws that most people think ought to be in place. (In fact all of these conditions apply, which is why there are many unpopular laws that governments nevertheless insist on trying to enforce, and why many laws that are widely considered good ideas have not yet been enacted.)

That said, I think that you misunderstood the point I was trying to make in the first place. The point that I was trying to make didn’t have to do with attempts to “codify” morality, or with what people in a given society widely consider to be moral or immoral. My point had to do with what it is actually right to do, or actually wrong to do, or what people do or do not actually have a right to do. That’s an independent question; there are lots of cases where something was widely considered right even though it was wrong — say, slavery or witch-burning — and lots of cases where something was widely considered wrong even though there wasn’t anything wrong with it — say, interracial marriage or homosexual sex.

The point I was trying to make, then, is that something being legal or illegal has precisely nothing to do with whether it’s right or wrong to do it. Pointing to something and saying “That’s against the law” tells you something about what might happen to you if you do it and get caught, but it tells you nothing about whether you ought or ought not to do it. And pointing at an order and saying “That’s a legal order” tells you nothing about whether you ought to obey it, to ignore it, or to defy it. This is just an application of the principle set out by Dr. King in his letter from Birmingham jail:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all”.

FormerlyLarry:

Every right to not comply with a legal order?

Your remark presupposes that the legality of an order has any moral significance. Actually it doesn’t. The cops who, in earlier times, turned firehoses on peaceful marchers, dragged black students out of segregated lunch-counters, forced Japanese-Americans into internment camps, opened fire on striking workers, and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act against innocent people, were all issuing “legal” orders, too. And so what? They had no right to act that way, whatever the law said. And the people being thus targeted had every right not to comply with the orders.

Let us know how all that works out for you.

Of course it’s true that caving in to an abusive dickhead will often make things go better for you, for the time being, than insisting on your rights. But that has exactly nothing to do with what your rights in that situation are. That’s a question of power, not a question of right.

IMHO really good cops are rare. It takes a special kind of person that can handle the authority over the general public without it changing them in negative ways.

If the power that cops are given over ordinary badgeless people is so morally corrosive then maybe we ought to be talking about ways to reduce or to check that power, rather than looking down our nose at the behavior of the people victimized by it.

Radfem:

But that’s policy issues. In my opinion, tasing a passive resister is akin to torturing them.

Precisely. Except that it’s not even “akin to.” It just is torture.

Using powerful electric shocks to inflict disabling pain on someone whose actions pose absolutely no physical threat, in order to coerce compliance with the officer’s demands, just is using torture to try to get what you want. Using repeated shocks on someone who is lying helpless on the ground is precisely the kind of official sadism that we’re familiar with from authoritarian regimes like Augusto Pinochet’s or or Saddam Hussein’s.

Incidentally, how much you want to bet that here, as elsewhere, the campus cops will “review” the incident and decide that the problem is that they equipped the cops with tasers? Because, you know, out-of-control cops sure wouldn’t brutalize people by low-tech means like beating them or shooting them. Ha ha ha.

Robert,

O.K., but I don’t think that that very well explains the decline in union membership and union influence over the past 30 years. Average real wages are substantially lower now than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s, and despite several years of modest increases during the late 1990s, the steady trend since 1973 has been the erosion of workers’ wealth, not an increase in the baseline.

Constant,

The I.W.W. was founded in 1905. Its membership peaked in the early 1920s at about 100,000 workers. During the first couple decades of its existence its most numerous constituents were timber workers and miners in the American West. You may think that the logging towns and mining camps of the 1900s-1920s were hotbeds of “left-wing intellectuals” playing at working-class solidarity, but you can hardly expect most people to agree with you.

You may note that it also predated the Communist Party U.S.A. by about a decade and a half. The economic ideas they promoted were generally not communist, but rather syndicalist. The immigrant members who were deported to Russia after the Palmer Raids usually found themselves jailed, exiled, or shot.

The membership of the I.W.W. today is about 1% of what it was in the early 1920s, and due to the impact of the Wagner Act and similar measures most workers find it more advantageous to join conservative, NLRB-recognized unions. However, I’d suggest that a balanced view of the IWW’s role in labor history would require looking back a bit further than 2007 and it would also require a bit more detailed of a discussion than you’ll find from a WikiPedia article.

Brandon,

What I’m suggesting is that different unions have different organizing models just as different firms have different business models. Excluding politically, economically, or culturally vulnerable segments of the labor market from your organizing is a model that some of them have adopted, but others adopted a model of trying to organize all workers everywhere to the extent that they could. The exclusionist organizing model is usually unstable in a free market, because unions depend on membership to get anything done, and excluding large segments of the working population creates an entrepreneurial opportunity for inclusive unions to pick up membership.

I think the fragility of their position is part of the reason why conservative union bosses actively aided the government in its efforts to violently suppress the radicals. The government in turn liked and supported the conservative unions because they drew workers away from radical unions, which during the 1900s-1920s tended to be more or less explicitly anarchist.

Aaron,

I doubt she’d be surprised. What she expresses in her article about the role of male-dominated unions in excluding women and marginalizing their concerns is not surprise, but rather anger. In any case, there is a very similar history within the AFL (the “American Separation of Labor,” as A. Philip Randolph liked to say) and its role in propping up Jim Crow in the American South. As well as the long history of nativism and anti-immigrant politics throughout the history of the AFL.

Half Sigma,

Neither all workers, nor all unionized workers, are men. Do everyone a favor and get Sam Gompers out of your head before you start thinking about the characteristics of the labor movement broadly.

Dave,

SDS isn’t a union. It’s a student organization. (That’s what the first “S” is for.)

Making more money is not the primary goal of joining a union—any kind of union. The primary goal is for workers to gain more autonomous power in the workplace. One way such power can be exercised is by bargaining for higher wages. (Most conservative unions today use it to bargain for job security and generous benefits for senior employees, more than for higher wages.) But there are lots of other ways that workers might exercise it.

And I don’t care what kind of unions conservatives can live with. I am a free marketeer, not a conservative. Thus I prefer anti-statist radical unions to establishmentarian conservative unions that have spent the past 70 years selling out workers in the name of maintaining their positions of influence within the liberal corporate state.