Comments Elsewhere

Incidentally, for reference, see also some brief remarks of mine on demythologizing the “higher law” doctrine, and the relationship between natural law and personal interest or commitment: (1), (2), (3).

Jeremy,

No; the voluntariness is key. Where did I suggest otherwise?

Well, I started this thread of conversation by asking a question about the rough handling of the few by the many in some non-consensual societies (e.g. Athens and Roman-occupied Palestine); got a response that the authority in question wasn’t necessarily rightful authority; asked if you meant mere power; and got a response that it was more than mere power that we were discussing, at which the shift over to consensual societies happened. As I said, I’m just having trouble understanding what claim you ultimately are defending about the relationship between numbers and authority, and trying to get clearer.

In a formula like “when a voluntary society stands up for a common end, that has authority to it,” there are at least three things doing conceptual work: (1) social (majority? supermajority?) consensus, (2) authority, and (3) the voluntary nature of the society (which I presume means that dissenters from the consensus have complete freedom of exit). But if (3) is doing no work in the relationship between (1) and (2), then the same claim would have to apply to non-consensual societies as well as consensual societies. If, on the other hand, (3) is doing some work, and is a necessary condition for (1) and (2) to have the claimed relationship that they have, then the question is what difference there might be between this claim about “voluntary society” (which, given freedom of association and freedom of exit, might consist of one person alone, or all rational creatures in the universe, or any size and arrangement in between) and the usual anarchist claim that all rightful authority derives from individual sovereignty and voluntary association (which again might mean one individual person, or the whole cosmopolis, or any size and arrangement in between). Maybe you meant to say something different, which I’m not grasping, in which case what I’d need to know to better understand it is how the claim about numbers and authority relates, if at all, to nonconsensual societies (where presumably the differences, if any, between these two claims would arise).

Or maybe you didn’t mean to say anything different, and just meant to restate the libertarian-individualist claim in other, panarchistic terms; but then I don’t see how that would connect with the claim libertarianism shouldn’t be about what is right or moral. Clearly, if this is the right understanding of your position, then your theory has already built in a very robust universal constraint of some kind on claims to the authority of superior numbers, which has nothing in itself to do with superior numbers, viz. the requirement of unanimous sustained consent to participation in the social project, whatever preferences or beliefs the majority faction may have. But if that requirement is an essential part of the claim you’re advancing, then it becomes increasingly hard for me to see how your claim is substantively different from mine, or how the requirement of consent is distinct from what I would call “natural law” or “inalienable natural rights.”

Admittedly, you might have a theory about the underlying status of the consent-requirement that is very different from what I would be willing to entertain — for example, you might think that while the consent-requirement is binding on every claim of authority, it’s only binding because, as a matter of taste, you prefer to hold people to a consent-requirement rather than not to hold them to it. But then, obviously, the question to ask is why anybody other than you should care about what requirements you would prefer to hold them to. I prefer that everyone drink unsweetened iced tea instead of sweet tea, but I’d never dream that these preferences give me the right to require bitter tea or resist vulgar sweetening by force. But requiring consent and resisting tyranny seem to be on quite a different footing.

As for what that footing may be, well, “sublime,” “over-arching,” “transcendent,” “Platonic,” etc. are your words, not mine. I’m not actually advancing any claim about the status of the moral constraints on claims of authority except to argue that they are not contingent on the beliefs or preferences of particular human beings. There are lots of things that are that way (e.g. the germ theory of disease) that don’t require much in the way of appeals to a separate and superior realm of Forms (or whatever) to talk about them.

My beliefs are just opinions, too. By treating them as such, I’m more likely to be able to present them in a way that others who don’t hold them find acceptable. Why? Because I understand the arbitrary nature of my beliefs, so I don’t pretend that they have some special truth that will compel somebody to acknowledge.

I don’t think that your solution, at least insofar as I’ve understood it, is nearly as eirenic as you seem to think it is. Look at it this way: my standards for consent and for the use of force against other people are either rooted in something outside of my particular preferences and tastes, which is in principle accessible to other people; or else they are not. If they are not, then I’m proposing to force other people to adhere to my own standards, whether or not those other people have any reason, even in principle, to care about the standards that I’m forcing them to hold to. This is, in the end, a proposal for trying to remake the whole world in my own image, for no reason other than the brute fact that it is my own image. If, on the other hand, they are rooted in something outside of my preferences and are in principle accessible to other people, then what I am proposing is that people other than myself do indeed have a reason to care about this stuff already, whether they’re aware of that reason or not, and my goal is not to remake them to suit my own preferences, but rather to take an interest in them as they are in their otherness, and in the things that they, as my fellow creatures, care about. That view gives me every reason to try and find the best way to communicate with those particular people and lead them from where they are now, towards a greater awareness of the reasons they already have; instead of what the other view seems to have on offer, which is a sort of talk in which “suggestion” that just amounts to bashing my no-less-but-no-more-justified preferences up against their no-more-but-no-less-justified preferences, until mine somehow win, on the basis of something other than shared reasoning.

Jeremy:

It goes beyond power; when a voluntary society stands up for a common end, that has authority to it.

O.K., I’m lost. I don’t think the Roman occupation of Palestine was an example of a voluntary society. It’s certainly true that in a voluntary society, consensus on a goal confers authority to pursue that goal. But do you intend to also transfer that claim about numbers and authority over to involuntary societies, like the American or Roman Empires? If so, what justifies the extension? If not, doesn’t that entail the existence of some principle constraining claims of authority, and undermining all claims of nonconsensual authority over others?

But they’re YOUR principles; in the end, they’re just preferences, opinions.

Well, I know you’re claiming this, but what’s the basis for claiming it?

And do you really mean to try and connect a radical form of moral relativism and a theory of majoritarian authority with Christian moral teachings?

smally:

I was under the impression that many state apologists will readily admit the government is a band of thugs, but that it is the “lesser evil”.

I don’t think that most liberal “lesser-evil” theories of the State recognize government as criminal. They recognize it as “an evil,” in the sense that it restrains liberty, but they generally go to some length to try to demonstrate the justice of nonconsensual political obligation (e.g., via a social contract, whether historical, tacit, or imaginary; or via non-contractual theories, such as Nozick’s procedural-rights account), and construe government as a service provided to citizens. Almost nobody defends the claim that government expropriation is no different in kind from brigandry, while also defending the claim that government expropriation should on (in order that even worse brigandry might be stopped. Maybe that’s what Hobbes believes, but not many followed him down quite that road.

So the upshot of lesser-evilist arguments is usually not that government is itself evil (in the contemporary sense of active wrongdoing), but rather that it’s bad relative to a utopian baseline, i.e., not as good a state of affairs as an anarchy composed of more or less ideal people. Since they rule out the ideal anarchy (for whatever reasons), you fall back to plan B. So government on this view is much more like fire insurance than like Mafia “protection”; something that, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to deal with, but which is morally permissible and which, in this vale of tears, you’re better off having, even at some cost.

I think these kind of arguments necessarily involve both (1) a lot of historical howlers in order to justify the claim that the single most deadly institution in the history of the world is actually defending people against chaos and destruction, and also (2) a lot of precisely the kind of mystification I’m talking about, in order to justify or at least excuse actively perpetrating evil against innocent people. (The cult of political compromise, the myth that democratic elections constitute mass consent to majoritarian or “representative” government, and the fabrication of tacit or imaginary social contracts to justify the legitimacy of government are all cases in point.)

You’re right that many if not most statists today like to fall back on utilitarian arguments in order to avoid arguments made on moral principle. Partly because forms of utilitarianism are very popular right now in both our intellectual and our mass culture; and partly also because it’s very handy to be able to abstract away any tricky questions about personal obligations, rights, virtues, vices, responsibility, complicity, defiance, etc. etc. etc. in order to zoom out to a depersonalized, God’s-eye-view calculation of aggregate outcomes. But I think that’s precisely because utilitarians start out by mystifying the issue and supposing that any question about the permissibility or legitimacy of coercing innocents has already been answered, when in fact it has merely been waved off as a necessary precondition of the utilitarian standpoint.