Richard,

Fair enough.

I’d forgotten your specific position on the nature of moral patient welfare, so I spoke much too loosely. (I didn’t mean to suggest that the issue was paternalism, exactly, in any case.)

In that case we’ll have to precisify my loose talk further than I had precisified it above. The substantive disagreement about what constitutes respecting an individual person then has to do with the sorts of “wishes” (or more precisely, the sorts of considered choices) that you’ve absolutely got to respect, not just the sorts of “interests.”

(And one of the desiderata for libertarian individual rights theories is that the kind of choices in question be specified in such a way that they don’t conflict, thus eliminating the question of whom to sacrifice. How far any given theorist succeeds at that task is, of course, a separate question.)

Richard,

Sorry it’s taken me a while to come back to this.

As a side note, the book that the anonymous poster is quoting from is by Leonard Peikoff, not by Ayn Rand. (It’s an attempt at a comprehensive, exegetical presentation of Rand’s philosophical thought.) As far as I know it doesn’t particularly misrepresent Rand’s own view on this point, but the stuff quoted from OPAR should be attributed to Peikoff, not directly to Rand.

Anyway.

I know that you’ve addressed the Nozickian line of argument before. But I don’t think you’ve understood Nozick’s point well enough to mount a successful critique of it. As I tried (probably unclearly) to stress in my comments above, the issue here isn’t that utilitarian calculators think they are pro-individual and Nozickian individualists just ignore it. The issue is that Nozickian individualists have a substantive disagreement with utilitarians over what constitutes respecting an individual person. The disagreement has to do with whether respecting individual people has mainly to do with maximizing pleasure (or happiness or whatever) for her, or whether it has mainly to do with respecting her wishes.

If you’re working on the latter notion, then it makes perfect sense to suggest that there’s a pretty strong link between individualism and a non-instrumentalist account of rights. Violating the rights of one individual person—even if it, in some sense or another, serves some other individual person’s “interests,” will be seen as treating the victim as less than an individual person with a life of her own, as a mere tool or plaything for others’ use. If you think that respecting individuals is mainly about respecting their wishes rather than promoting their interests, then the standard sacrifice cases are pretty easily understood as failures to be appropriately individualistic in your moral deliberations.

Now, whether it’s appropriate to label this particular failure-to-be-appropriately-individualistic as “collectivism” is a separate question. Maybe it’s not; in that case the question is not individualism as against collectivism but rather respect for individual people as against willingness to sacrifice one individual people for one or more other individual people. (I’m tempted to draw the distinction in terms of “individualism” as against “altruism,” but on balance I think that would be an unhappy way of putting it, Ayn Rand’s bluster notwithstanding.)

But I don’t think the book is shut on calling it “collectivism,” either—because I think that the sort of “respect” for individual people that utilitarianism claims to offer is, in an important sense, dehumanizing and anonymizing. Whether I’m right about that would take us pretty far afield from the discussion; but again, I think that at least the position is more sophisticated than you’re giving it credit for.

As for my remarks under (ii), I agree that there is a debate to be had about whether or not a given moral agent ought to incorporate considerations about her own definite individuality as a moral agent into her moral deliberation. But I think you’ve mischaracterized the terrain of the debate, as I remarked above; it’s not that the position I sketched requires you to think only about your own definite individuality when making moral decisions, but rather that utilitarianism systematically rules out thinking about such things at all. And yeah, that does have something to do with individualism as against collectivism. And I think your suggestion that utilitarian calculation subordinates considerations about the moral agent’s definite individuality to generic concerns for “the individual” unintentionally makes my point for me.

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.)

Richard: Let “absolute pacifism” be the claim that engaging in warfare (or, in the strongest version, violence of any kind) is intrinsically wrong, always and everywhere, without exception. I don’t know if anyone could defend such an extreme view, so I’ll set it aside for now.

A-train: BTW, who makes the strongest arguments for pacificism? Who are the philosophers of pacificism?

Well, people have defended such a position, so if actuality entails possibility then people can defend it. The most famous defender of such a position is probably Leo Tolstoy (cf. for example The Kingdom of God is Within You). It was also defended by the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his comrades in the American “non-resistance” movement (cf. for example http://fair-use.org/the-liberator/1838/09/28/declaration-of-sentiments-adopted-by-the-peace-convention ). On the interpretation of both Tolstoy and the Garrisonian non-resistants, a similar view was advocated by Jesus Christ.

A lot of their defense of absolute pacifism is scriptural, and insofar as it is scriptural, it can’t be expected to carry much weight with non-Christians. But they do also make some arguments that attempt to appeal to common sense, or to the ethical sense that underwrites the New Testament injunctions.

In particular they would not at all be convinced by your claim that the defensive use of violence is a regrettable necessity in a world where not everyone is a practicing pacifist. The standard response to the standard objection is that the fault for aggression lies on the aggressor, not on those who refuse to use violence to stop him. They generally held that everyone has a moral duty to stand with the innocent and to do what you can to help them avoid or frustrate their would-be persecutors. But not a duty to do so by absolutely any means necessary; the idea is that if you practice or endorse violence as a just means of protecting the innocent you cannot consistently condemn violence against the innocent as an evil—they object to the principle that it’s O.K. to shove people around to achieve your ends, however noble those ends are. In this connection they often stressed their opposition to the idea that anyone can permissibly do evil so that good may come; however noble the end, it cannot be achieved through ignoble means.

It’s important to note that the idea here is not just that universal peace is a constituent of an ideal world but also that peace is a constituent part of a virtuous human life. If you think that a virtuous human life just consists in doing whatever is conducive to producing an ideal world, and that producing an ideal world just consists in globally maximizing goods and minimizing evils, then this position will not make any sense, with or without the Christian underpinnings. But that’s just to say that absolute pacifism is incompatible with conventional consequentialism. True, but so are lots of things, and since the pacifists in question explicitly rejected consequentialist calculation, pointing out the incompatibility doesn’t provide a non-question-begging argument against them.

I reject absolute pacifism, but I don’t think that the main defenders of the position are foolish or refuted nearly as easily as most non-pacifists tend to think.

Richard: Anon (GNZ?) – you pose a false dilemma between “surrender unconditionally vs. fight back”. Cf. Gandhian non-violent resistence.

Bertrand Russell wrote an interesting article on just this subject in 1915 (“War and Non-Resistance,” Atlantic Monthly 116, 266-74). Here are some excerpts:

Let us imagine that England were to disband its army, after a generation of instruction in the principles of passive resistance as a better defense than war. Let us suppose that England at the same time publicly announced that no armed opposition would be offered to any invader, that all might come freely, but that no obedience would be yielded to any commands that a foreign authority might issue. What might happen in this case?

Russell noted that withdrawing from international power politics would make any threat of war immediately much less likely. But even supposing that some ravenous aggressor was hell-bent on invading and conquering England,

… Some of the more prominent would be imprisoned, perhaps even shot, in order to encourage the others. But if the others held firm, if they refused to recognize or transmit any order given by the Germans, if they continued to carry out decrees previously made by the English Parliament and the English government, the Germans would have to dismiss them all, even to the humblest postman, and call in German talent to fill the breach.

The dismissed officials could not all be imprisoned or shot; since no fighting would have occurred, such wholesale brutality would be out of the question. And it would be very difficult for the Germans suddenly, and out of nothing, to create an administrative machine. Whatever edicts they might issue would be quietly ignored by the population. If they ordered that German should be the language taught in schools, the schoolmasters would go on as if no such order had been issued; if the schoolmasters were dismissed, the parents would no longer send the children to school. If they ordered that English young men should undergo military service, the young men would simply refuse. … If they tried to take over the railways, there would be a strike of the railway servants. Whatever they touched would instantly become paralyzed, and it would soon be evident, even to them, that nothing was to be made out of England unless the population could be conciliated….

In a civilized, highly organized, highly political state, government is impossible without the consent of the governed. Any object for which a considerable body of men are prepared to starve and die can be achieved by … [nonviolent] means, without the need of resort to force. And if this is true of objects desired by a minority only, it is a thousand times truer of objects desired unanimously by the whole nation.

In one sense what Russell advocates is a universal policy “unconditional surrender” — i.e. just sitting by and letting any invader that wants to take the time and effort come over and take control of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. But since just taking over the buildings would convey no actual power and no mass concession of authority, what was “surrendered” would in the end be completely irrelevant.

My reason for believing that the universe did not come into existence just now is that I remember it being in existence yesterday.

You might claim that this is a bad reason, because it is possible for the universe to have come into existence just now with a lot of false memories in place. I’ll grant that it is possible for that to have happened. But so what? Pointing out a mere metaphysical possibility proves very little about my actual epistemic state. Unless you have some reason to offer for treating my memories as globally deceptive, or even profoundly unreliable, you have not yet given me any reason for doubting the evidence of my memory. But without some such reason, you’ve given me no reason to entertain your “might have been” as a “maybe” worth considering.

Cf. Outwitting Old Nick for fuller remarks on the older version of the same puzzle.

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.

One more thing.

“There’s another way in which classical liberals are strangely Stalinist. They seem to want to over-ride the huge public demand for state intervention.”

How is this argumentative maneuver any different from, say, deriding the civil rights movement in the American South, on the grounds that it’s “strangely Stalinist” to want to over-ride the demands of the large majority of the population of the Southern states for white supremacy and the public humiliation and political control of black and mixed-race Southerners?

Popular demands are not always legitimate. The mere fact that great numbers of people will vote for something is no guarantee whatsoever that they have any right to it.

“To justify inequalities of property, you must demonstrate that the poor have a duty to respect the rich’s property. How can this be done?”

Because it’s their property.

The claim is a specific application of the general principle that any given person is obliged not to take the fruits of another person’s labor from her. To do that is to treat her as if you had a right to force her to labor for your own profit. That is treating her as if she were your slave. But slavery is illegitimate. The proper question is not where she got a right to her property, but rather where you would get a right to live off her labor.

Note that this applies not only to the immediate wage or product of labor, but also to the things that she buys with them: helping yourself to someone’s larder, without her permission, is effectively forcing her to work for your benefit as much as taking her money directly is. After all, it is only for what she could buy with it that she was interested in the wages to begin with.

You might complain that not all property is gained by labor: sometimes people just have the good fortune of having natural resources or other valuable commodities on their land. But finding and gathering these resources are a form of labor like any other, and the land is a possession like any other. You cannot claim the right to exploit another person’s land without claiming a right to the labor she put into acquiring, using, and maintaining that land. And you cannot claim the right to take the windfalls without claiming the right to live off the labor involved in discovering and gathering them.

Further, this applies to gifts and inheritances, too. You cannot take a gift from someone without living off the labor of the gift-giver. If I want my friend to have a wrist-watch, and she wants to have it, then I have every right to give it to her for her to enjoy. She may not have received it through any labor of hers, but I acquired it through my own labor, and part of enjoying the fruits of my labor is being able to transfer them to other people as I see fit. Robbing from my beneficiaries means treating me as your milk-cow.

You might, finally, object that riches do not always come from any legitimate form of labor at all, but rather from conquest or plunder. Why should poor people respect the property claims of people who have accumulated their fortunes through gangsterism, or—what is no better, but far more common and more socially “respectable” in this day and age—through expropriating wealth in the form of tax subsidies, or “eminent domain” seizures and transfers, or by forcing would-be competitors out of business through government-backed monopoly privileges. Well, they shouldn’t. There is no duty whatsoever to respect the piratical titles of freelance or government-approved robber barons. And many libertarians (e.g. Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, etc.) have openly recognized and argued for exactly this point.

I should note in passing that the Saudi “princes,” whose claim to the petrochemicals of Saudi Arabia rests entirely on conquest and shameless seizure, are clearly in this last class. (For what it’s worth, I am anti-copyright and anti-patent, so I regard both Bill Gates and Paul McCartney as being at least partial members of this last class as well. Whatever portion of their immense wealth is derived from the fruits of their honest labor is dwarfed by the wealth they have extracted through government grants of monopoly privilege over the use and distribution of software and music.)

“A cornerstone of Nozick’s libertarianism is the principle that we own ourselves, so that any effort to tell us what to do is a form of slavery. This principle, though, doesn’t justify inequalities of income, because incomes are jointly produced by individual talents and social circumstances. Thierry Henry’s skills as a footballer, Bill Gates’ as a software developer or Paul McCartney’s as a songwriter would have earned them little 100 years ago. Even if they own their talents, they’ve no right to the social conditions in which these talents can thrive.”

This is a bizarre red herring. Since when did Nozick or anybody else claim that Henry, Gates, or McCartney does have a “right to the social conditions in which these talents can thrive”? The claim is only that they have a right to enjoy such fruits as they can earn by those talents under social conditions as they are, not that they have some kind of right to force other people to sustain the conditions they enjoy.

Maybe you could explain a bit more what you mean here?

“These market failures are another case for redistribution as insurance. The trick is to design the redistribution so as to minimize the disruption to markets that work well.”

I think that the claims you make are economically absurd, and ignore a great deal of important left-libertarian work on the effects of government constraints on market economies. (Just as one example, the New Left historian Gabriel Kolko extensively documented how the “robber baron” capitalism of late 19th and early 20th century America promoted “Progressive” regulation as a means of gaining and controlling monopolies. The tendency of free markets at the time was towards greater decentralization and competition, not towards amalgamation and monopoly. Murray Rothbard, in “Left and Right,” Roy Childs, in “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism,” and Kevin Carson, in “Studies in Mutualist Political Economy,” have talked at length about this within the libertarian tradition.)

But suppose for a moment that these claims were true: suppose it were true that free markets sometimes tended towards inefficient centralization or greater overall poverty or greater precarity in most people’s economic prospects or whatever. Still, so what? Would that then give you the right to use violence to make other people dispose of their property differently, so as to get the better results? Since when did you get the right to coerce other people in order to secure a more comfortable standard of living for yourself, your family, your friends, or your neighbors?

Richard: Kripke proposes that we simply stipulate that we’re talking about the possibility in which this very man wins the election, or whatever.

This is a common way of putting Kripke’s view in a nutshell. But I think that his point is actually directed at a more fundamental target than you suggest.

When Kripke talks about stipulating identity across worlds he’s explicitly criticizing the whole Lewisian view on which we are given a set of possible worlds ahead of time, and then strike out to find where a particular object of interest happens to be in them. The idea is not that you have these possible worlds and just stipulate that that man over there is Nixon; it’s that you don’t even have a cognitive grasp on the possible world except by way of starting with considerations about (for example) Nixon and how he might have been. Thus:

“A possible world isn’t a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope. Generally speaking, another possible world is too far away. Even if we travel faster than light, we won’t get to it. A possible world is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it. What do we mean when we say ‘In some other possible world I would not have given this lecture today?’ We just imagine the situation where I didn’t decide to give this lecture or decided to give it on some other day. Of course, we don’t imagine everything that is true or false, but only those things relevant to my giving the lecture; but, in theory, everything needs to be decided to make a total description of the world. We can’t really imaigne that except in part; that, then, is a ‘possible world’. …. ‘Possible worlds’ are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes.” (44)

“Most important, even when we can replace questions about an object by questions about its parts, we need not do so. We can refer to the object and ask what might have happened to it. So, we do not begin with worlds (which are supposed somehow to be real, and whose qualities, but not whose objects, are perceptible to us), and then ask about criteria of transworld identification; on the contrary, we begin with the objects, which we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects.” (53)

Of course, it’s a separate question whether Kripke is right or wrong about this; but I do think it’s important to keep in mind that he’s just not starting from the same problem that you are. In fact he’s trying to undermine the idea that there is such a problem at all. If you begin with things (Nixon, the die in front of you, etc.), or with stuff (water, gold, etc.), and then spin out possible worlds around them, then a lot of the problems that exercise accounts of transworld identification simply dissolve. (That doesn’t rule out the anti-essentialist view. You might hold that the range of possible worlds you can successfully spin out around the thing you have in mind is context-relative. But the view becomes much less compelling once you’re no longer worried about haecceities or counterpart relations r the like.