Mike:

Each and every US serviceperson today who is not deserting, refusing to follow orders or turning their weapons on their commanders in, in fact, a criminal, and one for whom we should feel neither sympathy nor pity, let alone the specious solidarity of “support the troops” when it’s those same “troops” who are carrying out slaughter, destruction and torture in our name.

While I absolutely agree with you about the bankruptcy of uncritical “support the troops” appeals, I think that the question of willingness and criminality are a bit more complicated than that.

To the extent that soldiers willingly engage in deliberate violence against innocent people, they are certainly complicit in the crime and should be held accountable. But it’s not quite true that all soldiers in the U.S. military are “willing agents” or “volunteers” unless they “desert or disobey.” Everywhere else in the world besides the military, when someone willingly signs on for a job, they can always quit later if they have second thoughts about either the job in general, or about specific requirements imposed on them by their employers. But in the military these are treated as crimes, and can be punished by death if the government so chooses. Soldiers, even so-called “volunteers,” who want to leave the military, but are coerced into staying by the threat of imprisonment or death, should not be considered willing participants, any more than should victims of the draft.

That’s not an excuse for soldiers who directly commit acts of violence against innocents; nothing can excuse that, even if you were drafted rather than “volunteering,” and you should be willing to face imprisonment or death before, say, gunning down a child or a family on patrol. (That’s true of conscripts no less than it’s true of “volunteers.”) But it does make the situation a lot less clear-cut a case of “willing agency” when it comes to, say, a payroll officer or a mechanic or a truck driver, who is coerced into playing some role in the war machine but is not directly committing violence.

Now, that said, on the question of uncritical blanket “support the troops” messages, and moral responsibility, I agree with you, and it reminded me a lot of something really valuable that Utah Phillips said, at the time of the first Gulf War:

I spend a lot of time these days going to demonstrations and vigils, talking to people who support the war. They can be pretty threatening. But I always find there are people there–and I don’t mean policemen, but there are people there who will protect you. I don’t go there to shout or to lecture, but to ask questions. Real questions. Questions I really need answers to.

When I joined the Army, it was kind of like somebody that I had been brought up to respect, wearing a suit and a tie, and maybe a little older, in my neighborhood. Think about yourself in your neighborhood, and this happened to you. He walked up to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, See that fellow on the corner there? He’s really evil, and has got to be killed. Now, you trust me; you’ll go do it for me, won’t you? Now, the reasons are a little complicated; I won’t bother to explain, but you go and do it for me, will you?

Well, if somebody did that to you in your neighborhood, you’d think it was foolish. You wouldn’t do it. Well, what makes it more reasonable to do it on the other side of the world? That’s one question.

Well, now hook it into this. If I was to go down into the middle of your town, and bomb a house, and then shoot the people coming out in flames, the newspapers would say, Homicidal Maniac! The cops would come and they’d drag me away; they’d say You’re responsible for that! The judge’d say, You’re responsible for that; the jury’d say You’re responsible for that! and they would give me the hot squat or put me away for years and years and years, you see? But now exactly the same behavior, sanctioned by the State, could get me a medal and elected to Congress. Exactly the same behavior. I want the people I’m talking to to reconcile that contradiction for themselves, and for me.

The third question–well I take that one a lot to peace people. There’s a lot of moral ambiguity going on around here, with the peace people who say, Well, we’ve got to support the troops, and then wear the yellow ribbon, and wrap themselves in the flag. They say, Well, we don’t want what happened to the Vietnam vets to happen to these vets when they come home–people getting spit on. Well, I think it’s terrible to spit on anybody. I think that’s a consummate act of violence. And it’s a terrible mistake, and I’m really sorry that happened. But what did happen? Song My happened; My Lai happened; the defoliation of a country happened; tons of pesticides happened; 30,000 MIAs in Vietnam happened. And it unhinged some people–made them real mad. And what really, really made them mad, was the denial of personal responsibility–saying, I was made to do it; I was told to do it; I was doing my duty; I was serving my country. Well, we’ve already talked about that.

Now, it is morally ambiguous to wrap yourself in the flag and to wear those ribbons. And it borders on moral cowardice. I don’t mean to sound stern; well, yes I do, but what does the Nuremberg declaration say? There’s no superior order that can cancel your conscience. Nations will be judged by the standard of the individual. Look, the President makes choices. The Congress makes choices. The Chief of Staff makes choices. The officers make choices. All those choices percolate down to the individual trooper with his finger on the trigger. The individual private with his thumb on the button that drops the bomb. If that trigger doesn’t get pulled, if that button doesn’t get pushed, all those other choices vanish as if they never were. They’re meaningless. So what is the critical choice? What is the one we’ve got to think about and get to? And, friends, if that trigger gets pulled–if that button gets pushed, and that dropped bomb falls–and you say I support the troops, you’re an accomplice. I don’t want to be an accomplice; do you?

And I don’t want to dehumanize anyone. I don’t want to take away anybody’s humanity. Humans are able to make moral decisions–moral, ethical decisions. What do we tell the trooper who pulls the trigger, or the soldier who turns the wheel that releases oil into the Persian Gulf, that they’re not responsible–just following orders, just doing their duty, have no choice–bypassing them, making them a part of the machine, we deny them their humanity, their responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions. Look, I’ve been a soldier. I don’t want any moral loophole. I need to take personal responsibility for my actions. And if we don’t learn how to do this, we’re going to keep on going to war again, and again, and again.

Utah Phillips (1992): from The Violence Within, I’ve Got To Know

Matt Simpson:

I’m a conventionalist when it comes to property.* A cursory glance at the current convention in the geographic region we call Israel shows that the Israeli government does, in fact, have the right to be there.

Whose conventions show that?

Last I checked, a lot of Palestinians, for example, do not accept the property conventions in question (e.g. they reject the colonialist conventions behind the Mandate and Balfour, accept property conventions that would allow for a right of return after forcible exile from traditionally-held lands, etc.). So what then gives the Israeli government the right to force Palestinians to act according to the boundaries set by its own property conventions, as opposed to the property conventions that they themselves accept?

(Note that you can’t answer by appealing either to conventions that allow for that kind of imposition, or to the alleged legitimate authority of the Israeli state to fix property conventions, without crassly begging the question.)

I suppose it depends on how the Demandingness Objection is spelled out. If the complaint against consequentialism is just that, if true, it would mean that most or all people aren’t always doing all that they’re morally obliged to do, then, sure, that’s not convincing at all.

But most of the carefully worked-out versions of this objection that I’ve encountered are complaining about something different: that maximizing consequentialism allows no conceptual room for supererogatory conduct. The problem isn’t that there’s anything unintuitive with the idea that fallible people often or always fall short. It’s that there are positive intuitive reasons to believe that there are at least some cases where doing something would be especially meritorious but failing to do it wouldn’t a case of falling short. The problem that many philosophers who stress “demandingness” have with maximizing consequentialism isn’t that the positive existential claim (that there are some ways in which we fall short when we omit to do something meritorious), but rather with the negative universal claim (that there are no ways in which we ever fail to fall short when we omit to do something meritorious).

Here’s a theological example: most Christians believe that God’s decision to incarnate Himself, to take on the sins of the world, and to suffer anddie on the Cross, was morally gratuitous: it was an act of undeserved grace, which God was not morally obliged to do, but did out of love for the world. But it’s impossible to make sense of a claim like that if you’re a maximizing consequentialist; either doing all that would lead to the greatest compossible aggregate of good effects within God’s range of choice, or it would lead to something less than the greatest compossible aggregate of good effects within God’s range of choice. Presumably, since God is all-seeing and all-powerful, he’d know ahead of time whether this is the case and would be capable of choosing the better course if there were a better course. But then it would follow that God’s actions were either morally obligatory for Him, or else morally wrong, depending on the breaks of whether or not the action led to the greatest compossible aggregate of good effects. There’s no room for the claim that God might willingly choose to do something above and beyond His moral obligations, because by definition there is nothing above and beyond the maximum. Which would be a problem for Christian soteriology.

I’m not a Christian myself, but I do certainly think that there are supererogatory actions which people can, and have, carried out, even in this vale of tears. Which seems like a good reason to reject maximizing consequentialism.

In other words, “right but I want to quibble”.

“Right” about what? It’s true that Micha was using the term “naturalistic fallacy” in a sense other than the sense in which Moore used it. (Specifically, he used it to refer to arguments that infer something about the moral status of something from its naturalness.) But I don’t have any basic problem with that kind of loose usage as long as it doesn’t interfere with accurately understanding what Moore meant by the term when he used it. The “quibble,” such as it is, is aimed to clarify how Moore himself used the term. Which is not an issue that Micha raised, or one that’s particularly important to assessing his argument; it’s an issue that you raised in the course of a reply to him.

It’s certainly true that the issue of what Moore coined the term “naturalistic fallacy” to mean is tangential to this conversation. But misrepresentations of his view, especially those that are very common and very misleading, are worth correcting anyway, in the interest of accuracy.

I read him right without the benefit of seeing his later explanation

Well, no; what he said is that by “natural” he means those things which arise from a “spontaneous order.” But that explanation is itself ambiguous, depending on whether he means strictly a “voluntary order” (which may very well be designed), or instead an “undesigned order” (which may very well be involuntary), or both. Libertarian writers have often used the term “spontaneous order” to refer to either, or both, or have simply equivocated between the two different meanings from one use to the next.

If he means the former, you read him right; but then the claim is unresponsive to what it was supposed to respond to. And, since that interpretation is unresponsive, it made sense for Micha to suggest, out of motives of charity, a more responsive reading.

If he means the latter, you read him wrongly, and the claim is somewhat more responsive to Francois; but then it is underargued and almost surely false.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that your reading of him is “off the wall;” I’m not even claiming that it’s wrong. My point is that whether you read his claim rightly or read it wrongly, the claim doesn’t get Arthur very far either way vis-a-vis his interlocutors.

And anyway, G. E. Moore invented the term “naturalist fallacy” to label philosophers who disagreed with him about morality.

No, he didn’t.

Moore coined the term “naturalistic fallacy” to describe a particular kind of move in ethical argument, which Moore believed to be fallacious. (Specifically, an attempt to establish a substantial ethical conclusion by equivocating between a statement of the form “Everything that is X, Y, and Z is good” and a definition of the form “‘Good’ means being X, Y, and Z.”) His issue with the naturalistic fallacy is meta-ethical, not normative; it’s not that he disapproves of the conclusions drawn from it, but rather that he disagrees with the way they are drawn. (He argues that this kind of maneuver tries to resolve substantive ethical disagreements on the cheap, by changing the subject from ethics to semantics, which fails to offer an ethically serious inquiry, i.e. one which might possibly result in reasons for action.) He did not accuse all philosophers who disagreed with his own ethical views of committing the naturalistic fallacy. In particular, he specifically argues that Henry Sidgwick did not commit the naturalistic fallacy in his ethical arguments, although Moore disagrees with, and spends half a chapter arguing against, Sidgwick’s hedonistic view.

Thus, while I don’t know what Arthur meant (and I see he has replied but I’ll take a gamble and submit this without reading his reply), as I understand him what he writes is not only true but trivially true. If something is natural in the sense of natural law, i.e., if it occurs in the absence of a state, then it is trivially true that in order for it to stop occurring, a state is necessary.

If that’s what Arthur means (I think it’s still not especially clear from his response), then he is either walloping a strawman or asserting a strong claim without evidence. If the argument started out about whether gender roles are or are “socially constructed” or “natural,” then the latter presumably refers to those things which aren’t derived from social construction (which may be a coercive process, a non-coercive process, or an admixture of both), rather than to those things which emerge spontaneously in the absence of coercion. If his claim is the trivial claim you attribute to him (that things that emerge spontaneously in the absence of coercion will emerge spontaneously unless coercion is applied), then he’s not successfully responding to Francois’s expressed concern. If, on the other hand, his claim is the substantive claim that things that aren’t socially constructed cannot be limited or eliminated without the use of coercion, then what he’s saying is responsive, but it’s also not as yet supported by argument. (And in fact is pretty obviously wrong, if it’s intended as a universal claim.)

JOR,

The same. The original essay is available online; cf. also GT 2003-09-30: Why There Are No Arguments for Terrorism for my responding to Honderich with a certain gesture of the hands.

Kevin: I think the net effect in this case, as in many hypothetical scenarios of dismantling the state in the wrong order, would be–as counterintuitive as it may seem–to increase the net level of exploitation carried out with the help of the state.

Well, I’m not sure that that’s especially counterintuitive. I’m perfectly willing to grant that there are plenty of cases where it’s true. What I’m trying to stress is that, as far as I can tell, we don’t disagree very much about the net consequences of different sequences of repeal. I agree that in the hypothetical case I gave, there might very well be a net increase in the predominance of class exploitation in the markets for labor, land, etc.

But, while I agree with you on that, I also think you have to keep in mind that when you make political choices you’re not just making choices about which God’s-eye-view net outcome you would prefer. You’re acting within the world, as one mortal creature among many fellow creatures, and when you deliberate about what to do you have to deliberate about what sort of person you, personally, are going to be, and what you, personally, are or aren’t willing to do to another human being. I know that I, personally, couldn’t live with deliberately choosing to shove around or rob another human being, or letting another human being go on being shoved around or robbed, for even a second longer, if all I needed to do to stop the latter would be to push a button, no matter how much I might prefer the results that I might be able to get from it. Because I’m not a thief or a bully, and I don’t want to let myself become an accomplice of thieves or bullies, either, even if it would otherwise improve my quality of life. Hence why I’d push the button, immediately and without reservation, even though I do in fact think that the net consequences of doing so would be substantially worse, in terms of things that I care about and which affect me personally, than the net consequences of repeal in the opposite order.

So I’m anti-gradualism not because I’m anti-dialectics, but rather because I think that there are personal obligations of justice involved in the political choices you make, and that dialectically-grounded praxis has to integrate those personal obligations into your course of action just as much as it has to integrate the general, big-picture view of class dynamics, socio-political structure, et cetera. In fact, if a process of deliberation abstracts away from the ground-level personal obligations of justice, fair treatment, etc. that we all have to each other, and only reckons what to do based on some very high-level structural-functional considerations about society as a whole and global-level net consequences, then I’d say that process of deliberation has become dangerously one-sided and acontextual. A praxis that doesn’t take into account what I could or couldn’t live with as a conscientious human being is an anti-dialectical and indeed an inhuman praxis.

But I fear that I’m beginning to throw a lot of jargon at the problem. Does that clarify or muddify?

Kevin: I’d probably even quibble as to whether it amounted to a reduction in statism even as such, since a high marginal tax rate on Bill Gates arguably amounts to the state ameliorating or moderating its primary act of statism in guaranteeing the income to Gates in the first place through IP.

Sure; this is a legitimate concern, to the degree that the exploitation in question is based not only on profiteering from the ripple effects of other, directly coercive acts, but where the exploitation is itself directly coercive (as is the case in government-enforced monopolies and captive markets). I would agree that there is some non-zero proportion of Bill Gates’s annual income, for example, which he actually has no legitimate property right to at all, and so no moral right to complain about taxation, any more than a slave-ship captain has a moral right to complain about a pirate making off with “his” gold, rum, and slaves. In such cases, my basic attitude is Tucker’s good old “No pity, no praise.”

But there are a couple problems in trying to translate this into any conclusion about income tax policy. Income tax policy has no way of distinguishing the legitimate portion of Bill Gates’s income (which I presume is also non-zero) from the extorted portion of it. In fact, in most cases, I think it would be impossible even in principle to calculate what the right proportions would be; in the absence of an actual free market process, there’s just no way to know how much of an intellectual monopolist’s income is legitimate and how much of it is an extorted monopoly rent.

And, beyond that, the tax also imposed alike on everyone in that income tax bracket, whether or not their income derives from direct violations of individual rights in the way that copyright and patent monopolists’ income does. Many if not most of the top 10% derive a lot of their income from direct coercion, but many of them do not (rather, they get fatter-than-free-market profits by profiteering of the ripple effects of other people’s coercion; but, while that’s also ethically objectionable, it’s a very different case from the standpoint of whether those profits can justly be expropriated). And if there’s even one single person who is robbed of even one cent of legitimately earned wealth by the general tax policy — and I think it’s next to impossible that nobody would be unjustly victimized by the tax — then, again, I think that’s reason enough to push the button. I couldn’t leave that one guy to go on getting robbed, even though all the rest of the people affected by the tax be a gang of pirates, swindlers, and extortionists. There are cases where expropriating the expropriators is legitimate and just; but government taxation is far too blunt a weapon to ever achieve it without inflicting a lot of collateral damage on innocent people.

Kevin,

I’m not actually sure that we disagree about that. Or, if we do disagree, then what we disagree about may be a bit different from what it might initially seem that we disagree about.

I actually agree with you that a dialectical understanding of the role of particular government programs in the statist social order is important. And I also agree with you that some sequences of repeal would lead to better overall results than other sequences of repeal, and I suspect that we largely agree with each other about what sequences would be preferable; for example, because of my understanding of the class dynamics of statist power, I think that abolishing the Wagner-Taft-Hartley first and then the antitrust laws later would have better overall results than abolishing the antitrust laws first and then the Wager-Taft-Hartley system later, in that the one first opens up space and time for de-regimenting organized labor and opening up space for workers to organize against exploitation by bosses, while the other opens up space and time for bosses to further consolidate and fortify their command-posts in the labor market.

Similarly, suppose you had a Sedition law, and a Hate Speech law, the first of which which banned anarchist speeches, and the second of which banned fascist speeches. Ideally, the best thing to happen would be for both laws to be struck down immediately and completely in favor of complete free speech. But if the political debate was such that it’s more or less unavoidable that one will be struck down before the other, then I suppose that the sequence of decriminalizing anarchist speeches, then decriminalizing fascist speeches would have better overall results than the sequence of decriminalizing fascist speeches, then decriminalizing anarchist speeches.

However, I don’t think that accepting either that method of social theory or those conclusions about likely results settles the question as to whether you should be a gradualist or an immediatist. I’m an immediatist, not because I deny that there’s ever an importance difference in the likely results of repealing A-before-B as versus repealing B-before-A, but rather because I think that there are things that nobody ever has the moral right to do to another human being, no matter what results you can get from it, and one of those things is coercing her in her use of her own person and property. If both A and B are genuinely coercive, then I’d argue that there’s never any justification or excuse for continuing to do either of them. Even if it would be better for A to go first and then B, rather than B to go first and then A, if the opportunity to repeal B arises before the opportunity to repeal A does, then I’d say that it’s morally obligatory to repeal B anyway, because neither you nor I nor anybody else has the right to go on coercing anybody for even a second longer, whatever our considered judgment about the likely results of their freedom may be.

Of course, if there isn’t any opportunity to repeal either A or B at the moment, then the question is what sort of strategy you ought to adopt in the effort to make the opportunity arise. And in that case, it’s perfectly reasonable for your considered judgment about likely results to determine your strategic priorities, in terms of which forms of coercion you will first and most intensely focus on making repeal-able, given your limited time and resources. And I think that we largely agree about

So I reckon that the question is this: suppose you had a rather limited version of Rothbard’s Magic Button, which would allow you to magically repeal (say) personal income tax on the top 10% of taxpayers, while leaving all other personal income tax and FICA payroll tax in place. And let’s take it for granted that we all dialectically understand the role of the State, and its different functions, within the social order of power and its relationship with the dynamics of class exploitation. Still. There’s the button. Would you push it, or would you refuse to push it, on the grounds that you need to cut taxes either from the bottom-up or else not at all?

Personally, I would push it. I would prefer the bottom-up-first sequence, if it were available (after all, that’d benefit me more personally, let alone the rest of the working class), but I don’t believe that I have the right to let other people go on being robbed, if I could stop it with nothing more than a button-push, just so that I can, or some other people that I care about can, enjoy a higher quality of life.

What about you?

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.