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.