Matt Zwolinski on the moral parity thesis

A while ago I posted about a few different things that I think are true, asking people to comment on what might change my opinion. Unfortunately, the responses I got were generally what I specifically said I was not looking for. I was hoping to get some recommended reading where people identified books, essays, etc. that followed what they consider to be the best, most comprehensive argument for an opposing view, rather than simply identifying a point they disagree with through a three-sentence explanation of why.

There is a consolation prize, however: one of the quintessential bleeding-heart libertarian philosophers, Matt Zwolinski, recently and coincidentally posted some thoughts that critique one of the ideas I mentioned: the moral parity thesis. This is the idea that, as Zwolinski puts it, “if something is wrong for individuals, it is also wrong for governments to do it.” Or, as Dan Moller put it in his book Least govern“At the very least, it should give us pause if we advocate social institutions that anchor a moral logic that we reject in face-to-face encounters.”

Zwolinski raises two concerns regarding the moral parity thesis. First, the moral parity thesis has radical implications, in that “it implies that almost everything governments do – from drug crime to social welfare to taxation itself – is morally illegal.” It also has troubling implications regarding the case of children – or at least it seems to suggest little usefulness.

The second objection is the idea that we “cannot extrapolate social morality from the morality of individual behavior.” That is, social morality might be an emergent phenomenon, “rooted in but not manifested in the behavior that gives rise to it.” If this is the case, rules about how to behave in individual, face-to-face encounters may well be a poor guide to understanding the rules that govern large-scale social interactions. If social morality is “a fundamental evolutionary phenomenon that emerges from our collective attempt to solve the problems inherent in social coexistence,” we cannot expect to answer these questions entirely through individual encounters, any more than you could deduce properties of the ocean from the study of individual H2O molecules.

These are interesting thoughts, but I don’t find them successful in undermining the moral parity thesis. I will soon have a post dedicated to each objection, explaining why Zwolinski’s concerns have not convinced me. But to give a flavor: I disagree with Zwolinski’s claim that the moral parity thesis implies the illegitimacy of things like social welfare programs. One can accept moral equality and still conclude that taxation and welfare programs are permissible. My next post will provide an argument in favor of the welfare state based on the legitimacy of moral equality.

Then I’ll follow up with another post discussing the turnout objection, and why I don’t think it undermines moral equality either.