Moral equality and emergent morality

This is my second of two posts on Matt Zwolinski’s critique of the moral parity thesis, in which I look at the second (and to me more interesting) objection to moral parity. According to Zwolinski, the “basic problem” with moral equality is that “we cannot base macro-level conclusions about politics and social organization (solely) on micro-level examples.”

I am sympathetic to the idea that the rules of individual, face-to-face interaction might be an incomplete guide to determining the rules of social institutions at the macro level. This rhymes with FA Hayek’s criticism of the concept of ‘social justice’. According to Hayek, the proponents of “social justice” go wrong for the same reasons as the issue identified by Zwolinski: they take claims about what would or would not be just in individual cases at the micro level and try to copy and paste them into the conclusions about the justice of large-scale, emergent social outcomes.

Hayek openly admitted that “the way the benefits and burdens are distributed by the market mechanism should in many cases be considered unjust. as it would be the result of a deliberate allocation to certain people.” But, says Hayek, we cannot extrapolate from cases of ‘intentional allocation to certain people’, carried out at the level of individual actors, to claims about just distributions at a societal level. An attempt to do so, Hayek argued, does not fall into ‘the category of errors, but into that of nonsense’.

But even if we grant that examples of appropriate behavior at the micro level cannot fully explain the rules of social organization at the macro level, this still does not provide much support against the moral parity thesis. The reason for this is that Zwolinski, as I see it, is working with too narrow a definition of the moral parity thesis to begin with.

In Zwolinski’s contribution, he describes the moral parity thesis as the idea that “governments have no rights that are not identical to or derivable from the rights of individuals. In other words, if something is wrong for individuals, then it is also wrong for governments to do it.” But I think this misrepresents what proponents of the moral parity thesis mean. For example, Michael Huemer (as strong a proponent of the moral parity thesis as you will ever encounter). described his view like this, in his book TThe problem of political authority:

Political authority is a special moral status that places the state above all non-state actors. If we reject this idea, we must assess state coercion in the same way as coercion by other actors. In any coercive act by the state, we must first ask ourselves what reason the state has to exercise coercion in this way. We must then consider whether an individual or organization would be justified in exercising a similar type and degree of coercion for similar reasons, with similar consequences for the victims.

Note that Huemer’s objection in no way implies that we should believe that micro-level examples of individual behavior are the sole determinant of macro-level conclusions about social organization. And when Huemer speaks of “agents,” he does not mean “individuals.” After all, he calls the state an ‘agent’, even though the state is clearly not an individual, and he also speaks of private organizations. Huemer does not claim, as Zwolinski puts it, that ‘if something is wrong individuals do, then it is wrong for governments to do the same.” Those who endorse political authority argue not only that the state can do things that no individual should be allowed to do, but also that the state can do things that would be impermissible if carried out by any other macro-level or emergent social institution.

Should we conclude that major religious organizations such as the Church of Scientology have special rights and moral exceptions that do not apply to any other organization because macro-level social rules cannot be entirely deduced from micro-level individual behavior? Or sufficiently large companies? Or clans? Or any other large-scale social institution you can imagine? After all, states are simply one of many different organizations used to coordinate social activities – so additional arguments would be needed for why these special moral exceptions arise only in the case of the state, but not each non-state social institution.

As Vincent Ostrom put it:

One can accept that all these forms of human association that Ostrom describes can operate on the basis of rules that cannot simply be deduced from micro-level examples of individual behavior. For example, I freely agree that the micro-level behavior of interactions between individual adults does not fully describe the responsibilities and obligations inherent in families. But that in itself does not detract from the moral parity thesis. To challenge the moral parity thesis, one would have to provide additional arguments as to why one should and only One form of social organization has such impressive and weighty moral exceptions as are usually attributed to the state. And the emergent nature of social morality itself still leaves this gap open.