Moral equality and the welfare state

This is the first of my two responses to Matt Zwolinski’s critique of the moral parity thesis, focusing on his claim that this idea suggests that welfare and taxation are morally illegitimate. Is this so? My answer is no, not necessarily.

I say “not necessarily” because it depends on whether one is an absolutist deontologist – someone who thinks that there are certain rights/duties that one should not violate at any time and in any place, regardless of the circumstances. If you think that property rights violations or theft can never be justified anyway, then the moral parity thesis does force the conclusions that Zwolinski identifies. But absolutist deontology leads to other implications that are patently absurd. Here are a few thought experiments, none original to me, to illustrate what I mean.

• Suppose you are on the balcony of your 20th floor apartment, and suddenly the railing you were leaning against gives way and you plummet to the ground. Fortunately, you manage to grab a flagpole hanging from the balcony of the apartment on the 15th floor. You start to make your way to the balcony to pull yourself up, when the owner of that apartment arrives and forbids you from making any use of his property. Despite your pleas, he refuses to allow you to climb onto his balcony and exit through his apartment, demanding that you immediately release your grip on his flagpole – this is his property, after all.
• You live in a house in the countryside on a one-hectare plot of land. One day I’ll buy all the land within a hundred yards of where your property line ends, so that your house is now effectively within a hundred-yard bubble of my land. I assure you, of course, that I will respect your property and not lay a finger on what is yours, but I insist that you do the same and furthermore, I insist that you are not allowed to set foot on my land. Doing so will constitute an infringement of my property, for which I will retaliate. You cannot travel to work or get supplies or food without passing through my property.
• Your child is starving, and the only option you have is to steal some bread to save your child’s life, or let him starve. (Determine that no other options are available – it’s one or the other.)

If someone is an absolutist deontologist who claims that property rights are always and everywhere inviolable, they are forced to say that the appropriate response in these scenarios is to let go of the flagpole and plummet to their deaths, to remain locked in their home and to starve, and let their child die rather than steal bread. If these are indeed your conclusions, this is your exit to end this conversation, because nothing I say next will make you relent. But for the other 99.9% of us, it seems clear that in these cases you have the right to climb into the flat, cross the country and grab the bread to save your child’s life. This doesn’t mean that doing these things aren’t rights violations – it just means that rights violations can sometimes be justified.

All this is accepted by prominent defenders of the moral parity thesis cited by Zwolinski. Michael Huemer, who advocates anarcho-capitalism, has no problem admitting this. For example, he wrote: ‘Compare this case: Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s children. Suppose the children would otherwise have starved. It does not follow that he did not actually steal the bread. What follows is at most that the theft was justified.” That’s why Huemer say the idea that ‘taxation is justified even if it involves theft’ is a ‘perfectly understandable view’. Huemer also admits that “stealing to provide social welfare can be justified.”

Now let’s bring the moral parity thesis back into play. Since individuals would have the right to violate rights under these circumstances, a government could do so on grounds of moral equality Also be justified if it engages in relevant similar conduct. If I have the right to take a loaf of bread to prevent little Marvin from starving, then a welfare program that provides Marvin with bread would be justified by the moral equality thesis. The concern Zwolinski expresses stems from absolutism, not moral equality.

This ties in with another objection that Zwolinski similarly raises about the moral parity thesis: how one should act towards children. Zwolinski says that if you “try, as the moral parity thesis does, to build a political philosophy from micro-level examples about adults interacting with each other, you’ll end up a bit bewildered as to what to say about children.” . They simply don’t fit the model, and so your theory ends up treating them as some kind of strange edge case.”

But this doesn’t seem to me to be the basis. The moral parity thesis, as I understand it, does not say that we should “build a political philosophy based on micro-level examples of adults interacting with each other.” The moral parity thesis simply holds that agents of the state do not receive special moral exemptions merely by virtue of being agents of the state. This leaves completely open the question of the specific content of moral obligations, and also how those obligations come about. You can believe in moral equality without believing that all moral obligations must be rooted in “micro-level examples of adults interacting with each other.” You can believe that there are special obligations and responsibilities when children are involved – I certainly do – but that is completely at odds with the moral equality thesis.

To be fair, there are certainly some thinkers in the libertarian tradition who are just as bad on the cause of children as Zwolinski says. Murray Rothbard believed that children should have the freedom to run away from home as soon as they are old enough to do so, and that parents cannot be forced to feed or care for their children because that is the parents’ absolute right would violate self-reliance. property. But this defect in Rothbard’s thinking, as in the thought experiments mentioned above, is a result of his absolutism and not of moral equality.

I would like to add that another point can be made in favor of a welfare state. In cases where theft might be justified to, for example, feed starving children, there may be practical (rather than moral) benefits to feeding those children through, for example, a government welfare program, rather than individuals engaging in justified theft. IWhen Billy the Baker finds someone trying to steal some bread, he obviously seems justified in trying to stop that person or report him to the police. But he cannot immediately know whether the potential thief is the personification of Jean Valjean, or someone who can easily afford bread, but simply does not want to pay for it. A well-run program could eliminate this uncertainty, because if people can prevent their children from starving by accessing this program, they won’t have to steal from Billy. Therefore, Billy can be sure that anyone he catches trying to steal bread from him will act. wrongly and can rightly be stopped.

Another consideration might be raised. While Jean Valjean may have the right to steal to feed his sister’s starving children, the cost of that theft will necessarily fall on someone else. On from whom Should those costs rightly fall? It doesn’t seem like there’s anyone in particular looking forward to that. Valjean may steal from Billy the Baker, but there is no specific reason why Billy and no one else bears the cost of the theft. And if Billy runs his bakery in a part of town with a lot of people in Valjean’s situation, he may be affected by these thefts in a way that Carl’s Croissant Shop in the wealthy and well-guarded part of town never has to experience. If someone has the right to participate in an action that inevitably imposes costs on someone else, but at the same time there is no specific “someone else” to whom those costs should fall, then anyone sharing the costs prevents that someone randomly bears the costs. an undeserved disproportionate burden of these (justified) thefts.

Now I can certainly think of counter-reactions to the above arguments, along with responses to them, and in turn counter-reactions. But my point is simply that, contrary to what Zwolinski claims, you could both accept the moral parity thesis and still accept that, for example, taxation or social security could be justified.

However, this still does not mean that the moral parity thesis does not have very strong implications. Even if you could justify taxes and welfare on the basis of moral equality, the range of programs that can be justified in this way is very small compared to the scope of what government actually does. A program that feeds starving orphans could be justified. But taking hundreds of millions of dollars a year to subsidize the arts interests of the wealthy through the National Endowment for the Arts certainly does not meet this bar. It doesn’t do that either subsidize and thus encourage housing construction in areas at high risk of flooding and other natural disasters. So in that sense, Zwolinski is right to argue that much of the way the government actually behaves is not justified by the moral parity thesis – but not in the cases he seemed to mention.