I was having a nice little discussion with a libertarian recently, and he made this point.
How’s this for a reductio – imagine Smith is on a plane with 100 disabled people, and the plane crashes on an island. As the only able-bodied survivor, he is the only one who can gather food. Now, if you believe in a right to food (or basic provision, or whatever) it seems as though you’re saying that he has the legally enforcible obligation to provide for all of these people, despite the fact that doing so would mean working 12 hour days, having no leisure time, having all the fruits of his labour taken from him etc. One of the disabled people has a gun, and so can force him to do this. The question is, what is the qualitative difference between Smith’s situation and the situation of a slave?
It seems that you have two options: firstly, to say that he is not a slave, because he is morally obligated to carry out this task. But to say that would be to moralize the definition of slavery (and from discussions with you before, I know you’re not a fan of moralized concepts.) It also has this weird consequence: one day, we could both agree that Jones is a bona fide slave, being forced by an (able bodied) master to labour against his will. The next day, if that master sold Jones to a bunch of disabled people, who had no other way of getting their basic food-needs, and who forced him to labour in exactly the same way, you’d have to say that over-night he became free, or, at least, not enslaved any more. The other option is to say that there’s nothing wrong with slavery per se, but this is clearly quite a bullet to bite.
How should egalitarians respond to such points? As someone who really, really likes Rawls, my initial thoughts were along these lines (these aren’t in order of importance, more the order I thought of them):
1. Smith can’t be FORCED to work 12 hour days. The disabled guy with the gun (let’s call him Black) can’t say “work 12 hour days, or I’ll shoot you”. That’d be wrong, and in clear violation of the 1st Principle of Justice. So Smith will never be forced to labour against his will. At most, he’ll be forced to give up some of the product of his labour. They’re not the same thing. So he ain’t a slave.
2. I’m pretty sure that if Smith was literally the only one who can gather food and there are 100 disabled folks, then we wouldn’t be in what Rawls calls the circumstances of justice. Roughly, we’re in the circumstances of justice if there’s enough food (though Rawls is interested in social primary goods, which include more than just food) for everyone in our political community to survive. I submit that with only one labourer, the political community wouldn’t be in that situation, and hence the Principles of Justice don’t apply (this is not to say that no principles of justice apply, such as one’s that Rawls hasn’t considered, but the Difference Principle certainly doesn’t apply).
3. Let’s suppose that we are in the circumstances of justice. If that is stipulated, then I think what is distasteful about Smith’s predicament disappears. His situation seems bad because we think “oh, Smith is doing all this work, and he’s still got bugger all … he’s still starving because he has to give all the coconuts he harvests to these damn disabled people”. If we’re in the circumstances of justice, that’s not the case, and he’s perfectly alive (if not as well of as he might be under a different Basic Structure). In that situation, I don’t think Smith can really complain about being treated unjustly. What’s he meant to do? Let his disabled plane-buddies die? Is that the just thing to do? Surely not.
4. Justice as Fairness isn’t supposed to capture the disabled. Rawls restricts his enquiry to what we owe to able-bodied citizens. Yes, that’s a limitation, but there’s nothing to say that the disabled can’t be captured by a different account (eg. a Dworkinian hypothetical insurance market, though of course, any supplementary account needs to be argued for).
Any other fruitful responses? They don’t need to be specifically Rawlsian.
EDIT: Obviously, the libertarian in question knows that I’ve reproduced his comments.
Forget Rawls!
you don’t need him to deal with this kind of lunacy!
The problem with your libertarian friend is that he has imported his horrible narrow selfish morality into the assumptions of his argument.
Here’s how I respond to the situation:
“Christ, I’m the only survivor. These other people are going to die unless I help them. Well, I better help them – I don’t mind going out collecting the food, because these are my fellow human beings and I don’t want them to die. I’d hope that they’d do the same for me if the situation were reversed, but even if they wouldn’t the situation is how it is. So I will help my needy and injured fellow humans.”
Why is your libertarian friend’s first response “fuck you, you can die, I won’t be your slave”?
That tells you something worrying about the guy’s personality, and I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone like that. Imagine if you had a car crash whilst giving them a lift…
Further points.
1. The situation is disanalogous to slavery because slavery is the systematic economic exploitation of a person of people by a cast which claims right over their life and labour to the point where the slave is treated and viewed as property.
In the case described, we may plausibly have coercion. I think it is right to say Smith is forced if Black has a gone – but he is simply one agent forced into action by another. Black does not make Smith his property by pointing a gun at him, so Smith is not a slave.
2. Of course the principles of justice don’t apply. The principles of justice are to govern “a well ordered society”, not dog-eat-dog survival nightmares in the remotest jungle.
To try and draw conclusions about state-enacted justice from this kind of thought experiment is like putting 200 humans in a gas chamber, giving them each a club, and saying “in 10 minutes the gas will start. We are prepared to let 1 person go – but only on the condition that the other 199 are dead before the gas starts. Get clubbing”, and then trying to draw conclusions about human empathy, teamwork, benevolence etc.
It’s simply stupid to try and draw conclusions about normal situations from utterly abnormal thought experiments.
“if Black has a gone ” = “if Black has a gun”
Paul,
I’m the libertarian he’s arguing with, and I think your first response entirely misses the point. We’re not talking about what people morally should do in the situation, we’re talking about what is morally acceptable to coerce people to do in the situation.
Your assumption that my response would be “fuck you, you can die, I won’t be your slave” is uncharitable and wrong. I actually agree with you that a decent person would react exactly how you described, and I know I personally would (so much for my ‘horrible selfish narrow morality’). But that’s not what the issue is about, and it’s an unfounded ad-hom, as well as distraction from the real question.
For instance, I also think that a decent person would not cheat on their spouse, but I don’t think that this rule should be coercively enforced by the state. The real question is: if Smith refused, for whatever reason, be it selfishness, hatred of disabled people, or whatever, would Black be acting legitimately if he forced him into working? And I think the answer is obviously no, because, among other things, it would mean that Smith is a de facto slave.
You say the situation is disanalogous to slavery, but it certainly seems to me like Smith is in a situation where he is being systematically economically exploited by a group which claims a right over his person and labour.
I also think your point 2 fails: we’re not trying to draw conclusions about empathy, teamwork, or benevolence. We’re trying to draw conclusions about how people are to be justly treated by other people, and unless you’re going to say that the rules of justice simply don’t apply on the island, it certainly is relevant.
Finally, It’s simply stupid to try and draw conclusions about normal situations from utterly abnormal thought experiments – I’ll use this one next time someone challenges me with the stunningly original “but what if Bill Gates buys up all the roads…”
Paul,
Like Dan, I think that libertarian moves can’t be had off so easily. With regards the unrealisticness of the example, yes it’s extreme, but I think it could probably be tweaked so as to be less silly.
Generally, I think it’s pretty difficult to go on the offensive against libertarianism, because the basic moral premises I affirm are just so different from theirs (by the word “basic” I don’t mean to imply some sort of foundationalism). I personally think it’s just *obvious* that it’s not wrong to coerce the rich to help the poor. Dan sincerely disagrees – indeed, he thinks it’s obvious that the converse is true. I can’t budge him from that position via argument (and likewise, he can’t budge me). Given that, I think egalitarians are restricted to defensive moves – saying why egalitarian political philosophy need not entail the undesirable situations that libertarians sometimes claim that it will.
Interesting discussion. Some very quick thoughts.
About the Different Principle: wouldn’t it require in this case (assuming the circs of justice etc) not only that the able-bodied person work for the other people, but also that he get a larger share of the social reward (I’m not sure what that would be in the terms of the island case). Such an inequality is only justified by the fact that the fruits of the able-bodied person’s labour are to the benefit of the worst-off. The DP doesn’t just say that justice requires that he work, but that justice requires him to be compensated. Have I missed something there?
One possible left-wing response to the Rawlsian (e.g. Jerry Cohen’s luck egalitarianism) is that even with the disabled person wielding a gun, the able-bodied person is still in a better bargaining position (i.e. what conceivable advantage would you have in shooting me — you’ll die either way). And that would allow him to say — I’ll get the food, but I’ll still eat more than my fair share because that’s the incentive I need to go foraging. Surely the demands of *justice* can’t require me to be overcompensated (leaving open the possibility that some other value might — efficiency? utility?).
Cohen’s response to the libertarian objection about slavery is that: (1) luck egalitarianism comes with a built-in qualification (the ‘modulo a personal prerogative’ rider), (2) even if *justice* might require him to dedicate all his efforts to their survival, there are a plurality of basic values which must be balanced intuitively with the claims of justice (contra Rawls who claims justice is the first virtue of social institutions and trumps all other claims). I.e. justice might require slavery, but intuitively, we would correspondingly emphasise some contrary ideal (freedom?) such that we need not act exclusively based on the demands of justice.
I might be misreading both Rawls and Cohen here, neither of whom might even admit a case like this one, but these are my very scattered thoughts on the subject…
Dan and Peter.
Are you both revising for finals?
If so, you can tell. You are totally wrapped-up in the world of analytic political philosophy. When the hell is over you will come back to this post and see how insane it is to anyone outside of the bubble.
nonetheless, some responses
Dan,
1. Why are you bringing in thoughts about the state and its role? I thought the situation was dog-eat-dog in the jungle? From whence considerations about the state? You keep vacilating between justice as a requirement of the state and justice as something that operates as a moral principle between individuals. Do you consider that they might not be the same thing?
2. Perhaps part of the problem is that you are having Kantian thoughts about justifying all actions “all the way down” via rationalist philosophy. Personally – being a Humean in ethics and a Weberian in politics – I think the question of whether Black is “justified” in coercing Smith is rather strange. We’re talking about survival here. Black wants to survive, and that’s what he tries to do. I’m not particularly interested in whether he is “justified” in using Smith to survive. Note the Kantian reaction here is: but he uses him as a means not an end!! But so what? This is a dog eat dog [Hobbesian]“state of nature” type situation, not the ordering principles of justice found in a modern stable society. So a) I fail to see why questions of justification are relevant beyond ‘is a person justified in trying to survive?’, which in turn is divorced from b) questions of state coercion, and in turn means c) I don’t see how you can conclude anything about state coercion – or for that matter, all that much about individual morality – from such a bizarre and strange example. But again, that’s because I don’t believe in objective moral principles which exist always and and are always binding upon actions which can or cannot be justified in accordance with such strange abstract principles. In other words, I think justice is a social construct and that in your thought experiment there isn’t enough of a society to begin constructing anything beyond personal survival.
3. You have ignored my point about slavery: that it involved treating somebody as property. Smith is being forced to do something – that doesn’t make him a slave, any more than a policeman forcing me to stay in a police cell after arresting makes me a slave. Coercion alone does not entail slavery.
Your problem here stems from the libertarian obsession with reducing everything you don’t like to “slavery”, as a way of denigrating it with an emotive example (c.f. Nozick trying to argue that paying tax is akin to forced labour is akin to slavery). I understand if you have a problem with coercion, but coercion is a wider and in many ways different thing from slavery. Slavery may require coercion, but it does not follow that all coercion results in slavery. So to argue that Smith is a slave, and to infer “and that’s really bad right!” is too quick.
also, do you not worry about importing a societal moral judgement – “slavery is wrong” – back into a pre-societal situation? (And furthermore, how can Smith be a slave when there is no aparatus of state power to enforce Black’s ownership of him? If Smith runs away in the night, which state-sponsored militia is going to return him to Black as a point of law?)
4. “We’re trying to draw conclusions about how people are to be justly treated by other people, and unless you’re going to say that the rules of justice simply don’t apply on the island, it certainly is relevant.”
I think I do want to say something like that. Like Rawls, i belive justice is a concept which, when applied to the actions of the state, only begins to operate when you have stability, organised power structures, regulated interaction etc. All your thought expermiment provides is some disabled people with guns and one bloke without a gun. How on earth can you deduce principles of justice for a state from this anarchic, violent situation?
And I’ll go further. I’m with Weber and (on my reading) Hobbes; politics and much human interaction is about controlling, mitigating or popogating violence. Here we have a deeply unstable situation where the potential for violence is a key element. I believe the “rules of justice” are something that gets applied *after* a group of people achieve stability and largely dispell the spectre of uncontrolled violence. They are not some magical a priori set of cosmic rules which exist in “the state of nature”, so to speak. Of course, if you have Kantian leanings about morality, such a thought will be deeply antithical to you.
5. ” I’ll use this one next time someone challenges me with the stunningly original “but what if Bill Gates buys up all the roads…””
Do so. Provided that you recall that *some* extreme thought experiments are useful for teasing out very specific points. The thought experiment you provide cannot yield the enormous and complex conclusions about justice that you want it to.
“Generally, I think it’s pretty difficult to go on the offensive against libertarianism, because the basic moral premises I affirm are just so different from theirs ”
What? Have you simply never read Cohen’s Selfownership Freedom and Equality? As the first 5 chapters are a complete demolition job of libertarianism and show that it is very easy to argue agaisnt libertarianism, if you go abuot it carefully. For somebody who spends so much time fretting about libertarian philosophy this strikes me as very odd indeed.
Cohen does an excellent job of showing that libertarianism is incoherent, doesn’t achieve what it wants to achieve, and (as you say) produces rather undesirable states of affairs.
Have you tried the basic Rawls-Dworkin line on Dan? Namely: distributions of wealth are largely products of the utterly arbitrary lottery of birth. People who are rich hardly ever “deserve” to be rich because of this fact, and so any claims rooted in their “deserving” to keep their wealth are fundamentally flawed (fill out with proper reasoning etc)?
If so, and Dan replies “I don’t care, I think it’s unfair”, well then we are back to Weber. And that means we have to win, and that means getting control of the state aparatus of power.
It’s an insane Kantian (and deeply Rawlsian) thought that politics can be settled through intellectual debate alone. As though, if we just word the arguments strongly enough, libertarians will come round to our way of thinking.
Ultimately, politics is conducted at the end of a gun – it’s just in modern society we are several steps removed from that gun, which has been dressed up in a cloak of legitimacy and handed to the modern militia (the police). But ultimately, rational arguments only get you so far. As Weber (didn’t actually) put it, it’s who’s got the guns that matters.
Paul,
Let’s see here.
1) I’m an anarchist, so I obviously reject the idea that individuals should be held to any higher a moral standard than the state. In fact, this is basically why I am an anarchist in the first place: wearing a soldier’s hat doesn’t somehow make murder legitimate, and wearing a taxman’s hat doesn’t somehow make robbery legitimate. But of course you see this as vacillating, even though I don’t think it matters. I mean, the point of the example still stands even if you want to change it to include the fact that everyone except for Smith decide to form a state and elect Black their leader.
2) and 4) seem to boil down to disagreements over the nature of morality, which I suppose means there’s not much possibility of having an interesting discussion. But yeah, needless to say, I do think that there are moral obligations on people even in the state of nature. How on earth do I expect to deduce principles of justice from this anarchic, violent situation? Quite easily, I expect.
3) And you’re missing my point about slavery; I agree with you that mere coercion does not entail slavery, but the simple fact is that there’s a lot more than mere coercion going on here. Smith is in a situation where he is being systematically economically exploited (as you put it) by a group claiming a right over his labour. If you want to say ‘well, they have no state-enforced property right over him, therefore it’s not really slavery’ that’s fine, just bear in mind that this is a heavily revisionist definition that seems to rule out most of the cases today that we would call slavery. For instance, I would have no problem saying that an Eastern European woman trafficked to the UK and forced to work as a prostitute is being held as a slave, but apparently you’d say that she isn’t.
As for GA Cohen, he does indeed show that it’s very easy to argue against libertarianism – provided, of course, that you beg the question on every other page. As far as I can tell, the basic argument boils down to “I really, really don’t like inequality, therefore self-ownership is false.” I’d highly recommend Eric Mack’s pretty comprehensive articles, “Self-Ownership, Marxism and Egalitarianism” parts 1 and 2, which are basically knock-down refutations of Cohen.
I have (obviously) some thoughts on the Rawls-Dworkin ‘lottery of birth’ argument, but maybe we can argue about that another time.
If you think G.A. Cohen begs the question you are either being dishonest or you are not a very good philosopher. Either way you are supremely arrogant to dismiss a philosopher of Cohen’s standing and intellect as guilty of question-begging on every other page.
I can understand disagreeing with his philosophy, but *question begging*? Christ. I think Kant was wrong about everything in ethics, but I think in the entire Groundwork he begs the question only once (albeit at a very important juncture), and even then that act takes us to the heart of most 2nd order ethical disagreement. I would never presume to dismiss him as begging the question on every page, just because I dislike his arguments/conclusions.
I’m sorry but that is all there is to it. I know it is rude for me to say such things, but there you go. I feel it needs to be said.
I’m not going to respond to your points anymore. This, by contrast, isn’t meant as a rude gesture, I just feel that we are so polarised in our views that it’s impossible to make headway for a lack of common ground.
So I’ll leave you with a joke (which, interestingly, you might have incoherent reactions to):
q. what’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?
a. under anarchism the poor are allowed to shoot back.
Paul,
I don’t know who taught you Kant, but they did so really badly. The sort of ‘from the State of Nature up’ view that Nozick etc have just isn’t Kantian, because it grants people foundational rights to coerce each other that clearly aren’t universalizable. To put it another way, there’s no fact-insensitive right of (crazily broad) self-ownership (in Kant).
The really important thing here is to note the sloppiness of the reasoning in the example. To go from ‘there is a right to x’ to ‘there is a right to coercively extract x from others’ to ‘there is a right to coercively extract x from others at enormous cost to them’ is clearly a piece of fallacious reasoning. I have a right to my pen. That does not mean that I can threaten a thief with a punch to get it back from him. It certainly does not mean that I can threaten a thief with a gun to get it back. So being committed to there being a right to subsistence does not imply that the disabled are entitled to coerce the able-bodied into supplying it for them.
Even if one were committed to that, that would not – as Cohen shows in SOFE – imply property rights over the person whom one had the right over. Do libertarians believe that in virtue of having the right to coercively defend my property against some individual I have property rights over them? Presumably not. Further, not all property rights, were one to persist in thinking that rights in general were property rights in particular, are slavery rights. Presumably I have some property rights in companies I have shares in. That does not make the company my slave (and if libertarians want to bleat about how companies aren’t persons, imagine I sell rights to my income; this does not enslave me, UNLESS I SELL RIGHTS TO DIRECT MY LABOUR AS WELL).
Finally, as Paul rightly points out, what the hell an example about one person’s coercively extracted support for a hundred otherwise totally passive individuals is supposed to tell us about systematic interactions involved in a genuine political system I’m not sure. Even if that coercive extraction of support would be slavery, what that tells us about anything else I have no idea. Read some Bernard Williams and grow up.
It’s a real shame that it’s apparently impossible to have an argument these days without it getting personal, but I suppose that’s due to the anonymous nature of the internet.
As for the substantive points, here goes: Paul, yes, Cohen begs the question a hell of a lot in his book (maybe not on every other page, but everyone’s allowed a bit of hyperbole). To the extent that SFAE is supposed to be an internal critique of libertarianism, it utterly fails. You cannot, to pick just one example, non question-beggingly argue against a historical theory of justice by assuming that the actual history of a set of holdings has no moral weight, as Cohen does. If you want to see the extent to which Cohen really does beg the question, I’d really recommend reading the Mack paper I linked to rather than reflexively defending your hero with appeal to his “standing and intellect” (and presumably his length and girth too.)
Rob, I fail to see how the moral maxim along the lines that everyone is a self-owner is not universalizable – it seems to me (although I’m certainly no Kant scholar) that this is about as universalizable as is possible to ask for in a maxim. As for what you say “the really important thing to note” is, I think we are talking at cross purposes. In this context, which is about the justified use of coercion by people/the state, I’m using ‘rights’ to refer to precisely those things that are legitimately enforceable, coercively if necessary – if what we’re talking about is something else, then I agree with you that things are not so clear cut. So I’m not sure that this is ‘fallacious reasoning,’ or even a misuse of language, as there is a strong tradition of thinking of the realm of justice as the realm of legitimate coercion. I don’t claim, or even believe, that justice is the whole of morality, but it does constitute the ‘ground level’ limits of how we can interact with each other.
Cohen himself admits that a lot of the apparatus of the welfare state does indeed infringe upon self-ownership (don’t forget, he does spend a considerable amount of time trying to reject it for precisely this reason.) For instance:
“Suppose that whenever I scratch my back I am required by the state to scratch someone else’s. It surely follows that I lack full ownership of my hand. And the implication of non-(full) ownership survives when we suppose that if I scratch your back in return for scratching mine, then some further scratching of the backs of third parties can be exacted by the state from each of us, after the manner of redistributive income taxation.”
And of course not all property rights are slavery rights; I find it very difficult to see an argument in that whole paragraph, particularly one directed against a position I happen to hold. Finally, if you don’t think that thought experiments can shed much light on real-world moral commitments, I think academic political philosophy is the wrong field for you.
“I’m using ‘rights’ to refer to precisely those things that are legitimately enforceable, coercively if necessary”
And I’m pointing out that whilst I might have a right to my pen, I’m not allowed to torture you half-to-death to enforce it (this would be an example of a pertinent thought experiment). That all rights are coercively enforcable does not imply that all rights can be enforced by any given coercive means.
I then went on to show that having a right that x do y does not imply a property right over them, or else libertarians would be committed to us all having property rights to each other in virtue of self-ownership. As I further pointed out, even if it did imply having a property right over them, then it would not imply a slavery right over them, because the mark of slavery is the right to direct labour, and having a property right does not grant that specific right.