“The true life, the life eternal has been found – it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you …. Everyone is the child of God …. As the child of God each man is the equal of every other man.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
“There is no God. … Yea, there is no God.” – Isaiah 44:6-8
An Anarchist Legal Order | by Roderick T. Long
I teach philosophy at Auburn University.
what kind of pathetic fraud are you?
What are you talking about?
I believe he’s condemning you for hypocrisy. That is, he believes an anarchist can’t also be a philosophy professor, especially at a government-funded university, without contradicting himself.
You could also make the same argument about roads, public bathrooms, electricity companies, etc. But it’s not our fault the state suppresses competition and enforces monopoly. You can hardly fault the people in the Soviet Union for waiting in bread lines when the government causes the shortages in the first place.
Anon, my friend, I am the last one to place moral blame on anyone. See my work.
He might also think the concept of anarchist legal order is oxymoronic.
Scott t won’t be back. His post resembles the hit and run comments on Rad Geek’s Robert E. Lee thread.
Don’t worry, he just earned himself a lifetime ban.
It might’ve been entertaining to see him explain himself.
So he thinks the consistent thing for anarchists to do is to let their opponents have a monopoly over higher education?
I’m not sure what he thought. It might’ve been interesting to find out.
Perhaps he thinks that boycotting the positions and working at non-state (or at least less-state) institutions is more appropriate.
Will we ever know?
He seemed more like a gun and run type of commenter anyway.
What was the context of that Nietzsche quote? If I remember correctly, Nietzsche believed God was dead and that people were unequal and thus there was a master morality for some and a slave morality for others.
Anyway, witty post!
Nietzsche is describing the content of Jesus’ message as he understands it. Nietzsche doesn’t agree with Jesus, but he describes Jesus’ views in generally favourable terms to highlight what he takes to be the contrast between the benevolence of Jesus’ message and the malevolence of mainstream Christianity starting mainly with Paul.
As for master and slave morality, Nietzsche’s views were complicated. He thought master morality was generally healthier than slave morality. And slave morality is dangerous because it can’t be confined to the ruled; it always converts the rulers, as Socrates converted the aristocratic youths of Athens, or as Christianity converted the Romans.
But he also thought that slave morality performed a useful function by giving rise to intelligence and science. (The masters originally tended to be rather dull-witted because you don’t need to plot and scheme when you can smash. And the masters had no interest in science because the concept of a reality/appearance distinction, on which science depends, is the result of a dissatisfaction with appearances, and contented rulers have no such dissatisfaction.) Also, the problem with master morality was that it tended to give rise to slave morality (because the masters conquer and oppress people, who in turn develop unhealthy values as a result). So Nietzsche looked forward to a new form of healthy mastership that would be intelligent, scientific, and non-oppressive. But he was always rather vague about the details.
Hmm I never thought of Nietzsche as a hopelessly confused utopian before.
I’d like to hear a little more about the “philosophical presuppositions of science” as you call them. Some of my friends in science tell me science has nothing to do at all with philosophy, at least nothing that doesn’t also apply to life in general (e.g. to the appearance/reality distinction I’ve been told that if we lived in The Matrix then it would be a problem for knowledge in general not just science).
“Judas went out and hanged himself.”
“Go thou and do likewise.”
“What thou doest, do quickly.”
Perhaps to return to the complaint about anarchists teaching at state universities as some kind of ‘fraud’: could there not be something to this misunderstanding, insofar as anarchists sometimes describe taxation as though it were inherently an injustice of the highest order, literally the moral equivalent of holding somebody up at gunpoint and stealing their money? Surely there are some injustices such that a reasonable person should not willingly co-operate with or contribute to any organization or institution that commits or directly benefits from those injustices; though opting out of some forms of indirect co-operation and contribution will require subjecting oneself to even greater injustice, and so not be required of a reasonable person, in those cases in which it is possible to refuse to contribute or co-operate without any severe detriment to oneself, one ought to refuse. Thus I ought, quite obviously I would think, to refuse to contribute or co-operate with the KKK, but am perhaps not unreasonable in paying my taxes. If taxation is as gross an injustice as racially motivated violence, however, why shouldn’t I conclude that I should at least not choose to contribute to or co-operate with the state’s taxation system when it is open to me not to do so, as it clearly is when it comes to choosing whether or not to work for a state university funded in significant part by taxation (yes, including tuition, since many students at state institutions receive federal loans to fund their education)? If, on the other hand, taxation, at least as we know it in the U.S., is a less serious injustice, then the choice to work for a state institution might be a reasonable acknowledgment that our society isn’t perfect and not outright collusion with intolerable evil.
Some anarchists and libertarians at least talk as though they think that taxation in most or all forms is an injustice of the highest order. Should even a person who thinks that it is such a serious injustice not refuse to receive his paycheck from the state, or does deciding to accept a paycheck funded by unjustly gained funds remain acceptable only for those who do not believe that taxation is necessarily as unjust as direct armed robbery or unprovoked assault?
The analogy with roads, electric companies, and the like won’t work: state universities don’t have anything remotely like a monopoly, and at any rate nobody has to be a professor at a state university even in the sense in which one has to drive and use electricity — a necessity that some more morally rigorous folks I know would question if not reject.
Would you rather a tax eater be an anarchist or statist?
There seems to be a slide here from the wrongness of contributing money to an immoral agency to the wrongness of taking money from an immoral agency.
Would it be wrong for rebels to steal guns from the state armory? Presumably not. Well, what if the government is giving the guns away. Does it then become wrong for the rebels to take them?
How is that different from students at private institutions? Most of them get federal loans too. Thus all colleges are tax-subsidised. And that includes not only loans to students but grants to institutions. Being public or private has more to do with how administrators are selected than with funding. Moreover, even the handful of colleges that refuse all federal funds (e.g. Hillsdale, Grove City) are tax-subsidised indirectly; subsidy-driven cartelisation of the industry allows them to charge more than they could in a free market. So the claim that no one should be a professor at a state-funded institution amounts to the claim that no one should be a professor — which would mean, in practice, that only statists should be professors. That’s an odd strategy for social change.
That doesn’t make sense. If working for a state institution really did count as supporting the state, then of course it would be wrong to do so whether or not taxation is a serious evil — because assault, kidnapping, and mass murder are serious evils, and the state does those things. But the claim that working for a state institution counts as supporting the state is the claim that needs defending.
So because the government steals money from us, it’s wrong for us to take any of it back and use it to fight the government?
Not true; see above.
Funny how in the combox on a post about why “context matters,” you drop the qualifer “state” from “universities.” The claim that state universities don’t have a monopoly *is* true; your point about private institutions just shows that state universities aren’t the only ones that receive funds collected via taxation. That may show that there is no relevant moral difference between working for one or the other, but it sure doesn’t show that state universities have a monopoly.
I’m not sure that the putative difference between contributing money to and receiving money from an immoral agency is relevant per se, though there are certainly cases in which the two would be rather different. If, for instance, I accept money from the KKK but don’t do anything to promote or defend the KKK’s projects, I wouldn’t be implicated in their injustices. But it’s hard to see how working for an institution that pays you with money collected via taxation is parallel to that example. For one thing, by working for the state, you certainly contribute to its projects. The analogy would be working for the KKK, contributing to the success of their projects, taking their money, but being an outspoken critic of the KKK. For another thing, if taxation is literally the moral equivalent of theft, then accepting a paycheck from an institution that collects its funds via taxation would be the moral equivalent of willingly accepting goods stolen at gunpoint from innocent people. If I were walking down the street, watched a man rob somebody, and then accepted a cut of the contents of the freshly snatched wallet, would I fail to be acting unreasonably and to be implicated in the robber’s injustice simply because I tell him that I disapprove and otherwise act to subvert theft? My guess is that you’d call me a hypocrite. If not, then I may just have some merchandise to offer you…
To be clear, I don’t imagine that these considerations create anything like deep problems for anarchists. I think they create problems for anarchists whose conception of injustice allows for no subtlety. The claim that taxation is literally the moral equivalent of theft strikes me as just such a lack of subtlety.
My point, obviously, was that the qualifier “state” applies just as much to nominally “private” universities as to nominally “state” ones.
To what rights-violating projects do I contribute?
Yes, but you left out the rather crucial fact that the person accepting the funds is a member of the group they were taken from.
Bob:
Well, you know, Auburn University is getting about $156,000,000 this academic year from state government, plus about $17,000,000 from the Feds’ “fiscal stabilization” grants to state government institutions. And about $315,000,000 from tuition and student fees. And about $150,000,000 from other sources (e.g. endowment income, gifts, etc.) Now for those (like Roderick, like me) who consider taxation to be theft, the $173,000,000 from government appropriations represents money that was stolen from taxpayers and then handed over to the University. That sucks, and governments should not do that. But the $465,000,000 from students, gifts, endowment income, etc. does not represent money stolen from taxpayers. I don’t know what you imagine to be happening in the accounting department at AU, but I can promise you that they don’t have a special vault where they put all and only the stolen money, so they can (ha ha, take that taxpayers!) pay professors or staff out of the pelf they have seized. What actually happens is that it all gets thrown into a big general fund and then apportioned out to a number of smaller funds, with the (minority of) funds that are stolen getting mixed in with the (majority of) funds that were not stolen, in such a way that it is impossible even in principle to divvy up the payments in order to determine which portion is the stolen portion, or to trace back the stolen portion to any particular set of victims that it would have been stolen from. If you want to get all down in the casuistry here then you ought to take more care to represent the case accurately: Roderick is not being paid out of “money collected via taxation,” but rather out of money which was partly collected via taxation, mostly collected via voluntary means, and which is managed in a way little different from that of any other government-subsidized enterprise. (To be sure, I think that government subsidies to companies suck, and that they ought to be abolished. But I do not think it is ipso facto hypocritical for a taxation-is-theft anarchist to work for, say, General Motors or to work as a doctor or nurse at their local government-subsidized hospital.)
I don’t know what you’ve said that would entitle you to that “certainly.” Could you explain what specific projects of the state (of Alabama?) Roderick is contributing to, and how he is contributing to them? If the answer is something like, “Well, he is contributing to the successful operation of Auburn University by teaching and doing research,” then don’t you think it matters whether or not the “projects” in question are, or are not, things that would be done anyway, and would be worth doing in their own right, if (especially if) the state were not involved in them?