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Suppose there is a trolley. Should we blow it up?
Tag Archives | Ethics
First 2008 Molinari Symposium Comments Online
The first of three commentaries for the Molinari Society’s authors-meet-critics session at the December APA is now online: this one by Nicole Hassoun of Carnegie-Mellon, author of “Why Libertarians Should Be Welfare Liberals.”
The other two commentators are Jennifer McKitrick (vice-president of the Molinari Institute and author of “Liberty, Gender, and the Family”) and Christopher Morris (author of An Essay on the Modern State).
The books under discussion are Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory and the anthology I co-edited with Tibor Machan, Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?
A Heap of Slavery
Nozick’s Tale of the Slave is online. You should go read it (it’s short) before continuing this post.
Okay, welcome back. Although the story ends with a question I think it’s clear that the intended answer is “none of them,” and that the sequence of cases is meant to be a kind of argument for that conclusion.
It’s important to see, then, that Nozick’s argument is not merely a Sorites argument.
A Sorites argument has the structure “A isn’t different enough from B to belong to a different category; B isn’t different enough from C to belong to a different category … and so on … so all the instances A through Z must belong to the same category.” Thus a pile of three pebbles isn’t a heap; a pile of four pebbles isn’t different enough from a pile of three pebbles to be categorised differently – so no number of pebbles can ever be large enough to count as a heap.
Although there’s philosophical disagreement as to how to describe exactly what’s gone wrong, that kind of argument is clearly fallacious; so if that’s all that Nozick’s argument were doing it wouldn’t be very impressive. But I think there’s a more charitable way of understanding the argument – namely that in each transition from one case to the next we are meant to recognise that the essence of slavery has not been affected – that slavery isn’t at all about how kindly or cruelly one is treated, for example. In a Sorites, each stage is a bit more heaplike than the next, whether it gets all the way to heaphood or not; but – Nozick wants us to see – each stage of his story is not any more freedomlike.
Class Struggle, Libertarian Style
Here at last (in PDF format – HTML versions to follow in futuro) are two broadly left-libertarian articles I wrote in the 90s that I’ve been promising for some time to post here. (The second one is broken into two parts because I can’t upload files greater than 5 MB.)
1. Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent
2. Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class, Parts One and Two
[Originally published in Social Philosophy & Policy 12.2 (Summer 1995) and 15.1 (Summer 1998), respectively; © 1995 and 1998, Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation; posted by permission of the Foundation.]
The first article critiques mainstream liberalism for privileging indirect and hypothetical forms of consent over direct, actual consent; the second explores the relation between big government and big business and argues that the malign power of the latter depends mostly though not entirely on that of the former. Both articles attempt to overcome the dichotomy between “capitalist” and “socialist” versions of antistatist radicalism.
My Name Ith Lythander Thpooner And I’m From Athol, Mathachuthetth
Tomorrow morning I’m off to Boston for a Liberty Fund conference on Lysander Spooner, organised by Randy Barnett. We’re reading extensive selections from Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, The Unconstitutionality of the Laws Prohibiting Private Mails, No Treason, Natural Law, and Letter to Grover Cleveland. Among the secondary sources included in the readings packet I was pleased to see both my own Spooner article and the reply from Randy to J. H. Huebert that I originally solicited for the JLS.
In other news, when McCain first chose Palin as his running mate, I described the pick as “fiendishly brilliant.”
I take it back.
I Thought the Law, and the Law Won
Greetings from Orange Beach! I got in tonight at 9:30, a bit later than I’d intended, but thereon hangs a tale.
I gave a midterm in class today, and I’d planned to leave right after. But while I was invigilating (as the British say) the midterm, I was reading Michael Thompson’s new book Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (a great book, though with a lousy cover – Brownian motion is not a good visual metaphor for Thompson’s conception of life and action), and I came across a passage that gave me an idea for some remarks to add to my Spooner paper.
Thing is, I’m giving a version of the Spooner paper as my presidential address at the APS this weekend (my second presidential address here; check out the first one, from 2002), and I wanted to include my latest thoughts. So I paused to ponder, write, and print; hence my tardy departure for the Gulf. Anyway, here’s the new material:
In his recent book Life and Action, Michael Thompson considers an example from Rawls involving a society whose practice of promising differs from our own in various ways we would regard as unreasonable – regarding promises as binding even in emergency situations, for example, or even when made while talking in one’s sleep. If one holds, as Rawls does, that such a society simply does not have our institution of promising, but has a different, unreasonable one instead, and if one further holds that the binding force of promises depends on the reasonableness of the institution of promising, it would seem to follow, Thompson points out, that none of the promises made in that society should be regarded as binding, even the ones that our own institution would approve. (Analogously, if one holds that the duty not to steal depends on the reasonableness of the institution of property, it would seem to follow that in any society whose property institutions have any unreasonable features, such as slavery, their institution of property is unjust overall, and so no act of theft in that society warrants condemnation.)
Finding such implications counterintuitive, Thompson suggests that we keep the claim that the normative status of individual instances depends on the reasonableness of the practice as a whole, but abandon the claim that the deviant cases are genuinely part of the practice:
No one will hold that just any series of actions … can exhibit the sort of unity we intend in bringing things under a single practical disposition. And there is no reason to imagine that just any general schedule of action might be employed to describe such a thing, or, equivalently, that to any subtle diversity of such schedules there must correspond a possible diversity of dispositions. … Suppose, for example, that I return a deposit someone has made to me, a book for example, thinking “It is his: I must give it back” … and that I have often done this sort of thing. Later, though, I return some autumn leaves that have blown from someone’s red maple onto my lawn, again thinking “They are hers; I must give them back.” Need we hold that the practical disposition manifested in my earlier acts must or could have shown up in an act of leaf-return? Need we hold that the disposition that was manifested in those sensible earlier acts is any different from that displayed in the like acts of a more reasonable person who would have let the leaves go? That returning the book and ‘returning’ the leaves struck me as ‘the same’, that I didn’t feel any difference, cannot be supposed to establish the identity. The disposition that operates in my intuitively reasonable acts of return, we might think, is no different from the one that operates in all the acts of return of a person who lets leaves blow by; something else is at work in me in cases where I busy myself returning them. (Michael Thompson, Life and Action (Harvard 2008), p. 190.)
On this reading, the “inner constitution of the practice” (say, of promising) is the same in our society and in societies that count promises as binding when made in sleep and so on; it’s just that this inner constitution “is associated, in the deviant communities, with a widespread error or a superstitious religious conviction or something on the order of a fad – disturbance, at all events, and mere dross ….” (p. 186) I suggest that for Spooner, the legal institutions of nonlibertarian societies likewise have the same libertarian “inner constitution” as those of libertarian societies, while their nonlibertarian practices are alien accretions – so that when a judge in the deviant society condemns a murderer and commands the return of an escaped slave, she is in the first case, but not the second, expressing the same practice as her libertarian counterpart – and so in the first case is applying law while in the second case she is applying something that stands to law as fool’s gold stands to gold.