News flash: Libertarian invents new reason not to help people!
Thinking about the coronavirus is bleak, so let’s do some political philosophy to cheer ourselves up.
Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan has a new post up claiming that our obligations to help strangers are much weaker than we might think they are, and may not exist at all, because most people are “morally very bad”.
Brennan begins with this question:
To what degree are our moral obligations to provide help and assistance to strangers reduced because those strangers are likely to be morally bad people?
He answers this question in 3 steps. First, he argues that you do not have any reason to keep Bob, a rapist or child molester, from starving, even if you can easily afford to help. Second, he argues that even if Bob has not actually done anything wrong, if Bob has a bad character and would do something very bad if he could get away with it, then you don’t have any reason to help Bob:
Bob is an evil person, though he has not yet done anything evil. We owe evil people less. You are free to, say, spend the money on toys for yourself rather than keep him alive through your charity. Indeed, you probably are obligated to refrain from helping keep Bob alive.
Finally, Brennan argues that most people are in fact morally very bad:
. . . Most people are disposed to be utter conformists and to obey evil authority. Nearly all our neighbors are disposed to be obedient concentration camp guards; they only reason they haven’t done that is because, thanks to moral luck, they haven’t been in such a situation. Further, most of people’s apparently altruistic behavior is in fact motivated by self-interest . . . People in general have quite bad moral character, but most of them haven’t done anything particularly bad because they haven’t had the opportunity . . .
This seems like a good reason to discount our estimates of what kinds of assistance we owe them.
The question I want to ask is whether this argument gives us a (strong) reason to oppose social insurance and progressive taxation, the main institutions that capitalist democracies use to assist those who find themselves in difficult circumstances. (If Brennan is merely claiming that our obligation to help others on an individual basis is not as strong as we tend to think, I also disagree, but this is a less interesting and less important claim.)
Brennan assumes that people have fixed, immutable moral characters, and that their characters are either good or bad. To use his terminology, people are either “saints” or “scoundrels”. Scoundrels will act terribly when circumstances permit; saints always act decently towards others. Brennan assumes that most people (“nearly all”) are scoundrels, and that the obligation of saints to help scoundrels is limited. Note that Brennan is viewing morality entirely from the point of view of saints, even though he claims that most of us are scoundrels.
We could certainly push back on Brennan’s model and his empirical claims, but let’s run with them and see what happens.
Imagine a group of scoundrels who live together in a representative democracy with a market-based economy. Even though everyone is a scoundrel, the society functions reasonably well because informal norms, social pressure, and the threat of civil and criminal sanctions all encourage people to behave decently towards one another. Most people are vaguely aware of the fact that they might commit atrocities under less favorable circumstances, when they bother to reflect on such things, but they nonetheless come to think of themselves as imperfect but morally decent people. This kind of grandiose moral self-delusion is, sadly, all too typical of scoundrels.
Suppose that the scoundrels want to implement a system of social insurance and progressive taxation. They support these welfare state institutions for three reasons. First, they value social insurance and progressive taxation for self-interested reasons. Poor and lower-income people directly benefit from income support and related programs, and most people want social insurance because unregulated markets leave people exposed to a great deal of risk. Second, people are motivated to live with others on terms that everyone can accept, and they believe that this means we cannot just say “tough luck, not our fault” to people who end up poor, sick, or otherwise disadvantaged. Instead, the government must ensure that the prosperity created by markets is widely shared. Third, history suggests that scoundrels who live in strong welfare states are less likely to support authoritarian populists when they are dissatisfied with social or economic conditions. Since people are at least vaguely aware that many people are scoundrels, this gives them a good reason to support a strong welfare state.
Now suppose one person – let’s call him Jason – objects to the welfare state on libertarian grounds. Jason goes around haranguing people about self-ownership, the Lockean proviso, solitary individuals stealing corn from each other in a state of nature, and similarly obscure philosophical matters, but no one finds his libertarian arguments compelling. So Jason changes his approach, and argues that the case for a welfare state is weakened because most people are scoundrels. In particular, Jason claims that he is a saint, and that he does not want to be taxed to provide assistance to other people, because they are all very bad moral scoundrels and as a result he, as a morally good person, does not have any obligation to help them.
No doubt this is a very powerful argument – poor Jason! (sad emoji) – but it does seem to suffer from a few minor difficulties.
For one thing, the scoundrels all agree that they have an obligation to help those who are less fortunate. And this seems to be entirely plausible. Imperfect people may struggle with morality more than saints like Jason, but if morality exists it presumably applies to scoundrels as well as saints. Saint Jason has simply not addressed this point; despite his saintliness he is viewing morality solely from the point of view of saints. No doubt this is just a saintly oversight.
Second, saints have reasons to support welfare state policies. People in a society of saints would have both self-interested and moral reasons to support social insurance and progressive taxation, just like people in a society of scoundrels. Saint Jason does not want to pay taxes because the taxes will go to help scoundrels, but the taxes from the scoundrels will be used to help Saint Jason. So it’s not at all clear that Saint Jason has a reasonable objection to the welfare state merely based on the “fact” that most people are scoundrels. Of course, Saint Jason may object to paying taxes because he is a libertarian, but remember the question we are asking is whether Brennan has discovered a compelling non-libertarian argument against the welfare state.
Finally, Saint Jason believes that he should not be forced to pay taxes because he is a saint, but how can the rest of us know that Jason is a saint? We can’t tell Jason is a saint from his behavior, because most people are scoundrels but behave decently to avoid social and legal sanctions. Suppose instead that Saint Jason tells us that he is a saint. Why would we believe this? Perhaps “Saint” Jason is just a frustrated libertarian who is pretending to be a saint, since no one will listen to his arguments about the sanctity of property rights. In fact, if we take Brennan’s claims about human nature at face value, our strong prior belief would be that Saint Jason is a scoundrel, and having Saint Jason tell us that he is a Saint would not lead us to update our priors at all.
[A fun aside: Brennan actually tells us that he is a saint! I kid you not. He cites his own saintliness as a reason we should trust him to tell us how saints would interpret the situations he describes: “(As a saint myself, I can tell you that’s what the saint would say.)” Is this a joke gone badly awry? I can’t tell.]
We could have even more fun looking at other implications of Brennan’s argument and the “evidence” he presents about human nature. But why bother?
It’s this simple: Saints help people regardless of their station or character, they minister in hospitals, in prisons, in poverty stricken areas.
Libertarians are the other kind.
Let’s just cut through all the ‘intrinsically morally bad’ distraction. Every person is intrinsically dead, unless they breathe, eat and drink. Why should Brennan or anyone else care if anyone has a curable disease or treatable injury, is starving or has no access to clean water? They were just going to die anyway, eventually.
Does that sound absurdly silly? It should. But it really isn’t any different from Brennan’s bafflegab.
Sounds like the talk from Hannity and his ilk…open up the economy full blast because these people were gonna die anyway. He just leaves out the eventually part. Good read Eric.
Lots of reading comprehension fail in the post above.
The piece is about personal obligations of charity, not about social insurance or government welfare payments. So you argument is irrelevant.
Nowhere do I say that people have fixed or immutable character. I use some examples of known character to elicit intuitions, and then I point out that our evidence shows that most people are very bad, morally speaking.
The rest of the post is irrelevant to what I actually wrote. So full of smug self-satisfaction and yet it fails to show even basic reading comprehension. Alas.
Just another proof that libertarians are simply total ahs.
A visit to Arthur Kling’s blog and Marginal Revolution (Cowen) reveals thousands more of those proofs, though they are not recommended for your mental health.
“then I point out that our evidence shows that most people are very bad, morally speaking.”
LOL! You have no “evidence,” just solipsism masquerading as ethical theory. There is no objective test that proves a person is not, in extremis, capable of rationalizing atrocity. Ergo, every person is very bad, morally speaking, including you.
You obviously lack rudimentary self-awareness. How you can write such objective tripe without cringing is basically incomprehensible.
ouch!
Joel
+3
The pea brain had a thought when reading Jason’s response above: He just realized his argument could be turned against his people.
Do we have any responsibility towards those 60 some millions who voted for tDump?
Jason,
First, I stated that it is unclear if your argument is intended to apply to the welfare state, or if it is just intended to apply to our obligation to help others on an individual basis. Your post was far from clear about this. Your final two paragraphs could easily be read to apply to institutions. I also note that in your reply you do not state that your reasoning is inapplicable to the welfare state, you just claim that your post did not address this. Do you believe your reasoning is inapplicable to the welfare state? I am genuinely curious. If so, that is a point of agreement.
As I noted in my post, there are serious difficulties with your argument even if it is only intended to apply to individual obligations. Arguably a society of morally imperfect people would still have obligations to one another. Those of us who believe in mutual obligations do not believe we live in a society of saints. The evidence you cite to justify your claim that people are morally very bad is not clearly relevant to your argument. What we learn from the obedience to authority experiments about morality and human nature is far from self-evident. We could learn to be a bit less morally arrogant, we could try to cultivate the attitude that “there but for the grace of God go I”. It is far from clear that politics makes people behave execrably (yes, I’ve read Against Democracy), but even if political behavior is terrible, that doesn’t necessarily justify treating people poorly in other areas of life – for actions they have not even taken but we believe they might have taken if they were put in worse circumstances! Putting this aside, don’t we have obligations to help people who have done something wrong and want a second chance? (The fact that you ignore this possibility is one reason I say you assume people have fixed characters.) Isn’t forgiving people a virtue we should encourage in each other? It seems to me you’re doing exactly the opposite – you’re looking for reasons to treat people in a punitive way. That’s a choice you should reconsider.
I am proud of the Angry Bears who seem unanimous in this.
Jason would have been more honest if instead of Bob he had named his hypothetical bad person Jason.
He does not seem to understand that by practicing social decency if not actual christian charity we nurture the growth of both social decency and christian charity so that we live in a rather better world than the jungle he hangs out in.
But “philosopher”? Oh, “Libertarian.” People who don’t have a large enough brain even to practice “enlightened” selfishness. People who have argued that since do-gooders get pleasure out of doing good, that means they are just as selfish as do-badders. Remembering that there are times when doing nothing is doing bad.
As Mark 12:31 puts it: ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself, unless he is very bad, morally speaking.”
oh. i stepped on my own line: i should have pointed out that “proving” do gooders are just as selfish as “do badders” because they get pleasure out of doing good. is not just an affront to decency, it is an affront to language.
we need a word to distinguish /good/ (as an idea) from /bad/. or /selfish/ from /not-selfish/. the fact that people who do good get pleasure from it is irrelevant to the distinction. it is in fact proof of the miracle of doing good.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but all the biological evidence I’m acquainted with supports the view that humans are a tribal species, not a “good” or a “bad” species.
What this means, operationally (or “ethically,” if that’s your thing) is that humans are “good” to their tribe and not so much to those who are not part of their tribe. Of course, it is the other tribe members who get to determine whether actions against the outgroup are “bad” or not. For example, was murdering Osama bin Ladin “bad?” Or “good?”
Coming up with a logically coherent ethic that parses these difficult challenges is hard. Making that ethic recognizable across tribes is much harder. The solipsistic “ethics” of the Jason Brennans are utterly useless.
Not just tribal, but “co-operative.” Humans derive great (Darwinian) benefits from co-operating with each other. Libertarians and other rabid capitalists would have you believe that “competition” is the holy law of evolution, dog eat dog. (Dog’s nobler ancestors are great co-operators.)
Somehow the idea that humans could co-operate in formal arrangements for mutual benefit is completely lost on them… except, of course, when they co-operate with their fellow predators to prevent their prey from co-operating against them.
I’m not sure “logically coherent” is possible… except as a matter of self deception to reinforce behavior otherwise a good idea… or a bad one in the quest for power.
Certainly. I don’t think we’re saying different things.
Of course, the ingroup deems cooperation to destroy the outgroup as “good” (in the Brennan lexicon), while those in the outgroup would classify it as “bad” (again, in the Brennan ad hoc taxonomy).
Joel
I can’t tell if that was addressed to me. While I don’t disagree with you (quite the contrary) I think I am saying something else.
It seems to me that we develop in our understanding of moral reality just as we develop over time in our understanding of “scientific” reality.
When Jesus said “love thy neighbor as thyself” and the Pharisee (?) asked him “who is my neighbor”, Jesus told him the story of the good Samaritan. The Samaritans were definitely the outgroup relative to the Jews. Our Libertarian wants us to go in the opposite direction to where we don’t even recognize members of our own tribe as “neighbors.”
I don’t know why wr are bothering with Glibertarians any more. They can go to Mars qnd do what they like there, and leave our shared world to us.
You could summarise the argument here – Librrtarians support the right of people to be arseholes. Fair enough if that is how they identify themselves.
Reason
I never thought I would agree with anyone who calls himself Reason, but I agree wholeheartedly with your summary of Libertarians.
The reason why we bother with them is the same reason we bother with fleas in the bed.
Besides, they are not honest: they have no intention of going to Mars and leaving us alone. They need us. And of course they have no intention of letting us do what WE want to do,
Libertarians are nothing new philosophically, but rather just another mutation of the far earlier split from spiritualism that was launched by the materialists. Plato was a spiritualist, but Machiavelli was a materialist. I am not sure that either or both were atheists though. We can be reasonably sure that Nietzsche was an atheist, but by his own refutation of traditional norms of morality was in effect defined by spiritualism, albeit in its attempted negation. Bertrand Russell was a pragmatist and an atheist. His friend William James was a pragmatist and a spiritualist.
Philosophy is ultimately just the fine art of rationalization, which is a strangely irrational idea. The search for true lies is an ancient human pastime. If we can convince ourselves that whatever we are doing is justified (necessary or at least reasonable in context of circumstances) then we can be free from guilt. If we can convince ourselves that whatever we are doing is just (moral), then we are morally superior and full of ourselves.
Doing is a more honest form of communications than rationalizing under all circumstances, but doing is proved by its effects rather than by its reasons.
Ron
thank you for this.
please permit me a rationalization:
Nietzsche, who rationalized against traditional norms, found himself one day doing, rushing out into the street to save a fallen horse from being beaten by his owner. I think he suffered a flash of realization more powerful even than the one Paul suffered on the road to Damascus. He realized his life’s work was completely and utterly wrong. The realization may have driven him mad, or drove him sane. In any case he seems to have retired from rationalization.
[oh dear, here comes another one: Bertrand Russell, a great mind, advocated using the atomic bomb on Russia before the Russians could get their own bomb. Simple game theory. Later, he became a famous pacifist.]
coberly:
Thanks right back at you Dude. The Nietzsche anecdote made me laugh. I can trace some of my earliest cynicism and skepticism back to my disappointments from learning about the philosophical search for “truth” in the West. I can tolerate Immanuel Kant and William James more than most of them and Nietzsche and Machiavelli not even a little bit.
https://ritholtz.com/2012/11/ayn-rand-was-not-a-libertarian/
Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian
November 30, 2012 1:30am by
Rand Hated Libertarians … and Many Libertarians Despise Rand
Many people assume that Ayn Rand was a champion of libertarian thought.
But Rand herself pilloried libertarians, condemning libertarianism as being a greater threat to freedom and capitalism than both modern liberalism and conservativism.
For example, Rand said:
“All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies, except that they’re anarchists instead of collectivists. But of course, anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet they want to combine capitalism and anarchism. That is worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism, because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. The anarchist is the scum of the intellectual world of the left, which has given them up. So the right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the Libertarian movement.
***
I’d rather vote for Bob Hope, the Marx Brothers, or Jerry Lewis [than a candidate from the Libertarian Party]…”
*
[I think this is funny. OTOH though, my view of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (a.k.a., Ayn Rand) is complicated by my historical knowledge of her early teenage circumstances and her ongoing relationship with her mother that sheds considerable light onto the cause of her narcissistic personality disorder. Rather than admire or despise Ayn Rand, I sincerely pitied what happened to that young girl that made her grow up the way that she did.]