Activists like slogans, and some slogans are accurate, but philosophical positions are often too nuanced to be captured in a bumper-sticker-length slogan.   So in several recent online discussions in which I’ve attempted to explain why Israel is justified in responding to attacks by Hamas, I’ve encountered people saying that because they’re libertarian, they are anti-war, and therefore I must be a bad libertarian.  That’s wrong, and one reason it goes wrong has to do philosophy’s resistance to bumper-sticker sloganeering.

To begin with, saying “war is unjust” is some kind of category error, along the lines of saying “physical force is unjust.”  Wait, the bumper-sticker objects, I thought libertarians were opposed to physical force.  This move elides the moral significance of the distinction between the use of force in aggression and the use of force in defense.  If Bob starts hitting Bill and Bill hits Bob back, they’re both using physical force.  But that doesn’t make them morally equivalent, and this shows why it’s a conceptual mistake to say that “hitting is unjust”: if Bob’s hitting is unjust (aggression), then Bill’s hitting is just (defense).   “Hitting” alone isn’t just or unjust, until we know who is committing aggression, the initiation of force, to violate someone’s rights, and who is using force defensively, to protect their rights.  Libertarianism isn’t about hitting, it’s about rights.  Similarly, saying “war is unjust” misses the important distinction between aggression and defense.  If Sylvania invades Freedonia, say because the former wants to annex the latter to obtain raw materials, Sylvania’s action is unjust.  But that implies that Freedonia’s use of arms to repel the unjust invasion is just.  So the question “is this war just?” is poorly formed.  It’s unjust for the one to have attacked, and (therefore!) just for the other to respond.

Of course, there are complicating variables, so it’s sometimes harder than it first appears to assess justice.  (See my “War and Liberty,” Reason Papers 26, Spring 2006; can’t hyperlink for some reason but it is online.)  But the point I’m making here is that the slogan doesn’t even come close to capturing the variables.   At this point in the argument, someone objects that because there may be harm to innocents, the analogy from Bob and Bill to Sylvania and Freedonia doesn’t work.  But it’s not that the analogy doesn’t work, it’s that there are other factors to be added to the evaluation.  The analogy works in skeletal form – an unjust aggression may be justly opposed – but it’s true that military action carries increased risk of harm to innocents.  This isn’t a particularly novel observation, though, nor is it something that only a libertarian would think of.  It’s been a principle of ethical theory about warfare for centuries.  So it’s true that assessing the morality of a conflict has to involve the degree to which both parties take care to minimize harm to noncombatants.  But here too, the moral assessment is not unitary: if Sylvania is indiscriminate in attacking but Freedonia avoids targeting civilians, we’d say “Sylvania is fighting unjustly” and also “Freedonia is fighting justly.”

Another objection that is largely a red herring is to note that it’s states that go to war, and the fighting is thus subsidized by involuntarily-collected taxes.  I certainly agree that states shouldn’t do this.   But not everything that a state does is illegitimate per se.  There are state activities that would be morally legitimate if not done by the state, so it’s only that the state is doing them that makes them bad.  If it’s already bad, then it’s bad for the state to do it (for example, private citizens owning slaves is morally wrong, so for the state to enslave people is also wrong).  But if it’s morally permissible to do a thing, then the wrongness of the state doing it comes from libertarian objections about the nature of state activity.  For example, the occupation of firefighter is morally legitimate, so to complain about state-run fire departments is not to object to firefighting per se, but to the scope of state power.  (See also: teaching.)  So the fact that states engage in macro-level self defense is not wrong because defending yourself is wrong, but because of some theory about the proper scope of state power.  But while we’re arguing about the proper theory of the scope of state power, firefighters are doing a good thing, not a bad thing, when they go put out fires.  And Freedonia’s army is doing a good thing, not a bad thing, when it  repels Sylvania’s invasion.

Sylvania, of course, is doing something wrong: invading Freedonia.  This aggression would be wrong even if it were some non-state entity – it is just like Bob’s attack on Bill.  Bob is wrong to attack Bill.  Sylvania is wrong to invade Freedonia.  Bill is right to fight back; Freedonia is right to fight back.

Now to the extent that the “I’m anti-war” sloganeering is useful, it’s going to be useful in places like Sylvania: making the argument that aggression is unjust, that launching a war is wasteful of resources, that attacks like this are callous about human life.  Libertarians in Sylvania ought to make it clear to their leaders that they oppose the war.  But Freedonians, even libertarian Freedonians, are not bound to say “we should stop fighting”; they have the right to defend themselves.  Remember, just because Bill is a peace-loving person doesn’t mean Bob won’t attack him.  Similarly, a society that eschews aggression may nevertheless find itself attacked.  Some of the people I’ve argued with about this will point out the number of times the US has engaged in warfare that couldn’t plausibly be described as self-defense, as if this were some sort of “gotcha” moment that proves I’m bad at libertarianing.  But this is to confuse history and philosophy.  I’m perfectly aware that the US has acted badly in the past.  But that doesn’t imply that it’s always in the wrong, and more to the point, it doesn’t disprove the normative argument about the legitimacy of self-defense.   So we often end up with something like:
Me: People have a right to defend themselves when attacked.
Other person: Tommy is an aggressive bully.  Carl often starts fights.
Me: ???

Maybe this would fit on a bumper sticker: We should oppose starting wars, but we are not obligated to eschew self-defense.

John Stuart Mill once gave expression to what he felt was a commonplace, namely that:

a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.

For limited creatures like us, wisdom in politics requires that we face opposition from those who see things differently. Because we are narrow-minded and partial beings, approximating truth in politics must take the form of “the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” 

James Madison was more skeptical of this kind of combat, at least in democratic contexts. He feared that competition between factions (groups organized around sectarian ideologies) might result in one becoming dominant. If it did, a purely democratic government would tyrannically enforce the interests of the dominant faction, at the expense of the common good. The remedy, Madison thought, was to adopt a republican constitution capable of cooling factional disagreement. Only a system of checks and balances, including a formal separation of powers, could stop a dominant faction from becoming tyrannical.

And yet Madison was clear that this remedy was unlikely to be successful absent a diverse civil society composed of competing factions vying for representation in government. Inspired by Mill, we might say something somewhat stronger: the powers of government, once separated, ought not to be distinct merely in the sense that they lie in different hands, but also in the sense that those in whose hands they lie have conflicting visions—some conservative, some progressive, say. Without this tension, we might worry that political change will happen more quickly and with less foresight and minority input than is desirable.

It’s true, of course, that executive, legislative, and judicial allegiance to the constitution can itself provide some source of tension independent of any substantive policy disagreements. (We saw, for example, that a court composed of largely Republican appointees was nevertheless able to restrain some of former President Trump’s more extreme excesses.)

But when many of our political disagreements are precisely over the interpretation of that founding document and the degree to which it constrains legislative, executive, and judicial bodies, it’s not hard to see that a legislature which shares the political goals of an executive which shares in turn the political goals of a judiciary might be less likely to “check” one another than they might be in the presence of more disagreement. 

This brings me to the respect in which the politics of the moment make me nervous. 

Along with a Democratic executive, we have a House of Representatives with a sizable Democratic majority and a democratically controlled Senate. The latter has an increasing capacity  to pass legislation with no Republican support.

Currently, the largely Republican appointed judiciary is the only source of robust “opposition” in the sense sketched above. In normal circumstances, it might be enough. And yet, there are increasingly loud calls for congress to “pack the court” as a means of sanctioning recent republican opportunism. If these calls are heeded,  the court would lurch leftward as well. 

Naturally, even in the event of a packed court, recourse would remain to the less formal civil society checks on majority excess the founders thought so important. But many of the most prestigious media outlets exhibit a bias friendly to the Democratic Party. So too with social media platform executives. And the leftward tilt of most colleges and universities indicates that they are only inadequately positioned to provide an appropriate counterweight. Commercial interests, long opponents of progressive economic policies, are coming around on many of them.  To make matters worse, the broader population, still reeling from the pandemic, is more welcoming of government action than usual, creating a kind of popular authorization for some fairly radical changes to economic policy. 

It isn’t, then, merely that we have a government increasingly in the control of persons with a predominantly progressive vision. We have a civil society, the major aspects of which also share that vision. 

Moreover, things aren’t likely to improve in this dimension, at least not in the medium term. The republican party platform (to the extent that there is one) is massively unpopular among young voters. Its flirtation with xenophobia will make it unpopular with immigrant voters. It has long lost favor with racial minorities and women. Thus unless the Democratic Party fractures along the fault lines it is clearly showing (or the GOP recovers some sense of itself), I imagine that we’ll see a sustained period of single-party dominance in each branch of government. Absent a cultural shift that seems as unlikely as it might be undesirable, our civil society will continue to lean heavily in a progressive direction.

Some might hasten to say that the GOP itself bears the primary responsibility for all of this. And they’d be (at least partially) right. The party has ceased being a principled proponent of limited government. It has become increasingly willing to wield its power to arbitrarily punish commercial actors that it dislikes (even when this is anathema to its stated commitments). We witnessed this in Trump’s lashing out at big tech firms and abuse of executive orders, and we’re seeing it now, as major GOP actors opportunistically threaten the MLB with sanctions for its recent opposition to Republican legislation.

But though the Republican Party may bear primary responsibility for the state of affairs that has me worried, it would be shortsighted to celebrate its (perhaps deserved) decline—at least so far as one is moved by the Millian reasons rehearsed above.

Montesquieu famously wrote that “every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.” The above reflections suggest that democrats have a substantial mandate for exercising their own newly won authority. And yet one does not have to be as pessimistic as Montesquieu was to worry that the accountability mechanisms of the current climate leave something to be desired. 

Those yearning for an end to gridlock may, in short order, have their wish. For those of us who appreciated the virtues of slowed political action, little is left but to hope that we are every bit as paranoid as we sometimes seem to our critics. The well-being of the nation depends on it.

In a recently published paper, I defend what I call U.S. free speech exceptionalism (FSE) against recent objections from philosophers. FSE refers to the constellation of legal norms and precedents that makes it difficult in the United States to prohibit various kinds of undesirable speech. In the U.S., for instance, hate speech is protected, as is much obscenity and defamatory speech that is liable to legal limitation abroad.

Critics of FSE often worry that it is irrational. After all, the reason to constitutionally protect free speech is that doing so realizes several crucial positive goods. These are varied, but a typical list will include (among other things): discovery of the truth, autonomy, diversity, and enabling better democratic deliberation. But—and here’s the problem for FSE—it is easy to imagine that there are circumstances in which we better achieve those goods by limiting, rather than protecting, speech.

Far from promoting truth and democratic deliberation, FSE tolerates misinformation (including false defamatory or libelous statements uttered in the absence of actual malice). Far from promoting diversity, FSE tolerates hate speech, which issues in patterns of exclusion and dignitary harm. Far from promoting autonomy, FSE tolerates demeaning pornography which silences women where it can most matter to hear them speak.

One response on the part of FSE is to deny all of this. Another is to say, sure, there’s bad speech. But the best response to bad speech is more, better speech. I’ve never found these replies satisfying. The best response, in my view, is to own up to these facts, admitting that free speech does not always advance the values that justify it, admit that more speech will not always be forthcoming, and to say that, nevertheless, FSE deserves our allegiance. In virtue of what?

You can read the paper for the full answer, but the short version is that we should accept FSE because departing from it creates new powers on the part of governmental bodies to act in tyrannical ways. Knowing what we do about human psychology and political power, we have good reason to think that these new powers will be wielded against unpopular minorities. Even if we are convinced that the people that wield the powers in the near term will use them for good, perhaps progressive, ends, we should not be very confident that future leaders will. More than that, we should expect that those silenced by the good people in charge now will be eager to vie for power themselves and silence those who silenced them. By hypothesis, those silenced will not deserve that kind of treatment.

It’s easy to respond to this argument with skepticism. Indeed, I’ve received plenty of sideways glances when I’ve told people why I’m a fan of U.S. free speech jurisprudence.

Well, the politics of the moment has seen an uptick in proposals for legislation that, I think, makes the argument credible. Such legislation aims to suppress the proliferation of radical ideologies. A bill currently under debate in New Hampshire is a good example. It would make it unlawful for a state agency (or contractor thereof) to advocate for or train persons to believe certain tenets of critical race theory, among other things. To take a concrete example, the law would arguably bar a public university from paying a speaker who thinks that the history of the United States is inherently racist. There are several proposed laws like this. Jeffrey Sachs calls them the new anti-woke laws.

At least some of these laws seem to me unconstitutional, violating first amendment rights of educators, contractors, and state employees. For that reason, I do not expect them to be passed (at least not in their current forms). If they are passed, I expect them to be struck down by the courts. But these expectations are expectations formed in a context in which the judicial commitment to FSE remains strong. Weaken that commitment, and I’m less sure.

Liberals worried about these kinds of laws should renew their faith in strong protections for free speech and norms tolerating heterodoxy. Conservatives inclined to support these laws (due to worries that state agencies sometimes use their power to promote fringe ideologies) should instead continue embrace the constitutional free speech norms that would in some cases lead to their being struck down. For eroding those norms will also make space for progressives to gain power and legislate in similar ways regarding “reactionary” ideology.

Mill was right when he observed that liberal toleration for freedom of speech was rarely principled. He saw this clearly in the reformation, when early Protestants held toleration up as an ideal only when they perceived their powerlessness to impose their ideology on others with impunity. Generally, the human disposition to “impose [one’s] own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others”, Mill writes, is “hardly ever kept under restraint by anything other than but want of power” (OL: 13).

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, we could embrace the imperfect modus vivendi that is FSE and convert opportunistic support for toleration into principled support. This, rather than attempting to sustain political power longer than our enemies (Sachs’ proposal), seems like the best way forward for our imperfect political union. Or so it does to me.

* Note: Thanks to Andrew J. Cohen for feedback on an earlier version of this post.

Although the ideal is to get everyone vaccinated, there currently are not enough doses, so while they’re making more, we get to argue about who should receive the doses that already exist.  Different suggestions imply something about underlying ethical principles and intuitions.  It seems mostly uncontroversial that health care workers ought to be vaccinated first.  If you can remember back to when we used to go places on airplanes, recall the safety announcements: please make sure your oxygen mask is secure before helping others.  The logic here is impeccable, if slightly counter-intuitive.   Even if you feel strongly that you need to tend to the needs of others above your own, if you pass out from oxygen deprivation, you can’t help anyone, plus you’re dead too, so that’s the wrong answer.  Securing your own oxygen first is thus not merely self-interested, it’s also the necessary condition for your helping others.  This is allegorical for lots of things, but particularly on-point here: if we’re worried about a global pandemic, it’ll just make things even worse if the health care workers get sick.  If they get sick, who will take care of me?  So it makes good sense for them to vaccinated first.  And of course we wouldn’t have this problem if there were more doses available. So people who work in labs that study and create the virus seem like they ought to receive priority as well.

After that, it’s less obvious.   Some considerations pro and con for various candidates:
The Elderly
Pro: they’re more at risk of serious complications and death
Con: they’re also more at risk of dying of other things
The Young
Pro: they’re more likely to violate social distancing protocols and participate in spreader activity. 
Con: they’re less vulnerable to serious complications and death.
Note that the analysis of old-vs-young folds in on itself.  It’s not the 80-somethings who are going to bars, nail salons, gyms, frat parties, the mall.  So if the main concern is spreader activity, that’s an argument for vaccinating younger people, but if the main concern is harmful consequences of actually getting the virus, that looks more like an argument for vaccinating the elderly.

Front-Line Workers – no one has a precise definition for this, but it seems to be a way to categorize people like the grocery store workers and bus drivers.  The argument here is that we are all dependent of the continued functioning of things like supermarkets and transportation systems, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to make sure they’re healthy.  But how about:
Teachers – since the schools are closed, not only are students suffering from suboptimal education, but parents of school-age kids have had their work disrupted, and in many cases were obliged to stop working entirely.  And indeed, many heath care workers and people in the “front-line” category are parents of school-age children, so it’s in everyone’s best interests to reopen the schools as soon as possible.
The counter-argument to both of those is that there’s no precise and uncontroversial way to prioritize how important one job is relative to another. 

What about political leaders?  If politicians get sick, how will we ever manage as a nation? Maybe the sarcasm of that remark doesn’t translate into writing, but seriously, one argument in favor of vaccinating political leaders is that it might mitigate the sort of conspiracy-theory resistance to vaccination.  While I don’t think politicians deserve greater protection from the virus, there’s a consequentialist argument for them being vaccinated publicly, if it helps disabuse people of irrational fears.

Another dilemma arises from the suggestion that even though one is supposed to get two doses, maybe we could trade off instantly doubling the supply for mitigated effectiveness.  That’s a different sort of approach to thinking about who gets it.  That seems like a tradeoff that, in principle, we could evaluate empirically, but in reality will take more time than we have.  So proponents of either are gambling, to some extent.  If two people have headaches, and there is only one 500-mg Tylenol in the house, one way to go would be to have one person take it, reducing the total number of headaches by half, but the other way to go would to break it in half and give each person 250 mg.  That seems “more fair” in one sense, but would this result in two people with slightly-improved headaches, or two people who still have headaches?  If it’s the latter, that means the medicine has been wasted.  Again, before moral reasoning can be applied, we’d need some empirics.

So, it looks like the right order of priority is:
Health care workers
Lab scientists and workers who study and create the vaccine
Philosophers (because the rest of the dilemmas are still not obvious)

There’s tons of online debate about whether lockdowns are helpful to fight the pandemic.  I have no idea whether they’d be helpful or not, but I suspect that they’re impossible anyway.  In his essay “I, Pencil,” Leonard Read famously highlights the vast interconnectedness of millions of people that lies behind seemingly-mundane phenomena like 20-cent pencils at Staples.  Echoing more academic treatment of similar themes in Hayek and Simmel and others, Read reminds us in laymen’s terms just how complex these networks are: not only do you need someone cutting down cedar trees, you need someone making saws and work boots and rope and chains; then you need trucks to transport the lumber to a mill, which means truck drivers, and people who manufacture trucks, and fuel for the trucks, which means people who drill for oil, and refine the oil, and all these people need coffee, which means coffee growers, exporters, importers, roasters, and so on.  I have been reminded of this fundamental lesson several times during the pandemic as pundits would occasionally say things like “if we could just shut everything down for a few weeks, we could stop the spread.”  But the problem is not that people are too selfish or stupid to stay home (though some are, to be sure), it’s that the very idea of “shut everything down” is a misnomer at best; at worst a deliberate red herring.

The Read-ian reason why we can’t actually “shut everything down” is that there are so many exceptions, each of which entails a vast web of corollaries.  Thinking about it just for a moment, look how deep it gets.  Don’t worry about whether you think any of these is essential; what matters for the exercise is that most people would.

A. Soldiers

B. Cops

C. Firefighters

D.  EMTs/Ambulance drivers

E.  All of these need support staff, road maintenance, mechanical and fuel supply workers, etc.

F.  All people who work in hospitals, including but not only health care workers

G. E again, for the people in F

H. Lawyers and judges and corrections officers

I. E again, for the people in H

J. child care workers for the people in A-I

K. Grocery store workers

L. The people who make/grow the food

M. The people who transport the food from L to K

N. E and J for people in K-M

O. That means we’ll need public transportation operators, and E and J for them also

P. Journalists, broadly construed to include people who make newspapers, tv, radio

Q. Power supply workers

R. So, even more E and J

And so on.  This exposes the fundamental fallacy in saying “shut it all down.”  We couldn’t if we tried.  That’s not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t practice social distancing until the pandemic is over.  But an actual shutdown, like a pencil, is something no one actually knows how to make.

110 Harms of Crony Capitalism

Guest Post by Neera Badhwar, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma and is affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy and Economics at George Mason University.

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David Forsyth interviews me about crony capitalism. While cronyism is both unjust and harmful, I argue that not all businesses that engage in cronyism are equally at fault. And some may not be at fault at all.

But you may prefer to read my discussion of crony capitalism in https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/cronyism-toxic-friendship-between-business-government, where I also reject the claim made by some libertarians that seeking tax credits is not cronyism because “the state never had a right to impose taxes on us in the first place.” This argument proves too much. If it’s ok to seek tax credits, it’s also ok to seek subsidies and low‐​interest or guaranteed loans, because they also draw on the taxes that the state “never had a right to impose on us”.