Libertarianism and Moral Dilemmas

Miscellaneous General
1

Jeffrey “Shock Jock” Sachs in that eminent scholarly journal, the Huffington Post:

My first reponse to this was to question the assumptions of the dilemma. For example, “the government” is nothing more than a group of individuals. If they have the resources to carry out the cumbersome process of taxation, they probably also have the ability to toss some bread to the starving man and help him out themselves. Why should the poor only be made richer on the condition that the rich are made poorer in the process? That’s not compassion, that’s spitefulness, greed, and envy.

But then I figured I was dodging the point. If we assume for whatever reason that the only way the poor person can be helped (a pretty sociopathic assumption, I think) is through coercive distribution schemes, then libertarianism would have the poor person starve.

But how useful are these sorts of dilemmas, and do they really prove anything? Couldn’t you easily turn the tables? For example, suppose that the money that was taxed from the rich person to give to his starving neighbour would otherwise have been spent on desperately-needed hospitals for refugees in a war-torn country. As a result of the wealth transfer, then, one person gets a square meal for a day but dozens of others far more destitute die from disease and malnutrition.

Or, perhaps more realistically, assume that had you not taxed the rich person, he would have invested in a company or a franchise that would have increased production and lowered food prices the very next day, helping not only the starving man but hundreds of others as a result.

Or suppose that we put all the poor under the care of the federal government, which totally crowds out all private provision of mutual aid or charity. Then, one day, the government goes bankrupt and all welfare and food stamps recipients starve and die. Boom, social democracy is evil, QED.

I’m curious as to what other people think about scenarios like this. Are they pointless, contrived fantasies or do they serve some purpose? For example, if you’re a libertarian only because you think libertarianism would promote human flourishing or welfare best of all alternative systems, and you were suddenly faced with a situation where (suppose) that wasn’t the case, wouldn’t you have to abandon libertarianism?

Libertarians are heartless
2

How to convince Jeff that 99% of all societies that went extinct agreed with his answer and that there is an important lesson to be learned there?

3

Under his logic the UN should be allowed to take our money to feed everyone in the world that is in hunger. But I’m almost certain he doesn’t support that sort of action.

4

If the government only helped poor people, if all they did was save people from misery and buy people life saving healthcare then I think that argument for a charitable government would be a strong one. But in reality it spends trillions of dollars and in the uk case hundreds of billions of pounds and in spite of all this charity supplied by the population, via taxation, there are still millions of people with out homes and healthcare etc. The real moral issue is that taking money away from someone else is wrong, even if a tiny portion of that goes to helping someone less fortunate than yourself. There are also strong arguments that the apparent charity that is gained from government creates its own problems and distorts incentives enough that it can cause more severe long term damage to society. So instead of alleviating social problems it exasperates them over a long period of time. Subsidize housing, everyone has a house look good at the start but then it all comes crashing down and everyone loses their houses and their deposits. The UK they gave everyone a house and now look millions of hard working young adults see house ownership as an impossibility. It also becomes an political infomercial as i like to call it, where politicians buy votes based on promises of free things. The politician could care less about helping poor people but if it can get him elected he will promise anything. Then when he gets in to power he gets a chunk of money and all he and his team have to do is spend it. Not realy a charity focused organization in my opinion and i didn’t even mention military spending.

5

tunk

I’m curious as to what other people think about scenarios like this. Are they pointless, contrived fantasies or do they serve some purpose?

I literally just addressed this on a different thread (The Minimum Wage and the Value of Labor.) I’ll post the relevant portion:

I would say that morality must be founded upon a faithful determination of what is innocence and what is guilt: This involves an assessment of competence, intent, alternatives, and action, as well as a principle that I call relative proximity. The actions of children and animals are not appropriate for the fullest judgments of morality; because their alternatives are limited and not well-grasped by a fully-developed competence. To condemn them by blindly judging their reasoning as fully-competent, and judging their actions as fully-intentional, even without a full awareness of their limited alternatives, is to commit an immoral act oneself. Their innocent dependence upon others for their survival is a benchmark for the justice of a society: How well does your ideal society provide for the protection of the truly innocent–how moral is it?

But the final element in judging morality is relative proximity. If a child is drowning in lake shallows, it is more immoral for the man at the shore to do nothing than a man at the crest of a nearby hill. One child is close to you; some other child in harm’s way may be closer to someone else–someone who then has a stronger moral responsibility to that child, around the crest of the hill, than you do. Proximity also affords you a better opportunity than the person around the hill to judge for yourself the character and the predicament of the person in jeopardy in front of you, and to decide if this is someone worthy of help–someone in danger of death, through no choice of her own, in spite of respecting others’ lives.

In the case of a child, who cannot competently weigh all the alternatives and is relatively-dependent upon others all the time, it would not be fair to make a final moral judgment, even if it were technically her fault for her predicament. Also, relative proximity contains a pun: For the relatives of these children are in more intimate proximity to the child, and so have a stronger moral obligation than a stranger “on the crest of a nearby hill.” One is justified in assuming that such children are provided for by those in closer proximity, unless the opposite is apparent–and, morally, they ought to be provided for by their closest relatives; so some element of hands-off leveraging and social pressure may be appropriate, though not ultimately at the cost of an innocent life. I want to end welfare so as to apply such social pressure upon irresponsible parents, so as to discourage their having children in poverty, at others’ expense. Not only does this irresponsibility deny children a moral role model, but it endangers the financial survival of the state itself.

And so I favor a minimum wage, so as to ensure that those low-skill workers who do work will be rewarded with the means for the very survival that makes the state preferable to statelessness. And as a last resort, if this “social pressure” failed to force irresponsible parents to provide for their children, and somehow private charity were insufficient, then I would support state financial intervention to protect the lives of the children–and, for that matter, any truly helpless person–all truly innocent people–but not for irresponsible parents, or irresponsible people generally.

Adults generally ought to face the consequences for their actions. And one need not jeopardize their lives to secure the survival of another. If, on the other hand, a person is trapped under a fallen tree, and you can save him at no risk to yourself, then things change: Unless you had some way of knowing that this person under a tree were one who does not respect others’ right to live, then it would be immoral not to help. The lack of knowledge about the person who is not in mortal jeopardy is a legitimate “out” with respect to helping adults; as it is often, but not always, safe to assume that they are in the position they are by dint of their own bad choices. Not so, with kids, who are not fully aware of their alternatives–but who are increasingly less “innocent” as they approach adult maturity.

And, more generally, I find that the right to life supersedes all other rights. And whoever stands in the way of anyone else’s survival, whether on principle or not, voids their own right to life: Life would necessarily devolve into a survival of the fittest, essentially. By extension, all “lesser” rights, those other than the right to life itself, cannot be provided at the expense of any life-respecting human’s right to life. Thus we have the irony of mass killing and horrific wars for control of the natural resources that sustain life; thus we have states and borders that ensure this right to life to the greatest number. And thus all the protests of the rights “absolutists,” that their property rights and freedoms aren’t fully respected, fall mostly on deaf ears–on living deaf ears.

Since a state currently best ensures the survival of life-respecting people in this real world where not all people are so, it is the most moral possible system–for now. And since direct democracy is the state system that opimizes individual choice, it is the most morally-healthy system. The smallest political subdivision in America, short of the individual voter himself, is the voting precinct, wherein the individual resides and has the right and the power to vote for issues that most closely address his local needs and most faithfully reflect his individual choices. Thus it affords the fullest set of consequences for his choices; and the greatest potential for his maturity into a fully-moral adult. This is how I came to develop my localized system of direct democracy.

6

Problems with the thought-experiment:

  1. The thought-experiment’s incorrect assumptions about our knowledge fundamentally change the parameters of right and wrong. What if the “rich man” is someone who only appears to have a lot of wealth but who is, in fact, simply managing that wealth on the behalf of others. This is the case, to an extent, with fund managers, CEOs, (used to be true of bankers), and so on. The thought-experiment assumes that we can just magically “know” such variables as a person’s net worth.

  2. The thought-experiment neglects the costs and moral problems with resolving the knowledge problems raised in point 1. For example, let’s say we begin surveilling people so we can determine what money is “actually” theirs and what actually belongs to someone else. This is, in fact, what the current system attempts to do. This is why you have to fill out a small ream of forms once a year and file them with the IRS who then inspects them looking for discrepancies. This is why financial transactions are surveilled and data-mined. But the morality of these activities is far from obvious. The claim that government nosiness in financial activity is not linked to other oppressive tendencies of the government is not credible. And then there are the costs. Even if you assumed that it’s moral, is it cost-feasible? If the current system is any indication, I think a good argument can be made that the costs themselves are prohibitive.

  3. The thought-experiment also implicitly assumes some kind of privileged moral perspective or objectively unbiased “weigher” of interests. This isn’t quite interpersonal subjective comparison because the claim is that “society” needs to take from “rich people” (in general) to give to “poor people” (in general). If you follow the threads with DarylLoydDavis, you will notice a lot of this same idealized moral conception in his arguments. The root problem is that the though-experiment incorrectly treats groups as telic actors - it is not immoral for “rich people” to not give to “poor people”, even if they are starving, even though it is immoral for a rich person not to help starving people when he can.

Where this matters is that we treat laws that target individuals as tyrannical (dictatorial) but laws that target groups - even small groups - as morally acceptable. So, we use laws to compel groups of individuals to do things (such as compelling rich people to give money to poor people) that we would never cognize using the force of law to compel an individual to do (compelling Bill Gates alone to give money to poor people). In this manner, we neglect the moral problem of forcing an individual rich man to give his money to poor people.

  1. It could be argued in response to 3 that a rich man who has never given any of his money to poor people is immoral. Refer to points 1 & 2 to begin with (surveilling an individual’s long-term behavior/character) but the problem really goes deeper than this. The problem here is that the rich man has a right to behave immorally. We acknowledge this right when he gambles or rents hookers or spends absurd sums to get a blimp and fireworks for his pool parties. So, the real question here is a civic question, not a moral question… in which ways is the rich man allowed to act immorally? Clearly, we deny him the right to murder (which is immoral). So there must be another dividing line, which leads to the next point:

  2. The thought-experiment neglects the distinction between asocial action and social action. In the former case, critical morality does not enter the picture - morality is nothing more than the individual’s chosen ends. Imagine that Robinson Crusoe alone on his island constructs a massive and thriving metropolis of robots that provide for his every need. He is fabulously wealthy but surely he does not owe anything to anybody else. He has not “taken from society” and owes nothing to anyone. So, the act of creating wealth, considered in its asocial aspect, has no critical moral dimension. It simply is. Morality only enters the picture where there is the possibility of creating harm. Harm, like value, is subjective so the only correct criteria by which to measure harm is by revealed dispreference, that is, complaint.

This is how we address point 3. Complaint is how we remove morality from the castles-in-the-air, Platonic dimension of Universal Right and Universal Wrong back onto terra firma. If nobody’s complaining, there is no harm being done and if there is no harm being done, there is nothing immoral going on. Workers being paid $0.35 an hour to do work when they could be doing something else and not complaining about their wage are not being harmed; we know this because they’re not complaining.

White, educated, liberal, bourgeois, hand-wringing, nanny-academics do not have automatic standing to register a valid proxy complaint on behalf of anyone in the world they deem to “not have a voice”. If you’re going to gin up a complaint, you need to at least do the leg-work to get specific individuals who have suffered specific harms and spell out those harms. This is what the Progressives did for all their little special-interests and they were very successful. It may even turn out that the people you champion really do have a valid complaint (kind of like the scenario depicted in Erin Brokovich, regardless of the extent to which that is a factual story).

There is more to be said regarding the criteria for liability for harm (being rich is not automatic evidence that you have hurt anyone) but I’m going to cut this off before I go on.

Clayton -

7

Ooooh, another question: what if magically one person in the world holds all the wealth and we all have to become his slaves? Doesn’t that disprove free markets? This was too easy, guys!

8

I posted in another thread that if Sachs wants to assert that some minimum standard of living is a human right (in the name of social equality), then you can’t stop at America’s borders. America’s borders and American citizenship are useful fictions. A human right is supposed to apply to all people at all times. If a starving kid in Africa has a right to the product of Sachs’ labor, then Sachs needs to fund the kids’ needs. Anything beyond a subsistence standard of living on Sachs’ part is him being a piggish greedhead and denying a human right to someone in a 3rd world country. If I were to steal Sachs’ money he has lying around in a bank account somewhere and I donated all of it to UNICEF, he should shrug his shoulders and mutter, “it’s for the best.” And of course that would never happen and he would sue my ass implying that he rightfully owns that money and that he ought to decide how to use it and not me.

Of course this would completely disintegrate the structure of our modern economy, so maybe a utilitarian wouldn’t have an issue with this logical implication. But leftists who try to sound utilitarian constantly sneak in concepts such as human rights and notions of innate moral value of human beings.

9

I think most such scenarios operate in a static universe; where one is “permanently rich”, and doesn’t need to make constant effort to stay rich.

10

lol Wheylous

11

One’s mere existence doesn’t entitle him to the property of others.

12

One’s mere existence doesn’t entitle him to the property of others.

Q.

F.

T.