Sometimes what you need is right before your eyes but you don’t see it. I confirmed this popular saying just now when I was trying to come up with something interesting to write about. In this case, it wasn’t right before my eyes, for I had to do a few online searches before landing on destination. But it was within the reach of my finger: a philosophical debate between bloggers. The debate was perfect for my purposes because it was going on right now and, more importantly, because I think that most of what they say is wrong. Thus there was a lot of room for criticism. And in passing it gave me the chance to beat up on Libertarians which, I must admit, I find pleasant.
The first argument in the debate is actually the worst. It was posted by Bryan Caplan on his blog EconLog. Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and staunch libertarian. In his post he proudly embraces his hard-line libertarianism implying thereby that some libertarian icons such as Friedman or Hayek erred on the moderate side. The debate is about welfare-abolitionism and how Friedman and Hayek were wrong in negotiating this point with liberals. He presents two arguments for welfare-abolitionism, the first of which is this:
Almost no one thinks you should be legally required to financially assist your relatives - even your indigent parents who raised you. The welfare-state abolitionist can fairly ask all of these people a tough question: If your parents shouldn't have a legal right to your help when they really need it, why should complete strangers?
Unless I’m missing something, the argument has the form of a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that we should have a legal obligation to help other members of society. It proceeds by observing that if we should have such an obligation to help others then we should have the obligation to help our parents, in particular. And then the punch line: but obviously we don’t have a legal obligation to help our parents; therefore we shouldn’t have an obligation to help others. Check mate.
Now this argument is bad, silly bad. For almost no one thinks you should be legally required to help your parents in addition to the help you should give them by paying your taxes. In fact, pretty much nobody but libertarians thinks you shouldn’t be required to help your parents by paying taxes and hence if that were the assumption it would beg the question. Children are indebted to their parents at least qua tax payers, if not qua their children. And having no legal obligation to help our parents qua their children is, of course, compatible with having a legal obligation to help them qua their fellow citizens. Hence, Caplan’s reductio produces no contradiction. And, it goes without saying, a reductio without contradiction is like marriage without consummation: hopelessly fruitless.
Caplan’s second argument is not as bad as the first one, but doesn’t work either. This is how it goes:
Second, and probably even more compellingly, the existence of welfare state is one of the main rationalizations for undercutting the greatest anti-poverty campaign the world has ever known: immigration. (Friedman said it most clearly: "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state." But Krugman's in full agreement). And unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution. There's no reason for libertarians to make apologies to social democrats: Libertarian defenders of immigration are the real humanitarians in the world, and the laissez-faire era of open borders without the welfare state was America's real humanitarian era.
Here Friedman returns to his position of libertarian guru after a couple of paragraphs demised due to excessive moderation. But let’s not be too touchy, let’s set this aside. Still the argument only works under the assumption that we have a paramount obligation to help the poorest people in the world. However, I’m not totally sure where the libertarian is going to find that assumption in her repertoire of arguments. . . Unless the argument is intended to show that the liberal’s position is incoherent by showing that given that the liberal wants to help the poor he would do a better job without welfare-state. But this just gets the liberal wrong. If Caplan is referring to the liberal theorist, he is wrong about his concern for the poorest people in the world. The liberal theorist wants to analyze what a just society is, wherever it is located and whatever its dimensions. And he claims, of course, that within that society there should be redistribution of wealth. No claim is made regarding people outside that society. On the other hand, if Caplan is addressing the liberal politician then he is wrong again, only this time about her obligation to the poorest people in the world. The politician has an obligation to her country primarily. True, usually the liberal politician will express concern for world poverty, but she does (or should do) that not in her role of politician but of private individual.
The third argument I want to consider was presented in response to Caplan by Mark Thoma, professor of Economics at University of Oregon, on his blog, Economist’s View. This is what he says trying to meet Caplan’s challenge:
The source of the insecurity for workers is the system we live under, capitalism. It's better than any other system yet devised at providing for our needs, but within this system changes in preferences, changes in technology, management errors, the weather - all sorts of things out of the worker's control can cause them to become unemployed. Because it's a risk that's due to the system we live under, the cost of insuring against it should be shared by all those living within the system and benefiting from it, i.e. the cost should be shared across the entire population. The burden of paying for capitalism's dynamism and flexibility shouldn't be limited to the individual or the individual's family. So I don't see any contradiction in saying that families should not be required to provide this insurance, but "complete strangers" should.
Now if I understand the argument correctly, the reason why we have a moral obligation to help other members of societies is that they are subject to an evil as the result of participating in capitalism, viz. unemployment. Since all members of society benefit from the workers being in an unstable position, they all should compensate them.
But I don’t think this argument gets the job done. For it’s not clear to me what would stop the argument from working the other way around, i.e. why it doesn’t justify helping the entrepreneur. After all, the workers benefit from the entrepreneur’s risking his capital and hence, under the same logic, they should compensate him for that. In fact, in capitalism everybody benefits from everybody’s risks and so the obligations should cancel out. Or at least Thoma should explain how it is that the obligations vary presumably in virtue of the benefits varying.
But I think the major problem with this argument for welfare is that it doesn’t establish the wrongness of the inequalities by themselves. Actually, in a fictional society with no rotation of jobs (hence no risk of unemployment) but which is identical to our capitalist ones in its inequalities, there would be no need for welfare—according to the line of the argument. I find this result intolerable and certainly far from the liberal conception of the just society.
I still believe in Rawls’ arguments for welfare. At least I know of no other compelling justification for it. I think the one point that Rawls makes that libertarians usually miss is that society is a cooperative endeavor. Everybody benefits from everybody else’s participating in society. So the deal has to guarantee that all come out better off. If the inequalities don’t go to the advantage of the worse off they have no reason to agree to participate and hence there will be no more inequalities (but nothing else either). When this happens, money has to be transferred from the rich to the poor. This is of course a very inaccurate expression of Rawls’ ideas but it will do for the present purposes.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Bloggers' Arguments for and against Libertarianism by Matias Bulnes, NYC
Posted by Matias Bulnes at 5:00 AM
Labels: an essay, an intervention
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2 Comments:
I'm no lover of libertarianism (to say the least), but I don't think Caplan's first argument (or rather, since his argument is woefully short, the argument that can be made from its resources) is as bad as you say. I think his second argument is some kind of sick joke.
At any rate, here is a recognizable reconstruction of his argument. I take it that there is a special bond between parents and their children, and that when children reflect on that bond, they often believe that it generates certain special obligations, ones which don't exist with other people, e.g. strangers. From that one might say that children have a reason to treat their parents interests as binding upon them; and, each child recognizes that other children have the same reason. Moreover, one could argue that such a reason is stronger than any reason that could be adduced for binding strangers to one another.
Now, one could argue, not implausibly, that the state has authority to enact a coercive rule only when citizens can recognize and accept the reasons grounding that rule. That is, the coercive rule compels behavior that citizens have a reason (if they were fully rational) to act on independent of the rule. Since citizens have a reason to be bound to their parents' interests, a rule coercing such an obligation could be authorized (is possibly legitimate).
This doesn't make such a rule authorized, of course. And Caplan's premise is that no such rule is legitimate (Caplan gives no reason for this other than that 'no one believes it'). Given the above assumptions about the comparative strength of the reasons we have, since we have no legal reason to support parents, it follows that we have no legal reason to support strangers.
Of course, you deny the consequent, but an argument of some kind needs to be proposed. Importantly, that argument must be addressed, not necessarily to libertarians, but to people who are firm in their belief that family and filial piety are the most important things in life. Although Rawls' argument from cooperation, the one you refer to at the end, can be forceful, it is probably too narrow in its scope. Fellow cooperators are not strangers to me and even if one could gerrymander estrangement, what I'm really worried about are the implications of such an argument for global poverty (the global poor are not cooperators in the requisite sense of the word).
I've been thinking about your possible defense of Caplan's argument because I had some doubts as to where exactly it goes wrong. If I understood it correctly, I had no doubts that it goes wrong because it demands too much: if a law is justified only when grounded in feelings at least as strong as familial bonds than almost no law is justified. The only way I see your defense can avoid this embarrassing conclusion is to say that we should have a law enforcing familial obligation, but that strikes most people as odd.
I will not get into the reasons why there should be no such law. After all, Caplan and I agree on that one. But I will try to to get to the bottom of the issue... or at least a little under the surface-- as a blog article permits. I'm sympathetic to the view that for a law to be justified it has to be grounded in reasons that (reasonable) citizens can recognize and accept. But it seems pretty clear to me that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to be a just law. I'm sure you can think of examples yourself where citizens have reasons to do something and yet they are not, and should not, be bound by a law. As a result, nothing relevant follows from the fact that familial bonds are stronger than other bonds. In particular, it doesn't entail that one should be a law only if the other is.
But also, and perhaps more importantly, I think that we should carefully separate reasons from emotions in this context. I may be in love with a women to the point that I would feel a binding force to help and protect her even beyond what my reason dictates. I can even be aware that I'm not being reasonable but the emotional bond be so strong to ignore that. If this is possible, then having ties or feeling a binding force toward certain behaviors does not necessarily imply that one has reasons, or at least not the right reasons--i.e. reasons that can be used for justifying coercion. I tend to think that our familial bonds are mainly emotional and do not necessarily constitute reasons that can ground laws, unlike our civil bonds. This, I think, may be what the line of defense you consider misses.
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