Coercion, Capitalism, and Rights
The emptiness of a popular critique of capitalism
1. Owning Property and Owning One’s Self
A few weeks ago, I mentioned a famous 1923 essay by Robert Hale, which argues against the defenders of laissez-faire that property rights and capitalism are inherently coercive.
Applied to property in something like land or a factory, the argument has intuitive appeal. If I own a piece of land, then I have the right (backed up by state violence) to prohibit your use of it. Or to make your use of it contingent upon your acting according to my will. That certainly looks coercive, especially if there aren’t many other landowners around to whom you could look for a better deal.
However, things look very different if we’re talking not about ownership of a piece of land, but of one’s self. Notice that the logic of Hale’s argument is just the same. My ownership of my body means that I can prohibit you from using it, or make your use of it contingent upon your acting according to my will. But do we really want to say that it is coercive to require employers to pay laborers for their work? Or to require that sex be consensual?
These counterexamples suggest that something’s gone wrong with Hale’s analysis. But what, exactly?
2. Coercion, Rights, and Obligations
Here’s a hypothesis. The reason we don’t think of A’s ability to restrict B’s access to A’s body as coercive is that we feel very confident in our judgment that A has a moral right to control his own body. And withholding something that you have a right to withhold is not generally regarded as coercive.
This idea is what underlies the ordinary distinction between threats and offers. A pay-for-service doctor who tells you he’ll perform a surgery you need if you give him $10,000 is making you an offer. On the other hand, a surgeon who is obligated to perform the surgery for you (maybe because it’s covered by national insurance) and who says he will only do it if you pay him $10,000 is making a threat. What’s the difference? The first surgeon is proposing to do more than he is required to do if you give him money. The second is proposing to do less than he is required to do unless you pay him money.
So, back to self-ownership. We feel very confident in our moral judgment that people have no obligation to work for or be physically intimate with others without consent. Therefore, proposing to withhold the services of one’s body unless the other does what one wants is not usually coercive. Our intuitions about the ownership of land and factories are perhaps not quite so clear, and so Hale’s argument seems more plausible applied to these objects.
But sometimes our intuitions about such kinds of ownership are clear. And when we shift to such a case, that plausibility disappears. Suppose that you’re a farmer who’s grown a bunch of potatoes on your land, through your own hard work. You offer to sell me a potato for a dollar. I’m not starving, and there are lots of other places I could buy food if I wanted. Does anyone really think that it’s coercive of you to withhold access to the potato unless I pay you for it? Of course not.
3. Baselines and Nihilism
The reason Hale doesn’t see (or agree with) all of this is because he’s operating with a somewhat different understanding of coercion. The account of coercion I’ve provided above relies upon what philosophers like Alan Wertheimer call a “moral baseline” test. Hale, in contrast, is using a “nonmoral baseline.”
We can understand the difference by going back to the distinction between offers and threats. We usually think of offers as expanding options (“Give me $100 and I’ll fix your toilet”), and threats as reducing them (“Give me a $100 or else I’ll shoot you”). But expanding or reducing relative to what? We need some baseline against which to compare the proposal in order to determine whether it is a coercive threat or a non-coercive offer. A moral baseline compares the proposal to what would happen if people acted as they are morally obligated to act. A nonmoral baseline compares it to some other standard, making no reference to the moral obligations of the parties involved.
Hale doesn’t spell out his theory of coercion explicitly, so we have to infer it from what he says about particular cases. But he seems to hold the view that an institution like property is coercive if it reduces someone’s options relative to any other possible institutional arrangement. From this view, it follows that private property is coercive because it limits some people options. Of course, it also follows that any other conceivable system of assigning rights over objects is coercive. Indeed, coercion on Hale’s view seems to be entirely zero-sum. Giving one person or group rights over an object always enhances their options by precisely as much as it limits others’. Sweden, The Soviet Union circa 1950, the United States circa 2024, the United States circa 1850 - all are equally coercive societies, according to Hale’s view.
Lest the reader suspect I am misinterpreting Hale for purposes of reductio, here he is in his own words on the coercive power wielded by factory owners in a capitalist economy:
To take this control by law from the owner of the plant and to vest it in public officials or in a guild or a union organization elected by the workers would neither add to nor subtract from the constraint which is exercised with the aid of government. It would merely transfer the constraining power to a different set of persons…Neither [arrangement] can be said to be ‘freer’ than the other in the sense that it involves less coercion on the part of human beings, official or unofficial.
Thus coercion, on Hale’s understanding, turns out to be a completely worthless moral concept. We cannot use it to evaluate any system as better or worse than another, since the overall level of coercion is always constant. And so it simply drops out of the analysis altogether.
And for Hale, that was completely fine! Hale was a legal realist who was deeply suspicious of all talk of “rights,” “liberty” “coercion.” What exactly Hale wanted to replace these concepts with was never quite so clear. But those of us who still hold some attachment to them need not follow Hale down this particular slope. Hale’s argument against capitalism appears to have power only because readers naively assume that Hale is condemning capitalism by calling it coercive. Once we realize that Hale’s argument implies that every social system is equally coercive, the argument loses almost all of its normative force.
[For further reading on Hale, here’s a nice critical review by Richard Epstein of Barbara Fried’s (Yes, SBF’s mom!) sympathetic book on Hale.]