Libertarianism and Moral Parity

Last week, I was in Stockholm for the launch of the Swedish translation of The Individualists. It was a lovely experience, and I'm deeply grateful to all the wonderful people at Timbro for their hospitality and stimulating discussion. While I was there, I spoke at length with Henrik Dalgard for his Ideologipodden podcast. You can listen to that here.

After the book launch, the Ratio Institute was kind enough to host me for a dinner discussion of the book. Dan Klein of George Mason University led the discussion, and asked me a question about something we talk about in the book that hasn't yet gotten a lot of attention from commentators: an idea that we call the moral parity thesis.

The moral parity thesis holds that governments have no rights that are not identical to or derivable from the rights of individuals. In other words, if something is wrong for individuals to do, then it's wrong for governments to do as well.

You can find expressions of the moral parity thesis throughout the libertarian intellectual tradition - going at least as far back as John Locke, and popping up in Bastiat, Rothbard, Huemer, and many others. But while the idea might sound commonsensical, it actually has fairly radical implications. For it implies that almost everything that governments do - from drug criminalization to social welfare to taxation itself - is morally illegitimate. Taken seriously, the moral parity thesis tilts very strongly toward anarchism.

For me, and I suspect for many others, the moral parity thesis has powerful intuitive appeal. When I first encountered it, it was a real "Emperor Has No Clothes" moment. I felt like I had discovered a way of seeing through the facade of government authority. All the technical details of day-to-day public policy arguments now seemed largelyirrelevant. The moral parity thesis made politics simple: if it's wrong for you or me to do, then it's wrong for government too. End of story.

Today, though, I no longer think the moral parity thesis works. The basic problem, as I see it, is that we can't base macro-level conclusions about politics and social organization (solely) on the basis of micro-level examples. Politics actually is more complicated than that, and the details really matter.

To see this, think about issues where there's an important difference between the effects of your individual action, and the cumulative effect of a lot of individuals acting similarly. One example (which I’ve written about before) is environmental pollution. Some kinds of pollution are individually harmless, but extremely harmful in the aggregate. If I drive my car past your house, the effect of my emissions on you or anyone else are negligible. But thousands (or millions) of people driving their cars produces a very different set of effects - air pollution, climate change, etc.

Since one individual driving a single car is generally harmless, most of us have the intuition that it would be wrong for some other individual to forcibly prevent him from doing it - or to force him to ensure his car meets certain emission standards. But does it really follow from this that it's wrong for governments to do so? The harms from driving that we are considering here are social problems, not individual ones. Or, to put it another way, they are a kind of emergent phenomenon - one which is grounded but not manifested in the behavior that gives rise to it.

To be clear, this isn't just the well-known problem of externalities. There are some externalities that operate at the micro level, such as when a factory's emissions makes its neighbors sick. The problem here is that some kinds of actions are individually harmless but socially destructive. And it is precisely these kinds of problems that the moral parity thesis seems ill-equipped to deal with.

The moral parity thesis seeks to extrapolate political morality from the morality of individual behavior. But maybe that's the wrong way of thinking about politics. Perhaps politics is grounded in a kind of morality that is fundamentally social. That, at least, is the suggestion made by David Schmidtz is in his thought-provoking recent book, Living Together. Social morality, on Schmidtz's view, isn't based on some inherent set of "natural rights." And it is not derivable from intuitions about the morality of individual behavior. Rather, social morality is about what makes societies work well. It's about what enables us to live together peacefully and cooperatively. It is a fundamentally evolutionary phenomenon that emerges from our collective attempt to solve the problems inherent in social co-existence.

I have a lot to say about this view, and will return to it in future posts. But for now let me just point out how it connects to another pet peeve of mine with respect to libertarianism: its utter failure to address the phenomenon of children. If you try, as the moral parity thesis does, to build a political philosophy out of micro-level examples about adults interacting with each other, then you're going to wind up a little stumped regarding what to say about kids. They simply don't fit the model, and so your theory winds up treating them like a kind of strange fringe case.

But children are not a fringe case. All of us were children at one point, and the continued existence of our society depends on us making, and raising, a lot more children in the future. If morality is fundamentally a social phenomenon, then the existence of children and the nature of our obligations toward them damn well ought to be a central consideration, not an afterthought.

There’s obviously a tension here between this way of thinking about morality and the kind of individualism that Tomasi and I argue is central to libertarianism. On Schmidtz’s view, which strikes me as broadly Humean in nature, society isn’t just a collection of individuals, such that we can extrapolate social morality from the morality of individual behavior. Society is fundamental, at least when it comes to thinking about social morality. Or, to put it another way, if our question is how to enable people to live together in peace and prosperity, then the appropriate starting place for our thinking is society, not Robinson Crusoe.