I agree with Jonathan below that the Constitution (through the spending power) allows Congress to spend tax money to protect the Earth from an asteroid.
On the other hand — and at the risk of confirming Mark Kleiman in his belief that libertarians are loopy — I don’t speak for all libertarians, but I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.
Bryan Caplan once suggested the asteroid hypo to me as a reductio ad absurdum against my view. But a reductio ad absurdum doesn’t work against someone who’s willing to be absurd, and I may be willing to bite the bullet on this one.
On the other hand, if you could show that, once the impending asteroid impact became known, all hell would break loose and lots of rights be violated by looters et al. during the ensuing anarchy, I could justify the taxation as a way of preventing those rights violations; but this wouldn’t apply if, say, the asteroid impact were unknown to the public.
This does make me uncomfortable, much like my view that patents are highly useful but morally unjustifiable, so I’m open to persuasion.
Borealis says:
Is there not an analogy to government funding to prevent infectious diseases from entering the country? No one’s rights are violated by the arrival of infectious disease carriers, but avoiding them clearly improves the general welfare.
That being said, I for one welcome our new alien overlords and the protections they bring against meteors.
February 15, 2011, 10:31 amPatHMV says:
Government can only protect us from outside threats which have a conscious motivation, a motivation to deny us our rights?
If an asteroid hits the earth, there’s a high possibility I’m going to die. Government is protecting my right to live by taxing me for that purpose. Without universal taxation for that purpose, we’d have a serious free-rider problem, where all those who don’t pay are still protected from dying by the asteroid-killing team (led by Bruce Willis) paid for by the rest of us.
February 15, 2011, 10:34 amdht says:
But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.
I think it depends on if the asteroid was known about, and could be stopped. The Declaration of Independence says everyone has a right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. If the asteroid could be stopped, then protecting the right to life by stopping it would be a major role of the government. The technology does not exist to prevent lightning strikes or hurricanes (or asteroids), so money government money should not be spent trying to stop them. An argument could be made that government money should be spent to alleviate the results of such an occurence.
Falling trees can be prevented by cutting them down before they fall, but one has to know that the tree’s falling is imminent, and that falling would be a danger to some human being.
February 15, 2011, 10:37 amJames Grimmelmann says:
It seems to me that all of the work in this worldview is being done by your definition of “rights.” If “rights” is confined to protection against things done to you by other people, than yes, an asteroid obliterating human life on earth is not a violation of one’s rights. But if that’s the definition of “rights,” what’s the moral argument that we should use that line to draw the limits of legitimate government?
February 15, 2011, 10:40 amIan Millhiser says:
When their political philosophy leads them to conclude that government must sit idly on its hands and allow the eradication of all human life, reasonable people conclude that their political philosophy must be wrong. Not that they need to “bite the bullet” and accept that all life must cease to exist.
February 15, 2011, 10:41 amkrs says:
It does, and it doesn’t. R.A.D. is supposed to put someone to the choice of taking an absurd position or backing away from their argument by admitting that the absolute position they argue maybe isn’t so absolute after all–with the idea that it’s a win-win for the person posing the hypo. If you’re willing to be absurd, that’s an unusual response, but I think the other side usually considers that a win.
Maybe the premise has some problems, but whenever I hear the hypo of an asteroid hitting the earth, I take it to mean that the questioner is supposing an epic sci-fi movie like disaster where the asteroid hitting the earth would necessarily have disastrous consequences on the order of millions or billions of deaths, a significant change in the earth’s orbit, and all hell breaking loose to such an extent that there might not be any possessions to loot or people to do the looting. The Onion article describes it in these terms:
The idea is basically “are you against taxation even to prevent the end of civilization?” Am I wrong about this?
February 15, 2011, 10:49 amthirdeblue says:
Congratulations Sasha, you just violated Poe’s Law.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/republicans-vote-to-repeal-obamabacked-bill-that-w,19025/
February 15, 2011, 10:52 amNI says:
Sasha, I am no longer a libertarian precisely because of this kind of argumentation.
“Rights” are something that can be academically discussed at one’s leisure when there are no emergencies on the horizon. If the human race were to be confronted with a potential disaster of the scope of a meteor, then suddenly survival takes priority over rights. If the human race were to be confronted with the possibility of extinction such that the only way to stop it would be a temporary increase in your taxes, then I frankly would not give a damn about whatever rights you might otherwise have in your wealth. And any libertarians who argued to the contrary would simply be ignored (or hooted), as they should be.
This is comparable to Saudi morality police allowing schoolgirls to burn to death rather than allow them to leave a burning building because they weren’t properly dressed. In both cases you have dogma taking priority over real world consequences. And the fact that you like one dogma and dislike the other is irrelevant to the underlying point, which is that academic philosophy takes a back seat to real world consequences.
February 15, 2011, 10:53 amJoelP says:
I don’t think you can really distinguish between a foreign army and an asteroid. Certainly, the members of the foreign army are moral agents in a way that a chunk of rock can not be. But the goal of a tiny government surely can’t be “protect me only from harm caused by moral agents.” It must be “protect me from harm I cannot efficiently prevent myself,” with perhaps more emphasis on harms that are injustices.
Also, libertarianism isn’t a suicide pact.
February 15, 2011, 10:59 amSasha Volokh says:
Borealis: You may be right about the infectious diseases, though usually that’s done by human agency (whether intentional or not), which might make a difference as to whether rights are violated. (I elaborate more on this below.)
PatHMV: I distinguish between life and the right to life. For instance, if you die of purely natural causes, you’re dead, but your right to life hasn’t been violated. Similarly, the destruction of the Earth by natural causes doesn’t seem to violate the right to life, if (as I elaborate on more below) a rights violation needs some sort of conscious agency.
dht: With the trees or lightning, I’m assuming that something can be done, like installing lightning rods or having rangers go around and inspect trees. Suppose we could publicly fund lightning rod installation or tree inspection that would reduce the probability that people would be hit by lightning or trees; that’s the analogy I’m drawing. On the view I’ve stated, those programs would be immoral because they don’t protect any rights.
krs: I would have thought that my original post was crystal-clear on this point: Yes, the view I’ve stated opposes taxation even to prevent the end of civilization, provided that end happens by purely natural means.
James Grimmelmann: Yes, you’ve hit it right on the head. All the work is done by the theory of rights. You’ve actually made two separate points, so I’ll deal with them separately. The first (kind of implicit) is: Why should the concept of rights violations be confined to things done by other people? The second is: Why should that be the limit of what government can do?
The second point is easier; it’s actually the first where I’m personally unsure.
My view (which is not unusual for libertarians) is that government occupies no special position. Whether it acts morally is judged by the same standard as whether a group of people, a gang, a mafia, etc., act morally. So, presumptively, taking money from people involuntarily (taxation) is immoral. But I believe that stuff that’s presumptively immoral becomes moral if the result of that rights violation is to protect other rights to a greater extent. So taxation is justifiable if and only if that taxation leads to a greater protection of rights. So to see whether the asteroid program is justifiable, we have to see whether it would protect rights (which would be automatically true if an asteroid impact would violate rights).
Now the harder question: would an asteroid impact violate rights? I’ve presented an implicit view of rights where a violation requires some sort of human action. Probably it would go something like this: a right is an ability to act without interference by someone else. So two issues arise: (1) Why the “someone else”? Why don’t you have a right to act without interference, period? (2) This doesn’t arise in the asteroid hypo, but it arises in other contexts: if “someone else” is necessary, does it have to be someone else’s intentional activity, or something else? (This affects, e.g., what kind of tort and criminal system are justifiable.)
Tentatively, I’ve thought that you at least need interference by some other conscious being (leave aside questions of whether the interference has to be intentional, or whether the act leading to the interference has to be intentional, or whether intent of any kind is necessary). The reason is that I sort of take the natural world to be the background condition of reality: it’s just seemed self-evident to me that, e.g., your right to life isn’t violated when you’re struck by lightning. Among other things, it’s seemed to me that you should have a rights violator for every rights violation, so if no one‘s violating your rights, there’s no rights violation.
But maybe I’m wrong about that.
February 15, 2011, 11:07 amMarcus says:
And here I thought taxation was supposed to bring about the end of civilization…
February 15, 2011, 11:09 amSasha Volokh says:
NI: This is an interesting and important point, which also comes up in constitutional questions like whether it’s O.K. to torture in a ticking nuclear bomb scenario. Let’s say I agree with you that, faced with such an existential threat, we should proceed anyway. (I probably do.) Should we say “Morality ought to include an acceptable way to act in this situation”? Maybe, but this isn’t obvious to me. Maybe we should just say: “In this case, we’re not going to act morally, so let’s just act immorally and face the consequences later.”
So I allow you to ignore or hoot the libertarians while you tax them anyway, and maybe I would do the same. But saying “the philosophy is wrong” is different from saying “the philosophy is right but I refuse to follow it now.”
February 15, 2011, 11:13 amSubmitted Without Comment : Lawyers, Guns & Money says:
[...] Verbatim Sasha Volokh: “I don’t speak for all libertarians, but I think there’s a good case to be made that [...]
February 15, 2011, 11:15 amMarcus says:
Sasha Volokh says, “So, presumptively, taking money from people involuntarily (taxation) is immoral.”
I realize this is a small part of the point you are making, but is there actually an argument that taxation in the United States of America is done so involuntarily? By my count, we elect representatives and senators to make our decisions by proxy. Part of those decisions involve taxation. How can this be considered involuntary? Of course, I am not suggesting that there are nations where taxation could be considered involuntary, I just do not believe the United States is one of those.
[SV note: You may have agreed to elect someone to tax me. That doesn't make my taxation voluntary.]
February 15, 2011, 11:17 amAnderson says:
I think Sasha is exactly right, and we had better let a few sizable asteroids hit the Earth and evaluate their effects before we rush to confiscate anyone’s income.
Hell, when you think about the likely effects on governments as a result of such impacts, the asteroid could be the greatest libertarian event ever! Next to Atlas Shrugged of course.
February 15, 2011, 11:20 amMarcus says:
“Of course, I am not suggesting that there are *no* nations where taxation could be considered involuntary…”
Fixed
February 15, 2011, 11:24 amyankee says:
Quoth Sasha above:
I think there’s an important suppressed premise here, which is that stuff that’s presumptively immoral becomes moral only if the result is to protect other rights to a greater extent. Your position seems to be that no other considerations can ever justify rights violations. But why should we be willing to accept that premise? Why can’t arbitrarily horrendous consequences (the end of human life) justify arbitrarily small rights violations (a tiny increase in taxes)?
February 15, 2011, 11:25 amthirdeblue says:
What if an alien species or god sent the asteroid after us. Then, under your definition, my right to life has been violated.
Maybe it’s debris after a human caused planet-crack to mine the moon.
February 15, 2011, 11:30 amgooners says:
Would starving to death be considered a purely natural cause, extending this justification to federal programs that help the needy? And is there a threshold for “life” that you’ve worked out? Is it the medical definition, such as synapses firing, heart beating, drawing breath, or do you attach any quality of life to the definition?
[SV note: Yes, starvation counts as a natural cause, so federal programs (or any government programs) could only be justified on an attenuated theory like "If people are starving to death, they'll commit more crimes, and we could control that with more police, but a cheaper way of doing it is with welfare payments." As for the definition of "life", I'm willing to agree that it's complicated, but I don't have to deal with it in the asteroid hypo; let's just say that we'll incorporate whatever definition we use for murder, for instance could you legally "kill" someone if their heart was beating, etc.]
February 15, 2011, 11:30 amMichael_Bluth says:
So I guess you are not too hot on the National Weather Service, FEMA or that agency that monitors volcanoes either?
[SV note: Nope. As I noted above, one can still make an attenuated argument, like "If volcanoes erupt then all hell will break loose and people's rights will be violated in the anarchy, and we could control this with more police, but a cheaper way would be to monitor the volcanoes and either prepare for their eruption or (if that's possible) prevent their eruption.]
February 15, 2011, 11:33 amNI says:
Sasha, first of all I probably could have made my point less intemperately than I did, and I apologize for my tone. Now that I have calmed down, here is what I think is the problem with your premise:
In practice, there are really only two possible foundations for morality: Religion, and utilitarian. (I think “natural law” is a subset of religion, whether proponents of natural law admit it or not.) If, like me (and I think you as well) reject religion, then you are left with utilitarianism.
Humans evolved as social creatures; human survival depends on living in community, and sometimes that means giving up things that you might like to do. And most of morality really boils down to: A society that tolerates certain types of behavior will not long survive. A society in which murder, theft, rape, pillage and plunder were acceptable behavior would not last very long, and if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be a pleasant place in which to live.
I think there are sound utilitarian reasons for having as small a government as practical, and I still have some strong libertarian tendencies for that reason. But if it comes down to a question of survival versus non-survival, I don’t see that as a close question.
[SV note: I don't know whether "natural rights theory" is considered "natural law" from your perspective (people use the terms differently) and therefore [a secular] “religion”. If you think “natural rights theory” is [a secular] “religion”, that’s fine, but then you’re wrong that I reject religion. I certainly reject utilitarianism. And in particular, I don’t want to condition rights on human survival, because that seems to reject a priori the idea that one’s moral duty is to die under certain circumstances.]
February 15, 2011, 11:35 amAdam Scales says:
Sasha,
Your post may, or may not, reflect a bravely principled stand. It is generally no accident that perceptions of threats vary with one’s political perspectives. To return to AGW, it takes considerable belief in one’s principles to say, “Yes, I believe in AGW, I believe it’s harmful, and can probably only be fought by imposing collective action through law. However, my interest in liberty is so strong that it would be wrong to do so.” In fact, most “popular” conservative critiques of anti-AGW efforts rest on a deep skepticism of AGWs potential danger. That is highly convenient. (I do not include here thoughtful and provocative commenters such as Professor Adler, or Bjorn Lomborg, who take issue with anti-AGW methods).
At the same time, proponents of strong anti-AGW policy have the luxury of not strongly valuing the things that would be at risk from such a policy. It is no great sacrifice to favor higher carbon taxes if you’re relatively wealthy and don’t care for cars; if your job isn’t threatened by regulation, and if you tend to consume things that are made overseas (and thus less likely to be made more expensive by domestic AGW policies). Moreover, those interested in combatting climate change are, it turns out, generally not enamored with the distributional consequences of free markets, whether domestically, or between developed and developing nations. All in all, it turns out that strong policies to fight AGW are suspiciously congenial to the (non-AGW) worldviews of those who advocate them.
Therefore, it is perhaps refreshing that you cautiously offer the courage of your convictions: no government-funded anti-asteroid lasers for you. But, I’m not quite certain that I believe you, and I’d like to suggest some reasons yours may not be as principled a stand as it seems.
When Rand Paul found himself in hot water after discussing the Civil Rights Act, it occurred to me that his comments (unfairly pounced upon, yes, but hardly a credit to his depth of thinking) might be usefully explained by something I call “the libertarian privilege”. The libertarian privilege is simple: Libertarians enjoy the luxury of only rarely being forced to confront the truly unpleasant consequences that would (occasionally) result from some of their ideological preferences.
For example, it is pretty easy nowadays to be against massive public works, government regulation of the internet, the bailouts and many other, often-deservedly controversial governmental intrusions. Why is it easy? Because they’ve already happened, and we’ve reaped the rewards. One is free to imagine something like the internet spontaneously coming into being without that pesky meddling precisely because we’re never going to have to find out. Sure, we can argue about where to draw the line today, but that line will be drawn
in the shadow of government-sponsored efforts that set the terms of the debate.
When Rand Paul questions the Civil Rights Act, he is privileged to imagine that all of the generally rational, non-racist comportment of civil society he sees around him today was something inevitable. Even if, in a private moment of reflection, he might be willing to concede that government intrusion sped up the process considerably, he probably cannot (and who can blame him?) imagine that such widespread discrimination would immediately recrudesce if these laws were repealed today. And it is a simple matter to underweight the negative experiences of others, particularly as they recede from historical consciousness.
My skepticism about your asteroid position is that it seems a very easy, academically-satisfying exercise to imagine your views on an event that 1) has a one-in-a million chance of occurring, and 2) is one in which you can be pretty certain you’re going to be outvoted, should it ever occur. That’s the libertarian privilege. I’d be more convinced of a position that affected you immediately and personally, not theoretically and in the distant future. At least, let’s see a position that will be disruptive, concrete and salient. It goes without saying that even if I’m right in my suspicions about your true preferences, your expressed preferences could well be right. But I think it worthwhile to consider them in this light.
This post is too long, but a couple concluding points. I am not immune from what I have criticized here. I have always been influenced by libertarianism, which properly inculcates a healthy skepticism about the limits of government. Those limits have moral, as well as practical dimensions, as your example reminds us. I hated the bailouts, but often wonder whether I’d still have a job without them – and am grateful that I could jeer on the sidelines while someone else took the difficult votes to make them happen. I am deeply skeptical of contemporary policies to promote racial equality, and very aware that had I been born even ten years earlier, (or 1,000 miles further south), I might not enjoy the privileged career that allows me to write at excessive length in the middle of the workday. In general, I take issue with the simplistic “where you sit is where you stand” method of debating, and perhaps I have violated that norm that here. But I cannot avoid the uneasy feeling that an argument that everyone knows has an asteroid’s-chance-in-hell likelihood of prevailing, is a particularly easy argument to make.
[SV note: It's funny that you characterize this as an "easy" argument to make. I would have thought that this is the sort of argument that would expose me to more ridicule, as in: "Look at these libertarians, who can't justify government under the clearest possible circumstances!" Anyway, if you think I might be motivated more by the approval of people who might like my ideological purity, that seems quite wrong to me, but I realize I may not be able to dispel that view. Anyway, I think I noted a bigger problematic belief right there in the original post: I can't see a moral justification for patents. And I think patents are hugely helpful, and in particular I think I'll benefit a lot from pharmaceutical patents. So there's something that could really affect me a lot.]
February 15, 2011, 11:35 amAaron says:
More than anything, this provides excellent evidence that there’s no real reason to separate “rights” and “interests,” indeed, that the distinction seems artificial and silly. Say to the average person on the street that their government has chosen not to stop the impending asteroid impact because it will not violate their rights, and they will look at you like a crazy person.
That’s not to say no such thing as “rights” can be observed, but just that maybe we should subsume them into a more practical, less rigid framework which takes account of both rights and interests.
February 15, 2011, 11:38 amCJColucci says:
A plump Irish child, baked and properly sauced, is delicious.
February 15, 2011, 11:38 amWhy others can’t see that this is an obvious satire is beyond me.
Laura(southernxyl) says:
Oh, man.
Your principles and philosophy need to be up to the task of guiding you through tough times when maybe you’re too distracted or don’t have time to think things through. If they’re not, they’re really no good except as a conversation piece.
This actually explains a lot of previously inexplicable things I’ve seen libertarians on this site say.
February 15, 2011, 11:41 amAllan Walstad says:
Marcus, the relevant question has to do with the presumed legitimacy of the democratic institutions and the powers they wield. Just because people vote in elections and the wheels of power turn does not make it legitimate. And it is quite reasonable for people who question the legitimacy of at least some aspects of government power nevertheless to vote in elections in order to try to minimize the damage to their liberty. That doesn’t make coercion “voluntary.”
February 15, 2011, 11:41 amMarcus says:
Satire only rings true. The statement you quote is fact.
February 15, 2011, 11:42 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
THERE.
In my darker moments, I’ve paraphrased the famous snark on puritanism: “Libertarianism is the haunting fear that somewhere, an able-bodied, affluent white man is being told ‘no’.”
February 15, 2011, 11:43 amchris says:
So, presumptively, taking money from people involuntarily (taxation) is immoral.
Taxation isn’t involuntary; it’s part of the social contract, just like obeying the rest of the laws of whatever country you become a citizen of. (This includes agreeing to the fact that the legislature can change the laws in the future; it’s no more unreasonable than any number of other contracts people voluntarily enter into.) If you don’t like it, emigrate or go seasteading or whatever.
Now, if your present country denies you the right to renounce your citizenship and leave, that IS immoral. But the US doesn’t do that, as far as I know. At most, they might confiscate enough of “your” property to pay the taxes lawfully accrued while you remained in the US — which seems fair enough, if you earned that property while benefiting from the laws and infrastructure of the US. Neither is free, and by using them you agreed to pay your lawfully-defined share of the cost (social contract, again).
The fact that there’s nowhere convenient to go that isn’t under the jurisdiction of some other government is no more a violation of your rights than lightning or asteroids.
[SV note: Did I sign a contract? I didn't think so. Anyway, the social contract theory doesn't explain how one can morally object to any practices of any government that allows emigration.]
February 15, 2011, 11:44 amPJens says:
I do not understand why we have to rush to taxation.
If anyone can convince me that an asteroid is going to hit the earth, I would gladly send a check to any group with a reasonable solution to the problem. Heck, I may even join physically to do what I can to save the earth.
Shouldn’t voluntary contributions and efforts be the first and best way to address any problem? Often, when an issue presents itself, people demand the government do something about it, and taxation becomes the lazy way of raising money for it.
[SV note: I agree. I'm just, for the sake of argument, assuming that, because of free-rider problems and suchlike, voluntary efforts won't do the job.]
February 15, 2011, 11:45 amiawai says:
I’ve independently concluded that taxation is still unjust in these “everybody dies” situations.
First, what to do about the people that believe that if an asteroid is going to hit, then it was meant to be, and they wish to die? Are you justified in forcing them to live?
Second, even if we agree that everyone does indeed share the same end or goal of avoiding the asteroid impact, how are the means of reaching that goal decided? What if I think that the best, cheapest, most sure method is to erect a solar sail on the object to pull it out of the way, while you think that an array of well placed nukes will cause the asteroid to break up and mostly deviate from its path of collision with the Earth? Each path should be explored by those who think it is going to be most effective, with their own resources. If you really do have the best method – you should not have any trouble raising funds voluntarily.
And “free-riding” should not at all be a factor; if your life is on the line, won’t you work to save yourself, even if others are saved with you? I might be able to buy the argument that people wouldn’t write novels if they couldn’t exclude people from reading them (I don’t), but it is ludicrous to suggest that externalities would prevent those wishing to save their own life from doing so because they might happen to benefit others.
Further, if you accept taxes in this asteroid hypothetical, is it world taxation? Does it imply a world government? How is the taxation scheduled? Do the rich and poor alike pay the same flat rate, because they all receive the benefit of life? Who decides, and how do we know that it is effective and efficient?
[SV note: I'm obviously with you in some sense. But I disagree with some of the arguments.
(1) If the Martians were planning to blow up the world and some people wished to die, I don't need to consider those people's views; I don't mind forcing those guys to not die. Suicide is always available.
(2) Yes, there could be disagreements about what's the most effective means, but again, there were disagreement over how to fight the Nazis in WW2, and I think it's morally justifiable for the government to tax people and decide on a particular strategy. Here, too, it's the idea of rights-violation that's driving things.
(3) I suppose if there were a one-time asteroid with 100% certainty of hitting, then everyone might give everything they had. But even then, if I knew 100% of people were giving, so safety would be guaranteed, I could see myself free-riding. Moreover, what if these asteroids happen every once in a while, and we know, predictably, that we raise more than we need each time? I think free-riding would increase then. Moreover, if the probability of being saved increased continuously with the amount of money raised, I could see free-riding leading to an inefficiently low probability of being saved.
(4) Finally, questions of world taxation, flat rates, who decides, etc., are interesting, but not crucial to this philosophical discussion. Maybe WW2 wasn't financed in the morally optimal way, but even the imperfect financing mechanism we had might have been preferable to doing nothing through government.]
February 15, 2011, 11:47 amyankee says:
Marcus—I think the rationale for calling taxes involuntary is that there are lots of individual people who don’t wish to pay taxes, and would not do so absent the threat of government coercion. In fact, that’s the whole point of tax funding. Otherwise you would just have a system of voluntary recommended contributions.
It also seems odd to say that I consented to everything my democratically elected representatives happen to do, even if I voted against them. Say candidate C runs on a platform of to imposing an apartheid code that discriminates against people of my ethnic background. I don’t think voting against C constitutes voluntary acceptance of apartheid: do you?
There are also lots of people who can’t vote (aliens, minors, residents of D.C.) but are forced to pay taxes anyway.
February 15, 2011, 11:48 amAnderson says:
Why others can’t see that this is an obvious satire is beyond me.
Satirical posts call for satirical responses.
February 15, 2011, 11:49 amkrs says:
Perhaps this is my ignorance. Your discussion of whether the impact of the asteroid would be known or unknown clouded that point for me.
February 15, 2011, 11:56 amMarcus says:
I think I follow this. Are you saying that if I do not like every single action my elected representatives take, then the legitimacy of the government is called into question? Like sort of an individual line item veto of the operation of government? If I have understood what you said, how can a nation actually function under a thought process like this?
I definitely understand your last line about liberty, but have to admit that such comments generally make the hair on the back of neck bristle. I am not someone who believes our liberties, in general and not including privacy, are under any imminent threat from the Feds (state governments on the other hand…). But then I am someone who defines liberties as the ability to move about freely, seek employment where I please, speak my mind openly, love/worship who/as I choose, and participate in the operation of my nation through elections. I do not believe that having the government of the wealthiest nation in the world ensure we all have the same basic needs like food, housing, education, and health care is a threat to my liberties.
February 15, 2011, 11:58 amuh_clem says:
Actually, he’s just proven Poe’s Law. Usually that’s reserved for the comments here, but occasionally there’s a front-pager that does.
February 15, 2011, 11:59 amyankee says:
I doubt Sasha believes there’s a social contract of the type you describe either. I don’t think he’s going to concede that failing to leave the country and renounce your citizenship constitutes acceptance of a contract.
I personally think “social contract” is a lovely metaphor, but I’m not going to accept it as a philosophical principle.
[SV note: Indeed. In fact, I think "social contract" is an awful metaphor. When I have more time, I might explain how I prefer the metaphor of the "social tort". Briefly: contract law is about civil responsibilities created by agreement, and tort law is about civil responsibilities created not by agreement. The relationship between people and the government should be conceptualized as tort-like: we have to justify government not by what it could do under some hypothetical agreement, but by what it may do on the assumption that some people don't agree.]
February 15, 2011, 12:00 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Rights, schmites: the Constitution doesn’t empower Congress to spend money to protect federal buildings?
February 15, 2011, 12:01 pmJames Grimmelmann says:
It might be more accurate to say that you have a theory of wrongs rather than a theory of rights. Your position is that certain human actions, such as murder, are wrongful because of the harm they inflict on others. Government, like any other person or institution, is not morally entitled to commit wrongs, except insofar as doing so is necessary to prevent greater wrongs. Since an asteroid impact isn’t a moral agent capable of committing a wrong, neither government nor anyone else is morally entitled to commit a wrong in order to prevent it. Is that a fair summary of your point of view?
[SV note: Provisionally, I think I like that way of phrasing it.]
February 15, 2011, 12:01 pmMark Buehner says:
Why does war always get an exception then? This argument isn’t about libertarianism, its about anarchism. Saving your population from asteroid impact joins saving it from conquest or genocide as legitimate collective concerns exactly because they can only be addressed collectively (federally to be specific). The slippery slope only enters the question when you start positing that the federal government can handle things qualitatively ‘more’ effectively (which is oft repeated and seldom proven- see our 3.5 trillion dollar ‘indispensable’ budget that 3 years ago was 40% smaller. Somehow we survived those dark ages known as 2007). I believe the linchpin of federalism anyway should be that the federal government should only handle power that they alone can execute do to fear of interstate warfare or some outside force stomping us.
[SV note: Absolutely not: The Nazis were rights violators. Fighting off the Nazis, at least in principle, justifies some amount of coercive action, because stopping the Nazis protects rights to an extent that can overcome the rights violation of the taxation. The view I've stated is not anarchism: it justifies, in principle, a huge government capable of fighting off invaders, catching criminals, and running a justice system, and perhaps even more; it just doesn't justify fighting "nature".]
February 15, 2011, 12:08 pmMarcus says:
Now this I get. And I definitely agree that I, or anyone most likely, agrees with everything their elected representatives do. But we certainly cannot have a national referendum every time the government wants to spend money.
Besides, what kind of a nation would we be today, and this gets to my ongoing confusion about libertarianism, if we only paid for what we liked? “Super Power” would certainly be off the table. In fact, it would never have received an invite to the party. So much, if not everything, we now take advantage of today is because of the system we have and because of the tax system we have in place. In fact, we would likely be even greater with an overhaul of the loopy holed tax policies we have created.
I say our taxes, whether you like where they are going or not (and I do not appreciate my taxes going to Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Blackwater the same as some do not like direct or indirect funding of abortion), are voluntary because we choose to live here, in this system. A system, I repeat, that has made us the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth. I just do not understand why people believe that we would be so much better off if we reverted to some crazy “every man for himself” style arrangement.
February 15, 2011, 12:10 pmzuch says:
NP. The rich and successful … but overtaxed and persecuted …. libertarians can just go build themselves a floating planet somewhere and watch the leeches and freeloaders and commies on Earth get pulverized, while sipping their Martinis.
Oh, nonsense. You don’t cure violations of rights by violating someone else’s rights. The only people responsible for any incipient rights violations are those that will riot in the coming apocalypse, so the only appropriate response is to kill them all … prophylactically.
And I don’t understand your distinction here based on the ‘certainty’ (or knowledge) of the impending disaster. Why is this important in an analysis of rights? How would such ‘analysis’ translate into similar situations but of less global extent? How about the chance of water pollution [possibly] causing increases in cancers? How about the possibility of poor child rearing and insufficient family support causing a predictable increase in the rate of homicides?
Cheers,
[SV note: Let me try to explain the "knowledge" distinction. If the asteroid impact is widely known, then there might be anarchy, looting, killing, etc., before it strikes. These are rights violations. Preventing them can justify taxation. So if the asteroid struck and (either because the impact would be unknown or because people are just soooooo law-abiding that they'd never loot, or perhaps because the existing police can take care of it) there would be no anarchy, then no rights violations, so no justification for the extra taxation.
I think you were thinking I was drawing some distinction based on probabilistic harms. That wasn't my point here. In principle, certain harms and probabilistic harms are treated the same. My example was just an asteroid that's equally certain but known vs. unknown, just for purposes of describing whether anarchy would result.
Oh yes, also, about poor child rearing and insufficient family support causing homicide increases: In principle, that could be a sufficient libertarian justification for welfare payments under this view.]
February 15, 2011, 12:12 pmMarcus says:
Damn.
“And I definitely agree that I, or anyone most likely, *do not agree* with everything their elected representatives do.”
Fixed
February 15, 2011, 12:13 pmBen says:
This raises an interesting game theory type problem. Suppose Sasha Volokh, newly elected President of the US, veto’s both congress’s and the U.N. security council’s bill to build a $100 billion dollar asteroid destroying laser. All seems lost until a consortium of defence contractors team up and ask for charitable donations so that they can build the laser. Do you think that an individual has a moral obligation to donate? Would you donate or attempt to free ride? Or would you build yourself a underground bunker full of ammunition and long life milk?
Personally, I would donate, and think that individuals would have a moral obligation to donate to the best of their ability (particularly if the required sum was larger). I certainly wouldn’t be voting for President Volokh again.
February 15, 2011, 12:13 pmMark Buehner says:
Is there any evidence that the resources we’ve taken from the alleged ‘every man for himself’ sphere of things and devoted to.. pick your social ill.. have been effective in reducing much less eliminating said ill? I can pour water on sand indefinitely and claim it makes the sun shine, but that doesn’t prove causation.
February 15, 2011, 12:15 pmPatHMV says:
This post is, frankly, a perfect example of why this country is not, and will never be, libertarian. The overwhelming majority of human beings who give this any thought at all will agree that it’s not worth giving any thought to, that OF COURSE it’s appropriate to tax us all to prevent an asteroid from crashing into the earth. The question itself, as a serious matter, is ludicrous to most of us.
One of the (several) fundamental flaws in libertarian ideology (and most ideologies) is the idea that there is a social equivalent to the concept of the hypothecated grand unifying theory of physics, one simple guiding rule that can then be extrapolated to provide rules for all circumstances, with complete internal consistency at all times.
That’s just not consistent with human nature or, in my view, the history of any society that ever was.
Take the game theory experiment where X is given $20, and must split it with Y. X can make whatever split they want, and Y then decides, knowing what the split is, to accept or reject it (in which case, both X and Y get nothing). By definition, no matter what the split is, Y will be better off financially. But all experiments have shown that Y will reject an “unfair” split, even though it means less money in Y’s own pocket. The precise definition of “unfair” varies, of course, but the more favorable the split is to X, the greater the chance that Y will reject the money all together.
It’s utterly illogical… except that man is a social creature, and understands innately that our survival depends on a certain level of cooperation, and that those who act unfairly need to be punished, even at some cost to ourselves.
February 15, 2011, 12:15 pmHyena says:
@Sasha
Under your theory we could get around the whole problem by the government granting to someone the property rights to the asteroid and the attendant duty to keep it from violating the rights of others by careening dangerously through the universe. In order to justify taxation, we’d only need one person to step up and claim the asteroid as theirs.
Alternatively, if space and all the bodies in it are currently common property, then this problem is already solved.
[SV note: Brilliant! Unfortunately, the asteroid owner would probably immediately want to give it to someone else....]
February 15, 2011, 12:15 pmMarcus says:
I don’t know, Mark. Has there ever been a sustained effort to address these matters without someone coming along to water it down or scuttle it altogether?
February 15, 2011, 12:17 pmTim O'Keefe says:
I find it weird that Volokh has a quasi-consequentialist view on rights violations:
I.e., it’s wrong to violate somebody’s property-rights in order to prevent massive death and suffering, but it’s justifiable to violate somebody’s property rights in order prevent massive rights violations. The usual libertarian/Nozickian line on this is that rights are “side-constraints” on action. It would wrong for me to steal Bill Gates’ money, even if I could use it to fund a Libertarian Revolution and install an awesome minimal state. Apparently Volokh thinks the theft would be OK.
February 15, 2011, 12:19 pmKen Arromdee says:
Let’s modify things a bit. There’s no asteroid, but rather you’re starving to death. Someone has some food and (by postulate) the only way you can prevent your own death is by stealing the food. Should you steal the food?
All the asteroid question is is a large scale version of the same question. Should you take someone’s possessions (in this case, take by taxes) in order to save your life? (Or to save many lives.)
What happens in a libertarian society to people who need to steal food to live? (And note that most answers map over. For instance, if you claim that private charity will take care of it, private charity could take care of the asteroid impact too. )
[SV note: Well, I already think it's unjust to take the food. (Not that I wouldn't do it in reality, but I wouldn't claim that it was morally justified.) I'm focusing on the asteroid because some people who don't believe in stealing for your own benefit might still believe in taxation for the truly common benefit, at least when you're looking at total annihilation.]
February 15, 2011, 12:20 pmHyena says:
@Ken Arromdee,
It wouldn’t matter. Sasha explains his conception of rights, which boils down to there not really being a moral universe beyond human interaction. Of course, that leaves one to question where he’d obtain those rights from since this is dangerously close to arguing that rights are a collective conception of humanity.
February 15, 2011, 12:25 pmKen Arromdee says:
Replying to myself: Yes, I know that an asteroid strike has a free rider problem and stealing food to live doesn’t. But it doesn’t look like this version of libertarianism takes free riders into account.
February 15, 2011, 12:27 pmMark Buehner says:
The Drug War? How much have we spent on the ‘war on poverty’, and what improvement have we seen? Of course for every failure you can always claim ‘we didn’t spend enough’. The impulse to double down on failure (rather than accept falsification) is a strong one… when you’re spending other people’s money.
Look, personally i don’t believe in Big L libertarianism because its impractical, but as a philosophical force ‘pulling’ our society away from unhitched collectivism, it is invaluable. The problem with statism is that demanding results for your spending withers away and dies, and you inevitably run into our current mess where we spend money because we spend it, and to say otherwise is to question how committed you are to humanism, regardless of the actual literal effect of the money being spent. Something has to oppose that tendency and statists certainly aren’t going to do it themselves, especially when the inevitable rent seeking cycle takes hold.
February 15, 2011, 12:27 pmkrs says:
If you have a post in mind for this, I’d be interested to hear the position. My guess is that it’s fairly straightforward, but I’m curious now.
[SV note: Well, patent law says that if you make something and patent it, I can't make the same thing, even if it's now common knowledge how it's made, and even if I made it entirely independently, without knowing about your thing. That seems inconsistent with natural rights: if I've found it, because I heard it on the street, that a particular combination of chemicals is effective against a particular disease, and then I can construct that using my own property, it seems immoral to prevent me from using my own property to do that. Basically, it's just a government-granted monopoly. Well, that's the argument against patents from a natural-rights perspective.]
February 15, 2011, 12:30 pmAllan Walstad says:
As far as the Constitution goes, it does after all have a mechanism for amendment. If the Founders did not anticipate either the possibility of civilization being destroyed by an asteroid, OR the possibility of humans being able to do something about it, then surely in the face of an actual threat there is a basis for amendment. And if such a proven threat is imminent, I’ve no doubt you could get the Congress, the President, and all the state legislatures to agree to the amendment within a single day.
The question of libertarian philosophy is something else of course. In the face of total destruction, I don’t think I’m going to object to a commandeering of sufficient resources to avert it. My concern is with how the imagined prospect, the mere possibility of some sort of catastrophe, or more generally of any difficulties, for anybody, that arguably do not lend themselves to non-coercive solution, can be a foot in the door for a general aggrandizement of government power. Look at how “defense,” for the US, has finally morphed into total global military control-freakism. Or look at how the power to “regulate commerce among the states” has morphed into a presumed power to prohibit home-grown marijuana for home use, to regulate home-grown grain for home use, and even potentially — in the absence of 5 Supreme Court justices with any common sense at all — into a power to reach into every individual’s and family’s private lives to force them to purchase fed-approved health insurance.
Where strict libertarians attempt to construct logically impregnable philosophical systems, they can serve a useful purpose because they have to think long and hard about difficult issues. Ultimately, however, in a true emergency, coercion will be exerted. What matters is how, over the long term, to limit coercive institutions sufficiently that individuals and families can pursue their goals without being robbed blind and having to wade through a swamp of presumptuous impositions, the negative effects of which have long, long since taken us past the point of diminishing returns. What matters is how to get out from under the instruments of totalitarian control that have already been created in the name of “protection,” that await a single demagogue to make ruthless use of them.
February 15, 2011, 12:31 pmAnthony says:
Only if you’re taxing people who aren’t at risk from the asteroid. Part of the problem here is that you can’t isolate the asteroid impact. If you could just say “If you pay, you won’t get hit by the asteroid; if you don’t pay, you will”, (almost) everyone would pay, but as long as protecting one person from the asteroid also protects his neighbor, you have a free rider problem.
February 15, 2011, 12:33 pmanguslander says:
Sasha’s psychology is immune from reductios because Sasha’s most basic moral commitment is to the existence of an abstract set of rights. He thus declines to conceptualize unpleasant implications of those rights (e.g. the one organization that could prevent it must stand idly by while we are all killed by an asteroid) as anything other than regrettable facts about the world. Thus, he should be perfectly comfortable saying something like, “perhaps we should wish things were otherwise, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that morality requires this horrific result. Blame morality; don’t blame me!”
I have two questions about such a psychology. One is about it’s rationality. If you cannot test consistent sets of abstract rights-attributions against their concrete implications, how do you decide which consistent set of rights-attributions constitutes morality? Ordinary variants of coherentism in moral epistemology allow you to test abstract principles against specific implications; through a process of reflective equilibrium you are supposed to arrive at knowledge of the true moral system. That process is not available to someone with Sasha’s psychology – someone who doesn’t think specific implications can dislodge commitments to a basic set of rights-claims – so how should Sasha go about deciding whether he’s morally mistaken?
The second question is clinical. Assuming Sasha isn’t just being provocative – assuming, in other words, that he seriously believes the Government shouldn’t shoot down an asteroid that will otherwise kill us all because that’s an illegitimate use of the taxpayers’ money – what kind of conditioning does one have to undergo to become that kind of crazy? I have a hunch that one moral genealogy – quite common among libertarians – involves learning about morality through shoddily written derivative libertarian literature as opposed to interactions with actual people. The libertarian thus comes to regard as sacred and worthy of protection a set of rather heavy-handed ideas, as opposed to human beings. (Ironic analog: some doctrinaire Communists.)
But I’ve no idea whether Sasha’s crazy has that as its source, or something else.
February 15, 2011, 12:34 pmByomtov says:
iawai,
First, what to do about the people that believe that if an asteroid is going to hit, then it was meant to be, and they wish to die? Are you justified in forcing them to live?
But this objection applies just as well to defending against a foreign invasion. Some people may prefer to live under the rule of the invader. Are you justified in forcing them to pay taxes to fight off the invasion?
Second, even if we agree that everyone does indeed share the same end or goal of avoiding the asteroid impact, how are the means of reaching that goal decided? What if I think that the best, cheapest, most sure method is to erect a solar sail on the object to pull it out of the way, while you think that an array of well placed nukes will cause the asteroid to break up and mostly deviate from its path of collision with the Earth? Each path should be explored by those who think it is going to be most effective, with their own resources. If you really do have the best method – you should not have any trouble raising funds voluntarily.
Shouldn’t all reasonable methods be tried? And why in the world do you imagine that the possible sources of funds have the scientific knowledge to judge which is best? This is market fundamentalism at its most absurd.
Further, if you accept taxes in this asteroid hypothetical, is it world taxation? Does it imply a world government? How is the taxation scheduled? Do the rich and poor alike pay the same flat rate, because they all receive the benefit of life? Who decides, and how do we know that it is effective and efficient?
I know. Let’s do a cost-benefit analysis to see which method has the best ratio of P(destroy asteroid)/cost and adopt that. Then we can debate the structure of the tax for a couple of years.
The whole argument is ridiculous.
February 15, 2011, 12:36 pmPooh says:
At risk of being insulting, if my world view led me to this conclusion, it would be a sign to re-examine my worldview to better conform to reality.
February 15, 2011, 12:37 pmMark Buehner says:
This might as well be a false flag operation. Like I said, I don’t know any libertarians that deny the government that authority to conduct war. How is this any different? If anything, its more pure, ie- whatever philosophical principle you point to allowing a government to conduct war to defend its people must surely provide for the government to protect its people from some other invariable external catastrophe following the same logic. And if you don’t believe either I question whether this is libertarianism or anarchism.
[SV note: This is not anarchism. Nothing I've said condemns taxation to conduct WW2, because the Nazis were rights-violators.]
February 15, 2011, 12:40 pmJon H says:
“or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree)”
Lightning and falling trees can be avoided without much effort. It is quite simple for the average human to achieve complete safety from these threats without requiring assistance.
On the other hand, safety from asteroid strikes is the kind of thing that an average individual cannot secure for themselves.
February 15, 2011, 12:48 pmMark Field says:
I love this.
February 15, 2011, 12:54 pmloki13 says:
No. Many states could not do this. See, for example, Florida. Any U.S. Amendment as to be submitted to the Florida legislature for ratification. No ratification could be made until at least one election cycle after the proposal was submitted. To speed this up, you’d need to change the Florida constitution, which is, well, a process which would also require an election period.
February 15, 2011, 12:55 pmMartinned says:
Even if we did, some people would still be outvoted. (Remember, there’s nothing magical about a 50%+1 majority.)
February 15, 2011, 12:57 pmPatHMV says:
And the constitutional amendment issue is irrelevant, because Sasha is not arguing about whether the U.S. Constitution allows this, but whether it would be permitted under libertarian principles and ideology.
February 15, 2011, 12:59 pmAllan Walstad says:
I’m saying that there is indeed a question about the legitimacy of coercion, and the fact that there are elections and the wheels of power turn does not by itself answer that question. Referring to “my representatives” simply begs the question. What if I don’t consider them “mine?” What if I question their right to decide how resources that I earned, that belong to me, will be allocated — indeed, to intervene and meddle in every aspect of my life?
The question for me is how individuals and families can function. “Nation” might be just a reference to all the individuals and their activities within some boundaries, but more often it comes across to me as little more than a rhetorical vehicle for legitimizing collectivism. “Nation,” as in “nationalism,” has of course been one of the most profoundly destructive concepts in modern history.
What you are referring to is a systematic robbing and coercing of people in order to meet the desires of others. I don’t see the legitimacy of that, cloaked or not in the trappings of democratic government. There’s another problem for you, which is what happens if the broader economic effects of such interference in people’s economic activities decreases the rate of growth of the “economy?” Even a small drag on economic growth will, over few generations, make people at large generally worse off.
February 15, 2011, 1:00 pmAllan Walstad says:
Interesting. Thanks for the tip.
February 15, 2011, 1:02 pmNick says:
What if, instead of “the government,” a single actor (let’s call him, “Chuck Norris”) devises a way to avert the destruction of humanity but he needs to steal/commandeer (depending on your point of view) the resources to do so. He steals the goods with no loss of human life, and successfully saves humanity from the asteroid.
To get even more absurd, what if you yourself owned the resources but (for whatever personal or sentimental reason) preferred to die with them than give them up to save humanity? Is that morally good or morally evil? If keeping them to yourself is morally evil, then if someone stops a moral evil (i.e. stops you from keeping the resources away from the person who will use them to save humanity), is that not a stronger moral good that more than offsets the evil of stealing? If push came to shove, and Chuck Norris was willing to fight you to the death to get those resources, is it morally right to kill him, preventing humanity’s only chance at salvation, because your right to dispense with your property as you see fit is a moral good while his attempt to steal it is a moral evil?
Morality is not really about deciding right from wrong (we can all agree that angels are better than devils), it is rather about distinguishing what is right versus what is more right, and what is wrong versus what is more wrong. And viewed through that scale, it is hard to imagine anybody actually believing in a set of morals that says that Chuck Norris’ actions are wrong – that is holds a belief that it is more wrong to violate almost any property right than it is to allow humanity to perish. Someone might say that they hold this set of morals, but I doubt anyone would actually believe it, and nobody actually lives their life in such a way. Certainly if you put yourself in the shoes of the person withholding the resources, you must see that that is morally wrong – could you ever see yourself doing that?
So taxation to save the earth from an asteroid is morally good because someone who would withhold their resources from taxation for such an effort is so extremely morally evil. And so even a libertarian can agree to taxation where such taxation is being used in such as way that it is morally evil to refuse (note that this does not always include simple wealth transfers because a case can be made under several morality systems where not giving charity may not be good, but is not necessarily more evil than the effort to steal it from you).
[SV note: The view I've expressed here would equally condemn Chuck Norris, and allow you to kill Chuck Norris if he tried to steal the stuff.]
February 15, 2011, 1:04 pmAllan Walstad says:
Why, Mark? Do you really think it’s on-target, or do you just get a kick out of empty ridicule as an art form?
February 15, 2011, 1:05 pmMark Buehner says:
Is the idea that ‘the constitution is not a suicide pact’ a first principle? If so, that also answers the question (although i reject the framing to begin with).
[SV note: I would think no, because I don't think you should adopt a version of morality [note that I'm not talking about the Constitution] that would rule out suicide a priori. Why can’t suicide sometimes be morally required?]
February 15, 2011, 1:07 pmSimon says:
How about a very simple, very common instance of public spending that takes place every year? Throughout the West, and in other arid climates, firefighters often have to suppress wildfires that threaten both public woodlands and private property (esp. in California). Those fires are sometimes generated by natural phenomena like lightning, and sometimes by deliberate or accidental human action. But the cause (and thus the moral valence) of the inferno generally cannot be determined until after the fire has been extinguished. Are public firefighters morally permissible under this philosophy? And may they fight both natural and man-made blazes?
February 15, 2011, 1:10 pmgooners says:
It is interesting the comments from people who have been insisting someone must explain why the federal government can’t make us eat broccoli, but want to hand-wave away the asteroid with a “this is ridiculous”. An asteroid is not in any way what the Founders were thinking of when they wrote about “common defense”, it is a natural occurrence. One that could potentially kill millions of Americans – like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. If defending against the asteroid is ok, where is the line that the federal government cannot cross to save lives from natural threats?
And for those who say an amendment would “easily pass”, can I direct your attention to Bobby Jindal scoffing at “something called ‘volcano monitoring’”, and Jim Inhofe’s stubbornness on global warming? Look at the reported asteroid threats now – there is always a percent chance attached like there is in much of science. How high does the likelihood of a strike have to be? How will you know the asteroid isn’t “just a religion of the Left to scare people into accepting their CommieNazi control of our personal lives”?
February 15, 2011, 1:13 pmarch1 says:
Sasha,
You’re right to be tentative, because you’re painting yourself into a manifestly ridiculous corner (an untaxed earth, in ruins). And if you were to settle on the position that
“…saying ‘the philosophy is wrong’ is different from saying ‘the philosophy is right but I refuse to follow it now.’”,
you would simply be sidestepping the issue by effectively declaring as out-of-scope the hard questions (at least, this hard question). That may decrease your discomfort, but it doesn’t shed much light on the real principles by which you believe we should operate.
A better way out may be pointed to by yankee’s comment:
I think there’s an important suppressed premise here, which is that stuff that’s presumptively immoral becomes moral only if the result is to protect other rights to a greater extent. Your position seems to be that no other considerations can ever justify rights violations. But why should we be willing to accept that premise? Why can’t arbitrarily horrendous consequences (the end of human life) justify arbitrarily small rights violations (a tiny increase in taxes)?
Can we hear your take on this?
[SV note: I have two points at the moment.
First, I'm not a utilitarian, and I don't believe in aggregating utility, say. So I'm not so comfortable with talking about the aggregate horrendousness of an event. That's not a strong argument, I recognize, because my rights-consequentialist view does allow me to aggregate rights violations. I do need to say something like "this taxation is O.K. because you protected rights to a greater extent than the rights you violated...", so I have to believe in aggregating rights violations; but I think one's moral sense can handle this, i.e., one can look at two states of the world and judge which of them has "less" rights violation.
Second, my view allows you to do moral wrongs for the sake of doing some moral rights (i.e. preventing other moral wrongs). That could already be said to diminish the concept of rights -- no longer are they inviolable; now they can be used as means to an end. But I'm O.K. with that because the end is still greater morality. So it's unacceptable to violate rights to merely advance people's interests or merely increase their utility; it requires actually protecting rights, and moreover to a greater extent than the violation you committed when you took the money by taxation.
Now it turns out my moral theory is all rights-based, and that's potentially a point where you can attack it. Maybe you can say that people's life is moral too, so that should be protected even at the cost of violating some rights via taxation. But I'm resisting that because I think there's nothing special about life, it's just something that people value, so protecting life in itself is just like increasing utility, which I've already ruled out. On the other hand, preventing murder is valuable not because life is so great (I don't believe in discouraging suicide) but rather because murder itself, as the extinguishing of the right to life, is evil.
O.K., finally, about my supposedly sidestepping the hard questions. There are two questions: (1) what is the moral way to act?, and (2) how would I act under pressure? No reason these have to be the same. If I say "stealing food to avoid starving to death is immoral but I'd do it anyway," there's no contradiction. I'm just saying I wouldn't then go around and claim I had acted justly.]
February 15, 2011, 1:17 pmzuch says:
Oh, I think you misunderestimate the John Galts of the world. Watch the movie.
Cheers,
February 15, 2011, 1:22 pmarbitrary aardvark says:
Good post. If a private entity deals with the asteroid, do they have a claim in quantum meruit against those who benefit?
I don’t think that the moral option is to do nothing. What methods of collective action are most likely to work, and do so with the least harm to a libertarian-ish social framework? Would a prize for deflecting/blowing up the asteroid be a useful way of dealing with the problem?
February 15, 2011, 1:24 pmKudos to hyena’s solution.
Personfromporlock has a point, although they’ve mixed up the constitutional and theoretical questions. Perhaps blowing up the asteroid is a necessary and proper action in order to be able to do other minimal-state kind of things. Of course the slippery slope looms when you go that far.
KevinM says:
Remember: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact” comes from a dissent. Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949). QED, it is a suicide pact.
(By the way, absurdAm, not um. Error so common it looks right.)
[SV note: I'm fairly certain the correct form is absurdum. If you have a source to the contrary, please provide. On the other hand, ad nauseam.]
February 15, 2011, 1:24 pmscalefree says:
I cannot imagine any definition of “moral” that includes the extinction of humanity. How is it better for all human life to be extinguished than some people pay more money to government than they want to IN ORDER TO SAVE HUMANITY. If this is satire, it’s one of the better exemplars of Poe’s Law that I’ve ever seen.
February 15, 2011, 1:25 pmWD says:
The obvious solution is to cut taxes, which stifle anti-asteroid innovation and create an atmosphere of uncertainty. Plus, the surviving rich will need the funds to reconstitute think tanks in the Koch underground lair, and fend off the ravenous horde.
February 15, 2011, 1:29 pmSteve says:
I still don’t get why it matters whether civilization is being wiped out by “natural” means. What I’m hearing is that if the Mongols are coming over the hill, libertarians will allow me to impose involuntary taxation on everyone to provide for the common defense. But if a pack of rabid lions is coming over the hill, sorry, no taxation, even if they’re going to eat us all. No taxation for the asteroid, either, because it’s “natural.”
I don’t really understand the theory as to why my authority to extract taxes from my fellow man hinges on whether the threat is from “natural” forces. Last I checked, humans are naturally occurring, if you want to be technical about it. What is the crucial difference between a blood-crazed Mongol (if you like, let’s hypothesize that the entire band of them fails the McNaughton test) and a man-eating lion? Why should it matter if we somehow determine that the asteroid was actually aimed at us deliberately by a malign alien species? What is the point of constructing a philosophy that turns these silly hypotheticals into game-changing distinctions?
[SV note: I've tentatively explained the difference in a comment above, see here. Briefly, it's the requirement that there be some rational agency behind it. I might be wrong about this, but it's hard for me to see how you dying of old age, say, is a rights violation.]
February 15, 2011, 1:29 pmMark Buehner says:
I think an asteroid falls quite neatly under providing for the common defense, or if you insist on an enumerated power the president has the power as commander in chief to prevent the military (and the rest of the populace) from certain destruction by means necessary and proper, just as he would have the power to move them from the path of a hurricane or quell a fire set to burn down a barracks. /silliness.
February 15, 2011, 1:33 pmMark Buehner says:
It doesn’t, i’ve never heard this formulation and have no idea why Sasha is proposing such a wrongheaded construction. Libertarians have no issue with the common defense. If you do you are essentially an anarchist (or perhaps a pacifist).
February 15, 2011, 1:35 pmDarel Finkbeiner says:
It just seems to me that there would be enough charity ( free labor/parts, etc ) to cover the needs of a Bruce Willis expedition to destroy an asteroid. Engine parts, fuel, nukes, drills, personnel, etc. could all be covered by private actors engaged in a very selfish charity to protect their own lives from a dangerous asteroid.
I don’t see how taxes even enters the equation.
February 15, 2011, 1:44 pmJames says:
Instead of having the legislatures ratify the amendment, you could use state ratifying conventions, the method used to repeal Prohibition.
February 15, 2011, 1:44 pmloki13 says:
Common defense? Hmmm…. I seem to remember something else….
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States[.]”
Yeah, it’s just the common defense. Silly me.
February 15, 2011, 1:47 pmKevinM says:
“Captain, the asteroid is approaching!”
February 15, 2011, 1:48 pm“Engage the cumbersome amendment process, Mr. Spock!”
(I’m a doctor, not a constitutional lawyer, etc. etc.)
Teh Anonymous says:
This is hardly topical at all, but for people curious about how one author handled the topic of an asteroid striking the earth (and whether private or public interests would handle it), check out Michael Flynn’s Firestar and its sequels.
February 15, 2011, 1:48 pmMarcus says:
Those are interesting examples, Mark. I’m not sure that the answer is necessarily that not enough money has been spent on either the Drug War or the War on Poverty, but rather that the monies spent have focused, and continue to do so despite all available evidence, on the wrong priorities. The money spent on interdiction, enforcement, incarceration, task forces, and the like are huge and the effort has largely proven to be a waste of time, expense, and lives. In my opinion, we have never committed sufficient time and resources towards education, rehabilitation, and those sorts of none militaristic/law enforcement avenues. Anytime money is set for these programs, it is erased before the ink is dried on the legislation. Regarding the War on Poverty, I would say that there has been as much, if not more, resources dedicated to fighting “The War on The War on Poverty” as there has ever been committed to fighting poverty. While I do not believe a war on poverty has any more chance of “complete success” as a war on terrorism, I do think there is far more that can be done to help the least among us. Especially, and I know I keep repeating myself, in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.
February 15, 2011, 1:50 pmPandabear says:
“This does make me uncomfortable” — it should. Since you did the math right, it should also make you reevaluate your moral premise, which is based on a naive definition of “freedom.” Free to starve, free to die of preventable disease …
February 15, 2011, 1:51 pmgooners says:
What if it isn’t the rest of the population? What if it is only a percentage? What is the threshold for that percentage? The constitution may not be a suicide pact, but if I’m on the west coast and the asteroid is heading for the east coast, where’s my suicide?
February 15, 2011, 1:51 pmKatahdin says:
I could certainly see the founders supporting taxation or conscription to avert natural disasters: ‘OK, every able bodied man down by the levee to fill sandbags’ or ‘everyone grab a bucket for the bucket brigade before the whole town burns’. But defending against heart disease isn’t ‘the common defense’; you defend against heart disease by eating right and exercising. Unless you want mandated exercise sessions and mandated diet, people are going to be able to put themselves at risk for heart disease.
The ‘Health Care Mandate’ isn’t a ‘Health Mandate’; it’s about mandating who pays for care. Health related ‘common defense’ situations would be mandating sewer systems, quarantine, or mandatory vaccination.
February 15, 2011, 1:53 pmMark Buehner says:
Do we need to post the entire constitution? What’s your point? Clearly those are the fundamental reasons government is granted its enumerated powers. If the world is destroyed you can’t fulfill any of your responsibilities. There is no issue with either congress taxing to destroy an asteroid or the president destroying it. The argument that there is, or would be under even the strictest constructionist interpretation, is abjectly wrong.
That doesn’t stretch to “we’re too fat and unhealthy, hence government can do whatever the hell it wants to fix us”.
February 15, 2011, 1:53 pmTed says:
I second this request.
[SV note: I fulfill the request, both in the original post and in my respect to Adam above, where I note my opposition to patents.]
February 15, 2011, 1:54 pmMark Buehner says:
Immaterial. Does the president have the authority to put out a fire threatening a single naval base? Of course he does. Half the country clearly qualifies.
February 15, 2011, 1:55 pmloki13 says:
Nope. States have different rules for their conventions. TO use Florida as an example again (since that is one you want to sidestep), the governor calls an election 5-10 months after submission (and up to 45 days after that depending on when the governor calls it). First meeting is held two Tuesdays after the election. There is no deadline for a decision.
So, again, we’re looking at a best-base scenario of six months. In Florida. Other states may take longer.
But why let facts get in the way of assertions? :)
February 15, 2011, 1:57 pmRyan Vann says:
“I don’t think that the moral option is to do nothing. What methods of collective action are most likely to work, and do so with the least harm to a libertarian-ish social framework? Would a prize for deflecting/blowing up the asteroid be a useful way of dealing with the problem?
Kudos to hyena’s solution.”
Morals are a non-factor in my estimation.
As for a collective action solution, I suppsoe it would work out like this. Those who have the highest valuation of life (the rich) are going to be more inclined to deflect the asteroid, and will probably do so. In essence, it would be paid for in a similar way governments finance these sorts of things, with a small population of folks paying for it.
Now, of course people are going to drone on about free riders, but a government tax system still doesn’t really address this paper problem, as there are non tax payers, not to mention other nations that might not be involved in the deflection.
February 15, 2011, 1:58 pmNo Theory of Jurisprudence says:
Practically speaking, in the face of a real, accepted existential threat, there will probably not be much discussion of rights. In most instances, people who stand in the way of your existence are not debated, but murdered.
February 15, 2011, 1:59 pmzuch says:
It’s not the “moral argument”. It’s the libertarian argument.
Cheers,
February 15, 2011, 1:59 pmGuy says:
Moral quandary averted!
With the suitable substitution for “Constitution”, of course.
February 15, 2011, 2:00 pmgooners says:
So could I, but they did neglect to provide for it in the constitution. Kind of like how I could see (some of) them supporting a national bank, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the constitution they had just written.
Not talking about what I want, I’m talking about what the constitution allows. With relation to health care, it is the “It would be great for the government to provide health care coverage for everyone, but that darned constitution just won’t let us” argument.
February 15, 2011, 2:01 pmloki13 says:
My point was your above post was silliness (in a good way!). First, you appeal to common defense… which is great, but people always read that into the Constitution while forgetting the companion “general welfare.” Then you talk about the executive’s enumerated powers in conjunction with the necessary and proper clause.
Heh.
Sometimes, the Constitution is like a Rorschach test. But you’re right- I didn’t have a substantive point, I was just enjoying highlighting your points.
February 15, 2011, 2:02 pmgooners says:
And the other half?
February 15, 2011, 2:02 pmanguslander says:
One other thing I just noticed I neglected to mention: a third problem with a conception of morality on which morality can have horrific implications is that it cannot explain why we should care about, or accept, morality in the first place. If morality requires us to allow the extinction of humanity then we should not commit to living in accordance with morality. We should, in other words, be immoral, because the costs to fellow humans (and ourselves) of being moral are too high.
This is metaethically bankrupt; if your theory implies that there is a combination of decisive altruistic and selfish reasons to disregard morality then your theory has robbed morality of any plausible source of normativity. There are disputes over what kind of normativity morality has, but nobody disputes that normativity in some sense is a distinctive characteristic of it.
[SV note: Not sure I agree, just like the idea that we're all sinners, and that no one can lead a sinless life, doesn't invalidate certain religious notions of sin. You can believe in ideals even while recognizing that you're not psychologically strong enough to live up to them all the time.]
February 15, 2011, 2:02 pmNo Theory of Jurisprudence says:
They might the instant it becomes apparent to some sufficiently sized group that private donations will not stop the asteroid. This group will then rob you, and justifiably so.
February 15, 2011, 2:04 pmMark Buehner says:
Also qualifies.
February 15, 2011, 2:04 pmEvan says:
I don’t understand why this moral dimension to an issue of state/interstate interest. The actors in this situation are not moral actors; they are states. It seems to me that the correct yardstick to use is legitimacy: is taking everyone’s money through taxation to prevent/mitigate an asteroid strike a legitimate use of a state’s authority? Presuming that such a decision is enacted through the proper channels (e.g. passed through both houses of Congress and signed by the President), I would say it is.
Is it immoral to confiscate the property of another entity? Probably in general, but we created states to do exactly that.
February 15, 2011, 2:12 pmRyan Vann says:
“They might the instant it becomes apparent to some sufficiently sized group that private donations will not stop the asteroid. This group will then rob you, and justifiably so.”
And if that money is still not sufficient, or there was no actual asteroid? What is your construction of justification?
February 15, 2011, 2:13 pmDavid Friedman says:
I cannot resist the temptation to put in a claim of priority on this particular issue. See p. 175 of the second edition of my Machinery of Freedom.
[SV note: In fact, David, I think Bryan Caplan may have said exactly that when he did his reductio ad absurdum, something like "David Friedman rebuts that view in Machinery of Freedom with his asteroid hypo...."]
February 15, 2011, 2:14 pmzuch says:
Quite true. The second doesn’t make any sense. ;-)
Cheers,
February 15, 2011, 2:16 pmEorr says:
This highlights the difference between classic utilitarianism and a Kantian categorical imperative that posits that a moral action is moral if the rules one creates to decide are moral if everyone else also adopted that rule.
February 15, 2011, 2:17 pmA Conservative Teacher says:
An asteroid is an invasion of rock/ice/etc from outer space, and as such, the US Government is obligated to protect the states from such an invasion under Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution. Thus it is Constitutional for the US government to do everything it its power to defend the United States from the imminent threat of asteroid impact. Or is this all just a silly argument?
February 15, 2011, 2:23 pmNo Theory of Jurisprudence says:
Then the thievery would not have been justified, and something horrible should happen to the thieves.
My construction of justification is that I would approve, which is the same construction of justification employed by everyone, everywhere, in the entire history of the world.
February 15, 2011, 2:32 pmloki13 says:
I think that this issue gets to the core of the libertarian problem; the holding on to a theory of first principles regardless of the actual real-world results. In part, I blame classical economics and homo economcus- the idea that we are rational human beings that perfectly respond to incentives and information, an idea which has been disproven time and again (although this can be useful in the aggregate).
While it pains me to make the comparison, I most easily compare libertarians to communists. Both of them come from an a movement in economics. Both of them prefer their theories to actual facts. And both of them take one aspect of human nature and exalt it while ignoring the other (equally important) aspect of human nature. For communists, it is the belief that the individual doesn’t matter- we are a group. For the libertarians, it is the idea that the individual is the only thing that matters, forgetting that humans are social animals, and that from the dawn of time, we have arranged ourselves in groups of various types (is it any surprise that ancient societies had, as a form of punishment, a shunning or ostracizing from the group). There is a delicate balance that goes on between the rights of the individual and the advancement of the group, one that is constantly being fought and refined, but while there is this alway-present tension, any philosophy that seeks to ignore one to exalt the other is doomed to failure.
That is why communists could never grapple with simple questions like, “What incentive would a person have to make anything if he doesn’t see the fruit of his labors?” while a libertarian ties himself into knots contemplating a simple question like, “Why shouldn’t humanity collectively try to stop a meteor that will doom us all?”
Personally, despite the rhetoric of the “communism” and “socialism” of America, if anything, I think we lack too many of the community binds that keep us together. Not because government has crowded out other collective institutions, but because we have become so individualized that every decision becomes “what’s in it for me?” We are hard-wired to sense unfairness, and to behave in a group; when we lose those ties, we all suffer.
February 15, 2011, 2:34 pmPatty Shundynide says:
But see Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144, 160 (1963) (majority opinion of Goldberg, J.) (“while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.”).
Your inference is a non sequitur.
As opposed to “absurdam” — an uncommon error.
February 15, 2011, 2:36 pmGuy says:
Shh! It’s a secret!
February 15, 2011, 2:36 pmAnthony says:
Well, I have some doubts about your theory of human behavior, but even if true, at that point the people who have spent the money have the argument ‘well, we saved your property at our expense, and therefore we deserve recompense’.
February 15, 2011, 2:37 pmeyelessgame says:
One of the reasons I am a liberal and not a libertarian is precisely this: I believe libertarian philosophy is admirable in establishing preferred, mutually beneficial behavior among rational actors in a peer relationship.
But it fails, utterly, when confronted with any entity that is not a rational actor – be that entity microbial, environmental, psychological, historical, developmental, evolutionary, or emergent.
As such, it becomes armchair, ivory-tower, theoretical philosophizing, whose closest analogues are Aristotelian physics, Marxist fantasies, and Harold Hill’s music instruction.
February 15, 2011, 2:38 pmAllan Walstad says:
Stealing the rifle to stop the mass murderer? I was thinking of quoting it earlier. Great book, by the way. I have two copies on my shelf.
February 15, 2011, 2:43 pmTemporal Recidivist says:
The utter detachment of libertarianism from reality is neatly encapsulated in this post and the subsequent discussion.
Libertarianism is the fiction that every man is an island totally unmoored from any connection, real, personal, political, financial, or social. What matters is only self.
Logically, true libertarianism can exist only in death.
February 15, 2011, 2:47 pmMark Buehner says:
It doesn’t, because this entire conversation is a strawman. And a strange one. There is nothing in libertarian principle that denies collection action against imminent danger to the civilization, and aside from this post itself i’d love to see some scholarship proving otherwise.
Libertarianism does not claim government is unnecessary! To the contrary, there are areas where the government is vital, and defending the state from outside destruction is numero uno on that list. This is a conversation appropriate to anarchists, who actually believe in an absence of government.
[SV note: Oh but there is a lot of libertarian principle against collective action -- it's called anarcho-capitalists, as exemplified by the Murray Rothbard tradition. Now I'm no anarchist -- I believe in government against against invaders, criminals, defrauders, etc.; my point in the post is just that all those guys are straight-up rights violators, as opposed to an asteroid. But anyway, I don't think it's correct to say the position against collective action is supported by no scholarship; there's a lot of scholarship along those lines, even if you (and I) disagree with it, and even if you also disagree with my version.]
February 15, 2011, 2:54 pmchris says:
gooners at 1:13 makes a good point: the asteroid is already here, it’s called “global warming”. And some people are quite loudly refusing to contribute to stopping it, because they prefer to deny its existence, believe it will miss, believe the effects won’t be that bad… easy to dismiss sea level rising when you live in Oklahoma. (Or live in DC and represent Oklahoma.)
February 15, 2011, 2:56 pmShark says:
I think this is the posting where libertarianism did this for me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDthMGtZKa4
February 15, 2011, 2:57 pmkrs says:
It showed up in a majority opinion shortly thereafter. American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 US 382, 409 (1950), and subsequent opinions have reaffirmed that the Constitution (or at least the Bill of Rights) is not a suicide pact. See, e.g., Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144, 159 (1963) (under the heading “basic principles”); Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U.S. 500, 509 (1964); Haig v. Agee, 453 U.S. 280, 310 (1984).
It may that the Constitution was briefly a suicide pact or that there are still Justices who believe that it is, but I think the current state of precedent is that it is not.
February 15, 2011, 2:58 pmTed says:
Some hypos just really go beyond my imagination. Kill Chuck Norris in a fight? Really?
February 15, 2011, 3:00 pmAllan Walstad says:
Loki, it’s a problem for any philosophy that actually has principles, to deal with challenges and hard cases. I credit the strict libertarians with the intellectual honesty and fortitude to try to do that, rather than just make things up as they go along. As for classical economics and homo economicus, what you are doing is broad-brushing a very diverse group of people with a trite and well-worn prejudice. The staunchest and most principled supporters of liberty among economists, namely, the Austrians, have always criticized the perfect-knowledge, perfect-reasoning caricature that to some extent does populate the mathematicized econ mainstream, with its fetish for equilibrium models.
Ok, there’s only so much I can try to sort out at any one time.
February 15, 2011, 3:02 pmloki13 says:
I am always in favor of actual scholarship (as opposed to law review scholarship… ahem) in favor of libertarianism. Instead, I only see assertions of counterfactuals. Kind of like communism. You know- when you point out that communism fails in the real world, you always hear (from true believers) that it just wasn’t done right!
When we hear about libertarian failures, such as problems caused by a lack of regulation, the retort is always that the real failure was that, somehow, somewhere, there was some other regulation that was really the problem. And this can never be falsified, because any time things blow up due to lack of regulation, there will always be a government that the libertarians can point to and say, “yeah, there was too much of it.”
It’s amazing- the United States has had a pretty good run since 1920. Yet all we here is how everything has gone downhill. Or it would have been better if we hadn’t done X, Y, and Z.
It’s like the “voting with your feet” that Prof. Somin always brings up. Sure- that would be great. But where’s the empirical studies that indicate that this is what people *really do*?
February 15, 2011, 3:04 pmGramarye says:
If following a libertarian philosophy would naturally demand of the government that it stand by and allow the people whose responsibility it is to defend die to the last man, simply because that civilizational extinction was not caused by other moral agents, then yes, we have moved past the realm of “the philosophy is right, but I refuse to follow it now.” We are emphatically within the realm of “the philosophy is wrong.”
Of course, to assert that, I guess I have to be making a different assumption from Sasha about what makes a political, economic, and/or social philosophy right. However, one of the most common–and, I would argue, the most compelling–justifications for libertarian thought is the intuition that a system in which too many individual choices are constrained or coerced by government is unlikely to yield greater human happiness than a more collective decision-making system.
An unexamined assumption of Sasha’s argument seems to be that even if libertarian principles could be shown (even in just a particular case, since we’re dealing with a hypothetical in which that case does in fact materialize) to result in death and misery beyond anything the Soviet Union ever accomplished, it would still be correct to follow that philosophy. The obvious (rhetorical) question that comes to mind in response is: Why?! What basis can any moral philosophy assert–other than the existence of a sentient supernatural entity that commands one to accept otherwise-preventable extinction as natural–to demand such self-destructive allegiance? I certainly see none.
Thus, either libertarianism is not actually as Sasha has set it forth in the above argument, or “the philosophy is wrong.”
So my question to Sasha is this, very simply:
If libertarianism is what you describe, then why should anyone choose be a libertarian?
[SV note: It's much like "Why should anyone choose to be, say, a Catholic, or Orthodox Jew, given all the hard stuff those religions make you do?" Well, it's not exactly a matter of pure choice. If you think the principles are correct, then it's the correct system. You don't have to choose to follow the system, but there is an impassable leap between "I couldn't get myself to do that in real life" and "The philosophy is incorrect." The obvious "middle ground" is "I couldn't get myself to do that in real life, which means that sadly I'm not moral enough." This might be true without making the philosophy wrong. Note that I myself would probably support an asteroid relief plan, but maybe that would just be me not having the fortitude to follow through with my convictions.]
February 15, 2011, 3:05 pmDice says:
Taxation as a means to finance those things which are considered to be legitimate functions of government in libertarian terms (e.g. national defense, enforcement of contracts, protection of personals from bodily attack by criminals), in my understanding, isn’t something that is considered to be “morally justified.” It’s more of a “if we don’t have these minimal things, all society goes to hell and everything sucks for everyone in a huge way, so we have to hold our nose and allow taxation for these few minimal items” situation.
Wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to imminent destruction of the earth by asteroid strike?
Free rider concerns and concerns of collective action failure suggest this isn’t something that private enterprise is best placed to address. It looks like a pretty obvious public good to me.
Would you feel better if Bug-Eyed Monsters targeted the asteroid at us? Although the outcome is the same either way, somehow whether the government gets involved would be justified in one situation but not in the other? That’s just weird.
February 15, 2011, 3:06 pmRyan Vann says:
I should rephrase my question, as I might have implied a pretense of fraud. What if the asteroid wasn’t actually a threat after the fact, but was perceived to be before the fact?
And if someone disapproves?
February 15, 2011, 3:06 pmAllan Walstad says:
Are you denying that anarcho-capitalists are libertarians?
February 15, 2011, 3:07 pmAxel Edgren says:
It would appear I still don’t have a single reason to not hold American libertarians in total contempt. Thanks for making life so easy for me, Sasha.
[SV note: Note, though, that I probably speak for very few, if any, libertarians. There are anarcho-capitalists who would agree with me on the asteroid, but they would go further and not have government intervene in WW2, for instance, whereas I would favor that.]
February 15, 2011, 3:09 pmloki13 says:
Perhaps. I view it more like a philosophy that denies the complexities that are inherent in human nature, like communism.
To put it more succinctly- let us say your philosophy is a simple one “Do not kill.” It is very easy to apply. But you either find it doesn’t work so well in the real world (self-defense, just war, etc.) or you modify it. And keep modifying it. You modify your philosophy to fit the real world, not the real world to fit your philosophy. Put another way, one consistent pacifist marooned on an island of cannibals will be a tasty, consistent, meal.
That’s why I can accept most conservative economic positions (I do enjoy Milton Friedman), while think libertarianism is a crock. But that’s just me. :)
February 15, 2011, 3:10 pmMark Buehner says:
Similar to when regulation fails and we hear that there simply wasn’t enough of it, as opposed to some failing in the nature of layer after layer of unaccountable bureaucracy. Maybe this is a failing of any system eh? And again- you are using the straw man that ‘no regulation’ is the libertarian ideal, as opposed to limited and local regulation.
February 15, 2011, 3:13 pmMark Buehner says:
They would appear to be anarchists.
February 15, 2011, 3:14 pmRyan Vann says:
This thread sure isn’t short on comedy.
February 15, 2011, 3:18 pmPlodding Blockhead says:
Even accepting Sasha’s premises that (a) taxation is a violation of a right, and (b) a violation of a right can be moral only if it leads to a greater protection of rights, there is a missing premise: that no person ever has a right to demand the aid of others. If there is ever the moral right to demand aid (or if it is ever immoral to refuse to render aid, whether demanded or not), then the argument collapses. I expect that Sasha would argue that there is no such right; indeed, based on his post and his own comments above, I would expect Sasha to reject any notion of duty other the duty to avoid affirmative acts that violate the rights of others.
I certainly don’t agree with that position as a matter of morality (or political philosophy, but we can keep that separate). I say it’s immoral to stand idly by while a man drowns. To be consistent, I think Sasha has to say that it isn’t.
[SV note: Correct.]
February 15, 2011, 3:18 pmAllan Walstad says:
How high a likelihood of how big a strike, right? We do have some info on that. For starters, human civilization has existed for thousands of years now without being destroyed by an asteroid. The really large, civilization-threatening impacts are at least millions of years apart. This is why I think we should be careful to distinguish between actually discovering an asteroid on a collision course versus Chicken-Little foot-in-the-door excuses for expanding government coercion.
February 15, 2011, 3:19 pmMark Field says:
Both. I admire great snark, no matter its victim, and like most great snark there’s enough truth in it to sting.
February 15, 2011, 3:27 pmMark Buehner says:
I wouldn’t put it that way. There is a given probability that we get hit by an asteroid. Its not some periodic function of the solar system, its probability. Our odds of getting hit tomorrow are essentially identical to being hit one million years from today. The odds of getting hit by a planet killer in a given year are very small, but the bigger a frame of time you consider the more certain the hit becomes.
February 15, 2011, 3:28 pmloki13 says:
No. That’s just a dodge. In other words, there is something just as wrong with someone who says that regulation will solve any problem as there is with someone who says that regulation is the cause of all problems.
And your last sentence doesn’t make any sense- first, local regulation has nothing to do with libertarianism- that’s federalism. Those are two different concepts. A completely central government can be libertarian, whereas a federalized system where each locality used their police powers to the max would hardly be libertarian (most of what we now treasure as the rights we have are because of the intrusion of the Federal Government via the civil war).
Second, no regulation is a libertarian ideal. There are some disputes between libertarians as to the the extent (to correct market inefficiencies, to solve free rider problems, for the common defense etc.) but these are akin to the Bolshevik/Menshevik debates – more an argument over who is the true Scotsmen. What is inarguable is that they seek no regulation (except for those few regulations they deem to be beneficial).
February 15, 2011, 3:29 pmRyan Vann says:
This is only compounded by the potentiality that, even if there is a 100% certainty of impact, accumulating enough money to stack dollars into space to act as a buffer still might do nothing to cushion the blow.
February 15, 2011, 3:30 pmAllan Walstad says:
Different groups call themselves anarchists. I’m asking specifically, are you denying that the anarcho-capitalists are libertarians? Or do you not even know? Murray Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist. David Friedman, who commented briefly on this thread a little while ago, was known to me as an anarcho-capitalist, though he may have since changed his mind, and I’ll leave it to him if he chooses, to make any distinctions as far as his position is concerned. But my point is, if you are going to make confident pronouncements about what libertarianism is or isn’t, what it says or doesn’t say, you ought to have some knowledge of that tradition and its varieties.
February 15, 2011, 3:32 pmMark Buehner says:
Just as no war is an ideal, no sickness an idea, no crime an ideal. So what? If one of the ideals of liberalism is the elimination of poverty, does it follow that liberals don’t believe in anti-poverty programs? That’s nonsensical. We live in an imperfect world, libertarians don’t deny that.
February 15, 2011, 3:32 pmAllan Walstad says:
Well, that’s pretty disappointing, Mark.
February 15, 2011, 3:35 pmJesse-Az says:
How come we always use Argumentum Absurdum to vilify Libertarian talking points, when it can be used to vilify any political theory?
We could save thousands of lives a year with mandatory drug testing, by making everybody drive 5 mph, banning swimming pools. Would those of you arguing the asteroid theory be willing to give up all your rights to save lives? It’s the same argument, just in the opposite direction.
February 15, 2011, 3:38 pmloki13 says:
Well, seeing as the above post is about one libertarian’s struggle to reconcile his beliefs with the idea of raising taxes to prevent the annihilation of the human species, I have to wonder. :)
February 15, 2011, 3:39 pmyguy says:
The conclusion does not appear to follow from the stated premise. More importantly, though, your claim that taxation is involuntary is decidedly problematic, seeing under the Constitution some power of taxation is retained by Congress by the acquiescence of 3/4 of the states; and while there is a minority of citizens who pay reasonable taxes involuntarily, I don’t see how they can argue that such taxes are unjust without either proposing a tax-free method of funding government or exposing themselves as thieves at heart.
I don’t think it’s a hard question at all. There can’t be a violation of rights without an intentional violator, and an asteroid doesn’t qualify as such.
But that doesn’t matter, because the Constitution was not adopted only to prevent the violation of rights, but also, among other things, to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”; and since those blessings cannot be had by a country populated by nothing but corpses, it is self-evident that taking reasonable measures to avoid such a catastrophe is a legitimate function of the federal government.
[SV note: As long as one person doesn't want to pay taxes, then taxation is involuntary for that guy. It's not very complicated. That doesn't mean that taxation is unjustified: in fact (unlike anarcho-capitalists), I favor all sorts of government action, funded by taxes, to protect people's rights! But I don't see how you can say that taxation is voluntary just because most people pay voluntarily (and even then, some of them pay because they're afraid of being arrested if they don't do so).
Second, nothing about my argument relates to constitutionality. I think it's unquestionably true that the federal government has the power to tax. That's irrelevant to my point, which is about the morality of taxation.]
February 15, 2011, 3:50 pmyguy says:
It is voluntary nevertheless, as long as you are free to emigrate.
[SV note: Wow, if the government decides to arrest you and kill you, then you're voluntarily submitting yourself to be arrested and killed because you haven't emigrated? Is everything the government does to you voluntary on your part as long as you're free to emigrate?]
February 15, 2011, 4:03 pmOPISO » Libertarianism and Asteroid Defense says:
[...] Sasha Volokh’s post arguing that his version of libertarianism might not allow government spending to provide for asteroid defense has drawn predictable howls of outrage, including Brad DeLong’s claim that it proves that “libertarians are completely insane.” [...]
February 15, 2011, 4:05 pmPender says:
I have to say, this strikes me as very weird on two levels.
First, why on earth would one cling to a system of morality that produces counterintuitive results? It’s internally consistent, but so would be an axiom that murder is immoral only during even-numbered calendar days. If your friend told you that he sincerely ascribed to that belief, even though he agreed that it was totally counterintuitive that murder should be acceptable on the odd days, the obvious question is, okay, why do you believe that then? I guess Sasha’s answer would be that the libertarian axioms GENERALLY produce intuitive results, and are better enough than competing theories that he is willing to tolerate an occasional wacky result, but I guess I would wonder why he wouldn’t come up with another axiom to patch the weirdness — e.g., the government should protect only against invasion of personal rights EXCEPT in cases of widespread cataclysmic devastation — something along those lines.
Second, I always thought that libertarians agreed that public goods (i.e. non-excludable and non-rivalrous goods) should indeed be provided by the government. But Sasha’s belief system seems to suggest that it’s okay to defend against a potential cataclysm ONLY IF the force behind the cataclysm is sentient (and therefore presumably capable of violating people’s rights).
[SV note: You're unaware of the range of libertarian thought. Anarcho-capitalists, for instance, a la Murray Rothbard, think government should do nothing at all, regardless of whether there are public goods. Most "mainstream" libertarians do believe in public goods, it's true. But there's a fairly straightforward libertarian deontological tradition that leads straight to anarcho-capitalism. I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, by the way, because I do favor government provision of military, police, justice system, etc., but I'm just saying that it's incorrect to say libertarians agree on public goods.
Finally, "producing intuitive results" isn't the test for a moral system. In fact, part of the value of thinking philosophically is that sometimes you'll discover things that turn out to be true even if you couldn't have gotten there intuitively. Or else why not just rely on intuition and have done with it? Sometimes you're so wedded to a particular result that philosophical premises must be incorrect if they lead to that result; sometimes you're so wedded to some premises that whatever follows must follow even if it's counterintuitive. And sometimes you have results that are usually intuitive but not always, and "patching" them would require changing the premises so much that they wouldn't be attractive premises anymore. It's not just a single test of intuitiveness.]
February 15, 2011, 4:13 pmjbarntt says:
I haven’t read any of the comments, so it’s likely someone else has made a similar response.
The issue seems to be: How would a libertarian government deal with the possibility of an asteroid strike. I will assume that the form of government, and its underlying philosophy is American. I will also assume that the said strike would be devastating.
I would guess that out government was most libertarian from 1801-1817, with Jefferson and then Madison in the White house, and with a sympathetic Congress.
The issue of spending money would then be a question of fact: What is the probability of an asteroid impact ?
Assume it is enough to worry about, then it seems to me, the general welfare clause and the common defense clause operate. I would assume that even a strong libertarian would allow for this.
The problem could be that the threat is real but minor, and the government is using it to grab power.
The problem would be solved in one of two ways, at the ballot box, or via revolution.
This is not an easy question.
[SV note: Note that the original post said the asteroid plan would be clearly constitutional. The philosophical view I stated has nothing to do with the constitution.]
February 15, 2011, 4:17 pmRyan Vann says:
Funny everyone wants to bring up the constitution, as if the world = USA. I suppsoe this hypothetical meteor would only hit and effect the US?
February 15, 2011, 4:30 pmJohn says:
By Volokh’s standard, then, the government isn’t allowed to raise taxes to do things like fight brush fires, build flood-levies, shoot rabid dogs, engage in control of epidemic disease, and so forth?
I find it astonishing that anyone could actually believe this. If we accept the premise that libertarian principles require the outcome Volokh is suggesting here, isn’t that prima facie evidence that libertarian principles are wrong? At the very least, doesn’t this reductio demonstrate that Volokh’s version of libertarian principles clearly has pretty fundamental flaws?
February 15, 2011, 4:36 pmNickM says:
Sasha separates rights loss from rights violation for purposes of determining what government may morally take property to prevent. This is not a feature of libertarian theory; it is a feature of his moral theory.
Nick
[SV note: Could you please elaborate? You have what seems to be an interesting point.]
February 15, 2011, 4:42 pmNick says:
No wonder you are troubled. I am as much of a moral relativist as the next guy, but a system of morals that, in struggling to find a balance between two wrongs, says that it is more good/less evil to protect property than it is to steal, in every possible contingency, even when billions of lives are on the line, is abhorrent.
If this brand of libertarianism sets the balance between property rights versus human life in excess of $1 > 6 billion people, then I have no compunctions judging it as an evil moral system. As I said, I’ll accept moral relativism to an extent and that different people can have different acceptable “exchange rates,” but this level of exchange is evil – really really evil. It is apropos to call this view as proposed like end of the world Armageddon evil.
[SV note: Moral relativism??? I don't know where that's coming from. I'm a moral absolutist, not a moral relativist.]
February 15, 2011, 5:04 pmPender says:
What exactly IS the test for a moral system? How does one decide to believe one axiomatic system rather than another if not by intuition?
February 15, 2011, 5:20 pmarch1 says:
SV:
Now it turns out my moral theory is all rights-based, and that’s potentially a point where you can attack it. Maybe you can say that people’s life is moral too, so that should be protected even at the cost of violating some rights via taxation. But I’m resisting that because I think there’s nothing special about life, it’s just something that people value, so protecting life in itself is just like increasing utility, which I’ve already ruled out. On the other hand, preventing murder is valuable not because life is so great (I don’t believe in discouraging suicide) but rather because murder itself, as the extinguishing of the right to life, is evil.
Aside: Sasha, Though I don’t like where it’s taking you at the moment, I appreciate your honest and clear argumentation style.
Are you trying to minimize rights violations as an end in itself, or as a means to the end of maximizing rights, or as a means to some other end?
If as an end in itself: Does this mean you’d prefer a universe forever devoid of life to one (however full of prosperous, rights-enjoying intelligences) in which there occurred a single, arbitrarily venial, rights violation? Really?
If as a means to the end of maximizing rights: How do you hope to get a positive score at this if everyone’s dead?
If as a means to some other end: What’s this other end, and how is it that the “asteroid demolishes earth” scenario scores better (relative to that end) than the “tax levied but earth unscathed” scenario?
February 15, 2011, 5:25 pmSasha Volokh says:
arch1: I think it’s minimizing rights as an end in itself.
Now about your hypo: Does this mean you’d prefer a universe forever devoid of life to one (however full of prosperous, rights-enjoying intelligences) in which there occurred a single, arbitrarily venial, rights violation?
Well, I’m not sure what “preference” would do here. For instance, consider a world of perfectly rights-respecting, flourishing people. No rights violations there. Now consider the Moon. There’s no immorality going on in either place. So from my moral perspective, those are equivalent.
So introduce a tiny rights violation in the first world, and yes, it does follow that there’s less rights violation on the Moon. But what does it mean to say I “prefer” it? I wouldn’t do anything to privilege the Moon. If I could push a button and make that world go out of existence, I wouldn’t do it, because that would involve snuffing out all those lives, which would itself be a rights violation. So suppose I did say I preferred the Moon, what would that entail?
February 15, 2011, 5:35 pmReal American says:
Of course, the govt solution to stopping the asteroid will probably include building more high speed rail, subsidizing hybrid vehicles and ethanol, banning incandescent light bulbs, and a carbon trading scheme. After trillions of wasted dollars, we’ll learn there was no asteroid in the first place – probably a spec of dust on the telescope.
February 15, 2011, 5:55 pmarch1 says:
Sasha,
Let’s operationalize the preference question as follows (I’m staying at the level of universes to keep things simple and also to try to understand how thoroughgoing your approach really is):
The evil alien who kidnapped you convinces you that in 60 seconds, our universe (assumed unique) will be replaced by one of two new universes depending on which of two buttons you push:
Blue button (or neither, or both, or if you try any funny stuff) – a universe forever devoid of life
Red button – a universe teeming with flourishing intelligent life in which there occurs a single minor rights violation.
Which button do you push? (45 seconds…?-)
February 15, 2011, 6:01 pmNo Theory of Jurisprudence says:
It might be the case that the theft was still justified (Man pulls out unloaded gun and waves it at police, they shoot him, justified.) Then again, it might not.
If the threat is existential, what difference would that make?
February 15, 2011, 6:04 pmjbarntt says:
Prof. Volokh,
To my post of Feb. 15, at 4:17 PM, you replied:
[SV note: Note that the original post said the asteroid plan would be clearly constitutional. The philosophical view I stated has nothing to do with the constitution.]
Let us leave aside the constitution, the issue is then the individual right not to be taxed, (i.e., taking what is mine by force for use by others).
You mention philosophy. In the sub field of logic, matters tend to be clear, e.g. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem is proved. It cannot be denied by a rational person.
On the other hand, the question of how best to constitute a government involves dealing with human nature, which is less subject to neat rules.
It seems to me that when we look at government, i.e., the degree and manner in which we delegate power to a small subset of us, we can look at it from a philosophical view, but the manner that we look at the issue must account for human nature.
I’m sure you understand this, I’m not so clear as to your objection to my post. Philosophy is a broad subject, and political philosophy is inherently different from logic.
A certain degree of pragmaticism is required in politics that is irrelevant in logic. Libertarianism is in the realm of political philosophy. It is bound by logic, but there is more to it, otherwise it is a waste of time.
February 15, 2011, 6:08 pmArkady says:
@Sasha
Dead people, I think we’d all agree, have been stripped of their rights. So, on Sasha’s argument, it would be immoral for the citizenry to be taxed to defend itself against an asteroid strike that would have the effect of stripping the citizens of their rights.
This seems to conflict with:
Evidently, taxation to protect people from having to give up being creatures that have rights (via obliteration by asteroid strike) is not to be counted as protecting “people’s rights to some greater extent.”
February 15, 2011, 6:11 pmNo Theory of Jurisprudence says:
The weakness of this position is that you assume that the global human population, when faced with what it concludes is impending doom, will still be focused on generating the requisite response using things like “dollars” or “taxes” which don’t exist in a post-human world. If the powers that be believe the mechanism of taxation will not deal with a global threat, and they have the power to do so, forced labor is the solution, and justifiably so.
The discussion will not have anything to do with accumulating dollars. If the threat is an Apocalypse, the only currency is human labor, and it will be stolen too, as if it were dollar bills.
February 15, 2011, 6:19 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
My point was really that the Constitutional point moots the theoretical question. It’s certainly moral – in fact, a duty – for Congress to protect the public’s investment in government buildings, and so to tax the public for it.
As far as the theoretical question itself goes, SV presupposes that the sole function of government is to preserve rights. But most of us think that implementing collective action to prevent collective catastrophe fits in there somewhere, too.
February 15, 2011, 6:19 pmNo Theory of Jurisprudence says:
Moving “all” to right after “save” resolves your concerns.
The reason Professor Volokh’s position is absurd is precisely because it is willing to trade all human lives for a little bit of freedom (freedom from taxation). Professor Volokh’s position would be absurd to many of us even if you added weight to the “rights” side of the equation. Anyone willing to trade all human lives for a lot of freedom (freedom from being murdered, freedom from involuntary servitude) will be exterminated if the meteor comes, because the rest of us think that person is insane, and we’re going to defend ourselves.
EDIT: In other words, if the left side of the equation is ALL HUMAN LIVES it doesn’t make any difference what the right side of the equation is, because the left is still weightier. There is nothing you can place that will make the sacrifice of all human lives justifiable, and any moral or political theory that reaches this result needs modifying.
February 15, 2011, 6:26 pmyguy says:
I didn’t say anything like that.
It’s plenty relevant, because taxation is unquestionably moral if it’s consensual, and that is the sort of taxation the Constitution provides for.
February 15, 2011, 6:29 pmRyan Vann says:
And the people can justifiably fight the oppression of forced labor, which may mean destruction before the rock ever gets the opportunity.
February 15, 2011, 6:33 pmyguy says:
No, it would be voluntary if I violated the law by which I implicitly agreed to abide by my remaining in the US.
Obviously not, because the government can violate the law just as I can.
February 15, 2011, 6:39 pmNo Theory of Jurisprudence says:
I am suggesting they cannot justifiably fight the oppression of forced labor. If the meteor is going to extinguish all human life, the moral imperative is to do whatever is necessary to prevent the Apocalypse. This is precisely why one side would be “justified” to force another into labor, or taxes.
If you are justified in murdering me, then I’m not justified in defending myself.
February 15, 2011, 6:58 pmJon H says:
gooners wrote: “An asteroid is not in any way what the Founders were thinking of when they wrote about “common defense”, it is a natural occurrence”
Nonsense on stilts. You think the founders were unaware of dikes? Flood control? *Holland?*
February 15, 2011, 7:05 pmByomtov says:
Steve writes:
To which SV responds:
So the Mongols want to kill us and take our property, including eating our food. The lions want to kill us and use us for food. It’s really hard to see why this difference matters in terms of the moral response to the threat.
The rational/irrational distinction doesn’t seem very powerful. Both lions and Mongols are behaving rationally by their lights.
February 15, 2011, 7:27 pmAnthony says:
The test for a moral system depends on what you’re testing it for. If you’re testing for whether or not you’re willing to believe in that axiom system, testing margin cases for whether they agree with intuition is a fair test. However, there are a number of ethical schemes that claim (erroneously, IME) to be derived a priori from logic (I believe Ayn Rand makes a claim of that type), and I’m guessing SVs system is one of those.
Pretty much all ethical systems have margin cases that intuition doesn’t like, though; they just differ in where the edge cases are. In some cases it’s because it’s a moral quandary for which there exist no good options.
February 15, 2011, 7:35 pmtomemos says:
No, it’s not, and you seem to have misunderstood what the original post says. Sasha is not saying that it would be absurd to let the asteroid hit (like it would be absurd to ban swimming pools) and that therefore he is not willing to go that far. He is saying that it would be absurd to let the asteroid hit, yet he is willing to go that far.
If you ask me, “You’re in favor of a speed limit to save lives, so are you in favor of a 5 mph speed limit to save the most lives?” then I am bound to respond, “No, I concede that there are other concerns which we have to balance with our desire to save lives, and a 5 mph speed limit compromises those other concerns too much to be worth it.” Then you would have made the point that my desire to save lives is not absolute, which hopefully is the point you wanted to make.
What Sasha is saying in the post is that his desire to limit the role of government solely to protecting against rights violations is absolute. People aren’t bothered that he’s answering “No”; they’re bothered that he’s answering “Yes.”
February 15, 2011, 8:02 pmSasha Volokh says:
Anthony: I’m not in any way an Objectivist; one of the many ways in which I differ from Objectivism is I don’t think moral systems can be derived a priori from logic, and in particular, mine isn’t one of those. This asteroid business is a margin case that intuition doesn’t like.
February 15, 2011, 8:05 pmtomemos says:
I’m surprised no one has said anything about this. I’m not religious, but my understanding is that religious principles are taken on faith. Whether or not keeping kosher makes the world a better place is immaterial: God tells us to keep kosher, so we keep kosher. Obviously I’m disregarding a lot of theology and religious philosophy here to keep things simple, but most would agree that we subscribe to religions based on whether we believe them, not based on evidence or on what we think would be practical.
Political ideologies, by contrast, are all about what will have better effects in the real world. There’s nothing metaphysical about politics. You don’t have to be a utilitarian to believe that a political system that totally disregards practical effects is not one with a good foundation.
February 15, 2011, 8:12 pmtomemos says:
I didn’t take Nick to be saying that you were a moral relativist. Rather, I think he was saying that despite being a moral relativist—and therefore disinclined to call belief systems evil—he views your belief system as evil.
February 15, 2011, 8:16 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I could be wrong about this, and if I am then I hope Yankev or somebody will correct me. I think there is a not insignificant number of Jews who keep those laws in the absence of a belief in a personal God who desires it of them.
Motivations for why we do what we do are pretty complex sometimes.
February 15, 2011, 8:23 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
…I say this b/c of a conversation I had on the net several years ago, mostly between me and a Jewish man, but commented upon by some others. He was explaining about mitzvoth, and I asked if he did them only because as a Jew he was supposed to, or if he felt that he was pleasing God when he did them. The question took him aback, but he finally said that if somehow there was some kind of being that was gratified in some way when he performed them then he could live with that. None of the other Jewish people looking on, so to speak, thought that was weird.
February 15, 2011, 8:27 pmSteve P. says:
No wonder Sasha doesn’t post often — it must be exhausting responding to so many comments. Especially when some assume things about his beliefs that aren’t in evidence (e.g., objectivism).
For my side, congrats to Sasha for articulating a principled strand of libertarianism that just about no one (including myself) agrees with. But it’s still an interesting idea, and another reason why I wish he’d post more.
February 15, 2011, 8:29 pmSasha Volokh says:
Steve P.: Since you bring up people’s assumptions about my supposed Objectivism, I’ll just say this to make things super crystal-clear for everyone: The view I’ve stated above is completely opposed to Objectivism. There’s no way an Objectivist would ever take this position. No surprise that what I’m saying is inconsistent with Objectivism, because in fact I disagree with every basic axiom of Objectivism.
February 15, 2011, 8:38 pmBelligerati » Blog Archive » Taking rights based liberterianism to some extreme but natural conclusions. says:
[...] quite enjoyed two posts, Asteroid defense and libertarianism and Asteroid defense and libertarianism. Forget marginal revolution, I think the Volokh Conspiracy has the highest quality commentators on [...]
February 15, 2011, 8:40 pmSasha Volokh says:
tomemos: Aha yes, my bad.
February 15, 2011, 8:42 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Every basic axiom? Really? Per Wikipedia:
Hell, I believe that reality exists independent of consciousness.
February 15, 2011, 8:43 pmArun says:
The solution lies in the fact that the Sasha Volokh theory of rights is absurd. The libertarian stand against taxation is like the Islamic stand against interest. But really, it is excessive taxation and usury that is the problem.
February 15, 2011, 8:44 pmtomemos says:
Sasha: “Aha yes, my bad.”
Not at all; the point was made in a confused way.
February 15, 2011, 8:55 pmSasha Volokh says:
Laura(southernxyl): I think maybe reality exists independent of consciousness, but not enough to make an axiom out of it. A lot of stuff in Objectivism, I like in a general way, but not in an axiomatic way. Same with reason and the senses as the basis of epistemology. Moreover, I do believe in altruism, which conflicts with the Objectivist view of rational self-interest as the only moral goal of life. I like capitalism, but for Objectivism that’s not an axiom, just the consequence of all the previous. As for aesthetics, I have no view about the proper role of art in human life.
February 15, 2011, 9:19 pmDilan Esper says:
I rthink one obvious point to make here is that sasha undervalues utility. Rights are important. But why is utilit not important?we can see that it is hia poaition that rights cannot be overridden by human welfare, but why would anyone really nelieve that? There’s certainly nothing inherent in the notion of a right that says that it has tobe treated as more important than even the greatest conceivable benefit to humanity.
Sasha asserts this but he gives no persuasive reason why it is right.
February 15, 2011, 10:49 pmex0du5 says:
The definition of defense should not refer to the form of the agency. It’s “defense against harm” – it’s measured by the health of the individual defended not harmer, ie. the ability of the individual to exercise their rights.
But this is one of the problems with classical libertarian theory: it’s focus on “rights”. All of the rights are offered as a priori notions based on freedom, but they are _argued_ as if they derive from the “healthiest” choice of rights. Why should we have freedom of speech but cannot lie to get others to agreements? Well, speaking freely exposes more viewpoints, allowing for more options to be considered to find the “best” or “healthiest”. Lies lead to people making unhealthy decisions unwillingly. Since everyone is eventually wrong (if learning is still possible), we allow wrong so we can choose the “most right” for our purposes.
If libertarians stopped their rights-based approach and just accepted that there are many scientific metrics of health (of organisms, of macroeconomic and microeconomic structures, of ecologies, and of many other sociopolitical structures studied in the world), they would make a lot more sense about these issues. They might understand that asteroids, or actual aliens, or animal attacks, or bacteria, are all legitimate agents of harm that the government should protect against to the best of it’s ability. All of them are the universally-applicable, economy-of-scale preferred reasons for governments being formed in the first place.
Why should we buy military weapons to defend against human invaders, but expect a different entity to supply the same level of militarisation against alien invaders?
February 16, 2011, 12:22 amArkady says:
A libertarian and a rational person debate the end of civilization:
February 16, 2011, 7:13 amNick says:
Yes, this is what I meant. But to be clear, I am not calling *your* belief system evil, I am calling *the proposed* belief system evil. The fact that this morality leaves you uncomfortable when you see how horrible this position leaves you, and you almost ask to be convinced otherwise, means that maybe you don’t really believe in it.
February 16, 2011, 7:46 amA. E. Dawsoni says:
This is a fine example of why Libertarians need to be given their own planet.
February 16, 2011, 9:25 amzuch says:
No. They need to build their own planet.
Cheers,
February 16, 2011, 11:30 amzuch says:
I understand that “rights” might be violated. But they’re being “violated” [in your sense of the word] by the humans that are rampaging and looting. And it is only these people whose are abusing the rights of others that you have a moral argument for curtailing their own rights … you know, like taking them out and shooting them. Instead, you seem to think that you can curtail the “rights” of the group of people whose won’t be affected by the potential looting (perhaps because they would take it on themselves to buy rocket launchers in preparation for Armageddon, or perhaps because such looting is random and some might just escape all on their own due to happenstance) by taxing them to pay for the indirect protection of the others that would be affected. How utilitarian … nay, say, socialist … of you….
OK, so if there will be harm, there’s justification in taxation (at least ex post facto, and we’ll run that risk of unjustified taxes when we don’t know for sure). But that still doesn’t address the point that only some people will be affected (or affected to the same degree) whereas you’re taxing everyone before the fact, and also the point that you seem to insist that only those whose intentions cause violation of rights of others may legitimately be taxed, which means that even if you insist that a prevention tax must be imposed, you are only allowed to impose it on the rabble and detritus of humanity, the ones that will loot and rampage if and when the asteroid hits.
Wow. OK…. Expect the LTP at the door at any moment.
Cheers,
February 16, 2011, 11:56 amNeo says:
Now the harder question: would an asteroid impact violate rights?
That’s nothing. Consider the rights of the HIV virus. They talk at biodiversity conferences about stamping out HIV.
There is some sort of irony or oxymoron in there somewhere.
February 16, 2011, 12:28 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Sasha, I’d be willing to stake quite a bit of money on my perception of fact that my bedroom doesn’t wink out of existence while I’m asleep. Now maybe that’s really theory, not fact, because I can’t easily verify it.
There is a school of thought that we and all of our existence are a dream that Buddha is having, and at some point he’ll roll over and dream something else. Because I have no control at all over that kind of thing, I’m willing to put it aside in favor of an axiom of consciousness-independent reality.
February 16, 2011, 1:16 pmPender says:
There’s no logic without axioms, though, and axioms by definition can’t be justified by logic. When you choose between two internally consistent but mutually exclusive axiomatic systems, then, you can’t rely on logic at all. So how else to decide besides intuition?
February 16, 2011, 1:16 pmDR says:
And I believe it’s immoral for the Government to protect any Libertarian from any harm than might occur to them, including that of terrorists or other evil people.
Libertarianism is nothing but a futile attempt to justify adolescent self-fascination. Most people grow out of it, but I gather there are some who never do.
February 16, 2011, 1:53 pmKevinM says:
Sasha: Oh, jeez. AbsurdUM, of course – never fails when I get on my high horse! I can only attribute it to temporary brain freeze — and to a little high school Latin being a dangerous thing. Accusative, masculine, if memory serves, but I doubt if it does.
February 16, 2011, 3:39 pmBest regards.
arbitrary aardvark says:
Leaving aside any discussions of morality or ethics for the moment, there are some reasonable arguments that sasha’s suggestion that taxes not be raised to fight killer asteroids is a practical and reasonable one which could be made on utilitarian grounds.
February 16, 2011, 5:39 pmHaving the government raise taxes to fight a killer asteroid is not the same thing as successfully stopping the asteroid. Sometimes politicans make promises while raising taxes that in the end don’t get kept. And sometimes people do less than they otherwise might or could, because they think the government is doing that thing for them. If people know in advance that the government is limited to dealing with rights violations,and is not omnipotent, all knowing and omnibenevolent, they would be free to join asteroid killing clubs, buy asteroid insurance, build superhero iron-man type suits, or pursue other strategies. Any of these strategies has its own problems, but so does a government that raises taxes to fight killer asteroids. Using the twentieth century as a model, people were less at risk from killer asteroids than from being killed in holocausts, nuclear or otherwise, by governments that grew too big once they passed the boundary of only being allowed to protect rights. In my own life, I’ve been less at risk from things falling out of the sky than from cops pointing guns at me. Whether or not sasha is right in theory, I suspect he’s right in practice.
ex0du5 says:
The reason I dislike “rights” approaches is because they presuppose that certain defined behavioral identification filters correctly correspond to healthy or unhealthy. That we fully understand the domains and their correct conceptual boundaries.
That is not a theory of learning. That is a theory that “we are right”. A scientific theory understands that current models may deviate from experience in both consequential and inconsequential ways. That we might be wrong and learn something new. So, understanding that being health centric, when metrics of health have a rich mathematics and scientific generalisability, would provide an actual measure to evolve (optimise) theories on, provides immediate advantages over the rigid rights-based systems. There is adaptibility to learn the best description in health optimisation. In rights-based systems, there is just the inevitable shame of being wrong for once, and now forever-on less trusted.
But if you actually believe that the healthiest systems require important freedoms and areas of privacy, it shouldn’t be difficult to make scientific arguments that substantiate it. The success of genetic algorithms does show that there are clearly favorable search complexity optimisations that come from freedom to explore different regions of the solution space. Real-world systems like the immune systems take advantage of search complexity optimisations like this.
So, when interested in defining what is meant by a defensive government, having a scientific definition of defense would describe the variety of social structures that participate in power games, and what are their metrics of health and harm.
The fact that we can define “fitness landscapes” for a good variety of mathematically evolving structures through selection or extinction dynamics is important to understanding how to make this rigorous. There are ways to calculate survivability of information structures, and choice spaces, and their control theory. Health metrics define explicitly what is meant by harm and are much more natural foundations for scientific delineations of government action.
But defense then, pretty naturally, becomes health care too. And ecology care. And economy care. Where harms can be defined consistently, those structures will naturally form protection mechanisms to lessen selection. That’s a basic result of behavioral search optimisation, that 5% of search space having better times still means better times, as does .5% and .05%. Learning will get you better or keep the same, for the most part.
Libertarians get distracted from the really important things, and tend to get lost in logical arguments. This opinion comes from a card-carrying big L libertarian for my entire voting life, and one who regularly met up at the monthly meeting at Denny’s. There is a lot to admire in freedom, but the reasons why needed to be kept in mind. Otherwise — lost in word games.
February 17, 2011, 1:29 amAlan J says:
Nobody is asking you (OR government) to “sit idly by” in this asteroid scenario any more so than they are asking you to sit idly by while a human rights atrocity occurs in another country that you feel very strongly about. You have many options, almost an infinite amount, which you are at liberty to pursue.
The sole constraints being placed upon you in the context of this discussion, constraints which are insignificant at best and barely constitute an impediment (except in the minds of violent people who seek to physically abuse others), is that your pursuits don’t involve conscripting other persons by force into your personal crusades, be it going to fight wars against “bad guys” in foreign lands, or be it a crusade to stop an asteroid….. You go do these things….. on your own dime…. and on your own time. Nobody is stopping you. Don’t conscript others and there won’t be a problem. If you do conscript others, absent their consent, then you are most likely a violent individual.
The fact that your violence may be extremely limited to rare circumstances does not lend me much consolation, nor does it persuade me much that you are a swell guy anymore so than a murderer who “only” murdered but once, should lend him approbation for his exercising great restrain for not being a serial killer. Same goes for despicable thieves who engage in acts of random looting (even if it is “but a mere loaf of bread to feed ones hungry family) during times of natural disaster (see: Hurricane Katrina for plenty of disgusting specimens).
As to the nauseatingly common rejoinder that we somehow have a “duty to our fellow men” to remedy such problems, and that the man who abstains from doing this claimed (which is an act of omission) could in his own right be considered morally psychopathic (or sociopathic, at the very least) in the same way that a parent who neglects to feed their child might be considered a terrible human being, if it comes to the ethical dilemma of on one hand possibly being guilty of an act of commission based on some claimed duty which I find to be preposterous at face value, versus being a psycopath who engages in acts of commission of forceful acts against others, I choose the act of omission over the act of commission, as by far the most reasonable of the two possibilities every time.
Even for sake of arguendo if there might be some “duty” that I owe to society writ large, a la collectivist ethics mentality, such that either my physical persons or the fruits of my labor can be conscripted for the benefit of some ‘scheme’ that a large group of people have concocted, a simple probability based analysis is going to lead me to discard this possibility almost every time.
Between doing something which I have previously determined to almost certainly be morally repugnant to my ethical framework (initiating aggression, for example), versus possibly being guilty of doing something which I “might” be wrong about (neglecting a “duty” and “obligation” to society, in this case), but which I nonetheless consider unlikely, because I find the claimed obligation which I am supposedly in breach of to be a sketchy theory, at best…. I clearly have to go with the one I am more certain of, and discard that which I am less certain of.
I don’t believe natural disasters of any form are ever a necessary and sufficient criteria to give rise to a moral obligation. I consider that a complete ex nihilo claim that arises from nowhere logical; it’s certainly has not arisen by peaceful contract, nor is it a duty that may arise as a result of my forcing an externality on others and having to be obligated in some form my actions which caused those consequences by proximate cause…. in this case, the claimed duty is seems to arise out of a thin air. Of course this makes perfect sense in the minds of collectivists who think obligation to others just by virtue of being alive, and having to aid others in times of need or exigent circumstances makes sense in their mind. I therefore reject that I owe you jack squat, and by extension, I deny you have any legitimate grounds to take my money, absent that obligation for the benefit of society.
February 17, 2011, 1:30 amMark A. Sadowski says:
Not all libertarians are deontologists.
Consequentialist libertarians believe that political and economic liberty lead to the best consequences in the form of happiness and prosperity, and for that reason alone it should be supported.
I, for one, would like it if the government taxed me in order to defend me from an asteroid, regardless of the asteroid’s ultimate moral intentions, simply on the grounds that such a defense is a nonrival and nonexcludable public good.
Philosopher Jonathan Wolff criticizes deontological libertarianism as incoherent, writing that it is incapable of explaining why harm suffered by the losers in economic competition does not violate the principle of self-ownership, and that its advocates must “dishonestly smuggle” consequentialist arguments into their reasoning to justify the institution of the free market.
All ethical systems are both deontological and consequentialist in nature, since they all require a rule for motivation and an outcome measure for implementation. The biggest difference between consequential libertarians and deontological libertarians is that there is no such thing as a “pure” consequentialist libertarian (the very notion is absurd). Through their dogged pursuit of self-consistency and ideological purity deontological libertarians just make themselves look silly.
February 17, 2011, 2:00 pmAlan J says:
And yet quite amazingly, almost all laws by their very nature, are entirely deontological oriented in the way the statutes are quite intentionally constructed. A consequentialist written statute would be the very rare exception, I speculate.
I guess almost all lawyers in the world have cluttered minds who cling to silly little outdated deontological ideas. We should rewrite every law in the world. Good luck with that. You want to talk about a complete and utter destruction of the entire field of law worldwide, overnight…. yeah… you go do that. Go watch just what a hellish nightmare that causes because almost nobody in the world truly thinks in consequentialist terms, and you go watch how almost every statute written will be widely criticized as being vague.
Not only would you have to write every statute, but you would have to radically alter the entire underpinning of almost all legal concepts such that they now comport with a consequentialist framing. Almost nobody would understand it, as its so radically different from what they not only learned in law school, but what they learned in life in general which is almost entirely deontological oriented, including almost all rules children were taught growing up.
With respect to these millions of new statutes, peoples actions would have to now have to be judged by the end-result rather than by the action itself. And any good lawyer will right off see how that causes problems with almost everything. You would have to completely redefine different concepts like agency, intent, good faith exceptions, criminal negligence, strict liability, we would have view probabilities in an entirely new light in which we are not accustomed, we’d have to relearn and reapply differently damn well everything.
Not to mention that this may impose a whole new level of burdens of proof the likes of which we probably can’t even conceive of, and involves viewing probabilities in a radically different light. You’d have to parse the motivations of peoples actions to an extent we don’t nearly do now, such that if Man A took an action that had or did not have Consequence Y, as prescribed by law…. you would have to delve deep into that persons actions in ways we are radically unaccustomed to in deciding whether that person is guilty. We either apply a strict liability nightmare from hell to everything and say that the persons good faith or intent in trying to comply with it don’t matter, else we have to re-teach and re-learn almost everything in law. We’d have to figure out thousands of new litmus tests that we essentially don;t need now under deontologically oriented law, and for example some of these tests would relate to how we decide the thresholds for when guilt should apply when a person who took Action X did not achieve Consequence Y, even though he may have intended to try that…. but some things are beyond peoples agency and involve probabilistic functions, particularly when the action or transaction involves a causal chain having more than one person such that we have to question whether Man A can be held accountable for things beyond his control that resulted in Consequence Y not being achieved as proscribed by law.
I suspect that out of desperate convenience in this new dystopic consequentialist world view of law, we would just end up making every new law a strict liability nightmare, because we probably couldn’t figure out how to work the radically increased burdens of proof (though maybe in 300 or 500 years, we might finally get the hang of it).
February 17, 2011, 4:15 pmLibertarianism Off the Deep End « Upset Patterns says:
[...] Volokh goes off the deep end: I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, [...]
February 17, 2011, 6:22 pmMark A. Sadowski says:
Alan J: “And yet quite amazingly, almost all laws by their very nature, are entirely deontological oriented in the way the statutes are quite intentionally constructed. A consequentialist written statute would be the very rare exception, I speculate.”
And similarly amazingly, almost all of economics is consequentialist in its very nature. A purely deontological field of economics would be a total oddity. After all, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were all consequentialist libertarians. I dare say a case can even be made that Rothbard was at least partly consequentialist.
But despite your elegant response you seem to have missed my point. I’m claiming that ethical systems without either consequentialism or deontology are impossible. All attempts to have one without the other are utterly incomprehensible, and it is deontological libertarians that seem to be leading the charge.
February 17, 2011, 6:47 pmAlan J says:
(1) Quite a fair assessment. Don’t disagree with this, and wouldn’t even challenge the Rothbard one, because particularly in matters of economics, even he did come at it from a consequentialist and utilitarian kind of angle.
(2) I gather that what you are trying to emphasize is that we need to consider both consequentialism and deontological ethics, so that we have sort of a balanced or “holistic whole” if you will, rather than fixating on just one to the detriment of the other?
The one problem we will have with that is in the limited circumstances when the two conflict. In cases where both the action as well as the end result happen to align by happenstance such that both the consequentialist and the deontology believer are happy and get what they want out of it, then all is well. No troubles. Each party got what they wanted. But in some cases where the two do not align, that’s going to be a problem.
The consequentialist takes the ends justifies the mean position, and the deontological person takes the means justify the ends position, even when it leads to really “odd” (putting it politely, substitute a variety of other adjectives) results. If you have a case where the deontolgical people get the rule of action they want, and it leads to a nice end-result, then the consequentialists are happy too… everyones happy… no probs.
But there’s going to some occasions when the two things conflict. The deontologist is going to say they want this particular rule, but the end result may be something the consequentialists don’t like. Conversely, the opposite problem may occur. Both parties may agree that an end-result is good, but they deontologist does not care for the manner in how it was achieved (e.g. I want money in my pocket…. I like money…. but there are means/actions which I won’t take to get that money, though I do very much want it as an end-result).
The two factions will occasionally come into conflict, and who prevails? How do we reconcile these two different approaches when the conflict. It seems rather intractable. There doesn’t appear to be a “third way” which extricates us all from the problem. If there existed this third way, we’d all probably be a lot happier and argue a lot less, because then people wouldn’t argue as much over this divide, if there was an easy third way to solve the problem when the two conflict.
February 17, 2011, 8:25 pmnick says:
If any ideology is to be remotely close to being practical, it must allow for exceptions to its rules, as we do in law. Nobody is going to ever discover a simple formula or principle that covers every important case. So why not make an exception for Acts of God whose prevention is an obvious public good?
If you insist on trying to find an ethical argument that covers all cases, how about this one: you generally agree with negligence law that persons often have a duty of care to other persons, correct? And that these duties are sometimes collective, for example the members of a corporation have a collective duty, as an artificial person, of care to me under negligence law? For example, if I visit an corporate office they collectively have a duty to me to keep the office free from various hazards.
So why not a corporation of all humans that owes a duty of care to everyone? It’s a straightforward extension of the corporate duty of care, owed to all people, and paid from all shareholders (i.e. again in theory all people) via the corporate treasury. Obviously, since this corporation is a monopoly, and investing in it is involuntary, we want this duty to cover only a narrow set of cases that can’t be dealt with otherwise: perhaps only acts (of nature or humans) whose prevention is an obvious public good.
February 17, 2011, 9:06 pmEli Rabett says:
The government is already taxing you to track all sorts of stuff out there in space including asteroids. You really need to rent a clue
February 17, 2011, 9:57 pmClub Troppo » Missing link Friday – diversity, anonymity and libertarian train spotting says:
[...] Asteroid defense and libertarianism Sasha Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy [...]
February 18, 2011, 4:09 amAlan says:
The closest approximation to a libertarian nation existing now is Somalia. No Somalians are attempting to find, let alone destroy, asteroids. If they had the technology, some Somalians would construct an asteroid and aim it at a wealthy individual.
Have you thought of writing for The Onion?
February 18, 2011, 7:26 amMatt says:
This post and comment thread should embarrass everyone involved. Does it really require a serious debate to ask whether it’s a good idea for us, as a nation and society, to take some collective action to prevent us all from being instantaneously destroyed? Is your cash so sacred that getting to keep a little more of it for the last few weeks of life is better than your or your progeny getting to have any more life at all? Thinking this is a question worthy of serious consideration really should cause one to do a little reflection on what one considers serious and important.
February 18, 2011, 12:13 pmAndrew says:
Sasha, I don’t think you’ve reached an authentic state of reflective equilibrium on this issue. While your position is logically consistent with your postulates concerning rights, those postulates themselves sit uneasily with equally strong intuitions about the value of human life itself.
You’ve settled on the rights postulates, and so are heavily discounting competing values. However, should you ask yourself why rights are important, I suspect you’ll end up with an unsatisfying answer of “it’s self-evident,” or will be forced to meliorate the absolutist position you’ve adopted.
February 18, 2011, 8:47 pmCraig2 says:
What if the asteroid contained gold? Lots of gold? Would not Capitalist be hedging their bets on the point of impact?
February 18, 2011, 9:48 pmThe NonSequitur » Give me more absurdum on that reductio! says:
[...] get in the way of a free enterprise solution. That was parody, but Sasha Volokh, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, has a different sort of reason, but of the same spirit and leading to the same [...]
February 18, 2011, 9:59 pmnick says:
Isn’t Chuck Norris in this scenario protected from a tort lawsuit or criminal prosecution under the public necessity defense? For example under public necessity a firefighter can destroy your house to prevent a fire from spreading. Sasha, are you opposed to the public necessity defense or do you think it doesn’t apply here?
February 20, 2011, 4:26 amLibrary: Round-up of Reading « Res Communis says:
[...] Asteroid defense and libertarianism – The Volokh Conspiracy [...]
February 21, 2011, 1:10 pmMurphy vs. Famous Keynesian says:
[...] I’m not so sure I would be happy with Volokh’s views in general.) Specifically, Volokh said he thought it would be immoral to tax people, even to stop an asteroid that would destroy the [...]
February 22, 2011, 11:55 pmRicocheting through the blogosphere « My Blog says:
[...] link on mises.org, which is a response to an article by Brad DeLong, which is a hit-piece attacking Asteroid Defense and Libertarianism on volokh.com and was immediately reminded that I had divulged half a blog on the Volokh comments, [...]
February 23, 2011, 12:53 amTim Fowler says:
krs – RE: “disastrous consequences on the order of millions or billions of deaths, a significant change in the earth’s orbit, and all hell breaking loose”
an asteroid hit would not change the Earth’s orbit that much. The Earth is too massive compared to the impactor. If the asteroid was 1/500th of the Earth’s radius (over 12 km, a serious impact) and was the same denstity as the Earth, the Earth mass would be 125 million times as large as the asteroid’s.
NI – re: “Sasha, I am no longer a libertarian precisely because of this kind of argumentation.”
Is it because you see libertarians make that type of argument and you are pushed away from libertarian ideas because of your reaction to the people that hold them (if so I submit that other political persuasions also have people that make odd arguments), or is it that you think that in order to be a libertarian you have to accept such arguments. If the later – Most libertarians wouldn’t agree with Sasha here, and nothing about most versions of the libertarian idea require, or even strongly support having an opinion like this. Anarchist would be a different story. Strong anarcho-capitalists would say people should pay for the service of asteroid removing without being forced to. I don’t know what other forms of anarchists would say.
SV – If force isn’t justified to collect taxes to deflect an asteroid, than I don’t see why force would be justified to fight the Nazis. The asteroid is a worse threat. Depending on your interpretation of what constitutes a right, the asteroid might not be violating your rights, but if force isn’t justified to deal with an existential threat to the human race, I don’t see how its justified to protect your rights either.
February 23, 2011, 5:50 pmStephen says:
Hi,
I live in Auckland, New Zealand.
You’ve probably seen in the news we’ve just had a major earthquake in Christchurch.
People are trapped in collapsed buildings.
A far as I can follow Sasha’s reasoning those peoples’ “rights” are not being infringed, and therefore government agencies should not intervene.
??????
For myself, I am extremely grateful we have a central government that can quickly marshal the response to a disaster like this. Without government co-ordination the response would be piecemeal and take far, far longer. There would be no civil defense plans so confusion would reign. Drinking water would not get to people who need it. People would die of cholera. It’s unlikely that anyone would be trained to pull people out of collapsed buildings. People would stay trapped.
Putting everything in place to respond to a major disaster requires taxes.
But since none of this involves peoples’ “rights” being infringed I guess it’s no concern of the government?
February 23, 2011, 6:59 pmThe economics of insanity says:
[...] are two quotes (don't look at the links just yet). First: I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, [...]
February 24, 2011, 6:58 amJack V says:
I thought this was very interesting. I definitely disagree with the conclusion, but it’s edifying to see how the question raises what people expressing libertarian thought (legitimately) want.
As a thought experiment, consider how we’d feel if the asteroid could only be averted by something _everyone_ would agree was a violation of their rights. I think people would in general still agree that forcing people to comply was better than extinction, but feel very, very unsure about it, and look for any other solution.
So I think that helps me understand where Sasha is coming from.
I agree that letting people make their own choices is a good thing – the question is when it’s overshadowed by something else actually being a MORE good thing.
This seems like a clear case where you HAVE to choose for someone else. Of people who don’t want to contribute to the “not die by asteroid fund”, you have to decide whether (a) they get the benefit of being saved by everyone else (b) you decide on their behalf that being forced to pay is better than being killed by the asteroid (c) you kill them because they were going to die anyway (clearly wrong).
If case (b) is rare enough, then you needn’t worry about it, but experience suggests that — for people who live in proximity to other people in any way — it’s common for lots of things, unless we have massive societal change.
Also, this only matters if we’re raising a NEW tax. Presumably the government would be spending existing emergency funds on this, rather than directly raising new money. So the hypothetical republicans have approximately zero chance of giving the money back to the taxpayer, the only plausible choices are (a) spending it on other government functions which are pointless if the asteroid destroys them or (b) saving everyone from the asteroid.
February 24, 2011, 8:08 amLibertarianism is an anti-human position | Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time says:
[...] Kleinem and The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan Adler, Sasha Volokh has decided to share his personal opinion that, well, maybe spending taxpayer money on asteroid defense isn’t okay. In his words: I [...]
February 24, 2011, 8:05 pmDaylight Atheism > Wednesday Link Roundup says:
[...] Libertarianism in a nutshell, as told by The Volokh Conspiracy (HT: Slacktivist, again – what can I say, he's posted some great [...]
February 25, 2011, 3:40 amOrders of insanity | slacktivist says:
[...] immediate provocation for all of this was the internally consistent, but barking mad, insistence by Sasha Volokh that “taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid … is an illegitimate function of [...]
February 25, 2011, 4:32 pmBad Spock says:
Hokay, I saw that a few of you get it, but it has to be said. YOU DO KNOW THAT THE ONION IS A SATIRE SITE THAT POSTS FAKE NEWS REPORTS FOR LAUGHS, RIGHT?
February 26, 2011, 7:19 pmFor the love of god, please stop taking The Onion seriously, it just makes you look incredibly stupid (more so than political arguments usually do, in fact!)
Michael says:
I think the key distinction Sasha wants to make about the asteroid having no conscious motivation behind it can be dispensed with easily. If there is such a planet-destroying asteroid on a course for the earth, it is clearly — ipso facto, inter alia and quid pro quo — the result of God wishing to smite humanity for its endless transgressions.
Thus, the morality of us collectively (whether using governmental institutions with their associated compulsion, or through cooperative and collaborative efforts based on financial donation and voluntary labour) acting to protect ourselves from His mighty wrath turns on whether it is moral for us to attempt to spare ourselves from His actions. Should we be defying God’s angry will, essentially, even if to save ourselves?
One can generalise this to cases where it’s not certain the asteroid will in fact make impact. As the asteroid hurtles towards us, God is Dirty Harry, pointing the Magnum at us and asking us if we feel lucky, punks. The trivial question is whether we should be taxing each other to try and build a bullet proof vest. The big question is, should we be doing anything other than simply submitting to His righteous fury at our sinning ways?
February 27, 2011, 1:23 amCATO is from the green hornet right? says:
Did any of you even bother to read Rand? Seriously you libertarians make objecti-vists look WORSE. Objectivism is not actually against working together if the outcome is agreeable to all, which is why Objectivism often requires some semblance of law and order (you need to cooperate first).
But if we wander into loony libertarian zone, we see people without clear motivation, applying very fuzzy rules without a hint of rationale. Rand was not against logic, Rand was not against analyzing a situation and then doing what works. But obviously as is apparent by this post and the commenters that the Libertarian demographic is represented by loony faith based rule application rather than any kind of attempt at a sound philosophy.
CATO would shoot asteroids.
February 27, 2011, 2:15 amSteko says:
SV: “but it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights”
You need to shatter the paradigm and think of the asteroid itself as another rival government exerting it’s coercion on you. It’s about to tax you at 100% of all current wealth and future income (and life) making the amount the US government is asking for to blow up the asteroid a pittance. In short the US (and friends) are effectively declaring war upon Asteroidia.
February 27, 2011, 4:18 amEtherist says:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Mr. Volokh.
If your political philosophy leads to passivity and suicide in the face of certain doom, maybe you should rethink that part of it.
February 27, 2011, 8:25 amAlex says:
I don’t want to argue with you about rights and whether the asteroid violates rights, because I think entering into that discussion is already assuming that rights are an adequate ground for moral theory. Have you ever asked yourself, “Why base a moral theory on rights at all?” To me, we champion rights talk simply because we’re so saturated in it, and because it’s a relatively easy explanation of political morality (much easier than, say, morality is a physiological drive).
February 27, 2011, 9:38 amAlex says:
I don’t want to argue with you about rights and whether the asteroid violates rights, because I think entering into that discussion is already assuming that rights are an adequate ground for moral theory. Have you ever asked yourself, “Why base a moral theory on rights at all?” To me, we champion rights talk simply because we’re so saturated in it, and because it’s a relatively easy explanation of political morality (much easier than, say, morality is a physiological drive).
February 27, 2011, 9:38 amJack says:
Well. That settles that. Now we can get down to figuring out how many libertarians can dance on the head of a pin. I think it’s 7, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to claim it’s 256.
February 27, 2011, 10:36 amagnx says:
It’s interesting, when doctrinaire propertarianism is brought to its ultimate extent, to see people who would rather defend doctrinal rigidity over all else.
February 27, 2011, 6:30 pmKogo says:
Nope, you lose:
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
You have no moral right not be taxed. Sorry! Try again, stupid conservative.
February 28, 2011, 10:00 am