Highlights from The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer

Clear thinking from Huemer as always

[Review] The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer

Italics are Huemer’s. Bolding is mine.

Direct physical violence is rarely used as a punishment. Nevertheless, violence plays a crucial role in the system, because without the threat of violence, lawbreakers could simply choose not to suffer punishment. For example, the government commands that drivers stop before all red lights. If you violate this rule, you might be punished with a $200 fine. But this is simply another command. If you didn’t obey the command to stop before all red lights, why would you obey the command to pay $200 to the government? Perhaps the second command will be enforced by a third command: the government may threaten to revoke your driver’s license if you do not pay the fine. In other words, it may command you to stop driving. But if you violated the first two commands, why would you follow the third? Well, the command to stop driving may be enforced by a threat of imprisonment if you continue to drive without a license.

A few words about what defenders of authority are not committed to: The idea of political obligation does not entail that the government’s commanding something is by itself sufficient for one’s having an obligation to do that thing. Those who believe in authority may hold that there are further conditions for the government’s commands to be binding; for instance, that the laws should have been made in accordance with fair and democratic processes, that the present government should not have usurped an earlier, legitimate government, and so on. They may likewise hold that there are limits to the government’s authority; for instance, that the laws may not be grossly unjust, that they may not invade certain protected spheres of privacy, and so on. So the idea that one must perform an action ‘because the law requires it’ may really mean, roughly, that one must perform an action because the law requires it, the law was made in an appropriate way by a legitimate government, the law is not grossly unjust, and the law is within the sphere of things the government may legitimately regulate.

Anarchists face a catch-22: most people will not give anarchism a serious hearing because they are convinced that the position is crazy; they are convinced that the position is crazy because they do not understand it; and they do not understand it because they will not give it a serious hearing.

The primary issue is whether one is being asked to give up something to which one has a right, as the price of rejecting the social contract. This certainly seems to be the case. If a board chairman cannot demand that board members pay him a dollar to express dissent from a proposed schedule change, how can someone be required to give up home and job and leave all friends and family behind to express disagreement with a contract? Here is one answer: perhaps the state owns all the territory over which it claims jurisdiction. Thus, just as I may expel people from my house if they do not agree to help clean up at the end of the party, the state may expel people from its territory if they do not agree to obey the laws and pay taxes.

Even if we granted that the state owns its territory, it is debatable whether it may expel people who reject the social contract (compare the following: if anyone who leaves my party before it is over is doomed to die, then, one might think, I lose the right to kick people out of my party). But we need not resolve that issue here; we may instead focus on whether the state in fact owns all the territory over which it claims jurisdiction. If it does not, then it lacks the right to set conditions on the use of that land, including the condition that occupants should obey the state’s laws.

For illustration, consider the case of the United States. In this case, the state’s control over ‘its’ territory derives from (1) the earlier expropriation of that land by European colonists from the people who originally occupied it and (2) the state’s present coercive power over the individual landowners who received title to portions of that territory, handed down through the generations from the original expropriators. This does not seem to give rise to a legitimate property right on the part of the U.S. government. Even if we overlook source (1), source (2), which applies to all governments, is not a legitimate basis for a property claim. Might does not make right; the mere fact that the state exercises power over the people in a certain region does not give the state a property right (nor any other kind of right) in all the land within that region.

What is notable about this case is not just that the state failed tragically in its obligation to protect some of its citizens. More important for the social contract theory is what happened afterwards. The women sued the District of Columbia in federal court, for the government’s negligent failure to protect them. If the government had a contractual obligation to make a reasonable effort to protect its citizens, then the women should have had a clear-cut case. In fact, the judges dismissed the case without a trial. The plaintiffs appealed, but the dismissal was upheld.

Why? No one disputed the government’s negligence, and no one disputed that the women had suffered great harm as a direct result of that negligence. What the court denied was that the government had any duty to provide protection to the three women in the first place. The Appeals Court cited ‘the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen’. The government’s duty, the court explained, was only a duty to the public at large, to provide a general deterrent to crime. The court worried that the recognition of a duty to protect individuals ‘would effectively bring the business of government to a speedy halt’ and ‘dispatch a new generation of litigants to the courthouse over grievances real and imagined.’

Suppose that an unconscious patient has been brought to a hospital, in need of surgery to save his life. Under ordinary circumstances, physicians must obtain the patient’s informed consent before operating. In this situation, insistence on this principle would preclude the application of lifesaving medical care, as the patient is unable to either consent to or dissent from the treatment. In such a case, it is generally acknowledged that the doctors should proceed despite the lack of consent.
. . . when we appeal to hypothetical consent, the parties’ hypothetical consent must be consistent with their relevant actual values and philosophical beliefs. Imagine that a third patient is brought into the hospital in the same condition as the first patient, unconscious and in need of surgery. But in this case the attending physician, due to his familiarity with this particular patient, is aware that the patient has strong religiously based objections to the practice of surgery, even when needed to save life.

Rawls’s optimism, however, is without justification. He describes at length how it is conceivable that his own theory of justice should be the focus for a consensus among individuals with differing religious, moral, and philosophical views. These differing views might all turn out to support a single political conception. Following the exposition of this logical possibility, one might anticipate the presentation of evidence that the possibility is realized in some actual society. Such evidence might take the form, for example, of a series of arguments, each starting from tenets of a widely held religion, moral system, or philosophical system and each concluding in the central principles of Rawls’s theory of justice. No arguments of this kind are to be found in Rawls’s work, nor is any other form of evidence for the conclusion that every reasonable comprehensive doctrine supports Rawls’s theory of justice.

The closest Rawls comes to arguing that some religious doctrine supports his theory is in his discussion of religious toleration, where he cites John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” in illustration of why religious thinkers may support toleration. In fact, Locke, while tolerant for his time, was highly intolerant by modern standards, explicitly rejecting the idea of toleration for atheists and those who profess socially destructive ideas. That observation aside, the more serious difficulty is that what Rawls seeks to provide in this passage falls far short of what his theory needs. What is needed is an argument that all reasonable persons would agree to all the major tenets of Rawls’s system; what Rawls provides is an explanation of a way in which a follower of one religion could reasonably support one of Rawls’s principles of justice.

Anarchist thinkers do not, as a rule, appear particularly less rational, informed, or reasonable than partisans of other political views. They do not, for example, refuse to offer reasons for their views, refuse to consider objections, or refuse to take into account the interests of others. It is therefore difficult to identify any non-question-begging rationale for excluding them from the class of people whose agreement is sought. Unless anarchists are to be simply excluded from the agreement, hypothetical social contract theorists owe us an account of how political anarchists could be convinced to accept government.

The hypothetical social contract theory, on the present interpretation, offers the following candidate justification for this sort of coercion: one may coercively impose an arrangement on individuals, provided that the individuals would be unreasonable to reject the arrangement.

This principle stands in stark conflict with common sense morality. Imagine that an employer approaches a prospective employee with an entirely fair, reasonable, and attractive job offer, including generous pay, reasonable hours, pleasant working conditions, and so on. If the worker were fully informed, rational, and reasonable, he would accept the employment offer. Nevertheless, the employer is not ethically entitled to coerce the employee into working for him in the event that the employee, however unreasonably, declines the offer.

Why does Rawls believe that the parties in the original position could reach agreement rather than persistently disagreeing, as people do in the actual world? The reason is simple: ‘[S]ince the differences among the parties are unknown to them, and everyone is equally rational and similarly situated, each is convinced by the same arguments’.

Rawls’s conclusion does not follow from his stated premises. Rawls assumes that, once all particular inclinations and all individual characteristics (or knowledge thereof) are excised, all reasonable and rational people will be convinced by the same arguments. This assumption rests on a particular diagnosis of the phenomenon of widespread intellectual disagreement: that such disagreement is due entirely to such factors as ignorance, irrationality, and biases created by knowledge of one’s individual characteristics.

In actual democracies, no one is required (by the state or anyone else) to state their reasons for advancing policy proposals. Moreover, the quality of the reasons offered for a policy proposal is only one part of what determines the fate of that proposal, and nearly everyone knows this. The fate of policy proposals in actual democracies is determined at least as much by rhetoric as by reasoning, and rhetorical appeals are heard considerably more often than sober, rational arguments. Political outcomes are also influenced by self-interest. ‘Deliberation’, Cohen assures us, ‘focuses debate on the common good’ — but in reality, competing interest groups vie for control of political processes in the hopes of using state power for selfish gain. It would be extremely unusual to find citizens so naive as to think that only their stated arguments, not their political power, would determine whether their policy proposals were adopted.

Granted that no society satisfies Cohen’s conditions for an ideal deliberative democracy, if there were such a society, would its government then have authority?

It is unclear why it would. Recall the Bar Tab example (Section 4.1). Your colleagues and students have voted, over your objections, to have you pay for everyone’s drinks. Now add the following stipulations to the example: before taking the vote, the group deliberated. Everyone, including you, had an equal opportunity to offer reasons for or against forcing you to pay for everyone’s drinks. The others advanced arguments that it would be in the best interests of the group as a whole to force you to pay. They attempted to reach a consensus. In the end, they were unable to convince you that you should pay, but everyone else agreed that you should pay. Are you now obligated to pay for everyone? Are the other members of the group entitled to compel you to pay through threats of violence?

To avoid excessive utopianism, we should respect the following constraints:

i) We may not assume unrealistic levels of altruistic motivation. In examining the advantages and disadvantages of the system, we must assume that the anarchist society will be populated by people with relatively normal levels of selfishness, and we must accept the consequences of that selfishness within the particular social structure.

ii) We may not assume perfect rationality or knowledge. Our defense of anarchism must be consistent with the fact that people periodically make mistakes.

iii) We may not assume psychological uniformity. We must recognize the fact that human beings have a variety of motivations and character traits; for example, that some individuals are unusually aggressive or reckless.

iv) We may not simply assume persistence of the system over time. Rather, we must be able to argue that, once adopted, the system would be able to resist forces that might be thought to undermine it.

v) We may not assume simultaneous, worldwide adoption of the system, since there is no plausible way in which that could come about. We must imagine that (perhaps as a transitional stage) some limited region or group becomes anarchist in a world otherwise dominated by states.

On the other hand, it is worth noting two things that do not render a social theory overly utopian:

i) If a theory ‘cannot’ be implemented simply in the sense that people cannot be convinced to implement it, this does not render the theory too utopian.

As an analogy, suppose it is proposed to me that I should donate $200 to charity this month. I reply: ‘No, that is not realistic, because I refuse to do it.’ Intuitively, I have not articulated a valid objection to my donating $200, however intransigent my refusal may be. Similarly, the refusal of most members of society to take anarchism seriously, let alone to attempt to implement it, does not create a valid objection to anarchism. Of course, if most people have some reason for rejecting the theory, that reason might be cited as an objection to the theory. Anarchism is to be evaluated by supposing, perhaps improbably, that the system is adopted and considering from there whether a desirable and just state of affairs would result.

ii) To be sufficiently realistic, a model for society need not be feasible or desirable under all social conditions. It need only be argued that there are some conditions, likely to be realized now or in the future, under which the model would succeed.

. . . the theory of liberal democracy might be too utopian. It would not be excessively utopian simply to advocate that we maintain current institutions, functioning exactly as they now do. But few thinkers adopt this position. Most believe that some degree of reform is called for – for example, that the democratic process should be less influenced by special-interest groups. The more one knows about how government actually functions, the less likely it is that one can sincerely assert that it operates as it should. This opens up the possibility that the changes we would like to see in democratic states are overly utopian. Advocates of liberal democracy face the same strictures against utopianism as advocates of more radical positions, such as anarchism or socialism.

It may seem strange to suggest that a mainstream, liberal democratic position might turn out to be too utopian, while some radical anarchist alternative might be sufficiently realistic. But the distinction between utopianism and realism is not a matter either of how far a proposal is from the status quo or of how far it is from the mainstream of political thought. The distinction between utopianism and realism chiefly concerns, roughly, whether a political or social idea requires violations of human nature. A mainstream political view might turn out to require such violations, while some radical alternative does not. It is perfectly possible for a small change to be unfeasible, while some much larger change is feasible.

One common form of utopianism consists of confusing the way individuals and organizations are ‘supposed to’ behave with the way they will behave. When social systems are evaluated, it does not matter how a system is supposed to work; what matters is how it can be expected to work under realistic assumptions about human nature. For example, we can say that the function of government is to protect the rights of its citizens, but nothing follows from this about what government will actually do.

On 11 September 2001, America suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history. Four airplanes were hijacked and destroyed, the Pentagon was attacked, and the World Trade Center was destroyed, resulting in close to three thousand fatalities. This was many times worse than any other terrorist attack ever suffered by the U.S. or any other country.
What were the consequences for the United States government? First, the president’s approval rating underwent an immediate and enormous jump, from about 55 percent to almost 90 percent. Over the following seven years, it dropped steadily, finally ending below 30 percent in 2008. Though this remains a matter for speculation, it is plausible that George W. Bush would not have been reelected in 2004 if not for the terrorist attack.

On the face of it, this is paradoxical. If there was anyone whose job it was to protect Americans from this sort of attack, it would be the executive branch of the U.S. government. As the head of that branch, George W. Bush might have been expected to come under criticism. As an analogy, imagine that you have hired a company to provide security for your building. You have just learned that last night, vandals broke into the building and destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. Someone now asks you what you think of the job that your security company is doing. What do you say? ‘Best security company ever!’?

This book is an effort to help push society along towards the needed skepticism of authority. It may seem that my position is extreme – as of course it is, relative to the current spectrum of opinion. But current mainstream attitudes are also extreme, relative to the spectrum of opinion of earlier centuries. The average citizen of a modern democracy, if transported back in time 500 years, would be the most wild-eyed, radical liberal on the planet – endorsing an undreamt-of equality for both sexes and all races; free expression for the most heinous of heretics, infidels, and atheists; a complete abolition of numerous standard forms of punishment; and a radical restructuring of all existing governments. By current standards, every government of 500 years ago was illegitimate.

We have not come to the end of history ( pace Fukuyama). The evolution of values can proceed further in the direction it has moved over the past two millennia. It could proceed to an even greater distaste for the resort to physical force in human interactions, a fuller respect for human dignity, and a more consistent recognition of the moral equality of persons. Once we take these values sufficiently seriously, we cannot but be skeptical of authority

Mozi’s argumentative strategy is simple and compelling: he begins from an uncontroversial ethical prohibition, applies the same principle to a particular kind of government policy, and finds that the policy is morally unacceptable. It is in the spirit of Mozi that I question the institution of government as a whole. If one individual travels to another country to kill people, coercively extracts money from members of his own society, forces others to work for him, or imposes harmful, unjust, or useless demands on others through threats of kidnapping and imprisonment, the governments of the world all condemn that individual. Yet these same governments do not shy away from undertaking the same activities on a national scale. If we find Mozi’s argument compelling, then it seems that we ought to find similarly compelling the argument that the great majority of government actions are ethically unacceptable.