A little while ago I I posted about some things that I believe to be true.I asked for input that might change my mind. Unfortunately, the response I received was exactly what I had said specifically. do not have What I’m looking for isn’t simply a point you disagree with and a three sentence explanation of why, but rather recommended reading, listing books, essays, etc. that you believe provide the most comprehensive support for your opposing point of view.
But there is a consolation prize: Matt Zwolinski, one of the archetypal libertarian philosophers, recently happened to write Posts Some ideas that criticize one of the ideas I mentioned, moral equality theory, which is the idea that, as Zwolinski puts it, “if it’s wrong for individuals to do it, it’s wrong for governments to do it,” or, as Dan Moller puts it in his book, Minimal governance“If we are advocating social institutions that entrench a moral logic that we reject in face-to-face encounters, it should at least give us pause to think.”
Zwolinski raises two concerns about moral equality. First, it has fundamental implications in that “almost everything that government does is morally unjust, from drug crimes to social welfare to taxation itself.” It also has troubling implications for the case of children. At the very least, it seems to have few useful implications.
The second objection is the idea that we cannot infer social morality from the morality of individual actions. That is, social morality may be an emergent phenomenon that is rooted in the actions that cause it but not manifested in them. If this is the case, then the rules about how individuals should behave face-to-face may not be very useful as a guide to understanding the rules that govern large-scale social interactions. If social morality is a fundamentally evolutionary phenomenon that arises from collective attempts to solve problems inherent in social coexistence, then we cannot expect to fully answer these questions by reference to individual encounters, just as we cannot derive the properties of the ocean from the study of individual H2O molecules.
These are interesting ideas, but I don’t think they succeed in undermining the moral equality argument. I will be posting one post on each counterargument and explaining why Zwolinski’s concerns do not convince me. But as a preface, I do not agree with Zwolinski’s claim that moral equality implies the illegitimacy of things like social welfare programs. It is possible to accept moral equality and still conclude that taxation and welfare programs are permissible. In my next post, I will provide an argument in favor of the welfare state that is premised on the legitimacy of moral equality.
Then, in another post, I’ll talk about the emergent objection and why I don’t think it undermines moral equality.
