Paternalism and Capacity

In general, paternalism is presumptively wrong when it is directed at a person who is capable of making autonomous decisions on her own. And paternalism is not presumptively wrong when it is directed at a non-autonomous person. One way to interpret the relationship between paternalism and autonomy is that if two people have the same capacities to make decisions, then they ought to be subject to or protected from paternalism to the same degree. Let’s call this view Similar Paternalism:

Similar Paternalism:  People should respect non-autonomous older people’s decisions to the same extent that they respect similarly non-autonomous young people’s decisions. Paternalism towards older people is as morally risky as paternalism toward younger people.   

Similar Paternalism is partly justified by the desiderata that like cases be treated alike. It's generally good if people’s moral status does not depend on normatively extraneous, contingent factors (such as age, ability, or life stage). On this view, if an older person and a young person are equal with respect to their ability to make decisions, then they also are equal with respect to their entitlement to not be treated paternalistically.

This view stands in contrast to two alternatives. Call the first alternative Youth Paternalism. This view holds that paternalism toward young people is easier to justify, holding constant a person’s capacities, than paternalism toward older people:

Youth Paternalism: All else equal, people should respect non-autonomous older people’s decisions to a greater extent than similarly non-autonomous young people’s decisions. Paternalism towards older people is more morally risky than paternalism toward younger people.   

Most people who disagree with Similar Paternalism will resist this view on these grounds. There are several justifications for Youth Paternalism. First, older adults may have previously made autonomous choices that would weigh against paternalism, such as issuing advance directives. Also, older adults may have acquired a kind of dignity, in virtue of having been autonomous in the past, that weighs against the justifiability of paternalism. And older people may have life plans, set in place in the past, that prohibit paternalistic treatment in ways that similarly capacitated young people do not. Or, it may be that paternalism toward older people is presumptively worse simply because it is more likely to misfire or be counterproductive.

I think that both Similar Paternalism and Youth Paternalism are mistaken because paternalism toward young people is, all else equal, less justifiable than paternalism toward similarly capacitated older people. Call this view, Elder-Paternalism.

Elder Paternalism: All else equal, people should respect non-autonomous older people’s decisions to a lesser extent than similarly non-autonomous young people’s decisions. Paternalism towards older people is less morally risky than paternalism toward younger people.   

Against Similar Paternalism, I agree with the youth paternalists that when assessing the permissibility of paternalism, it not only matters how autonomous a person is, it also matters whether their autonomous capacities are rising or declining. The problem with similar paternalism is that it fails to include all the information about a person’s autonomous capacities that would be relevant to decisions about whether, in virtue of their autonomy, paternalism toward someone is warranted.

But against Youth Paternalism, I think that choices made by people with declining capacities merit more respect. I think this for three related reasons. First, if a person’s autonomous capacities are rising, then paternalistic interference is more morally risky than it would be if their capacities were declining because, to the extent that paternalism operates over time, there is a greater risk that it will eventually violate an autonomous person’s right against being paternalistically interfered with.

Second, interfering with a person whose autonomous capacities are rising can also be morally risky because it can impede the development of her autonomy, whereas that is not a consideration for a person whose capacities are in decline.

And third, to the extent that a prohibition on paternalistic interference is grounded in the value of respecting the value of people’s autonomous capacities or quality of will, there is a sense in which younger people, in virtue of their rising or accelerating autonomy, do have more metaphysically robust autonomous capacities than older people who are similarly capacitated at a given time.

This is not to say that it is generally OK to treat older people paternalistically. I suspect that there’s too much paternalism toward children and toward older people. My claim here is just about the relative strength of a presumption against paternalism for older people and children. If I’m right, then caregivers and policymakers are making a mistake when they assume that paternalism towards children is a paradigmatic case of justifiable paternalism, or when people suggest that interference with children’s choices is the least morally risky kind of paternalism.

 

Mask Mandates and Politics

 

People should wear masks to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. If you don’t wear a mask, and you give someone COVID-19, then you might have violated their bodily rights (assuming they couldn’t consent to the risks). That’s wrong. So you should wear a mask.  

 

If it’s wrong to refuse to wear a mask, should it be illegal to refuse to wear a mask? It depends.

Most things that are wrong shouldn’t be illegal. Even if refusing to wear a mask is risky, so is prohibiting mask-refusal. Public officials should weigh the risk of mask-wearing against the risk of enforcing a mask mandate.

 

Depending on the severity of the virus in a place, it might make sense to enforce a temporary mask-mandate, but this should usually be a last resort. As it stands, public officials haven’t invested enough in less prohibitive ways of reducing contagious transmission, such as contact tracing and expanded testing, so mask mandates are probably unjustified in a lot of places.

 

Mask mandates can also backfire if people view them as illegitimate. In which case, public officials shouldn’t enforce them because they won’t be effective and they may be counterproductive. Elsewhere, mandates may be unnecessary if almost everyone wears a mask voluntarily and private businesses require them. And mask mandates may be enforced in ways that are discriminatory or inegalitarian. In these contexts, mask mandates are especially morally risky.

 

So while it’s possible that public officials can justifiably enforce temporary mask mandates in some contexts, that doesn’t mean that everyone everywhere should be required to wear a mask throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

When it comes to the ethics of mask mandates, there’s not an easy, one-size-fits-all answer to the policy question. Even if people have enforceable rights against being infected with COVID-19, in some contexts, officials will lack the authority or the ability to enforce these rights in a morally acceptable way.

 

These answers don’t make for good politics because proponents of mask mandates have political incentives to discount the risks of unjust enforcement and opponents of mask mandates have political incentives to discount the risks of contagious transmission.

 

But contagious transmission and law enforcement are both morally risky, and in both cases the risks are sometimes distributed in inegalitarian and disproportionately harmful ways. Public officials should balance the moral risks of enforcing a mandate against the moral risks of not enforcing a mandate. If they did, then they’d find that there’s not a yes or no answer to questions about mask mandates—it depends.

The Theology of Liberalism

In Eric Nelson's newish book The Theology of Liberalism, he argues that Rawlsian liberalism represents a break with the liberal theories that went before it. Rawls is skeptical of merit, very concerned with the seeming arbitrariness of the distribution of talent, and wary of the inegalitarian distribution of opportunities that results from inherited inequalities of ability and resources. Liberals before Rawls viewed people differently. They "rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness. Their animating conviction ...inferred the possibility of human freedom and merit from the justice of God" (xi)  

Nelson's book is, in a way, a defense of the older approach. Nelson writes, 

"There is something deeply inegalitarian about Rawlsian egalitarianism. In place of the ... insistence on the equal moral power of all human beings to shape their lives in accordance with virtue, Rawls gives us an essentially hierarchical account of human nature in which the “better endowed” take the place of the Augustinian elect. (71)

Rawls's desert-skepticism then motivates his support for broadly egalitarian redistributive policies. But As Nelson points out, this move is too quick, and even if one is skeptical about deservingness, the existing distribution of resources may still be morally significant. 

Nelson argues that even if people have no natural rights to the distribution of natural resources or talents they inherit, it doesn't follow that the present-day owners of resources aren't entitled to them. After all, the distribution was to some extent a result of good-faith actors who, if they were acting wrongly, were not blameworthy for their wrongdoing. Also, those who are disadvantaged by the present-day distribution would not have otherwise existed. And since we cannot identify the victims of an unjust historical distributive pattern, we also cannot identify a sound principle of rectification. 

So even if the present-day distribution is in some ways arbitrary and free from considerations of merit, people may still have some kind of a claim to their inherited share of resources. Nelson writes, 

The moral rights of those who have purchased natural resources ought to be defended even by those who ... regard rules allowing the ownership and exchange of natural resources as unjust. I suggested that those holding such a view should concede that we often have reason to attribute good faith even to those who act in accordance with unjust rules, and that such good-faith rule-following itself gives rise to claims...My arguments should have important consequences for all dignitarian liberals—that is, for all of those who defend liberalism on the grounds that it respects the inviolability and “separateness” of persons— even if they dissent from libertarians in arguing for a “patterned,” rather than an “historical” approach to the theory of justice. For any theory of justice will necessarily confront the question of rectification. Whether we suppose that, in the abstract, the principle of justice requires equality of resources, equality of opportunity for advantage, the delivery of basic capabilities to all persons, or the maximization of the welfare of the least well-off, we have to consider the moral significance of the fact that we inhabit a world that has been structured by an infinite number of good-faith human transactions that conflict with our chosen principle. (155)

This is a really interesting argument. Here is how Nelson's argument could inform ongoing debates about distributive justice that go like this: 

A: It's wrong to enforce redistributive policies that create a particular distribution or end-state pattern of resources because such a system would violate people's rights! 

B: People don't really have natural rights that align with the current property system though. And people certianly don't deserve what they earn within the current system. If anything, the current property system violates rights! So redistribution is good because it remedies the rights violations that are inherent in the current system and it doesn't violate anyone's well-deserved entitlements. 

Nelson: Even if the existing distribution is in some sense arbitrary and undeserved, it could still be disrespectful to treat people as if their claims within the current system are irrelevant. 

So Nelson offers a kind of middle-ground, where existing distributions can carry some weight without assuming that any redistribution necessarily violates people's rights. So redistribution is not necessarily unjust, nor is it morally required. Again, here's Nelson on this point. 

It is not mere reliance on existing rules that commands our respect, but rather the good-faith reliance of those whose “minds,” “feelings,” and “consciences” assure them (mistakenly but not unreasonably) of the justice of those rules. What the requisite sort of respect amounts to—whether it should be conceived as a trumping consideration or simply as a pro tanto reason for deference (and if the latter, how it should be weighed against other concerns)— must of course remain an open question. But it is a question that political theorists should be interested in answering. (157)

 

FAQ's

1.  Q: Should people say bad things, (e.g. demeaning, inegalitarian, or mean comments)?

A: No.

 

2.  Q: If people shouldn’t say bad things, then should saying bad things be illegal?

A: No. Most things that are bad shouldn’t be illegal.

 

3. Q: But maybe if someone says a bad thing outside of work, they should still get fired from their jobs?

A: Not usually. Often the same reasons against making something illegal are also reasons against imposing other sanctions on people.

 

4. Q: Ok but what if a boss fires someone for saying a bad thing? If that’s wrong, then shouldn’t what the boss did be illegal?

A: No (see question #2).

 

5.  Q: What if instead of people getting fired or facing legal penalties, everyone just yells at the person who said the bad thing?

A: It depends. Sometimes this is a good idea. Sometimes, yelling at people in this way amounts to saying a bad thing (see question #1).

 

6.  Q. So basically, you’re saying that people can’t say bad things but they have to put up with other people saying bad things and not facing legal penalties or getting fired. And it’s only sometimes ok to yell at people who said bad things? It sounds like you’re saying that people have to put up with a lot of stuff they disapprove of in order to avoid inappropriately sanctioning or punishing someone. What kind of view is that?!

A: Liberalism.

 

Call Outs, Proportionality, and Liability

One problem with the criminal justice system is that too many things are crimes. Another problem is that people who commit crimes are often punished in ways that are disproportionate to the wrongfulness of the crime.

 

I discuss these problems elsewhere. TLDR, I think people only forfeit their entitlements to a certain kind of treatment (non-interference, assistance) insofar as they failed to treat others in that way. And people only forfeit their rights against interference (liability) in proportion to the extent that they failed to treat others in this way. On this view, liability is set at the price of the violation and in the coin of the violation. So too many things are crimes because the law punishes people who aren’t liable to be interfered with (e.g. drug users) and even when people are liable to be interfered with, the criminal sanctions are often disproportionate to the crime. 

 

Beyond the criminal justice system though, this framework for understanding liability can also apply to informal sanctions and criticism, such as social exclusion or public shaming on social media. These practices are within the realm of social norms. No one is getting arrested or going to jail for bad tweets. But practices of exclusion and shaming still raise questions about the ethics of enforcement, just not legal enforcement. 

 

Way back in 2017, Conor Friedersdorf drew an analogy between Parfit’s case of the harmless torturer and social media call outs. In the harmless torturer case, one thousand torturers each press a button that causes an imperceptible amount of pain, but cumulatively the button pressing amounts to torturing their victim. Friedersdorf wrote,

An analogous phenomena plagues efforts to enforce social norms via social media. Each critic scolds a transgressor in ways that seem proportionate and reasonable, as if turning to a stranger at a supermarket and saying, “Excuse me, I heard what you just said, and I really think you got it wrong.” What few critics fully realize is that thousands of others are doing the same and much worse—that the cumulative effect is a digital equivalent of thousands of people gathering around a transgressor at the supermarket and angrily shouting insults for three hours. If that happened in offline space the mismatch of proportion would seem monstrous; when it occurs in the online space only the target typically notices.

Here, Friedersdorf is making a similar point about proportionate liability, even if someone acted wrongly, the online response to wrongdoing is often disproportionate.

 

Say someone says something mean, thoughtless, or offensive online. How are they liable to be treated? Before asking this, we first we should ask, should people consider mean, thoughtless, or offensive online speech a kind of moral violation? I think too often, good faith speech is considered a moral violation when it shouldn’t be. But in some cases, yeah, a person may say something that is morally bad. In these cases, setting liability (roughly) at the price of the violation and in the coin of the violation would mean that the person who said the bad thing lacked the standing to complain about social sanctioning, which would consist in other people saying mean, thoughtless, or offensive things to him.

 

And there’s also a proportionality constraint. If the person had a big following, they may be liable to experience more social sanctioning than someone who had a small following. This is because people with bigger followings are likely to have done more harm in saying whatever mean, thoughtless, or offensive thing they said. Twitter screws this up though because sometimes people with a small platform are amplified onto a big platform. So for example, when Justine Sacco made a bad joke on twitter, her joke was amplified, and then she was exposed to the big-following norms of social sanctioning even though she committed a small-following violation. It was the people who amplified their voice that amplified the harm, but they were not subject to any social sanctioning.

 

Anarchists often argue that the same moral reasons that govern our personal relationships (e.g reasons for non-violence) should also apply to political relationships. But by the same token, the same moral reasons that pertain to political relationships also apply to our personal relationships. Those who are critical of inappropriate and disproportionate forms of sanctioning by political actors should also be critical of these practices within social life.

 

I’m not claiming that people shouldn’t identify, criticize, and resist injustice when they see it. I’m claiming that moral reasons related to liability should inform how people identify, criticize, and resist injustice. And if you think it’s wrong for agents of the state to engage in excessive policing and punishment, then you should also question practices of policing the boundaries of social groups and publicly sanctioning people online.

Liberalism at Work

In general, bosses shouldn’t fire workers for stuff they do on the weekends. Bosses should be legally permitted to fire workers for this reason. But people shouldn’t cheer bosses on when they do.

Lately, several people lost their jobs based on social media postings or their conduct outside of work. (Examples here, here, here, here, and here) Each case is different, but in many of them, it seems that bosses were firing workers in an attempt to demonstrate the company’s commitment to workplace inclusivity.

 

I agree that inclusivity is an important value at work. Nevertheless, I think liberals and progressives should generally oppose these dismissals because they should oppose workplace domination. Libertarians should oppose these dismissals too because even though employers should have a legal right to fire people at will on the basis of their social media posts or behavior outside of work, they still shouldn’t do it. Workplace domination is bad even if it shouldn’t be illegal.

Elizabeth Anderson makes a compelling case against workplace domination. When she joined Russ Roberts on EconTalk to discuss her book, Private Government, one of her examples of workplace domination was political pressure at work. She described “white-collar workers who are quite commonly pressured by their bosses to contribute money to favored political campaigns or political action committees.” Employers can monitor employees’ donations and employees with disagreeable politics could be disadvantaged in promotion decisions. 

 

Roberts then noted that employers can often dictate what workers do when they are not at work. Anderson replied,

Quite right. And this, I think, is even more objectionable. Normally we think that once you are off duty, you should be free from any kind of control or regulation by your boss. But, in the United States, the default rule of employment is employment at will. And that entails that your boss can fire you for any or no reason at all, including things that the boss finds out about your off-duty activity. For instance.…stuff that you might post on Facebook expressing perhaps controversial opinions can get one fired even if the Facebook posting isn't addressed to fellow workers or harassing them in any way but just expressing an opinion that the boss disagrees with. …In reality, people are fired for what they do over the weekend, and in their leisure time.

In contrast, Tyler Cowen wrote in response to Anderson,

A business usually should have the right to fire a worker for Facebook postings or other forms of “outside the workplace” activity. For a start, a lot of workers put racist, sexist, or otherwise discomforting comments and photos into their Facebook pages. When employers fire them, very often it is to protect some notion of the freedom of the other workers….The question of workplace freedom often boils down to one set of the workers against another. In that setting, allowing for a lot of apparently arbitrary firing decisions on net may support rather than oppose worker autonomy. (Private Government p.112)

In this exchange, I think Anderson and Cowen are both half-right. Anderson is right in saying that employers shouldn’t monitor employees’ social media accounts or speech outside the workplace, nor should they pressure employees to contribute to their favored political causes. Cowen is right that employers should not be legally prohibited from doing these things.

On the other hand, I also think Anderson and Cowen are also both half-mistaken. Anderson shouldn’t support regulations that limit employers’ ability to dismiss employees at will because this solution just trades workplace domination for political domination, which is even more pervasive and less escapable.

And Cowen should have been more worried that employers would fire people for bad reasons, or that it could be bad for employers to defer to an employees’ fellow workers to decide whether a person should be fired. The same reasons Anderson gives against subjecting employees to surveillance and arbitrary threats of dismissal from their bosses are also reasons against subjecting them to the same kinds of threats from their coworkers.

Another worry about firing people for their social media posting or behavior outside of work is that it is likely to be counterproductive if the goal is creating a welcoming workplace, even when bosses target speech and behavior that would undermine the values of corporate inclusivity. 

Consider a workplace that fails to make everyone feel welcome, a workplace that does not live up to its company’s commitment to inclusivity. In a workplace like this, expanding employers’ ability to dismiss people on the basis of their speech and conduct outside of work is may seem appealing in the short run. But without deeper reforms, corporate policies that permit bosses to fire people whose private conduct is viewed as objectionable or disagreeable could backfire in the long run.

Ultimately, expanding the power of the government, the bosses, or even the majority of workers is likely to end up harming the workers who have the least social power.

Moral Catastrophes and Progress

The past is full of moral catastrophes. 

The good news is that people seem to be getting better. Moral catastrophes like slavery, mass violence, genocidal war, the use of torture as punishment, and the denial of political equality are way less common today than they were in the past. As Michael Huemer argues, this is a sign of our collective progress toward adopting better, objectively correct values. 

The bad news is that people seem to be getting better, which suggests that we are probably living through moral catastrophes that we cannot recognize because we haven’t made enough progress yet. Evan G. Williams writes about this in “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe”. He argues that even if it’s pretty unlikely that any particular practice is wrong, it’s also pretty plausible that something we’re doing is seriously wrong. Williams then writes,

Our descendants may well view us with the same repugnance as we view our slave-owning forefathers….The fastest way to end this catastrophe, so that our wrongdoing will stop sooner rather than later, is to build a society that makes rapid intellectual progress and is flexible enough to take decisive action when the need is recognized. (981)

 

On his view, this requires the cultivation of a marketplace of ideas that is more effective at enabling good ideas to outcompete bad ideas. Williams emphasizes the importance of investing in education, effectively communicating scientific theories to people, and discouraging social norms that make it hard for good ideas to gain wide currency. 

 

The bad news about Williams's bad news is that there are also barriers to progress within education, science, and culture. For example, it’s often unclear how much education actually promotes learning (see here and here). And it’s unclear that science is set up in a way that really rewards or advances the ideas that have the most merit (see here). And it’s unclear that increasing exposure to different viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas actually makes people better at evaluating claims in a nonpartisan way.

I think Williams is right about our present circumstances, and the value of institutions that foster 'rapid intellectual progress.' So what would an investment in intellectual progress look like? 

Here are two new models that aim to improve our current approach to intellectual investment. First, consider Collinson and Cowen's proposal for a discipline of Progress Studies. And second, there's Minerva's innovative approach to effective education. Avoiding moral catastrophe will not only require that we rethink our institutions, it also requires rethinking how we rethink things. 

SSC vs. NYT

 

Scott Alexander closed his blog, Slate Star Codex.

 

As he tells it, a reporter from the New York Times was writing a story about the blog and the reporter told him that the paper would reveal his full name in an article. (Scott Alexander is the blog author’s first and middle name, but he doesn’t use his last name on the blog). Alexander decided to close the blog in the hope that it would preserve his anonymity because he was afraid that publishing his last name would put him at risk of losing his job or that it could endanger his housemates. Alexander writes,

When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.

So he closed his blog in an attempt to preserve his anonymity.

 

Should the NYT have published Scott Alexander’s real name? Saying it’s “NYT policy” doesn’t seem very persuasive for two reasons. First, I couldn’t find NYT policy on this, but the policy I did find says that the NYT permits anonymity when there is a good reason for it (e.g., in criminal justice or national security contexts). Felix Salmon points to this statement, which also says that names can be withheld when people have good reasons.

 

The paper also refers to anonymous artists like Banksy or Elena Ferrante by using their pseudonyms. The NYT also uses stage names, like “Lady Gaga, 34” rather than “Stefani Germanotta, 34.” And the NYT recently published an article that included the line “The Chapo co-host Virgil Texas (he lives and works under that pseudonym)” and also withheld the name of the co-hosts then-girlfriend who works in media because “she wants to stay anonymous; the Chapo fans scare her.”

 

And second, even if there were some kind of policy, that wouldn’t settle the question of whether the NYT should require the use of real last names in cases like Alexander’s or the Chapo story. Instead of citing a policy, Journalists and editors need to use their own judgment to decide whether publishing someone’s real name is important enough for a story that it’s worth the harm it would cause.

 

Some people may say that the NYT shouldn’t publish Alexander's full name because it is doxxing, which is the term that he uses. I’m not sure about calling it doxxing though since lots of journalism publishes people’s real names associated with events or topics that they’d rather not have their name attached to. Journalists shouldn’t be expected to give their sources veto-power over the publication of names. When someone says they have a safety concern associated with being identified, that doesn’t always mean that they shouldn’t be identified. It means they think there’s a risk. Journalists and editors must then decide whether the news value of the story is worth the risk.  

But there’s also a difference between what people should be allowed to publish and what they should publish. Sometimes the newsworthiness of a story isn’t worth the risk. For example, the Washington Post recently published a story about a woman who wore blackface to a party two years ago. They published the woman’s real name, and as a result of the story, she lost her job. That strikes me as a case where it probably wasn’t worth it to publish a random person’s real name, given the balance between the news value of a story about a Halloween party that happened two years ago and the harm it caused the woman who was named.

 

And sometimes the balance between newsworthiness and respect for privacy can shift over time. This is why some newsrooms go through old content and unpublish some stories when the news value of a story is outweighed by the harm associated with making someone’s name permanently attached to the story.

These are often hard questions though. Journalists are likely to make mistakes in both directions-- granting anonymity when they shouldn’t and revealing identities when it’s really harmful. Of course, I support a culture of openness and speech and transparency, and I don’t think journalists should lose their jobs when they make a bad call and publish something they think is newsworthy. I’m just saying that there can be pretty strong moral reasons against publicizing people’s names or personal information.

 

In Alexander’s case, unless the news story really was about his true identity, it doesn’t seem like the news value of publishing his last name outweighs the harm Alexander says it would cause in his personal life. So they shouldn’t have planned to publish his last name. Or, if the story was about Alexander’s true identity, then it sounds like that wasn’t clearly communicated to Alexander. Either way, the NYT policy on pseudonyms is really unclear and it sounds like they made a mistake here.

 

This discussion of anonymity in the news also highlights the fact that reporters are always making normative judgments even if they purport to be just reporting the facts. Judgments about what is newsworthy and judgments about acceptable risk, for example, are moral judgments. To say that something is newsworthy is to say that it is the kind of information that people have an interest in knowing. To publish someone's name is to say that the value of privacy is outweighed by the value of transparency in this case. 

These value judgments are unavoidable in journalism. And newspapers aren't 'more objective' when they are unclear and reticent about the moral reasoning behind their editorial judgment. If newspapers really care about transparency and accountability, as they often claim, then they should also be transparent and accountable when it comes to their own values.

Faith and Distrust

Advocates for social change can approach those who are resistant to change by having faith that they are capable of reform. Or, they could withhold their faith until others demonstrate that they have changed. Call these dispositions Faith in Humanity and Democratic Distrust. At first glance, it may seem that these dispositions are at two ends of a spectrum. On one end, someone could adopt a disposition of expecting the best of people, investing them, and communicating those high expectations. On the other, someone could adopt a disposition of expecting nothing (or worse), and communicating those low expectations.

 

Ryan Preston-Roedder makes a case for Faith in Humanity. Preston-Roedder writes:

Many of the people we regard as moral exemplars have profound faith in people’s decency: When segregationists bombed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little girls, Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted that “somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality”

Preston-Roeder characterizes faith in humanity as a disposition to adopt charitable beliefs in others and to invest in other peoples' decency. On his view, this kind of faith can encourage people to be more decent, and Preston-Roeder also worries that a disposition of distrust can backfire in this sense. Additionally, he argues that faith in humanity can help people avoid injustice in themselves because it protects people against the tendency to blame or sanction people who don't deserve it.  

 

On the other hand, faith in humanity is risky. It can make people vulnerable to exploitation, and they may fail to blame or sanction people who really do deserve it. Preston-Roeder argues that the risk is worth it because it is better to fail to punish the guilty than to mistakenly punish the innocent.

 

Contrast Faith in Humanity with Democratic Distrust. Meena Krishnamurthy makes that King also displayed democratic distrust. She writes,

The value of distrust is primarily motivational: distrust motivated Black citizens and their supporters to engage in new forms of action that would work to ensure racial justice. Its value is contingent. The connection between distrust and being so motivated is not a necessary one, but it is a tight one. If King had continued to trust White moderates, then political change would likely not have come or, at least, would have come very much later. It is King’s confident belief that White moderates would not act justly and that Bull Connor and other avatars of institutionalized racism would continue to act unjustly that motivated him to take things into his own hands. It is why he couldn’t wait any longer.

 

How can faith in humanity be compatible with democratic distrust? How could both dispositions explain King's civil rights work? Preston-Roeder and Krishnamurthy’s accounts both have a cognitive and a volitional component. Both accounts are justified on principled and pragmatic grounds.

 

Maybe the answer is that the two dispositions aren’t on a spectrum, as King's example shows. Maybe the two dispositions rely on each other. On the one hand, people have faith in the goodness of others and their capacity for change only when they can recognize that others are falling short, need to change, and won't do it on their own. This is a kind of distrustful mode of recognition. On the other hand, distrust can only be motivational and pragmatic if there is also some hope that people can change eventually.

                                                             

Or, it could be that distrust is a justified disposition to adopt when considering direct action or immediate political reform. Still, this disposition is not as productive or motivationally useful in the absence of faith that even the worst people are capable of profound moral transformation.

Equivocation about Classical Liberalism

 

Jacob Levy argues that libertarians should not resist intersectional approaches. Levy writes,

 

To the degree that classical liberals resist intersectional social analysis because of a mood affiliation with their dislike of identity politics in general and the politics of antiracism in particular, I would hope that the current mass movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd—and the fact that those opposing that movement include violent agents of state coercion as well as an executive pressing the limits on military involvement in civilian politics—could hasten a change.

 

In this sentence, Levy's claim seems to be that libertarians should embrace intersectional social analysis because they have very strong reasons to support the mass movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd?

 

Levy's conclusion doesn't follow from the considerations he mentions earlier in the sentence. But I think it's interesting where Levy's argument goes wrong. First, let's state it in a more general way so we can see the structure of the argument:  

 

1. Some people (X's) resist an approach/theory (T) because they oppose issues (A and B) 
2. Recently, a social movement (M) happened that was about (A and B) but also other issues (C and D) 
3. X's support (C and D) 
4. So X's have reason to support M as long as they care about (C and D) more than they oppose (A and B) 
5. If X's Support M then they should support (A and B) 
6. Therefore, X's should support (A and B) 
7. If X's support (A and B) then they should not resist T 
8. So X's should not resist T.

 

One thing to notice about this general argument is that (5) and (7) are often going to be really controversial premises. Take (5). Social movements are built on broad coalitions. People can support a movement for their own reasons without signing on to all of the commitments of a movement. For example, classical liberals can consistently support the protests and police reform efforts without changing their minds about identity politics.   

 

As for (7), even if someone does support antiracism reforms and identity politics, it rarely follows that substantive views like this entail a commitment to a specific method of social analysis. And when it comes to (8) isn't it also kind of strange to think that the thing classical liberals should take from a historic movement against institutional racism and violent policing is that maybe they've been too hard on intersectional social analysis?

 

There is also a kind of equivocation that happens throughout the argument. Fabio Rojas makes this point in his recent reply to Jacob. Rojas argues that a lot hangs on how we interpret intersectional social analysis (T). Rojas writes:

There are now multiple intersectionality theories. Sure, there are probably many social scientists who are happy to accept the hypothesis that people are "multiply marginalized," and some grumpy libertarians should mellow out and accept that. Jacob is definitely right on that point, and accepting a "basic" intersectionality will help classical liberals understand illiberal social practices better. However, there's a lot more to intersectionality theory than the "basic model," including a tight alliance with Marxist theory and a deep suspicion of markets. At the end of the day, this more expansive, and very popular, version of intersectionality theory is simply incompatible with a normative framework built on a presumption that markets and trade are the best way to organize an economy.

 

Rojas's point is that it's a mistake to equivocate between these two conceptions of intersectionality. If the theory (T) refers to the first definition (T1), then it doesn't seem like classical liberals should oppose it, but it's also not clear how many classical liberals do oppose it. If it's the second definition (T2), then they should clearly oppose it because T2 is directly opposed to classical liberalism. Levy doesn't make the case that T2 is consistent with classical liberalism.

 

This point can also be made about other key terms in Levy's analysis. Take his conception of "Classical Liberals." At points, he presents them as people who are committed to free markets and limited government (X1). These classical liberals include those who argue against immigration restrictions, occupational licensing requirements, qualified immunity, and for the decriminalization of sex work, and drug legalization. At other points, he paints classical liberals as a group of Ron Paul stans who are skeptical of antiracism and identity politics, some of whom are racist (X2).

 

If Levy is addressing (X1), then he should make a case for intersectional social analysis on grounds that don't involve defending identity politics and antiracism, since (X1's) don't really disagree. If Levy is talking about the much smaller group of people who also call themselves classical liberals (X2) and arguing that they should embrace intersectional social analysis because they should also embrace identity politics and antiracism, well, my guess is that such an argument wouldn't make much progress with this group.

 

Maybe Levy would reply that there are more X2's out there than I acknowledge because many libertarians are unsympathetic to identity politics and antiracism. But here again, the argument rests on a kind of equivocation in Levy's presentation of identity politics and antiracism. For example, if Levy is using the term identity politics (A) to refer to things like Abolish ICE, Black Lives Matter, and #metoo (A1), then I think that most classical liberals (the X1's) would wonder why he thinks they don't broadly support these causes. If Levy is using the term to refer to a narrower set of commitments (A2) like support for campus speech codes or voting for Hillary Clinton, then Levy hasn't shown that classical liberals should embrace this kind of identity politics.

 

I recognize that this is a kind of clunky way to put the point. But I think this framework is helpful in identifying a more general problem with recent libertarian arguments in the genre of "Why the Liberty Movement Should Embrace the Left" (see e.g., here and here). They define the "Liberty Movement" in a way that evokes the worst versions of the view (X2) and they characterize "the left" (A1/T1) in the most plausible, uncontroversial way.

 

If these writers considered the best version of "The Liberty Movement" then they would find far less disagreement with the best version of "the left," but that disagreement would be much harder to resolve. It wouldn't be a disagreement about the value of social equality. We all oppose racism and sexism and are committed to helping people in poverty. Rather, the disagreement between the best version of both perspectives would be a disagreement about whether policies that aim to address social inequality are justified given that enforcing them necessarily involves threatening all citizens with state-backed violence. It is a disagreement about how to make tradeoffs between political subordination and social and economic subordination.

 

There are good arguments on both sides, and there may be more agreement than we think. But libertarians and progressives will only build bridges and find common cause by addressing the best versions of all the views on the table.   

 

All the Monuments

The Reversal Test is a heuristic for reversing Status Quo bias. It goes like this: 

Reversal Test: When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias

. (Bostrom and Ord 664) 

  

Some people are mad that cities (like Richmond) are taking down Confederate monuments and statues of  Columbus and Churchill. A common argument is that taking down the monuments would erase history or prevent people from understanding their heritage. 

 

How would this defense of monuments fare if we applied the reversal test? If monuments and statues of racists and war criminals are necessary for understanding history and heritage, then why not put up more monuments to historical injustice? If one would oppose adding more monuments, then why think that the current distribution of monuments to injustice is optimal? 

 

Does applying the reversal test suggest that people should also consider taking down even more monuments? The president presented this as a reductio of removing Confederate monuments and other statues of unjust officials. But why is this a reductio?  

 

It's great that the monuments are going. 

 

Let's take down even more monuments to war. Take down all the monuments to public officials. Take down all the public theatre and symbolism of the government. It's creepy and authoritarian. Judges and lawmakers should meet in bland looking office parks without all the theatre of the state lending legitimacy to lawmaking and criminal justice. Cops should dress like gym teachers or grocery store employees. 

 

There's plenty of room for good art and architecture that isn't state-sponsored. And I'm basically fine with public art that doesn't glorify the government. Or, if people want to build monuments to Washington or  Lee on private property, of course, they shouldn't be stopped (although fwiw I think that would be a pretty messed up thing to do). 

 

But just as public officials shouldn't build new monuments to injustice, they should take down all the existing governmental monuments and other glorifications of state power. Even Washington.