On Looting and Burning

Before I get going, I'd like to remind you that I was writing about police violence and systematic injustice against blacks (and others) in the criminal justice system years ago, before it was cool and on your mind. So when you see me talking about protestors' excesses, it's not because I think that's the most important issue, but because it's what I find philosophically interesting now.

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NPR recently featured a piece on a book defending looting. 

On its face, looting seems wrong. Consider the basic doctrine of defensive violence. If someone is attacking you or others, you may use defensive deceit, subterfuge, and even violence back at them, if doing so is necessary to stop them. The principle is a bit more complicated than that, of course. (I discuss the complexities in the second chapter of When All Else Fails.) There are issues about imminent and on-going general threats, how proportional the response can be, what exactly "necessary" means, and so on. (Generally, the necessity requirement is that you can't use a more harmful response when a less harmful response is as effective.)

Still, you are not in general allowed to attack innocent bystanders. If the bully picks on me daily, I can't beat up his cousin or a stranger as a way of making him stop, even if somehow beating up this innocent third person induces him to stop. I can't steal lunch money from an innocent third person to stop that the bully from stealing mine. I can't engage in racist attacks against Koreans to stop white people from engaging in racist behavior toward me. 

There may be special cases where this behavior is excusable, such as that you may break into a store to hide if that's necessary to stop someone from abducting you. 

One might try to overcome this presumption against hurting innocent third parties in two sorts of ways:

1. Argue that the third parties aren't actually innocent.

2. Argue that the good consequences of looting and riots justify the behavior. 

There are smarter and dumber versions of 1. Let's start with the dumber version. On Facebook, you can see people sharing memes that make it seem white people and all black people are part of two big, coordinated moral teams. When some white people mistreat some black people, or vice versa, that's team W attacking team B, and vice versa. 

But of course we're not on teams. There are individual people acting wrongly. There is indeed systematic injustice, as my own book on criminal justice documents and diagnoses. But even this systematic injustice is not all white people hurting all black people, but rather specific white people hurting many black people or in some cases specific black people. 

Unfortunately, both hardcore racists such as the KKK and many of today's woke folk accept the team sport mentality of ethics. But this way of thinking is a cause of our problems, not a solution. Some British people were awful to some Irish people in the past, so should an Irish person today hate all British people and hold them responsible? Not only does this attitude moral responsibility incorrectly, it leads to further conflict. On the contrary, if you could wave a magic wand that would stop people from thinking of themselves and others as part of ethnic and racial teams, you'd do the world a big favor by waving it. 

The smarter version of 1 is to say that people are complicit. Everyone is complicit in these injustices because they could have worked to stop them or perhaps could have stopped them, but they instead tolerated them or even indirectly aided them.

But this is problematic for a few reasons, too. 

For one, complicity actually means involvement, not failing to act. Yet most of the time, when people say others are complicit, what they mean is that these others could have stopped the problem but didn't, not that they contributed to the problem. 

Second, not everyone is complicit. Some people have in fact worked to stop systematic injustice, and looters and rioters have no idea whether the person whose small business they're destroying is complicit or not. Some people have or had very little power. Some people are new the country and haven't had a chance to do anything. And so on. It's not as though the rioters first document individual people's moral responsibility and then target those who have it coming. (If you do, though, please remember that by this line of argument, my neighbor's houses may be targeted but not mine. Remember, protestors, I was working on this years ago before most of you even cared. Thanks.) 

Third, the bigger problem is that if we're going to say that nearly every person in the US is complicit in various injustices, this once leads to the perverse conclusion that I am justified in looting your house and attacking your businesses. After all, you all are not merely complicit in the criminal justice system's systematic mistreatment of blacks and the poor. You are complicit in the even worse injustice of closed borders and how immigrants are treated. At any rate, the Open Borders crew and I will be passing through Cambridge, MA, this weekend to loot any house with a pro-Biden or pro-Trump sign. Any car with a Bernie sticker is gonna burn. 

Regarding 2: The consequentialist argument is weak for at least two reasons as well. First, it's far from clear that looting and rioting help produce desired consequences. The empirics are complicated, and there is strong evidence that people react to such behavior by voting for law and order candidates. If I were Trump, I might encourage such looting as a way of drawing people back to me. "Look, the Democrats will let your homes and businesses burn. I will restore civilization." It's an effective message, and there is good evidence it works. It may not be enough to get him re-elected, but it appears to be helping him already. (Can we loot the looters' houses because of their complicity in re-electing Trump?)

But, regardless of the empirics, you get the same problem as the previous argument: it proves too much. If we may riot and loot to protest police murders, why can't we riot and loot for countless other causes, including higher stakes causes, such as climate change or closed borders?

At any rate, I'm not saying all rioting and looting is wrong. Burning and looting the local police station in many cities and towns is probably justifiable. This is too simple, but in general, since the government is acting wrongly, you may attack its property, but not the property of third parties. 

More on Angry Mobs

 You might have some imperfect obligation to speak out against some issue. (It can't be a perfect obligation, can it? Does anyone think you are literally obligated to speak out for or against some issue at all times you're awake?)

Even if so, it doesn't follow that other people have permission to make you speak out on demand. For instance, even if you should speak out against the genocide of the Uighurs or against closed borders (two things that are far more important, morally speaking, than Black Lives Matter), it doesn't follow that I, Jason Brennan, may approach you at any time and insist that you speak out on the spot. If I further harassed, harangued, and threatened you, you would be justified in defying me.

At any rate, I am please to report that last night in DC, I found that exactly zero protesters were wearing "Free the Uighurs/Fuck the CCP" or "Open Borders" T-shirts. I beat up 300 people with a baseball bat, thus protecting the world from their horrifically violent silence. 

What Counts as Political Knowledge?

Since the late 1950s, many political scientists, economists, and political psychologists have measured what Americans and others know about politics. The results are uniformly stark and depressing: Around the world, the majority of citizens are deeply ignorant about basic knowledge. In the US, the average citizen knows who the president is but not much else. That citizen doesn't know what bills have passed, what various indicators are of economic or social health, who their representatives in congress are, who controls congress, or most of the other stuff you'd think they'd need to know to vote well. They are also systematically misinformed about the basics in the social sciences.

When I cite such stats, some democrats dissent. They say that while the kinds of knowledge that Pew or the American National Election Studies test are indeed forms of political knowledge, they are not the only forms. Lots of things matter for politics: the local price of daycare, a bus ticket, or milk, the way police treat you in your neighborhood, and so on. We shouldn't privilege what political scientists call "basic political knowledge" because the actual knowledge needed to make good political decisions is far wider, and many so-called "ignorant" or "misinformed" citizens in fact have this kind of knowledge. 

Two responses:

1. Even if so--and I agree that citizens have such local knowledge--that doesn't tell them how to vote. So you know the local price of milk and know that the jobs are drying up in your local town. (Actually, citizens almost never know their local unemployment rate.) Your local school system sucks. Should you vote for protectionist Trump, anti-immigration Bernie, or free-trade and pro-immigration candidate? Your local knowledge doesn't help you. Should you vote for someone who wants to raise or cut the minimum wage? Your local knowledge doesn't help. Should you vote for someone who wants to strengthen teachers unions or expand school choice? Your local knowledge might help a bit here, but then perhaps the national problem is distinct from your local problem, and you still need to understand the political economy of unions and the social science of school choice. So, yes, your knowledge matters, but it's not enough to ensure you can vote for your professed goals or interests. You need more than that. Knowing there is a problem does not mean you know how to solve the problem. 

2. A deeper response is that I don't think the people who make these arguments actually take their own arguments seriously. What I mean is that they are onto something deep, but their arguments are actually arguments against expanding the scope of democracy precisely because democracy--and, indeed, all political systems--does a terrible job accommodating and using local knowledge. 

As Hayek pointed out in 1945 (and others before him), decision-makers need to know not just general statistics, but various kinds of local and dispersed forms of knowledge in order to make good decisions which properly solve the economic (or social) problem. The problem decision-makers face is that much of the knowledge they need is dispersed among the many, is implicit or tacit, and is constantly changing. Even if you had a snapshot of all that is known right now, the economic and social situation constantly changes. Make a decision tomorrow based on information from today and it will be suboptimal at best, because things have changed. 

Market prices turn out to be excellent (if imperfect) ways to communicate this knowledge because they are functions of supply and demand, and because supply and demand curves are functions of our individual actions in response to our disparate knowledge. Market prices are an emergent feature of the aggregation of individual decision-makers acting on their local knowledge, personal desires, and so on. Market prices communicate information to others in ways they can use. Even better, they do so without requiring the people using that knowledge even understand what the information means. If a fire closes the mine, the price of tin will increase, and people will substitute aluminum or plastic, even if they have no idea why the prices have changed. 

Market prices are an excellent way to communicate disparate, local knowledge to all decision-makers. (In a market, everyone is a decision-maker and planner.) Voting is not. It is not even comparable. It is many orders of magnitude worse. Voting is infrequent. It is monopolistic. You vote on only a few things. The information signal is weak and unclear. It lacks the features that make market prices work. 

It's precisely because of the importance of such local knowledge that we want, all things equal, to minimize the scope of politics and increase the scope of the market and civil society. The democrats who use "local knowledge" to justify voting actually don't take the very issue they invoke seriously. Their arguments actually undermine rather than support their conclusions. How does voting Democrat over Republican every four years help communicate my local knowledge of the price of a gallon of milk to the people in charge? Answer: It doesn't. 

The Society to Nation-State Slide

Most political philosophers at some point refer to something called "society". "We owe a debt to society." "The basic structure of a society must be justifiable to all people in that society on terms they can reasonable accept." "We should provide a universal basic income to all people in our society." "A society is just only if the 'distribution' of income matches this particular pattern I concocted last night.' "Our society is racist." That kind of thing.

 

Philosophers almost always uncritically assume that "society" is coextensive with some nation-state or other.

 

On its face, this seems clearly false. 

 

For instance, consider the Ralwsian-style arguments for prioritizing co-nationals in welfare payments, or for holding that principles of distributive justice hold for people inside nation-states but not between them: Rawls would say that we have special obligations to those within the same society, because we are involved in a web of cooperation from which we as individuals derive great benefit.

Here, the argument is that your own personal welfare depends in large part on your membership in and belonging to a particular society. You depend upon various background institutions, past rates of capital accumulation, and so on. In virtue of receiving such benefits, you owe more to fellow participants who helped create and sustain the social conditions that make you so well off.

 

However, there’s no clear way in which the “society” in question here just so happens to be co-extensive with the modern nation-state. Each of us is connected to billions of others in complex webs of cooperation, with some people close and others distant, with some strands thick and others thin, all organized by various overlapping formal and informal institutions, most of which regulate parts of the web but not the whole thing. Each of our webs is different and different parts of our individual webs are governed by different institutions. Your web does not match the borders of your nation-state, and indeed, you are more highly connected to, dependent on, and aided by many people outside your borders than many/most people inside. 

 

Similarly, suppose Rawls says, "We owe more to co-nationals because we have to justify the rules of the game to them. The institutions of our society won’t be legitimate unless each member has a sufficient stake in those rules, and sufficiently benefits from them, that it’s reasonable to demand they play along by those rules.” 

But, again, there’s no plausible interpretation of “society” which equates it with any modern-nation state. You are part of a web of cooperation and influence, with different institutions regulating and influencing different parts of your web. Even the institutions that directly regulate you are not co-extensive with your nation-state. They involve more both more local and more international laws, rules, customs, and norms. Your web of cooperation overlaps with but is different from mine.

 

Rawls has no response to this objection, because he explicitly imagines away this complexity. In A Theory of Justice, for the ease of constructing his theory, he asks us to imagine an isolated autarkical nation-state, which people enter only by birth and leave only by death, in which all norms, customs, and laws are more or less uniform across the entire state. In Rawls’s imaginary example, he stipulates that society is equivalent to all the members of a state and we are all indeed subject to the same basic structure. But this has little to do with the real world. In the real world, nation-states do not have a uniform basic structure and there is no “society” co-extensive with the nation-state.

 

It's not as though the real world is simply a complicated departure from Rawls's thought experiment or model. Rather, Rawls's thought experiment fails to model or capture the important aspects of real-life social interaction. The reality is--a reality which any serious political philosophy must acknowledge--that we are each in complex webs of interaction and influence, each with slightly different webs, with some strands thicker than others, and with the webs not matching the boundaries of our modern nation-states. 

 

If you're reading a book or article on political or social philosophy which makes this mistake, throw it in the trash can. It's trying to analyze or solve a fake problem while ignoring the real problem. 

Society ≠ all the people subject to a particular national government.