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.

****

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. 

The Intuitive, Presumptive Wrong of Interference

The Mercatus Center held a book forum on In Defense of Openness (IDoO) with Anna Stilz, Kit Wellman, and James Witte as respondents. I'll post the podcast when available. 

Our main strategy in the first few chapters of IDoO is to argue that there is an extremely strong presumption in favor of free trade and open borders. We then look at and defeat objections which try to override this presumption.

We start by using modification of Michael Huemer's starvin' Marvin case, which goes roughly as follows:

Imagine Starvin' Marvin is starving. He will starve unless he makes a trade with some people. Fortunately, there are people in a market who want to buy what he sells. But suppose Bob shows up with armed guards and forbids those people and Marvin from trading. As a result, Marvin dies.

Here it looks like you have done something really evil and wrong. You don't have to be a libertarian to agree. 

In response, Stilz said:

For one thing, the case is ambiguous: it’s not obvious that what is salient here is that Marvin is prevented from making a trade with a willing partner, rather than the fact that he is placed into a scenario in which he must starve and die.  Most people agree that it is wrong to leave people with no option but to starve.  But note that there are many ways to prevent starvation (we might give people a right to economic exchange, we might give them a universal basic income, we might give them land on which to grow food, and so on).  So how do our intuitions about starvation support strong rights of free exchange?

That's right on it's own as a response to this one example, but it's a problematic response overall for a few reasons.

1. We anticipated this point in the book. Accordingly, we included number of alternative cases where the stakes are lower. It still seems wrong, indeed, awful and rotten, to interfere even if the stakes are lower. Imagine Marvin will merely remain poor. Or imagine Bas is literally indifferent between eating at Denny's or Perkins, but I show up with a gun and order him to pick Perkins. Here, I have treated Bas very wrongly, even though he is indifferent between the two outcomes. The wrong of interference comes not merely the welfare loses from interference, but from the interference itself. We don't even have to posit that Bas has a "right to choose where to eat" to explain why this such an evil way to treat him.

Indeed, if you have a theory which says, "When Bas is indifferent between A and B, it's ok to threaten to force him to choose B with state violence," I'd regard that as a reductio of your theory. The fact that your theory says that means your theory is false. (If you had some good reason to threaten him, that's different, but it'd better be a mean good reason. See below.)

2. Regarding Stilz's own solution, imagine that when Starvin' Marvin shows up, I once again post armed guards and forbid him from making a willing, consensual, mutually beneficial trade with others. But suppose I offer him a sandwich and care package, plus I give the willing trading partners some cash, too. Here, it nevertheless seems that I wrong him badly. Threatening him with armed guards and violently stopping adults from interacting with each other who want to do so seems very wrong, even if I make the payments so high as to be equal to the welfare gains from trade. I had better have a damn good reason for treating them this way. Not just any old reason will do.

It's of course scary and frightening to have armed guards who threaten people with violence. This is more analogous to the real world--there are indeed armed men who will attack you at the border or track you down and attack you inside the country. Indeed, even US citizens such as I have to interact with armed, mean Border Patrol agents when driving on various highways in the US. But you imagine that the interfaces is done magically instead. Suppose I cast a magic spell which simply prevents Bas from ever going to Perkins. He would rightly be pissed even though by hypothesis he has other alternatives that are as good.

So, there is a strong presumption in favor of not treating people like this. This presumption can be overridden or defeated if one can show that there are other hidden moral or welfare costs to allowing such trades, but the presumption must be overcome.

3. Overcoming the presumption is difficult, not easy, as Stilz suggests. Consider some things that would not justify this kind of violence or interference: You can't forbid Marvin from trading because you feel like it, because you dislike his race or religion, because he listens to the wrong music, because you want to use video footage for a documentary you're making, as a form of performance art, because some of the neighbors dislike it when people trade, or because some other people want to trade with Marvin's potential partners and hate the competition. You can't say, "I want to stop Marvin from trading because I am worried that it will reduce the income of the very rich by a slight amount for a short time." None of these look like good justifications. So the presumption seems very strong, not weak.

4. It's worth noting--and I did note--that even Rawls agrees. (Stilz is, I think, a kind of Rawlsian.) Rawls things there are very strong rights to be able to live where you want, to take a job you want (subject to reasonable regulation and licensing in special cases), and so on....but only within one country. But Rawls has close to zero argument at all for restricting this to one country.  

On "Silence Is Violence"

TL;DR: If we take "silence is violence" seriously, then I am authorized to beat most of you up.

A video is going around with a bunch of white kids harassing some white woman outside a restaurant because she didn't make a BLM fist on dem...

A video is going around with a bunch of white kids harassing some white woman outside a restaurant because she didn't make a BLM fist on demand. I have no idea how representative or common this kind of thing is; I suspect it was largely unique to this particular mob. 

They repeat the slogan "Silence is violence". 

From a strategic point of view, it's a beautiful slogan for few reasons.

If you get people to believe it, then they are forced/bullied/pushed/induced/conscripted/whatnot to join your side. Once somebody sincerely says, "Either you're with us or against us," you recognize that they are forbidding you from being neutral. Either you fight for them or fight against them. Either way, you have to fight. Threats backed with overwhelming force often work.

But it goes beyond that. By equating literally doing nothing with literal violence, you thereby authorize people in your own group to use violence as they see fit. Most people raised in a modern, liberal, tolerant, open, democratic society were taught that you may use violence defensively, not offensively. You may use it against perpetrators of violence, not against innocent bystanders. However, if you can convince yourself that innocent bystanders doing nothing are literally committing violence, then you are thereby authorized to use defensive violence against them. If eating dinner and not raising a fist when asked is violence, then you may punch back! Far from condemning this mob for acting like every other religious and struggle session mob throughout history, we should perhaps praise their restraint, as they didn't literally beat the hell out of this "violent" woman . Or, perhaps, we should condemn them for not responding to the violence of her silence with actual violence. Maybe this mob was too cowardly to stop her violent silence.

As a strategic matter, it's brilliant messaging for controlling your mob and others. But is the position correct?

It's easy to come up with cases where one is obligated to act rather than remain silent or to do nothing. You ought not pass by the drowning toddler when you can save him with little effort. You ought not let your colleague grope a grad student at a party when you can intervene, especially if it won't cost you your job. You ought to stand up for your friend when the bully pushes him, but the two of you outnumber and can take the bully. 

But of course the world is full of injustice. Right now, people are literally enslaved. China is engaging in genocide or something close to it against the Uighurs. Myanmar's government is engaging in genocide against the Rohingya.

Some people are unaware of these things, though as far as I can tell, the typical person in the mob above is unlikely to regard ignorance of atrocity as an excuse when the news of the atrocity is easy to encounter.

If silence is violence, then, can we not condemn even more people--including most BLM protestors--for their silence and complicity in horrific evil? Note that I wrote two books and multiple papers in response to systematic violence against blacks in the US, so I am not being defensive here, and further, I share many of the BLM protestor's concerns. But that said, the crimes I just mentioned--slavery and genocide--are even worse than how the US's criminal justice system treats blacks. Alternatively, if we care about structural injustice, in terms of sheer overall loss of welfare, closed borders is worse than everything else by a couple orders of magnitude. Should we form a mob and intimidate any BLM protestors who don't make the open borders hand signal (I guess we'll need to devise one) on demand?

One might insist that the difference is that some issues are more salient or local.

I'm not sure what difference "local" makes except in cases where one can actually make a big difference. It's easy to save the  drowning toddler in front of you, which is part of what makes it obligatory rather than optional. But beyond that, it's not clear to me why local matters. If it takes equal effort to stop a horrific injustice overseas or a less horrific injustice here, you should stop the injustice overseas. But we're not really talking here about stopping injustice. Getting some women eating dinner on a DC sidewalk to make a fist is not going to make a difference in reforming the police.

I'm also not sure how "salience" makes a difference. BLM is salient in part because the news covers this issue far more than it covers, say, the Uighur atrocities or the injustice of closed borders, and they cover it more in part because that's what people are protesting. Citing salience here is a bit like saying the topic you want to discuss is the most important because you happen to be discussing it. Nope.

At any rate, starting tonight, I plan to wander DC with a bat and beat up anyone who isn't already wearing a T-shirt proclaiming their disgust at the top 10 on-going injustices in the world today. Silence is violence, and I intend to stop the violence!

Personally, it turns out I complain the correct amount about all the injustices in the world, so I am not liable to defensive violence. The rest of you had better watch out, though. 

The Harm Principle and Toleration: An Interview with JS Mill

As many of you know, I am a trained necromancer. (I learned this skill after I wrote Why Not Capitalism? I so thoroughly destroyed G. A. Cohen's book that Satan was forced to relinquish Cohen's soul to me from hell. I now keep it in a shoebox under my desk and use it as a footstool.) One of my skills is talking to the dead. Today, I'm interviewing John Stuart Mill on his book On Liberty.

Brennan: "You say that neither government nor society should regulate or control actions unless they cause harm to others."

Mill: "Correct."

Brennan: "So, what you mean by that is so long as someone claims an action--such as writing an op-ed criticizing their philosophy of gender identity--harms them, then the action should be regulated heavily by society or government."

Mill: "Uh, no, that doesn't follow."

Brennan: "Wait, why not?"

Mill: "Well, for one, anyone can claim they are harmed by anything. We can't just let individual people decide by fiat that they were harmed. A principle like that would surely be abused. I mean, if all it takes for you to be able to assert control over others is that you were harmed by them, people will claim to be harmed all the time. Human beings are pretty crappy and will generally take advantage of structures of power for their own benefit. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that this is how people behave. A church may be created for the purpose of saving souls, but give it 10 years and its new purpose becomes amassing wealth and real estate. You can't trust people--whether in social mobs, bureaucracies, or in governments--with much power. That's one of the big reasons I oppose paternalism, you may recall, if you read the second half of that book."

Brennan: "But suppose they could be trusted, would that be enough? And suppose it did cause real harm by some objective standard."

Mill: "Well, no. The other problem is that you are confusing a necessary condition with a sufficient condition. I'm saying that we should tolerate anything people do that doesn't harm others. But I'm not saying that if something does harm others, it should therefore automatically be subject to any, let alone significant, social or political regulation."

Brennan: "Why not?"

Mill: "I mean, to simplify the argument I make in that book, it comes down to this: When we decide what level of freedom people should have, and how much we should tolerate, we should draw the line where doing so produces the most overall social progress and overall best living conditions for people. High tolerant, risk-taking societies produce great social, political, scientific, artistic, and cultural progress, while heavily moralizing, indignant, puritanical, risk-averse, and mobbish societies do not. Tolerant societies make people flourish, intolerant societies do not. I realize that's an empirical argument and requires empirical proof, but I think history and economic analysis rather clearly demonstrates I'm right."

Brennan: "Can you give me an example of a harm that we should tolerate?"

Mill: "Take one from economics. If a competitor comes along who builds a better mousetrap, she might put your mousetrap company out of business. It's plausible to say that you've been harmed--probably far more than a person would be harmed by, say, allowing a conservative speaker to come to campus, a speaker the person is free to ignore. So, imagine we said that in order to prevent harm, we never allow people to outcompete each other in the market. What do we get? Stagnation, poverty, rent seeking, and a political system run by insiders who control the anti-competitive regulations for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else. See the medieval guild systems, for example. We all are better off in a system where such competition is allowed, even though each of us would prefer that we, and we alone, be immunized and protected against such competition. Similarly, overall, we each benefit greatly from living in liberal, open, tolerant cultures, even though we each selfishly might wish to crush and destroy those who have ideas and beliefs we despise."

Brennan: "People are much less racist, ethnocentric, sexist, and so on today then back when you were writing, say, The Subjection of Women. Do you think we're a more tolerant society?"

Mill: "Yes, for sure. But at the same time, we should be careful not to credit people with being tolerant when they really aren't. Most people today are not very tolerant overall, even if they are more tolerant than most people were through most of history. Toleration means putting up with things you dislike and disapprove of. For instance, Jay, do you disapprove of homosexuality?"

Brennan: "No, not at all. I think there is no moral difference between heterosexual or homosexual sex, or really any consensual sex among adults."

Mill: "Then you can't really be said to tolerate these actions, because you don't disapprove of them. It's a bit like saying you are tolerant of people using red toothbrushes. Toleration means putting up stuff you dislike and disapprove of. In contrast, if an evangelical Christian thinks homosexuality is sinful but puts up with it, doesn't harass gay people, and generally leaves them alone, that's tolerance. So, what are some things you disapprove of?"

Brennan: "Illiberalism, for one. Liberalism is the correct theory of justice. I also, frankly, tend to think that non-liberals are almost universally motivated by a will to power and that their putative reasons for illiberalism are a cover for their self-interested actions."

Mill: "Ok, so as a liberal, you have to tolerate illiberal people. Here, read this FAQ to understand what that means. Toleration is an extremely demanding principle, and most people don't live up to it."

Is Academia a Right-Wing Institution with a Left-Wing Cover?

In this post at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen speculates that Los Angeles is the most "right-wing" city in the US in terms of practice, rather than people's political beliefs. Here, "right-wing" signifies strong inequality in status. 

In LA, there is winner-takes-all kind of tournament, and people are strongly motivated to raise their own status while willing to accept radical inequality in prestige. People are treated differently based on their status and prestige, and in particular, how they look, whom they know, and who's in their network. All of this is tolerated and celebrated, despite the overtly "left-wing" politics people claim to espouse. 

If I recall correctly, in another post, Cowen speculates that often times the political ideology of a place tends to counteract, balance, or cover up the underlying politics. So, for instance, LA and New York are very hierarchical and status-driven, but espouse left-wing politics, while red cities often have much lower income inequality, but espouse conservative ideas.

I similarly wonder if academia is a right-wing institution with a left-wing cover. Below is a partial excerpt, modified in various ways, from a paper forthcoming in an edited anthology:

Given how poorly universities behave and given how much they undermine social justice, it’s strategic for administrators to use social justice talk as much as possible. While academia is supposed to aim at a higher mission and be non-profit, the actual people inside academia are normal, selfish, for-profit people. Egalitarian talk is often a cover or disguise for the pursuit of self-interest, just as talk of salvation in the medieval Catholic church was often a cover for the pursuit of real estate, power, and wealth. 

While academia is filled with people who posit egalitarian ideals, it is not an egalitarian place. In behavior, academia may be the most right-wing institution in the US, even more than the military or the police. (Think of how open the military and police are to accepting and promoting common people. Now think of how open the good colleges and universities are.) Higher ed serves a very right-wing function, namely, to reinforce class hierarchy. Academia is highly hierarchical; everything and everyone gets ranked, and everyone is acutely aware of such rankings. Finally, while nearly all academics pay lip service to left-wing ideals, their actual behavior is predominantly selfish. In short, academics simultaneously promote egalitarianism philosophy and inegalitarian outcomes. Status, not education, is the sine qua non and the essential product it sells; if it stopped providing this, it would quickly go out of business. Higher education strongly contributes to income inequality, especially in the United States.

 

People often use moral language to disguise their pursuit of self-interest. Academics in general are trained to use moral language in a sophisticated way. Perhaps we should regard academic egalitarianism as cheap altruism. If I say I’m an egalitarian, I come across as nice and caring, even though I haven’t thereby done anything to help others or sacrificed my self-interest to help the poor. On the contrary, many egalitarians go out of their way to explain why their egalitarian commitments do not require them to donate their excess income to others.

 

The Necessity of Economic Growth: Why Growth Beats Global Redistribution

Some countries are rich and others poor. Some people are rich and others poor. Many philosophers and politicians conclude poverty is thus a misallocation problem, too much here and too little there. Consider this thought experiment:

 

           Misallocated Pie

Great Grandma baked a pie, enough to give all 206 of her great-grandchildren a full slice. But thanks to her bad eyesight, she gave 20 great-children giant slices, 60 of them medium slices, and the rest tiny slices, so little that they’ll go hungry. 

 

Misallocated Pie elicits egalitarian intuitions: The lucky should redistribute some of their big slices to the unlucky kids. Once everyone gets an equal portion, everyone will have enough. 

Philosophers often employ variations of Misallocated Pie to argue that richer countries should redistribute their wealth to poorer countries. They also use it to argue that the richer people inside single countries should redistribute their wealth and income to poorer people. 

Simple arithmetic reveals that reallocating the existing world income cannot eliminate world poverty. In Misallocated Pie, when everyone gets an equal slice, everyone gets enough. In the real world, allocating equal slices means no one gets enough. We cannot end world poverty without significant widespread economic growth. 

In 2019, purchasing price parity-adjust world product was about $128 trillion USD. That’s the total value of all goods, services, capital investment, capital development, NGO activity, government activity, and so on, produced in one year, adjusted by differences in costs of living.

Imagine, unrealistically, that I can wave a magic wand converting all production into consumable income. Imagine the magic wand split world income equally all living people. Imagine there is no loss of production.

PPP-adjusted per-capita world product is about $16,100. That’s just slightly higher than the American poverty line (for one adult living alone). It’s about half of what socialist Bernie Sanders considers a proper annual living wage. It’s approximately the same per-capita income as Issaquena County, Mississippi, the poorest county in the contiguous United States that is not majority Native-American. By comparison, the relatively poor Appalachian region of the United States has a per-capita PPP-adjusted mean income of about $39,000. 

Thus, waving the magic wand doesn’t end poverty. Rather, equalizing income means everyone is poor. Granted, more than half the world is below the mean income, so my wand makes them richer. Nevertheless, perfectly executed global redistribution means no one would meet standard of living sufficient to lead a properly secure and autonomous life.

It gets worse. The magic wand thought experiment overstates the case for global redistribution and understates the case for growth. I asked you to imagine all current production is converted to income and distributed equally. In reality, most production could not, even in principle, be converted to income and transferred or redistributed to workers. GDP includes various kinds of capital investment, government spending, infrastructure development, and other kinds of output which cannot be made liquid and transferred. 

It gets worse. By hypothesis, the magic wand converts all economic output into consumable income. By hypothesis, governments, universities, non-profits, and for-profit corporations produce nothing and cannot exist. The thought experiment asks you to imagine we maintain current world per-capita income without any capital investment or reinvestment, without spending any money on capital goods, without investing in new energy sources, without investing in infrastructure and transportation, and so on. It’s nonsense. This means even perfectly egalitarian redistribution could not ensure everyone receives $16,100/year.

It gets worse. We’re also imagining that when the magic wand is waved, people continue to work at the same rate and with the same productivity. We’re imagining white collar workers who used to work 70 hours a week for high salaries keep working for their guaranteed tiny salaries of $16,100. We’re imagining teenagers at McDonald’s put in their 20 hours per work rather than using their $16,100 to party. We’re imagining that there is no disincentive to work, even though everyone gets $16,100 a year no matter what. Real people aren’t like that. I, for one, would quit, and so would you. If we had to keep working to get that $16,100, we’d both work less productively. 

The upshot is that if you care about ending poverty, growth takes priority over equality. While there may be some justifiable role for redistribution, redistribution remains secondary. Political philosophers often talk as if there is and always will be enough stuff for everybody, as if the only issue is how allocate that stuff. Not so.