Dan Moller’s Governing Least: A New England Libertarianism is one of my favorite books on libertarian philosophy. In it, he discusses one idea that I think is underrated, and deserves to be highlighted. The idea is what he calls residual obligations.
First, Moller’s approach to libertarianism is not based on a hardline approach like many associate with Rand or Rothbard. Moller does not think in terms of exceptionless rules, or rights that are inviolable in all circumstances. He acknowledges that sometimes, rights violations can be justified. Suppose I find myself in the following scenario:
People with an absolutist view of rights might argue that I’m morally obligated to stay outside and freeze to death. Common sense morality, however, says this is a case where it’s permissible to violate someone’s property rights. However, Moller points out what’s often overlooked is that a rights violation being justified isn’t the end of the moral analysis. Too many people speak as if overriding a right necessarily means the same things as erasing the right altogether. But this is a mistake. As Moller puts it, an overridden right is not a deactivated right. A justified rights violation is still a rights violation. The reasons that exist to avoid harming someone, though overridden, have not ceased to exist, and harm was still caused to someone who did not deserve it.
As a result, Moller says, “the overridden reason to avoid harming you” still being in effect produces “residual obligations for me.” If you see that I’ve broken your cabin window and taken some of the supplies you kept stored in there, would be wrong of me to merely shrug and say “well, the emergency situation I was in overruled your property rights, so unfortunately for you, this is all your problem.” Instead, I now have some residual obligations to you. Moller suggests these obligations include restitution – if I caused $300 worth of damage to your cabin in order to break in, I should repay you for the damage. There is a further obligation of compensation to the extent that you are otherwise harmed by my actions, and I should take efforts to compensate you for those harms. I should express sympathy – even though my action may have been justified, it was still regrettable, and it still caused harm to you, and for me to treat that as a matter of indifference would be wrong. And there is an obligation of responsibility which is “not just backward looking, but forward-looking.”
The forward-looking nature of responsibility is of particular interest. For example, if the mountain pass in the above thought experiment was widely known to be a hazardous place to hike, and I also knew that there was a major snowstorm coming in, and could have easily anticipated that taking a hike that day could place me in a situation where I might need to break into someone else’s cabin in order to survive, that gives me a strong obligation to avoid putting myself in that scenario in the first place. As Moller puts it, “If I can reasonably foresee that some action of mine will put me in the position of facing an emergency that will then render it permissible to harm you, I must take responsibility to avoid such actions of possible. I should not think that I have less reason to take responsibility because I can avoid harms by transferring them to you instead. And failing to take responsibility weakens my claim to impose costs on others when the time comes.”
I think this is basically right. If I had been the hypothetical hiker above and was later trying to take moral inventory of my life, I wouldn’t find myself thinking “If only I had been a better, more moral person, I’d actually be dead already. I’d have had the decency to do the morally correct thing, and I’d have frozen to death outside that cabin years ago.” But if I failed to live up to my residual obligations, and never attempted to make things up to the cabin owner, I would feel like I had done something wrong to that extent. As I’ve written before, I don’t want to be the kind of person who feels comfortable with making others bear the costs of my choices, or of my misfortunes. As Moller phrased it, “the core impulse isn’t outrage about being asked to give, it is in the first instance a bewilderment at the suggestion that we are entitled to demand.” And Moller goes on to argue, persuasively in my view, that “if we recognize even modest strictures on making others worse off to improve our lot” then “we quickly run into a form of libertarianism.”
A simple question we should all ask ourselves about any belief we hold is “If I was wrong about this, how would I know it? What would it actually take to convince me that I’m mistaken?” If you can’t answer that question, that should be a big red flag. This is hardly an original observation on my part, of course. Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example has written that “a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light entered it, you would be blind.” Similarly, if your mind ends up in the same state regardless of the evidence or arguments you encounter, then intellectually you have been “blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.” To illustrate the point, Yudkowsky goes on to say this holds true even for things as basic as 2+2 = 4, and that he finds “it quite easy to imagine a situation which would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3.”
So, what would it take to convince me I was wrong about the moral argument for libertarianism? Well, as mentioned, I don’t think it’s right of me to demand and compel other people to carry the costs of my actions or my misfortunes. If someone could provide me with a convincing argument that I would become a better, more moral person if I did adopt such a belief and began to act in accordance with it, that would in turn convince me I was wrong about the moral argument for libertarianism.
What about you, EconLog readers? What’s a core belief you hold, and what would it take to convince you that you were mistaken about it?
READER COMMENTS
Ahmed Fares
Dec 13 2023 at 3:44pm
The ideal society is a meritocracy. The problem with a meritocracy is that it contains the seeds of its own destruction, as those who win in the first round pass along advantages to their children in the form of education and inherited wealth. Then you end up with a plutocracy.
Here, the perfect is the enemy of the good. A less than perfect meritocracy with some redistribution of wealth which encroaches on the absolute property rights of libertarianism is preferable to the alternative of a plutocracy, a so-called socio-economic caste system.
It’s striking a balance between equality of opportunity and property rights, and recognizing the trade-offs between the two.
Kevin Corcoran
Dec 13 2023 at 5:05pm
This depends on what meaning you assign to the concept of “merit.” In Social Justice Fallacies, Thomas Sowell’s latest book, he talks about a slippery sort of equivocation people can make between different meanings of that word. The meaning relevant to traditional defenses of meritocracy only considers the “individual capabilities that are relevant to the particular endeavor. Merit in this sense is simply a factual question, and the validity of the answer depends on the predictive validity of the criteria used to compare different applicants’ capabilities.”
However some people use the term differently, so that “merit is no longer simply a factual question about who has the particular capabilities relevant to success in a particular endeavor. Now there is also a moral question as to how those capabilities were acquired – whether they were a result of some special personal exertions or were just some ‘unmerited advantage,’ perhaps due to being born into unusually more favorable circumstances than the circumstances of most people.” Or, as you put it, people who gain “advantages” from their parents “in the form of education and inherited wealth.”
On the second definition, one would dispute the “merit” of NFL quarterbacks like Peyton Manning and Eli Manning, given that their father, Archie Manning, was also an NFL quarterback. Sowell writes:
I’m very much okay with using merit in the factual rather than the moralized sense. If I find myself in need of surgery one day, I’m going to want the surgeon who has the most (factual) merit to put me under the knife. And if someone was to tell me that particular surgeon lacked merit in the moralized sense, because he had been born to wealthy parents who were also surgeons and have every advantage in becoming an accomplished surgeon – well, I don’t care, and protests of “but plutocracy!” aren’t going to make me one whit more willing to employ the services of a less skilled surgeon because they had to overcome lots of disadvantages on their way to becoming a surgeon. And I wouldn’t want a policy in place that forces anyone else to do that either.
steve
Dec 13 2023 at 9:08pm
The issue of unmerited advantage is important especially because it may mean that people we think are factually better really are not or vice versa. Who is actually more likely to do better in the long run, the kid who gets an 800 on his math SAT who has had lots of tutors and took the test 4 times to get the best possible score and has time to study all they want, or the kid that gets a 770 but comes from a poor family and is working full time off the books to help support his family, took the test once and has limited study time? People who believe in test scores might claim the first kid is factually better but I dont think that’s so clear. Certainly in my hiring I have found the latter choice to do very well and the first to sometimes disappoint.
Steve
Ahmed Fares
Dec 13 2023 at 11:03pm
Denmark provides free post-secondary education and a living stipend. You can come from a poor family and still have a good shot at life.
Kevin Corcoran
Dec 14 2023 at 11:00am
You’re switching to a different (worthwhile, but still different) discussion. Also, for the sake of clarity, I’m going to use the term “ability” for what Sowell calls merit in the factual sense, and “admirability” for the moralized sense of merit.
Ahmed’s claim was that meritocracy is undermined if people gained their ability due to advantages in their childhood. I claim that the reason they have those advantages is irrelevant. Your claim is that it’s often difficult to tell who has the best ability, and that people may sometimes take a higher test score to mean someone has the most ability, whereas that may not be the case. And sometimes, someone with a lower test score but who was a more admirable person in what they overcame in life might end up having better ability despite their lower test score.
Well, that’s all true enough, but none of that is relevant to what I was saying. My point was simply that at the end of the day, it’s ability that matters, and if I had to choose between the surgeon with the best ability, or the one with the most admirable backstory, ability wins that face-off ten times out of ten. You correctly note that it’s often difficult to tell who will have the best ability, and that test scores are an imperfect indicator. Sure, but I never said otherwise. (I didn’t mention test scores at all, so I have no idea where that even came from!) Everything is an imperfect indicator – even the best predictor we have, that of general cognitive ability, only has a .22 correlation with job performance. I didn’t make any claims about how we ought to judge who will have the best ability. My claims was simply that ability is, at the end of the day, what actually matters – regardless of how that ability was gained.
If you think someone’s admirability is also a reliable indicator, and a more admirable person with a lower test score might ultimately show higher ability than a less admirable person with a higher test score – yep, I agree that’s plausible and it’s very likely true in many cases. And if you want to take that into consideration when making a hiring choice, great! I would too! But still, the thing you’re still aiming for is the person with the greatest ability – factual merit. The admirability factor, in your example, may be instrumentally useful inasmuch as it might be a signal to help determine factual ability, but it’s still ability that you’re trying to determine. And there’s a world of difference between treating admirability as a predictor of ability, and treating them as substitutes.
steve
Dec 14 2023 at 12:43pm
??? Note that I didnt say admirable. I am claiming that someone who has very limited time to study and almost no support structure very likely has more ability and more potential than someone who scores a little bit better with every advantage possible. We might very likely end up with more people with more ability if we acknowledged the differences in advantages. This is also based upon real life experience. We have seen that people who had great scores in college dont always translate well into Med school or great scores coming out of residency dont always do well when in real live practice. When you achieve what looks like excellence by devoting lots of time to do that, then have to function in real life where you dont get hours to work out a problem that needs solving in 10 minutes some people fail. Conversely, those who have always lived under those pressures can thrive.
Since I have worked with surgeons in some capacity for over 50 years I probably have a pretty jaded opinion about people having the ability to determine who is most able. I think there is a bit of hubris in declaring that we can be sure about who factually has the best/most ability. All too often that is really determined based upon looks, the way people talk, ability to socialize. Best is also situational.
Steve
Kevin Corcoran
Dec 14 2023 at 1:22pm
And note that I didn’t say you said admirable. I said that I would use that word to describe how Thomas Sowell describes the moralized version of “merit.”
And as I said, I agree that this can very well be the case in many situations. You’re trying to kick down a door that’s wide open here. Although, again, I never said anything about test scores at any point, so I’m still confused about why you’re still trying to bring them in. Nothing said in the post, or by anyone else, had anything to do with test scores.
Once again – I never made any claims that were remotely in the ballpark of “declaring that we can be sure about who factually has the best/most ability.” I’m really confused about why you keep returning to this.
To try to reiterate as clearly as I can – my claim is that what matters is who will perform a given task best, regardless of how much or little they overcame in order to become the best. I’m not making any claims that test scores (or any other particular measure) ought to be used to make that determination – that was never at any point what was under discussion. I agree that knowing in advance who will perform a task the best is fiendishly complicated, and any of the proxies we might use to try to predict that are highly imperfect. What Ahmed found objectionable was when people “pass along advantages to their children in the form of education and inherited wealth.” My claim was that this is irrelevant. Note, I’m not claiming that having these advantages will, in fact, guarantee that a person will grow up to be the best at a given task. What I am saying is that in any given case, if we somehow knew for certain that the person who would be best at a task gained that ability entirely because they had all the advantages Ahmed described, that knowledge provides exactly zero reason to prefer someone else. Yes, the person who had all the advantages and had all the most impressive test scores might not actually be the best, but that’s not at all relevant to the actual discussion. The question is whether or not someone being the best at a given task due to “unmerited advantages” is a problem that needs to be offset. And I don’t think that it is. Repeatedly saying that test scores aren’t great predictors of performance is just compeltely irrelevant to that question.
Ahmed Fares
Dec 14 2023 at 3:09pm
If you have equality of opportunity where everyone has a chance to become a surgeon, then the quality of surgeons would be higher because you’re drawing from a larger pool of people.
David Seltzer
Dec 13 2023 at 6:52pm
Kevin, thought provoking a usual. Per your hiking example, I would pay 300 dollars for the damage. If the cabin were occupied by the owner, I would offer to pay them a lot more for shelter and food. To reinforce my point, If I were stranded in the Arabian Desert in Jordan, the price of water is high, I would pay the price.
Ron Browning
Dec 14 2023 at 7:22am
I will not answer the question that you asked, but since you have brought up snowstorms and morality, I will submit the following.
You are trapped in a freak overwhelming snowstorm, you stumble upon a wrecked car with a family all dead, except for an infant safely buckled in the car seat. Morally, that child becomes yours, and you must safeguard its life as relentlessly as you would your own.
Convince me otherwise.
Jon Murphy
Dec 14 2023 at 9:15am
Are you saying one must adopt the child or simply protect the child until you both are rescued?
Kevin Corcoran
Dec 14 2023 at 10:26am
I don’t think I can convince you otherwise, because I agree that in the circumstance you describe, you should indeed safeguard the infant’s life. Indeed, I’d go a bit further than you put it, as you said I must “must safeguard its life as relentlessly as [I] would [my] own.” But happen to think that if it came down to saving the life of a child, or my own, then I’d sacrifice myself to save a child’s life. This carries over into all kinds of circumstances one might imagine – if there was only space on a lifeboat for me or a child, I’d give it to the child. If I was in Nazi Germany and I could distract some Nazis and prevent them from discovering a hidden child, but at the cost of myself, then that’s what I should do.
Of course, I’m making it easy on myself here, talking all nobly like that with nothing actually on the line. Maybe I overestimate myself. Perhaps if I actually was in Nazi Germany, my courage would fail me, and I’d remain hidden and allow the child to be discovered. But the key thing is in that circumstance, I would consider my behavior to be a failing. But when I say “I don’t see myself as entitled to make other people carry the costs of my choices or my misfortunes”, that doesn’t seem like describing some personal failure on my part, and something I should aspire to change.
Dylan
Dec 14 2023 at 7:35am
Your last question is a good one, but one I don’t know if I have a satisfactory answer to. Moral beliefs appear to be particularly difficult to change via rational argument (which I think you implicitly acknowledge in your hypothetical on what it would take to change your moral belief).
For me, I’m a strong open borders proponent. I have believed this for what I thought were both pragmatic and moral reasons. Pragmatic in the “trillion dollar bills lying on the sidewalk” sense, and moral, because I think it is evil to essentially condemn people to a life of poverty based on the luck of where they were born. Or to a life of living in Siberia to people that hate the cold.
The last few years have challenged my pragmatic assumptions a bit, because I have underestimated just how strong anti-immigration sentiment is around the world. But the moral belief hasn’t wavered. And, I have no idea of what would change my mind on the moral argument. You could conceivably convince me that allowing people to move wherever they wanted would be the end of the human race, in which case I might agree that the human race surviving should take precedence over the competing moral claim of freedom of movement. But, I haven’t really changed my underlying moral belief, just subordinated it to another higher claim.
Anything I can think of that would change my moral belief, in the end is just a circular argument. Maybe that’s different if you’re a hardcore utilitarian or deontologist but, when push comes to shove, I think most of us are moral intuitionists.
Kevin Corcoran
Dec 14 2023 at 11:19am
Hey Dylan –
Let me be more specific about what kind of thing would change my mind about a key moral position like that. I’ll actually go for something even more foundational – the idea that “suffering is bad.” That’s about as plausible a premise as you’ll ever find in moral philosophy, and one that I take to be true. But some people disagree – for example, moral antirealists or nihilists don’t think anything is really bad. Here’s how they can convince me to change my mind.
I would need them to provide me with an argument where the premises, taken together, validly entail the conclusion “therefore, suffering is not bad.” And the premises of that argument would all themselves have to be even more plausible than the plausibility of “suffering is bad.” If the argument uses any premises that are less plausible than “suffering is bad” I would take that as a reason to reject the argument. Many antirealists have offered logically valid arguments that would entail suffering is not bad. Many realists have made logically valid arguments that take the badness of suffering as a premise. When two arguments, each logically valid, reach different conclusions, I favor the argument between the two that has the most plausible premises. To do otherwise would suggest reasoning by favoring less plausible premises over more plausible ones – and down that road lies madness.
The same is true in this case. I’d need to see an argument where the premises, taken together, logically entail “therefore, it’s right of me to demand and compel other people to carry the costs of my actions or my misfortunes,” and all the premises in the argument would have to be even more plausible than the idea that it’s not okay for me to shift the costs of my burdens onto others. I don’t know what such an argument would actually be, of course. If I did, then, well…I would believe it’s okay for me to do just that. But that’s at least an outline of what such an argument would look like.
Dylan
Dec 15 2023 at 5:49pm
Thanks for the further explanation. I’ll say that makes sense, and I tend to believe you that you would revise your beliefs in that scenario, but you strike me as an unusually and particularly thoughtful person in this regard. For most of us though, I think ranking the plausibility of foundational beliefs is particularly hard, and when faced with something that puts two different beliefs in conflict, the rational thing to do is to ignore the conflict.
Jon Murphy
Dec 14 2023 at 9:28am
I’ll give you two: One where I did change my mind and one where my mind hasn’t been changed, but has certainly been opened.
1) Carbon taxes. Like most economists, I used to believe that carbon taxes (or Pigouvian taxes in general) were the 1st best way to solve an externality. However, over the past 10 years or so, I’ve become convinced that Pirougivan taxes are not the first best, or even a solution to, the problem of externality. Pigouvian taxes are more likely to make the problem worse. Indeed, I am currently working on two papers: the first where I show the Pigouvian model doesn’t work even given its own assumptions once you move past the initial time period and the second where I discuss the whole Neoclassical problem of externality relies on an incorrect understanding of cost and market failure that is incorent with economic theory.
2) Adam Smith and doux commerce. Back in 2020, Edwin van de Haar and I had a back and forth in Economic Affairs over whether Adam Smith was a doux commerce theorist and the broader evidence of the trade-creates-peace thesis. After this exchange and various private exchanges between Edwin and myself, I am more open to Smith not being a doux commerce economist. His views are a lot more subtle than I initially thought. And while I am still a doux commerce theorist myself, Edwin has convinced me to at least be more open to the idea it may be incorrect.
Jon Murphy
Dec 14 2023 at 9:29am
Sorry, that should say “incoherent with economic theory”
Roger McKinney
Dec 14 2023 at 1:28pm
Since libertarianism came from theologians distilling its principles from natural law with Biblical support, someone would need to disprove those to get me to change my mind about them.
Without the Biblical God, any moral system is as good as another. They differ only in what people find personally acceptable. For example, the world saw slavery as morality good until Christians rejected it. Without Christianity, there is no reason to reject slavery except inertia. Ancient Greeks like Aristotle made good logical arguments for slavery.
Mark Z
Dec 14 2023 at 9:35pm
There’s also biblical support for slavery, and most theologians until about 200 year’s ago defended slavery as compatible with Christianity. Abolition of slavery historically happened earliest in the least religious countries. Pretty hard to argue Christianity specifically is conducive – let alone necessarily – to ending slavery.
Roger McKinney
Dec 15 2023 at 1:34pm
The “slavery” the Bible supports is more like indentured servitude.
Christian Europe got rid of slavery in the middle ages only to have Spain and Portugal revive it. Then the UK and US ended it again long before anyone else and Christians led the movement.
nobody.really
Dec 18 2023 at 8:14pm
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom
6th Cent. BCE: Athenian lawgiver Solon abolished debt slavery of Athenian citizens and freed all Athenian citizens who had formerly been enslaved, but retained chattel slavery.
3d Cent. BCE: Indian emperor Ashoka abolished the slave trade but not slavery.
326 BCE: Lex Poetelia Papiria abolished Nexum contracts, a form of debt bondage.
9 CE: Xin Dynasty banned slavery in China. (Reinstated in the next dynasty).
956 CE: Goryeo dynasty (Korea) freed existing slaves.
Not clear that Christianity is either a necessary or sufficient condition for banning slavery.
Henri Hein
Dec 14 2023 at 3:41pm
It’s an interesting question for me. I’m a skeptic. Thus, I tend to question my own positions, except maybe the skeptical one. One thing that would move me away from skepticism is if the physicists collectively agree on a natural law being proved beyond any doubt and that all other theories must now conform to this one law.
David Seltzer
Dec 14 2023 at 5:54pm
Kevin asked. “What’s a core belief you hold, and what would it take to convince you that you were mistaken about it?” The death penalty. I believe the state has no right to put a person to death. It deprives that individual of their life and liberty. Yet, if I were on a jury deciding the fate of a convicted felon who decapitated a baby, I would advocate for the death penalty. It’s possible I can hold two opposing ideas about the states use of this considerable power. Reconciling those opposing beliefs ain’t easy.
Roger McKinney
Dec 14 2023 at 6:18pm
Most people hold to contradicting ideas.
David Seltzer
Dec 14 2023 at 7:06pm
Roger, I don’t know if the number is greater than 50%, but I’ve seen many examples of that. Thanks for the comment
Roger McKinney
Dec 15 2023 at 1:36pm
I should have added that libertarians are least guilty of that error.
nobody.really
Dec 18 2023 at 8:28pm
I used to talk this way, too–but then I changed my mind, and maybe I can change yours.
The crucial thing to consider here is the distinction between indirect and direct objects. Today when I use the word “advocate” with an indirect object (e.g., “advocate for the poor,” using the preposition “for”), I think of it as representing a client. In contrast, when I use the word ‘advocate” with a direct object (e.g. “advocate social safety nets,” without a preposition), I think of it as promoting a policy.
When you discuss the death penalty, I surmise you are discussing a public policy. Thus, I exhort you to stop advocating for the death penalty–and instead merely advocate the death penalty (or advocate the use of the death penalty).
You’re welcome.
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