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The best sentence I read today
So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.
That's from Will Wilkinson and for those of you on EST I read it yesterday. The whole post is interesting.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 30, 2008 at 12:57 PM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
Lots of loving of the state going on on the libertarian blogs lately.
Between your 'hearasy' yesterday, Wilkinson's defense of positive rights today, and yesterday's Wilkinson post cited here, not to mention Reason.com's Bob Barr loving, I'm not getting nearly my daily dose of fire and drum pounding rage. . .
Not that you guys aren't all correct and perfectly reasonable, I could just use someone going after the state instead of saying how great it is.
Posted by: LibertarianGuy at May 30, 2008 3:32:19 PM
Speaking of great sentences, the one from Adam Smith re: diamonds and water, is looking pretty good these days:
Outside Seattle, cooking oil rustling has become such a problem that the owners of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Washington, are considering using a surveillance camera to keep watch on its 50-gallon grease barrel. Nick Damianidis, an owner, said the barrel had been hit seven or eight times since last summer by siphoners who strike in the night."Fryer grease has become gold," Damianidis said. "And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away."
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan at May 30, 2008 4:10:27 PM
I'd say it's the best bit of doublethink I've read today. The rest of the post could be used as a defense of totalitarianism.
Posted by: Ben at May 30, 2008 8:43:36 PM
I kinda agree with LibertarianGuy's post; it seems that (at least since I've been reading) Tyler delights in showing how much he differs from the typical libertarian. I've stopped becoming shocked and now just realize that Tyler Cowen isn't a typical libertarian. (BTW I am not "purging" him or anything, I'm just saying I used to think he shared my basic premises and so it was odd if we came to different conclusions, but the longer I spend at MR the less I think he and I agree on first principles.)
I have encountered a lot of annoying libertarians and I totally understand that they (we) sometimes err on the side of oversimplification. But yeah, I don't see the value in devoting lots of mental power to defending modern states.
Anyway, I followed Wilkinson's point up until this claim:
Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because “If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible” is a false premise.
Up until then, I thought he was reasonably claiming that just because one couldn't morally defend the State, didn't commit one to being an anarchist, because of pragmatic reasons.
But then in the quote above, Wilkinson wants more than that. If I understand him, he is saying, "Just because you can't morally defend the State, doesn't imply that you can't morally defend the State."
Yes, it quite obviously does. You can admit that the State is immoral, shrug and say, "But like s*cks, I'd rather be oppressed by George Bush than Attila the Hun." But that's not the same as morally defending the presidency.
Posted by: Bob Murphy at May 30, 2008 8:58:05 PM
Shoot, whenever I am lazy and don't preview the post, a typo slips through. Above I meant to say:
You can admit that the State is immoral, shrug and say, "But life s*cks, I'd rather be oppressed by George Bush than Attila the Hun." But that's not the same as morally defending the presidency.
Posted by: Bob Murphy at May 30, 2008 9:02:59 PM
A probably unrelated question: Does the federal government has any right to know what places did I visit before to come back? I think not, independently if it is legitimate or not.
Posted by: Pedro P Romero at May 30, 2008 11:46:56 PM
Nah man, he's just saying that legitimacy does not exhaust everything about what is right.
An illegitimate government presiding over nothing but awesomely happy, fulfilled, prosperous people is presumably (in his rendering) preferable to a legitimate government presiding over unhappy, morose people in decrepit poverty.
To some of us, that is obviously true, and to some of us, obviously false. To others it's maybe hard to say.
I certainly agree with his pluralistic take on morality: there is no one metric or one final, simple prioritization of precisely defined values that can be said to encapsulate all of my moral beliefs. Sometimes I even [gasp] make it up as I go along. I think this is human, natural, and healthy.
Posted by: mk at May 31, 2008 1:43:59 AM
BTW: above post is a response to Bob Murphy. Sorry for the confusion :)
Posted by: mk at May 31, 2008 1:44:49 AM
Au contraire! A Libertarian abiding by a 'statist' government because they have a better standard of living than if they lived in a nation that is achingly to anarchism yet is violent and dirt-poor invariably waters down his argument. Does anyone take an Environementalist who drives a car to a protest for air pollution, who opposes nuclear power plants in a way that coal power plant take its place, etc.? Or a Marxist yabbering on about the plight of the worker yet dutily turn up for work on time and holds a well-paid position?
Posted by: Gil at May 31, 2008 2:43:48 AM
mk wrote:
An illegitimate government presiding over nothing but awesomely happy, fulfilled, prosperous people is presumably (in his rendering) preferable to a legitimate government presiding over unhappy, morose people in decrepit poverty.
That's fine, and that's what I thought WW's point was going to be.
But no, he's not merely saying it's a preferable outcome or situation, he is saying that the illegitimate government is morally defensible (his exact words). And I'm saying that no it isn't, because one of the implications of illegitimacy (in this context!) is moral indefensibility. (I think I spelled that last word correctly though the browser disagrees with me.)
Look, suppose someone broke into my house. I come home, see the broken window etc., and so I keep my family out in the driveway while we wait for the cops to show up. (I'm just making up a story here; in reality I wouldn't call the cops but instead would don my Iron Man suit in the trunk.)
While we're waiting, the gas leak that has been there since the morning finally catches and the house blows up.
We are amazed and realize that if it hadn't been for that burglar, we would all be dead. So we are better off, we prefer that he broke into our house.
I wouldn't say we morally defended his actions, or that we just proved a blanket prohibition against theft is actually too simplistic in this oh-so-complex world, and that people running around saying they are against thievery are actually ideologues who don't know what's good for them.
Posted by: Bob Murphy at May 31, 2008 12:27:04 PM
So what this brilliant sentence boils down to is that government might actually have some benefit even if it doesn't operate by unanimous consent?
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at May 31, 2008 10:05:40 PM
I love Will, but why does he insist on making a point with borderline double negatives. Seems like it could be put in simpler terms. The beauty of great thought is putting it in terms that everyone can understand. Does writing in that style appeal to anyone but academia or silly intellectuals?
Posted by: Dave at Jun 1, 2008 7:14:26 AM
Does showing it illegitimate prove it morally defensible?
'“justified” just means “best for flourishing.”'
Sure, this is how the powerful justify the systems that allow them to flourish.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 2, 2008 8:03:25 AM
What is legitimacy?? Doesn't legitimacy imply some higher authority within which to be legitimate? If that higher authority is "morality" then then you're going to have 6 billion different opinions on legitimacy, because that's how many distinct versions of morality there are in the world (IMHO..) Isn't our "morality" just the product of what has worked for our forbears over the millenia?
Posted by: Ansel F at Jun 2, 2008 3:44:14 PM
