More on Machan

-
Even as I beg to differ with Tibor Machan regarding benefit corporations, I think he's done quite a fine job of responding to Ted Honderich's charge that a libertarian society would be morally abominable here.

In essence, Honderich moves much too quickly from the claim that, in a libertarian society, it would not be viewed as just for the state (or any other entity) to take responsibility for redistributing income to economically vulnerable people to the conclusion that no one would in such a society would acknowledge any moral obligation to redistribute income to economically vulnerable people. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the impermissibility of the use of force here would seem trivial and irrelevant to Honderich, an occasional apologist for political violence. It is disappointing, however, that Honderich, a capable philosopher, can’t see the difference between “I am morally obligated to perform action action A (or one of a class of actions of which A is a member)” and “Physical force may be used to compel me to perform action A.” Machan seems to me to be correct that

it is quite often morally wrong for many who know of such a case [of great deprivation] to fail to provide help. (If, however, they had more vital goals to pursue, say attending to their children’s medical needs, this wouldn’t be so.) Lack of generosity, compassion, or support for those who deserve it would be morally wrong. Indeed, it could well be true of many that they ought to help anyone in such dire straits and very wrong for them not to do so.

I would only add that responding to economic vulnerability in a stateless society is not just a matter of personal solidarity, valuable as this is, but also of ending privileges that make and keep some people poor and of effecting reparations for past acts of large-scale theft and land engrossment.

Comments

christopher said…
There's a interesting thing most statists neglect. The argument that the State is necessary to care for the poor just has to assume that those in charge (the majority in a democracy) have a starkly different view on moral obligations than the group being ruled. It sort of assumes the rulers are the poppers and the ruled are the misers. But if the rulers didn't care about obligations to the poor, there would be far less going to the poor. The rulers would spend revenues on themselves and their projects.

Furthermore, it's always ignored that the main reason there is support for government support of the poor is that people care about the poor. This can't be expected to shift dramatically if the state were abolished. The only reasonable defense would be that governments take care of the poor better than voluntary organization, but I've seen no evidence of this.
April 26, 2010 at 11:49 PM
Gary Chartier said…
Chris, I couldn’t agree more. I tried to make some of these points here:

http://liberalaw.blogspot.com/2010/03/poverty-without-state.html
April 27, 2010 at 6:48 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians for Redistribution

-
Libertarianism is a redistributive project. That’s another way in which radical market anarchism is rightly seen as part of the socialist tradition. Statists on both the left and the right favor the redistribution of wealth. Libertarians, by contrast, are often assumed to be dead-set against all varieties of redistribution. But it’s important to see that whether this is really the case or not depends on how we answer several questions: Agent : who effects the redistribution? Rationale : what justifies the redistribution? Means : how is the redistribution accomplished? Statist Redistribution For statists, the agent of redistribution is the state. The rationales for redistribution are primarily consequentialist —it’s seen as designed to bring about some favored end-state—though it may also be used to punish the putatively undeserving and to reward the arguably virtuous. The means ? The creation of monopolies, the enactment of regulations, the confiscation of proper
Read more

Socialism revisited

-
I'd like to try to tie together and expand my observations re. the great “socialist”/“capitalist” terminological debate that’s been proceeding at C4SS and AAE . “Socialism” as Genus; “State-Socialism” as Species I think there is good reason to use “socialism” to mean something like opposition to: bossism (that is to subordinative workplace hierarchy); and deprivation (that is, persistent, exclusionary poverty, whether resulting from state-capitalist depredation, private theft, disaster, accident, or other factors . “Socialism” in this sense is the genus; “state-socialism” is the (much-to-be-lamented) species. Indeed, using the “socialist” label provides the occasion for a clear distinction between the genus “socialism” and the species “state-socialism.” Thus, it offers a convenient opportunity to expose and critique the statist assumptions many people reflexively make (assumptions that make it all-too-easy for political theory to take as given the presupposition that its subject
Read more

Nicholas Lash (1934-2020)

-
I learned a few minutes ago that Nicholas Lash had died earlier today. Nicholas was a brilliant, incisive philosophical theologian who was by far the most formidable member of the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge during the time I was a PhD student. He was, as far as I'm aware, the first Catholic to hold a chair in the Faculty since the Reformation. (A laicized priest married to a former nun, he was not, like many people with similar profiles, an enemy of his church. He remained unapologetically and obviously Catholic.) Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and the holder not only of a PhD but also of an earned DD from the university, he was an elegant prose stylist whose work was rarely simple—he sought to remind us repeatedly of the complexity of thought, language, and the human situation—but always stimulating and insightful. He engaged with a broad range of topics and figures—from Newman (the subject of his dissertation and first book) to Marx to William Jame
Read more