A while back, I posted about a few different things I thought were true, asking for something that would change my mind. Unfortunately, the responses I received were generally the same as what I specifically said. ~ No I’m looking for. I wanted to get recommendations for books, essays, etc. that people would find that present the best and most comprehensive case for opposing views, not just point out the points you disagree with and then explain why in three sentences.
But there is a consolation prize: a man I recently met by chance, Matt Zwolinski, one of the quintessential sympathetic libertarian philosophers. Posted Some thoughts on the moral equivalence thesis, one of the ideas I listed. This is the idea that “if what individuals do is wrong, then what governments do is wrong,” as Zwolinski puts it. Or as Dan Moller puts it in his book: Minimum governing“If we are to defend social institutions that sanctify the moral logic that we reject in face-to-face encounters, we should at least pause.”
Zwolinski raises two concerns about the moral equivalence thesis. First, the moral equivalence thesis has radical implications in that it “implies that almost everything government does, from the criminalization of drugs to social welfare to taxation itself, is morally wrong.” It also has problematic implications for children. At the very least, it seems to have little useful implications.
The second objection is that we can’t “extrapolate social morality from the morality of individual behavior.” That is, social morality might be a new phenomenon that “founds on but doesn’t emerge from the behavior that produces it.” If so, then rules about how we should behave in our individual encounters would be a very poor guide to understanding the rules that govern large-scale social interactions. If social morality is “a fundamentally evolutionary phenomenon that emerges from our collective attempts to solve problems inherent in social coexistence,” then we can’t answer that question entirely by referring to individual encounters, any more than we can infer properties about the ocean from studying individual H2O molecules.
These are interesting ideas, but I don’t think they are successful in undermining the moral equivalence theory. I will write a separate post dedicated to each objection and explain why Zwolinski’s concerns do not convince me. But let me say up front that I do not agree with Zwolinski’s claim that the moral equivalence theory implies that things like social welfare programs are illegal. One can accept moral equivalence and still conclude that taxes and welfare programs are permissible. My next post will provide an argument in favor of a welfare state that presupposes the legitimacy of moral equivalence.
After that, I’ll post a follow-up article talking about the opposition to emergence and why I think it doesn’t undermine moral equality.
