This is the second of two articles on critiques of Matt Zwolinski’s moral equivalence thesis, and explores a second (and, to me, more interesting) objection to moral equivalence. For Zwolinski, the “basic problem” with moral equivalence is that “we cannot draw macro-conclusions about politics and social organization (in isolation) on the basis of micro-cases.”
I sympathize with the idea that the rules of personal face-to-face interaction can be an imperfect guide to determining the rules of macro-level social institutions. This is in line with FA Hayek’s critique of the concept of “social justice.” In Hayek’s view, advocates of “social justice” are guilty of the same problem that Zwolinski points out: they take claims about what is fair in individual, micro-level cases and try to copy and paste them into conclusions about the fairness of large-scale emerging social outcomes.
Hayek freely admitted that “the way in which benefits and burdens are distributed by market mechanisms must in many cases be regarded as unjust.” If It was the result of deliberate allocation to certain people.” But Hayek says that one cannot extrapolate from cases of “deliberate allocation to certain people” at the level of individual agents to claims of fair distribution at the level of society as a whole. Hayek argues that attempts to do so fall “not in the category of error, but in the category of nonsense.”
But even if we grant that micro-level instances of appropriate behavior cannot fully explain the macro-level rules of social organization, this still does not provide much traction against the moral equivalence thesis. The reason, in my view, is that Zwolinski is applying the moral equivalence thesis too narrowly to begin with.
In Zwolinski’s post, he explains the moral equivalence thesis as the idea that “governments have no rights that are not identical with or derived from the rights of individuals. In other words, if what individuals do is wrong, then what the government does is wrong.” But I think this misrepresents what proponents of the moral equivalence thesis mean. For example, Michael Huemer (the strongest proponent of the moral equivalence thesis you can find) explain In his book, his views are as follows: teaThe question of political authority:
Political authority is a special moral status that puts the state above all non-state actors. If we reject this concept, we must evaluate state coercion in the same way that we evaluate coercion by other actors. In the case of state coercion, we must first ask what reasons the state has for exercising coercion in this way. Then we must consider whether individuals or organizations would be justified in exercising coercion of a similar kind and degree, with similar effects on the victims, and for similar reasons.
Note that Huemer’s objection does not at all require that we believe that the only determinant of macroscopic conclusions about social organization is instances of microscopic individual behavior. And when Huemer speaks of “agents,” he does not mean “individuals.” After all, he calls the state an “agent,” even though the state is clearly not an individual, and he also speaks of private organizations. As Zwolinski puts it, Huemer “assumes that if something is wrong, individual Those who support political authority argue that the state can do things that individuals cannot do, as well as things that would not be permissible if other macro or emerging social institutions were involved.
Since macro-level social rules cannot be derived entirely from micro-level individual behavior, should we conclude that large religious groups, such as the Church of Scientology, have special rights and moral immunities that do not apply to other organizations? Or sufficiently large corporations? Or clans? Or any other large-scale social institution imaginable? After all, the state is only one of many organizations used to coordinate social activity, so further arguments are needed as to why these special moral immunities arise. only But that’s not the case for countries any Non-state social institutions.
Vincent Ostrom said:
We need not think of “government” or “governance” as something that only the state provides. The family, voluntary associations, villages, and other forms of human association all involve some form of self-government. Rather than looking solely at the state, we need to pay much more attention to building the basic institutional structures that enable people to relate constructively to one another and find ways to solve the problems of their daily lives.
It is possible to accept that all these forms of human association described by Ostrom may operate according to rules that cannot be simply deduced from micro-level instances of individual behavior. For example, I freely agree that the micro-level behavior of individual adult interactions does not fully explain the responsibilities and obligations that are part of a family. But that in itself does not affect the moral equivalence thesis. To refute the moral equivalence thesis, one must ask why one only One form of social organization typically has an impressive and significant moral immunity attributed to the state, and the emergent nature of social morality still leaves the gap unfilled.
