Robert McGee’s Surveys on the Ethics of Tax Evasion

Robert McGee has been conducting surveys on how people perceive the ethics of tax evasion in different circumstances for many years, and he has written up the results of these surveys in a number of papers. One of the remarkable things he finds is that, by and large, people believe that you’re obligated to pay your taxes even in the most extreme circumstances — for instance Jews in Nazi Germany paying taxes to fund their own murders.

Typically, he will distribute surveys to a group of people asking them to say, on a scale of 1 to 7, how much they agree or disagree with statements that begin “tax evasion is ethical…” and end with circumstances like the following:

I took some time to go through his papers and pull out the answers to two of these questions in particular (#s 13 and 16). Unfortunately, the questions were not always worded the same way (once in a while the question was phrased with the double-negative “Tax evasion would not be unethical if…”, sometimes the year on the Nazi question was given as 1935 instead of 1940, and one time the phrasing of that question was entirely different). In one case, instead of a scale from 1 to 7, the scale was from 6 to 0 (I have adjusted those numbers in the table below to conform with a 1-to-7 scale).

Below are the results, showing the number of people in each survey, the average answers to questions 13 and 16, and the average result across all of the questions in the survey. Note that some of the surveys did not include all of the questions, so these averages are not necessarily comparable across surveys. It is also possible that one or more of the surveys in the table incorporate one or more of the other surveys under their umbrella (it was sometimes hard to tell from the papers themselves):

The surveys:

Some things that jumped out at me while I was reviewing the data:

• In two cases, #25 & #31, the 177 business students at a university in the Dominican Republic and the 315 faculty and students in Australia, the Nazi example actually scored worse than average — in other words, survey responders thought that a Jew in Nazi Germany had a worse excuse for tax evasion than the majority of other questions on the survey (in fact, the Australians rated that excuse 15 out of 18).
• In comparison, the “unjust war” example was considered a worse-than-average excuse for tax evasion in ten of the 43 surveys. Eight of those ten surveys were done in the United States (the other two were the Dominican Republic and Australia). Only 13 of the 43 surveys were done in the United States, so this seems to indicate that the United States is a particularly hostile place for the war tax resistance argument.
• The survey respondents most hostile to the idea that Jews in Nazi Germany could ethically resist their taxes were 26 students at an Episcopal seminary in the southern United States, who gave them a 5.54 out of 7.
• The group most hostile to war tax resistance was 202 accounting majors at a large college in Utah.
• Six surveyed groups gave war tax resistance an average score indicating that war tax resistance was more ethical than not (<4). The strongest show of support was a 3.3 average score from 256 students at Hubei University and Wuhan Industrial College in China. The other five groups included two groups of students from Beijing, one from Macau, one from Kazakhstan, and one from Iran. These groups typically had lower scores in general across the board, with the exception of the Iranian students, who had a 5.06 average score but a 3.67 score for the war tax resistance question.
• Only ten surveyed groups, on average, agreed more than disagreed with the idea that Jews should not feel ethically obligated to fund their own extermination. One group was evenly split, and 24 surveys showed that on average, people felt Jews were obligated to pay Nazi taxes.

In the third section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle puts some flesh on the bones of the assertion he made in book one that a virtuous person is a person who takes pleasure in acting virtuously.

Virtue doesn’t consist in doing the right thing even though it is unpleasant to do so, but in taking a pleasure in virtue that outweighs any incidental unpleasantness of any particular virtuous act.

So for instance, although a courageous person is pained by fright in a frightful situation, he takes pleasure from his bravery in standing his ground and rising to the occasion, and this pleasure outweighs the pain. For a coward, the pain of fear outweighs the pleasure of bravery.

Aristotle believes that it is important to get proper education and training from a young age in order “both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.” An example of this sort of training is punishment, which associates vice with pain in a Pavlovian way.

Pleasure and pain are primary motivators, and so investigating them is very important to the ethicist: “it is by reason of pleasures and pains that men become bad, by pursuing and avoiding these — either the pleasures and pains they ought not, or when they ought not, or as they ought not, or by going wrong in one of the other similar ways that may be distinguished.”

Aside from pleasurable/painful, two other motivators are noble/base and advantageous/injurious. But pleasure/pain is the important one, since noble & advantageous things are typically also pleasurable, and base & injurious things are typically also painful.

To sum up, “the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad.”