Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
not being a “Good German” →
does your responsibility end where the law begins?
Some feedback:
The biggest decision I think you have ahead of you at this point is whether you want to not support the government, or actually resist it in some fashion.
Not supporting the government is, of course, much easier than resisting it.
On the other hand, resisting the government may have much better results.
I thought it was important that before I begin considering whether to or how to resist the government that I start by withdrawing my support for it.
I think many of the people who are out on the streets with their signs and chants are fooling themselves if they think they oppose the war — their chants don’t take a nickel from the bottom line of their actual support.
How to or whether to resist the government is another matter.
I think that a compelling case for the need to resist the government can be made.
Now, finally, I have the luxury of being able to weigh that case.
Once I stop supporting the government, I can make the decision of whether to wash my hands of it or whether to actively oppose it.
Until I stopped supporting the government, my “opposition” to it was a matter of opinion and had pretty much as much weight as any other opinion does — less than nothing unless the weather is hot enough so that air exits my mouth at less than the ambient temperature.
So, what’s your goal?
20 years from now what would the “perfect” government look like?
Given your knowledge of human nature, is such a government possible?
Is it worth your individual effort for an extended period of time?
I don’t spend much time anymore thinking about what a good government would look like.
I’ve come to disbelieve in government — not in the sense of disillusionment, but actual non-belief.
I think that what we call government is really just people and places and buildings.
The actions of “government” are really just the actions of people following certain rules and roles and norms.
Which isn’t to say that “government” isn’t a useful shorthand for referring to a set of institutions, employees, legal algorithms, etc.
But this shortcut doesn’t in itself have an existence.
The mistake is like saying that you want to refer to the creative, life-giving entropic momentum in the universe by the name “god” — (“okay,” says the skeptic) — then you start to personify “God” and give Him opinions and motives and eyes and a crown and such.
Pretty soon, you’re not naming an abstraction so much as creating literature and living in a fantasy world.
So the question isn’t “what kind of government is good,” “what can a just government demand of its citizens,” etc. but “how should people behave towards each other, since the idea of an external government to which we must relinquish our consciences is a myth?”
It’s like asking an atheist to tell you what kind of god he thinks made the world, or what kind of responsibilities God has toward his creation, or what kind of responsibilities we should have towards God, or how God would have us live.
The atheist would say none of those are meaningful questions, since there is no god.
The questions the atheist would ask are: “how should we live, given that we can’t rely on a god to tell us how to live?” “how was the universe created, if it wasn’t God who did it?” and so forth.
I think it’s important to awaken in people their own consciences and their sense of responsibility for their own choices.
I think that’s more important than dreaming up some institutional or algorithmic structure designed to take these burdens off of our shoulders.
When a government agent steals from me, it is just a person stealing from me.
When a police officer threatens to make me a hostage, it is just a person threatening me with kidnapping.
That they use the excuse of having a job description or “government” that authorizes such behavior is their hallucination and their problem (though I certainly will take into account the threatening delusions of my well-armed fellow citizens), and I feel as helpless trying to reason with them as Elizabeth Smart must have felt in the clutches of her God-authorized child-snatcher.
My feelings towards reform of government are much as my feelings towards any large criminal syndicate that threatens me: reduce the threat as much as possible, and keep my head down meanwhile.
Agreed.
However, there is a reason we have abstractions, so we can work with more complex thought objects than the base atomic components (if there are such things) that exist at “lower” levels.
By your standard, almost everything (if not everything) we talk about is a myth.
My problem isn’t with the use of abstractions or shorthand symbols but with the confusion this causes when people forget or deny that they’re using abstractions.
When people say that the reason they’re performing an action is because the government requires it, they’re using “government” as an excuse for their behavior in a way that is often dishonest.
The problem with the shorthand version is that it covers too much ground — it’s ambiguous.
It pretends to explain something, but actually leaves it unexplained.
The shorthand of “government” or “law” as an excuse for behavior hides behind it a jungle gym’s worth of evasions of personal responsibility.
It is, indeed, important to awaken in people their own conscience and sense of responsibility for their actions and decisions.
But if you do it without other tools or some other structure in place, that re-awakened conscience will quickly fall victim to the same factors that caused the person to abdicate it in the first place, and you’ll be right back where you started.
My feeling is that people do not have the capability to abdicate their consciences.
They can make trade-offs, they can decide to defer to the judgments of people they consider better-informed, or whatever — but in doing so they are exercising their consciences.
If you make the wrong decision by following someone else’s judgment — you have made the wrong decision, not the someone else (who may also have made the wrong decision, but you know what I mean.)
And this is the problem that “government” (among other things) pretends to cure.
“Government” says “I will make some of your decisions for you, and I will take all the blame if things go bad.”
That’s snake oil.
Can’t be done.
It’s like a perpetual motion machine.
And, crucially, it killed almost two hundred million people in .
Which is to say, people killed almost two hundred million other people in , shooting them in the back of the head, starving them to death, stuffing them into gas chambers, etc. thinking all the while that it wasn’t them who was doing these things but the “government.”
(And that isn’t even counting the deaths when armies met on the battlefield).
If you decide to go along with the law or the majority or what have you because you’re not confident that your own judgment is any better — that’s a plausibly sensible heuristic and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
But your decision and your action is ultimately yours, and you are responsible for the consequences.
If it turns out to be a screw-up, the right thing to do is to consider alternative courses of action that won’t be so screwed up — the wrong thing to do is to passively hope that the law / majority / whatever will improve so that your moral laziness won’t have those consequences anymore.
It’s tempting to object to this by saying that the law is different, because it really is an implicit gun-to-your-head that eliminates your freedom of choice.
But even a gun to your head doesn’t eliminate your freedom of choice — it just adds to the set of consequences your choices may produce.
It becomes a factor that you add up along with all of the other factors before making your decision.
In the case of a gun to the head, it’s a pretty big consequence and a pretty overwhelming factor, but it doesn’t change the basic rules of the game.
Here’s another excerpt from Juanita Nelson’s account of her arrest that I found , too late, alas, to include it in ’s Picket Line:
It is, as far as I can see, an unpleasant fact that we cannot avoid decision-making.
We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority.
For we then have made the decision to do that — have concluded because of belief or of fear or of apathy that this is the thing which we should do or cannot avoid doing.
And then we share in the consequences of any such action.
Are we doing more than trying to hide our nakedness with a fig leaf when we take the view expressed by a friend who belonged to a fundamental religious sect?
At the time he wore the uniform of the United States Marines.
“I’m not helping to murder,” he said.
“I’m carrying out the orders of my government, and the sin is not mine.”
I could never tell whether there was a bitter smile playing around his lips or if he was quite earnest.
It is a rationalization commonly held and defended.
It is a comforting presumption, but it still appears to me that, while the seat of government is in Washington, the seat of conscience is in me.
It cannot be voted out of office by one or a million others.
I’m responsible for the actions I choose — I cannot rent out my conscience to another person, army, government, corporation, majority or law-book.
It’s not just unwise, given the history of the last century, but it is literally impossible.
Each of my decisions is a decision I choose based on what I anticipate the consequences will be.
I may take into account what the law says, or what the Bible says, or what the movie critic for the Chronicle says, but ultimately I’m the one making the choice.
If I ignore my conscience, I’m committing a particularly dangerous form of suicide — choking off the guardian of my free will and leaving behind the sort of dangerous robot who’s spent the last hundred years swerving from cradle to grave building gulags and genetically engineering more evil forms of smallpox.
Not for me.
It feels good to find a kindred spirit who has walked the road I’m on ahead of me.
The following is a passionate call for tax resistance by Gina Lunori that I’m reproducing here:
It’s Revolution Time Again
by Gina Lunori
I’ve heard Republicans talk about getting the government off our backs often enough now that I think it’s sunk in.
If I ever see a Republican who actually means it, I think I may dust off my voting suit and try to find my way to the polling place.
I’d like the government off our backs, and off our toes, and out of our pocketbooks and the rest of us, too.
I’d like the government to keep its hands to itself and go back to where it belongs, if the more pessimistic theologians are right after all and there is such a place.
They say we have a government to protect us from criminals, and every year politicians pass new laws that grease the wheels for bigger and more outrageous crimes.
Could Enron have happened without the help of the politicians who helped out as surely as if they’d been driving the getaway car?
They say we have a government to keep the peace, but war-hungry people know that the best way to feed their bloodlust is by using the government.
Case in point: the present Iraq war, which was not caused by the American people using their government as designed to protect them from threats, but was the result of a few individuals using the government as a tool for their own ends.
Who believes that if actually argued on its merits, this war would have met with the approval of the American people?
Defenders of the government can’t sing its praises with a straight face, so they are reduced to sowing fear of what might happen if the government abandoned its post.
Get government off our backs and what’s to keep the Ku Klux Klan from coming back and taking over the South?
Get government off our backs and who will fix our roads?
Get government off our backs and who will clean up the environment?
But the government has never done anything that couldn’t be done better if the government got the hell out of the way and let people do it on their own.
The government didn’t free the slaves so much as it finally stopped enforcing their slavery.
It doesn’t fix the roads so much as it fixes the bidding on the contracts to make the roads.
It doesn’t clean up the environment — hell, it’s the worst polluter this country’s got!
All of these things that people claim couldn’t be done without the government around to call the shots would have been done, probably better and with less waste of time and effort, if the government hadn’t been getting in the way.
The government runs off to Cancun to negotiate a “free trade” agreement and ends up spending all of its time trying to make excuses for the barriers to free trade it relies on.
Imagine: a bunch of governments meeting to make rulesgoverningfree trade.
That’s like a bunch of graffiti artists spray-painting an anti-vandalism message on an alley wall.
That’s like a bunch of alcoholics getting together at happy hour to hold a drinkathon for sobriety.
It’s nuts, but in Government Land, up is down, dry is wet, and free trade is a mountain of asterisks guarded by bureaucrats.
Your legislators all run for office on crime-fighting platforms, but if you look at the results of their legislation — which opens the door to new assaults and thefts with every bill that’s passed — you’d be in your right mind to want to move the Capitol to Alcatraz.
They claim to be working for national defense, but when you see how vigorously they’re arming the world and angling for war you begin to understand that the biggest threat to the United States is its own government.
But I’m not asking you to join the Black Bloc or even the Libertarian Party; I won’t wish upon a star for the government to vanish into thin air.
But could we at least have a better government?
Not “one day” but tomorrow, and then the tomorrow after that and so on.
Nobody can respect this government, but most people have some idea of what government they could respect, and I think if we each one of us pushed in that direction, as different as our opinions are, the direction would generally be up, and not just back-and-forth like it is today.
I’m not saying we should have crude majority rule.
The majority doesn’t necessarily have any sense just because of its size.
I mean: look at any bestseller list.
If the government dreams, I believe it sometimes dreams that it will one day have the power to force everyone to read Chicken Soup for the Soul every day.
It’s like that with the rest of its laws — let a majority, or even a sufficiently powerful minority, believe that something is good for everyone and — whammo! — a law is sure to follow making it mandatory.
The worst part is that there are many dopes out there who don’t trust their own opinions enough that this would bother them.
“Well, the law says I should read Chicken Soup for the Soul — who am I to argue with the opinions of the majority?
I’m only one person, after all.”
Pity a nation that has a population whose consciences have atrophied so much that they’d let a majority make the decisions for them when it really counts.
And pity a society that lived through the 20th Century without putting safeguards in place to prevent this.
Don’t get me wrong — it only makes sense in an important matter to consult the people around you, to get a sense for what other people would do in a similar situation.
But if, after getting this feedback, your conscience still tells you that to do what the majority would have you do means doing something wrong — are you going to go ahead and do wrong?
Might as well just click off the ol’ brain entirely, then — you won’t be needing it.
It’s true that some people are better judges of right and wrong than others, but I’d bet that if you just set everybody free to do what they felt to be right the world would be a whole hell of a lot better than if you let some majority or influential minority of people decide what everybody ought to be doing.
The law never made any right person righter than they already were, and although it may be true that fear of the law has made some wrong people think twice, it’s also true that the same fear regularly convinces otherwise sensible people do awful things.
And it takes these otherwise sensible people out-of-service, as people anyway.
They can still push buttons and follow orders, I suppose, but their conscience is the part of them that’s most desperately needed in this world, and we, by allowing government to prohibit independent conscience, have allowed these necessary consciences to wither away.
I meet people all the time who have decided that the government is the best judge of how they should conduct their lives — I feel like laying a flower on them and saying something nice to the next-of-kin.
I get the feeling that if the government decided it could get better use out of them by grinding their bones into glue, they wouldn’t get much further back along the path to humanity than cursing their bad luck on the way to the glue factory.
There are some people who really do serve their country — as people, complete, with their bodies and their minds and their consciences.
They’re wonderfully dangerous men and women, and the government categorizes them that way if it recognizes them.
After all, a person of conscience only follows the government’s dictates accidentally, when they happen not to prohibit good or mandate evil, and how often is that, really?
The revolutionaries who ripped this country away from its colonizers felt that they had to explain themselves.
The monarchy they were ridding themselves of was different from the republic that suffocates us now, but the excuses people had for putting up with it were pretty much the same.
The revolutionaries responded to these excuses by saying that as far as they could tell, the reason we put up with governments at all is that we use them to protect our rights — for instance to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — from those who would try to violate them.
Furthermore, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
Ask yourself now: is your government protecting lives, or endangering them?
Does it protect liberty, or threaten it?
Does it facilitate the pursuit of happiness, or frustrate it?
If the government were merely inefficient and clumsy at doing its job I might grumble a little, but I’d probably let it slide.
But when a government, like ours, has become a threat to life and liberty, I say it’s time for a change.
We’d be better off without it.
If we need a government at all, the government we need is a different one — not just this one with a sprinkling of new heads above its ties.
If the choice were between a bloody and awful revolution like our Civil War and keeping the government we have today, it would be argued — and I might argue myself — that the cost is too high, and it’s better to suffer under the government we have than pay such a price in blood for a new one.
But who says this is the choice we have to make?
Is there no other choice than between a bloodbath and an embarrassing and savage parody of democracy?
Are we like Hollywood — so sapped of creativity that we can’t find a path from where we are now to where we want to go that doesn’t involve a thrilling penultimate act with car chases, shootouts and explosions?
Right now, the cost of avoiding this bloodbath at home includes inflicting a bloodbath on Iraq and funding bloodbaths elsewhere.
We’re not fooling anyone by puttering around and delaying and attributing our reluctance to pacifism.
What’s in the way of us taking this country back?
It’s not 535 members of congress, or a few thousand rich, politically-connected people in the halls of power.
The problem is the millions of Americans who are waiting, waiting, waiting, hoping that someone else is going to fix things for them, wishing that they lived in a make-believe world where they could continue to buy their toys and pay their taxes and some day a movie star hero will come and rescue them.
They plead every couple of years for their representatives to make some small sacrifice for their benefit — but, though they’re disappointed every year, they remain unwilling to make any sacrifice themselves to make a real change.
There are millions of people in this country who are of the opinion that the war in Iraq was a terrible adventure, dishonestly engaged in, and with terrible consequences — but these same millions of people do absolutely nothing effective to change their country’s actions.
They mumble complaints, or forward emails, or put bumper stickers on their cars, and passionately wish that somebody else were doing something effective, and then they go back to work the next morning to wish again over coffee the way you might pray that your favorite team wins the Super Bowl.
Myself, I’m sick of arguing with the government.
I don’t have any more argument with the government — I know what kind of beast it is, I know what kind of woman I am:
We’ve come to a sort of an impasse.
I’ve got a new bone to pick — it’s with people who know perfectly well that things have gone to hell in this country but who aren’t lifting a finger to do anything about it (or who flatter themselves into thinking that “voting” is the same as doing something about it).
Voting is kind of like gambling on sports, but slightly more sacred (maybe you remember the outrage when John Poindexter’s crew at DARPA started a program to encourage gambling on world events as a way of enhancing intelligence estimates).
You’ve got to play to win, and playing with only a vote is hardly playing at all.
The people who place big bets, in large denominations, are the ones who get the big pay-outs.
The rest of us are just paying the house.
When I was a kid, even before I could vote, I’d look over the voter’s pamphlet and weigh the arguments carefully and imagine that I was making grave decisions of right and wrong.
Only later did I realize that voting for the right thing isn’t the same as doing the right thing.
It’s only sort of a feeble “I wish” followed by an agreement to leave it up to the majority, or to the skillful manipulation of that majority, or to some other mechanism that bears no resemblance at all to an assertion of conscience on my part.
There’s an election coming up, and there are a bunch of candidates holding debates and raising money, and a lot of people who really ought to know better holding their breath and anticipating how they’re going to whisper their “I wish.”
I consider it a lucky day when I meet someone who cares as much as I do for the soul of my country and yet cares as little for who wins the Democratic presidential nomination as for who won the World Championships of Parcheesi.
But most people I meet who pretend to be anguished about the state of their country have got it backward — it’s their country that should be crying over them.
While I want to put a flower on the corpses of these prematurely dead citizens, the country wants to build a monument over the mass of them and inscribe on it:
“remember these dead and never let this happen again.”
You may have something you’d rather be doing with your time than going up against the government.
That’s fine. It’s not for everybody.
But the least you can do is to stop supporting the government.
If you’re going to decide that you’ve got other things to be bothered with, at least get out of our way.
Don’t think that you can pay your taxes every month and then hide the pay stub behind your back and declare yourself neutral.
I heard someone praise a conscientious objector who refused to fight in Iraq, and I asked him if he was still paying taxes.
He told me that the government hadn’t created a “conscientious objector” category for taxpayers, so he was sorry to say he wasn’t able to stop paying.
As if you only have a conscience when the government issues you a permit for one!
I told him I know people who’ve stopped paying their taxes without waiting for permission, just by lowering their income and living below the tax threshold.
He told me that he wasn’t prepared to make that kind of sacrifice.
If I had a pocket calculator I could have told you the maximum price of his conscience.
If I had a quality postal scale I probably still couldn’t discern its weight.
Like Walter Mitty these armchair peaceniks burn their draft cards in their daydreams, meanwhile the people who serve in the military in their place are equipped, and shipped, and paid for by Walter Mitty’s tax dollar.
The biggest obstacles to change aren’t the few who are abusing the government, but the many who are submitting to it and facilitating the abuse.
A government that loved liberty would be trying at every opportunity to expand and protect that liberty.
Our government tries everything it can to evade the few protections that have survived since its founding.
Look at how shamelessly it has whisked people off to Cuba — Cuba! — in order to sweep them out from under the protection of the Constitution.
A person who loves liberty would not shovel coal into a tyrant’s engine just to earn a higher salary.
Why does a person in the United States who claims to love freedom, and who is intelligent enough to understand that the government is freedom’s enemy, still feel that it’s worthy of respect to be a taxpayer, and the more salary — and therefore the more taxes — the more respect?
If you love liberty, if you hate war, you should at once withdraw your support from the government.
Withdrawing your moral support isn’t enough — it’s your practical support that the government feeds on — it doesn’t give a damn what your opinions are.
This is something you must do because you know the difference between right and wrong and you know, when you look the facts straight in the face, that when you willingly give practical support to the government you participate in its wrongs.
But this is more than a matter of personal integrity.
Imagine the power of this statement. What if every person who felt that the government had lost their moral support also withdrew their practical support?
What if only one in ten did?
It would be the beginning of the end.
It would be that nonviolent revolution we’re praying for.
How is that going to happen?
Better you should ask yourself:
How is that going to happen if even I do not help make it happen?
Cast your vote — don’t just punch out the chad but vote your whole person: body, mind and conscience.
Put a price on your conscience and determine for yourself if the cost of continuing to give practical support to the government is higher than the cost of withdrawing that support.
There’s a myth that “death and taxes” are inevitable.
Taxes, at least, are avoidable — although to those with cheap consciences, only at comparatively expensive rates.
I know people who are living what in most parts of the world would be considered wealthy lives, without doing anything to put them in fear of IRS auditors, and who are still living tax-free.
And their consciences, which to them are quite valuable commodities, remain intact and unmortgaged.
It’s easy to come up with excuses for not acting.
And it’s easy not to recognize them for excuses.
For instance: “Isn’t the U.S. government much better than, say, China’s or Saudi Arabia’s, or so many others?”
But that only works if you think the course of nations is the sort of course that should be graded on the curve.
What a sad concession it would be to believe that our republic, the first one out of the gates after the age of monarchies, was the finish line for this country and the best sort of government anyone could aspire toward.
A bunch of powdered-wigged slaveholders somehow miraculously scribbling out the best scheme for protecting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness anyone could hope for.
Imagine instead that maybe we’ve learned something in the last two and some centuries — that we can do much better than we’re doing now, because what we’re doing now stinks.
But don’t imagine for a minute that it’s going to change on its own, or that you can continue to prop it up without sharing responsibility for what it’s doing.
The discussion continues over at the Claire Files Board, much of it about whether people are morally obligated to evade taxation (for reasons above and beyond simple self-interest), or whether on the contrary because the money is essentially being taken from you at gunpoint, only the people holding the guns bear the moral responsibility for how the money ends up getting spent.
One person asks me:
What would you think of working in an above-the-radar business that diverted money away from the public sector and into the private?
An obvious example would be a tax consultant.
Suppose you made a hundred grand showing people how to legally cut their taxes.
You could only do so by saving them far more than a hundred grand in income, you’d be diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars away from the public coffers and into private hands.
Even though you’d have to pay substantial taxes to do this efficiently wouldn’t you actually be doing more to defund government than if you simply prevented them from getting anything out of your own pocket?
I’m actually doing a version of this.
But I’m not a qualified tax professional, so rather than making a hundred grand helping people divert hundreds of grands away from the government, I’m doing something a bit more modest.
I’ve volunteered at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites in San Francisco to help lower-income folk fill out and submit their tax forms.
A lot of people who qualify for tax credits like the EITC don’t bother to file tax returns for various reasons (they don’t know about the credit, don’t know they qualify for it, can’t be bothered with the paperwork, etc.).
The VITA program does outreach to lower-income folk and helps them get their EITC claims.
This is a program in which everyone is working hard to take money away from the government and give it back to some of the people it was stolen from.
“Do what you love” is my motto!
It requires that I work arm in arm with people from the IRS.
But the end result of my efforts is that money is taken out of the government’s trough and handed back to people who’ve had it taken from them in the form of FICA.
It makes me feel a bit like Robin Hood.
I’m not objecting at all what you’re doing but you do know that EITC is simply a government program for forced wealth redistribution, right?
Well, I haven’t done all the math on this, so correct me if I’m wrong, but the EITC is only available to people with earned income, which is by definition people who have been paying taxes via FICA.
So at least some of the money they’re getting back via EITC is money they’ve paid in via FICA.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get back more than you paid in; maybe so.
So as far as I’m concerned, this isn’t wealth redistribution so much as the recovery of stolen property.
The discussion continues over at the Claire Files Board.
There’s a lot of talk about whether the act of paying taxes, because it is not strictly voluntary, can ever make you partially culpable for what the government does with the money.
Fool that I am, I decided to rush in where angels fear to tread and try my hand at the philosophy of ethics and justice.
I should confess in advance that I have no training in this field, and so I’m probably using terms like “culpability” and “blame” in careless ways that would make real scholars of philosophy cringe.
The Claire Files Board is frequented by folks from the radical libertarian tradition.
I should say a word or two about some of the basic assumptions that underlie the conversation so those of you who aren’t from this tradition can follow it better.
One way libertarian theory is summarized is with a single sound-bite:
“Thou shalt not initiate force against another person.”
The initiation of force is sometimes called “aggression,” and the “thou shalt not” is usually omitted in favor of a less commandmentesque phrasing.
“Initiate” is used instead of, say, “commit,” because libertarian theory acknowledges the validity of force when used in self-defense (or, sometimes, in just punishment).
“Force” here is conceptually large enough to include things like fraud and theft, whether or not any violence is involved.
A good fundamentalist libertarian who believes in this principle doesn’t make an exception for kings, police officers, elected officials, priests, or the like.
The one law is good enough for everyone.
Taxation, therefore, is the initiation of force by the tax collector against the taxpayer, and for that reason it is unethical to force somebody to pay a tax, even for a good cause.
But of course the single-sentence rule that seems so simple at first is the basis for a wealth of long-running and probably unresolvable debates.
There is much debate over what constitutes “force,” what circumstances allow force to be considered non-“initiated,” and what constitutes a “person,” for instance.
(How do we justify initiating force against a toddler who would otherwise run out into traffic?
Should non-human animals be protected under this principle?
Is abortion the initiation of force against the fetus, or is it self-defense against a fetus that is aggressing against the mother, or is the fetus not a “person” in the sense of this rule?)
The following debate is between people discussing against this radical libertarian background and trying to figure out some conclusions that are consistent with it.
I start off with three distinct scenarios — imagine a thug named Josef presenting Voltairine with an offer (he hopes) she can’t refuse:
case #1
“If you throw this bomb at that family, I’ll give you this brand new car.”
case #2
“Nice car you’ve got there. If you throw this bomb at that family, I’ll let you keep it.”
case #3
“What a nice car you have. If you give me money to buy a bomb so I can throw it at that family, I’ll let you keep it.”
In the first case, if the bomb is thrown, it’s pretty clear that both parties in the transaction are aggressors — the hired killer and the party that hires the killer.
In the second scenario, arguably the person who is being threatened with carlessness is a victim whether or not she accepts the deal, but my moral intuition is to say that she’s in no way blameless if she throws the bomb to save the car.
The third case doesn’t seem all that much different to me.
Where have I gone wrong here?
Whereupon one reader responded (in part — see the link above for the complete back-and-forth):
Okay. We know you’ve done #3 [he means metaphorically, by paying taxes].
Do you think you would have done #2 if that had been the “offer” instead?
Why not if you don’t see the difference?
The difference is that in complying with #3 you have no design or intent to injure an innocent person, in complying with the other cases you do.
Assuming you comply in each case:
You intend to kill innocents for personal gain.
You intend to kill innocents to avoid personal loss.
You don’t intend harm to any innocents.
He also asked “Are you a murderer?”
(When I replied, “Would you accept a plea bargain: How about Taxpayer Manslaughter?”
he said “Not if you are a murderer.
What are your victims entitled to from you?”)
I tried to address his “design and intent” objection first:
There are a couple of differences between #2 (bomb this innocent family, Voltairine, or Josef will cause you a personal loss), and #3 (Voltairine, give Josef funding which he says he will use to bomb an innocent family or Josef will cause you a personal loss).
The most obvious one is in the way the blame for the harmful act is distributed between the immediate actor and the behind-the-scenes unethical manipulator.
In case #2, Josef cajoles Voltairine to commit the act.
If the act is committed, Voltairine is responsible for committing it to the extent that she could have chosen a different act; and Josef is responsible for committing the act to the extent that he unethically restricted Voltairine’s alternatives.
(Does the ratio of blame distribution depend on the severity of the restriction?
“I’ll cancel your manicure appointment if you don’t kill this family” vs. “I’ll kill your family if you don’t kill this family.”)
[It occurred to me later that some might argue that Josef is only guilty of unethically restricting Voltairine’s alternatives, and doesn’t have any actual guilt for the bombing.]
In case #1 (bomb that family, Voltairine, and Josef will give you a car), Voltairine is certainly responsible for throwing the bomb to the extent that she could have chosen a different act; but Josef is responsible for hiring a contract killer.
I can imagine a tortured ethical system in which hiring a contract killer would not be unethical (something like this:
“there is nothing unethical in merely offering such a contract unless it is accepted and acted on, and only an unethical person would accept such a contract and therefore the breach of ethics happens at the time the contract is accepted and the entire sin would be on the acceptor’s shoulders.”)
I don’t think that anyone here is arguing such an ethical system, so I won’t get bogged down in trying to refute it.
For the purposes of this discussion, I’m assuming it’s agreed that Josef and Voltairine both have blood on their hands in case #1.
(Does Josef’s amount of blame rise with the attractiveness of his offer?
Would offering the kingdoms of the earth in exchange for the bombing be worse than offering a coupon for a free two-liter bottle of pop?
Or is the blame constant once the threshold is passed at which an offer is attractive enough to be accepted?)
Case #3 combines the two.
In #2, Josef threatened Voltairine into becoming a killer or being subjected to a personal loss.
In #3, Josef threatens Voltairine into hiring a contract killer [“funding a killer’s crime” would have been a more accurate way for me to put this] or being subjected to a personal loss.
I would suggest that under this analysis, assuming that Voltairine takes Josef’s offer in cases 1, 2, and 3 that the ratio culpability(V1):culpability(J1) is roughly equal to culpability(V2):culpability(V3)
That out of the way, onto the second difference between cases #2 and #3 — “design and intent.”
In case #2, Josef says “here’s a bomb, I’d like you to throw it at that family, whereupon it will explode and kill or maim them.”
Now Voltairine could say “I hope it’s a dud, because I’d really rather not kill those people” but I don’t think that saves her from blame if she throws the bomb and her wishful thinking turns out to be only that.
In case #3, Josef says “give me money so I can buy a bomb to throw at that family, whereupon it will explode and kill or maim them.”
Voltairine could say “I hope he changes his mind and spends this money on something else instead, because I’d really rather not pay him to kill those people [and here, “rather not give him money that enables him to kill those people” would have been a better choice of words]” but I think she runs into the same problem.
In either case, Voltairine has to either be non compos mentis in order to escape actual culpability, or has to be willfully lying to herself about reality in a futile attempt to evade actual blame.
Josef is certainly fully responsible for what he chooses to do with Voltairine’s money, particularly after she’s handed it over and is no longer an actor on the scene and the family has yet to be bombed.
(In contrast, the bomb can’t decide on its own to become a harmless dud while in mid-air.)
But it’s hard to argue that Voltairine therefore has no responsibility without also saying that in case #1 Josef would have no responsibility — after all, after offering Voltairine the car as payment for the future contract killing, Voltairine until such time as the bomb is thrown has complete control of the situation and could decide on another course of action instead.
The first objection to this is likely to be that in case #1, Josef is entirely free to offer the car or not offer the car, and to offer the bomb contract or not offer the bomb contract, whereas in case #3, Voltairine is being unethically threatened with personal loss into offering the money that facilitates the killing.
I would agree that this makes culpability(V3)<culpability(J1) but I don’t see how this makes culpability(V3)=0.
I think Voltairine in case #3 has contractor-style responsibility to the extent that she could have chosen another action that did not involve committing or facilitating the bombing.
I then tried to answer his “Are you a murderer?” and “What are your victims entitled to from you?” questions:
This feels like a bog I’m stepping in.
Government agents and others use taxpayer money for a huge variety of crimes with a huge number of victims.
People who choose to give aid and comfort to the criminals when they could do otherwise are also numerous (and I am among them), and the extent of our culpability is a complex question, if indeed such culpability exists (as you suggest it may not).
I don’t think that the issue of culpability can be dismissed by pointing out how impossibly difficult it is to assign particular blame to particular aiders & abetters for particular crimes.
It certainly would make real-world prosecution of these crimes a headache.
And it seriously strains theoretical models of culpability and restitution.
The question “what are your victims entitled to from you?” is too simple a question for the complex answers it deserves.
Some of the victims are dead.
How does one make restitution for murder?
Of the ones that aren’t dead, they are numerous and scattered — how would I find them and make restitution?
Am I entitled to withhold restitution from victims who have victimized me in an equivalent manner?
Questions like these don’t dismiss the validity of your question, but give an idea of how much would have to go into an answer and why I’m not going to be able to do a good job of making one here.
This isn’t a reductio ad absurdum against my theories of culpability.
Complex isn’t the same as absurd.
The fact that a mechanism of appropriate restitution is likely to be too complex for human minds to assemble does not mean that the theory of culpability which such a mechanism would address is wrong.
A murderer is culpable even though it is impossible to provide appropriate restitution to the victim.
I incline toward the viewpoint that the libertarian ethical ideal of “initiate no aggressive act” is damn near impossible due to this complex web of complicity, and that people who believe that they can escape this by merely “intending” to initiate no aggressive acts are missing something important about intentions and actions.
How does one cope with this fog of culpability and diffuse aggression, especially if it is impossible to actually stand aloof from it?
Ball-and-stick models like “if you commit an aggressive act, you owe the victim appropriate restitution” fail under the load of this complexity.
I suspect that the solution involves something more along the lines of a constant effort to identify, avoid and reduce culpability combined with a perpetual attitude of restitution which manifests itself in the form of a gratuitous generosity toward victims (of any collective aggression that I help perpetuate) that goes above and beyond any ordinary ethical obligations that would be held by a mythical Unsullied Libertarian.
Any person I meet might be a victim I owe restitution to, therefore I should not just refrain from aggressing against this person, but I should treat them with special kindness above and beyond my baseline ethical obligation.
Not because I can say in confidence that I owe this particular person anything, but because by doing this on a large scale I can have some hope of balancing the accounts and doing actual restitution for my actual crimes, whose actual victims I may never be able to identify.
I will not be surprised if you find this to be grotesque.
I’m not all that satisfied with it myself.
As I said, I feel like I’m stepping into a bog here.
The complexity of this situation makes me much less confident of my intuitions and conclusions here.
My debate partner tries to pin me down a little more concretely on the consequences of this guilt I claim to hold:
Assuming you are responsible for murders in Iraq, or someplace else, would the parents, children or spouse of those you’d killed (or those further threatened) be entitled to kill you because of your contracts with this regime?
Would those further threatened be entitled to kill you to remove your support for this regime?
Could we say that those who destroyed the World Trade Center were entitled to take out a couple of skyscrapers filled with murderers like you?
Do they have to wait for you to buy more bombs to throw at them and try to shoot down the bombers or can they justly kill you in your sleep?
Can someone here who gives nothing to the regime justly kill you to prevent you from murdering more innocents?
To which I respond:
I don’t accept the premise that being victimized by a retributive killing is the appropriate restitution for murder, but that’s another can of worms, and I think I’ve got too many other cans open right now.
But maybe what you’re asking is less about the ethics of retribution and more along the lines of:
“If you are willfully complicit in a system that does not respect human life and libertarian ethics, do you have any grounds to complain if some victim of that system (or anyone at all, really), violates that same respect and ethics toward you, say by killing you in revenge or just out of fury?”
I think it is probably true that the extent of my complicity in aggression makes it more difficult to find firm footing to stand on when complaining about the aggression of others.
However, I also see the “two wrongs don’t make a right” principle coming into play here.
And added to this is the question of whether someone who is likely to be a victim of the government has a right to kill someone who is on-the-whole a supporter of the government in self defense.
Perhaps, you suggest, if Osama has a trial, and Johnny Cochrane has some space on his calendar, we’ll get to see this tested in court.
I don’t think this is an inherently laughable argument, but like any cases in which self-defense is raised as a defense it would depend on the actual evidence (which, as I’ve mentioned before, is found deep in the bog), the proportionality of the response, the reasonableness of the fear of harm, etc.
Certainly Osama won’t stand a chance in a real-world courtroom with such a defense, and even in some omniscient, olympian, bog-proof court I doubt he’d get very far with it.
My debate partner also disagrees with one of the steps in my argument:
Case #3 combines the two.
In #2, Josef threatened Voltairine into becoming a killer or being subjected to a personal loss.
In #3, Josef threatens Voltairine into hiring a contract killer or being subjected to a personal loss.
No way are you getting that through the door.…
V doesn’t hire or contract with anyone by yielding money under threat of violence.
There can be no agreement or contract since J is not offering V any value that is legitimately his to offer.
I think my unfortunate wording (I offer a corrected version in italics above) may have confused things.
So I try to pin things down more precisely about where complicity stops and victimization begins with a few more scenarios:
Case 4: Josef threatens to take Voltairine’s car unless Voltairine hires somebody of her choosing to throw a bomb at the innocent family.
Outcome 4.1: Voltairine hires herself, since this minimizes the personal loss to her while not resulting in anything worse for the innocent family than hiring someone else to do it.
Outcome 4.2: Voltairine hires some third-party, Clarence, to do the dirty deed.
Outcome 4.3: Voltairine shops around and finds that Josef himself offers the best deal, and so hires him to throw the bomb.
If in case #2, Voltairine would carry at least some guilt and in case #3 Voltairine is wholly innocent, what category would outcomes #4.1, #4.2, and #4.3 fall into?
What if we modified case #3 and made it so that Josef was threatening Voltairine with an aggressive, unethical, but relatively trivial act.
Would that make a difference in determining whether Voltairine carries any guilt?:
Case #5: Voltairine, if you give me money to buy a bomb so I can kill some innocent family, I won’t throw this egg at your car.
If she complied, could she really tell friends of the family later, “my hands are wholly clean; I have done nothing unethical”?
Wouldn’t this provide an easy ethical “out” for people who want to contract killings?
A would-be killer could answer the phone, “Hello, you’ve reached Bugsy’s Drive-By Service, where we spill the blood and absorb the guilt.
We’re having a pledge drive today — I’ll sign you up for magazine subscriptions you don’t want unless you hire me to kill someone right now.
Can I take your order please?”
I’ve apparently put myself on trial for murder and hired a fool for a lawyer, which is to say I’m representing myself.
Or misrepresenting, perhaps.
The prosecutor seems skeptical of my guilt, but I’m still holding out hopes that my arguments for the defense will eventually convict me.
You can follow the gavel-to-gavel coverage at The Claire Files Board.
On the one hand, it would be a mistake to go along with the “half a dozen bad apples” theory of what happened in Abu Ghraib (er, I mean Camp Redemption).
Clearly the problem was not just caused by a small handful of people going savage, and the solution to the problem won’t be simply to isolate and denounce those people.
On the other hand, if we pursue this line of thought too recklessly, we can find ourselves propping up the “I was only following orders” excuse.
This is the start of an article from today’s Wall Street Journal that I’ll interrupt below for a tangent, although it’s worth your time to follow the link and read the rest.
Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in that with conventional methods they weren’t getting enough information from prisoners.
The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities.
In a , draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, passages were deleted as was an attachment listing specific interrogation techniques and whether Mr. Rumsfeld himself or other officials must grant permission before they could be used.
The complete draft document was classified “secret” by Mr. Rumsfeld and scheduled for declassification in .
The draft report, which exceeds 100 pages, deals with a range of legal issues related to interrogations, offering definitions of the degree of pain or psychological manipulation that could be considered lawful.
But at its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than “obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens,” normal strictures on torture might not apply.
The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued.
Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the “necessity” of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or “superior orders,” sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no “moral choice was in fact possible.”
I’ve seen this weird backwards-world description of the so-called “Nuremberg defense” pop up a in a couple of places lately.
The description in this Wall Street Journal article is typical.
It’s grotesquely ironic, since the principles adopted by the war crimes trials in Nuremberg were designed precisely to dismiss this sort of “following orders” defense.
Calling this the “Nuremberg defense” is kind of accurate, in that it was a popular excuse attempted as a defense at the trials.
But the way this term is being used now carries the implication that this defense was enshrined as a valid one by the Nuremberg tribunal — when exactly the opposite is true.
Here’s the part of the Nuremberg principles from which the Journal’s quote about moral choice comes:
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
This was clarified elsewhere in the Nuremberg judgment:
As you can see, it says exactly the opposite of what the Wall Street Journal describes as the “Nuremberg defense” — and the legal position of the Dubya Squad’s lawyers.
Is there something you care about more than winning the next election?
For example, curtailment of civil liberties; imprisonment without trial; torture; military adventures based on lies that kill tens of thousands of people?
And I don’t want you just nodding your heads.
I want your push-comes-to-shove response.
Let’s say it’s and the choice somehow gets to be completely stark: proclaim your enthusiasm for torture or lose.
Which will it be?
It would be nice if that were not a question, if it was everyone’s moral intuition that you can’t trade lives for electoral victory.
Indeed, anyone who made such a trade would both an evil coward.
But, um…
Here’s what I believe about John Kerry.
On the Patriot Act, on No Child Left Behind, on war, on gay marriage, on whatever: in every case he voted and spoke with one goal: getting elected president.
For Kerry and the Democratic leadership, getting elected was more important that a thousand American lives, more important than tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, more important than the Constitution.
Now of course this is more or less just the reality of American politics.
But, um, it is morally monstrous.
I actually admire a straight-up enthusiastic murderer more than someone who with eyes fully open endorses murder in order to further a certain set of personal ambitions.
I do not believe that our sad little species offers up any more despicable choice.
Kill because you believe it’s the right thing to do and you may be terribly, terribly wrong.
Kill because killing polls well and you’re not even worth frying.
I’ve been arguing that, as FDR’s administration represented a sort of socialist revolution in America, GWB’s represents a fascist revolution.
Of course, in both cases the revolution is pretty mild: FDR wasn’t Stalin; Bush isn’t Hitler.
But even if he were, let me put it like this.
Hitler is an evil man.
But by himself he’s just another nutjob.
He needs help.
But he also needs acquiescence.
He needs a whole citizenry and specifically a set of leaders who are just too chickenshit to say stop.
Hitler is despicable, but the Vichy collaborators aren’t even good enough to be despicable, if you get me: they’re too empty.
And Hitler can’t do his thing without them.
Hitler believes something.
And other people believe what he believes.
But the real nightmare is the people who know he’s wrong and still help him herd the Jews into the cattle cars.…
Now what I’m about to say is a horrible thing to say to Democrats, really a dangerous thing because it constitutes a motivation for further acts of moral self-destruction.
But the fact that Bush spoke plainly and took controversial and clear positions on most issues was a key reason he won.
People looked at Kerry as if gazing into a void.
That itself presents certain dangers in a leader that makes people leery of casting their vote.
No telling what Kerry might do in a given situation because he comes unencumbered by beliefs.
I mean, let me ask you this.
Had Kerry been elected, would there be any difference in American Iraq policy?
How about in the approach to Iran or North Korea?
He’s unpredictable or unstable because he’s always feeling around for the safe answer.…
[I]f you take what I’m saying as strategic advice, then it won’t work as strategic advice or in any other way.
You’ll hear what I’m saying as follows: next time we’d better simulate commitment.
And then you’re truly living in a hall of mirrors.
You’ve reached the point at which it is literally impossible to say what you believe or to believe anything, because your act of belief is always strategic.
But we could say this: belief is never strategic.
You never actually believe anything because you think it’s fun to believe it or because it will make you a million dollars or will win you the presidency, though you can start out on a lengthy process of self-delusion.
But you believe something when and only when you take it to be true.
So here, again, is the question for Democrats: is there anything you believe that you would not give up or qualify in order to elect a president?
If not, I suggest that there is no reason for you to exist at all.
Get out now: you can’t possibly do anything good for anyone.
Give up.
Disband your party.
Hang yourself.
You really won’t be killing anyone when you do.
So: is opposing the invasion of Iraq worth taking a political risk?
If not, nothing is.
If nothing is, die like the cur you are.
That way you won’t be killing people by performing acts you yourself don’t believe in.…
Strategic questions cannot be the only questions.
I think that the Democratic party had an absolute moral obligation to run against the Patriot Act and the war, to present an alternative to these disasters, even if it had been perfectly clear that these oppositions would lead to resounding defeat.
It’s bad going down to defeat for what you believe, but it must be really sorry to betray all your convictions and get whipped anyway.
The election of should have been a pivotal moment in American history, but turned out to be one that yielded nothing but bathos.
It was not a turning point because the Dems were too scared to turn.
It’s funny because the “get out the vote” thing was so extreme on campuses etc. but it was actually a good year for apathy because Kerry refused to articulate any convictions.
Everyone kept saying “this is the most important election of my lifetime.”
But it was barely an election at all.
If you voted for Bush or you voted for Kerry, all you did was ratify the politics of the Bush administration.…
So here’s my advice, such as it is.
Forget questions like: should we tack left or right?
How can we carry Ohio?
How can we appeal to Christians?
Who’s the least offensive southern governor?
How can we show that we’re tough on terror?
How do we reach out to pro-life voters?
How nasty can we get in our opposition to gay marriage?
Etc. Stop asking the strategic question at all for a second.
Take a safari into your own heart and come back believing something.
Now take a deep breath and say it.
Naturally, I took a look around to find out what else this Crispin Sartwell has to say.
I found his very interesting-looking book on Extreme Virtue, and also a well-thought out meditation on the “support the troops” mantra and its use by people who are against the war: “I find this puzzling,” he writes.
“If you think the war is wrong, then you think what the soldiers are doing is wrong.”
The way out of this dilemma is to think of the troops as being automata, acting apart from their own wills, or somehow in ways that are immune to judgment.
That way you can continue to support them, because their actions are separate from who they are.
This, Sartwell says, is going way too far.
[E]ven in a context in which someone is telling you what to do, you’re responsible for what you do.
If this is not the case, then not only are there no war crimes, there are no war heroes.
¶ To join the military is a decision.
To allow yourself to be deployed to Iraq is a decision.
“For us to oppose what our troops are doing and to support them for doing it,” Sartwell concludes, “is to regard them as inanimate objects, as things with no responsibility for their own actions.
It is to excuse everything on the ground that the persons doing it have no conscience, understanding or will.”
But Sartwell is astute enough to see that if he pulls on this thread of logic long enough, he may end up chillier by one sweater:
[W]e, too, need to accept our responsibility.
Thoreau went to jail because — in protest of the war and as a refusal to participate in it — he declined to pay his taxes.
I myself, though I oppose the war, am no tax resister.
In other words, when the authorities order me to cough up (or, rather, when they confiscate the war machine’s cut directly from my paycheck), I utter nary a peep.
The laws and mechanisms under which I do this are designed precisely to exculpate me, to diminish my own sense of my responsibility.
But whether the law treats me as a child, an object, an idiot or a victim, still I am responsible as I pay for what I hate.
Support our taxpayers.
The “Pitstop Ploughshares” — a group of five peace activists from the Catholic Worker movement who broke into Shannon airport in Ireland and disabled a U.S. Navy supply plane with hammers and a pickaxe — have been found not guilty by a Dublin jury.
This follows two mistrials.
One of the defense attorneys challenged the jurors, in closing arguments:
As you should expect by this point, Aristotle thinks that there are those who are overly-serious, those who try to make a joke out of everything, and pleasant people who find the sweet spot in the middle.
(The “urbane” vs. “rustic” terminology hints at an interesting investigation, but I’ve got too much on my plate to look in to it right now.
Any pointers?)
Much of this section is predictable from the pattern shown by the previous ones and from common sense.
But Aristotle lets slip a passage that allows us to take an interesting detour.
[Of t]he man who jokes well… There are… jokes he will not make; for the jest is a sort of abuse, and there are things that lawgivers forbid us to abuse; and they should, perhaps, have forbidden us even to make a jest of such.
The refined and well-bred man, therefore, will be as we have described, being as it were a law to himself.
The “a law to [or unto] himself” translation is common to all of the translators I have been referring to (Ross, Chase, Browne, Gilles, Grant, Hatch, Moore, Peters, Stock, Taylor, Vincent, Welldon, Williams), though some say that the refined man behaves “as though” he were a law unto himself, others say that the refined man “is” a law unto himself (in these matters).
Stock goes so far as to add (in his paraphrase) “It is the use of philosophy to render law superfluous.”
I assume the translators used the phrase “a law unto himself” to translate “νόμος ὢν ἑαυτῷ” because they were following the lead of the translators of the King James Bible, who used a similar phrase to translate the similar Greek phrase “ἑαυτοῖς εἰσιν νόμος” in Romans 2:14 (“a law unto themselves”).
For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.
For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
Both Aristotle and Paul are saying that in the absence of explicit laws, a righteous person still has a conscience that can guide them and act as an internal lawbook.
But both Aristotle and Paul seemed to believe that there is or ought to be a set of explicit external laws that takes priority.
In Paul’s case, these laws were the revealed commands of God; in Aristotle’s case, the considered and codified guidance of the enlightened polis.
(Aristotle seems to believe that the whole point of having a government and laws is to train people in virtue, punish vice, and enforce Justice.
This seems a naive and limited view of what governments are actually for, but, on the other hand, most people who criticize governments but who believe in them tend to implicitly make their criticisms by way of contrasting an existing government with an ideal one that is much like Aristotle’s. So maybe Aristotle is just fleshing-out this ideal government that people use for such comparisons.)
Thoreau upended this hierarchy: he put conscience first, and said that the written laws of governments and religions are only fall-back measures for people with simple minds or faulty consciences.
He wrote a number of times of the tension between law and conscience, law and freedom, and even conscience and freedom.
Not all of what he said seems to cohere into a single point of view, but much of it is, as you might expect, thought provoking and rhetorically powerful.
Here are some examples:
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey.
We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law.
It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound.
Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.
The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker.
The stern command is—move or ye shall be moved—be the master of your own action—or you shall unawares become the tool of the meanest slave.
Any can command him who doth not command himself.
Let men be men & stones be stones and we shall see if majorities do rule.
“And I reason without obeying, when obedience appears to me to be contrary to reason,” rejoined Mirabeau.
This was good and manly, as the world goes; and yet it was desperate.
A saner man would have found opportunities enough to put himself in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society, and so test his resolution, in the natural course of events, without violating the laws of his own nature.
It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government.
Cut the leather only where the shoe pinches.
Let us not have a rabid virtue that will be revenged on society — that falls on it, not like the morning dew, but like the fervid noonday sun, to wither it.
Any man knows when he is justified, & not all the wits in the world can enlighten him on that point.
I do not believe in lawyers—in that mode of defending or attacking a man—because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, & in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not.
Let lawyers decide trivial cases.
Business men may arrange that among themselves.
It is comparatively a different matter.
If they were interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing.
As I mentioned , I tried to flesh out a variety of political philosophy that I whimsically dubbed “topianism.”
I meant the name to highlight the distinction between it and utopian political philosophies (meaning, most all of the rest of them, including the mainstream ones that pass for conventional wisdom) — that is to say that it’s not aiming at organizing society in some ideal way, but in understanding and navigating society as it is in the here-and-now (not in the outopos where it will never be, or the eutopos where we might ideally project it to be, but in this topos right here where we’re standing).
I’m not crazy about the name “topianism,” but I need some sort of tag to attach to the idea while I look for a better one.
Topianism is almost more of an ethical code than a political philosophy, except that it has a component with profound political consequences: its claim that there is no second standard (or set of standards) by which to judge acts in the political sphere — instead, a single standard applies to everyone.
Questions like “is she a citizen?” or “is he a defendant?” or “is she the queen?” or “is he licensed?” or “is that legal?” don’t play the same sort of decisive role in topian evaluation as they do in utopian philosophies.
Topianism bears a lot of resemblance to existentialism because of its emphasis on personal responsibility and on avoiding the temptation to deflect or deny this responsibility.
When you talk about responsibility, you sometimes end up getting into the tangle over free will.
There’s a lot of philosophical debate over whether free will makes any sense at all, and if it does, how it must be structured so as to make sense and whether a free will so structured bears any resemblance to the more intuitive, common-sense version of the concept.
And there’s a lot of psychological debate over the extent to which our conscious decision-making is actually a causal factor in our actions or is only an after-the-fact “just so story” we tell ourselves.
Be all that as it may, most of us feel that we inhabit a world in which we choose some actions and some things just happen to us and in which there is a big difference between the two.
This is crucial to our sense of being living participants in existence and not just spectators along for the ride.
The existentialist tradition did a lot of work identifying some of the ways we conveniently pretend to be spectators instead of participants from time to time in order to try to cheat our way out of confronting our need to decide and our responsibility for the results of our decision-making.
Topianism emphasizes how this works (or rather doesn’t work) in the political sphere.
It insists that you cannot displace an individual human decision onto an institution, a hierarchical order, a rule, or anything of the sort.
In other words, you cannot say “I did it because it was the law,” or “I did it because it was my job,” or “I did it because it was an order,” or “I did it because it got more votes than the alternative” as a way of trying to mean “the choice I made to do it wasn’t really my choice.”
In its most uncompromising form, topianism won’t even let you foist your decisions off on rules of thumb, ethical principles, or topianism itself.
You can refer to such things in the course of explaining your decision-making, but you can’t try to make such things bear any of the weight of your actual decision-making or shoulder any of the responsibility for your actions.
It is an anarchist philosophy, but not because it preaches that The State should be abolished, but because it asserts that The State, as an independent moral agent capable of making decisions and shouldering responsibility, does not exist.
The attitude of a topian to The State is not like the attitude of an assassin to the Emperor but like the attitude of an atheist to God.
Topianism does not mandate pacifism, or the nonaggression principle, or aversion to coercion (though some, like Tolstoy in the quotes below and in what I quoted , blend the two ideas or find that they both derive from a common root).
Indeed if it were to mandate such a thing, it would be self-undermining, as its practitioners would be pacifists or nonaggressive or noncoercive because of a rule rather than because of their choice.
A topian can throw a man in prison, but only by saying “it’s because I think they should be confined and I’m willing to take responsibility for confining them,” and not “I’m following the law and what the warrant says.”
A topian can steal from his neighbor, but only by saying “I want his property and don’t respect his ownership of it,” never by saying “I have a legal seizure order” or “to each according to his need.”
Topian decisions can be wise or unwise, good or bad, praiseworthy or blameworthy.
The one thing they cannot be is foisted off on someone or something other than the person actually deciding.
A topian can never merely follow an order because it is an order or because the person who gave it holds a rank or position.
But a topian may conclude that some other person has a better track record of wisdom and good judgment in some field and may follow his or her advice for that reason — though never losing track of the fact that the choice and the responsibility for the consequences lie with the person taking the advice, not the person giving it.
This may sound slippery, since it seems easy to just linguistically transform an improper delegation of responsibility into a reasonable one just by saying “I choose it.”
Is there a meaningful difference between saying “I did it because of an order from my commander” and saying “I did it because I chose to follow the advice of that commander-guy who seemed to me to be well-informed and of good judgment”?
I think there is.
In the latter case, you have to at least ostensibly own the responsibility for your choice and make a more-or-less honest claim of having thought it over and justified it — furthermore, your posture is obviously conditional on the good judgment of “that commander-guy” and not just an unconditional carte blanche of obedience.
In the former case, none of that is true: you’re merely a tool in your commander’s hands.
That said, it’s certainly possible to describe your decision in a way that formally looks proper but is really a dishonest dodge gussied up in the right package.
You can’t just change your language in a “politically correct” fashion, you really do have to honestly change your attitude.
Here are some ways I’ve seen the topian creed, or something close to it, expressed:
Juanita Nelson:
“It is, as far as I can see, an unpleasant fact that we cannot avoid decision-making.
We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority.
For we then have made the decision to do that — have concluded because of belief or of fear or of apathy that this is the thing which we should do or cannot avoid doing.
And then we share in the consequences of any such action.
Are we doing more than trying to hide our nakedness with a fig leaf when we take the view expressed by a friend who belonged to a fundamental religious sect?
At the time he wore the uniform of the United States Marines.
‘I’m not helping to murder,’ he said.
‘I’m carrying out the orders of my government, and the sin is not mine.’
I could never tell whether there was a bitter smile playing around his lips or if he was quite earnest.
It is a rationalization commonly held and defended.
It is a comforting presumption, but it still appears to me that, while the seat of government is in Washington, the seat of conscience is in me.
It cannot be voted out of office by one or a million others.”
“A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.
He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.”
Mary McCarthy:
“If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”
Hannah Arendt:
“[T]here is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters.
The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child.
¶ Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, ‘Why did you obey?’ but ‘Why did you support?’
… Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word ‘obedience’ from our vocabulary of moral and political thought.
If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.”
“For myself, I’ve decided one thing only.
I’m going to tell the executioner: ‘You alone, not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my death, and you are going to have to live with it!
If it weren’t for you willing executioners, there would be no death sentences!’
So then let him kill me, the rat!”
Tolstoy:
“The men of our time complain of the evil current of life in our Christian world.
This cannot be otherwise, when in our consciousness we have recognized not only the fundamental divine commandment, ‘Do not kill,’ which was proclaimed thousands of years ago, but also the law of the love and brotherhood of all men, and when, in spite of this, every man of our European world in reality renounces this fundamental divine law, which he recognizes, and at the command of a president, emperor, minister, a Nicholas, a William, puts on a fool’s costume, takes up instruments of murder, and says, ‘I am ready, — I will strike down, ruin, and kill whomsoever you command me to.’
¶ What, then, can society be, which is composed of such men?
It must be terrible, and, indeed, it is terrible.”
“[T]he chief evil from which men suffer has for a long time not consisted in this: that they do not know God’s true law; but in this: that men, to whom the knowledge and the execution of the true law is inconvenient, being unable to destroy or overthrow it, invent ‘precept upon precept and rule upon rule,’ as Isaiah says, and give them out as just as obligatory as, or even more obligatory than the true laws of God.
And so, the only thing that now is needed for freeing men from their sufferings, is this: that they should free themselves from all the theological, governmental, and scientific reflections, which are proclaimed to be obligatory laws of life, and, having freed themselves, should naturally recognize as more binding upon them than all the other precepts and laws, that true, eternal law, which is already known to them, and gives, not only to a few, but to all men, the greatest possible good in social life.”
“ ‘What is to be done?’ ask both the rulers and the ruled, the revolutionists and those engaged in public life, always attaching to the words, ‘What is to be done?’ the meaning of, ‘How should men’s lives be organized?’
¶ They all ask how to arrange men’s lives, that is to say, what to do with other people; but no one asks, ‘What must I do with myself?’
… ¶ [T]he chief cause of men’s stagnation in a form of life they already admit to be wrong, lies in the amazing superstition… that some men not only can, but have the right to, predetermine and forcibly organize the life of others.
¶ People need only free themselves from this common superstition and it would at once become clear to all that the life of every group of men gets arranged only in the same way that each individual arranges his own life.
And if men — both those who arrange others’ lives, and those who submit to such arranging — would only understand that, it would become evident to all that nothing can justify any kind of violence between man and man; and that violence is not only a violation of love and even of justice, but of common sense.”
“Suppose a problem in psychology was set: What can be done to persuade the men of our time — Christians, humanitarians or, simply, kindhearted people — into committing the most abominable crimes with no feeling of guilt?
There could be only one way: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen, and so forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced of the existence of a kind of organization called ‘government service,’ allowing men to be treated like inanimate objects and banning thereby all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this ‘government service’ must be so unified that the responsibility for their dealings with men would never fall on any one of them individually.”
Thoreau:
“It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.”
“There is but one obligation and that is the obligation to obey the highest dictate.
— None can lay me under another which will supersede this.
The Gods have given me these years without any incumbrance — society has no mortgage on them.
If any man assist me in the way of the world, let him derive satisfaction from the deed itself — for I think I never shall have dissolved my prior obligations to God.”
“I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance.
However flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant.
Let us see if we cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own conditions.
Does not his law reach as far as his light?
The expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all.”
“The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true.
False relations grow out of false conditions.”
“Consider the cloak that our employment or station is; how rarely men treat each other for what in their true and naked characters they are; how we use and tolerate pretension; how the judge is clothed with dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility that does not belong to him, and the criminal, perchance, with shame or impudence which no more belong to him.
It does not matter so much, then, what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks.
Change the coat; put the judge in the criminal-box, and the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men.”
“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?
Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good?
Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves?
Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever?
Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit?
What right have you to enter into a compact with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you?
Is it for you to make up your mind, — to form any resolution whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding?
I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not.
Let lawyers decide trivial cases.
Business men may arrange that among themselves.
If they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing.”
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?
Why has every man a conscience, then?
I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
“A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences…
They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.
Now, what are they?
Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?
Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments… ¶ The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.
They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.
Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.
Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.”
“My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with, — for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel, — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government.
How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action.”
“If… a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State.
Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff.
Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones.
Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?”
Walter Raleigh:
“[N]o senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons; for politic members meet with neither encouragement nor reproaches for what was the effect of number only.
For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it.
Hence it is, that though a public assembly may lie under great censures, yet each member looks upon himself as little concerned: this must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than any single Roman would do.”
However, a piece of verse that she uses as the introduction to one of her chapters fits right in here at The Picket Line:
“Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.” Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright The coming pest with border fortresses, Or catch your carp with subtle argument.
All force is twain in one: cause is not cause Unless effect be there; and action’s self Must needs contain a passive.
So command Exists but with obedience.
