A while back, I posted about a few different things I think are true, with a request for people to offer up what might change my mind. Unfortunately, the responses I got were generally what I specifically said I was not looking for. I was hoping to get some recommended reading, where people identified books, essays, etc. that made what they consider the best, most comprehensive case for a contrary view, rather than simply identifying a point they disagree with, followed by a three sentence explanation about why.
However, there is a consolation prize – one of the quintessential bleeding-heart libertarian philosophers, Matt Zwolinski, recently and coincidentally posted some thoughts critiquing one of the ideas I listed – the moral parity thesis. This is the idea that, as Zwolinski phrases it, “if something is wrong for individuals to do, then it’s wrong for governments to do as well.” Or, as Dan Moller phrased it in his book Governing Least, “it should at the very least give us pause if we are advocating social institutions that enshrine a moral logic we reject in face-to-face encounters.”
Zwolinski raises two concerns regarding the moral parity thesis. One, the moral parity thesis has radical implications, in that “it implies that almost everything that governments do – from drug criminalization to social welfare to taxation itself – is morally illegitimate.” It also has troubling implications regarding the case of children – or at least it seems to have little useful to suggest.
The second objection is the idea that we can’t “extrapolate social morality from the morality of individual behavior.” That is, social morality might be an emergent phenomenon, “which is grounded but not manifested in the behavior that gives rise to it.” If this is the case, rules about how we should behave in individual, face-to-face encounters might very well be a poor guide to understanding rules that govern large scale social interactions. If social morality “is a fundamentally evolutionary phenomenon that emerges from our collective attempt to solve the problems inherent in social co-existence”, we can’t expect to answer those questions entirely by reference to individual encounters any more than you could derive properties about the ocean from the study of individual H2O molecules.
These are interesting thoughts, but I don’t find them successful in undercutting the moral parity thesis. I’ll have one post upcoming dedicated to each objection, and explain why Zwolinski’s concerns haven’t persuaded me. But to give a preview – I disagree with Zwolinski’s claim that the moral parity thesis implies the illegitimacy of things like social welfare programs. One can accept moral parity, and still conclude that taxation and welfare programs are permissible. My next post will be providing an argument in favor of the welfare state that assumes the legitimacy of moral parity.
After that, I’ll follow up with another post talking about the emergence objection, and why I don’t think it undercuts moral parity either.
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