Moral Parity and the Welfare State

This is the first of my two responses to Matt Zwolinski’s critique of the moral parity thesis, focusing on his claim that this idea suggests that welfare and taxation are morally illegitimate. Is this so? My answer is no, not necessarily. 

I say “not necessarily” because it depends on if one is an absolutist deontologist – someone who thinks there are certain rights/duties it is always and everywhere impermissible to violate, regardless of the circumstances. If you think property rights violations or theft can never be justified, no matter what, then the moral parity thesis does force the conclusions Zwolinski identifies. But absolutist deontology leads to other implications that are clearly absurd. Here are a few thought experiments, none original to me, to illustrate what I mean. 

• Suppose you’re on the balcony of your 20th story condo, when suddenly, the railing you were leaning against gives way and you plummet toward the ground. Luckily, you manage to grab a flagpole hanging off the balcony of the 15th story condo. You start to shimmy your way to the balcony to pull yourself up, when the owner of that condo arrives, and forbids you from making any use of his property. Over your pleas, he refuses to grant you permission to climb onto his balcony and exit through his condo, and demands that you release your grip on his flagpole immediately – this is, after all, his property. 
• You live in a house out in the country on a one acre plot of land. One day, I buy all the land within a hundred yards of where your property line ends, such that your home is now effectively contained within a hundred-yard bubble of my land. I of course assure you I will respect your property and will not lay a finger on what’s yours, but I insist that you do the same and furthermore, I insist that you have no permission to set foot on my land. Doing so will constitute trespassing on my property, against which I will retaliate. You cannot travel to work or get any supplies or food without crossing my property. 
• Your child is starving to death, and the only options you have are to steal some bread to save your child’s life, or let them starve. (Stipulate there are no other options available – it’s one or the other.)

If one is an absolutist deontologist who holds property rights are always and everywhere inviolable, they are forced to say the proper response in these scenarios is to let go of the flagpole and plummet to their death, to remain trapped in their house and starve, and to let their child die rather than steal bread. If those are indeed your conclusions, this is your off-ramp to exit this conversation, because nothing I say after this will make you budge. But to the other 99.9% of us, it seems obvious that in these cases, you’re justified in climbing into the condo, crossing across the land, and taking the bread to save your child’s life. This doesn’t entail that doing these things are not rights violations – it only means that sometimes rights violations can be justified.

All of this is accepted by prominent defenders of the moral parity thesis cited by Zwolinski. Michael Huemer, who advocates for anarcho-capitalism, has no problem admitting this. For example, he wrote “Compare this case: Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s children. Assume that the children would otherwise have starved. It does not follow from this that he didn’t really steal the bread. At most, what follows is that the theft was justified.” Because of this, Huemer says the idea that “taxation is justified even if it is theft” is a “perfectly understandable view.” Huemer also allows that “stealing in order to provide social welfare might be justified.”

Now, let’s bring the moral parity thesis back into play. Since individuals would be justified in engaging in rights violations in these circumstances, by moral parity a government would also be justified when it engages in relevantly similar behavior. If I’m justified in taking a loaf of bread to prevent little Marvin from starving to death, then a welfare program that provides Marvin with bread would be justified by the moral parity thesis. The concern Zwolinski expresses comes about as a result of absolutism, not of moral parity. 

This ties into one other objection Zwolinski raises about the moral parity thesis along similar lines – how one should act regarding children. Zwolinski says that if “you try, as the moral parity thesis does, to build a political philosophy out of micro-level examples about adults interacting with each other, then you’re going to wind up a little stumped regarding what to say about kids. They simply don’t fit the model, and so your theory winds up treating them like a kind of strange fringe case.”

But this seems off base to me. The moral parity thesis, as I understand it, doesn’t say we must build “a political philosophy out of micro-level examples about adults interacting with each other.” The moral parity thesis simply holds that agents of the state don’t gain special moral exemptions simply by virtue of being agents of the state. That leaves the question of the specific content of moral obligations completely open, along with how those obligations are derived. You can believe in moral parity without believing that all moral obligations must be rooted in “micro level examples about adults interacting with each other.” One can believe there are special obligations and responsibilities when children are involved – I certainly do – but that is completely orthogonal to the moral parity thesis. 

In fairness, there are certainly some thinkers in the libertarian tradition who are as bad at the case of children as Zwolinski says. Murray Rothbard held that children should be free to run away from home as soon as they are old enough to do so, and that parents can’t be compelled to feed or care for their children because that would violate the parent’s absolute right to self-ownership. But this defect in Rothbard’s thinking is, as in the above thought experiments, a result of his absolutism and not of moral parity. 

Let me add one more point could be made in favor of a welfare state one could make. In cases where theft might be justified in order to, say, feed starving children, there could be practical (rather than moral) advantages to having those children fed through something like a government welfare program rather than through individuals engaging in acts of justified theft. If Billy the Baker finds someone trying to steal some bread, he’d obviously seem justified in trying to stop that person, or turning him in to the police. But he can’t immediately know if the potential thief is Jean Valjean personified, or someone who can easily afford bread but just doesn’t want to pay. A well-run program could remove this uncertainty, because if people can prevent their children from starving by accessing this program they don’t need to steal from Billy, therefore Billy can be sure that anyone he catches trying to steal bread from him is acting wrongly and can justly be stopped.

Another consideration could be raised. While Jean Valjean might be justified in stealing to feed his sister’s starving children, the costs of that theft will necessarily fall on someone else. On whom should those costs justly fall? It doesn’t seem like there is anyone in particular to single out for that. Valjean may steal from Billy the Baker, but there’s no specific reason for Billy rather than anyone else to bear the cost of the theft. And if Billy runs his bakery in a part of town with lots of people in Valjean’s situation, he might find himself burdened by these thefts in a way that Carl’s Croissant Shop in the rich and well-guarded part of town never has to experience. If someone is justified in engaging in an action that will inevitably impose a cost on someone else, but at the same time there is no particular “someone else” on whom this cost should justly fall, then everyone sharing the costs prevents anyone from arbitrarily bearing an undeservedly disproportionate burden from these (justified) thefts. 

Now, I can certainly think of counters to the above arguments, along with responses to those, and counter responses in turn. But my point is simply that contrary to what Zwolinski claims, one could both accept the moral parity thesis and still accept that, say, taxation or welfare might be justified. 

However, this still doesn’t mean the moral parity thesis doesn’t have very strong implications. Even if one could justify taxation and welfare based on moral parity, the range of programs that can be justified in this way is very small compared to the scope of what government actually does. A program that feeds starving orphans could be justified. But taking hundreds of millions of dollars a year to subsidize the art interests of the wealthy through The National Endowment for the Arts certainly doesn’t clear this bar. Nor does subsidizing and thus encouraging housing construction in areas with a high risk of floods and other natural disasters. So in that sense, Zwolinski is correct that much of how the government actually behaves is unjustified by the moral parity thesis – but not in the cases he seemed to cite.