Moral Parity and Emergent Morality

This is my second of two posts on Matt Zwolinski’s criticism of the moral parity thesis, looking at the second (and to me, more interesting) objection to moral parity. To Zwolinski, the “basic problem” with moral parity is that “we can’t base macro-level conclusions about politics and social organization (solely) on the basis of micro-level examples.”

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the rules of individual, face-to-face interaction might be an incomplete guide for determining the rules of macro-level social institutions. This rhymes with F. A. Hayek‘s criticisms of the concept of “social justice.” In Hayek’s view, advocates of “social justice” go wrong for the same reasons as the issue identified by Zwolinski – they take claims about what would or wouldn’t be just in individual, micro-level cases and attempt to copy-paste that into conclusions about the justness of large-scale emergent social outcomes.

Hayek freely granted that “the manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people.” But, Hayek says, we can’t extrapolate from cases of “deliberate allocation to particular people” carried out at the level of individual agents to claims about just distributions on a society-wide level. Attempting to do so, Hayek argued, falls not into “the category of error but to that of nonsense.” 

But even granting that micro-level examples of appropriate behavior can’t fully account for macro-level rules of social organization, this still doesn’t provide much traction against the moral parity thesis. The reason is because, as I see it, Zwolinski is operating with too narrow a definition of the moral parity thesis to begin with.

In Zwolinski’s post, he describes the moral parity thesis as the idea that “that governments have no rights that are not identical to or derivable from the rights of individuals. In other words, if something is wrong for individuals to do, then it’s wrong for governments to do as well.” But I think this misstates what advocates of the moral parity thesis mean. For example, Michael Huemer (certainly as strong an advocate of the moral parity thesis as you’ll ever find) has described his view like this, in his book The Problem of Political Authority:

Political authority is a special moral status, setting the state above all nonstate agents. If we reject this notion, then we should evaluate state coercion in the same manner as we evaluate coercion by other agents. For any coercive act by the state, we should first ask what reason the state has for exercising coercion in this way. We should then consider whether a private individual or organization would be justified in exercising a similar kind and degree of coercion, with similar effects on the victims, for similar reasons.

Note that Huemer’s objection in no way requires believing that micro-level examples of individual behavior be the sole determinant of macro-level conclusions about social organization. And when Huemer speaks of “agents” he doesn’t mean “individuals.” After all, he refers to the state as an “agent” even though the state is clearly not an individual, and he also speaks about private organizations as well. Huemer is not claiming, as Zwolinski puts it, that “if something is wrong for individuals to do, then it’s wrong for governments to do as well.” Those who endorse political authority argue not only that the state may do things that no individual would be permitted to do, but also that the state may do things that would be impermissible if engaged in by any other macro-level or emergent social institution.

Should we conclude that because macro-level social rules can’t be derived entirely by reference to micro-level individual behavior that, say, large religious organizations like the Church of Scientology have special entitlements and moral exemptions that apply to no other organization? Or sufficiently large corporations? Or clans? Or any other large-scale social institution you can envision? States, after all, are simply one of a number of different organizations used to coordinate social activity – so one would need additional arguments for why these special moral exemptions emerge only in the case of the state but not any nonstate social institution.

As Vincent Ostrom put it:

One can accept that all these forms of human association Ostrom describes may operate on rules not straightforwardly derivable from micro-level examples of individual behavior. I, for example, freely agree that micro-level behavior of individual adult interactions does not fully describe the responsibilities and obligations that are part and parcel to families. But that, in and of itself, does not touch the moral parity thesis. In order to dispute the moral parity thesis one would need to provide additional arguments for why one and only one form of social organization holds such impressive and weighty moral exemptions as are typically ascribed to the state. And the emergent nature of social morality, by itself, still leaves that gap unfilled.