Maverick Philosopher

I don't like law enforcement agents (qua law enforcement agents) and I try to avoid contact with them, not because I violate laws or have something to hide, but because I understand human nature, and I understand how power corrupts people, not inevitably, but predictably. Cops and sheriffs are too often arrogant, disrespectful, and willing to overstep their lawful authority But there is a species of varmint that I like even less than law enforcement agents: criminals and scofflaws. They are the scum of the earth. To clean up scum you need people who are willing to get dirty and who share some of the attributes of those they must apprehend and incarcerate. I mean such attributes as courage, cunning, some recklessness, with a dash of ruthlessness thrown in for good measure.

Government and its law enforcement agencies are a necessary evil. That is not pessimism, but realism. There are anarchists and others who dream of a world in which good order arises spontaneously and coercive structures are unnecessary. I want these anarchists and others to be able to dream on in peace. For that very reason, I reject their dangerous utopianism.

Suppose we consider Hocking's three points seriatim.

1. The criminal is such by definition only. No doubt this is true of some criminals. If the Brady Bunch were to make hand gun possession by decent folk illegal, then those people would become criminals by a mere act of irrational legislation. An example liberals might prefer is that of the peaceable fellow who cultivates cannabis sativa solely for his personal enjoyment, or for the alleviation of a medical disorder. Such a fellow is as it were defined into criminality. But the notion that every criminal is such by definition only, however, is palpably false. The reader is invited to supply his own counterexamples. But if he has trouble he may wish to contemplate the recent case of Tookie Williams, the shotgun murdering hero of some Hollywood liberals. It would be absurd to hold that the wrongness of murder is simply a matter of the positive law's saying it is wrong.

2. The state fosters inequalities that drive people into criminality. The state fosters inequalities? I would have thought that people left to their own devices pursuing their interests in accordance with their talents and ambitions would be source enough of inequality. Why is X’s net worth greater than Y’s? Because X works hard, saves and invests, and practices the ancient virtues, while Y devotes himself to wine, women, and song. Surely that is true for many values of X and Y. The modern welfare state seriously penalizes the sort of productive behavior that naturally results in economic inequality while rewarding unproductive behavior.

In any case, no one is driven into criminality by inequalities or by poverty. Poverty no more causes crime than wealth causes virtue. That is a liberal fallacy that ignores free will and cannot explain the plain fact that vast numbers of people who have lived in straitened and unequal circumstances have not turned to crime.

3. The criminal is best dealt with locally. This is perhaps true of some criminals. But it takes more than a bunch of local yokels to put the finger on the likes of Bonnie and Clyde. The professional criminal is precisely a professional, and it takes professionals to control him. When thugs like Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Cyde, and Pretty Boy Floyd roamed the land, even professional law enforcement had a hell of a time getting the drop on them due to the former’s superior firepower. A six-shooter is no match for a Thompson submachine gun.

Now let’s consider the (inclusive) disjunction of the three points: every criminal is either (1) or (2) or (3). In other words, can we parcel out the criminal population in such a way that every criminal falls under one or more of these heads? Obviously not. Where does one place a serial killer like Ted Bundy? This dude was no criminal by mere extrinsic denomination. His intrinsic attributes more than justified the appellation. Nor can the blame be placed on state-induced inequalities. And again, a local posse got up by Jethro and his brother is unlikely to corral a guy as smart as Bundy. Examples are easily multiplied.

Further questions: How would an anarchist society deal with aggression emanating from foreign states? How would voluntary associations ever on the brink of dissolution be able to stand up against ruthless gangs like MS-13 that enforce severe internal discipline and kill apostates? A fortiori, how would such voluntary associations be able to counter terrorist cells that enjoy state-sponsorship? The notion that terrorist cells with state-sponshorship could be combatted effectively by loose voluntary associations lacking central organization is ludicrous.

I am sure that a sophisticated anarchist has an answer to these questions and many more besides. It would be interesting to hear what those answers are. For the nonce, however, I remain a conservative, one who holds to the moral justifiability of a limited state.

Aren't anarchists making the same mistake that leftists make, namely, ignoring the ineradicable propensity for evil in human nature? Arguably, that propensity is part of the justification for having a state in the first place. It is also part of the explanation of why states first arose. If the utopian fantasies anarchists and leftists cherish about human nature were true, states would never have arisen. It is precisely because of the predatory nature of human beings that states were necessary in the first place.

Nothing is gained by ignoring the plain facts about human nature that make the existence of the state a necessary evil. It is curious that anarchists and leftists, opposites as they are in many ways, meet in the same strange bed of the denial of man's fallen nature.

The state lays claim to moral authority, to the right to rule and the right to be obeyed. If it has the right to command and be obeyed, then the citizen has the correlative moral obligation to obey. But "the primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled." (18) Conflict is the result: the obligation to obey contradicts the obligation to be autonomous. We might call this Wolff's antinomy.

There are three ways of responding to a contradiction: deny the first limb, deny the second limb, deny the contradiction. In the present case: deny the legitimacy of the state's claim to authority; deny that there is a moral obligation to be autonomous; deny that there is a genuine contradiction.

Wolff denies the first limb: he asserts that there is no obligation to obey the state's commands. On his view they lack legitimacy, binding moral force. (18) This is not to say that the anarchist will not comply with state commands. He may do so for prudential or even sentimental reasons: they are the commands of the government of his country and his feelings of attachment to his country may incline him to comply with its government's laws. The point, however, is that the laws have "no objective moral basis." (19) American laws have no more moral claim on Wolff than the laws of Sri Lanka. "All authority is equally illegitimate. . . ." (19)

Towards a Critique

It is important to note that Wolff is talking about not only all instances of state authority, but all types of authority whether state or non-state. The illegitimacy of state authority is but a special case of the illegitimacy of authority as such. Note also that W's position implies that legitimate authority is not just nonexistent, but impossible where the impossibility is grounded in the very concepts of authority and autonomy. After all, he arrives at his antinomy by 'unpacking' (explicating) the concepts of authority and autonomy.

W's position thus implies that no parent could ever have authority over any child, and that the concept of a God having authority over his creatures is necessarily vacuous or uninstantiated. But these implications are arguably reductiones ad absurdum of the Wolffian position.

Consider first the parent and child case. Suppose a wise and loving parent — there must be one somewhere! — has her fifteen year old child's best interests constantly in view. What I mean is that the child's best interest is identical to one of the mother's interests. The parent wants all and only what is best for the child, and the wisdom of the parent is in part constituted by her knowledge of what is best and how to attain it. The child, however, does not know all of what is in her best interest. So there will be situations in which the parent will issue a command to the child, a command backed up by force, a command that the child will not be able to validate and accept given her level of knowledge, moral insight, and reasoning ability. The child will simply have to obey the parent's command, and indeed because the parent has commanded it (i.e., not because the child sees why it is morally necessary).

Now the question is this: Has the parent violated the autonomy of the child? Or is the parent's commanding and the child's obeying consistent with the child's autonomy? I would say that there is no violation of autonomy. This is because the child's best interest — something she is not in a position to appreciate at present but will be able to appreciate in future — is identical with one of the mother's interests. In other words, the mother is commanding what the child would herself agree to if she knew her best interest. So there is no conflict between the mother's authority and the child's ideal autonomy. The mother's authority is legitimate because it aims at what is best for the child. And the child's obedience is no violation of her automony since she herself will be in a position later to validate the mother's command.

Wollf claims in effect that the autonomous person recognizes no commands. (15) There is clearly something right about this. But it is only an ideal. At the ideal limit of moral and intellectual development, one would obey no commands just because they were commanded. To put it another way, at the ideal limit, there would be no need for obedience taken in the strict sense. Recall that, strictu dictu, for A to obey B is not for A to do as B says, but for A to do as B says because B has said (commanded) it.

But from the fact that there is no need nor justification for obedience at the ideal limit, it does not follow that there is no need nor justification for obedience here and now. Many children and adolescents and some adults do not know their own best interests. Their autonomy is not violated if they obey wise and benevolent dictators.

But are there any wise and benevolent dictators? Yes, there are a few parents who fit this description. But even if they were merely possible, that would suffice to defuse Wolff's antinomy. For recall: his argument is that it is conceptually impossible that authority -- any authority -- be compatible with autonomy.

W's argument, in effect, is that since all authority is illegitimate, then state authority is illegitimate. I have just argued that it is false that all authority is illegitimate. So W's argument that state authority is illegitimate collapses.

But for all I have said, it might still be the case that state authority is illegitimate. But if so, a different and more specific argument is needed to show that.

Nota Bene: I am not arguing that any existing state, or any past state, is comparable to a wise and benevolent parent. I am not even arguing that it is possible that there be a state that is comparable to a wise and benevolent parent. I am arguing only that W is wrong to assert that "All authority is equally illegitimate. . . ." (19)

1. "The fundamental assumption of moral philosophy is that men are responsible for their actions." (12) Wolff intends moral as opposed to mere causal responsibility. But if we are morally responsible, then we are "metaphysically free." W. doesn't explain what he means by "metaphysically free," but since he mentions Kant, we may impute to W the view that we are libertarianly free, that is, free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. Thus we enjoy more than the compatibilist 'freedom of the turnspit' (Kant).

So if we are going to do moral philosophy at all, we must assume both that we are morally responsible for some of our actions and omissions and libertarianly free with respect to those same actions and omissions. So far, so good.

2. Taking responsibility for an action involves more than being (morally) responsible for it. "Taking responsibility involves attempting to determine what one ought to do . . . ." (12) W assumes that there is an obligation to take responsibility for one's actions, and I suppose he would say that this assumption is part of what we must assume if we are to do moral philosophy at all. It is clear that one cannot take responsibility for one's actions, or be held responsible for one's actions, unless one possesses both free will and reason.

3. According to W, "Every man who possesses both free will and reason has an obligation to take responsibility for his actions . . . ." (13) Here a question arises: Is it in virtue of my possession of free will and reason that I have the aforementioned obligation? If yes, would W not be inferring an 'ought' from an 'is'? That I am free, and that I possess reason are non-normative facts about me. Taken together they entail that I am capable of taking responsibility for my actions. But how does it follow that I ought to take responsibility of them, that I am morally obliged to? Let's let this query simmer on the back burner for the time being.

4. The responsible man is not capricious or anarchic: he sees himself bound by moral constraints. "But he insists that he alone is the judge of those constraints." (13) A responsible person will listen to others in the course of trying to determine what he should do, but he will not rely on another's authority to determine what he must do. He will not be told what he must do; he insists on seeing for himself what he must do.

5. It seems to follow that a responsible person, on W's conception of same, not only will but must 'tune out' or disregard any moral instruction that he cannot understand or validate for himself with his own resources. The only laws he accepts are the laws he gives himself. He is thus self-regulating, or (in Anglicized Greek) autonomous. The autonomous man submits, but he submits only to laws he himself has enacted. He does not submit to the will of another. (14) He recognizes no commands. "For the autonomous man, there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a command." (15)

But here there may be a problem. The morally responsible person relies only on himself for the "final decisions" (15) about what he should do. But what if he doesn't know what is in his own best interests? Or only knows it imperfectly? What if he lacks the insight to see what he must do? What if he is morally obtuse, or value-blind or lacks the capacity for moral reasoning? Or perhaps he has moral insight but it is routinely and easily clouded by unruly passions.

Suppose wise and caring parents override the autonomy of a teenager by commanding her to do something for her own good. W's scheme seems to entail that they do her wrong by violating her autonomy, and she does wrong if she acts in accordance with the parents' authority because it is their authority. For W, "The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled." (18) This implies that one ought never submit to the authority of one's moral superiors.

Suppose I have good reason to believe that you are morally superior to me, but you command me to do something ("Love thine enemies," for example) that I cannot validate using only my own reasoning powers and moral intuition. If I refuse to submit to your better judgment, then I preclude the possibility of moral development. In a case like this, W's position seems to imply that I have a moral obligation to do something that would preclude my moral development.

1. Overview. W's thesis is that "the concept of a de jure legitimate state" is "vacuous" and that "philosophical anarchism" is "the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man." (19) W. proceeds by first explaining the concepts of authority and autonomy and then arguing that they are irreconcilable. The upshot is that the state lacks moral justification.

2. W. defines politics as "the exercise of the power of the state" and political philosophy as "the philosophy of the state." (3) "The state is a group of persons who have and exercise supreme authority within a given territory." (3) Distinctive of the state is "supreme authority" whether it be vested in one person or in a group of persons. (4)

3. To have authority is to have the right to command, and the right to be obeyed. (4) The power to compel compliance, however, is not the same as authority. As a matter of fact, states use and threaten the use of force in order to compel compliance with their rules and regulations. But that fact does not confer authority on them. Compare theft and taxation. The thief has no right to my money even if he has the power to take it. A duly constituted government, however, presumably does have a right to some of my money. It has authority over me. If I withhold the taxes I owe, I cheat the government. But no one will say that if I withhold money from a thief, I cheat him. (4)

The problem, of course, is to explain wherein consists the difference between these two cases. Whence derives the state's authority? Given that might does not make right, what is the source of the state's right to command and right to be obeyed? Why isn't taxation a form of theft?

4. It is one thing to claim authority, another to have it. (5) But there are two ways of having authority. If I claim authority over you, and you accept my claim, then there is a sense in which I do have authority over you. This is the descriptive (non-normative) sense of 'authority.' But there is also a normative sense of 'authority.' Suppose I claim authority over you, and you accept my claim; it does not follow that my claim to authority is justified. It does not follow that I possess authority in the normative sense. And what holds for me, holds for the state. A state whose claim to authority is acknowledged is not the same as a state whose authority is justified.

5. Correspondingly, there are non-normative (descriptive) and normative (prescriptive) concepts of the state. Descriptively, a state is "a group of persons that is acknowledged to have supreme authority within a territory. . . ." (5) Such states are de facto states and lie within the province of political science. Prescriptively, a state is "a group of persons who have the right to exercise supreme authority within a territory." (5) This is the notion of a de jure state. It falls within the province of political philosophy. Political philosophy is thus a normative enterprise: it is concerned with legitimate states and what constitutes their legitimacy. (5)

6. There are two construals of supreme (ultimate) authority in the normative sense, Rousseauean and Lockean. The first is that the state has ultimate authority over all matters that occur within its jurisdiction. The second is that the state has authority over only some such matters. Thus on the Lockean approach, the "supreme authority of the just state extends only to those matters which it is proper for a state to control." (6) The authority of the Lockean state is accordingly limited. One of the questions of political philosophy is that of the limit, if any, to the range of affairs over which a just state has authority.

7. If I command you to do something, and you do it, not because I have commanded it, but because you perceive the reasonableness or moral obligatoriness of the content of my command, then you are not strictly speaking obeying a command. My commanding is merely the occasion of your becoming aware of your duty, and my role might just as easily have been played by an admonishing fried or your own conscience. (6) Wolff's point is that, strictly speaking, it is not prescriptions or proscriptions that have authority; it is only persons who can be said to have or lack authority. "Thus authority resides in persons . . . by virtue of who they are and not by virtue of what they command." (6) Any duty to obey is a duty owed to a person or persons; strictly speaking, there is no duty to obey a prescription or proscription. There is no duty to obey the moral law.

8. It is a fact that people accede to claims of supreme authority. But ought they? Suppose the persons who make up the state order you into military uniform, and you, acceding to their authority, comply. W's question is whether the state's authority is justifiable. It exists all right and is backed up by force; but is one morally obliged to acquesce in it? "Under what conditions can a state (understood normatively) exist?" (8)

The "fundamental task of political philosophy" is to justify the supreme authority of the state which is tantamount to proving that "there can be forms of human community in which some men have a moral right to rule." (8)

9. Suppose the de facto political 'authorities' command all and only what, for independent reasons, one is morally required to do. Would that coincidence of the commanded and the morally required suffice to demonstrate the legitimacy, the de jure authority, of the political 'authorities'? It would not, on W's view. For W, it is a question of the right to command and the correlative obligation to obey a command. Where do some people (the political 'authorities') get the right to command other people? This is W's question, and it cannot be settled by appealing to what is the case as regards claims to authority and acknowledgements of authority. "Normative concepts . . . refer to what ought to be rather than to what is." (8) Thus the concept of normative supreme authority cannot be justified by adducing facts about existing states.

If you do what I tell you to do, it does not follow that you have obeyed me. The concept of obedience requires that you do as commanded, because you are commanded.

10. For W, it is possible that every belief in authority is wrong, that no person or group of persons has ever had the right to be obeyed. Indeed, W is entertaining the possibility that it is impossible for there to be justified authority. So his question could be framed as follows: How is justified authority (correlatively, obligatory obedience) possible?

To put it another way, how can the concept of a de jure or legitimate state be shown to apply to something? How can it be demonstrated that this concept is not vacuous? W's contention, of course, is that it is vacuous, and thus that no state is morally justified, which is just what the anarchist thesis amounts. To see how W supports this contention requires separate posts.

11. Critical Remark. It is perhaps premature to begin launching a critique since I am still in process of trying understand W's overall argument. But already something smells fishy. He seems already to have things so rigged that it will be logically/conceptually impossible for there to be any moral justification of the state. Given #9 above, even if there were a complete coincidence of what is commanded by the people in power and what is morally required on independent grounds, that would not suffice as a justification. But then what could?

The point is that the liberty of the majority requires curbs on the liberty of malefactors. So the truth is precisely the opposite: Unless there are 'souls' in jail, no one is free.

One mark of a reasonable person is the ability to view matters synoptically and dialectically. One avoids onesideness. One looks for the counterexample and the counterthesis. One aims for balance and rapprochement between and among competing theses.

That ALL prisoners are wrongly imprisoned is grotesquely false. Yes, some are wrongly imprisoned. And yes, imprisonment involves the violation of the liberty of the prisoner.

But the safety, security and well-being of the actual and potential victims of crimes counts for something as well. Liberty is a value, but security is a competing value. I expatiate on this tension here.

There is analytic reason and there is synoptic reason. The former allows us to analyze a proposition and see what it entails and what it excludes. Fastening onesidedly on the liberty of the individual, the anarchist derives by analytic reason his system of propositions. But lacking the synoptic faculty, he ignores the competing value of security, a value which, though opposed to liberty, is also necessary for the exercise of liberty.