Justice Lectures 5 and 6: Libertarianism

Libertarians are kind of annoying in their purism, but I think it’s a useful political philosophy to use as a thought experiment, at least to highlight the ways in which we are willing to let our liberty be reduced.

The easy argument against strict libertarianism (=no government action except the enforcement of contracts and national defense) is: what will you do when your house catches on fire—or if your neighbors’ house catches on fire. Clearly there are some collective goods that we want government to provide because the market alone will not adequately account for the externalities (positive or negative). That said, we don’t need government to _run_ everything. For example, we think that to ensure equal opportunity, we want every child to have access to a good school. That doesn’t mean the government needs to operate the schools, just that it has to pay for them. Hence the logic of charters. [Aside: I won’t go into the arguments against vouchers here, but I think there are good ones.]

Sandel’s 1st two libertarian requirements: 1) No paternalism, and 2) No moral laws are fairly hard to argue against. Of course, when your actions incur a cost on others, we have a right to restrict them. Heroin addicts tend to steal other people’s property, so we are justified in legislating against heroin use.

The third libertarian requirement, that there be no redistribution of wealth, is a bit tougher. Technically, as soon as you charge one person more in taxes than another person, you are redistributing wealth. Maybe the libertarian would argue for a flat tax instead of progressive tax policy. From a strictly libertarian perspective, it is hard to argue for progressive taxation. But I think once you take a broader look at justice (for example, adopting the veil of ignorance), a progressive tax policy becomes pretty reasonable.

One last point on libertarianism. It basically assumes that every individual is entitled to his own rights to do whatever he wants. However, the reality is that we have only one habitable planet, and we’re all stuck sharing the finite resources we have access to on Earth. The ideal of everybody being able to do whatever they want simply doesn’t work when there are finite resources. So we’re going to have to give up some of our individual rights in order to survive together on this one planet. Surely we can figure out a fair way to do that.

Justice Lecture 4: Higher vs. lower pleasures

This lecture really annoyed me. Sandel describes how Mill distinguishes between higher and lower pleasures. Mill’s argument as I understand it is that higher pleasures trump the lower pleasures in terms of the utilitarian calculus. So, for example, the pleasure that I derive from being able to eat a bowl of rice if I’m starving should trump whatever pleasure you derive from tossing that bowl of rice in the mud. It’s been too long since I’ve read Mill, so maybe I’m not accurately representing his position. But if I were drawing distinctions between the utility gained from different kinds of activities, that’s the sort of distinction I would want to draw: one that can be universally agreed upon. Having a shelter over your head, or food to eat, or medicine to make you healthy are all going to trump pleasure gained from entertainment.

However, Sandel polls the class about whether they prefer the Simpson’s or Shakespeare. To me, this is not a very important distinction in matters of ethics. There are reasons to prefer one or the other, but ultimately not all people are going to agree. But who cares? So what if someone prefers watching mass-produced cartoons than live theater? Lots of people would pay more to see a football game than the symphony, or spend more money on their monthly cable bill than they do buying books. We could have a long debate about promoting culture and education and reasoned thinking, but that debate doesn’t really change our moral code. Individuals get to choose what they enjoy doing, whether that’s watching a ballgame or a lecture.

However, we will draw the line when the pleasures of diversion come into conflict with basic human needs like sustenance, shelter, freedom, or health. Let’s not let the other debate about culture be confused with this distinction.

p.s. Are all values commensurable? If they are, we should be able to translate all values into dollar amounts. I think I'll come down with the economists on this one and say that we can assign dollar amounts to all values. We certainly have to make tradeoff decisions; how else can we make those decisions than by comparing different values.