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It’s true that collecting taxes and performing the necessary functions of government does require the ability to coerce people. If someone is unwilling to pay what they rightly owe, or is unwilling to follow the rightful laws of the land, then the government has to have the ability to compel them to do so. But it’s important to recognize that just because something is coercive doesn’t automatically make it unjust; after all, as we’ve already established, there are plenty of contexts in which even the most hardline libertarians will agree that coercion is justified – like for instance, if someone steals your property and you have to coerce them into giving it back (or reimbursing you), or if someone tries to harm you physically and you have to use physical force to defend yourself. The Non-Aggression Principle only prohibits the proactive initiation of force; so if someone is already violating someone else’s consent, there’s nothing wrong with using coercion to stop or redress that violation. In other words, while anti-statists will often push the line that (in Walter Williams’s words) “it’s immoral to take one person’s money and give it to another person, for any reason,” even they will admit when pressed that they don’t actually mean any reason; there are certain cases in which coercively redistributing money is not just fine, but morally obligatory.

 What’s more, I’d be willing to go even further than that; I think that most reasonable people (including anti-statists) would agree that there are a number of contexts in which coercion can be acceptable even aside from just these narrow cases of counteracting other coercive acts. We’ve only been focusing on those counter-coercion type cases so far, but if we’re going to talk about the moral permissibility of taxation in general terms, we also have to consider the concepts of coercion and consent in more general terms. And in that broader context, I don’t think it’s too hard to find situations in which violating someone’s consent can be justified even if they aren’t already violating anyone else’s consent themselves. Just to take the most extreme possible case, for instance, imagine if there was an incoming meteor threatening to destroy all life on Earth, and (for some reason) the only way to stop it involved taking a single cent out of Bill Gates’s bank account without his consent. I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone would consider this to be morally acceptable (aside from perhaps a handful of stubborn anti-statists who were just trying to make an ideological point – and even they, I would think, would cave if they were actually somehow forced to make the call in real life). But this example isn’t like those others mentioned above, in which one person is actively violating someone else’s consent and is being taxed as a corrective. In this case, taking that one penny away from Bill Gates is nothing but an act of pure utilitarianism; the benefits significantly outweigh the harms, and that’s all there is to it. It’s a clear-cut violation of the Non-Aggression Principle – and yet it’s also very obviously the right thing to do. Not only that, but even if we tweaked the scenario’s parameters to be somewhat less extreme – e.g. if we made it so it involved taking $10 or $100 out of Bill Gates’s bank account instead of just one cent, or if we made it so the meteor was only threatening the lives of a few million people instead of all life on Earth – taking the money would still obviously be the right thing to do. Of course, if we pushed the parameters further still, we’d eventually reach a point where this was no longer the case; if we forcibly took away everything Bill Gates owned, for instance, and spent it on something completely trivial and unimportant, this would clearly no longer be a net positive by any reasonable standard. But the point here is just that it’s not a black-and-white kind of thing, where anything that coerces anyone for any reason whatsoever is categorically forbidden; the Non-Aggression Principle isn’t an absolute. The line between permissible coercion and impermissible coercion lies somewhere along a spectrum. Our question is just where that threshold lies.

Let’s consider another example to help clarify the point. Say there was a big forest where a bunch of people were fleeing from a rampaging Tyrannosaurus or something, and the only way for them to survive was to keep quiet enough to escape its notice. If one of them happened to be a huge loudmouth who was constantly shouting all the time, it seems obvious that it would be permissible for the rest of them to compel that person to be quiet (even by force if necessary) in order to save their own lives. This would be a clear-cut case of one person imposing a negative externality onto the rest of the group without their consent, so the rest of the group would be justified in using coercion to counteract that externality. But now let’s imagine that the group has to make another choice: Say they’re fleeing from the Tyrannosaurus and they come across the only safe refuge in the entire forest – a fortified cabin whose owner has conveniently gone on vacation for a few days. Hiding in the cabin would save all of their lives – but let’s say the owner has left a note on the front door saying that they don’t want anyone to come into their cabin because it might get their carpet slightly dirty and they don’t want to have to deal with the minor annoyance of vacuuming it. Would it still be morally permissible for the group to hide in the cabin for a few minutes until the Tyrannosaurus has passed? Again, I think it’s obvious that it would be. Sure, it would create a slight imposition on the cabin owner – and violating someone’s preferences in this way isn’t a good thing – but what’s even less of a good thing is having a bunch of people die horribly for the sake of keeping some silly carpet clean. The value of their lives would clearly outweigh the value of the cabin owner’s preference not to have to spend five minutes vacuuming their carpet; so the immorality of keeping them out of the cabin would clearly outweigh the immorality of ignoring the cabin owner’s preference in this one case.

The kind of one-dimensional thinking that says it’s impermissible to ever initiate any kind of non-consensual action against another person or their property for any reason – i.e. the Non-Aggression Principle – misses the most important point of scenarios like this: Yes, it’s true that coercing people is morally bad – but it’s also not the only thing that’s morally bad. It’s possible for things to happen that are even more egregious than using someone’s property without their consent. And in such cases, if we have no other choice but to choose the lesser of two evils, it’s okay to opt for the coercive option if doing so will prevent an even greater harm – even if it means impinging on someone’s private property, and in fact even if it means seizing their property outright.

Let’s consider one more variation on the Tyrannosaurus example. Say that instead of finding a fortified cabin, the group instead comes across a cache of high-powered tranquilizer guns capable of knocking out the Tyrannosaurus for long enough for them to escape. And let’s say that once again, these tranquilizer guns are owned by someone who’s off on vacation and hasn’t given their consent for anyone else to use them. Let’s also say that there are thousands of guns in the cache – far more than any one person could ever use themselves – and the owner would scarcely even notice the loss of one of them. In this case, would it not still be morally permissible to take one shot from one of the guns in order to save the lives of everyone in the group? If you were there yourself, would you not take the shot? Or would you insist that doing so without the owner’s consent would be unacceptable, and watch with folded arms as all your loved ones were horrifically killed in front of you before succumbing to the same fate yourself? Again, I think that for any reasonable person, the answer is obvious: In these kinds of situations, seizing someone’s property – even without their consent (and even if it’s not possible to reimburse them later) – is totally acceptable. (And this would be even more true if, say, the group of people fleeing from the Tyrannosaurus had been the ones who provided the gun owner with all the infrastructure needed to acquire the guns in the first place, and had never received any sort of payment for that service – in which case they could justifiably say that they were just reclaiming the share of the gun owner’s wealth that they themselves were responsible for creating.)

But of course, this is exactly what’s happening when a government collects ordinary taxes. If a country is (say) being threatened by a hostile neighbor, it might choose to tax some of its citizens (particularly the wealthier ones with more money to spare) so it can mount a national defense to keep its population safe. Or if there’s a raging epidemic of violent crime within the country’s borders, it might tax its citizens so it can fund a police force to stem the violence. In such cases, the government is using its coercive powers to take away people’s property without their consent – which is not a good thing in itself – but the alternative outcome if it didn’t collect these taxes would be even worse. And again, that’s not to say that it’s never possible for a government to tax its citizens for less worthy reasons; it’s absolutely possible, and in such cases, we can rightly say that the government’s actions are less justifiable (more on this point momentarily). But the point here is just that this is all a matter of degree, not a matter of some absolute black-and-white principle that forbids coercion for any reason in any context whatsoever. Once we’ve established that there are situations in which coercion can be justified, it’s just a question of where we draw the line. Unfortunately, a lot of people with anti-statist leanings, even despite acknowledging that exceptions have to be made in some cases, will still insist on treating it as an all-or-nothing kind of binary anyway – and this often leads them to draw hard lines in places that, frankly, just end up seeming kind of arbitrary.

What do I mean by “arbitrary,” exactly? Well, just to refer back to our Tyrannosaurus scenario one last time, we’ve established that most people (anti-statist or not) would agree that taking one of the tranquilizer guns without the owner’s consent would be justifiable if it meant saving a whole group of people from being killed. The same would be true if (for instance) instead of having one giant rampaging monster threatening everyone’s lives, it was a bunch of smaller monsters like Velociraptors or killer hornets or something; the size and quantity of the monster wouldn’t be relevant, because it would be the same basic situation regardless. This is likewise why most people would generally agree that taxation would be permissible in order to stop a genocidal foreign army from invading and decimating the population, or to stop violent gangs from doing the same thing within their own communities. It wouldn’t matter how big each of the threatening individuals were or what species they belonged to; it would be permissible to take some resources from those who had plenty to spare in order to stop the threat and save people’s lives. And yet, if we tweaked the scenario so the threatening individuals were even smaller and more numerous still, and were still threatening to kill people by the millions, there would actually be a lot of people who would all of a sudden insist that coercive taxation absolutely could not be used under any circumstances to protect the victims, and that everyone would have to either find their own means of keeping themselves safe, or else just be out of luck. Does this sound hard to believe? Unfortunately, it’s not a hypothetical; it’s basically the current reality of the healthcare debate in the US. The monsters that are constantly threatening to kill millions of people are called “microbes,” and the weapon used to fight them off is called “medicine” – but aside from these names, the situation is no different from any of the scenarios mentioned above. A bunch of dangerous organisms are attacking us and threatening to kill us – just the same as if we were being attacked by pack of Velociraptors or a swarm of killer hornets – but because they’re just an inch or so smaller than hornets, a lot of people have decided that now it’s suddenly no longer permissible to protect against them if it means taking away anyone’s property without their consent.

This is what I mean by “arbitrary.” When deciding where the Non-Aggression Principle can be applied, anti-statists will often concede that exceptions have to be made for things like physical security; if we’re under threat from dangerous monsters or armies or terrorists or what have you, and the private sector is unable to fully fend them off on its own, they’ll grant that it might be permissible to take people’s property without their consent just in these special cases. And yet, if the looming threat is deadly disease, they’ll insist that protecting people is somehow no longer a matter of their “physical security,” and therefore doesn’t fall under the same criteria – even though it’s fundamentally the same dynamic at play. By insisting that government can only be allowed to collect and spend tax money on things like military defense, and not on things like healthcare, anti-statists are defending a principle that doesn’t actually have any real defensible basis. And the result, when they get their way, is often a lot of needless suffering. As Alexander writes in an FAQ (responding to arguments from a hypothetical libertarian questioner):

[Q]: There’s a difference [between providing military defense and providing healthcare. In the latter case], people may die, but it’s not your job to save them. The government’s job is only to protect people and property from force, not to protect people from the general unfairness of life.

Who died and made you the guy who decides what the government’s job is? Or, less facetiously: on what rational grounds are you making that decision?

Currently, several trillion dollars are being spent to prevent terrorism. This seems to fall within the area of what libertarians would consider a legitimate duty of government, since terrorists are people who initiate force and threaten our safety and the government needs to stop this. However, terrorists only kill an average of a few dozen Americans per year.

Much less money is being spent on preventing cardiovascular disease, even though cardiovascular disease kills 800,000 Americans per year.

Let us say, as seems plausible, that the government can choose to spend its money either on fighting terrorists, or on fighting CVD. And let us say that by spending its money on fighting terrorists, it saves 40 lives, and by spending the same amount of money on fighting CVD, it saves 40,000 lives.

All of these lives, presumably, are equally valuable. So there is literally no benefit to spending the money on fighting terrorism rather than CVD. All you are doing is throwing away 39,960 lives on an obscure matter of principle. It’s not even a good principle – it’s the principle of wanting to always use heuristics even when they clearly don’t apply because it sounds more elegant.

There’s a reason this is so tempting. It’s called the Bad Guy Bias, and it’s an evolutionarily programmed flaw in human thinking. People care much more about the same amount of pain when it’s inflicted by humans than when it’s inflicted by nature. Psychologists can and have replicated this in the lab, along with a bunch of other little irrationalities in human cognition. It’s not anything to be ashamed of; everyone’s got it. But it’s not something to celebrate and raise to the level of a philosophical principle either.

[Q]: Stop calling principles like “don’t initiate force” heuristics! These aren’t some kind of good idea that works in a few cases. These are the very principles of government and morality, and it’s literally impossible for them to guide you wrong!

Let me give you a sketch of one possible way that a libertarian perfect world that followed all of the appropriate rules to the letter could end up as a horrible dystopia. There are others, but this one seems most black-and-white.

Imagine a terrible pandemic, the Amazon Death Flu, strikes the world. The Death Flu is 100% fatal. Luckily, one guy, Bob, comes up with a medicine that suppresses (but does not outright cure) the Death Flu. It’s a bit difficult to get the manufacturing process right, but cheap enough once you know how to do it. Anyone who takes the medicine at least once a month will be fine. Go more than a month without the medicine, and you die.

In a previous version of this FAQ, Bob patented the medicine, and then I got a constant stream of emails saying (some) libertarians don’t believe in patents. Okay. Let’s say that Bob doesn’t patent the medicine, but it’s complicated to reverse engineer, and it would definitely take more than a month. This will become important later.

Right now Bob is the sole producer of this medicine, and everyone in the world needs to have a dose within a month or they’ll die. Bob knows he can charge whatever he wants for the medicine, so he goes all out. He makes anyone who wants the cure pay one hundred percent of their current net worth, plus agree to serve him and do anything he says. He also makes them sign a contract promising that while they are receiving the medicine, they will not attempt to discover their own cure for the Death Flu, or go into business against him. Because this is a libertarian perfect world, everyone keeps their contracts.

A few people don’t want to sign their lives away to slavery, and refuse to sign the contract. These people receive no medicine and die. Some people try to invent a competing medicine. Bob, who by now has made a huge amount of money, makes life difficult for them and bribes biologists not to work with them. They’re unable to make a competing medicine within a month, and die. The rest of the world promises to do whatever Bob says. They end up working as peons for a new ruling class dominated by Bob and his friends.

If anyone speaks a word against Bob, they are told that Bob’s company no longer wants to do business with them, and denied the medicine. People are encouraged to inform on their friends and families, with the promise of otherwise unavailable luxury goods as a reward. To further cement his power, Bob restricts education to the children of his friends and strongest supporters, and bans the media, which he now controls, from reporting on any stories that cast him in a negative light.

When Bob dies, he hands over control of the medicine factory to his son, who continues his policies. The world is plunged into a Dark Age where no one except Bob and a few of his friends have any rights, material goods, or freedom. Depending on how sadistic Bob’s and his descendants are, you may make this world arbitrarily hellish while still keeping perfect adherence to libertarian principles.

Compare this to a similar world that followed a less libertarian model. Once again, the Amazon Death Flu strikes. Once again, Bob invents a cure. The government thanks him, pays him a princely sum as compensation for putting his cure into the public domain, opens up a medicine factory, and distributes free medicine to everyone. Bob has become rich, the Amazon Death Flu has been conquered, and everyone is free and happy.

[Q]: This is a ridiculously unlikely story with no relevance to the real world.

I admit this particular situation is more a reductio ad absurdum than something I expect to actually occur the moment people start taking libertarianism seriously, but I disagree that it isn’t relevant.

The arguments that libertarianism will protect our values and not collapse into an oppressive plutocracy require certain assumptions: there are lots of competing companies, zero transaction costs, zero start-up costs, everyone has complete information, everyone has free choice whether or not to buy any particular good, everyone behaves rationally, et cetera. The Amazon Death Flu starts by assuming the opposite of all of these assumptions: there is only one company, there are prohibitive start-up costs, a particular good absolutely has to be bought, et cetera.

The Amazon Death Flu world, with its assumptions, is not the world we live in. But neither is the libertarian world. Reality lies somewhere between the “capitalism is perfect” of the one, and the “capitalism leads to hellish misery” of the other.

There’s no Amazon Death Flu, but there are things like hunger, thirst, unemployment, normal diseases, and homelessness. In order to escape these problems, we need things provided by other people or corporations. This is fine and as it should be, and as long as there’s a healthy free market with lots of alternatives, in most cases these other people or corporations will serve our needs and society’s needs while getting rich themselves, just like libertarians hope.

But this is a contingent fact about the world, and one that can sometimes be wrong. We can’t just assume that the heuristic “never initiate force” will always turn out well.

Even Huemer, thoroughgoing anarchist that he is, agrees that the Non-Aggression Principle can’t be treated as an absolute; the only way of making it even remotely credible, as he points out, is to add so many exceptions that it ultimately ceases to function as a firm rule at all:

In libertarian lore, [the simplest version of] the Non-Aggression Principle says something like this:

[…]

NAP0 (a.k.a. “pacifism”): It is always wrong to use force against others.

That’s obviously false, and almost no one (including libertarians) believes it, because there are cases of justified self-defense and defense of innocent third parties involving use of force. So we make our first qualification, resulting in:

NAP1: It is wrong to use force against others, unless doing so is necessary to stop someone else from using force against others.

But in fact, almost no one, not even libertarians, believes NAP1 either. It too is obviously false. There are many examples showing this.

Example 1: I promise to mow Ayn Rand’s lawn in exchange for her grading some of my papers. Rand grades the papers, with copious helpful comments (pointing out where students are evading reality, hating the good for being the good, etc.), but then I don’t mow the lawn. I also refuse to do anything to make amends for my failure. Haha.

Almost everyone, including libertarians, thinks that the state can force me to mow the lawn or otherwise make amends (e.g., pay the money value of a mowed lawn).

Example 2: I start deliberately spreading false rumors that Walter Block is a Nazi. This causes him to be ostracized, lose his job, and be blacklisted by the SJW culture that is academia.

Almost everyone, including most libertarians, agrees that Walter should be able to sue me for defamation in court, and collect damages, coercively enforced, of course.

Example 3: Hans-Hermann Hoppe owns a large plot of land around his house. One day, when he emerges from his house to collect his copy of Reason, he sees me sleeping peacefully in a corner of his lawn. Though I haven’t hurt anyone and (being very thin and meek) pose no physical threat to anyone, Hans is nevertheless irritated, and demands that I get off his lawn. I just plug my ears and go back to sleep.

Almost everyone (especially Hans) thinks that Hans can use force to expel me from his lawn.

Example 4: I have become seriously injured by a hit-and-run driver, and I need to be taken to the hospital immediately. The only available car is Murray Rothbard’s car, but Murray is not around to give permission. (I am also not sure he would authorize saving me.)

Almost everyone thinks it is permissible for me to break into Murray’s car (thus initiating force against his property?) to get to the hospital.

Example 5: Powerful space aliens are going to bomb the Earth, killing 3 billion people, unless you deliver to them one recently-plucked hair from the head of Harry Binswanger. Harry, unfortunately, cannot be persuaded to part with the hair for any amount of money. (He really wants to live up to his name, you see.)

Almost everyone thinks it is permissible to forcibly steal the hair.

Of course, all of these examples are easily accommodated: we just have to add appropriate qualifications and clarifications to our NAP. Once we add the needed qualifications, we arrive at:

NAP6: It is wrong to use force against others, unless:
(i) Doing so is necessary to stop them from using force against others (unless: (a) their force was itself justified by one of the conditions listed herein, in which case it is still wrong to use force against them), or
(ii) It is necessary to enforce a contract, or
(iii) It is necessary to force someone to pay compensation for defamation, or
(iv) It is necessary to stop someone from using someone’s property without the property owner’s consent (unless: (b) the use of the property is necessary, in an emergency situation, to prevent something much worse from happening, in which case it is still wrong to use force against that person), or
(v) It is necessary to prevent some vastly greater harm from occurring.

We’ve added five main qualifications ((i)-(v)) and two meta-qualifications ((a) and (b)). Is NAP6 true at last? Well, it’s hard to say whether we’ve included all needed qualifications and sub-qualifications. At least this latest NAP is no longer obviously false. But it’s so complex that it’s hard to claim that it’s obviously true either, and it’s really unclear why someone else cannot propose another qualification, say, “… or (vi) it is necessary to stop the poor from going without health care.”

Libertarians will disagree with qualification (vi), but they don’t have a good reason to resist it, if their libertarianism just rests on a NAP. We added (i)-(v) and (a) and (b) in order to accommodate our ethical intuitions (as rationality demands), but then why can’t a leftist add (vi) to accommodate their intuitions?

In other words, NAP6 might be true, but you don’t establish anything interesting by appealing to it, since someone with different starting intuitions can just as reasonably modify NAP6 to fit those intuitions.

(And just to affirm what he’s saying here, I personally wouldn’t even see why qualification (vi) would have to be its own point; to me, it seems like something that would fall squarely under qualification (v).)

With all this being said, of course, it’s worth reiterating that just because it’s possible to justify coercion in some cases doesn’t mean that everyone who claims to have a good reason for violating someone else’s consent is in fact justified. Most of the time, when someone takes someone else’s property without their consent, it’s just called “theft,” because their reasons don’t meet any of the criteria above. They might claim to have justifiable reasons for their actions – and they might even believe it themselves – but if our only condition for allowing people to coerce each other was just that they thought they had a justifiable reason to do so, it’d turn all of society into a total mess. Far better to have some kind of formal, coordinated system through which we can decide which acts of coercion truly are justifiable, and can implement them in a way that’s consistent and minimally disruptive, rather than just having a free-for-all in which coercive acts are committed by random individuals on a completely haphazard basis regardless of whether or not they’re actually justified. To quote Alexander again:

The right to property [is an important one]. On the individual scale, taking someone else’s property makes them very unhappy, as you know if you’ve ever had your bike stolen. On the larger scale, abandoning belief in private property has disastrous results for an entire society, as the experiences of China and the Soviet Union proved so conclusively. So it’s safe to say there’s a right to private property.

Is it ever acceptable to violate that right? In the classic novel Les Miserables, Jean Valjean’s family is trapped in bitter poverty in 19th century France, and his nephew is slowly starving to death. Jean steals a loaf of bread from a rich man who has more than enough, in order to save his nephew’s life. This is a classic moral dilemma: is theft acceptable in this instance?

We can argue both sides. A proponent might say that the good consequences to Jean and his family were very great – his nephew’s life was saved – and the bad consequences to the rich man were comparatively small – he probably has so much food that he didn’t even miss it, and if he did he could just send his servant to the bakery to get another one. So on net the theft led to good consequences.

The other side would be that once we let people decide whether or not to steal things, we are on a slippery slope. What if we move from 19th century France to 21st century America, and I’m not exactly starving to death but I really want a PlayStation? And my rich neighbor owns like five PlayStations and there’s no reason he couldn’t just go to the store and buy another. Is it morally acceptable for me to steal one of his PlayStations? The same argument that applied in Jean Valjean’s case above seems to suggest that it is – but it’s easy to see how we go from there to everyone stealing everyone’s stuff, private property becoming impossible, and civilization collapsing. That doesn’t sound like a very good consequence at all.

If everyone violates moral heuristics whenever they personally think it’s a good idea, civilization collapses. If no one ever violates moral heuristics, Jean Valjean’s nephew starves to death for the sake of a piece of bread the rich man never would have missed.

We need to bind society by moral heuristics, but also have some procedure in place so that we can suspend them in cases where we’re exceptionally sure of ourselves without civilization instantly collapsing. Ideally, this procedure should include lots of checks and balances, to make sure no one person can act on her own accord. It should reflect the opinions of the majority of people in society, either directly or indirectly. It should have access to the best minds available, who can predict whether violating a heuristic will be worth the risk in this particular case.

Thus far, the human race’s best solution to this problem has been governments. Governments provide a method to systematically violate heuristics in a particular area where it is necessary to do so without leading to the complete collapse of civilization.

If there was no government, I, in Jean Valjean’s situation, absolutely would steal that loaf of bread to save my nephew’s life. Since there is a government, the government can set a certain constant amount of theft per year, distribute the theft fairly among people whom it knows can bear the burden, and then feed starving children and do other nice things. The ethical question of “is it ethical for me to steal/kill/stab in this instance?” goes away, and society can be peaceful and stable.

He sums up this principle of not violating people’s consent unless it can be done in a formal, systematic way with the general phrase “Be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness”:

A friend (I can’t remember who) once argued that “be nice” provides a nigh-infallible ethical decision procedure. For example, enslaving people isn’t very nice, so we know slavery is wrong. Kicking down people’s doors and throwing them in prison for having a joint of marijuana isn’t very nice, so we know the drug war is wrong. Not letting gays marry isn’t very nice, so we know homophobia is wrong.

I counterargue that even if we ignore the ways our notion of “nice” itself packs up pre-existing moral beliefs, this heuristic fails in several important cases:

1. Refusing the guy who is begging you to give his drivers’ license back, saying that without a car he won’t be able to visit his friends and family or have any fun, and who is promising that he won’t drive drunk an eleventh time.
2. Forcibly restraining a screaming baby while you jam a needle into them to vaccinate them against a deadly disease.
3. Sending the police to arrest a libertarian rancher in Montana who refuses to pay taxes for reasons of conscience
4. Revoking the credential (and thus destroying the future job prospects of) a teacher who has sex with one of her underage students

Sure, you could say that each of these “leads toward a greater niceness”, like that you’re only refusing the alcoholic his license in order to be nice to potential drunk driving victims. But then you’ve lost all meaningful distinction between the word “nice” and the word “good” and reinvented utilitarianism. And reinventing utilitarianism is pretty cool, but after you do that you no longer have such an easy time arguing against the drug war – somebody’s going to argue that it leads to the greater good of there being fewer drugs.

We usually want to avoid meanness. In some rare cases, meanness is necessary. I think one check for whether a certain type of meanness might be excusable is – it’s less likely to be excusable if it’s not coordinated.

Consider: society demands taxes to pay for communal goods and services. This does sometimes involve not-niceness, as in the example of the rancher in (3). But what makes it tolerable is that it’s done consistently and through a coordinated process. If the rule was “anybody who has a social program they want can take money from somebody else to pay for it,” this would be anarchy. Some libertarians say “taxation is theft”, but where arbitrary theft is unfair, unpredictable, and encourage perverse incentives like living in fear or investing in attack dogs, taxation has none of these disadvantages.

By the rule “be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness”, we should not permit individuals to rob each other at gunpoint in order to pay for social programs they want, but we might permit them to advocate for a coordinated national taxation policy.

Or: society punishes people for crimes, including the crime of libel. Punishment is naturally not-nice, but this seems fair; we can’t just have people libeling each other all the time with no consequences. But what makes this tolerable is that it’s coordinated – done through the court system according to carefully codified libel law that explains to everybody what is and isn’t okay. Remove the coordination aspect, and you’ve got the old system where if you say something that offends my honor then I get some friends and try to beat you up in a dark alley. The impulse is the same: deploy not-niceness in the worthy goal of preventing libel. But one method is coordinated and the other isn’t.

This is very, very far from saying that coordinated meanness is a sure test that means something’s okay – that would be the insane position that anything legal must be ethical, something most countries spent the past few centuries disproving spectacularly. This is the much weaker claim that legality sets a minimum bar for people attempting mean policies.

As far as I can tell there are two things we want in a legal system. First, it should have good laws that produce a just society. But second, it should at least have clear and predictable laws that produce a safe and stable society.

For example, the first goal of libel law is to balance people’s desire to protect their reputation with other people’s desire for free speech. But the second goal of libel law should be that everybody understands what is and isn’t libel. If a system achieves the second goal, nobody will end up jailed or dead because they said something they thought was totally innocent but somebody else thought was libel. And nobody will spent years and thousands of dollars entangled in an endless court case hiring a bunch of lawyers to debate whether some form of speech was acceptable or not.

So coordinated meanness is better than uncoordinated meanness not because it necessarily achieves the first goal of justice, but because it achieves the second goal of safety and stability. Everyone knows exactly when to expect it and what they can do to avoid it. I may not know what speech will or won’t offend a violent person with enough friends to organize a goon squad, but I can always read the libel law and try to stay on the right side of it.

This approach is especially helpful when it comes to things like taxation because it lets people know in advance that they’re going to be taxed every year, so they can plan their finances accordingly, as opposed to potentially being caught off guard by a more random approach. But aside from just making coercion more predictable, this approach also has the advantage of making it so fewer acts of coercion are committed in general. Alexander continues:

The second reason that coordinated meanness is better than uncoordinated meanness is that it is less common. Uncoordinated meanness happens whenever one person wants to be mean; coordinated meanness happens when everyone (or 51% of the population, or an entire church worth of Puritans, or whatever) wants to be mean. If we accept theories like the wisdom of crowds or the marketplace of ideas – and we better, if we’re small-d democrats, small-r republicans, small-l liberals, or basically any word beginning with a lowercase letter at all – then a big group of people all debating with each other will be harder to rile up than a single lunatic.

As a Jew, if I heard that skinheads were beating up Jews in dark alleys, I would be pretty freaked out; for all I know I could be the next victim. But if I heard that skinheads were circulating a petition to get Congress to expel all the Jews, I wouldn’t be freaked out at all. I would expect almost nobody to sign the petition

(and in the sort of world where most people were signing the petition, I hope I would have moved to Israel long before anyone got any chance to expel me anyway)

Trying to coordinate meanness is not in itself a mean act – or at least, not as mean as actual meanness. If Westboro Baptist Church just published lots of pamphlets saying we should pass laws against homosexuality, maybe it would have made some gay people feel less wanted, but it would have been a lot less intense than picketing funerals. If people who are against promiscuity want to write books about why we should all worry about promiscuity, it might get promiscuous people a little creeped out, but a lot less so than going up to promiscuous people and throwing water on them and shouting “YOU STRUMPET!”

This is my answer to people who say that certain forms of speech make them feel unsafe, versus certain other people who demand the freedom to express their ideas. We should all feel unsafe around anybody who relishes uncoordinated meanness – beating people in dark alleys, picketing their funerals, shaming them, harassing them, doxxing them, getting them fired from their jobs. I have no tolerance for these people – I am sometimes forced to accept their existence because of the First Amendment, but I won’t do anything more.

On the other hand, we should feel mostly safe around people who agree that meanness, in the unfortunate cases where it’s necessary, must be coordinated. There is no threat at all from pro-coordination skinheads except in the vanishingly unlikely possibility they legally win control of the government and take over.

I admit that this safety is still only relative. It hinges on the skinheads’ inability to convert 51% of the population. But until the Messiah comes to enforce the moral law directly, safety has to hinge on something. The question is whether it should hinge on the ability of the truth to triumph in the marketplace of ideas in the long-term across an entire society, or whether it should hinge on the fact that you can beat me up with a baseball bat right now.

(if you want pre-Messianic absolute safety, there are some super-democratic mechanisms that might help. America’s Bill of Rights seems pretty close to this; anyone wanting to coordinate meanness against a certain religion has to clear not only the 50% bar, but the much higher level required of Constitutional amendments. Visions of more complete protection remain utopian but alluring. For example, in an Archipelago you might well have absolute safety. The skinheads can’t say “Let’s beat up Jews right now”, they can’t even say “Let’s start an anti-Jew political party and gradually win power”. They can, at best, say, “Let’s go found our own society somewhere else without any Jews”, in which case you need say nothing but “don’t let the door hit you on your way out”. In this case their coordination of meanness cannot possibly hurt anyone.)

Of course, even if we accept that coordinated coercion is better overall than uncoordinated coercion, and that using a formal mechanism like government is generally better than not doing so in such cases, it’s still true that government won’t always get things right every time. Sometimes, a government will tax and spend its citizens’ money in a way that doesn’t serve any higher justification, but simply funnels the money into politicians’ pockets, or wastes it on things that the population doesn’t actually want. In such cases, the government can no longer be said to be acting legitimately – so in order to rectify the situation, it makes sense that there should be some kind of formal mechanism through which citizens can declare (in a systematic, coordinated manner) that they no longer recognize their government’s legitimacy to continue governing them, and can oust it in favor of a government that better represents them. And that’s exactly what democratic elections are for; the whole function of the voting process is to enable citizens to reject political leaders who they feel are no longer using their powers of coercion for justifiable ends, and to replace them with leaders who do use those powers more properly. We’ll get more into this topic later, when we discuss why democracy generally works better as a system of government than all the other non-democratic alternatives out there. For now, though, the point is just to recognize that we need to have some form of government in place in order to help us handle issues of coercion – both to redress instances in the private sector in which people are unjustifiably violating each other’s consent, and to allow us to coordinate in areas where violations of consent are justifiable, so we can ensure that they’re all done in as fair and just a manner as possible. Simply refusing to accept any kind of government at all isn’t an adequate answer to these problems.

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