Tag: philosophy

In a coercive social order, the government exercises state power to ensure compliance with the decisions of a few individuals who govern everyone else. A government the exercises state power only in accordance with the community consensus could be described as a cooperative social order. A Pyramidal government will often employ coercion, and a Horizontal government will often require consensus building to facilitate cooperation. Insofar as coercion can be employed to build consensus, and cooperation between the elite and a subset of the working class can support a hierarchy, these two social orders can be distinguished from the Pyramid and the Horizon.

Defenders of coercive social order have many examples to demonstrate feasibility. Cooperative social orders historically exist only temporarily and at small scales. As such, advocates for cooperative authority must demonstrate that they propose something feasible as well as desirable. In the absence of longstanding empires built on cooperative arrangements alone, the advocate for cooperative social order remains at a disadvantage.

A forensic analysis of failed cooperative social order reveals a few themes. After an initial period of easy consensus, the community finds it more and more difficult to address needs without imposing some hierarchy. Clashes around those nominated to the hierarchy and their handling of the situation then erode the ability to form consensus, and the community fails. Alternatively, the community adapts to hierarchy and practices more coercion to maintain itself.

Both trajectories might be framed as failures of cooperative social order, and one might infer that coercion must be a feature of any functioning society. However, the historical prevalence of coercive social order provides an additional dimension to the account. Any cooperative social order brought into existence must cope with coercive social orders already established. A successful cooperative community attracts individuals seeking refuge from coercive societies and invites individuals to resist coercive societies through collective action. The rulers of a coercive society then have an interest in the failure of cooperative ventures in order to discourage challenges to their power. Since no community can maintain itself against constant attack, the cooperative eventually succumbs to economic or political pressures applied by its neighbors.

Coercive social orders enjoy a substantial natural advantage. By definition a coercive government needs to build consensus across a smaller number of individuals. Rulers agree on law and policy, police and military segments agree to obey the rulers and enforce compliance on the rest of the population.

A cooperative social order must obtain a wider consensus or else resort to coercion. Even in a small community, obtaining agreement will consume more time and effort than the unilateral action of a single individual. Larger communities or networks of communities take on additional coordination burdens to make and implement large scale decisions. By every measure, a cooperative social order is less efficient than a coercive social order.

The natural advantage makes coercive social order attractive, but it should not obscure the human cost. A coercive society engages in a form of warfare with its own citizens. Enforced compliance enables rulers to organize society around their interests and appease only enough broader interest to maintain the support of the martial class. The support of the martial class then carries out violence to ensure compliance of remaining population, dividing the society within itself. An honest critique of coercive social order must focus on the morality of enforced conformity and systemic oppression. A focus on efficiency serves only to obscure the moral cost of a coercive social order.

English-speaking political theorists identify John Rawls as among the most important political philosophers of the 20th century. Rawls developed a rational theory of justice in liberal democracy using a thought experiment inspired by social contract theory. He imagines organizing a state where none of the organizers know their position in the society they create. Assuming the organizers are rationally self-interested, Rawls claims that they would establish two principles of justice. The Equality Principle states that rights and freedoms should be as extensive as possible while being distributed to all citizens equally. The Difference Principles states that social and economic inequalities should be evaluated by their benefit to the least advantaged, and competition for prestige positions should be fair and open to all.

From the examples he employs, Rawls imagines that the United States political economy reflects the principles of justice. The Bill of Rights defines an equally distributed system of rights and freedoms, political positions are won in open and fair elections, and capitalism allows anyone to earn economic success on the free market. Rawls argues that the competition inherent in republicanism and capitalism ensures beneficial outcomes regulated by free choice of the citizens.

Like John Stuart Mill, Rawls overestimates the benefits of republican capitalism. Economic inequality is maintained by concentrating wealth, effectively transferring it from the working class to the wealthy. The worst-off individuals are both the most vulnerable and the most exploited. Their liberty is limited by their lack of wealth. Comparing American capitalism to the Nordic model or social market economies of Europe, the poorest benefit from increased regulation on the market and constraints on economic advantage influencing electoral politics.

Rawls published Theory of Justice in 1971. To frame the United States as conforming to the Difference Principle in the shadow of the civil rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr requires overlooking substantial injustices. Charitably, Rawls may have acknowledged the shortcomings in American political economy, but his emphasis on competition shows substantial sympathy with capitalist justifications of the market. The Difference Principle requires one to evaluate inequalities based on how the losers in the competition fare, so Rawlsian argments should be marshalled to support social justice and a welfare state.

Fortunately, Rawls’s positive assessment of capitalism can stand apart from the Difference Principle. The Difference Principle does not assert that there should be inequalities; it merely sets the conditions for inequalities to be just. While Rawls composed his theory of justice for liberal democracy, he succeeds in framing a notion sufficiently general that it applies to political organization generally. Recuperating the work of Rawls and Mill from their commitment to liberal democratic capitalism enables anarchist and socialist arguments to be framed in the language of academic political theory.

Pyramidal distributions of power guarantee social and economic injustice. To maintain sufficient support from the working class, the aristocrats will establish affinities between themselves and the working class. These affinities create the illusion of shared incentives, enabling the aristocrats to recruit for and justify the actions of the military and police that enforce state power. Identification with the aristocratic affinities divides the working class against itself, limiting its ability to act collectively. Horizontal distributions of power prevent the rise of aristocrats and therefore the motivation for stoking division.

The history of class exploitation, colonialism, and racial oppression demonstrates the theory. Medieval Christian lords pointed to shared religion as their source of authority, enabling exploitation of Jewish people and warfare against Muslim empires. British colonizers fomented rivalries in Africa to cultivate economic relationships and eliminate competition. With the unifying identity of “whiteness,” some Americans abuse people of color as a means of sharing in the superiority of the elite who exploit all of them.

When aristocrats promulgate affinities, they create a hierarchy of moral status. The preferred group, always significantly overlapping with the aristocracy, enjoys the full status of moral personhood. They have legally recognized rights and freedoms largely defended by the authority of the state. As one deviates from signifiers of the preferred group, one loses moral status. Legally recognized rights are not defended by the state and may be retracted, enabling any economic success to be plundered by the preferred affinity or the state itself. Public policy defines ways to control and contain marginalized groups, denying them agency. While the preferred affinity group, especially the aristocrats, may enjoy prosperity, the marginalized groups never enjoy the equivalent security.

Social and economic disparity raise significant obstacles to the cultivation of agency. Compounded traumas of poverty, incarceration, and illness impose significant economic, social, and personal costs. Some options may be significantly more costly for a member of a marginalized group, and some may be entirely unavailable. Anything they build remains vulnerable to the preferred affinity group’s plunder. While some individuals can overcome structural disadvantage, those who fail represent a failure of society to uphold the moral obligation toward them. By inhibiting and denouncing the agency of marginalized group members, the aristocrats who organize society become culpable for that immorality.

Since horizontal distributions of power remove any incentive to align affinity groups with social value, these specific harms to agency cannot arise. Self-governing communities could embrace promulgation of affinity groups to strengthen inter-community networks and facilitate research into history and migration. In that context affinity collapses into a curiosity or historical accident rather than a signifier of moral status. Without the horizon, aristocrats weaponize affinity to establish and maintain the hierarchy that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. As such, only horizontal distribution of power enables a moral forms of governance. All governance under a pyramid at best has immoral features.

The Pyramid and the Horizon illustrate the persistence of social injustice, but the argument takes for granted an obligation toward justice. A society should be just for the same reason that a person should be moral. The terms identify the ideals toward which a society or an individual should strive. However, such a simple account risks question-begging, so one also needs an account of justice that demonstrates its desirability.

Morality and justice originate in the need to live in harmony with others. Like all primates, humans live in groups. Our survival is tied to both our ability to fend for ourselves and our ability to help one another. Fundamental moral norms such as honesty, generosity, and harmlessness create a safe environment for individuals to cooperate. A norm of reciprocity ensures that individuals cultivate beneficial connections and sever harmful ones. While social units will define more specific norms, the root of morality is behavior that facilitates living in harmony with one another.

When social units mature into political entities, laws supplement morality by defining norms that political power will enforce. Since cooperation remains important to survival, laws should provide a basis for cooperation among citizens to distribute resources, solve problems, and resolve conflicts. A just society has laws that facilitate beneficial cooperation among citizens, just as a moral person behaves in ways that facilitate living in harmony with others.

If political power concentrates in a small group, the law will reflect the interests of that group primarily. If control over resource distribution enables a group to force bondage on the rest of the citizens, that group can cooperate within itself to exploit all other citizens. Such laws would be unjust insofar as systematic disadvantage poisons cooperation. If an individual is not protected by law, they must use extra-legal means to protect themselves. They must be suspicious of any cooperation because they would be unlikely to prevail in a legal dispute.

Injustice threatens the motive to cooperate, a motive inseparable from the urge to survive. Citizens should push their society toward justice because a just society benefits all citizens. We strive to be moral so that we can live in harmony with others, and we strive for a just society so that we can share the advantages of that harmony.

Utilitarian ethics evaluates morality by the ratio of pleasure to pain. John Stuart Mill, who framed the most philosophically robust version of Utilitarianism, applied his ethical theories to his writings on poliical economy. Like many of his contemporaries, Mill promoted “liberal democracy,” a political philosophy with a system of individual rights and freedoms that allows citizens to influence the action of government. Free market capitalism was seen by many political economists, Mill included, to be an essential ingredient of a free society. Unfortunately, capitalism accomplishes the opposite as wealthy people have opportunities never available to the poor. Understanding why Mill does not anticipate this dynamic and reject capitalism shows why Utiltarianism should instead reject capitalism, not merely reform it.

 

As a Utilitarian, Mill argued that moral good is achieved when there is generally more happiness than there is pain. Undergoing pain voluntarily into order to achieve a worthy end, like an athlete training for a competition, is good when the happiness gained outweighs the pain suffered. While an individual can decide to trade some current pain for future pleasure, Mill does not think that a society can ask one person to suffer for the sake of another person’s happiness. In such a situation, Mill argues that no one could be happy because any pleasure they enjoy could be taken away at any time if someone else would benefit.

 

When applied to political economy, Mill’s Utilitarian framework evaluates policies by their potential for enabling happiness and avoiding pain. Since Mill acknowledges that happiness depends on the individual’s preference, he prefers a societal system that enables individuals to pursue whatever happiness they choose as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. Mill also recognizes that concentrated wealth affords a small group more choice, and therefore more possibilities for happiness, than the majority of people enjoy. Instituting a tax on inheritance would ensure that wealth would be gradually redistributed, as Mill argues in his Principles of Political Economy.

 

However, Mill proposes only a gradual redistribution by reducing inheritance rather than an aggressive redistribution by taxing wealth directly. However, the advantages that accompany wealth tend to enable further concentration of wealth. Wealth purchases influence through political donations, lobbying, and propaganda. Political influence allows wealthy people to obstruct redistributive efforts, further exacerbating wealth inequality. Through philanthropy, wealthy individuals influence the education, science, and the economy, shaping it according to their needs and their beliefs. The working class generally enjoy fewer choices, and even their available choices must serve someone else’s happiness even if it luckily also serves their own.

 

A charitable interpretation of Mill’s views would assume that Mill believed the harms done by concentrated wealth are not too severe, that concentrated wealth would not influence public policy to prevent redistribution, and that Mill would revise his proposal if his beliefs changed. Mill argues against socialism by claiming that capitalism provides more freedom than socialism, that inequality provides more motivation to strive, and that monopoly abuses are unlikely to manifest. While Mill did not see wages declining during his day, the decline of real wages from the 20th to 21st century has now been well-documented. Compounding advantages of wealth enable monopolistic collusion to prevent wage increases. Reduced wages motivate workers, requiring them to spend more of their waking hours working in order to provide for their needs. The working class then have very little freedom as long as they remain chained to wage-earning activity.

From a contemporary perspective, none of Mill’s objections hold. While the wealthy may enjoy a high degree of freedom, the corresponding suffering of the working class cannot be justified. As such one might assume that, if he were exposed to the right data, Mill would agree that capitalism fails to enable freedom, and that more direct redisribution of wealth may be needed.

Ethics classes often focus on moral dilemmas and other cases that expose conflicting intuitions about right and wrong. These boundary cases require unpacking foundational moral assumptions using the tools of ethical reasoning, so they provide ample opportunities for introducing the topics to students. Unfortunately, disproportionate focus on boundary cases eclipses the wealth of clear cases and widely shared values that form of the foundation of morality. When pedagogy breaks down certainty, it should do so in order to repair a renewed certainty anchored in more complete understanding. Otherwise, students learn the problem only and not the solution as well.

If morality appears only in the lens of dilemma, one learns to fit any moral judgment into the form of a dilemma. A debate over fundamental human rights naturally frames itself as a set of conflicting moral judgments arising from a clash of intuitions. When forced into the dilemma mold, the issue reduces to the conflict of racist and not racist, sexist and not sexist, etc. On the other hand if an appeal to a fundamental moral value would determine the judgment to be made, the dilemma constitutes little more than a question readily answered.

The concept of moral good rests on the possibility of moral responsibility. Praise and blame flow from agency, the ability to make choices, form intentions, or influence the outcome of events. Without agency moral good cannot exist because a lack of agency voids responsibility. One might hold various commitments about the extent to which determinism binds actions or intentions, but an agent must at minimum feel a perceived agency in order to assess their actions in light of morality.

Given the connection between agency and responsibility, moral good requires agency. A world with no agency would be a world where no individual could be praised for their good deeds or blamed for their evil ones. Agency makes moral good possible, serving as a necessary but not sufficient condition for both good and ill. As such, promoting agency and the conditions that allow individuals to form the capacity for agency would also promote moral good. Denying or discrediting the agency of rational, sentient beings hinders moral good. By definition moral norms promote moral good, so morality must require promoting agency and ensuring that beings capable of agency receive the support they need to develop and exercise agency.

The moral value of agency clarifies the broader issues of social justice in just that way. Creation and marginalization of a group creates a division between the dominant group and the marginalized group. The dominant group defines the marginalized group in ways that diminish their humanity and their status as moral agents in order to justify discrimination and prejudice. The effects of systemic oppression further diminish opportunities to develop and exercise agency through distressed material conditions and acculturation of abusive stereotypes propagated by the dominant group.

Given the moral norm in favor of agency, no dimension of identity discrimination can be morally justified. Creating group divisions to deprive an entire group of agency runs afoul of that norm. The consequences of those divisions multiply those wrongs and cannot be morally justified. Social injustice poses a moral wrong that needs to be addressed, not a dilemma that resists resolution.

Nevertheless, this argument does not become clear unless focus shifts from analysis of complex cases to the logical foundation of morality and ethical reasoning. Dilemmas provide solid opportunities to understand the nuances of ethical reasoning, but most everyday morality remains in the space of broad certainty and widely shared values. Rather than demonstrate the instructor’s intelligence by smashing student intuitions, ethics teaching should focus on ensuring that students have both a firm foundation of moral judgments and some practice in applying ethical reasoning to novel cases as well as familiar ones.

A community may organize so that power concentrates in a few decision-makers who organize and direct the efforts the everyone else. The small number of decision-makers relative to the rest of the population constraints the number of opportunities to lead or wield social or political power. A small number of people will hold power over the rest, and very few people will be able to attain those power positions. Power in such a society can be represented by a pyramid with the few “at the top” ruling the many “below” them.

A community may also organize to limit the scope of any social or political power. In such a society leaders or decision makers oversee a small or narrowly defined domain to organize or direct only a few people, or only within a specific circumstance or activity. Opportunities to wield social or political power may be numerous even if the scope of that power remains relatively small. Many people, potentially every person, may find an opportunity to lead in some capacity. Power in such a society can be represented by a horizon with many “leaders” who must cooperate with one another to achieve large scale shared goals.

The Pyramid and the Horizon represent an abstraction of power distribution in a society as one might find it. Political states throughout the world tend toward the Pyramid, ruled by an elite few who organize and direct the many. The Horizon appears in less formal associations or small communities.

When set against the the history of politics and political states, the Pyramid serves as the preferred tool for conquerors and rulers who rely on coercive power. The rising political class forms or allies with a martial class to compel obedience from the working class that forms the majority of the population. The monarchies that arose in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire exhibit this pattern, as do monarchies in India, China, and Japan. Governance aligns with the interests of the political class generally, the martial class where needed to maintain loyalty to the political class, and the working class only to ensure continued support for the political and martial class. Since the political class needs to prevent unified resistance from the working class, they need only to serve the interests of a defined subset at the expense of the rest. Much of the political class’s influence over the working class can be accomplished by propaganda rather than serving material interests, convincing the privileged subset that their interests align with the political class and against the rest of the working class.

The Horizon pattern emerges organically in small communities or in response to systematic oppression by the political class of an established Pyramid. Anarchists and collectivists, generally committed to cooperative power, tend toward the Horizon when organizing for reform or revolution. Distribution of power prevents the formation of a well-defined political class since any person may exercise power in some domain but will be subject to power in other domains.

As such, the political class and its supporters perceive the Horizon as a threat. Establishing a Horizon existentially threatens an established Pyramid and will diminish the power and associated wealth or control over resources that the political class enjoys. The political class will work against any reform that distributes power more broadly, preferring to maintain systems of oppression rather than sacrifice their privilege and power. Pyramid propaganda will frame the Pyramid as the only viable model and argue that the Horizons generally collapse into instability. However, no political entity can survive under constant attack, and a move toward the Horizon attracts sustained attack from any Pyramid. Historically, evidence for Pyramid reactions to such threats can be seen in the wars against France instigated by aristocrats who feared their privilege at risk in the wake of the French Revolution, the framing of anarchist collectives as bent on destruction, and the assassinations of civil rights leaders carried out by the FBI under COINTELPRO.

Nevertheless, the Pyramid instantiates injustice throughout its system of governance. The political class leverages their influence to concentrate wealth and resources, utilizing the martial class to suppress active resistance. Continued extraction of wealth from the working class reinforces established power as it enables the political class to purchase support from the martial class and often a select privileged subset of the working class established to divides the working class.

Since the Pyramid cannot sustain itself without that pattern of exploitation, support for hierarchies of power entails support for continued oppression and abuse of the majority of people for the benefit of a minority aristocratic class. Accepting the status quo of the Pyramid means accepting the rampant death and destruction leveled against a divided working class and whatever foreign states the Pyramid can exploit through the threat of military force. Concentration of power will always produce such abuses because the political class needs to enact abuse to maintain its position. Reform of the Pyramid is impossible. To achieve justice a community must move toward the Horizon.