The Sound and Fury of Holmes and Sunstein’s “The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes”

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Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein’s The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes presents itself as, among other things, a rebuttal to libertarianism. Its scope is, of course, broader. The authors also want to get the goat of progressives who would underestimate the economic burdens created by government. The book is well-written and entertaining but, ultimately, a good deal less groundbreaking, revolutionary, or even intriguing than Holmes and Sunstein seem to think.

Stripped of the countless supporting examples and anecdotes, the basic argument of The Cost of Rights is this:

  1. There’s a difference between natural rights and legal rights. Natural rights preexist government. They’re fixed and, well, natural. We can argue about what they are, but we can’t make up new ones. Natural rights can be discussed within a positive liberty vs. negative liberty context.
  2. Legal rights can’t preexist government, because they are a) constructs of the state and its laws and b) claims by individuals upon the government (for services, for protection, for enforcement, etc.). Legal rights can’t meaningfully be broken into negative and positive sorts because even those rights that say we have a “right to not be X,” actually mean “we have a right to demand that government actively protect us from X.” (E.g., a right not to be killed is really a right to be protected, by the government, from being killed.) So, in this sense, all legal rights are positive rights.
  3. Because all legal rights demand something from government and that something means government must expend resources (on enforcement officers, on buildings to station them, on infrastructure, an so on), legal rights depend on taxes.
  4. Most things we think of as legal rights (e.g., the right to contract, to protection from violence, to private property and its enforcement) are only meaningful (i.e., can only be relied on to exist and be protected) if government expends resources to protect them. This means that a) government must exist and b) government must collect resources (taxes).

The bulk of the book’s 250 pages is paragraph after paragraph in the form of, “We have a right to contract, but that demands courts and police and politicians drafting contract law and judges interpreting it. And all that costs money,” followed by another like, “We have a right to be protected against theft, but that means police and courts and…” One gets the point quite quickly.

An Infinite Regress?

My colleague, Tom G. Palmer, wrote a scathing review of the book (pdf). Among his many critiques are that The Cost of Rights amounts to an infinite regress.

For there ever to be a right of any sort, by Holmes and Sunstein’s own theory, there would have to be an infinite hierarchy of people threatening to punish those lower in the hierarchy. Since there is no infinite hierarchy, we are forced to conclude that Holmes and Sunstein have actually offered an impossibility theorem of rights in the logical form of modus tollens: If there are rights, then there must bean infinite hierarchy of power; there is not an infinite hierarchy of power; therefore there are no rights.

I find this particular problem with Holmes and Sunstein’s thesis less troubling than Tom does. We have a right not to be abused by the police. To which Holmes and Sunstein respond, “Okay, so that means we need tax dollars spent on people watching the police for bad conduct and enforcing the laws against the police.” Tom’s infinite regress criticism means saying, “Ah ha! But who watches the watchers? Thus we need another layer of people enforcing the laws against the people enforcing the laws against the police.” And so on, for ever and ever.

From the standpoint of strict logic, Tom’s rebuttal works. There is an infinite regress here. But it doesn’t bother me because, in terms of practical, in-the-world effects, Holmes and Sunstein have a reasonable response. Namely, with each additional layer, the protection gets better. Not all police will abuse us. If, say, 10% of police do abuse citizens and that’s without one layer of additional protection, then perhaps only 1% will do it with one layer of protection. We’re getting closer to absolute protection of our right not to be tortured by the police. A second layer might reduce the rate of abuse to 0.1%. A third to 0.01%, and so on. At some point, even though our protection isn’t absolute, it’s close enough. Thus we avoid the infinite regress.

… Signifying Nothing?

So if the infinite regress left me unvexed, and if I approach the argument in the very abstract form presented in the four points above (and accept without question the natural/legal rights distinction and the conclusions drawn from it), what’s the takeaway from The Cost of Rights? Unfortunately, not a lot. Because Holmes and Sunstein haven’t really offered an argument against much of anything, especially not mainstream libertarianism.

In responding to The Cost of Rights, the libertarian can adopt one of two tactics. The first is to say, “Yep, we do need people to protect our rights, but why do they have to be the government?” In other words, to raise the anarcho-capitalist explanations of how rights protections and the rule of law could happen without the state. The book never addresses this possibility. It just assumes–without acknowledging the assumption–that “protection” and “enforcement” can only ever be the provence of the state. They may be right–many libertarians are not anarchists–but the idea of the state as the only effective rights protector is by no means a priori true.

The second tactic is to say, “So what?” Just because we need the state to protect rights doesn’t mean we need this huge state we have now. Minarchist libertarians, for example, say that yes we need the state to protect our rights and yes we need to pay the state to do that through taxation (or voluntary payments), but the state should be limited to protecting our natural rights and enforcing contracts and providing defense and that’s it. In this sense, the overarching, adumbrated argument of The Cost of Rights given above is, when it comes down to it, compatible with minarchism.

In fact, when Holmes and Sunstein attack “libertarians” and “limited-government” folks (they use the terms interchangeably), it’s clear that what they actually mean is “anarchists.” In other words, they think libertarians want no state and attacks them for holding that obviously (to them) silly position.

The Cost of Rights fails to genuinely wrestle with the actual arguments of its opponents.

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“Why End the World?” A Writer’s Perspective on the Post-Apocalypse Genre

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Post-apocalyptic fiction is kind of hot right now. My first novel, The Hole, fits the genre and my publisher, Permuted Press, puts out pretty much nothing but post-apocalyptic stories. Recently, someone asked me why the genre is so popular.

While I have thoughts on an answer from a reader’s perspective–the end of the world is scary stuff, we like the thought of beginning anew, etc.–what I want to offer here is a writer’s answer. Why is The Hole a post-apocalyptic novel?

There’s certainly no reason the story I tell in The Hole couldn’t play out just as well in a non-apocalyptic setting. Nothing in the plot demands that the characters begin their journey in a world wiped out by plague. Nothing in it dictates that the crazies wander through a barren landscape instead of a densely-populated, modern-day America.

I could argue that the post-apocalyptic setting adds to the loneliness of my two main characters. I could tell you that placing the events of The Hole after the end of the world focuses attention on what really matters: the plight of Elliot Bishop and Evajean Rhodes and the mystery they set out to solve. All of which is probably true. But it’s not what ultimately decided the issues for me. It’s not why I went post-apocalypse.

No, I chose to write about the end of the world because it’s easier.

Writing a novel is a ton of work. Telling a long story involves keeping track of hundreds of details of plot and character and setting, while not bogging down in those details to such an extent that the story suffers. Telling a long, complex story is terrifically difficult–and I am in awe of writers who can pull it off. (This is why it’s so lamentable that the typical university English literature education spends so much time studying imagery and symbolism and ideology and characterization–and spends practically no classroom hours on pacing and story.)

Ending the world gives the writer freedom to ignore a great deal of those details. If your main characters are the only people left, then they’re the only people you have to worry about. In a fully populated world, the events of The Hole would’ve caused all sorts of ongoing reactions by governments, organizations, and individuals. I’d have had to keep track of all that and work it in to the specific story of Elliot and Evajean. Far simpler, then, to just kill off all the governments, organizations, and individuals.

As an author approaching my first novel, the post-apocalyptic genre was a sandbox that gave me room to play while allowing me the luxury of not having to keep track of too much at once. (Though the editing process revealed just how much there still was to keep track of–and how poorly I managed to do so in the first draft.)

I’m sure other authors have better, less self-servings reasons for ending the world than “it makes the writing easier.” But, if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that it was mine.

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Frank Rich, Al Jazeera, and Silly Analogies

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Over at the New York Times last week, Frank Rich got all kinds of mad at the American mainstream news’s coverage of the Egyptian uprising. The corporate media overplayed the Facebook/Twitter “revolution.” They continued “the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media.”

All of which might be true. American’s aren’t terribly well-informed about what goes on overseas. They don’t know a whole lot about the part of the world we’ve been fighting wars in for the last decade. Correcting these failures could, in fact, be a good thing.

(Though one should always be careful not to assume that lack of knowledge is always and everywhere the result of censorship or stupidity. It might instead result simply from lack of interest. Not everyone wants to spend hours studying Egypt, and they may have very good reasons for feeling that way. We should be careful not to politicize what may be nothing more than matters of taste.)

But Rich goes rather off the rails with this antepenultimate paragraph:

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

It’s true that Al Jazeera isn’t on many American cable boxes. It’s also true that Al Jazeera provided better coverage of the Middle East situation than the American networks. But the “Iron Curtain?” Really? Millions of Americans–news hungry, nay, news ravenous Americans—were prevented from seeing Al Jazeera by “the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers,” says Rich.

Except, you know, for that whole World Wide Web thing. Al Jazeera’s right there, in all its live and steaming glory, for anyone with a browser and an Internet connection. Which is to say pretty much everyone. So what has Rich teed off, what has him fuming, is that millions of Americans, starved for news, had to turn from the screen in their living room to the (slightly smaller) one in their den.

In Rich’s world, this act of surfing–which most of us spend more time doing anyway than we really ought to–is akin to “Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s.” It’s indistinguishable from “Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal” In other words, the idea of having to (easily, legally, and with no threat of reprisal) switch from the cable box to the browser window is functionally equivalent to risking imprisonment at the hands of totalitarian state thugs.

Maybe Frank needs to just relax. And turn off his TV.

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THE HOLE hitting stores in July

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At long last–and it is a very long last, I assure you–my first novel, The Hole, is edited, turned in to the publisher, and in the production pipeline. It’s with great pleasure that I can finally announce that Permuted Press has given it a release date: July 2011.

In July, you’ll be able to buy a much better, much revised version of The Hole, in bookstores, on Amazon, and on various ebook readers. This one has an updated ending that better explains the central mystery of the novel. It has a new setup that makes a great deal more sense than the original. And it lacks all those wild inconsistencies and inaccuracies that plagued the first, serialized draft. In short, the revised novel–again, coming in July from Permuted Press–is all around … awesomer.

What’s more, in the week since I turned it in, I finalized the new back cover text. Here it is.

The world as Elliot Bishop and Evajean Rhodes know it is gone. Destroyed. In just two weeks, a horrific plague raged across the planet—driving its victims insane before killing them.

The two survivors set out on an unimaginable journey, driven by a cryptic message from Evajean’s husband:  If anything terrible happens, you must get to Salt Lake City. But the pair soon discover they are not alone, and that the plague has done more than kill. The countryside between Virginia and Utah now crawls with victims who have been driven mad—violent lunatics fueled with definite yet unknown purpose.

To survive, Elliot and Evajean must fight for their lives—against the crazies, against sinister forces who would stop their quest, against long-ago hidden menaces—and uncover the deeply guarded secret of those driven mad and the plague that spawned them.  The secret of a destructive force unleashed on the world by one of America’s most powerful religious sects…

I’ll post more news as it happens, here and on Facebook. The next big step is work on the cover (no, that one up there at the top of the post is not the final), which I’m thrilled to see. More importantly, this means more new writing. The novel’s done. I can now get to fresh stuff.

If you want to stay up to date on all that, learn about new developments with The Hole, and be notified of my latest fiction, you can check here or, better yet, fan me on Facebook. Doing so’s just a couple of clicks and then you’ll instantly be in the know.

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Did Jesus fulfill Biblical prophecies?

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According to columnist David Limbaugh, there are too many coincidences for the Bible to be mere fable. Specifically, he’s shocked how closely the story of Jesus as told in the New Testament matches the messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. “The specificity of some of the individual prophecies is powerfully probative,” he writes, “but the odds against so many of them being fulfilled in the person of Christ by coincidence are utterly breathtaking.”

Limbaugh isn’t thinking clearly. Explaining why, I wrote this letter to the Washington Examiner, which was published in the January 5 issue.

Alternative explanation for biblical prophecies

Re: “Too many coincidences for the Bible to be mere fable,” Dec. 29

David Limbaugh is convinced that the fact that the story told in the Gospels so well matches the prophecies of the Old Testament proves the truth of Christianity.

Limbaugh fails to consider the alternative explanation: that the story as told in those Gospels was written with prior prophecies in mind. The earliest Gospel according to Mark was written six decades after Jesus’ birth by an author already convinced of his messianic status and no doubt familiar with all “574 Old Testament verses containing messianic prophesies.” We ought not be surprised, then, that Mark tells his tale in such a way as to fulfill those prophesies.

Thus, in order for Limbaugh’s argument to work, he needs to assume that the story of Jesus as presented by Mark, Matthew, Luke and John is truth instead of legend. In other words, Limbaugh must assume the very conclusion he is arguing for.

Aaron Ross Powell
Alexandria

Limbaugh’s logic works like this: We can be sure the New Testament is true and that Jesus was the messiah because he fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. How do we know he fulfilled those prophecies? Because it says so in the New Testament. Put even more simply, Limbaugh’s argument is that the New Testament is true because the New Testament is true.

What’s troubling about Limbaugh’s column is not the obvious logical fallacy. Those are common enough and often trip up even the best of us. No, what’s troubling is that the response I gave the in letter is just so obvious.

Limbaugh came up with what he took to be a slam-dunk argument. But he clearly didn’t take even a brief moment to ponder counter arguments. He didn’t put in the effort to respect his intellectual opponents.

I’m reminded of a passage from John Stewart Mill’s On Liberty. Discussing the need to do exactly what Limbaugh didn’t, Mill writes,

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

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Can we be Moral without God?

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The following letter I wrote appeared in last Monday’s Washington Post.

Michael Gerson rejects the idea of godless morality ["A moralist in atheist's clothing," op-ed, Oct. 15]. “Of course we can be good without God, but why the hell bother?” he wrote. “If there are no moral lines except the ones we draw ourselves, why not draw and redraw them in places most favorable to our interests?”

That atheists do lead moral lives and act selflessly, as Mr. Gerson admitted in the case of Christopher Hitchens, proved the error of the point.

The critique was further undermined by the fact that many of the moral prescriptions of Scripture guide almost no one today, from condoning slavery (Ephesians 6:5) to the murder of unruly children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). This indicates that we bring a preexisting moral sense to these teachings, accepting those that agree with it and rejecting those that don’t.

Without God, we’d simply allow this moral sense to guide our actions — as most of us, atheists and theists alike, already do.

The comments from readers on the Washington Post website ran overwhelmingly positive. One objection raised a few times, however, is worth exploring here in a little more detail. Here’s how one commentator put it:

So, morality is inate and inborn? Immorality must therefore be a genetic flaw. Too bad the societal standards of morality change, meaning that morality is not preexisting.

While I do believe that much of our moral sense is innate and, thus, biological in origin, this is not what I meant by “preexisting.” Rather, I intended only to express that this moral sense preexists any rules each of us gleans from the Bible. Whether our morality is biologically baked in or the result of cultural teachings, my point was simply that it does not come from scripture. If it did–if scripture were the only source of human morality–then we’d have no way to explain why the Bible’s more repugnant teachings, like those referenced in the letter above, are rejected by good people everywhere.

We critique the Bible with the moral sense we bring to it. Those commands it contains which agree with our moral sense, we embrace and then use the force of the Bible to strengthen. Those commands we find incompatible with our moral sense, we simply ignore. Either way, our morality comes prior to finding support for it in the Bible.

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An Update on THE HOLE

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January 1st, 2011. That’s my due date for getting the revised manuscript turned in to Permuted Press. And I’m on track to do it. I tweaked Chapter 11 to satisfaction yesterday, leaving me with only four to go. After that, I have to head back to the middle for a little while to fix the vile little town of Nahom–which will be a good deal scarier in its new incarnation–then give the whole thing another read and polish, and I’m done. I hope. January 1st will tell.

So what’s changed between this revision, which could see print from Permuted as early as the latter half of 2011, and the serialized version still on the web? Quite a lot. The prose is better, for one, and lots of mistakes of action and timing have been addressed. But those are minor. The big stuff is, well, bigger.

(What follows is, I hope, spoiler free, but if you haven’t read the serial edition, you might want to skip the rest of this post. While it probably won’t ruin things for you, you’re not going to get much out of it, either.)

To start with, the Hole of the book’s title is, for much of the book, gone. Like no longer mentioned by Elliot and Evajean and no longer the intended goal of their cross-country journey. It shows up later, in dramatically different form, but, as originally written, the whole Hole thing wasn’t working. The new setup maintains a better sense of mystery and keeps the developing plot more coherent.

Then there’s Nahom. It’s being upgraded, spiking the creepiness factor and giving Elliot and Evajean good reason to want to get the hell out. This will be the last thing I do to the manuscript, as I intend to use it as an opportunity to pepper in references to what will happen later. Foreshadowing’s cool.

Finally, the conspiracy at the book’s core is deeper. More of it is explained. Upon turning the last page, you’ll know better what really happened and there shouldn’t be any major points of weirdness left dangling. Which isn’t to say I’ll answer everything. Typically, I like a little mystery left in what I read–and I have plans sketched for a long prequel short story or novella I’ll begin working on as soon as the novel is out of my hands, a prequel that’ll fill in even more of the backstory.

So that’s where things stand. January 1st looms. Back to work.

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Roger Scruton Thinks Facebook will Destroy Humanity

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“Every scientific advance is welcomed by those who see a use for it, and usually deplored by those who don’t,” Roger Scruton writes to open the first chapter of his new book, The Uses of Pessimism. He then tells the story of John Ruskin, a “great critic and social philosopher” who, in the 19th century, warned against the evil of railroads, with their fast-moving, rural-tranquillity-destroying ways. “Yet how quaint does Ruskin’s cry of heartfelt protest now seem,” Scruton says.

“Quaintness” doesn’t even begin to describe what happens next.

Roger Scruton is, it should be said, a conservative. Not “conservative” in the Sean Hannity, gay-hating, immigrant-fearing, evangelical way, but “conservative” in the more respectable sense of having a deep appreciation for tradition and a wariness of change for change’s sake. That’s all fine and good but, in the case of this chapter from his new book, conservatism leads Scruton to a set of remarkably silly claims.

He quickly shifts from railroads to expressions of terror at the next wave of technological progress, the “posthuman future,” as he calls it.

The ‘posthuman’ future promises enhanced bodily and mental powers, immunity to disease and decay, even the conquest of death. And many argue that we have no choice but to embrace this condition: it will happen anyway, if only because biological science and medical technology are both moving in that direction. … A new kind of optimist has therefore emerged, advocating a transformed human being who will emerge from the million years of man’s incompetence to stuff the disasters back in Pandora’s box.

This distopic nightmare would be downright awful, Scruton tells us. Why? Well, for one, we need death in order to make us appreciate life. He references a play about an immortal woman who, after 400 years of life, realized she could no longer love or be loved. “Poetry, drama, portraiture and music show us that mortality is inextricably woven into the human scheme of things,” Scruton writes. They show us that “our virtues and our loves are the virtues and loves of dying creatures; that everything that leads us to cherish one another, to sacrifice ourselves, to make sublime and heroic gestures, is predicated on the assumption that we are vulnerable and transient.”

Of course, most humans live far longer today than they did 1000 years ago and will likely live much longer in the future than they do today. But it is not at all clear that, as a result, a contemporary of Jesus loved his wife and children more than a contemporary of Roger Scruton. Rather, it seems quite obvious that love and virtue will remain love and virtue, easily adaptable to changing circumstances. And if they don’t, if we’re all miserable when we (someday) become immortal, then that misery will lead us to give up our immortality. But I don’t think that will happen. We’ll simply find new ways to be virtuous, to make sacrifices, and to cherish each other. A parent watching his child die is reminded of his love, true, but what a terrifically shitty way for it to happen. The Christian Scruton is simply voicing his religion’s silly fetishizing of suffering–and we’ll all be better off when that sort of thinking withers away.

But that’s not the really silly stuff, no. Because who is leading the charge to this awful, unimaginable world where we all live a really, really long time? Ray Kurzweil. And Facebook. Scruton again:

In Kurzweil’s future people morph into avatars, who peer at each other from the arctic vacancy of cyber-space. This is already happening, as we know from Facebook, MySpace and Second Life. By placing a screen between ourselves and others, while retaining control over what appears on it, we avoid the real encounter–forbidding to others the power and the freedom to challenge us in our deeper nature and to call on us here and now to take responsibility for ourselves and for them.

These two sentences display an old, cranky ignorance of how social networking actually functions in the actual world. For instance, if what Scruton says is true, we’d expect that people today–who use Facebook quite a lot–would spend less time in face-to-face social contact than people in the past. They don’t. Facebook does not replace social interaction, it augments it. Facebook allows us to keep up on old friends, find out what our families are up to, and coordinate real world get togethers. Yes, teenagers spend a great deal of time surfing Facebook and MySpace, but at the expense of television and other non-social activities.

The last sentence of the above quote speaks to a deeper problem of lack of reflection in Scruton’s thinking. After all, what could be more avoiding of a “real encounter” than writing or reading a book? At least on Facebook, there’s another person immediately on the other side of the text, a person who can respond in near real time to challenges of their deeper nature. But, while reading a book, we’re interacting through dead trees with people who are, in many cases, dead themselves. And the typewriter Scuton tapped this book out on certainly did not have the “power and freedom” to challenge the turgid arguments it was forced to manifest upon the page. Books are wonderful things. Interacting through them with authors living and dead is one of life’s great pleasures. But just as books did not destroy humanity and the human condition, neither will Facebook.

Scruton is no different from John Ruskin, who he lampoons in the chapter’s initial lines. He’s faced with technology he doesn’t understand, doesn’t care to understand, and so despises as the harbinger of terrible things. Like Ruskin’s warnings, Scruton’s should not be taken seriously.

A guy like Scruton probably hates rock ‘n roll, too.

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Book Review: “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley

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Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, is terrific. So terrific, in fact, that I penned a review of it for the Fall 2010 edition of the Cato Journal.

That review is now online in PDF form. I give a good summary of Ridley’s argument while raising a few concerns with its ability to withstand focused criticism. Here’s the opening paragraph.

Science writer Matt Ridley is, as the title of his new book suggests, optimistic about humanity’s future—and not just at the prospect of even better lives for those lucky enough to have excellent lives already, but at the possibility of radically transforming, for the better, the lives of those today suffering near the bottom. The key, he thinks, is economic growth, that boogeyman of naysayers and concerned citizens everywhere. “It is precisely because there is still so much further to go that those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow down in the face of looming environmental disaster may be not only factually but morally wrong,” he argues. The path to that better world 100 years from now will not be smooth. Mankind is likely to experience traumas both of a natural sort and of its own creation. Most troubling, “The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could yet snuff out future prosperity on earth.” Ridley doesn’t let this possibility get him down. Humans are too driven to trade, exchange their ideas, and imagine new ones for a few bad apples to ruin the future.

Check out the rest. And read the book, too.

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Practical Political Philosophy and Will Kymlicka’s Endnote 42

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Confusions of the real and the ideal underly far too many policy debates. Libertarians, for instance, often assume perfectly functioning markets and compare them to genuinely (mis)functioning governments. Progressives do the opposite, highlighting the very real warts on the existing markets while assuming that government policies will, in practice, turn out exactly as perfect as we’d wish them to. Whenever the real is compared to the ideal, the real comes out tarnished.

Real/ideal confusion is a particular plague within political philosophy. Philosophers, using the powers of their intellect and the tools of reason, argue to perfect conceptions of justice and then assume that those conceptions (the ideal) can be made manifest if only we decide to do so. For instance, in Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer argues that, if we banish money from certain realms of human experience, then everyone, rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, blessed and cursed, will have equal access to all that is good within those spheres. He ignores and so wholly discounts the economic insight that, with money excluded, people will “pay” for those goods in other ways, with some having more of this new form of payment than others.

Likewise, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, tells us that justice permits inequalities in the distribution of goods only if those inequalities benefit the worst-off members of society. He doesn’t tell us how we are to know who the “worst-off members” are, how we are to keep track of them as they shift from worst-off to not-worst-off and from not-worst-off to worst-off, or how we are to measure equality and inequality–all of which are likely impossible tasks to accomplish with any degree of accuracy. It is merely assumed that, upon discovering just principles, we can rejigger the world to conform to them.

That’s why it was so deeply refreshing to come across endnote 42 in the “Libertarianism” chapter of Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy. Kymlicka is far from a Hayekian libertarian–the chapter is downright scathing, in fact–and has built his career discussing theories of justice. With that in mind, here’s the text of the endnote.

Consider the question of state capacity. It seems clear that liberal-egalitarian theories have operated with over-optimistic assumptions about state capacity. For example, in developing his theory of liberal equality, Bruce Ackerman explicitly appeals to the idea of a “perfect technology of justice” (Ackerman 1980: 21; for similar assumptions, see Arneson 1990: 158; Roemer 1985a: 154). Of course, Ackerman knows that this is not available in the real world. But he does not tell us which parts of the resulting theory can be implemented, given our actually existing “technology of justice.” The inherent limitations in the capacity of the state to achieve social objectives have been theorized by social scientists, both on the right (Glazer 1988) and the left (Rothstein 1998). But this literature has not yet permeated the philosophical debates. One looks in vain in the corpus of the major left-liberal political philosophers (Rawls, Dworkin, Cohen, Roemer, Arneson, Ackerman) for a discussion of the extent to which the state can or cannot fulfill the principles of justice they endorse.

(Emphasis added.) If true–and my reading in the field indicates that it is–this is a shocking admission. The project of these philosophers is telling us how society should be structured in order to fulfill obligations of justice. By nature of their role as “left-liberals,” they believe that the structuring of society should be conducted via the state. If the state cannot fulfill the goals of that structuring, then the merit of the ideas antecedent to the structuring is seriously undermined.

Imagine if a philosopher of bioethics spent years writing a book in which she concluded that the moral obligation of modern medicine is to cure cancer through the application of natural spring water. Or if a researcher in education told us that schools should be built on the assumption that children already know the sum total of all knowledge in the universe. While the goals of these scholars would remain laudable (curing cancer is good, as are highly knowledgeable children), their scholarship would have little value. Children don’t already know everything and natural spring water cannot cure cancer, no matter how much we might like otherwise.

Of course, the arguments of Rawls and Walzer are not valueless. Forcing us to think about the justice of our society and its structure and prodding us to make our world more just are crucial and worthwhile pursuits. But it remains facile to conduct those pursuits without even considering the feasibility of the proffered conceptions of justice.

There’s another problem, too. Insisting that our states be organized around perfect conceptions of justice–which demand perfect technologies of justice–might very well produce worse results for humanity than accepting a less-than-perfect justice, but one achievable by the technologies we actually possess. A chef attempting to prepare an unattainably perfect omelet will break a lot more eggs than a chef setting out to make–and actually achieving–a merely excellent one.

But admitting this and and moving forward with it in mind would mean discussing “the extent to which the state can or cannot fulfill the principles of justice” the philosophers demand–something Kymlicka (who is arguably as well-versed as anyone in the philosophical literature) tells us simply doesn’t happen.

That Kymlicka’s insight hides in an endnote is telling.

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