A Social Anarchist Issues a Challenge

Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny, by Jesse Spafford, Cambridge University Press, 242 pages, $110

What do anarchists advocate? It depends on whom you ask. Among free market libertarians, anarchists typically share a vision in which private firms, competing on the market, replace the security services traditionally monopolized by the state. But most self-described anarchists espouse a very different vision in which private property is viewed as a tool of oppression analogous to the state. For social anarchists, communal cooperation and egalitarian sharing should (largely or entirely) replace market competition and private holdings.

Social anarchism has had relatively few defenders within the analytic tradition of academic philosophy. Jesse Spafford, a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, aims to fill that gap with Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny. Spafford seeks to show that social anarchist conclusions can be drawn from premises that libertarians have reason to find attractive.

Spafford’s arguments are more complex than I can do justice to in a brief review, but here is a regrettably simplified sketch of some of his main lines of argument.

Spafford grounds his case for social anarchism in what he notes is a “recurrent theme in libertarian thought,” namely that “persons should not be allowed to discretionarily impose costs upon others.” In Spafford’s hands, this commitment becomes a “Moral Tyranny Constraint” that forbids anyone to “unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably act in a way that would leave others with less advantage than they would have possessed had the agent made some other choice.” 

From this foundation, Spafford derives some conclusions that are likely to be congenial to free market libertarians, such as self-ownership and a consent theory of state legitimacy (specifying that the mere fact that the state has issued a decree does not, in and of itself, give anyone a reason to obey the decree unless they have consented to the state’s authority). But he also derives a conclusion that libertarians will find less welcome, to put it mildly: that self-owners cannot legitimately own anything other than themselves.

This conclusion will likely seem radical even among social anarchists, many of whom seek to target private ownership of the means of production (e.g., land, capital equipment) or of commodities for market exchange, while making an exception for personal property (e.g., the proverbial toothbrush). Spafford allows no such exceptions.

Spafford’s ban on external property begins deceptively modestly, with a defense of the famous “Lockean proviso” put forward in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which requires those appropriating resources for their own use to do so in a way that does not worsen the position of others. Spafford’s case for the proviso is that it follows straightforwardly from the Moral Tyranny Constraint: If my acts of appropriation leave you worse off, then I have imposed a cost on you without your consent.

Those libertarian theorists who accept the proviso, such as Robert Nozick and David Schmidtz, think it is fairly easy to satisfy, given the greater opportunities that a private-property society provides to everyone, whether they are among the earliest appropriators or not. But Spafford argues that the proviso actually rules out all exclusive appropriation. For even if the ways in which private appropriators are likely to use their resources (given market incentives) are, on net, beneficial to others, the mere fact that they could use those resources in ways that would harm others’ interests is a moral cost to those others, just as the fact that a slaveowner could freely decide to beat or murder her slaves is a moral cost to those slaves, even if the slaveowner is not so cruelly inclined. Being subject to the arbitrary will of another is incompatible with freedom, regardless of how that will is likely to be exercised. Spafford therefore rejects private property on the same grounds that he rejects state authority.

Spafford’s argumentative skills are impressive, but that does not mean his case is convincing. In particular, his grounding principle, the Moral Tyranny Constraint, seems much too strong. Libertarians have traditionally distinguished between different ways of imposing costs on others, with some ways—those involving “aggression” (however defined)—being subject to much more stringent prohibitions than the rest. I think Spafford is right that those who find it problematic to impose costs on others via aggression should also find it problematic to impose costs on others via non-aggressive means; but I think he is too hasty in assuming that they should find it problematic in the same degree, licensing prohibitions of equal stringency.

The fact that an action would impose an uncompensated disadvantage on others, even non-aggressively, is plausibly a prima-facie case against its moral permissibility. But there’s a long distance from a prima-facie case to an all-things-considered case, let alone to a case for the legitimacy of forcibly preventing such imposition.

In order to traverse that distance, one would need for there to be no countervailing considerations. Spafford argues that pragmatic considerations cannot be legitimate objections if they are grounded in utilitarianism, since utilitarianism—as both John Rawls and Robert Nozick have argued—treats benefits to some people as though they could make up for costs to other people. But not all pragmatic considerations need assume the truth of utilitarianism. If, as most economists agree, abolishing private property would drastically lower a society’s standard of living (for familiar informational and incentival reasons), then such abolition would itself seem to run afoul of the Moral Tyranny Constraint by imposing uncompensated costs on nearly everybody. And if the constraint both mandates and forbids the abolition of private property, then it would seem to be a non-starter as a principle.

Even leaving such economic considerations aside, Spafford’s extreme version of the Moral Tyranny Constraint seems to run against the spirit of that constraint. Some degree of discretionarily imposing costs on others is surely a necessary part of the background of ordinary life. To take an example that Spafford himself discusses, suppose the person I’m in love with chooses my rival over me, thereby making me worse off without my consent. This choice is allowable, in Spafford’s view, only if I am somehow compensated for my loss. (I note in passing that compensation might be very difficult. What kind of compensation would be adequate for, say, the suicidally lovelorn?) But the notion that the right to choose one’s partner depends on the possibility of compensating disappointed suitors certainly feels like moral tyranny against the chooser. If every imposition of costs, regardless of kind, raises the specter of moral tyranny, that would make the prohibition on moral tyranny itself, incoherently, an instance of moral tyranny. This is one reason the traditional libertarian position of a stringent bar against some forms of imposing costs and a laxer bar against others makes more sense.

It’s also unclear whether a bright line between self-ownership and ownership of external resources can really be maintained. Is a prosthetic limb part of a person’s body? If we say no, we treat the self-ownership rights of a disabled person as having a narrower scope than those of the non-disabled. But if prosthetic limbs are indeed covered by self-ownership, despite being inorganic and detachable, it will be difficult to exclude external tools—and so on. Not for nothing have thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Hegel regarded property as an extension of the self. And this is arguably the libertarian basis for discriminating among cost impositions: Those that physically interfere with the extended self will reasonably face a more stringent prohibition than those that do not, and one certainly cannot legitimately suppress the latter by engaging in the former.

Still, this is an intelligently argued book that deserves careful reading and discussion—particularly among market libertarians, since it offers ingenious and powerful arguments, from premises many libertarians will find appealing, to conclusions that most libertarians will be eager to avoid. That’s the sort of challenge that libertarians need to take seriously. And although, as I say, I ultimately don’t think Spafford’s case succeeds, my review has necessarily had to leave out the full details of his arguments, and thus is not a complete response to them.

Note that while the hard copy of this book has a hefty price tag, a PDF version is, appropriately for a manifesto against exclusive ownership, available for free on Cambridge Core’s Open Access site.

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