 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell Today we have a little bit of a different episode, another one where it's just Aaron and I are going to chat about something that Aaron is writing about, has written about and also gives a lecture on. And it's something we've talked about with Michael Hummer and some other people on the show. Today we're going to be talking about political obligation. Why should you obey the state? And I guess the first question I want to ask Aaron, since we're going to kind of do this like Aaron is the guest, but I'll chime in, occasionally the first question I want to ask Aaron is why does it matter? It seems A, like some people may be listening to this who are libertarians would say this is a really extreme topic. It's not something that is generally acceptable in polite company and Western political discourse to even question the authority of the state. So it makes it seem at the very least weird and also maybe extremists who shouldn't be listened to pointing someone could write a blog post about Cato and point to this podcast and say, see this is why you shouldn't listen to Cato on their tax policy because they actually seriously discuss the question of political obligation and whether you should obey the state. So why should we even have this conversation? Aaron Burrus Well I think all of us have this conversation. I think this isn't a question that's off the table for anyone because you hear people bring it up all the time. It's in the context of the government's doing this thing and it's not supposed to do that. It's not okay for it to do that. What it just ordered us to do, the travel ban, the first version of the travel ban was wrong. It's not okay for the government to do that and therefore I and anyone else don't have an obligation to obey it. Civil disobedience has a long history in this country. We all ask this question. We all have lines where we think if the government was to issue the following sort of command, I would not obey it or in fact be obligated not to obey it. So discussing it is not the problem. I think where people sometimes get a little bit worried is when you take it all the way back to the beginning. So you say, and that's why I think it's an important question to ask because if we're going to draw these lines, we're going to say here's where it's okay for the government to demand that I do X, but if it demands Y, then it's not okay. It helps in those conversations to have a theory of well, how does it get to demand things of me in the first place? Is it okay for it to demand things? What are the parameters for that? What are my general obligations towards it at all? Because those are then going to inform the specific questions that are certainly not off the table and are certainly things that play out in conversations all the time. We don't seem to have the conversation in the general sense as part of our policy discussions, even though it is a big part of modern political philosophy. I mean, in some way, you're not asking anything different than what John Locke asked, correct? Yeah. No, this has been an important question for quite a long time. I mean, we have all the way back to Plato's dialogue, the credo, when Socrates has been condemned to death and his friends are trying to talk him out of it or trying to, you know, we can sneak you out of this prison and into exile and he says no, and he offers a bunch of reasons why he has an obligation to abide by the command, in this case, to commit suicide of a court of his Athenian peers. And so he says, I have obligations to the state of Athens. And so it's been a conversation since the very dawn of Western philosophy. And it's an important one. I mean, we have this institution that we have granted enormous power over us that can do all sorts of things to us that we wouldn't allow anyone else to. We can exercise violence against us in a legitimate or missable way that we would consider a criminal act if done by any other person or by another government. We have an obligation as citizens to assess these powers, to understand where they come from, to understand what their limits are and understand what our relationship is to this institution. You kind of touched on it a little bit just now, but what are the unique things about the state and or maybe to put it a different way? What is weird about the state that can do violence but also commands other things of us? Sure. So I think we start by saying, look, we clearly have moral obligations to other people and we can be in situations where our duty is to obey them in certain ways or to respect their commands or to not interfere with their interests. This is just the nature of human morality and these things would exist without a state or with a state in any other form. So the question then is the things that the state does that would be impermissible if done by non-state actors, what are those and why does it get to do those? And so I think the things that make the state weird, if you recognize the state is really, the state is just… At least aberrant compared to other things in society. But the state is obviously just made up of other people and so these other people get to do things to us or give us certain sorts of commands and we have to obey them that other people wouldn't. And so I think that the things that set the state apart, set government apart, first is that it can demand obedience from us in a way that other people can't or don't, that it's allowed to issue us commands and then if we don't follow them it gets to force us to follow them via violence or the threat of violence or punish us if we fail to comply in ways that again individuals can't. So you can issue me a command or my boss here at Cato can issue me a command but if I refuse he's not entitled to lock me up or take my property or shoot me whereas the state can do those things. So that's one area where the state seems different. Another one is non-competition. So the state says not only do I get to issue these commands and that you have a duty of obedience to me but no one else has that authority over you and in fact if someone else tried to get that authority or you tried to set up an alternate authority I could punish you I could prevent it from happening. So I get a monopoly on these powers over you. And then the third one is taxation and the state says you need to give me a certain portion of your property and if you don't I can punish you and an individual doesn't get to do something like that. We can enter into contracts with people where we owe them money sure but they don't get to beat us up if we don't give it to them and those contracts are limited in all sorts of ways that our relationship to taxation is not. So a lot of people listening to this might think that the answer to your questions or at least your skepticism is obvious at least maybe as it concerns America if you're American and maybe some other countries too that the reason you have to pay your taxes is because the U.S. Constitution was signed and ratified by the people of the United States and you are a citizen of the United States and that is why the government has power over you or to put it in a different way in a more general sense that there is a social contract that we all consented to in order to enter into a state relationship and that has given the state legitimate power over us. It would be both Locke's theory or so Hobbes and to some extent actualized in the U.S. Constitution. That seems to be pretty convincing or at least to most people what's wrong with that theory. Well so the consent theory which is one of the major theories that's given for justifying the state's authority sounds convincing because in the abstract it is. We absolutely believe that obligations can arise from consenting to be bound to them. So if I sign a contract with you then I have consented to be bound by the terms of that contract. If I make a promise to you I've consented to be bound by that promise that I've done something morally wrong if I then violate the promise in your trust. So the question is not whether general notions of contract or consent work to give rise to obligations. The question becomes do they work to give rise to the sorts of obligations that the state claims namely obedience and non-competition and taxation. So yes there's a story you can tell of at one point we all lived in a pre-government world a state of nature and we had we call it absolute freedom in a certain sense because there was no government telling us what to do there was no laws we had to follow but it was in Hobbes terms our existence there was solitary poor nasty brutish and short it was not fun and so we decided to get together and we would give up a little bit of this freedom that we had in order to create this thing called government that would then protect our persons protect our property protect our other liberties and in doing so we would benefit our lives would be better but we would agree to obey the laws that this institution created we would agree not to rebel against it so not compete with it and we would agree to support it so that it could continue to operate i.e. pay it taxes and that sounds like a good story but but it's got some obvious problems you know that the first is that i didn't sign any such thing i've never lived in the state of nature and neither have you we we never got when we became citizens of the united states for both of us it was through birth we just happened to be born here we weren't given the option we weren't showing the terms of the contract so on any very literal sense the story doesn't hold up in terms of like explicitly signing this contract or but what about people who became citizens so the becoming citizens is an interesting case because that looks more like explicit consent the first it certainly would not apply to most people in this country so that if if that's the way you have to do it then the government they have to pay taxes then that would be only people who became citizens have to pay taxes yeah i mean yeah so i i guess i'm okay with that but that's not how things work and the government certainly doesn't say look if you know if you never got around to signing this thing or you never had the chance then sure we'll we'll lay off and we won't command you when we won't try to tax you so the government steps outside of that limited range of authority but also there's there's an interesting thing about the becoming a citizen that your the social contract is not a contract so it doesn't have you know we both law school you know that contract law requires consideration requires both parties to to have obligations to each other and to give something up if you look at the the oath that a new citizen takes it's all about their obligations to the state the state doesn't give a list of things that it will do in return for them so it's a it's a loyalty oath is there like protection and implied at least a police protection maybe maybe not like medicare or medicaid maybe that's not explicit but i think that at least cops and armies and sort of basic functions sure there's an implied thing but but the explicit term so if we're talking about like the instance where you actually have a contract in front of you and you sign it which is the closest that you know is that becoming a citizen looks like the closest to that version of the social contract the explicit social contract it then that version doesn't look like a contract like like joining a health care a health club yes um there's not like that there's also a problem there's this a line of supreme court cases um that that seem to repudiate that notion of government um i mean i'll i'll toss it over you can give us the facts one of them one that i talk about is castle rock v gonzalez which i'll ask our real attorney yeah that case uh happened uh not far from where i grew up south of dember colorado and a woman who had a protection order against her bad ex-husband uh for her protecting her three her three kids one of these sort of typical restraining orders it said if you come near me or you take take the kids then then state law said that the police shall arrest uh the the person the husband the ex-husband upon him breaching this this restraining order and so she went the husband went to pick up the girls from school i believe is the way it worked and he was driving them around all day calling her and saying very threatening things about what he was going to do to the three kids i think it was three girls and she kept going to the cops and saying the state law says that you shall arrest you you have to arrest my ex-husband upon him violating this restraining order so do it and the cops said well what do you think they'd say they said okay well we have other priorities well we'll get around to it at some point uh they didn't you know they she said oh he's over downtown dember he just called me and they're like you know i'm sure he'll come back i'm sure that he'll he'll bring the girls back well the next morning he showed up at the police department and committed suicide by cop at which point they found the three girls dead in his car she brought the case to the supreme court on the theory that the police had denied her police protection that had been commanded by the colorado state legislator that they shall arrest him upon violating this restraining order and she said you've denied me my life liberty of property my property without due process of law and your obligation as police and the supreme court held seven to two that the police have no obligation of that sort more specifically that the legislator can't command the police to do things in a specific order or to put priorities in a specific way mainly the sort of famous conclusion that was written is that shell means may in this situation so she didn't have in some way she didn't have the ability to enforce the law herself if she would have gone and dragged the guy back to the police department she could have been guilty of at the very least like the tort of false imprisonment or kidnapping and the police didn't enforce the law either so what happened with this obligation the state has to protect you right so this looks like so she we can presume that she had more or less obeyed the law as most of her life that she had not tried to set up competing governments and that she had paid her taxes so it looks like she had fulfilled the terms of her side of the social contract and if the social contract were a genuine contract the state would have obligations on its side too and you know the government does all sorts of things but if nothing else protecting your you from violence is I mean that's the story we give for social contracts the very beginning and so for the government to then say well no you know we don't we don't really have an obligation to do this most basic of functions that we exist for looks like repudiating the contract or saying it's not a contract in a meaningful sense in the first place and and it certainly is not the case then that the government then responded but okay because we in this case absolutely failed to protect your rights and to protect the the welfare of your children we're going to consider this thing null and void right like no they they still expect her to obey them and to pay them so but but they owe the they owe it they owe police protection to everyone I mean that that would be the not maybe that's sort of the ruling of another case called Warren versus District of Columbia which is a DC court of appeals case that the police don't owe any specific person police protection but they owe the people police protection doesn't that satisfy the contract I don't see how because the the government has is very specific that it's you that owe it these duties and obligations and taxes and so if you can't you can't get out of a contract by if you sign a contract with your with your health club to pay them 50 bucks a month for access to their services but they routinely kick you out of that health club or they routinely you know like you go in and they just go around turning off the various machines that you want to use but let other people use them and then you reply you say like well you've violated the terms of our contract they're like no no no we're our contract is you know to give access to a health club to the people in general that's not going to fly so so the the point is not that therefore there's no such thing as political obligations it's that the specific case of it being a social contract doesn't look like it works for the government here but but I want to bring up that there's another way that we could get to this which would be implicit consent that gets around the I didn't sign this thing angle yeah so if you you stayed here you'll be living in the United States you accept the services you do all the stuff so right so that the the analogy here is you know you walk into a restaurant and you sit down and you order food you didn't you didn't sign a contract when you walked in saying you know in exchange for service I will pay the bill but it's it's implied in your actions your actions indicate that you agreed to be bound by these terms namely at the end of the meal they'll bring a check and you need to pay it and so all of us you know if we we live within this country we use its services I rode the public transit in this morning and so are these the kinds of things that indicate a general acceptance of of the terms of the contract and here again the I think the answer is unsurprisingly no and part of that is because in order to have these implicit actions indicate consent there needs to have been a genuine choice in play like you know so if you were if you were forced at gunpoint to sit down at that restaurant table and order food you wouldn't then say you know you okay you've agreed to the terms of the contract because you didn't have you didn't have a meaningful choice so I have this David Hume in a in an essay he wrote on the called on the social contract he he made this point about the implicit consent argument he said can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country when he knows no foreign language or manners and lives from day to day by the small wages which he acquires so the point here is that it is really hard to leave your country in some cases it's it's legally very hard to leave your country some some cases actually just illegal like North Korea for example yes or or they they'll charge you an arm and a leg they actually I think it's something like $1,600 to renounce their citizenship to the United States yes so so those are those are instances you know there's those are state imposed barriers but it's also the case like your country is the culture that you know it's the language that you know it's where your family is your friends are your your support networks it's where you have been employed where you've built up a career so leaving it would be extremely costly and whether that rises to the level of impossibility so that your choice to stay is not a meaningful choice may differ from person to person some of us have access to resources that would make it easier than others but but we can't just say like it's not as simple as saying look well you chose to stay here so therefore you're bound but isn't the costiness of of giving up these leave the country giving up these social support networks job or things like that isn't that just saying that the the government the state has provided you with a lot and that's why it's costly so you so you received a ton of benefits from the state I think it would be hard to argue that most of the costliness is on account of state benefits so my family is not a state benefit my friends are not state benefits my career is not a state benefit but all these entities Kato exists in a system of laws and benefited by the property laws of the District of Columbia and by the utilities of the District of Columbia and your children benefit by the schools of Arlington and all of these things so they're mixed up with benefits of the state yes but that's just an argument for how widespread the state's reach is it's you know that the a protection racket in a city could make a similar claim that you know we look all the businesses are paying us this protection money and because of that you know that we have a certain structure in place and you haven't been robbed and so you've now consented because you've been embedded in this system like saying that there is a system is not the same thing as saying that like every last piece of it is legitimate or has power although the that question of benefits does come up in one of the the later theories it's just not really related to explicitly consent I do want to touch on one really one last point on consent before we move on to the next one which I think is important which is if if consent consent is something so I have consented to a set of terms to a set of rules right that are at least like sufficiently knowable yes I mean maybe not every explicit rip all contracts have but at least you know somewhat knowable yes and and that's how consent works in our everyday lives you know like you tell me like do you agree to do this and I say yes but if say I make a promise to you to I'm gonna I'm gonna stop by and feed your pets because you're out of town okay and so I've consented to do that I now have an obligation to show up three times well you're out of town if I then show up and you're like oh and by the way I also need you to mow my lawn and take out the trash and also run some errands and I'm going to I'm actually going to be out of town for an extra six weeks and need you to do all of that like you've that's not what I agreed to right so when we agree to things contractually there's a set of terms and there's a length of the agreement the agreement doesn't perpetuate forever and if the terms change like some some little bits of change might be acceptable but but if it changes significantly then we consider the agreement is now null right so the government changes the terms of the social contract all the time without my consent and often against my wishes and it seems to last forever right and there's no way for me to say okay I don't agree to that because that wasn't in the original agreement or I you know that was so long ago so that's another example of how this agreement we have the state doesn't look like a contract before totally moving on from consent I did want to spend more time because I think it's the most predominant theory but I also what about voting so we talked about citizenship we talked about becoming a citizen we talked about the options available to you but what every time you vote in an election is that sort of reupping the justification of the government doing things to you voting would seem to give rise to consent in some instances if if we get together if we friends 10 of us get together we're going to go out to dinner we're trying to decide where to go and we say well let's put it to a vote and I want Chinese food and three of us end up voting for Chinese food but six of the group ends up voting for Italian food it would be at the very least kind of uncouth for me to then stamp my feet and say well I'm not going to go and throw a fit and go home that voting seems like a a way to settle those kinds of differences in a legitimate way so the question is is it the same sort of apply to the state and I think the answer is no first many of us well first there's a lot of people in this country who can't vote but are still bound by its laws whether you know a lot of the case felons have their right to vote stripped from them and we can't say well they committed a crime and therefore they don't have because it's if nothing else that's circular children immigrants yeah but but also many of us vote defensively so we think that all the options are bad and wouldn't consent to any of them but we you know we know we're going to suffer through one of them so it might as well be the least worst one but that doesn't seem like consenting I mean that would be you know that the mugger says your money or your life he's given you a choice and you vote on it that you haven't consented to the outcome and and then of course our vote your vote doesn't really have any impact whatsoever it's won among millions and so you didn't really you didn't consent to the outcome because the outcome would have been the same whether you participated or not let's move on then to a some one of the other general theories of political obligation as of course philosophers have been talking about this for a while so so they have kind of itemized them out and and but I think a lot of our listeners and people who are objecting to this entire conversation are probably thinking about with some of these one of them is fair play which I think H. L. L. Hart did one of the versions of that but but you write it down in our little outline is if we benefit from a cooperative scheme we need to abide by its rules or we're just free writing and that I think a lot of people feel that too about why they should obey the government what's wrong with that government if the government is just another word for the things we do together then we've all gotten together we have you know sacrificed in certain ways so as citizens we've people have paid taxes they've given up their time sometimes they've given up their lives defending the country it's it's a big cooperative enterprise and if I have benefited from it so I went to public schools I you know was protected by police so on then I have an obligation to kind of repay or otherwise I'd be free writing you know so if the neighborhood gets together to have a potluck and everyone brings food but I don't and I show up and just eat food that everyone else brought there seems to be something wrong with doing that so it would be unfair of me to take advantage of the sacrifices of other people this is another one where clearly that the concept of it can give rise to obligations but the question is is does it give rise specifically to the kinds of obligations that the state asks for Robert Nozick had a an objection to this which was that in order for fair play to come into play the benefits need to be accepted not merely received so if the benefits are forced upon you or you never had a choice in accepting them in the first place then we wouldn't say that you now have an obligation to repay them you know maybe maybe like it would be a nice thing to do but you certainly can't be forced to and and the government looks very much like that kind of setup so the the benefits that the government gives me I didn't really have a choice about receiving I didn't have an option of a different police force I in in many cases the the services the government provides not only does it provide them but it it monopolizes them it doesn't allow other people to come in and and provide alternative services so I'm I'm embedded in this system I'm embedded in this geographical area that is run by the state and again unless I unless I can move out of it I I don't have a way to avoid these a lot of these services and a lot of these benefits would the same objection exist for occasionally you see these hit pieces on libertarians where they write something like Mr. Libertarian goes to his job at the Cato Institute and on the way he uses public roads and stop signs and stop lights and benefits from and Cato is protected by the public fire department I think that we did have a fire alarm a few years ago and someone did tweet that it was funny that Cato was waiting for the fire department that seems to be kind of benefits that we receive is that is it the same objection applied to this what you just said about is we didn't accept them or are we accepting them by using them so we we've received them whether we accepted them would hinge on whether we had a choice about receiving them or a choice about using them at all so the roads you know I it would be quite difficult for me to get from my home in northern Virginia to my office here at Cato in the District of Columbia without using state provided means I there's there's the metro and there's roads I could like but that would be sidewalks this sounds like that guy who built his own toaster yeah it would just be this like game he'd be like all right Aaron like we like maybe some very extreme libertarians would try and figure out how to do this but it might be impossible it might be impossible and I could I could telecommute but even then I would be using other infrastructure that was provided by the state so it's it's impossible to avoid it well seems to be related to one of the episodes we did on on a concept that I've termed the statrics because you have to think about how the state has made the alternatives not exist at least in so far as competing if you wanted to start a private road business or many many other private supply supply schools things like this you have to compete against the state which has privileges that you do not as a private business so you can so they can subsidize so it as a result of that if those things do exist there they're many of them are crowded out right by the state so then then you look around you say look at all the benefits of the state and it's and it's also it's not just that there isn't a choice is that the state made there be less choice on top of that yes and a lot of these objections we're making now are quite similar if not the same to the objections to implicit consent theories but there's there's another problem with the fair play thing which is if it does let's let's stipulate that it does give rise to obligations that I do need to play fair that this was a genuine cooperative scheme that I did accept these benefits instead of merely receiving them that still leaves open the the question of okay I've so now I have some sort of obligation to this this thing called the government well there's or I have some sort of obligation so there's there's two problems the first is who are those obligations to because the people who sacrificed to give me all of these benefits were not the members of the government they were my fellow citizens my fellow taxpayers so it would seem that my obligation is to them which would mean maybe the way to discharge that would be through paying for supporting government programs maybe it's also you know starting a business that employs lots of people or starting a private school that gives scholarships to poor children there are lots of ways that I could discharge that that aren't to the government and then second those obligations it's not clear that those obligations that the way we repay them the way that I repay the sacrifice my fellow Americans made in paying for roads say is by obedience non-competition and taxation you know maybe it's taxation maybe maybe like I have to pay back but but why you know if at the potluck my obligation is to pay is to bring food it's not to obey the commands of the other people at the potluck and to agree to never set up my own potluck on the other side of town so so again the obligation there may be obligations here but the specific ones that the state demands don't seem to arise from fair play you have listed here a different theory of political obligation which is called gratitude but is that much different than fair play what it is that you you should be grateful for all you have gained from the state I mean again what this should pops in my head right now because a lot of these things we're talking about can be should also be thought about in context of something like North Korea just because we're talking about general political obligation so maybe one thing we should be talking about is not right now I mean adding into the conversation but more as a political and our political conversations is you know if something sustains America's legitimacy does it also sustain North Korea's legitimacy because you can make all these arguments about North Korea you could say oh they get so much from the state and that they do get a few bags of rice and starving and then so I'm listening here I'm like and they don't tend to leave and they don't tend to leave and they probably don't want to leave because they don't know so what sort of is that does that challenge the view of legitimacy but yeah so I was thinking about that when I read this line we have all gained from the state I was like that sounds like something North Korea would tell you so you should be have gratitude of the great leader but aside from going in America we have gained to some extent is this different than a fair play so it's it's different than fair play in that it attempts to get around the accepting receiving distinction and problem for fair play so gratitude says look because you have used these things whether you accepted them or merely received them you should feel a sense of gratitude to those who provided them to you and then the sense of gratitude turns into an obligation to repay that debt so you know if you you're in a car accident your unconscious and someone comes by and hauls you out before the car burns you should feel a sense of gratitude to that person even though you were in no position to accept or reject the help now so that that it seems to have solved that problem with fair play but but a lot of these same objections apply so why would it give rise to the sorts of obligations that the state demands so why would it give rise to obedience you know the person helps you out of the car maybe you have to you should take them out to dinner but you shouldn't you know they can't just start issuing you commands that you then have an obligation to obey is that like Chewbacca's life debt yeah so Chewbacca's life debt is a good example of you know Han Solo saves Chewbacca um in some way we'll find out in 2018 like Han Solo movie but um and so Chewbacca pledges to you know be Han's companion and to help him out and protect him um so that's you know it's a debt of gratitude that he doesn't have pledged to obey him does he I assume not I'm not sure it doesn't seem like obedience is a strong suit of Chewbacca I agree but you know so I mean this is again it's a theory like gratitude is a real thing and the obligations that arise from gratitude are a real thing but just like fair play the questions remain of even if you have a debt are obedience non-competition and taxation the the way that you discharge that debt uh and also who do you owe that debt to you know do you should feel gratitude to the government agents or should you feel gratitude to the your fellow citizens who supported this stuff um and finally like there's there's the issue of you know we at the Cato Institute spend a lot of our time pointing out the ways that government makes things worse um and and if government especially has its non-competition thing so it's keeping out what we would say are frequently better solutions that would be cheaper more effective less dangerous so on and so forth then yes we may have benefited but overall we might be worse off now than if the government were smaller or different in some way or it were a different government entirely so that starts to complicate the gratitude narrative there's the great uh Harry Brown quote which is the government is good at one thing it knows how to break your legs hand you a crutch and then say see if it wasn't for us you wouldn't be able to walk which seems to make that a problem now another uh theory of why we owe things to the state is association which maybe we've kind of touched on to a little bit which which is the we're all Americans um this is a thing called America you're part of it it's a ongoing endeavor so you need to obey American laws as part of this thing called America right so this one this one is it's like all the others you can analogize it to non-political life and it seems to make sense like if you are part of your local church or synagogue say it may have rules or traditions and being a member of that organization means obeying those rules or respect and respecting those traditions so does does the government work in a similar way you know you you're a member of a family and being a member of a family means having certain sorts of relationships to each other you know often you have to respect and obey your parents and so on but the so the question is is the government that sort of thing and I think that no I think that one of the problems with association is yes we're all Americans and there's something called America and we're part of this but that's not the same thing as the Department of Justice right like government is not America or the the Raisin Administrative Committee which is which is a New Deal agricultural program the Raisin Administrative Committee is also not America no so that so America would be America if the government was had different rules or better rules or fewer of them so that it's they're not the same thing we can't we can't conflate society and state but but also there's some real concerns with the the consequences of an associational account which is namely if if government is America if obeying government is if obeying the American government is part of what it means to be an American then it's not clear where the limits are I'm here in some North Korea in this that some just extreme obedience extreme obedience is required if on a purely associational account there would be no meaningful way to say that crosses the line that no the government you know doesn't have the authority to do that because it's it's America and you know this is who you are and you obey it you know so it's that that's pretty scary from the North Korea example it's also I think there's there's cause for concern because our our feelings of association can be misleading you know so the the government is very good at making us feel like it represents America it's like half they spend pretty much half their time telling us that so they you know the the pageantry of it the the symbolism of it you know there's it's not it's not a coincidence that the buildings throughout Washington DC look the way they do look as imposing and the classical architecture I mean it's it's meant to make the government seem really important really significant and part of a long tradition that is America and and so we know that your feelings of association can be manipulated we know that they can be you can have to to use a god awful term false consciousness you can see it so North Koreans you know who think that like clearly their government is illegitimate but because it's a slave state but a lot of them feel I mean they've effectively been brainwashed you know we see this with members of cults you know the cult leaders can be very good at convincing you that they have authority over you and that you are part of something bigger than yourself and I'm not saying that the United States is a cult but but just that the we should be willing to examine those feelings of association and willing to say you know how much of this is legitimate how did I arrive at these feelings are am I being not manipulated but you know have I been influenced in certain ways public schools for example sure lots of allegiances things like this and that and I think the north korea examples it's bring it up again it's good because I think it challenges people as we said at the beginning of this episode to take these questions seriously because actually the best argument against North Korea is not that it has bad policies I mean those are good arguments is that it is a completely illegitimate criminal organization that is claiming authority that it does not have and oppressing people based on this claimed authority and so people would would analyze the legitimacy of North Korea's government in a similar way we're doing now they would do they would say well they consented and they said well no they never really had a choice and it only matters if you meaningfully have a choice there's like oh well they were born there it's like yeah but they couldn't they couldn't have been born anywhere else they they didn't become citizens they they they participated in the process somehow and then they would say well you know but they receive benefits yeah but they're brainwashed they don't really have any choice and so they would fully delegitimize North Korea but then you get over to America and do these same arguments apply so I think it's a it's a good it's a good foil for talking about these in a in a good way yeah now there's another possibility which is the state is legitimate because it fulfills some other moral quality so you have this listed as a natural duty argument it's just it's it's somehow moral by itself so in so far as being moral it takes your obligation because it more things that are moral should receive your obligation your obedience yeah so so we clearly have there's morality outside of the state outside of politics and that you know we have we have moral obligations that exists simply by nature of us being humans who live in relationship with other humans and and so the the question here is do those calling pre-existing moral obligations are they what gets us to the the authority of the state and there are various ways that we might argue for that so one that I want to set aside really quickly because it it might it might look promising but I think it's it's not quite on point is you know when the state says you shouldn't murder there's a law against murder that you know you have an obligation to obey the state and therefore we've we've solved the obligation problem that no because the the reason that you shouldn't murder is because you shouldn't murder and the state has a law against murder but that's not what makes murder wrong and in fact if the state had no law against murder it would still be wrong and if the state for whatever reason legalized murder it would still be wrong so you would have an obligation to disobey the state yes in that regard yes so so that doesn't get us to that's not quite political obligation and and and quite a lot of the laws on the books are simply just statements of pre-existing moral obligations most of them certainly are not but but there's some other arguments that might be more promising so one might be a utilitarian account so utilitarianism we've talked about in the show before says you know the right thing to do the morally proper thing to do in any when you have face a moral choice is to basically add up the consequences of the various options so how much happiness or how much pleasure how much utility will be created by your various options and then your obligation is to do whichever one of them creates the most utility so if if having a state and having and obeying the state so maximizes utility then that's your obligation is to is to obey it you know and so that would go back to our social contract like if you know not having a state is really bad the solitary poor nasty brutish and short then having one is morally good and we should support it i think one of the the problems with that one is it's it would seem to say we should only support it when it maximizes utility and there's a lot of reason to think that many if not most of the things that governments do do not in fact maximize utility that we do better off if more people refused to obey those laws refused to pay for those programs so it's it doesn't seem to get us to the kind of blanket obligation that states demand of us there's the other one is that we we have an obligation to obey just institutions so this is this argument goes that we we have a there's a pre-existing duty to behave justly and to support that's just a moral duty it's just a moral duty to behave you know i need to be just in my own life and in my dealings with others and i need to support justice out there in the world and support institutions that are seeking to promote or are promoting justice and and so if if the government is a just institution and is promoting justice then i have an obligation to at the very least not interfere with it but to also support it in that mission of promoting justice in the world this one i think has again a number of problems one is that no government is perfectly just so they certainly wouldn't apply to north korea and it wouldn't apply to a great many of the things the united states government does and so we get in a weird situation where should i only do i only have an obligation to support those parts of either those states or those parts of the state that are just which maybe but that's not again the blanket obligation so you know that police and prosecutors and the dea are pretty convinced that i have an obligation to comply with or support or not interfere with the war on drugs even though the war on drugs is monstrously unjust well maybe it's just that when you said that no government is perfectly just and i think you could make an argument that yes but they strive toward justice like we have a court system with error correction method methods that we acknowledge will produce unjust outcomes due to the very nature of human fallibility but but it's trying so you have a duty to support institutions that are at least attempting to achieve justice perhaps but i think it would be it would be a stretch for a lot of the things that governments do to say that these are well-meaning and genuine attempts to achieve justice we could we could point to all sorts of things that the state does and go back to the war on drugs is not a well-meaning attempt to support justice i think that we could we could agree that a lot of things that our new administration has done and the the people who operate within it many of them are not well-meaning advocates for justice so again we we would have to pick and choose effectively there there's also the problem here that if our duty is to justice it's not so it's not to the it's not to the government right it's to you know the government is merely the means by which we happen to be promoting justice then it would seem that we would have an obligation then to promote justice in whatever means is a most is most effective not simply to promote justice via the existing government and so in a situation like north korea where the state is is everything but just it would seem this would say you have an obligation to effectively rebel to violate the non-competition to try to establish actually just institutions and we probably we could accept that with north korea like yes but but then given that no state is perfectly just including our own it would mean that we would have an obligation to seek out alternatives if we can find them if we can enable them which again the state is going to deny us it's going to say like look yes you know you can't you can't like be supporting me but at the same time be trying to establish a new regime that's going to be more just a new set of institutions that are going to be more just because that's that's rebellion well it's it's odd because it almost a proper view of this argument I think would would have you um trying to create just institutions as you said rebellion against some of them but it would definitely wouldn't have you just kowtowing to a monopoly on the use of force in a geographic area it certainly doesn't get us to it might get us to something where it's like I obey this because it's just and then if that's the only problem we have then it doesn't the fact that it's a state or not or it's called a state doesn't seem really to matter because it's just a just thing so you should you should obey justice and follow justice that's a good thing we can call it the state or not but your your obligations are to justice as you said right and and your then your obligations start to whatever institutions in whatever form with whatever labels are best or most efficient at promoting justice exactly so where does it get us I mean we talked about this at the beginning we've gone through a lot of the classic arguments for political obligation and I imagine that most of our listeners are probably not convinced about this still which I which I understand or at least they practically think that it's it might be interesting in the abstract but practically they're going to go obey the state what where does this get us what do we what what have we learned about how to approach both a political philosophy and and but also be just looking at politics in our daily lives yeah so I mean one one answer to that which is not mine would be if the state if we've now demonstrated that the state's authority is not justified then we need to abolish it and have political anarchism which be the absence of a government that that would be the only way to you know if enforcing its authority because it's not justified is immoral we need to stamp out immorality and therefore I am skeptical of that I'm not an outright political anarchist um and and I feel that way because I think going back to the kind of utilitarian case or the social contract case that I'm I'm not convinced that in terms of its just straight outcomes political anarchism would actually be better for people in their everyday lives than some sort I mean right at least right now right now yes like it I think if we if we smash the state tomorrow things would get pretty bad so and that that keeping things from getting pretty bad is another one of our obligations another one of our moral duties there can be conflicting things here so we have to trade them off it's not a perfect world so in other words it's like if we're going to bring about mad max and then maybe 200 years after that we'll have a nicely organized anarchistic society we might have to also make account for the fact that we put people through 200 years of mad max and the pain and suffering of that yes but so another possible thing is we could say like we might dispute that these are that the arguments against each of these five theories are quite as incisive as I made them out to be and say no I think these theories or at least some overlapping version of multiple of them gets us to something and I might grant that but but even if we grant it it seems that they would at best get us to a very minimal state that that these accounts would get us to something that looks closer to nosics minimal state than it does to the expansive say federal government that we have today that most of what it does is not justified by any or all of these theories but but I think the all of those are like practical like you know okay so given this what sort of world should we institute but but I think the really important thing to draw from this line of thinking is more of a an approach to thinking about what government what our government does going forward and this is to say that look if most of what the state is doing is not on strong moral grounds and can't quite the powers it exercises can't quite be justified be fully legitimate then we should be at least skeptical of what it does we should see it we should not be we shouldn't venerate it and hold it up as you know the highest achievement of of the human mind that it's it's effectively a necessary evil but a necessary evil is still an evil even if only a little and we should be wary of that and so going forward we should be checking it at every instance we should be shifting the burden so that when it claims a new power we should say why do you get to exercise that new power what is the value in that new power you know like you're a lot of your powers I don't they're not as firmly grounded as you think they are and so you need to have a really good reason why I'm willing to put up with and why we should all agree to a little bit more authority exercised over us and then recognizing I think the final step is if we recognize that at some level you know the state exists because we weren't good enough to live without one if we were all morally perfect we wouldn't need it right so if it exists for that then it's in part a failing of us that we need this thing and and so we should always be working to be better and we should always be working to move the world in a direction where we need it less and less thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org