Not paying what you owe is a form of theft. Should one try to steal from the federal government in order to āredirectā the money to effective charities? Like the idea of āstealing to giveā more generally, it seems like one of those questions that could be fun to ponder in a philosophy seminar room (we can surely imagine some thought experiments in which this would seem justified), but that seems like a terrible idea to encourage in practice.
In particular, I think the following key passage implicitly places the burden of proof in the wrong place:
I donāt have a knock-down argument for why this critique is incorrect; I just find it too speculative and abstract to outweigh the more concrete, dollars-and-cents case in favor of [stealing to give].
I think the opposite. I canāt give a knock-down argument for why the naive utilitarian case for stealing-to-give is incorrect in any given instance (other than the simple expectational result of averaging over the commonsense belief that most such norm-breaking is likely to prove counterproductive, and we shouldnāt believe ourselves to be the exception without exceptionally strong evidence). But I think we should have a very strong prior against such uncooperative, anti-social norm-breaking.
Not paying what you owe is a form of theft. Should one try to steal from the federal government in order to āredirectā the money to effective charities? Like the idea of āstealing to giveā more generally, it seems like one of those questions that could be fun to ponder in a philosophy seminar room (we can surely imagine some thought experiments in which this would seem justified), but that seems like a terrible idea to encourage in practice.
In particular, I think the following key passage implicitly places the burden of proof in the wrong place:
I think the opposite. I canāt give a knock-down argument for why the naive utilitarian case for stealing-to-give is incorrect in any given instance (other than the simple expectational result of averaging over the commonsense belief that most such norm-breaking is likely to prove counterproductive, and we shouldnāt believe ourselves to be the exception without exceptionally strong evidence). But I think we should have a very strong prior against such uncooperative, anti-social norm-breaking.