Not paying what you owe is a form of theft. Should one try to steal from the federal government in order to “redirect” the money to effective charities? Like the idea of “stealing to give” 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 don’t 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 can’t 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 shouldn’t 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 “redirect” the money to effective charities? Like the idea of “stealing to give” 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 can’t 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 shouldn’t 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.