Error

Now, if you own a house, you can demand that other people obey you or leave your house. But the state does not own the country; no one does.

By what authority does such ownership exist? Because at some point, we’re arguing over which social structures (ownership, government, negative rights) are good or bad, and I don’t see much justification to draw the line where you choose to.

I think there are two main appeals to libertarianism. One “practical libertarianism” is based on a belief that on current margins moving towards less government would be beneficial. I’m sympathetic to this position and I think one can hold it for purely consequentialist reasons.

The above argument is “philosophical libertarianism”. I’m not so convinced by these arguments.

On these theories, for example, you wouldn’t be justified in stealing a loaf of bread even to save a starving person’s life.

I think the reason a lot of libertarian theories bite this bullet is that failing to do so seems to be abandoning the alleged reasons for libertarianism. For example, the article argues that one of the common sense reasons why other concepts of government fail is that they seem to imply the government can do things that normal people can’t do, like take people’s property. But we have now just said that actually, it is allowed for normal people, not just governments, to take people’s property if their is a good reason. We could go through an entire sequence of hypotheticals, like can you take money from someone to buy bread if you’re starving? If you aren’t starving but someone else is, can you take money from someone else to buy bread to give it to the starving person? The upshot of that sequence is that if you don’t bite the bullet, then there’s no limiting principle. You’re basically saying redistribution is in fact allowed.

Likewise for the lifeboat example. I don’t see how any principled approach to libertarianism can give the answer that you can threaten the rest of the passengers. That’s literal coercion! If you then engage in the insane terminological gerrymandering where that counts as “self-defense” then so does so much other stuff. Is it “self-defense” if you force a doctor to give you a surgery you can’t afford? None of the desired libertarian conclusions would follow. Especially given that libertarianism also needs to justify why private property is a thing, and most justification I have seen go back to freedom of a person’s labor by way of homesteading. Giving the answer the author seems to give for the lifeboat hypo seems like a massive problem for libertarianism.

This doesn’t support a content-independent entitlement to enforce the state’s rules, nor a content-independent obligation to obey.

I’m not sure why there is a requirement that a theory of government be content-independent. This seems like an arbitrary requirement the author has imposed on theories they don’t favor. Kind of by definition, a consequentialism wouldn’t support a “content-independent” position? But they could still support government based on an expectation about the distribution of government actions they expect to actually be realized. They could also support something like an-cap, for a consequentialist it seems like a modeling/​empirical question (and kind of collapse back to practical libertarianism potentially).

I think there is essentially a moral hypothetical no-free-lunch theorem. No principled moral theory can exist that matches “common sense” intuitions on all hypotheticals. Although I’m open to practical libertarianism, nothing here seems convincing that philosophical libertarianism is the “least bad” option.

Executive summary: In this crossposted introduction to his longstanding argument against political authority, Michael Huemer contends—through accessible moral reasoning rather than complex theory—that no state has a justified, content-independent right to rule, and that belief in such authority is based on weak or incoherent arguments like the social contract, democracy, or utilitarian necessity; instead, he proposes that common-sense morality applied consistently leads to a broadly libertarian skepticism of state coercion.

Key points:

1. The core problem of political philosophy is authority, not policy—specifically, whether any person or institution has the moral right to coerce others in ways that would be impermissible for individuals.

2. The concept of political authority combines two controversial ideas: that the state has moral legitimacy to rule (even when wrong) and that citizens are morally obligated to obey its commands, neither of which Huemer finds defensible.

3. Huemer critiques common justifications for state authority:

   • Social contract theory is factually false (no real or implicit contract exists) and conceptually flawed.

   • Democracy does not legitimize coercion by majority vote, since majority power does not override individual rights.

   • Utilitarian arguments may justify specific coercive actions (e.g. emergency rule to avoid chaos) but not general, content-independent authority.

4. Denying authority does not require full anarchism, but it does mean state power should be treated like any private coercion: only justified when strictly necessary, such as to prevent harm.

5. Libertarianism follows from three claims: coercion is generally wrong, government operates coercively, and governments have no special moral status exempting them from ordinary moral rules.

6. The ‘skepticism of authority’ approach is rhetorically powerful because it aligns with ordinary moral intuitions and shifts the burden of proof to statists, avoiding the need for extreme rights theories or technical economics.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

It seems you have assumed the existence of some rules that don’t necessarily exist in absence of a state to uphold them, such as property or contract law. You can’t use rules that depend on some unspoken authority, to argue against the existence of all authority.

Does all this entail anarchism? Not quite. The above arguments support that no one has a content-independent right to rule over society. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the state should completely stop operating and disband. They shouldn’t do that unless we have some alternative available that would also provide social order and prevent widespread violence.

I just finished reading a rather detailed book about the famous “Amish” and was surprised to realize that they are complete anarcho-pacifists… to the point that neither private property nor economic inequality pose any problem for them when it comes to self-government without coercive authority (and they never resort to litigation in state courts). Their fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs, moreover, don’t seem very different from those of other churches.

The book, unfortunately, doesn’t delve into the possible psychological conditions that allow them to achieve this feat. But their economic system is certainly based more on mutual altruism than on “common sense.” They don’t mind that some have more money than others, but at the same time, they don’t tolerate poverty or precariousness.