[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, interview by Non Facies Furtum]
Michael Huemer received his BA from UC Berkeley in 1992 and his PhD from Rutgers University in 1998. He is presently professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of more than 60 academic articles in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and metaphysics, as well as four amazing books that you should definitely buy: Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001), Ethical Intuitionism (2005), The Problem of Political Authority (2013), and Approaching Infinity (2016). As he is a very influential libertarian philosopher active in the Front Range area, we contacted him for an interview and asked several questions related to the philosophy of liberty, and to his work.
FRV: Can you outline your strongest argument for why the state lacks legitimate authority?
MH: We don't need an argument that the state lacks authority. We would need an argument that the state has authority. If there's no reason why the state would be relevantly different from other agents, then we should assume the state is subject to the same moral principles as other agents.
Now, there are several philosophical theories about why the state has authority. I discuss the most important ones at length in The Problem of Political Authority. But none of the theories is any good. All of them either (a) appeal to factually false claims, or (b) appeal to claims that, even if true, simply would not establish anyone's authority. An example of (a) is the claim everybody at some time agreed to establish a state (of course this never happened). An example of (b) would be the claim that a majority of people support the state (if a majority of people want something, that doesn't make that thing right).
I can't fairly present all the theories of authority, nor the problems with them, here. I wrote a 350-page book to do that (among other things), and all of it needs to be read to understand the complete argument. But the basic reason I don't believe in authority is simply that no one has given any good reason why the state would have authority. In brief, no one has told me why 535 people in Washington have the right to tell everyone else what to do. If there was a good answer to that, someone would probably have thought of it by now.
FRV: What do you think is the most practical path to achieving a stateless society?
MH: I don't know. What I am doing is trying to get more people to understand anarcho-capitalism, in the hope that if enough people understand the theory and why it's a good idea, it will eventually come about.
We could move toward anarchy gradually. For example, we could start with local governments outsourcing policing duties to private security guard companies. (Of course, there would need to be a number of competing security companies, and an easy mechanism for citizens to change companies.) Similarly, courts could start referring more cases to private arbitrators. If these experiments went well, they could be expanded, and the government shrunk at the same time.
Of course, this probably would not happen until there was much greater understanding of and support for free markets.
I don't know whether this is the best path. But it's one possible path that seems to me worth considering.
FRV: You have written much on the subject of ethical intuitionism; can you explain this idea, and provide some examples of how applying it to moral situations leads to the conclusion that the state is an immoral institution?
MH: The theory holds that we have intuitive awareness of some objective ethical truths, and this is the basis for the rest of our knowledge of ethics. I've written a book on the subject (Ethical Intuitionism), as well as a number of academic articles. You're basically asking me, "Hey, could you summarize your 300-page book in a couple of minutes?" To which the most accurate answer would be, "No, I can't." There's nothing I could say in a brief space that wouldn't be misleading. (The book is 300 pages because there is a complex set of ideas and arguments that require that amount of space to fairly present.)
But I can give you some examples of the moral problems with the state. One example is about taxation. Suppose that I personally decided to start "taxing" people. I go around to people's houses demanding a cut of their total income, which I plan to use for a charity that I run to help the poor. I threaten to kidnap and imprison my neighbors if they don't give me the money. This would be regarded as clearly wrong, and no one would think they owed me the money. I would be called a thief and an extortionist.
But that is like the government's behavior when it collects taxes. The difference between "extortion" and "taxation" is just that one is done by a private agent, and the other is done by the government.
A second example concerns military intervention. What if I announced, one day, that a certain foreign country might be building weapons of mass destruction, and that they had to be stopped? What if I got a group of friends together, flew to that country, and started shooting people and blowing up buildings, in an effort to change that country's government? Most would consider my behavior wrong even if the foreign government was really bad. I would be labelled a terrorist and a mass murderer.
But this is like the government's behavior when it goes to war. The chief difference between "terrorism" and "war" is, again, that one is done by a private agent and the other is done by the government.
Most people judge extortion much more harshly than taxation, and terrorism much more harshly than war. We're failing to apply to the state the moral standards that we apply to everyone else. But, as my book argues, we have no good reason for this double standard.
Notice that my argument here does not appeal to some abstract, general moral theory, such as utilitarianism, or ethical egoism, or even a theory of natural rights. I am just appealing to common sense moral judgements about particular cases that almost everyone would intuitively accept, regardless of their political orientation. Whether you're a liberal, conservative, libertarian, or something else, you almost certainly think extortion is wrong (when done by someone other than a government). So that seems to me a fair starting point for a political argument.
FRV: What are your strongest arguments against moral relativism?
MH: Moral relativism is commonly understood as the view that what is right or wrong is determined by social conventions, by what society approves or disapproves of. So, for instance, polygamy is wrong in our society because it's against our customs, but it is morally right in most primitive societies.
This view also implies that if society approves of torturing babies for fun, then it's morally right to torture babies for fun. It implies that the people who lived in Nazi Germany were right to persecute Jews, since that was the custom of their society. And that those citizens who tried to save the Jews were actually acting wrongly, because they were defying the customs of their culture. These are absurd conclusions, and we have no reason to believe them.
Most relativists appear to be guilty of an embarrassingly simple confusion: they confuse truth with belief. Thus, they infer from "there are different moral beliefs in different societies" to "there are different moral truths in different societies." The premise does not at all support the conclusion. Once you remove this confusion, there isn't any reason for believing the conclusion.
FRV: Is moral relativism often used to justify state intervention and growth?
MH: I can't recall any examples of that. In fact, some people believe that moral relativism supports less government intervention. They reason that since there are no objective moral truths, we shouldn't impose our values on other people.
Of course, that's an error. If moral relativism is true, it doesn't follow that we shouldn't impose our values on other people. What follows is that we should impose our values on other people if and only if the customs of our society support imposing our values on other people.
FRV: Besides government, what other institutions or practices have you determined to be immoral, that you would like to see done away with?
MH: I think the most immoral thing our society is doing right now is factory farming (the source of almost all the meat you get in stores and restaurants). It inflicts extreme pain and suffering on animals of a sort that, if inflicted on a human, we would certainly call torture.
Why do I say it's the worst practice? Sheer numbers: in one year, we kill about 40 billion animals for food worldwide -- about six times the entire human population of the Earth. In just three years, we kill more animals than the total number of humans who have ever lived.
This makes it plausible that a few years of factory farming causes more suffering than all the suffering human beings have ever endured, from all causes combined, for all of history.
For some reason, most libertarians don't seem to care about this. But I find it hard to see how this isn't the worst problem in the world. You could think that human suffering counts for a thousand times more than animal suffering, and it would still be true that factory farming is the worst practice in the world by far.
FRV: For readers who are interested in reading your work and seeing more of your ideas, which pieces would you recommend starting with, and how can they go about finding your writings?
MH: Search for me on Amazon. I have four books out, all on very different topics, plus a fifth coming in 2018. I suggest starting with the topic you're most interested in. The Problem of Political Authority is the most popular, since it's about politics. I also have some videos, interviews, and articles available online for free.
[We would like to thank Michael Huemer for his responses and contribution to this edition of the Front Range Voluntaryist. His ideas are valuable for their ability to help define an objective system of morality, and they make an excellent introduction to both a truly logical approach to morality and to the fundamental convictions of liberty-oriented thought. Support another Front Range Voluntaryist and check out his work!]