Every argument I've heard for redistributive taxation, but applied to organs, sex, and sports
When it's your body, taxation is theft, paternalism is creepy, and in sports, performance is all that matters.
I’ve never met a utilitarian with a conservative political agenda. Which is weird when you think about it because, well… read on.
Step 1: A world in which abortion is illegal will have greater fertility.
Step 2: Greater fertility leads to overwhelmingly positive utilitarian consequences, even compared to the loss in happiness to unwanting mothers. (Most people have kids, whose kids have kids, whose kids have kids, causing an exponential cascade of increasing utility in the long-run. Add to that the findings from turn-away studies, which find that most women who are prevented from getting an abortion end up happy with having had a child.*)
Conclusion: So, on utilitarianism, one should be pro-life.
Step 1: An anti-gay culture leads to greater fertility (in the harsh world of the early 20th century, gay people had to maintain heterosexual unions for appearances' sake and sire offspring.)
Step 2: Greater fertility leads to overwhelmingly positive utilitarian consequences, even compared to the loss in happiness to gay people (again, because of the exponential growth of humans resulting from reproduction, compounding through the generations into the indefinite future).
Conclusion: So, on utilitarianism, one should oppose gay rights.
Now, you could just be a libertarian like me and say we have a right to liberty even if it conflicts with the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But in my experience utilitarians change their empirical beliefs to accommodate their moral intuitions, whereas deontologists just change their moral beliefs. So, I know better than to proceed without tackling the usual objections.
My point is relevant because most people are net-positive utility receptacles: Happiness surveys find most people are happier than not, glad to be alive all things considered, etc. Before you complain that most happiness data is self-reported, note that self-reported happiness is correlated with how often people smile and laugh, how happy a person appears to their peers, and how much baseline activity is found in the the expected regions of the brain associated with pleasure and reward in neuroimaging. Also: when it comes to something so subjective as happiness, is there really a better judge than oneself? Who would that be?
And anyway, the average value of a marginal life is estimated to be something to the tune of $15 million in the West, reflecting a positive contribution to the economy. You could object that we will someday max out our population size anyway, and so it doesn’t make a difference whether we do it sooner or later, but there’s two problems with this objection: First, how soon we grow the population does matter, because the more years we have a larger happy population, the more utility. Second, fertility rates are currently nearing below-replacement levels in the developed world, so it's far from clear at all that the global population will inevitably reach the maximum size permitted by Earth’s resources.
Robin Hanson is fond of arguing that most people are libertarians about sex, where usual arguments for wealth redistribution, paternalism, and exploitation go to die.
Wealth Redistribution: the sexual marketplace is full of natural disadvantages and undeserved windfalls. We could redistribute (financial) wealth to "correct for" these disadvantages (not in kind, but in degree), but liberals are disgusted by this idea. Before you say, “we only support redistribution for the sake of ensuring mere survival,” consider social security, which grants the richest segment of our society, the elderly, financial payouts—and, in a regressive way. The rich spend more time getting educated and therefore pay into the system for fewer years, and they enjoy a greater life expectancy, allowing them to collect the benefits for a greater number of years.
Paternalism: Even if we could force people to marry the people who they would be better off marrying, most liberals think we shouldn't forcibly arrange marriages (in fact, I'm told there's evidence that arranged marriages do surprisingly well, but good luck convincing a Western liberal to paternalistically control marital rights by appealing to the goodness of the outcomes.)
Here are a few examples of paternalism that are widely endorsed: forcibly treating and warehousing schizophrenics, drug addicts, and suicidal people. The justifications usually go something like this:
1) If one’s preferences are irrational, then we should force them to behave in alignment with their rational preferences, or with preferences they ought to have. (Objection: would we do this in the case of people pursuing hopeless careers unadvisedly? Or a romantic partner who is bad for them? Or in excessively eating fast food? Or joining a high-cost religious group? Assume that this would increase utility and result in more happiness for these individuals.)
2) If people who do X are analogous to children doing X, and we would prevent children from doing X, then we should prevent people from doing X. (Insert for “X” not getting an education, not eating healthy food, doing hard drugs, dating the wrong partner, spending two years pursuing an utterly hopeless career aspiration.) Maybe this argument sounds more promising, but I still find it troubling.
How analogous are we prepared to say the typical adult is to a child, and how much like one’s parents do we think the rest of society stands in relation to us? How reliable is the government as an arbiter of which adults are just being responsibly irresponsible, and which ones are the man-children?
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a world with only eight people, Parents 1 and 2, their five children, and Bob. Bob is a competent adult who mostly just keeps to himself down the road. The parents are blind, and are therefore fallible judges of who is or isn’t their child. Just assume for the purposes of the example that more utilitarian good would be done if everyone just adopted the blanket policy “obey the parents,” rather than by relying on the parents to differentiate the children from Bill, because under the rule of the Parents, most of the world population (which consists primarily of actual children) thrive, and because most people (generally being children) aren’t competent to judge whether they specifically count as mature enough to make their own decisions.
Bill longs to live a normal life, but Parents 1 and 2 beat him into submission. He waits for their permission to go to bed each night, receives a swift spanking when he forgets to brush his teeth, etcetera. Even if paternalism maximizes utility in this world, does Bob really have a moral obligation to subject himself to this undignified insanity?
(While I’m at it, Jason Brennan makes the interesting point that paternalism and democracy have conflicting rationales: “because people are dumb, the state should push them around for their own good; however, those same dumb people should have power over others” by means of the ballot box. It’s certainly worth pondering.)
Exploitation: Leftists are fond of arguing that because the bargaining position of workers and employers is uneven, the competitive outcome of a salary negotiation is bound to be exploitative. Bryan Caplan points out that, strangely, no one thinks Channing Tatum would necessarily be "exploiting" an unattractive working-class single mother just because he has a lot more to offer than most people, even though they hardly enjoy equal bargaining circumstances.
Bootstrapping Meritocratic “Just-Pull-Your-Shit-Together-ism”: I took a political philosophy class in which we discussed Robin Hanson’s infamous blog post exploring the surprising similarities between violent movements for wealth equality and incels. The argument that won the room against Hanson’s satirical proposal that we redistribute wealth in order to offset the disadvantages of being repulsive to the opposite sex was the most libertarian thing I had ever heard. In a stroke of soaring rhetoric, some guy who identified as a Marxist says, more eloquently than I can recreate it here, “They should just take responsibility for their sex appeal and hit the gym.
And even if they’re so ugly they can’t help it, why should it be my burden to make up the difference financially for their sake? Am I supposed to be his slave?” without a sense of irony. You’ll just have to take my word for that one, or ask someone to who supports wealth redistribution beyond what would alleviate our bare needs to explain what they think is wrong with Hanson’s proposal.
Understanding the Libertarian Critique of Wealth Redistribution:
When liberal political theorists talk about “society,” what they really mean is the people within the nation state in which they happen to live. It’s so unfair to be poor in America—let’s take money from the rich and put it where it will do the most good… the American elderly and American single mothers.
As Bryan Caplan put it in his debate with Peter Singer,
Singer argues for a moral obligation for First Worlders to help Third Worlders, and people twist it into a moral obligation for the global super-rich to help the global rich.
Why wouldn’t we redistribute wealth to the people who actually need it the most—namely, the global poor? I’ve never heard a persuasive argument for this. What do the American poor, or the wealthy elderly, have on starving Haitians and Nigerians infected with malaria in terms of any moral complaint—fairness, hardship, injustice? The typical targets of American wealth redistribution are hardly the most morally desirable.
Liberals often complain that Elon Musk is a monster because he doesn’t give up his billions for the sake of the American lower class. At the same time, the typical lefty lives a life of relative luxury when compared with the rest of the world, and is not moved to part with their nonessential income for their sake. Is this hypocritical?
You may suggest that because wealth has declining marginal utility, Elon Musk is guilty of an even greater sin. The more money you have, the less it can make you better off in terms of happiness. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and the same is true, after all, of your kidneys: you don’t need both, but even if we could painlessly confiscate people’s organs, a liberal is unlikely to support such a utilitarian scheme.
It’s often thought that wealth inequality is unfair because the market rewards traits we don’t choose to have: many people are born into wealth, status, a well-connected social network, and natural talents. But when Serena and Venus Williams claim that they couldn’t have succeeded without the tireless support of their father, who found them their coaches, people hardly decide that they don’t deserve their success or think the awards of a tennis match should go to the most disadvantaged candidate rather than the highest performer.
It’s worth noting that if we say that in order to deserve anything, you have to be responsible for everything leading up to your having it, then no one deserves anything, because no one caused the Big Bang. When a kid organizes a drive for charity, don’t clap for them: they don’t deserve it. What an ugly attitude that is!
Whatever your theory of desert, I don’t think it obviously follows that if people don’t deserve their wealth, they therefore deserve to have it taken from them. But anyway, you can be entitled to something that you don’t deserve; if a friend gives you a watch as a gift, not as an award for your virtue, is it okay for me to snatch it away and give it to the homeless because they “deserve” it more? If not, then perhaps the same is true of the inheritance of wealth by non-deserving children.
More arguments for Wealth Redistribution:
Here are a few more rationales for taxing one’s income that apply equally to your body parts:
“You wouldn’t have that but for the government”
“You’re better off because of the government”
“Your utility diminishes at the margin”
“You didn’t earn that”
“You don’t deserve to have that”
“You accepted benefits from the government”
“Redistributing your income could be done in such a way that it would lead to good consequences”
Lacking money is largely a result of unfair or unfortunate initial circumstances
The basic idea behind libertarianism is what’s known to political philosophers as the thesis of moral parity: something that would otherwise be a rights violation if done by an individual doesn’t become okay just because the government does it; rather, the government has to pass the same moral tests as private actors do in order to be acting in the right.