7 Against Prisons and Taxes
7.1 Introduction
Governments sometimes do things that are morally questionable, for instance instituting drug laws that disproportionately punish low income and minority groups, or distributing tax dollars to controversial organizations. What I aim to show here is that even some of the most basic and seemingly uncontroversial functions of government are morally questionable. Specifically, I will argue that it is morally wrong for governments to tax or imprison their citizens at all.
In Section 7.2, I advance my argument against taxation and incarceration, which turns on the idea that there is no relevant difference between taxation and extortion, or between imprisoning and kidnapping. In Section 7.3, I consider and dismiss a number of attempts to justify taxes and prisons. In sections 7.4–7.5, I criticize the most promising attempt to resist the argument, according to which we consent to this treatment by entering into a “social contract” with the government. Finally, in Section 7.6, I show how my argument can be adapted to establish that there should be no restrictions on immigration.
7.2 Taxation and Extortion
Maybe it seems obvious to you that the government has every right to imprison and tax its citizens. To begin to see why it’s not so obvious, notice how morally problematic it would be for an ordinary citizen to do more or less the same thing.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that what Jasmine is doing is wrong. When she demands money from her neighbors at gunpoint, that’s called extortion. When she locks her neighbors in her basement, that’s called kidnapping. It is wrong to kidnap people, and it is wrong to extort people, even when it’s for a good cause.
My argument against taxation and imprisonment is going to turn on the idea that there’s no morally relevant difference between what Jasmine does and what the government does. Let me begin by saying something about what that means. Suppose I walk into my house, raid my fridge, sit down on my couch, and flip on my TV. There’s nothing wrong with that. Now suppose that I walk into your house (without permission), raid your fridge, sit down on your couch, and start watching your TV. That isn’t morally okay.
Why is it morally okay in the one case but not in the other? Here’s the obvious difference: my house belongs to me, and your house doesn’t belong to me. In other words, the fact that my house and fridge belong to me and yours don’t is a difference between the actions that explains the moral difference between them, why the one is morally okay and the other isn’t. This difference in ownership is an example of what I’m calling a morally relevant difference. More precisely, a morally relevant difference between two things is a difference between them that can explain why they differ morally. In other words, it’s a difference that makes a difference to the morality of a situation.
Not just any difference will count as a morally relevant difference. To see this, suppose I’m in my car and I run over a jogger, and compare this to a case in which I run over a cockroach. The cases differ in multiple ways. In the one case, the thing I ran over was jogging and in the other case the thing I ran over was crawling. But that’s not what explains the moral difference between the two actions, why I did something immoral in the one case but not the other. Rather, the morally relevant difference is that in the first case it’s a person I ran over and in the second case it’s a cockroach. What this shows is that just because you’ve identified a difference between two cases, it still may not be a morally relevant difference. Indeed, it may be that two cases differ in all sorts of ways, and yet none of the differences are morally relevant.
Now that I have explained the notion of a morally relevant difference, we are ready to see the argument:
The idea behind TX1 is that, whenever there is some moral difference between two cases, there must always be some further difference between them to explain why they differ morally. Absent some such difference, it would be arbitrary to say that the one action is wrong and the other isn’t just as it would be arbitrary for me to bump some students with an 86% up to a B+ but not others. As for TX2, my hope is that it will strike you as obvious. I’m not sure what more I could say to convince you that extortion and kidnapping are wrong.
TX3, by contrast, probably doesn’t strike you as obvious. Maybe you’ve already thought of multiple differences between what Jasmine does and what the government does that could potentially explain why what she does is wrong but what the government does isn’t. The following three sections will be devoted to defending the argument by addressing such putative differences.
7.3 Morally Relevant Differences
In this section, I’ll consider six putative morally relevant differences between what Jasmine does and what the government does, and I’ll show that they do not undermine the argument—either because they are not morally relevant after all, or because we can adjust the VIGILANTE case to make the differences go away.
First, one might suggest that the morally relevant difference is that what Jasmine does is illegal, whereas what the government does is not illegal. I admit that it’s not illegal when the government does it. And since it’s the government that makes the laws, it’s no surprise that it permits itself to tax and imprison people. Yet plenty of immoral things aren’t illegal, for instance cheating on your boyfriend or on a midterm exam. And plenty of illegal things aren’t immoral, for instance underage drinking, or driving without a seatbelt. So, it’s far from clear why this difference in legal permissibility would be a morally relevant difference.
Second, one might observe that, unlike Jasmine, the government doesn’t come to your door and demand money at gunpoint when taxes are due. That’s true. Though let’s not forget that they will eventually come to your door with guns to take you to prison if you keep ignoring their polite reminders. With that in mind, let’s revise the Jasmine case to tighten the analogy:
By revising the story so that Jasmine doesn’t take their money at gunpoint but instead leads them to her basement at gunpoint when they consistently fail to pay—we have eliminated the alleged morally relevant difference between the two cases. We no longer have an objection to TX3. Of course, now that we have changed the details of the case, we need to make sure that TX2—which says that Jasmine is doing something wrong—is still plausible. But surely it is, even when we modify the procedure by which she extorts and kidnaps her neighbors.
Third, one might point out that government officials have been elected to serve as representatives of our interests, whereas Jasmine was not elected. This may indeed be a morally relevant difference, but we can again revise the case so as to circumvent it.
It still seems as if Jasmine is doing something wrong. So TX2 remains true. And since Jasmine is elected in this revised case, the proposed objection to TX3 fails. Nor should it be any surprise that holding an election doesn’t make a difference. Suppose I order pizza for the whole class, and when it arrives we vote on who pays the bill. The majority of the students vote that you should pay, and so I point a gun at you and demand that you pay. That would be wrong, even though we voted on it.
Fourth, one might insist that it’s okay for the government to imprison criminals because it’s public knowledge what the laws are and what the penalties are for violating them, whereas Jasmine just starts kidnapping and extorting people out of nowhere. There’s an easy fix here as well. We simply build it into the story that, before she starts kidnapping people and demanding money at gunpoint, she puts up a large, laminated poster in the center of town, labeled ‘Jasmine’s Rules’, and once everyone has had a chance to read it, she begins locking up violators in her basement and demanding money from her neighbors on threat of imprisonment.
Fifth, one might insist that taxation and imprisonment are morally justified because we would all be so much worse off without them. That’s almost certainly true, but it’s irrelevant. Jasmine’s kidnapping and extortion are also making things better in her neighborhood. There are fewer con men, and the gym really is helping keep troubled kids off the street. So, this isn’t even a difference between the cases, let alone a morally relevant one.
Furthermore, just because something would make the world a better place, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s morally permissible for someone to bring it about. To see this, consider the following case:
Surely you’ll agree that it was morally impermissible for the doctor to force the kidney upon the saint, even though the doctor’s actions made the world a better place on the whole. Likewise, even if the world would be a worse place without someone locking up criminals and forcing the rest of us to help pay for it, that doesn’t mean it’s morally okay for anyone to actually do it.
Sixth, one might insist that the country belongs to the government, whereas the neighborhood does not belong to Jasmine, and that this is why the government but not Jasmine is allowed to do these things. But I see no more reason to think that the country literally belongs to the government than that some street corner literally belongs to the drug dealers that have claimed it. It’s true that the government acts like they own the place, and
that they have enough power to cow people into letting them do what they want. But there’s no good reason to think that some patch of the surface of the Earth is literally owned by the government. It’s just not plausible that the country and the neighborhood differ in this way.
Furthermore, even supposing that government owns the country, we can once again revise the case so as to circumvent the putative morally relevant difference:
It still seems as if Jasmine is doing something wrong. So TX2 remains true. And since Jasmine does own the apartment complex in this case, the envisaged morally relevant difference has disappeared, and the present objection to TX3 fails.
7.6 Immigration
We have seen that governmental practices of taxation and imprisonment are immoral. It would be wrong for an ordinary citizen to do these sorts of things—even for a good cause—and the government isn’t different from an ordinary citizen in any way that makes for a moral difference between the two. This same style of argument can be put to work to undermine other governmental practices as well. Let’s look at just one example: immigration.
Once again, we’ll start with a Jasmine case, and argue from there to a conclusion about immigration policy. Here is the case:
And here is the argument:
OB1 is the same as TX1, so no further defense is needed. OB2, I hope, is obvious. So, as before, the crucial question is whether we should accept the third premise. Is there a morally relevant difference between Jasmine closing off the park and the government closing off its borders?
The difference can’t be that the park doesn’t belong to her, since (as argued in Section 7.3) it’s equally true that this portion of the Earth’s surface doesn’t belong to the government. Nor is the difference that people who come into the country without permission reap the benefits of tax dollars without paying any taxes themselves. For the same is true in Jasmine’s case. The visitors are enjoying the benefits of a crime-free park, and the lack of crime is subsidized by Jasmine’s extorted neighbors. Indeed, it’s precisely because it’s crime-free that the visitors have come to her park rather than using the one in their own neighborhood.
7.7 What Can the Government Do?
We have seen that ordinary governmental practices of taxing citizens, imprisoning criminals, and restricting immigration are all morally problematic. Is there anything the government can do that isn’t wrong? The reasoning I’ve been using above suggests the following answer: it is morally acceptable for a government to do a certain thing only if it would be morally acceptable for Jasmine to do the same sort of thing.
With that in mind, here is one thing the government is permitted to do: use weapons and threat of violence to prevent imminent threats from foreign countries. This passes the “Jasmine Test” since it also wouldn’t be wrong for Jasmine to use guns and threat of imprisonment to deter someone who is actively trying to kill her neighbors. I am skeptical, however, that the Jasmine Test can be used to justify much else that the government does. For instance, it wouldn’t be okay for Jasmine to extort her neighbors in order to buy and stockpile weapons in preparation for a purely hypothetical future threat to her neighborhood. Accordingly, the Jasmine Test can’t be used to justify governmental practices of taxing people in order to build up the military in preparation for hypothetical attacks from other countries.
Let me close by once again emphasizing that the conclusion of this chapter is not that the world would be better off without taxes and prisons. It almost certainly wouldn’t be. The point, rather, is that these practices are immoral. Sometimes, as in the SAINT AND SINNER case, there is something that could make the world a better place, but no one is morally permitted to do it.
Reflection Questions
- I claimed in Section 7.3 that the government doesn’t own the country. But how does anyone come to own anything? Try to think of a plausible general account of how people come to own things, and see what it implies about whether the government owns the country.
- Is it possible to justify taxation on the grounds that much of the wealth that people enjoy is wealth that they are not really entitled to, for instance because they acquired it in some unjust way?
- At the end of the chapter, we used the “Jasmine Test” to show that some functions of the government could still be legitimate. What does this test say about other governmental functions that we haven’t considered here? Is this the right test for evaluating whether governmental practices are right or wrong?
Sources and Resources
The arguments against political authority and the social contract are drawn from Huemer (2013, ch 1–2). For classic defenses of the social contract theory, see Hobbes (1994) (free text), Locke (2021), and Rousseau (1997) (free text). For a contemporary defense, see Rawls (1999). I learned the SAINT AND SINNER example from David Boonin.
Wolff (1998) is an accessible opinionated introduction to the basic question of whether there is any way to justify the authority of the state to make and enforce laws. For a more balanced and broad introduction to the field of political philosophy, see Hampton (1997). Wellman and Simmons (2005) offers two competing perspectives, one for and the other against the claim that we have a duty to obey the law. Gilbert (2006) argues that we are “plural subjects”, and our obligation to obey the law is grounded in our joint commitment to uphold political institutions.
On the specific issue of punishment, Boonin (2008) offers an extended defense of the view that legal punishment is morally impressible and should be abolished, while Hampton (1984) argues that the only justified form of punishment is punishment for the purpose of moral education.
Rawls (1999) attempts to derive a theory of justice from facts about the sort of social contract we would agree to in an idealized situation he calls “the original position”. Anderson (2014) (Wireless Philosophy) is a useful lecture on this idea:
One objection to a Rawlsian understanding of the social contract is that it at best involves hypothetical consent—each of us would, if we were in the original position, consent to the terms of the contract—and hypothetical consent is not enough to generate actual obligations. See Stark (2000) for response to this objection.