A challenge for non-anarchists

Political Philosophy
1

By “state” or “government”, I mean the whole ruling apparatus in countries, including legislators and laws, police, armies, etc.

There are countless examples of actions that would be considered morally wrong if performed by a regular person but permissible if done by state agents. Look no further than the assault and coercion stemming from the enforcement of laws.

Despite being a popular view, I have yet to see a good justification for believing in those privileges in the case of existing states. To make things clear, I propose a tentative framework:

We write C \rightarrow A to say: “If an agent satisfies the condition(s) (processes, situations, …) C, then it is morally permissible for the agent to do the action(s) A.” Some examples:

  • Consent given by X → have sex with X
  • Being very poor → steal from someone rich
  • Being chief of a tribe where X is born → demand that X follows the tribe’s traditions

A good justification must fulfill the three principles below. There is a degree of ambiguity, but I don’t think that’s too much of a problem, and I could clarify if needed.

The actuality principle: The conditions C must actually hold for the agent, here existing states.

The relevance principle: The conditions must explain why they permit the actions. There must be some sensible connection. This can be checked, for example, by imagining non-state agents fulfilling the conditions. Would those agents also have the right to do the actions mentioned?

The ground-level principle: This one is not necessary per se, but useful. The idea is to avoid highly abstract or loaded terms. The language should not obscure the relevant conditions justifying the actions, and it should not smuggle in assumptions that would make it collapse into “Being a state → rule.” I would, for example, avoid terms like “fair justice system”, “democracy”, “will of the people”, “social contract”, “the Constitution”, and be more descriptive.

As a general term for those privileges, we may use the word “rule” in the right-hand side of the implication, but being somewhat precise would be interesting. Many believe, for example, that some laws are or can be unjust. A question we can ask, then, is how to justify some state privileges while avoiding condoning unjust lawful actions.

The challenge is then to provide a good justification for any set of such privileges (and explain why it is a good one). In other words, provide the conditions fulfilled by states (and implicitly not usually fulfilled by the regular person) that allow them to be morally justified in doing actions like coercing, assaulting, or imprisoning people.

Examples

I’ll present some justifications to see the framework in action.

Divine right of kings: It was argued by some that their legitimacy came from God himself. Basically, right granted by God → rule. The relevance might be acceptable if we believe God to be capable of doing such a thing. But the actuality principle fails. It’s unclear whether God ever did give the king those rights.

A consent theory: Those privileges come from people consenting to them. So, some people consented → rule. This fails the relevance principle, as it is not clear how some people consenting allows the state to rule over everyone. If restricted to “rule over those who consented”, then I fail to see how this is one of the privileges.

The framework should be able to handle consequentialist arguments somewhat, but in any case, if you don’t feel like it, you can just write the justification informally.

2

Thanks — I think your C → A framework is very clear, especially with the three constraints (actuality, relevance, ground-level). It does a good job of isolating where many standard justifications tend to break down.

Before going further, I just want to clarify one point about the scope, to make sure I’m not talking past your framework:

Are you treating the C → A structure as a purely theoretical / logical justification model,
or is it also intended to remain stable at the level of practical application?

I ask because the two might introduce slightly different constraints. At the theoretical level, the focus seems to be whether a condition C can justify A in principle. But at the application level, there may be an additional requirement that C can be applied consistently across comparable cases, without leading to instability depending on interpretation.

Related to this, I had a small structural question about how conditions C are treated in your framework.

In your setup, C seems to function as a single layer of justification. But it looks like some candidate justifications might rely on different kinds of dependence, rather than just different conditions.

For instance, there seems to be a difference between:
• conditions grounded in causal or practical dependence (e.g. coordination, enforcement), and
• conditions grounded in something closer to status or role-based dependence (e.g. acting as a collective agent or institution)

If these are treated as the same kind of condition, the relevance test might become sensitive to which type of dependence is implicitly assumed, especially when comparing with non-state agents.

So one question that might be worth clarifying is:

Do you see all admissible C as belonging to the same type of dependence,
or would you allow that different types might need to be kept distinct for the relevance principle to remain stable?

More generally, it seems possible that some disagreements about justification might not come from which conditions hold, but from whether structurally different kinds of dependence are being treated as if they were the same.

I’m happy to stay within whichever scope you’re aiming for — just wanted to make sure I’m aligning with how you intend the framework to be used.

3

C can be almost anything. The two kind of conditions you present are obviously different but both can be under C and even mixed. You need not see it as a ‘single’ layer of justification. As long as it’s ground level in its description. I am not sure what you mean by the (in)stability of the relevance principle.

4

Greetings fellow anarchist. I am a baby in anarchism and don’t understand it yet really, only that is seems far more appealing than capitalism and I vacillate between it and communism. Ready to learn more.