Reason / If a reviewer could summarize Knowledge, Reality, and Value in a few hundred words, there would be no place left for professional philosophers. Instead of this mission impossible, I will focus on a few landmarks and highlights of the book, especially in the area of ethics, which is the foundation of political philosophy.
Most people, and not only college students, think confusedly, says Huemer. Even experts are confused when they think outside their own fields or about “the larger implications of the discoveries in their own fields.” A philosophy book such as Knowledge, Reality, and Value helps its readers to think logically and rationally. In the search for truth, “rationality is the master intellectual virtue, the one that subsumes all the others.” Rationality requires objective thinking, which means avoiding biases, including ideological, emotional, or identity-group biases.
Errors of logic and logical fallacies must be avoided, but Huemer points out that some practices are wrongly labeled as fallacies: “Sometimes a ‘fallacy’ is not a fallacy.” For example, the admonition to avoid ad hominem arguments should not justify disregarding “negative information about an individual [that] is very relevant to whether you should believe what they say.” Cranks are not good guides to the truth, and arguments from “smart and reasonable people” should be given much more weight.
According to the “phenomenal conservatism” espoused by Huemer, the rational presumption is that things are what they appear to our senses, memory, introspection, or intuitions, “unless and until you have specific grounds for doubting that.” Science and analysis often provide such grounds.
God and metaphysics / Huemer reviews the different metaphysical arguments for and against the existence of God. He considers the old theological paradox about whether God can make a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it. The short answer is no and perhaps He cannot be literally omnipotent after all. The author of Knowledge ends up arguing that the presence of evil in the world — small children with terrible diseases, for example — is “strong evidence that there is no God,” or at least not an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. Huemer’s final stance is agnosticism.
However, he also argues that immaterial souls exist because otherwise nothing can account for the identity of an individual from conception or sometime before birth to death, even when losses of memory occur along the line. This conclusion is just one of many surprises, along with their supporting arguments (and objections and counter objections), that await the reader of Knowledge.
Another major problem of metaphysics, with some ethical and political implications, is determinism vs. free will. Is everything determined in advance by physical causes or do individuals have free will to choose (at least sometimes) among alternatives? If only because of quantum randomness, physicists are divided on physical determinism. Another argument: If everything is determined, even deterministic ideas must be predetermined, so why believe them?
Huemer sides with theories of “soft determinism” that leave room for free will. If everything is strictly predetermined, you don’t have the choice of throwing this magazine through the window. But introspection reveals that you can do this if you want to. The reconciliation between free will and determinism seems to be that a person’s own choices are part of the multiple causes that affect the real world. The fact that individuals are held at least partly responsible for their actions (murder, for example) also suggests that free will is inseparable from human existence. There are different degrees of freedom and one can maximize his free choice “by being more self-aware.”
Utilitarianism / Huemer reviews different meta-ethical theories about the objective truth or lack thereof of ethical statements. He sides with “ethical intuitionism” as the most sensible theory. It is a form of moral realism (as opposed to nihilism or relativism) according to which objective ethical truths exist, at least some of which are attainable through our considered (or “checked”) intuitions of what is morally good or bad. For example, “You should not torture babies for fun” is an uncontroversial moral statement.
Turning from meta-ethics to ethics proper, Huemer examines two major Western ethical theories: utilitarianism and deontology. Concerning the former, he considers consequentialism a sort of utilitarianism. Perhaps under the influence of economics, it seems to me more fruitful to do the converse and take utilitarianism in a narrow sense, as a special sort of consequentialism, the latter consisting of the set of all theories according to which consequences count in judging the value of an action. In this perspective, utilitarianism is a more precise way of measuring and weighing the consequences of different actions.
For a utilitarian in this narrow sense, “the right action in any circumstance is always the action that results in the greatest total quantity of well-being,” where well-being can be understood in terms of enjoyment or desire-satisfaction. The famous Trolley Problem asks us to imagine a runaway trolley on the verge of hitting and killing five persons on the tracks, but it can be diverted to another track where it would only hit and kill one person. A utilitarian seemingly would favor switching the trolley and save five lives at the cost of one.
That seems right. But now consider a doctor who has five patients: three who need, respectively, a heart, two lungs, and a liver, and two who each need a kidney. Following the same utilitarian logic as in the Trolley Problem, shouldn’t he coercively harvest the five organs from one healthy patient? That doesn’t seem right, and it violates Huemer’s ethical intuition. His books are full of these thought experiments familiar in ethical philosophy.
Typically, we want to evaluate different consequences across individuals and we need a method to compare those consequences. Utilitarianism provides one: the right action is the one that “produce[s] more utility rather than less.” More generally, including when the consequences are more complex than just counting lives lost, the utilitarian method requires what economists call interpersonal comparisons of utility or well-being. It is necessary to compare, for each alternative, the well-being gained or lost by different individuals and to calculate a net total. As economists have discovered over the past hundred years, this fundamental problem is scientifically unsolvable, notwithstanding the gauche attempts of benefit–cost analysis. Contrary to what Huemer may seem to suggest, it is scientifically meaningless to add positive utility and negative utility across individuals. This is especially clear in modern economics, where utility is viewed as merely a ranking of preferences in each individual’s mind.
Economists — at least those who have reflected on the issue — recognize that moral criteria are necessary to justify individual actions and public policy. We should expect moral philosophers to provide arguments that do what economics as a science cannot: bear a normative judgment on consequences across different individuals. Philosophers should not be content to recycle old economic-utilitarian arguments that have no scientific justification. To be blunt, philosophers should not simply mimic bad economics and try to maximize welfare by adding up “utils” (fictitious units of utility) and choosing the alternative with the larger net number of them. Huemer’s argument in this respect could be much improved.
Huemer admits to being tempted by utilitarianism, but he realizes that some of its implications violate clear ethical intuitions. I think he dismisses too summarily rule utilitarianism, where what is right and wrong is determined by general rules, as opposed to act utilitarianism (discussed thus far), where each decision depends on a specific utility calculation. For example, the general rule to not kill an innocent person is intuitively preferable to a morality that permits such killing for the “greater good.” In this perspective, morality assures the coordination of individual actions, rather than trying to realize some impossible maximization of well-being.
Deontology / The second category of moral theory is called “deontology” and emphasizes moral duties or obligations that are at least partly independent of consequences. An absolute deontologist like Immanuel Kant thinks that some actions are morally wrong whatever their consequences; for example, killing an innocent to save the rest of mankind would be wrong. The notion of individual rights, notes Huemer, “is a particularly popular deontological concept.”
But then, he argues, absolute deontology also has implications that are intuitively wrong. Suppose that saving mankind from a deadly disease requires plucking one hair from the head of an immune girl to synthesize a medicine that will cure everyone. The girl and her parents do not consent. Taking one hair from the girl is a rights violation, albeit a small one by any account, but it appears to be morally impermissible in absolute deontology.
Huemer defends moderate deontology, a “middle ground position between consequentialism and absolute deontology.” In place of absolute rights, this view proposes to substitute “prima facie rights,” which “may permissively be violated in extreme circumstances.”
It is precisely to determine these circumstances and their threshold that Huemer’s moderate deontology can be useful. But he may be too much of a moderate because he suggests that it would still be permissible to kill one person if the alternative were between his death and the annihilation of mankind. Given the “radical uncertainty” (to use George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen’s expression) of future consequences, it seems to me that such behavior would be clearly immoral. We simply cannot know the consequences of this murder, a general idea emphasized by Friedrich Hayek, notably in Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Rules are an adaptation to our ignorance, and assuming perfect knowledge is not useful.
Huemer sometimes seems to be a prisoner of simplistic economic utilitarianism, although he finally offers this prudent conclusion: “I judge the problems for moderate deontology to be the least bad.”
He argues that there is a moral duty or obligation to privately contribute significant money to charity. In a similar way, you have a moral obligation to save a child from drowning in a pond if you can do so at a low cost for yourself. This moral duty, Huemer notes, is particularly stringent toward the global poor — the poor in poor countries — who are much more in need of assistance than poor Americans, who are comparatively rich. An important caveat is that moral duty does not entail legal obligation.
Against political authority / Huemer derives moral and political philosophy from the moral intuitions of common people — or, at least, of common people in an advanced Western country such as the United States. “I rely on clear, mainstream intuitions,” he writes. For example, lying and stealing are usually wrong, but not in all circumstances. “The foundation of my libertarianism,” he writes, is “common sense morality.” A brilliant application of this approach is developed in his earlier book, The Problem of Political Authority, which outlines his political philosophy.
The first part of this book is a philosophical argument against political authority and in favor of anarchy. Political authority is the hypothesized moral property that allows governments to “coerce people in certain ways not permitted anyone else.” It has two aspects: the legitimacy of government rule and the ethical obligation of citizens and residents to obey.
Concerning the first aspect, the state (all levels and branches of government) has no authority to rule that is independent of the content of its bans and decrees. It only has authority to mandate something that is already an ethical obligation that any individual or private group may force others to follow. For example, the state is only allowed to prevent murder because any individual has the right to do so — notably by defending himself and others. But the state is not allowed to steal from the rich to give to the poor (or the other way around) if no individual has such authority. To answer that the state may do things that individuals may not do presupposes what has to be demonstrated, which is the fallacy of circular reasoning.
Huemer argues that political authority cannot be anchored in a social contract nor in democratic approval. Pace old contractarian theorists like John Locke, an actual social contract does not exist and thus cannot serve as a foundation for the legitimacy of the state and the obligation to obey. A merely hypothetical contract — as defended by contemporary philosophers like John Rawls — is not sufficient to create a general obligation to obey. Huemer appeals to moral intuitions. An emergency surgeon is presumed to have an unconscious patient’s implicit consent to perform a life-saving operation barring contrary directives. But a presumptive social contract cannot apply to conscious individuals who are unlikely to consent. Just think of anarchists who have publicly declared that they have signed no social contract submitting them to political authority.
A democratic majority cannot justify the coercion of a minority. In a group of five individuals, a majority of three may not claim political authority over the other two. As for an idealized “deliberative democracy” where everybody can be heard equally and a consensus is somehow reached, this is a “purely hypothetical scenario” that cannot justify political authority.
If the state has no legitimate political authority, it follows that “no state is legitimate, and no individual has political obligations.” No one is morally obliged to obey the state. “I claim,” Huemer writes, “that one may break the law when what the law commands is not independently morally required and no serious negative consequences will result.” The state may ban murder because any individual may ban it. But the state may not ban victimless crimes, such as consuming drugs, tobacco, or alcohol, or hiring somebody’s services at a mutually agreed wage. “No one is obliged to obey a command merely because it comes from their government.”
Individuals’ submission to authority is widespread and dangerous. Stanley Milgram’s experiments at Yale University in the 1960s found that a large majority of people will follow orders and inflict pain and possibly even death on others simply because an authority figure requests it. Another example Huemer invokes is the horrible My Lai massacre, a war crime committed during the Vietnam War.
The symbols, rituals, and propaganda of the state make the “citizens” emotional, pliable, and obedient. Huemer illustrates this by citing “the use by private citizens of the word ‘we’ to refer to the government, as in ‘We invaded Iraq in 2003.’ ” The realization that political authority has no clear foundation except in a pro-authority bias in the human mind defeats the idea that “just obeying orders” is a morally acceptable excuse.
From all that, it follows that anarcho-capitalism is the ethical alternative, Huemer argues.
Moral critique / His moral defense of anarcho-capitalism is impressive but not without weaknesses. Coercion revolves around violence and threats of violence, but he admits he cannot completely articulate the so-called “nonagression principle.” He thinks he can build the case for anarcho-capitalism on mainstream moral intuitions about specific cases of coercion. But what if most people think that they derive a net benefit from government and thus accept its coercion?
Many people seem to reject the sort of moral intuitions that he proposes. For example, they have no objection to a government-imposed minimum wage, which forbids a demander and a supplier of labor to agree on terms of employment. Many other contemporary beliefs could be cited as examples.
Another weakness lies in Huemer’s use of simple economic utilitarianism to compare the state and anarchy. He seems tolerant of interpersonal comparisons of utility. He mentions “marginal social benefit” and even the “total utility of society,” as if he believes these expressions have an ascertainable meaning. If this apparatus is questionable for justifying government intervention, it is not useful for arguing against government intervention either.
Violating a person’s property rights is permissible only “provided that doing so is necessary to prevent something much worse from happening.” This “much worse” might attenuate the problem, but how much worse? I suspect that Huemer is making a moral comparison, but then why make a detour through highly contestable economic constructs? Here again, the reader would have liked him to explain more clearly how alternative consequences are to be compared.
Huemer remains intellectually humble before such complex problems, which is refreshing for a libertarian. “I am unsure what to make of this,” he writes at one point. He is both a reasonable and a radical philosopher.
I remain suspicious of the argument that anarchists don’t want to sign any social contract. How would we really know? Do anarchists really exist? Talk is cheap and people claiming to be anarchists may just be bluffing to get a better deal such as lower taxes or higher subsidies. But let’s entertain the idea that a few political philosophers are serious anarchists. We would only really know that if they actually chose to live in an anarchic society. It is true that this is currently impossible in a world paved with states, but one could counter that this fact makes the anarchist’s bluff even cheaper.
Speaking about the social contract, Huemer does not consider the contractarian theory that may be the most challenging: that of James Buchanan (see his 1975 book The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan). In fact, The Problem of Political Authority does not even cite or mention Buchanan. The Nobel laureate proposes an implicit social contract based on the necessity of individuals to agree on some basic conditions of life in society: the definition of property rights, the delimitation of “public goods,” and the creation of a state to enforce the individual rights defined in the social contract.
One function of the state in classical liberalism and in most libertarian theories (including Buchanan’s) is defense against foreign tyrants and thugs. In a Huemerian way, we can argue that any individual has this self-defense right and thus the state must have it too. The implications for state-waged just wars may be wider than many libertarians believe because self-defense is not exclusively passive. If an individual threatens to make me his slave and to shoot me if I resist, I don’t morally need to wait until the bullet is out of his gun to open fire in self-defense.
Economic arguments for anarchy / The second part of The Problem of Political Authority presents the standard anarcho-capitalist argument that whatever is required by social order, liberty, and prosperity would be done better by private cooperation in a stateless society. After the philosophical part of the book, this is the economic part.
Huemer recognizes that “anarchists face a significant challenge of avoiding utopianism.” But, he adds, statists — even those on the side of liberal democracy — face a similar challenge. To be realistic, any social theory must avoid negating what we observe is basic human nature. The state must be analyzed as it works in the real world, not as a sort of ideal entity that stands “above the empirical human world, transcending not only the moral constraints but also the psychological forces that apply to individual human beings.” Huemer argues that if you compare anarchy as it is likely to work in the actual world with the state as it is, the state does not win.
Crimes — real crimes, not victimless crimes — create injustice and, in the current system, more injustice for the poor than the rich. “The question,” Huemer notes, “is whether anarchy faces a greater problem or a greater injustice than government systems.” He goes on to argue that anarchy is a “superior alternative” to government even if we try to minimize the latter’s “exploitation and abuse.” His economic argumentation is reminiscent of Santa Clara University economist David Friedman, who is often cited in The Problem of Political Authority. (See, among other works, Friedman’s 1973 classic The Machinery of Freedom.)
In an anarchic society, public protection as well as the resolution of contractual disputes and eventually of criminal cases could conceivably be solved by private protection agencies and arbitrators. These services would be offered on the market to individuals and probably to voluntary groups such as homeowners associations. Arbitrators would develop a body of law the way the common law evolved, although different legal rules could arise in different places. Thomas Hobbes exaggerated the potential for continuous violence when contending parties have roughly equal power. Armed conflict would be rare because it is costly and in the interest of few people. If protection agencies fought too often, they would lose their employees and their profits; there is no conscription in a free society. Apprehending criminals, forcing them to compensate their victims, and jailing those who cannot compensate would satisfy market demand.
“Under certain favorable conditions,” Huemer argues, even the external defense of a stateless society would not be impossible. A society without a government army would not threaten any foreign power and may be less subject to aggression. At least 15 countries currently have no military forces, including Leichtenstein and Costa Rica. Moreover, the conquest of an anarchic society would be difficult because the conqueror could not use an existing government structure (including government bureaucracy) to impose its rule. No official surrender would be possible. The possibility of guerrilla resistance would provide a further disincentive to a potential invader. Murray Rothbard defended similar ideas in his 1973 book For a New Liberty.
Compare these possibilities with the internal and external danger of standing armies and the risk that war now creates for the very survival of mankind: “The apparatus we have devised for rendering ourselves secure against foreign aggression is itself the primary source of the greatest danger that the human species has ever faced,” Huemer notes. During the 20th century, some 140 million individuals died in interstate wars. In comparison, death forecasts from climate change are next to nothing.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Huemer argues that anarchism presupposes a much less utopian view of human nature than statism. During the 20th century, besides the war dead, 123 million individuals were killed by their own governments, mainly communist and fascist. That is nearly five times the estimated number of non-governmental murders over the same period.
Huemer takes human beings to be “only approximately rational and only approximately egoistic.” He observes that violence has been on a secular decline. He notes that “once one has an advanced, prosperous, liberal society, the continuing need for government is far from clear.”
Doubts about anarchy / It seems to me that The Problem of Political Authority would have benefited from incorporating some of Anthony de Jasay’s philosophical and economic insights. Philosophically, de Jasay was also an anarchist looking for arguments that, as he wrote, make “a lesser demand on our moral credulity.” He offered a strong critique of “social justice.” (See “The Valium of the People,” Spring 2016.) Economically and politically, de Jasay emphasized the neglected but crucial fact that most — he would say all — government interventions harm some individuals to favor others, which is the essence of governing. (See his seminal 1985 book The State.)
That said, both Huemer and de Jasay may underestimate the risk of anarchy. One problem is that social coordination in a stateless society may require stifling norms to replace laws. The experience of primitive stateless societies with their “cage of norms” is not encouraging. (See “A Shackled Leviathan That Keeps Roaming and Growing,” Fall 2021.) The argument for a constrained state is that it minimizes violence by squeezing it into a formally controlled domain. Huemer’s counterargument is that anarchy would not face this sort of problem in an advanced society where moral rules can be expected to be liberal.
Like most anarchist theorists, Huemer sidesteps the argument of economist Mancur Olson that a “stationary bandit” under the disguise of a central state is less destructive of liberty and prosperity than a swarm of warlords or “roving bandits.” (See, among other writings, Olson’s 1993 American Political Science Review article “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development.”) The stationary-bandit state will not loot and kill, or will do it at a lower degree, because it will want to maintain taxable matter for future exploitation. A roving bandit, on the contrary, knows that whatever he does not loot will be looted by the next roving bandit passing by and will thus not be available for future looting. It is not implausible that roving bandits would thrive in a stateless society.
External security would probably remain the number one problem in an anarcho-capitalist society, at least as long as the world is paved with states — a fear expressed by both Friedman and de Jasay. Isn’t it likely that ISIS or the Taliban or a similar group would be attracted by the wealth of an anarcho-capitalist society and angered by its liberal culture? In 2015, two Islamists claiming to be part of the al-Qaeda network massacred a dozen staffers and visitors at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The attack was in revenge for the magazine’s cartoons mocking the Prophet. We can doubt the argument seemingly endorsed by Huemer that Islamists only attack us because our own states have previously attacked them. Indeed, as was often said, it is arguably at least as much because “they hate our freedoms.”
“The overwhelming majority of human beings are strongly opposed to murder,” Huemer observes. Reportedly, only about 2% of the population are sociopaths. But the exceptions do count, especially when supported by world terrorist organizations or rogue states.
It is relatively easy to defend the efficiency and justice of anarchy if all members of society are anarchists who favor justice. But this may not work if others who like wealth but not liberty are free to move there. Like many libertarians, Huemer argues for open immigration, but immigration can change the culture of a society and prevent it from remaining an oasis of liberty. For similar reasons, Buchanan opposed open immigration. The problem seems more complex than many libertarians think.
We know that lots of things can go wrong with the state. But lots of things could also go wrong with anarchy, and we don’t really know just how many and how wrong because we don’t have any experience with such a system in an advanced society. Hayek argued that spontaneously developed laws may drift into unjust and unacceptable consequences, the rapid correction of which requires legislation. Couldn’t the same happen with laws developed by private arbitrators, especially if vastly different legal systems resulted in the same society? Imagine if radically different criminal laws applied when you travel from one neighborhood to another.
In For a New Liberty, Rothbard argued that if anarchy does not survive, the worst that can happen is that we get the state back: “In trying freedom, in abolishing the state, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” But we could get a much worse state that the current one, which at least has roots in classical liberalism and partly escaped the tyranny traditionally exercised by political power. Huemer is more prudent than Rothbard and does not make the latter’s argument. He may still be too optimistic about anarchy.
Getting there from here? / The concluding chapter of The Problem of Political Authority argues that abolishing the state and establishing an anarcho-capitalist society is not implausible. Future generations may view state coercion as an outdated immorality. Large changes in values have already happened in economically and technologically advanced societies. Anarchy will emerge if and when enough individuals are persuaded that it is the best ethical and economic alternative.
Other conditions are necessary for the emergence of an anarchic society. Huemer hypothesizes that anarchy is likely to appear in a small, advanced, liberal society where the activities of the state would gradually and consensually wither away. The new anarchic society would be located in an area surrounded by liberal democratic countries that would not oppose the experiment. These surrounding states would provide a buffer against foreign aggressions. Once it has demonstrated the desirability of anarchy, the model would likely spread in the world.
All this may take decades if not centuries to play out. And it would only happen if, as Huemer points out, the state does not bring mankind back to the cave ages with a nuclear war or some other action that destroys the conditions of human liberty. He does believe that, given voters’ rational ignorance and other features of democratic systems, the establishment of anarcho-capitalism is more realistic than the dream of seriously reforming the current system. Perhaps.
Epistemic humility is one of the lessons of these two books. Another one is that rational philosophical inquiry is useful for trying to understand the universe (or the multiverse) as well as the way humans should behave toward each other. Third lesson: there exist serious philosophical and economic arguments against political authority and in favor of anarcho-capitalism.
The jury is still out on anarchy, and it will remain out until an actual experiment is realized. Perhaps classical liberalism or non-anarchist libertarianism is as far as we can go toward anarchy? In his 1969 book Éloge de la société de consommation (In Praise of Consumer Society), French philosopher Raymond Ruyer suggested as much: “Real anarchism, feasible and realized … is simply the [classical] liberal economy.” Certainly, we should at least aim to maintain or recover the “feasible and realized anarchy” and push the limits of classical liberalism. The ideal is anarchy, not authority.
