Libertarianism is often based on the idea of self-ownership. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on libertarianism states the following:

the key libertarian starting point is that people have a very stringent (perhaps the most stringent possible) set of rights over their persons, giving them the kind of control over themselves that one might have over possessions they own. This includes (1) rights to control the use of the entity: including a liberty-right to use it as well as a claim-right that others not use it without one’s consent, (2) rights to transfer these rights to others (by sale, rental, gift, or loan), (3) immunities to the non-consensual loss of these rights, (4) compensation rights in case others use the entity without one’s consent, and (5) enforcement rights (e.g. rights to restrain persons about to violate these rights).

Libertarianism is attractive in its endorsement of policies that empower individuals to lead their own lives, free from the control of others. For example, libertarianism endorses private property, drug legalization, freedom of speech, etc. which enable individuals to live their lives in ways that they choose without interference from the physical aggression of others. But libertarianism is notorious in its rejection of regulations by the state that many see as morally permissible. For example, libertarians often reject forms of wealth redistribution, welfare states, and social safety nets. Libertarians believe that, even if these programs produce good outcomes, to coerce people into supporting these programs via mandatory taxation (which is backed by the threat of physical force by the state if one doesn’t pay their taxes) is to violate their ownership rights over their property and their body.

The point is that we have ownership rights over our bodies and our legitimately acquired property (i.e. property which was acquired without the violation of any else’s rights); therefore, to control (or threaten control of) someone else’s bodies or property without their consent is to violate those rights. Many libertarian philosophers (anarchists) have taken this point to claim that all mandatory taxation is unjust. If this claim is correct, then it seems that libertarianism is committed to the rejection of the state, as most conceptions of the state involve (among other things) mandatory taxation of its citizens. This post will argue that this conclusion is incorrect. I will argue that an adequate justification of the state can be provided on broadly libertarian grounds.



I start by considering some specifications of rights that almost all libertarians (including anarchists) accept. I argue that the unifying rationale for these specifications supports the adoption of what Eric Mack calls the “anti-paralysis” postulate. This postulate places a constraint on how individual rights are to be delineated. I argue that this postulate can be used to support a new class of rights to compensate the five classes of rights mentioned in the above excerpt from the SEP article: exception rights. Exception rights permit disadvantaged individuals to infringe on others in special circumstances that would ordinarily be rights violations. Once one combines exception rights with the plausible premise that third-parties have the right to enforce the rights of others, I conclude that individuals are morally permitted to enforce the exception rights of disadvantaged individuals. One of the means by which an organization of individuals might enforce the exception rights of others is via mandatory taxation. Since an organization of individuals is permitted to enforce exception rights via mandatory taxation, and since the state is merely an organization of individuals, the state is permitted to enforce exception rights via mandatory taxation. This is a libertarian justification of the state because this reasoning is based on the implication of granting certain rights specifications that almost all libertarians (including anarchists) accept.

Libertarian rights

In this section, I will first explain why many libertarians place an inherent value on rights (as opposed to some other moral concept such as utility). Next, I consider some specifications of particular rights that almost all libertarians (including anarchists) endorse. I will consider specifications of particular rights related to property, rights to enforcement, and rights to impose minor intrusions. I argue that the unifying motivation for rights generally and for these particular specifications of rights is to grant each individual a sovereign space within which they can lead their own lives without being controlled by the will of others. Part of this entails that we delineate rights so that individuals do not become “morally paralyzed” – a condition whereby an individual has effectively no liberty because they are incapable of leading their own life without impermissibly violating the rights of someone else.

Why Rights?

I believe the purpose of morality is to constrain our rational self-interested behavior. In other words, morality is meant to guide our behavior towards ends that we wouldn’t otherwise pursue if we were fully rational, self-interested creatures. Thus, to understand the motivation of any moral theory, it might help to imagine a world where people did not behave according to any moral theory – a kind of “moral anarchy” as Nicolás Maloberti describes. This might help illuminate some of the motivations for adopting a rights-based moral system as opposed to, say, a consequentialist based moral system. Nicolás Maloberti (2017, p. 156) describes moral anarchy as follows:

In moral anarchy, individuals are free to treat others as mere resources for the satisfaction of their own personal goals. Moral anarchy could result in a state of affairs in which a great number of individuals are powerless to arrange their lives in the way they want. Having different goals and preferences regarding how best to achieve those goals, and having a natural tendency to care more strongly about the satisfaction of their own goals than the goals of others, individuals under moral anarchy might constantly interfere with one another in their corresponding pursuits.

In other words, under moral anarchy, individuals are morally permitted to pursue their own self-interested goals and preferences. They are “free” in the sense that there is no moral duty to refrain from maximizing the satisfaction of their preferences. However, the sense in which they are “free” seems meaningless. Sure, you have the liberty to pursue your personal goals and preferences, but other individuals have the same liberty to pursue their personal goals and preferences, even if the fulfillment of their goals seriously frustrates your own. In other words, other individuals have the liberty to treat you as a means for whatever their goals might happen to be, regardless of the limitations imposed on your freedom. If everyone is given maximum moral liberty to live their life the way they choose, then no one (other than the most powerful) has effective liberty to live their life as they choose. Under moral anarchy, might effectively makes right, which means individuals would be consumed under the all-consuming conflict and demands of competitors and stronger agents with conflicting goals.

The issue with moral anarchy is that we need moral prohibitions so that individuals can make use of their moral permissions. Nicolás Maloberti (p. 156) understands moral theories as ways of “specifying the conditions under which individuals must constrain their self-interested pursuit of goals.” In other words, moral theories provide solutions to moral anarchy by specifying (among other things) the moral prohibitions that should constraint individuals’ behaviors. This characterization makes sense to me. One such solution is provided by utilitarianism. I reject utilitarianism (and consequentialism generally) for a variety of reasons that I explore elsewhere. But for present purposes, it suffices to say that I reject utilitarianism as a solution to moral anarchy because it does not satisfactorily address the main detestable features of moral anarchy. Moral anarchy is detestable because it allows individuals to be used as resources by other people which results in people being unable to lead their own lives. But, as Maloberti (p. 157) points out, utilitarianism does not seem to adequately accommodate this worry because it unconditionally permits these same behaviors so long as the end result is more happiness over suffering. Whereas moral anarchy allows individuals to be used as resources by the strongest, utilitarianism allows individuals to be used as resources by anyone who would produce more net happiness by such usage.

Now, let’s look at possible solutions to moral anarchy from a rights-based moral theory. If we think of moral permissions as liberty-rights, then the problem with moral anarchy is that it focuses solely on liberty-rights. What is a liberty-right to life if other people have a liberty-right to terminate your life? It’s clear that liberty-rights are not sufficient. There is another essential dimension of rights that moral anarchy ignores: claim-rights. Claim-rights impose moral prohibitions on how individuals live their lives, specifically by restricting the ways an individual can interfere with another person’s life. Interestingly, the rationale for granting people claim-rights is the very same as the rationale we might have for granting people liberty-rights. The reason we might grant someone liberty-rights is to enable individuals to lead their own lives, but this very goal is frustrated by other people exercising their liberty-rights unless we also propose claim-rights which constrain those liberty-rights. In other words, in order to allow for the effective use of liberty-rights, we need claim-rights to attenuate our liberty-rights. For these reasons, it is clear that claim-rights are just as important as liberty-rights. As Maloberti (p. 157) notes:

In contrast to classical versions of utilitarianism, rights theories do not propose to escape from moral anarchy by means of providing a unique goal that all must serve either directly or indirectly. Instead, they propose to protect individuals’ pursuits of their own personal goals regardless of their optimality in the maximization of aggregative value. In order to accomplish this, rights theories allocate control to each individual over a specific set or range of actions. These allocations of control allow the individual to perform or refrain from performing the corresponding actions, and they impose on others the obligations not to interfere. Those ranges of actions might then be understood as configuring areas of freedom. Within those areas, the individual is taken to be fully sovereign in terms of what may be done…Within libertarian theory, individuals’ most basic areas of moral freedom are generally specified in terms of ownership rights, that is, in terms of the material objects that those individuals are entitled to control.

The precise boundaries of ownership rights are not to be discussed here. The point is merely to mention the attractive features of a rights-based theory such as libertarianism. The attraction of rights-based theories lies in their ability to protect us from being used as resources for others. It grants us a sovereign space by carving out boundaries within which we can lead our own lives (so long as we don’t encroach on anyone else’s boundaries) without being subject to the will of anyone else.

Property Rights

All libertarians are committed to each individual having strong ownership of their body (i.e self-ownership). That is, individuals have a claim-right against other people who might control their body without consent, and they have a liberty-right to use their body as they see fit (so long as it doesn’t encroach on like-rights for others). But almost all libertarians (including anarchists) believe that we also have the right to acquire ownership over objects beyond our individual bodies. The rationale for property ownership is the same as the rationale for self-ownership: if we only had self-ownership and no property ownership, our self-ownership would be merely formal; all individuals need the ability to control extrapersonal objects in order to live, to pursue their projects, and to lead their own lives. These are the same motivations to support self-ownership rights to begin with. So, if we have reasons to grant individuals self-ownership rights, we also have reasons to grant them property ownership rights. Now, there are infinitely many different ways libertarians might specify property rights. Philosophers have been labeled as either right-leaning or left-leaning libertarian depending on the extent to which their conceptions of property rights entail egalitarian ownership of resources (see here for some examples). Interestingly, most libertarians have rejected both extreme left-leaning and extreme right-leaning conceptions of property rights for surprisingly similar reasons.

An example of an extreme left-leaning conception of property rights is a universal joint-ownership conception of property. On this theory, every individual owns an equal portion of every external resource. Maloberti (p. 157) describes it as a system whereby “each individual would be assigned a claim right against every other, against the use and possessions of those resources. No individual would thus have the liberty to use or possess such resources without the approval of everybody else”. Because we have given every individual extreme claim-rights, the result is that everyone’s liberty-rights are effectively minimized. Eric Mack (2015, p. 213) signs on to this complaint when he says, “if the earth were the joint property of all mankind…there would be no elbow room for individuals to exercise their most fundamental natural right, viz., ‘the right everyone had to take care of, and provide for their Subsistence’ (Locke 1689, First Treatise, §87). For (almost) any exercise of this fundamental right requires that individuals be at liberty to acquire private property or, at the very least, to make use of portions of the earth.” So the problem with extreme left-leaning conceptions of property rights is the same problem that we experienced with moral anarchy: individuals would have effectively no liberty to acquire the resources which are necessary to lead their own lives. We would be at the mercy of the will of everyone else in order to lead our lives. Interestingly, the source of the problem is the reverse of moral anarchy: in moral anarchy, the problem was we maximized liberty-rights at the expense of claim-rights; under robust joint ownership, we maximized claim-rights at the expense of liberty-rights.

For this reason, most libertarians “accept that individuals can acquire unowned goods unilaterally, without having to ask the consent of approval of other people, some governing body, or anything else” (section 3 of the SEP on Libertarianism), which means they reject extreme left-leaning conceptions of property rights. However, most libertarians accept that permissible property acquisition, while unilateral, must be subject to the Lockean Proviso that the acquisition leaves “enough, and as good” for others. As Eric Mack (p. 214) notes, the Lockean Proviso “requires that the acquisition and disposition of property rights not on net make the extra-personal world less susceptible to any individual’s efforts to exercise his powers in ways that serve his ends.” Only the most extreme right-leaning conceptions of property rights reject all forms of the Lockean Proviso. Note that the complaint against extreme right-leaning conceptions of property rights is the same as the complaint against extreme left-leaning conceptions: without the Lockean Proviso, a privileged group of individuals could in principle come to own all valuable resources, which would result in everyone else being unable to lead their lives; everyone else would be at the mercy of the privileged property owners to acquire basic external resources necessary to lead their own life.

Interestingly, even though the complaint against both extreme left-leaning and extreme right-leaning conceptions of property are the same, the source of the complaints is the reverse. On the one hand, extreme left-leaning conceptions of property rights are rejected because they overly privilege claim-rights. On the other hand, extreme right-leaning conceptions are rejected because they overly privilege liberty-rights. Granting people excessive claim-rights (to all external resources) under joint ownership causes the same problem as granting people excessive liberty-rights (to acquire unowned resources) without a Lockean Proviso: individuals are left unfree to lead their own lives; they are instead at the mercy of the will of others (whether its at the mercy of other landowners or the general population). This reveals an important lesson: when delineating the specifications of individual rights, we have to perform a trade-off between the claim-rights and liberty-rights that are specified. We cannot increase one without reducing the other. Further, this trade-off must not overly privilege either dimension at the exclusion of the other. Otherwise, the result is that there is no effective liberty for people to lead their own lives.

Enforcement Rights

The above has focused on basic ownership rights, both of one’s body and of property. But there is another right that almost all libertarians (including anarchists) agree that we have: enforcement rights. Enforcement rights involve rights to retaliatory threats and self-defense to prevent future rights violations, and potentially the right to seek restitution and perhaps punishment for past rights violations. Every non-pacifist libertarian accepts some form of enforcement right, and (I would argue) for good reason. Given the observations made earlier in this post, I believe we can give an adequate explanation for why some libertarians are pacifists, an explanation that (I believe) reveals where they go wrong. One explanation for why some libertarians might support pacifism is that they assign special privilege to the claim-rights that individuals have; our claim-rights to our body/property are so strong that we maintain those claim-rights even when we are violating or have violated someone else’s rights, which makes it morally impermissible for others to retaliate in self-defense. Hopefully, the error here is clear. The error with this pacifist argument is that it overly privileges our claim-rights at the exclusion of our liberty-rights.

As Maloberti (p. 158) argues, “Anything short of that [permitting enforcement rights] will fail to provide the holders of basic rights with a sphere of moral freedom that is not contingent on others’ willingness to respect it.” Eric Mack (p. 214) echoes this sentiment in his argument for enforcement rights: “One natural line of argument goes from the prospective victim’s self-ownership to her possession of a moral liberty to defend herself against violations of that right, and from that moral liberty to harm-inflicting defensive acts not being [rights violations].” In other words, the reason that we ought to ascribe to individuals enforcement rights is that, without such rights, their basic ownership rights are effectively meaningless. If our ownership rights are to provide us with any effective liberty, then we must have not only the claim-right against individuals who might violate our rights, but also liberty-rights to retaliate against individuals who might do so. Thus, the motivation for supporting enforcement rights is the same motivation for supporting basic ownership rights in the first place. If one’s ownership rights are to mean anything, they must be complemented with enforcement rights.

Minor Intrusions

Finally, consider minor intrusions on someone’s body or legitimately acquired resources. Typically, libertarians treat minor intrusions with equal (or at least comparable) seriousness as major intrusions. E.g. just as it is impermissible for me to steal your kidney, it is also impermissible for me to steal your dollar. In both cases, I’m taking something that you own, which means in both cases, I’m violating your rights. If that is correct, then this would seem to erase our moral permissions to do anything. After all, whenever I burn leaves in my backyard, I cause smoke particles to fall in your yard. Whenever I use a telephone or a radio, I cause electromagnetic waves to be sent through your body and your property. Whenever I produce sound, I send sound waves through your home which impacts your eardrums. Whenever I breathe, I emit carbon dioxide which pollutes your airspace, and hence your property and your lungs. Assuming these intrusions on your property and body have not been consented to, these seem to all count as violations of your ownership rights. But if these acts are rights violations, then that would seem to leave no room for what we are morally permitted to do. David Sobel (2012) argues this point:

The ubiquity of difficult to avoid, minor infringements on other people’s bodies makes the simple argument [from libertarian rights to standard libertarian conclusions] unattractive. Strong moral constraints against all such infringements would make too many things impermissible. The thought that, quite generally, my self-ownership creates very powerful moral constraints on any and all involuntary infringements on my body would unacceptably interfere with your liberty as Nozick saw…Could the philosophical theory named for liberty actually turn out to be unacceptably restrictive of our liberty?

Peter Railton (1985) has made similar arguments related to pollution.

I will argue that when one attempts to apply such [Lockean rights] theories to moral questions about pollution, they present a different face, one set so firmly against laissez faire – or laissez polluter – as to countenance serious restriction of what Lockeans have traditionally taken to be the proper sphere of individual freedom.

Fortunately, from earlier lessons, we can see the error with these claims. The arguments by Sobel and Railton are mistaken in that they ignore that there are two separate dimensions of rights – claim-rights and liberty-rights. As stated earlier, a reasonable delineation of rights must not overly privilege one dimension at the exclusion of the other. The arguments by Ratilon and Sobel rest on a conception of rights that maximizes claim-rights at the exclusion of liberty-rights. This is the same criticism as pacifism and joint-ownership of property. As stated earlier, a proper delineation of rights involves giving significant weight to both claim-rights and liberty-rights.

How to delineate ownership rights

The considerations mentioned thus far provide important insights into the nature of ownership. It might be assumed that self-ownership (or full self-ownership) is a single concept with a precise, determinate content. For example, Vallentyne, Steiner, and Otsuka (2005, p. 204) define “full self-ownership” as “a bundle of rights that is (roughly) equal to the logically strongest set of ownership rights that people can have over themselves compatible with others having equal such rights over themselves”. Hopefully, based on earlier observations, it is clear that there is no single “logically strongest” set of rights. If you have two bundles of rights X and Y, then X might be stronger than Y along one dimension (e.g. in terms of claim-rights), but Y might be stronger than X along another dimension (e.g. in terms of liberty-rights). Still, there might be other undiscovered dimensions along which one bundle of rights might be stronger than another.

Jason Brennan and Bas van der Vossen (2017, p. 209) articulated the multifaceted nature of self-ownership:

More precisely, we can think of self-ownership as being made up of two variables. On the one hand, self-ownership offers protections (in the form of Hohfeldian claim-rights) against unwanted incursions on one’s person. On the other hand, self-ownership offers the freedom (in the form of Hohfeldian liberties) to use one’s person. Since liberties logically entail the absence of duties (including duties correlating to claim-rights), it follows that the two variables (internal to the idea of self-ownership) can be traded off against each other.

The real question, then, is what mix of the two variables internal to the idea of self-ownership (the claim to exclude and the freedom to use) is morally most desirable. This should be obvious, of course. Bas is a self-owner with the freedom to use his person, but this does not license him to punch Jason in the face. Self-ownership is not best understood by completely maximizing on the freedom variable to the complete denial of the exclusion variable. And, again pace Sobel, self-ownership is also not best understood by maximizing on the exclusion variable to the complete denial of the freedom variable.

I do not know what is the best mix of liberty-rights and claim-rights. In fact, I am not even sure if there could be a satisfactory answer. However, as the examples thus far have shown, I am in confident that the proper mix does not involve the exclusion of either variable. Maximizing liberty-rights at the exclusion of claim-rights leads to moral anarchy. Maximizing claim-rights at the exclusion of liberty-rights leads to persons being “morally paralyzed” from doing anything due to the risk of violating someone else’s excessive claim-rights. Both are unacceptable as they leave us at the mercy of the will of others, without any effective freedom, and without the ability to lead our own lives. This insight leads to the anti-paralysis postulate.

The anti-paralysis postulate

The anti-paralysis postulate by Eric Mack (he now refers to it as the “Elbow Room postulate” but I prefer the older naming) is a principle that specifies that rights must be delineated so as to not result in “moral paralysis”. Mack (p. 197) details the postulate as follows:

According to this postulate, a reasonable delineation of basic moral rights must be such that the claim-rights that are ascribed to individuals do not systematically preclude people from exercising the liberty-rights that the claim-rights are supposed to protect. When Railton and Sobel point out that the impermissibility of minor intrusions would be hog-tying, they are pointing out that this impermissibility would systematically morally preclude individuals from exercising the liberty-rights that are ascribed to them—the exercise of which is supposed to be protected by the claim-rights ascribed to them. The elbow room postulate tells us that, since the impermissibility of minor intrusions would be hog-tying, a reasonable delineation of rights does not construe minor intrusions as boundary-crossings.

Some have interpreted Mack’s postulate as treating claim-rights as a form of force that a moral theory must protect individuals from, just as moral theories must protect individuals from coercion from other individuals. David Sobel (2018) gave the following interpretation of the postulate:

Mack seems to be saying that the point of rights is to provide protection not only from other people forcibly preventing me from living my life by my lights, but also from a system of rights that would morally prohibit me from doing so…Mack can therefore be interpreted as saying that the point of rights is to enhance our ability to live our own lives by our own lights, unprevented by others or by the moral force of other people’s rights.

In other words, just as we should not grant individuals excessive liberty rights that would make the rights of others meaningless, we also should not grant individuals excessive claim-rights that would make the rights of others meaningless. In the former case, this permits individuals to use their liberty-rights to paralyze others. In the latter case, this permits individuals to use their claim-rights to paralyze others. The anti-paralysis postulate blocks this.

Note that the rationale for the anti-paralysis postulate is not ad-hoc or anti-libertarian. The justification of the anti-paralysis postulate is based on the exact same rationale for ascribing to individuals libertarian ownership rights in the first place. We ascribe to individuals liberty-rights so that they can have a sovereign space within which they can lead their own lives without being at the mercy of the will of others. We further ascribe to individuals claim-rights which formally reduces their liberty-rights, but which effectively enhances those liberty-rights by protecting their liberty-rights from being frustrated other individuals exercising their excessive liberty-rights. The same motivations justify unilateral property acquisition, the Lockean Proviso, enforcement rights, and minor intrusions. In all cases, the motivation is to avoid mixes of liberty-rights and claim-rights that effectively nullify our liberty-rights. Since the very reason we ascribed claim-rights to individuals in the first place is to enhance our effective liberty-rights, it makes sense that the claim-rights do not systematically preclude the exercise of those liberty-rights.

Justifying the state

Exception Rights

The anti-paralysis postulate tells us that rights should not be delineated such that the claim-rights systemically preclude individuals from exercising the liberty-rights that they were meant to protect. Specifically, we saw that rights should be delineated such that the following acts do not count as rights violations: the unilateral acquisition of property subject to the Lockean Proviso, the enforcement of one’s rights, and the imposition of minor intrusions on others. However, this does not go far enough. Even when these specific acts are permitted, there will still be some disadvantaged individuals who are morally paralyzed – individuals who, through no fault of their own, do not have the opportunity to acquire the resources necessary to protect their rights without violating anyone else’s rights. For example, consider children without adequate caretakers. Or adults who never developed the skills necessary to provide for themselves (either because of lack of opportunity or lack of ability). If there is no state, then these disadvantaged individuals might not be able to acquire the resources necessary to fund the protection of the rights that all libertarians agree they have. E.g. they wouldn’t be able to legitimately hire defense agencies to protect themselves from assault, to protect their property from theft, to enforce contracts with others, etc. In other words, they would be unable to effectively lead their lives independent of the will of others. Just as individuals would be morally paralyzed under joint ownership of property or under a system of rights where minor intrusions are violations, these individuals are likewise morally paralyzed.

According to the anti-paralysis postulate, rights must be delineated so that this does not occur. The disadvantaged individuals described thus far should be able to intrude upon the possessions of others without them counting as rights violations, i.e. without others having a claim-rights against the intrusions by the disadvantaged individuals. This is where exception rights come in. Exception rights attenuate our claim-rights. They allow for there to be special circumstances where others are morally permitted to take control over someone else’s resources in a way that would be impermissible in ordinary circumstances. Nicolás Maloberti (p. 161) outlines exception rights as follows:

Thus, while individuals’ basic rights are necessary for the protection of individuals’ capacity to lead their own lives, in certain situations, those rights themselves might restrict that very same capacity in other individuals without providing a significant benefit to anybody else. Exception rights block this possibility. Exception rights might then be understood as imposing constraints on the exercise of the most basic libertarian rights. With our own axe, we might do as we wish, as long as the use of our axe is not necessary for someone to save a stranger from a burning car, and as long we do not have to use it for something relatively important at the time. By implying this form of restriction, exception rights provide their potential holders a form of moral insurance against the faultless loss of the fundamental value that the most basic rights provide: a sphere of sovereignty that obviates the need to secure the approval of others to pursue our own ends and projects.

The motivation for exception rights is exactly the same as the motivation to adopt the anti-paralysis postulate: we should not grant to individuals excessive claim-rights that would make the liberty-rights of others meaningless. In other words, do not ascribe claim-rights in a way that paralyzes the liberty-rights of others. If the anti-paralysis postulate should be adopted (which, it seems like it should), then so should exception rights. The reason these are called “exception” rights is due to the special circumstances that are required before a disadvantaged person can intrude on others (unlike the minor intrusions mentioned above, which are imposed by all of us every time we act). With that in mind, it is now apt to detail the particular circumstances when exception rights apply.

Conditions where exception rights apply

Following Nicolás Maloberti (p. 162), there are four key conditions to take into account when determining whether X has an exception-right to intrude upon Y in a way that would ordinarily be a violation of Y’s rights.

The gravity of the peril faced by X. This means that exception rights apply only to situations where the peril faced by X is of a significant enough gravity. This includes, at a minimum, any violations of X’s basic ownership rights by a criminal – e.g. assault, property damage, theft, fraud, contract breach, etc. But it might also include comparable damages done by non-criminal forces, e.g. health problems that pose the risk of death or serious injury. Possibly, it might also include the peril faced by someone who merely lacks the opportunities necessary to function in their society (e.g. opportunity to education or occupation). The fact that such a perilous situation is not the fault of the X. That is, it is not due to a neglected reasonable opportunity for avoiding the situation. It’s not clear to me that this condition is strictly necessary. E.g. if a person made poor decisions in the past which placed them in dire situations, but they are actively trying to make better decisions, it seems that exception rights should apply to them if the other three conditions are met. The necessary character of the corresponding infringement to overcome the peril. The intrusion (on what would ordinarily be a right) of Y must be necessary (or close to necessary) in order for the exception right to apply. E.g. if X can be lifted out of dire circumstances by, say, working hard, then X does not have an exception right to intrude upon Y. X must lack an alternative method to escape dire conditions in order to permit intruding upon Y. This condition also tells us that X’s exception right only permits him to impose the minimum amount of intrusion necessary to bring himself out of perilous circumstances. The reasonable cost of compliance imposed on Y. The cost imposed on Y via the intrusion cannot be too great. E.g. X cannot amputate Y’s limb in order to save his life. The cost on Y must be reasonable. I don’t know how to determine whether or not a cost is “reasonable” other than by direct appeal to intuition. Perhaps this is something that can be explored in the future. The indeterminacy of “reasonable” is a problem, but it is not a fatal flaw of the argument, because we must all accept similar indeterminacy in allowing “minor” intrusions such as dropping smoke particles in my neighbor’s backyard when I barn leaves.

Notice that the conditions imply that compensation is not strictly necessary in all cases. However, compensation is relevant in at least two respects: (1) even if X is permitted to intrude on Y, X may be morally obligated to compensate Y to the extent that this is possible without falling back into perilous circumstances (in order to minimize the amount of intrusion placed on Y, from condition 3), and (2) compensation might be necessary to permit intrusions if it is necessary to reduce the cost imposed on Y to a reasonable level. For example, it might not be morally permissible to steal $1000 from someone because the $1000 cost is too large, but it might be permissible to steal $1000 and compensate them $900 because the $100 cost is reasonable.

The State

So far, I have argued that the anti-paralysis postulate grants disadvantaged individuals exception rights to intrude upon others in special perilous circumstances. To justify the state, I need only make the plausible assumption that third-parties are morally permitted to enforce the rights of others on their behalf (e.g. I am morally permitted to defend a woman being assaulted by attacking the assailant). If that is true, then third-party individuals are morally permitted to organize together to enforce these rights. But states are constituted groups of organized individuals, which means states are morally permitted to enforce the exception rights of disadvantaged individuals. Since exception rights involve intruding upon others in ways that would ordinarily be rights violations, states are morally permitted to intrude upon others (e.g. via mandatory taxation) in ways that would ordinarily be rights violations.

The final lingering question in the argument is whether the intrusions by the state (in the form of mandatory taxation) can satisfy the conditions required for exception rights to apply. Note that the question is not whether any actual states operate in a manner that meets these conditions because the question is not whether any actual states are morally permissible. The question is whether any state that imposes mandatory taxation can be morally permissible, i.e. the question is whether mandatory taxation is in principle impermissible. Now, it seems to me that mandatory taxation can be justified by states because the conditions required for exception rights are adequately met:

There exists individuals who would face a sufficiently large gravity of peril if there were no mandatory taxation by the state. This would be the disadvantaged individuals mentioned earlier who would be unable to legitimately hire defense agencies to protect themselves from assault, to protect their property from theft, to enforce contracts with others, etc. There exists individuals who would find themselves in the circumstances just mentioned through no fault of their own. Some people find themselves born into poor environments where they find themselves unable to acquire the economic resources necessary to avoid the perils mentioned earlier. Others might have the resources at one point but lose them due to unforeseeable accidents. Some of the disadvantaged individuals that I have mentioned find themselves unable to bring themselves out of these perilous circumstances (either because of lack of opportunity or lack of ability). This makes intrusions on others necessary to escape these conditions. I don’t know what tax rate counts as “reasonable”, but it seems clear that there are reasonable tax rates above zero. The range of reasonable tax rates is probably larger for individuals with more resources, so a progressive tax rate probably makes the most sense.

These conditions imply that the state should be fairly limited (at least if it is to be justified on the basis of exception rights). Taxation cannot be too high and the state’s activities should be limited to bringing individuals out of otherwise inescapable seriously damaging circumstances. I believe this suggests that the state is at least permitted to perform all of the activities that are commonly ascribed to what Robert Nozick calls the “minimal state”: police protection, contract enforcement, courts, and military. However, the state may be permitted to perform some activities beyond that of the minimal state:

The absence of opportunity to food, shelter, healthcare, and education seem to constitute perilous situations, so the state might be justified in subsidizing opportunity to these goods. Note, however, that the perilous circumstances are lacking the opportunity to these goods, not lacking the goods themselves. It is possible for someone to lack certain resources without lacking the opportunity to those resources, e.g. because they actively pursue conflicting interests, because of laziness, etc. For example, if physical and mental assessments indicate that someone is fully fit to earn money to purchase their own food and shelter, then this individual lacks an enforcement right to intrude upon others to subsidize their food and shelter (since conditions 2 and 3 would not be satisfied). On the other hand, the state is probably be permitted to provide these goods to children. If it can be shown that the state sufficiently compensates taxpayers, then this will be sufficient to justify more extensive taxation. It is conceivable that the state compensates taxpayers in the form of police protection of private property, the enforcement of contracts, the development of a population capable of participating in a market economy, etc. To the extent that state activities compensate taxpayers, it is morally permissible for states to fund those activities via mandatory taxation, since the cost placed on taxpayers would be effectively zero.

This concludes my argument for a libertarian justification for mandatory taxation by the state. To summarize, I will recap the following points to elucidate the stages and premises of my argument.

A reasonable conception of libertarianism ascribes to individuals the following rights: claim-rights that attenuate the liberty-rights of others, the right to unilateral property acquisition subject to the Lockean Proviso, the right to the enforcement of one’s other basic rights, and the right to impose minor intrusions on others. The unifying motivation for the rights specified in (1) involves an endorsement of the anti-paralysis postulate. That is, the rationale behind the rights specified in (1) implies that a reasonable delineation of rights should not ascribe to people claim-rights that “systematically preclude people from exercising the liberty-rights that the claim-rights are supposed to protect”. Thus, a reasonable conception of libertarianism should delineate rights without violating the anti-paralysis postulate. The anti-paralysis postulate supports ascribing to individuals exception rights. Exception rights attenuate our claim-rights in a way that permits faultless disadvantaged individuals to intrude upon others in ways that would ordinarily be a rights violation, so long as the intrusion is necessary for the individual to escape a perilous condition and the intrusion imposes a reasonable cost on others. Without exception rights, the disadvantaged individuals in the aforementioned circumstances would be “morally paralyzed”, which (given the anti-paralysis postulate) should not be allowed by a reasonable delineation of rights. Third-parties have the right to organize and enforce the rights of others. Because some disadvantaged individuals have exception rights to intrude upon others to alleviate their peril, third-parties have the right to organize and alleviate the peril of such individuals on their behalf. The individuals that constitute the state are therefore acting within their rights when they intrude upon others (via mandatory taxation) as a means to enforce the exception rights of the severely disadvantaged.

Qualifications

I would like to end with some qualifications on the argument I’ve given so far. Firstly, the requirements that I mentioned above should not be taken as necessary conditions for any coercive state activity; rather, they are necessary conditions to justify state activity based on exception rights. I have argued that mandatory taxation can be justified using exception rights, which are a class of rights that can be justified on libertarian grounds using the anti-paralysis postulate. However, this is just one possible way of justifying coercive activity by the state on libertarian grounds. There might be other libertarian justifications of other forms of coercive state activity that do not rely on the concept of exception rights or the anti-paralysis postulate. Whether this can be done is beyond the scope of this post.

Secondly, the argument is agnostic with respect to whether the state must or should have a monopoly on force, something that is often assumed to be a key feature of states. The argument that I have given thus far has focused on justifying mandatory taxation by a state. However, the argument says nothing about whether there can be multiple states within a given region. In principle, multiple states overlapping within a given region can be justified via exception rights, so long as they adhere to the conditions that I mentioned above. In practice, however, the problems entailed from multiple overlapping states are likely serious enough that states must (or at least should) have a monopoly on force within a given region.

Lastly, the argument is also agnostic with respect to the permissible scope of a state. How large should a state be? Can a global state be morally permissible, or should there be independent states each with their own sovereignty? Should there be different states for different regions, continents, cultures, ethnicities, etc.? Nothing that I have argued for here takes a stake on these matters. It’s likely that the answers to these questions depend on empirical facts that I do not know the answer to, such as the relationship (if any) between the size/scope of a state and the probability of corruption or tyranny, whether groups with sufficiently dissimilar cultures should be under the different political jurisdictions, etc.

Further Questions

Some lingering issues that have been touched on here that I hope to explore in the future:

I have not committed myself to any particular theory of property rights. I have only talked about how exception rights and the anti-paralysis postulate can justify taking someone’s legitimately acquired property. It will be worthwhile in the future to figure out what principles ought to constrain legitimate acquisition of property, whether that be some form of left-libertarianism or right-libertarianism. I have mentioned before that the best conception of self-ownership involves some mix of liberty-rights and claim-rights that does not reduce to maximizing one variable at the expense of the other. To fully articulate this conception may very well be impossible to do in a precise and satisfactory manner. However, it is worth investigating whether any writers have attempted this feat. Perhaps, if we cannot articulate a precise conception of self-ownership, we might be able to articulate a procedure that should be used to determine what self-ownership requires. As stated earlier, this argument does not imply that the only libertarian justification of coercive state activity involves exception rights or the anti-paralysis postulate. A further task is to find general principles that determine when any coercive state activity can be justified on libertarian grounds. Likely, this will involve finding general libertarian principles for justifying coercive action broadly (from the state or any other party). Some candidates for additional state coercive activities that can be justified on libertarian grounds might include the enforcement of policies that are selected through democratic elections, and wealth redistribution as compensation to any individuals who lack access to resources owed to them based on the accepted theory of property rights. At the beginning of the paper, I provided one reason to reject utilitarianism (that it unconditionally permits individuals to be used as resources by others, so long as more happiness is produced). I also mentioned that I reject consequentialism more broadly for reasons not mentioned in this post. In other posts, I have explained why I reject both utilitarianism and consequentialism.

Relevant Papers

The primary papers that have influenced my position: