Against Prisons and Taxes
1. 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.
VIGILANTE
Jasmine discovers that some con men have set up a fake charity and are conning some people in her neighborhood.
She captures them at gunpoint, takes them to her basement, and plans to keep them there for a year as punishment.
Quickly realizing how expensive it is to take care of them, Jasmine goes to her neighbors and demands $50 from each of them, at gunpoint. She explains that half the money will go towards taking care of her prisoners and that the rest will go towards a community gym to help keep troubled kids off the street. Those who do not comply are locked up in her basement with her other prisoners.
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:
Against Taxation and Imprisonment
(TX1) If there is no morally relevant difference between two actions A and B, and A is wrong, then B is wrong (TX2) It is wrong for Jasmine to extort and kidnap her
neighbors
(TX3) There is no morally relevant difference between Jasmine extorting and kidnapping her neighbors and the government taxing and imprisoning its citizens (TX4) So, it is wrong for the government to tax and imprison
its citizens
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.