Paul Walker's excellent response to a previous post of mine was structured along the following lines - even if private property is an interruption of liberty (which I argued it was) it still leads to more total liberty. Thus someone interested in maximising liberty should still support it (to what extent?).I responded that it is necessary to distinguish between maximising liberty and maximising good consequences. But of course for this we need a more rigorous definition of what constitutes liberty. The whole 'positive and negative liberty' debate is pretty heavily done, so I thought a fresh approach would be to focus instead on its antithesis - coercion.
What does it mean to be coerced? Consider three situations.
The Robber: Harold keeps all his money in a safe at home (perhaps because he expects deflation). Robber Robin breaks into Harold's house, and threatens to shoot him unless he unlocks his safe and gives him all his money.
The Slave: In a slave-owning society, a particular slave is whipped every day without fail. One day his owner says to him that he will stop the whipping for one day if the slave goes to fetch a pail of water. This example was invented by Robert Nozick, who you may have heard of in another context.
The Debtor: Bill lends his books to Ann but then he needs them back. For some reason, Ann refuses to return them. She then hears about a particular concert she wants to attend, and suggests to Bill that he can have the books back if he buys her the concert ticket. This example comes from Timo Airaksinen.
Here's a basic descriptive idea of coercion. There are other theories than descriptive ones, we'll cover those shortly. Imagine you have two agents, A and B, with B the dominant agent. Only actions Q and R are open to A (although R may constitute 'doing nothing', or 'not doing Q', or some variant).
A is coerced to Q iff:
1) B threatens A to perform Q, perhaps by imposing negative consequences for A if he/she performs R
2) In light of 1), A strictly loses when performing either Q or R
3) B gains from A performing Q.
By these broad concepts the robber is obviously coerced, and it seems like the debtor is also coerced. But is the slave? It seems that the owner is not threatening to do anything. If anything, he's promising something good for the slave. Rewarding people for good behaviour doesn't seem like coercion. You might respond that a lack of punishment isn't quite the same morally as an actual reward. This may be, but a potentially more powerful response comes from splitting into normative and descriptive coercion theories.
Normative and Descriptive Coercion Theories
The distinction between normative and descriptive coercion is first found in Nozick(1969). Normative coercion theories state that whether or not someone is coerced can be determined by appealing to morality - whether or not their human rights have been violated. So you aren't coercing someone to do something if you have some right to make them do it. Descriptive theories are those that rely purely on empirical evidence - we can determine whether or not coercion has occurred by deciding whether the victim was under some form of psychological duress or something similar. Nozick supports the concept of normative coercion (as an accurate description, not as a hobby!) but some modern philosophers differ.
Under a normative framework, Nozick argues that the slave is in fact coerced - because his human rights are violated. Likewise with the other two examples. He argues then that the normative explanation is a better one for helping us understand coercion.
There have been responses to this position and it is far from concluded. See, for example, Airaksinen(1988) and Carr(1988) (1988 was a good year for coercion!).
However I want to conclude with an application. Is taxation coercive? Under a descriptive framework it seems only coercive if the taxpayer loses from paying tax. If you are better off after paying your tax (and receiving the benefits of Government services, if any) you wouldn't need to be coerced into paying your tax - the fact that you are threatened seems irrelevant. In a descriptive sense it seems then that the only people who are coerced into taxation are those people (if any) who lose out from the Government taxation.
Does it matter if you're mistaken about whether you will benefit?
Under a normative framework it becomes more opaque. Does the Government have a right to tax you? That is the classic question of political legitmacy and redistributive justice, and I will not touch it here. However (and as Nozick correctly realised), what a normative model of coercion does for us is show that with respect to taxation, in order to show it to be coercive we have to engage with arguments of distributive justice. Nozick went on to attempt to do this in his famous book, but I feel many libertarians are content to assume that a threat equates to coercion, in any situation (and is thus wrong). This, I believe, is unsupportable.
Update: Sorry for any RSS readers that might have got to read this twice, but because I started writing this a few days ago it came up buried towards the bottom of the page, which was unhelpful. Thus I re-posted it.
Update 2: Brad Taylor responds here.