Topics Justice

Question The 'State of Nature' is often appealed to in order to make systematic the justification of the state and the extent of our political obligations to it. What option does the present day anarachist have if he refuses to accept the force of these arguments and genuinely wishes to live a stateless, obligation-free, apolitical existence ? Surely he didn't 'choose' to be born into a modern state and yet it seems that there is little he can do to live an alternative life. Is this a significant restriction of his freedom ?

Accepted:
September 27, 2007

Comments

Here are some options: (i) pick a country where there's not much in the way of rule of law and go off and live there. Or (ii) do as the founders of Sealand did, and try to set up shop on an oil rig or some such offshore. (But you might want to pick your territory a little more cleverly than they did.) Or (iii) raise up an army of like-minded people, overthrow some government, and set up a stateless, er, "state." (iv) Moving to another planet doesn't seem to be much of an option, but in principle, I suppose... A more practical compromise might be to (v) fake your death and disappear into the wilderness.

If it sounds as though I'm (a) being facetious, and (b) am not entirely sympathetic, I'd have to say that on (a), I don't really see much in the way of other options. [And for the record: I'm against overthrowing legitimate governments; I can't condone (iii). I'm also not big on (v), since it calls for fraud.]

On (b), I'm afraid it's true. I think there are lots of interesting questions about whether this or that use of government power is legitimate, and also lots of interesting questions about what the best political arrangement might be, but it would take an awful lot to convince me that anarchy would be an improvement over all but the very worst of states.

In some discussions, it's assumed that all state infringement on liberty needs justification, and that without that justification, states are illegitimate. Why we should think this way is not exactly clear. Compare: someone might say that in order to take any moral prescriptions seriously, we need to have an argument against moral skepticism -- or that we shouldn't take knowledge claims seriously unless we can defeat the skeptic. I'll confess to being something of a Moorean about such matters: massive doubts about assumptions that normally serve us well seem optional at best. But in this case, observing states where order has broken down, not to mention what happens when enterprises like Enron manage to stave off regulation, make me think that the evidence is on my side. Needless to say, that's not an endorsement of tyranny. But then, there's a wide swath of territory between anarchy and Myanmar.