Topics Justice

Question Is stealing money stolen from me more ethical than stealing money justly owned? If it is, and I believe that the government or the upper classes have unjustly appropriated money belonging to my working class family for generations, am I justified morally in giving false information to the IRS in order to avoid paying taxes?

Accepted:
February 16, 2011

Comments

There are two weak spots in the reasoning you sketch. First, the expression "more ethical" is a bit slippery. If one does not pause to reflect, one may be fooled into thinking that, if something is more ethical, then it's ethical or permissible or (as you say at the end) morally justified. But this is not so. It's presumably more ethical (more acceptable, morally) to snatch a woman's purse than to take it while threatening her with a knife. But this does not mean that it is morally justified to snatch her purse. All it means is that it is less wrong to do so. (Some would say that wrongness, like pregnancy, does not admit of degrees; but here I agree with you that it does.)

This first weak spot can be avoided by saying instead that stealing money that was formerly stolen from you can be ethical or morally justified. And this seems correct in cases where (a) the money was justly owned by you at the time it was first stolen and (b) it was not stolen to meet some urgent needs of the thief or of others and (c) there is no proper public authority available for you to appeal to that would be both willing and able to retrieve the stolen money for you and (d) stealing the money back won't have disproportionately harmful consequences (e.g. by provoking violent escalation).

The second weak spot is that you move from your belief that something like conditions (a)-(d) obtain to your being morally justified. This is again a bit slippery. Think of self-defense here: you are permitted to defend yourself, violently and even with deadly force, if you are under serious attack. But it does not follow that you may use deadly force if merely you believe that you are being attacked. It is true that you really have only your beliefs to go on, you have no independent access to the truth. But to invoke self-defense you need to show that your belief was well-grounded, that it was reasonable for you, given the evidence, to reach the conclusion that you were under attack.

We can fix the second weak spot by requiring that you believe after careful deliberation (no time pressure here) and with good reason that the government or the upper classes have stolen money from you and your family. Are you then justified in cheating on your taxes?

I would think that you are. Consider recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, where corrupt cliques were in power for decades, directly and indirectly stealing billions from the society and transferring this wealth to Britain and Switzerland and elsewhere. Had you been a citizen in Tunisia or Egypt, would you have been required to pay your taxes, as legally prescribed, to the penny? Surely not. It would have been morally permissible to pay as little as you could get away with -- though if you were reasonably well-to-do, you should then also have used at least some of your illegal savings to fund some of the things that were not publicly funded in Tunisia and Egypt but would have been if these states had been justly organized (basic education and health care, perhaps, or income support for the families of people who become ill or unemployed).

Now you weren't asking about Tunisia or Egypt, but about the United States. In this case it is not so obvious that there is the kind of theft you are suggesting. The tax rules are adopted and enforced under the oversight of an elected legislature, and one might say that it is perfectly permissible for a population to vote to impose taxes on themselves despite the dissent of a minority. (We cannot achieve perfect unanimity; and if we allow dissenters to exempt themselves from all tax obligations, then we'll never raise the funds the governments needs for even its most basic functioning.) Of course, you might disagree with this, but you would need some argument here for the claim that uniform taxes imposed with the consent of a majority of citizens amount to stealing from non-consenters.

Alternatively, you could claim that a lot of our tax money is stolen not by our government but from our government. Rich people make or promise campaign contributions in the millions and are rewarded by governmental subsidies, special tax breaks, tax avoidance and evasion opportunities worth in the billions -- this essentially constitutes theft because these special breaks for the rich are not consented to by the people and are not at all in the interest of the general public.

I think the second line of argument is more plausible, and there is abundant evidence that this sort of stealing is happening on a massive scale. But these are cases where rich individuals and corporations with the aid of corrupt public officials are stealing public funds that should be going for the legitimate purposes of government. It is these rich individuals and corporations and corrupt public officials who are stealing our tax money. If counter-stealing is permissible here, wouldn't we have to target the thieves? If we steal from the government, the result is that even less money is available for the legitimate purposes of government. The fact that others a stealing money from our government, thereby degrading the education of American children, cannot make it alright for us to steal money from this government thereby ensuring that these same children must attend even more run-down public schools.

Now this objection can be answered. You can say that, instead of giving $100 to the government of which $20 will be stolen by the rich, it is better that I withhold the $100 by cheating on my taxes and then give $80 privately for important social purposes (such as basic education) that the government is currently -- perhaps because of all the theft -- under-serving.

There is still another objection to overcome. It will be said that citizens ought to fight the problem of political corruption in the US politically, rather than privately by withholding taxes. Ours is a basically democratic country, and if we spot injustice in our political system, then we should mobilize citizens to correct this problem. If you win a majority of citizens to your cause, then your cause will prevail. If not, then perhaps you ought to swallow the injustice in deference to your fellow citizens who choose to continue to authorize or at least to permit it.

This objection is surely not conclusive; the question you pose is complex. To argue it out for the case of the US would take rather more space (and time) than are here available. But this itself really highlights the key point: when you face a decision of consequence, the mere belief that you are about to do the right thing cannot justify your decision. Whether what you decide to do is morally justified depends on the soundness of the grounds you have for your belief. The belief that by cheating on your taxes you are merely avoiding theft of your money or counter-stealing money that had been stolen from you and your family earlier -- this belief is not obviously true (nor obviously false). It takes a good bit of further thought to come to a well-grounded judgment about it. Without such a well-grounded judgment in favor of this belief, you cannot claim with any confidence that you are morally justified to cheat on your taxes.