Topics Ethics

Question Robert Nozick compared taxes to forced labor, on the grounds that taking money away from people forces them to work for more money. Is forced labor always objectionable? Suppose my city holds one day a year where everyone (with obvious exceptions for extenuating circumstances) is required to pick up litter. Would this be unethical? Is there an important difference between slavery and compulsory labor?

Accepted:
May 12, 2011

Comments

It is an honor to address this question as Nozick was one of my professors (and I must say he was an outstanding, funny, wise teacher). On my dear professor: You may be right about Nozick, though he did allow for a minimal state which would have required some (again, perhaps minimal) taxation and thus Nozick may have thought some forced labor is (as I think it is) sometimes quite justified.

On the difference between slavery and forced labor and whether forced labor is always objectionable: I suggest that slavery and forced labor differ, as you could have a slave whom you do not compel to engage in labor / work and you could compel someone to work whom you do not claim as your personal property. There might be emergency conditions when, for example, you are on a boat in a storm and the captain requires everyone to work to save the ship (imagine any who refulse to work are thrown overboard). Many people believe that when a nation is under attack, that nation may (rightly) elect to compel its citizens to serve in the military. Fighting is not a form of labor, but being in the military can involve a vast system of compulsory labor.

Perhaps the key difference between slavery and compulsory labor is that slavery seems intrinsically wrong; it is wrong in and of itself for one person to claim to own another person. At least since the Enlightenment or, in the USA, since the Civil War, it is widely held that there can be no justification of any kind for slavery; it involves a violation of an inalianable right --which is why even voluntary slavery is prohibited (viz. a person cannot sell him or herself into slavery). Compulsory labor can be morally wrong (think of women forced to be sexworkers), but we can easily think of cases of when compulsory labor would be fitting. Imagine, for example, someone's negligence creates a huge oil spill and a court then forces the guilty party to clean it up.