Does Obama believe in determinism, left-libertarianism or justice as fair reciprocity?

Dylan Matthews has made an interesting attempt to reverse-engineer part of Barack Obama’s political philosophy, based on some remarks he made in Roanoke, Virginia a couple of weeks ago:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me —because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

This point was immediately leapt upon and misquoted in a Romney attack ad, suggesting that the Republicans at least want to present this as a key point of philosophical difference between the two presidential candidates.

Matthews sees the debate as tracking the old philosophical dispute about the existence of free will and moral desert. On one hand, you have Obama sympathisers, who are sceptical about free will, and so whether people can ever be held ultimately responsible for their own success. This means that the rich cannot use the argument that they deserve their wealth to defend it against redistribution. On the other hand, those on Romney’s side of the debate are relatively credulous of the existence of free will, and so more likely to believe that the successful deserve credit for their success and deserve to keep their wealth. 

Now this is certainly a plausible reading of the dispute, and I think Matthews is right to connect Obama’s comments to luck egalitarianism, but I think this is only one of a number of ways to frame the argument. Even if it is a debate essentially about desert, the two sides might not map neatly onto the opposing sides of the free will debate. For example, someone who believes in free will might be in full agreement with the claim that the rich do not deserve full credit for their own success. All that the rejection of hard determinism entails is that it is possible that some people are sometimes morally responsible. But of course, this does not entail that people are always morally responsible. Thus it is likely that many Obama sympathisers believe it is possible (though perhaps unlikely) for rich people to deserve their wealth, but that as a contingent fact, in the present society, most or all do not.

In any case, it is far from clear that Obama’s point is about moral desert at all. Notice that in the quote above he makes only factual claims – there are no explicitly moral arguments at all.* I think this means, whether by accident or design, that Obama’s argument has ecumenical appeal across different moral perspectives. As I see it, Obama’s argument goes something like this:

Empirical Premise: The rich are not solely responsible for the own success, they were dependent on others in society.

Normative Premise:?

Conclusion: Some of the wealth of rich ought to be shared with the rest of society.

Obama’s argument can be filled out with the normative premise of luck egalitarianism: that inequalities can only be justified if they result from responsible choices. This seems to be Matthews’ assumption, which explains his focus on free will – without free will, there can be no responsible choice, and so no legitimate inequality. But there are other normative premises which can serve the argument just as well. I think the two most interesting, and the ones that are most likely to capture Obama’s point, are justice as fair reciprocity and left-libertarianism.

The basic normative premise of the position I call justice as fair reciprocity is that we have special duties to other members of our society because they are necessary contributors to what John Rawls calls “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” without which we could not prosper. Elements of this position are sketched out in the work of Rawls and Brian Barry. However, perhaps the clearest contemporary proponent is Andrea Sangiovanni, who argues that “those who have submitted themselves to a system of laws and social rules in ways necessary to sustain our life as citizens, producers and biological beings are owed a fair return”. Notice that questions of free will, luck and desert are not immediately relevant on this account. What matters is that success was dependent on the efforts and actions of other people, and so these others are owed a share of the rewards. Whether Obama is pumping the intuition about luck or the intuition about dependence on others is unclear – I can see the argument for both.

Another thing that Obama seems to be doing in the speech is subverting orthodox libertarian notions of property. In this he echoes left-libertarian political philosophers. As Matthews notes, Robert Nozick saw questions of free will and desert as irrelevant to distributive justice – he was against redistribution as he believed it to infringe individual rights. On the Nozickian view, the rich (like the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain in his famous example) get rich as the result of “capitalist acts between consenting adults”. That is, the free exchange of property. Left-libertarians accept the principle that there should be no restrictions on how people use their property. However, they argue for a more complicated view of who initialy owns what. On the left libertarian view, everybody has an equal claim to the natural resources of the Earth, and so anybody that has got rich by exploiting more than their fair share of these resources owes rent to the rest of humanity. Thus they combine the libertarian respect for property rights with relatively egalitarian proposals.

Obama follows the left libertarians in pointing out how supposedly self-made men like Robert Nozick’s idealised basketball player utilise the property of other people, and society in general to achieve their successes. The implication is that they owe rent in the form of redistributive taxation. Thus left libertarianism, too, can provide the normative promise Obama needs to complete his argument. In the context of current American politics, given that his argument is clearly aimed against libertarian defenders of the status quo, the left libertarian interpretation seems like a plausible reading of Obama, too.

Barack Obama’s Roanoke speech is so interesting from a philosophical point of view because of the variety of perspectives he could be appealing to. In its ambiguity it underlines the fact that effective political interventions often lack the rigour and precision of good philosophy.

 

*Whether normative propositions can be derived only from empirical facts remains a controversial question in moral and political philosophy, but I can’t see how Obama’s argument here can work without a normative premise.

Raoul Moat and Moral Responsibility

Public opinion regarding the Raoul Moat case has reached a familiar fork in the road. On the one hand, those sympathetic to Moat try to portray him as a person with mental health issues, let down by the authorities and society. On the other, some, like the Prime Minister, see him as “a callous murderer, full stop, end of story”. It is a debate that seems to emerge every time there is a high profile crime like this (see, for instance, the apologists for Joseph Fritzl, on the grounds that he was abused as a child).

Yet the disagreement is deeper and more significant than it appears on the surface. It is not simply the usual face-off between bleeding-heart liberals and uncaring conservatives. Rather, the difficulty that most people have in digesting such events has its roots in age-old philosophical tension between determinism and moral responsibility.

Determinism is the idea that all events are inevitable, the result of an inescapable chain of causation that began in the big bang. At its root is the belief that everything can be explained causally. Just as physical phenomena like the tides and the seasons can be understood and accounted for, the same is true for human characteristics and behaviour. The nature-nurture debate exemplifies this idea, seeking to understand how genetic and environmental factors make us the way we are.

The problem with determinism is that it appears to be inconsistent with free will and moral responsibility. If all my thoughts and actions can be explained causally, then it is unjustified to hold me accountable for my actions. I could not have acted in any way other than I did, so why should I be praised or blamed?

The relevance of these ideas to Raoul Moat should be clear. The thoroughgoing determinist will insist that Moat cannot be held responsible for the unfortunate murders that occurred: they were just the result of a toxic mix of circumstance and character that ended tragically. They will claim that you simply cannot put a person like Raoul Moat in a desperate situation like the one he was in, and not expect him to go on a murderous rampage. And Raoul Moat surely did not choose to be the sort of person prone to murderous outbursts, so it would be unfair to blame him for his actions.

The difficulty that society and the media face is their inability to reconcile two inconsistent propositions – that our actions are greatly conditioned by outside forces, and that we are morally responsible for what we do. The result is that certain forms of conditioning – mental disorder, childhood disadvantage – are seen as genuine mitigation, whereas others are not.

The determinist will insist that the question of whether Moat had a ‘genuine excuse’ for his actions as irrelevant. It is a matter of degree, and the threshold for sympathy, the point at which we characterise a person’s actions as involuntary, is arbitrary. To draw an analogy, what is the difference between a kleptomaniac and a person who simply finds the urge to steal harder than most to resist? We all have different inclinations, good and evil, of different strengths and we vary in our capacity to fight them. These are facts about ourselves that we do not choose.

The pertinent question in the aftermath of an incident like this has nothing to do with the character of the protagonists. If we dig deep enough for excuses, we will always find them, because Moat’s actions, like all of ours, were shaped by forces beyond his ken or control. Whether Raoul Moat was a good or a bad man is neither here nor there. The point is that something clearly undesirable (the shootings) has occurred, and the question is how we can avoid things like this happening again.

Ironically, this question feeds right back into the existing discussion. When the Moat sympathisers criticise the authorities for their inability to help him and neutralise the threat that he posed, they are trying to ensure that there is not another Raoul Moat. If social services or the police force act differently, they may prevent people like Raoul Moat being in positions like the one he found himself in.

Those that condemn Raoul Moat, on the other hand, focus excessively on pinning the blame on him, on holding him accountable for his actions. Nevertheless, it is possible that they are unconsciously working towards the same goal as the sympathisers. It is important to understand that while the literal truth of moral responsibility may be redundant, there is still good reason to keep up the pretence that we are morally responsible. A world where those who did wrong were not criticised or punished, by conscience, society or law, would be a world with much more wrongdoing. Therefore, even though it is not fair to blame Moat for his actions, it is necessary to denounce him to show would-be Raoul Moats the cost of behaving in such a manner.

There is a debate to be had, now that Raoul Moat is dead. But it has nothing to do with the man’s legacy. It is rather the question of how best to prevent such events from occurring again.