Anarchy

Dear Princess ‘Ishka,

At a philosophical dinner I took part to few days ago, I had the opportunity to entertain an extremely interesting conversation with O, who calls himself an anarchist. I don’t know much of anarchism but I have always found the idea quite unappealing. A world without enforced laws has always seemed to me pretty unrealistic. That is why I was so happy to hear the words of someone who believes in anarchy.

In this letter, I will outline the main points of this conversation and my final rejection of anarchy as a plausible conclusion. But I would urge you to think about it not as a trivial issue. It is indeed interesting and the thought of anarchy shouldn’t be dismissed with the scorn I myself have treated it in the past.

O started by pointing out that we have gotten used to the idea of living in legal states. In these states, we must obey the law and deviance is sanctioned or punished. The police is itself an institution whose presence discourages such deviance and is justified to employ violence whenever the law permits or requires it. O poses then the question: is a unified legal system a good enough reason for permitting or even requiring violence? Is it good that we must obey something which we never agreed upon and be punished if we do not?

If these questions raise even the least of doubts, it is interesting to wonder whether our world must be legal. It is so, of course, but shall it be so?

O asks: on what ground do we think that law is required? He answers that we take improperly for granted that people are going to be bad and we need laws to “make them behave”. Isn’t this a story we tell ourselves just because we don’t know anything better than a legal system? At this point, M intervenes and says “I don’t take people to be bad, but I don’t want to take the risk that they are, therefore I think law will be helpful”. In my opinion, there is even a deeper worry than this: can I myself grant that I will always be fair without the external incentive of law?

O accepts M’s objection but insists “What do you think will prevent people from being bad? Law itself or the fact that rationality will tell them that being bad could make you incur legal sanctions?” Obviously the latter. But if we take a legal system to require human rationality, that means that rationality is more fundamental than the legal system itself. If you accept this, why shouldn’t you believe that rationality alone can grant living together? Wouldn’t that be a world similar to ours but without any arbitrary enforcement of something we have never agreed upon and without anything such as “legal violence”? Everyone would live according to their rules and principles, and without being forced to obey anything they disagree with.

If you think this kind of reasoning is sound, you might very likely be an anarchist already. Let me then point out my objections.

O’s argument is based on the presupposition of “natural rationality”, as if human beings were “born rational” and they would be so, independently of any kind of unified education. This is a very strong claim, which becomes even stronger as he says that individual rationalities would work just like a unified law in determining individual behaviors. Such rationalities would have to be based on systematic moral theories (or codes of behavior), but how can we grant that each individual will formulate her own systematic theory?

Even if we were to accept “natural rationality” and “natural formulation of moral theories”, the question of how such theories could be integrated in a beneficial way is still unanswered. But let’s be even more charitable and grant such “natural integration”. What if someone starts exploiting the integrated system by, say, evading taxes? We wouldn’t have any common ground to say: you shouldn’t do that. Actually, there would even be individual theories which would allow evading taxes to the extent that the system as a whole doesn’t crumble. How can we grant that that is not the case? Could we accept it? I suspect that there would be something in us protesting: that is unfair!

At this point, O is forced to grant some content to that natural rationality, but on what base? Agreement? That would already amount to a legal system. Some kind of innate universal morality? But that’s just absurd: morality is the last thing which can be innate and universal at once!

Here is what I think: rationality is not natural but is something we learn; not everyone has a systematic theory of morality, and those who have it didn’t produce it spontaneously; we aren’t perfectly integrated beings, and integration is often something we have to work hard to obtain; we need a legal system because we must be granted the chance to meaningfully protest whenever something goes wrong. And what if the law is wrong? We must change it!

Forever yours,

‘Miasha