Monday, February 4, 2019

When You Do and Don't Have to Justify Your Choices

Sometimes you can make decisions and you don't have any obligation whatsoever to explain them to anyone else. Other times you have a strict obligation to justify your decisions. Which situation you are in depends strongly on whether your decision affects other people or not.

If you're walking down the aisle of a supermarket, you can place anything into your shopping cart. So long as you can pay for it, nobody gets to object. You affect other people by very slightly bidding up the price of food. But anyone who tries to object "You shouldn't get that food, because I want that food" is effectively doing the same to you. It's symmetric. Economists call these pecuniary externalities. When you buy something, you impose slightly higher costs on other buyers but slightly higher benefits on producers. It's a wash, and it doesn't make any sense to favor one buyer over another basically identical buyer, so we don't treat this like we treat other kinds of externalities (pollution, crime, etc.).  You can go on filling your cart with whatever you like, and there's no good reason for anyone to object.

Sometimes our decisions hurt other people. Notably, our political opinions and our choices of who we vote for impose policy on our neighbors. Given that, we're under some kind of moral obligation to explain ourselves. Of course, you have the right to your own opinions, in the sense that nobody can read your mind and convict you of thought-crime. Any attempt to actually enforce an "explain yourself or capitulate" policy would be intolerably authoritarian. (And besides, who wants to give any government the authority to decide what "the right answer" is to these kinds of questions?) What I'm describing is a moral obligation, not a practical or legal one. If your choices hurt other people, even if those choices are made entirely in your own head, acted upon in the secrecy of the voting booth, and protected by our laws, you have an obligation to give them some thought.

So I think people can legitimately decide things such as, "I like apples, so I'm going to buy more apples." without coming up with a philosophical justification. You can also decide, "I'm going to listen to a few Katy Perry songs" or "I'm going to drink a few beers tonight" or "I'm going to binge-watch the entire second season of The Punisher in a single weekend" without having to explain yourself to your neighbors or to society in general. (Sorry, enough about me anyway.) You can decide that you like these things, that it's just your opinion, that these are simply your own tastes, and nobody is harmed.

On the other hand, I don't think it's legitimate to think to yourself, "I don't think we should legalize marijuana. That's just my opinion, but I don't like it and will vote against it." You might legitimately argue that you've digested the literature and thought that marijuana causes more social harms than benefits, and that this justifies outlawing it and using state-sponsored violence to suppress the market. (Obviously I think such people have reached the wrong conclusion, but they've at least followed a legitimate process to get there.) I would applaud the person who at least made an honest effort at this, and I would scorn the person who doesn't even bother. The point here is that criminalizing marijuana entails deliberately harming certain people, and you have to justify a decision that causes someone harm. You don't get to flippantly say, "Let's sic armed men on people who do X, because it's just my opinion that we should do so."

There are a lot of laws that are in place because people use state power to enshrine their cultural or religious orientations. "I do/don't approve of marijuana" is a great divider between left-tribe and right-tribe. (Not as much in very recent years, but it has been.) And some policies aren't necessarily a left/right divider, but characterize prevailing attitudes. Drug laws in general are in place mostly because voters are answering the wrong question: "Do I personally approve of drug use?" The relevant question is actually, "Can we justify using violence to stop drug use?" It's similar with laws against gambling and prostitution and other vice laws. I would make a similar argument about people who want a "soak the rich" tax policy. Most of these people haven't made a careful calculation. They don't know how much "the rich" are paying now, they don't have a theory that computes the optimal amount, and they haven't compared the current actual to the modeled optimal and found it's too low. Mostly these people are emotionally responding "More!" to a vague question about how much the rich should pay in taxes. It's more a declaration one's membership to the Blue Tribe than it is a carefully considered result of an optimization problem. (I acknowledge that there are people who do the hard work and conclude that the rich should be taxed more. Those people are fulfilling their obligation to explain themselves, and I salute them. But I'll suggest they are a tiny fraction of total people calling for higher taxes on the rich.)

If your decisions and choices potentially harm other people, you have an obligation to explain your reasoning. If you support the use of state-sponsored violence to ban things or to confiscate wealth, I think this plainly qualifies as needing an explanation. People have very bad ideas about what good policy means. These ideas mostly sit quietly inside of people's skulls, compelling them to fill in the wrong bubbles on election day and giving moral support to the wrong politicians. These things need to be aired and exposed to the light of day. If there are compelling arguments, you're obligated to consider them, to come up with some kind of answer to them or perhaps even change your mind.

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