Well, this is a little unusual: I basically agree with the gist of Liam Murphy’s response to the Dan Klein essay I discussed in a post below. Coercion is either going to be a strictly descriptive term with, at most, indirect moral significance, or a morally loaded one. But in the latter case, your application of the term will depend on an underlying theory of rights, and so we may as well cut to the chase rather than futzing around with the derivative concept. However, he does steal a base here, I think:
So on Nozick’s account, labor contracts for less than the minimum wage are not coercive. But it is also doubtful that their prohibition is coercive, since the relevant description of the government’s proposal seems to be this: “We will enforce agreements where the wage rate exceeds $X, but agreements for less than $X will not be enforced and in fact will be otherwise sanctioned.” This is better than nothing, as far as government enforcement of labor agreements is concerned, and so rational employers and employees would not prefer that the proposal had never been made.Those who feel that something has gone wrong here might be tempted by another approach that Nozick discusses in his article, and which has been very influential. On the so-called “moral baseline” approach, we can count proposals as coercive if carrying them out would make their recipients worse off than they would be if everyone acted as they morally ought to act. A government’s proposal to enforce only certain labor agreements will count as a coercive, on this view, just in case governments ought to enforce all labor agreements.
Now, the form of inference in the first paragraph is pretty self evidently a bad one—for a quick reductio, pick almost any value of X for “the government will enforce murder laws and X” to prove that X is non-coercive—and Murphy himself clearly doesn’t subscribe to it. It’s introduced just to get us to agree that there must be something wrong with the conception of coercion upon which it’s purportedly based. But it at least does rather better than Murphy’s example suggests. Because here, too, there’s the question of a baseline: What’s the alternative to the government’s “proposal,” and is it worse from the perspective of employers and/or employees? Murphy’s implicit alternative here is “no labor agreements are enforced.” But that’s only the case to the extent that the government prevents or prohibits other mechanisms for the enforcement of agreements, at least agreements of which it disapproves. Now, moving up one level, it might indeed be better for all (or most) concerned for one entity to assume an ultimate monopoly on such enforcement, but the baseline for comparison here has to be the alternative rule under some alternative monopoly arrangement, not anarchy. (Full disclosure: Murphy was my thesis advisor when I was a student at NYU. I think he gave me an A-minus.)
5 responses so far ↓
1 Eric the .5b // May 9, 2007 at 1:41 pm
“But that’s only the case to the extent that the government prevents or prohibits other mechanisms for the enforcement of agreements, at least agreements of which it disapproves.”
Not to mention that it’s only the case if the government doesn’t levy fines or other penalties for such agreements…
2 Pithlord // May 10, 2007 at 8:09 pm
It’s good that Murphy is not a law professor, because there is a big distinction between agreements that the government or the courts will not enforce, and agreements that are forbidden with the threat of conviction and penalty
3 Pithlord // May 10, 2007 at 8:11 pm
I see Eric already made this point. Sorry.
4 Julian Sanchez // May 10, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Actually, he’s also a professor of law. And I think he does pretty much cover that under “other sanctions”.
5 X. Trapnel // May 11, 2007 at 12:46 pm
On the other hand, he might just concede the point but claim supporters of min. wage laws would think the argument goes through anyway: the minimum wage law is a solution to something that approaches an n-person PD, and we are in fact better with the “enforce +MW contracts, not enforce and perhaps punish -MW contracts” proposal than we are with “enforce all contracts” proposal, not just the “enforce none” proposal. Most libertarians would disagree strongly, of course, but I think it’s what Murphy meant.