There is much discussion over the environmental implications of the BP disaster. Rightly so, the blowout holds rank among the worst industrial disasters in environmental history. However, there is little discussion on how such disasters, all across the globe, continue to occur. In the wake of such disasters, there appears to be a rift between the state and big capital. The public often looks to regulators for habitat protection, biodiversity conservation and to levy punishment on the corporate sector. Industrial disasters do create conflict between these institutions, but it is latent. The state-corporate apparatus has ensured big industry will maintain a lock on the energy market. Because of this, the national economy is dependent on large corporate institutions and the conflict is short-lived. The real story is how big capital and state power produce quiescence and uncertainty within the public arena during and after disasters.

What happened in the Gulf is another unfortunate portrayal of glaring inequality. Most coastal communities in the deep south, especially in Louisiana, exhibit a domination of an elite over the non-elite. Local markets are dependent on healthy coastal ecosystems for resource (fisheries) harvesting and beneficial ecosystem services such as flood mitigation, water purification, storm buffering and more. Big oil maintains a strong presence in coastal communities as well, however, creating numerous problems for locals. From “Cancer Alley” to coastal erosion via dredging, big oil wrecks local economies.

So where’s the rebellion? Why is it that such social deprivation and threats to public/environmental health have failed to yield democratic participation? Perhaps it is the existence of a positive feedback loop between power, capital and quiescence.

Quiescence is often used to portray the legitimacy of systems of power and domination. The state seeks social and economic stability and utilizes power to ensure such stability. Because of this, systems of power and domination are maintained not because of their legitimacy, but because of quiescence itself. This is the very nature of power: Maintain the existing order by further centralization. Sociologist John Gaventa, in his book Power and Powerlessness, discusses this phenomenon:

Power is exercised not just upon participants within the decision-making process but also towards the exclusion of certain participants and issues altogether… The most effective and insidious use of power is to prevent such conflict from arising in the first place.

In regards to natural disasters, the prevention of conflict is achieved by the production of uncertainty. This is important, because it is in discourse over ones own socio-economic environment that the true character of a power system is revealed. Anthropologist and disaster expert Gregory Button, in his book Disaster Culture, notes we live in a highly professionalized culture where public debate is pushed aside by privileged arguments. Button writes:

Lay questions, objections and attempts to resolve uncertainty are often dismissed as uninformed, lacking in scientific vigor, irrational, and at times, almost hysteric. One woman whose life had been changed by the TVA ash spill recalled an exchange with a TVA official who avoided answering her questions and dismissed her reasoning. In response, she said, “Why do you treat us as stupid, why do you reject our arguments while upholding yours as the only reasonable ones?” This frustration typifies the kind of rejection and frustration many disaster victims suffer in contesting official versions of reality.

The tools of uncertainty manufacture consent. From disasters such as the TVA ash spill, the BP Horizon incident, or any industrial disaster, the public arena is dismissed while government/industry scientists, state agencies and the corporate sector dominate the discussion. This allows systems of power and domination, as explained by Button, to both define and control the distribution and interpretation of knowledge, while community members are made to feel as if they are arbitrators of uncertainty. Furthermore, Sociologist Max Weber notes that power systems wish to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping knowledge and intention a secret. This allows the elite to hide knowledge and keep their actions protected from criticism. The control of the discussion governs what is understood about disasters — manufactured uncertainty produces quiescence.

As for the BP Horizon blowout, the facts and uncertainties surrounding the disaster reflect these methods. The actual size of the spill is still unknown and until the PNAS publication we did not know the fate of the sequestered crude. The ecological impact of the spill, especially on rare species, such as migratory sea turtles, is now extended to the ocean dwelling habitat. If public discourse of the study ensues, however, some BP spokesperson will talk about how large spills like this are uncommon or pull out the big guns and call the spill “unprecedented.” There will be an ad campaign managed by BP that will discuss all the money and all the good they have done in the wake of the spill. The Environmental Protection Agency will boast a record of strict oversight. Even though the oil was thought to be in the deep ocean, the public will be ensured, by both state and corporate bureaucrats, that environmental contamination will be mitigated and public health will be protected. The same old song and dance that has occurred for the last four years, even though locals have continuously raised concerns over the official narrative. Of course, all of this ignores that oil spills are a very common occurrence and each raise public and environmental health concerns in their own right. Nevertheless, quiescence will remain because of the production of uncertainty.

There is much discussion in political circles, libertarian and otherwise, over the rise of freed markets and alternatives to fossil fuels. These are good discussions to have, and they are important to thrust into the public arena. It is important to keep the market as liberated as possible — this allows new technology and alternative institutions to develop. It is important to remember that recent shifts to adaptive governance and collaborative models for resource use/extraction are an option for local communities. There is much to be said about decentralization these days, and this is a good thing. It reminds us that social power is still in the fight, chipping away at systems of power and domination. It is equally important to know how entrenched authority manufactures consent and works to suppress social progress. On the road to the decentralized society we must understand power and its hurdles to transition.

Social power is the rebellion: it will lead to the end of uncertainty and thus the end of quiescence.

Cooperation Versus Coercion

Cooperative exchanges are those in which all parties have consented to the exchange. In coercive exchanges, at least one party has not consented. Most interactions are easy to distinguish. If I ask you to trade me $5 for a hot dog, you agree and we exchange, then the exchange is cooperative. If I tell you to give me a hot dog or I will shoot you, the exchange is coercive.

If libertarianism does nothing else, it demands cooperative interactions and condemns coercive ones. While that sounds simple, the results are powerful. Cooperative exchange ensures that all parties in the exchange at least believe they’re benefiting by it. If the goal is the most good for the most people, it would seem preferable that everyone would walk away from all exchanges at least somewhat happier than they arrived.

Beyond this though, the less coercion that’s tolerated, the most everyone must pursue their highest good while benefiting others in the process. Insisting on cooperation means I can’t just find a gun and hold people up for hot dogs. I have to make or invent things the hot dog holders want to get my hot dogs. Because people will act in their self-interest, insisting on cooperative exchanges works with, and not against, how humans operate to get them to benefit each other in the process.

And by making people exchange cooperatively with each other we create wealth, as it creates the conditions necessary to incentivize making new and better things to trade.

While sex-positivity certainly encompasses many thoughts and ideas, consent versus rape is perhaps one of the most fundamental. This can very easily be analogized to cooperation versus coercion. Basically, sex-positivity holds that all interactions of a sexual nature can be lumped into one of two categories, sex and rape. The difference between the two is enthusiastic consent. Enthusiastic consent in sex-positivity is really just a more-specific application of the idea of cooperative exchanges. In libertarianism, all non-cooperative exchanges are coercive. In sex-positivity, all sex not enthusiastically consented to is rape. In both, all parties in the exchange at least believe they’re benefiting by it.

The Social Contract

You can see how a focus on cooperation undergirds libertarianism in several related ideas. First is the idea that the so-called “Social Contract” is insufficiently cooperative, as valid contracts require more than passive consent. In fact the concept of contracts in general is essentially cooperation. You can also see the focus on cooperation and consent in the non-aggression principle.

Shades Of Gray

Unfortunately, cooperative versus coercive isn’t always a black-and-white distinction. Some people draw a bright line between physical coercion and other kinds of threats. But even that is not sufficient, as most people see the threat of blackmail as coercive. Similarly, most people see slander as coercive as well. The world we live in contains interactions that cannot be neatly lumped into one or the other category.

The same is true of sex and rape. Enthusiastic, as opposed to passive, consent is aimed at helping to differentiate between a person unable to resist and a person who is consenting. Still, drugs, alcohol, fear and communication problems do make some people seem to be enthusiastically consenting who are not.

The Benefits

Even if the lines aren’t as clear as we’d like them to be, trying to achieve a world in which more exchanges are cooperative and fewer are coercive is worth the effort. When people do things because they want to, and not because they fear harm, they live in a freer, more innovative and prosperous world.

Similarly, it’s a worthy goal for all sexual interactions to be enthusiastically consented to.

What Libertarianism Can Learn

Libertarianism is generally steadfast in holding that individuals should not coerce each other physically. Physical violence and threats of violence are pretty universally condemned. But where non-physical threats come into play, we often shy away from steadfastly upholding a person’s ability to exchange without them. In short, we’re generally okay with trying to control each other’s behavior through non-physically violent threats. These generally including mocking and shaming. Some would even go as far as to defend a person’s right to slander or blackmail.

Sex-positivity, on the other hand, seeks to do away with all attempts to control another’s enthusiastically consensual sexual behavior. Sex-positivity admits that no one knows what’s best for another person, in bed or outside of it. So all attempts to control, whether physical or not, are inappropriate and are not worth the drawbacks. In essence, sex-positivity acknowledges and incorporates the appropriate solution to Hayek’s knowledge problem better and more thoroughly than libertarianism currently does.

Sex-positivity seeks to destroy the judgment and shame which keep people from being able to fully enjoy sex, or a lack of sex, or anything in between. It seeks to allow the greatest amount of peaceful, voluntary sexual exchange.

Libertarianism should seek to destroy the judgment and shame which keep people from being able to fully enjoy any kind of peaceful, voluntary exchange. In this way, it will fully engage in creating a world which allows the greatest amount of peaceful, voluntary exchange possible.

The economic contribution of his essay is that it represents the thesis advanced by German economist Georg Friedrich Knapp in The State Theory of Money (1924), an expose advocating the Chartalist approach to monetary theory claiming that money must have no intrinsic value and strictly be used as tokens issued by the government, or fiat money. Today, modern-day chartalists are from the school of thought known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

Without getting into the intrinsic value debate, this is where I strongly depart from Denninger, because if we accept the thesis that all money is a universal mass illusion, then a market-based illusion can be just as valid or more valid than a State-controlled illusion. What Denninger and Greenbackers and MMT supporters reject is the notion that monetary illusions themselves are a competitive marketplace, falsely believing that only the State is in a ‘special’ position to confer legitimacy in monetary matters.

Regarding this issue of State-sanctioned legitimacy, bitcoin as a cryptographic unit seeks and gains legitimacy through the free and open marketplace. It is not a governmental instrument of legal tender that requires regulatory legitimacy and coercion by law in order to gain acceptance.

Therefore, the path to widespread adoption of bitcoin hinges on three primary market-based developments: (a) robust and liquid global exchanges similar to national currencies that can offer risk management via futures and options, (b) more user-friendly applications that mask the complexities of cryptography from users and merchants, and (c) a paradigm shift towards “closing the loop” such as receiving source payments and wages in bitcoin to eliminate the need for conversion from or to national fiat.

Even after graciously accepting Denninger’s definition of what the ideal currency would be (which I don’t) and searching for any economic nuggets of value, his arguments can be distilled into four main criticisms of bitcoin as a monetary instrument. First, bitcoin does not provide cash-like anonymity. Second, bitcoin transactions take too long for confirmations to be useful in everyday transactions. Third, bitcoin exhibits irreversible entropy.  Fourth, the decoupling of the stateless bitcoin from the obligation of monetary sovereigns is considered a fatal weakness.

Now that we identified the objections, let’s take these in order.

On the first point surrounding bitcoin anonymity, Denninger only embarrasses himself with this criticism. By default, bitcoin may not offer anonymity and untraceability like our paper cash today, but it is better described as user-defined anonymity because the decision to reveal identity and usage patterns resides solely with the bitcoin user. This is far superior to a situation where users of a currency are relegated to seeking permission for their financial privacy which is typically denied by the monetary and financial overlords. Also, his capital gains tax issue is a non-starter because it’s a byproduct of a monopoly over money.

His second criticism of a lack of utility in the ‘goods and service preference’ due to timing of sufficient block chain confirmations has some merit. However, advances have been made in the use of green addressing techniques that solve the confirmation delay problem by utilizing special-purpose bitcoin addresses from parties trusted not to double spend.

Denniger’s third criticism that bitcoin exhibits irreversible entropy is confusing. Typically, entropy refers to a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system’s disorder. In the case of bitcoin, I suspect Denninger is taking it to mean the degradation of the matter in the universe because of his explicit comparison to gold. While it is true that bitcoins lost or forgotten are ultimately irretrievable, I view that as a feature not a bug because it is the prevailing trait of a digital bearer instrument. Two bitcoin digital attributes that make it superior to physical gold are its ability to create backups and its difficulty of confiscation. Furthermore, the number of spaces to the right of the decimal point (currently eight) is immaterial to bitcoin’s suitability as a monetary unit.

Now for the big and final one. Denninger asserts that monetary sovereign issuers possess not only the privilege, but the obligation, of seigniorage, which Denninger refers to as bi-directional since sovereigns have the responsibility of maintaining a stable price level during times of both economic expansion and economic contraction. As a product of Hayekian free choice in currency, market-based bitcoin is decentralized by nature and poses a false comparison to the century-old practice of central bank monetary manipulation. Fear not deflation.

Governments have appropriated the monetary unit for their own benefit by declaring it the only preferred monetary unit for payment of taxes to the State. Believing that governments have sincere and good intentions in administering the monetary system is akin to believing in fairy tales. Control of the monetary system serves one and only one interest — the unlimited expansion of the sovereign’s spending activity to the detriment of the unfortunate users of that monetary unit. Decentralized Bitcoin obliterates this sad state of affairs.

Denninger’s biased and establishment preference for a monetary sovereign serves only to harm his analysis because it undeniably closes him off from alternative, and usually superior, free-market monetary arrangements. More damaging, however, is the fact that it places him outside of the mainstream in free banking circles and squanders his remaining quasi-libertarian credibility as a champion of markets.

In their remarks on Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State, both Christopher Morris and Jan Narveson object to Sartwell’s conclusion that existing states are conceptually incompatible with the very possibility of consent (40, emphasis added). Specifically, they object to the strength or the sweep of the incompatibility claim: Morris thinks that this is an exaggeration and an unnecessary one, and Narveson insists that such a strong claim of incompatibility cannot be taken literally. Each attempts to refute the incompatibility claim, at least as originally stated, by means of counterexamples. Presumably, if you can point to at least one case where individual consent to be ruled is actually secured by an existing state, then clearly (modal logic and all that) it must not be logically impossible for existing states to secure it. And each argues that Sartwell could have done just as well, for the purpose of undermining consensualist accounts of legitimacy, with a much weaker claim. Narveson goes so far as to attribute this weaker claim to Sartwell, insisting that Sartwell really must have meant to say, not that existing states operate in a way that logically precludes any of their subjects from consenting to their rule, but rather that they operate so as to preclude the unanimous consent of all their subjects — that is, that there must always be at least one dissenter in any given state, not that there never can be any non-dissenters.

What then are the counterexamples to be considered? Narveson mentions those who voted in a government election for the party currently in power. Morris, for his part, says that at least some people seem voluntarily to perform acts that seem to constitute consent, and they seem to do so with the requisite understandings. I’d be interested to know whether the performances Morris has in mind are performative utterances like the Pledge of Allegiance or citizenship oaths, where the utterer explicitly declares her support for a particular government, or whether he also means to include other kinds of acts, which have some other purpose but from which consent can reasonably be inferred. But whatever sorts of spontaneous or ritualized performances Morris or Narveson may have in mind, what puzzles me is that, while they indicate these cases as counterexamples to Sartwell’s strong claim — as presented on page 40 of Against the State — neither Morris nor Narveson seems to engage with the direct argument for which the strong claim is the conclusion — as presented on page 50 — in which Sartwell explicitly considers and rejects the claim that these sorts of individual performances could count as consenting to the State’s rule. Thus:

… consent is always compromised by force; the mere existence of effective force dedicated to some end constitutes coercion toward that end, whatever you may think or want. If I consent to abide by the law when that law is enforced by a huge body of men with guns and clubs, it is never clear, to say the least, whether my consent is genuine or not. … It will always be prudent for me, under such circumstances, to simulate consent, and there are no clear signs by which a simulation could be distinguished from a genuine consent in such a case. That I am enthusiastic in my acquiescence to your overwhelming capacity for violence—that I pledge my allegiance according to formula, sing patriotic songs and so on—does not entail that I am not merely acquiescing. … [T]he mere existence of an overwhelming force by which the laws will be enforced compromises conceptually the possibility of voluntarily acceding to them. Or put it this way: the power of government, constituted by hypothesis under contract, by which it preserves the liberties and properties of its citizens, is itself conceptually incompatible with the very possibility of their consent. (50-51)

That is, the standing threat of overwhelming force ensures that any individual performance is made under duress, ruling out the preconditions for any genuine consent. I’d be interested to hear what Narveson and Morris make of this argument for rejecting their purported counterexamples to the strong claim. Unless there is some response to it, then it seems like the attempt to use individual performances as evidence for the actual existence of (at least some) individual consent to the State, which is to say, as evidence against Sartwell’s strong incompatibility claim, is simply question-begging.

Now, I think it would be perfectly fair for Narveson and Morris to object that Sartwell’s argument, as stated, does need some tightening, and may also need some elaborating. But I think that once the tightening and the elaborating have been done, the argument does in fact provide a basis for a very strong version of Crispin’s strong incompatibility claim — and the strong version of that strong claim will be of general interest for anyone who intends to connect their notion of political right to respect for individual liberty, and their notion of liberty to respect for individual consent in the use of person or property.

Now, if someone goes through the motions of consenting while under a background threat of force against dissenters, for Narveson or Morris to be able to insist that it is possible for that to express genuine consent only if they deny at least one of the following principles:

1. Any seeming expression of consent to a condition C, if given under a standing threat of force against refusers, is given under duress.
2. Any seeming expression of consent to a condition C, if given under duress, cannot be treated as a genuine expression of consent to C.
3. If you cannot do anything that could be treated as a genuine expression of consent to a condition C, then you do not count as having consented to C.

All three seem initially plausible, to me at least, but if Narveson or Morris accepts all three, then it quickly follows that he cannot count as having consented to any condition C when there is a background threat of force against those who refuse to consent to C. Since that’s how existing states roll, nobody could do anything that would count as having consented to the state — and that would remain the case even for those who say that they consent with all their heart out of an earnest feeling of duty and with a great deal of pride. If all three principles are accepted, then even if you want to give your consent to the State’s rule over you, you can’t do it, because the state’s unilateral imposition of the terms preempts your efforts to consent to the terms.

So, if Narveson or Morris wants to avoid that conclusion, he’ll have to pick one of the principles to reject, and the question is which one to pick.

Principle (1) looks like it’s not very far off of a definition of acting under duress (or performing the specific action of seemingly-expressing-consent under duress). I doubt that much of anyone will be inclined to reject that — or, if they are so inclined, it will probably be because they first rejected a principle very similar to principle (2) — basically, (2) modified so that under a standing threat of force against refusers substitutes for under duress — but are inclined to think that any case of genuine consent should (therefore) not be considered a case of action under duress. In which case you have a counterexample to (1) rather than to (2), as I’ve stated the principles. But if so, then the motivations for rejecting (1) will be similar enough to the motivations for rejecting (2) that my comments below should apply equally to either.

Principle (2) may look much more promising to someone who wants to defend the claim that people may be voluntarily consenting to state authority — even though they would have been forced to acquiesce even if they had tried to refuse. The idea would be something like this: Look, you’ve given us a perfectly good reason to think that there are at least some people who would seem to be consenting but aren’t actually consenting. Fine, but why think their situation affects those who sincerely dowant to agree to the terms the State sets down? At most this seems like an epistemological problem — that we may have trouble finding out whether somebody consented or not just on the basis of their outward actions. It doesn’t make it logically impossible for them to have done so.

Some of the ways in which Sartwell tries to state his case might indeed incline you towards a worry like this — as when he argues that It will always be prudent for me, under such circumstances, to simulate consent, and there are no clear signs by which a simulation could be distinguished from a genuine consent in such a case. The mere fact that a second or third party couldn’t distinguish a simulation from genuine consent wouldn’t (just by itself) warrant the conclusion that there can be no such thing as genuine consent. But I think that there are two possible responses to this worry. First, if the worry is purely epistemic, it still poses a serious problem for any consensualist justification of the state — if it is the case, as I think it is, that it is illegitimate not only to use someone’s person or property without her consent, but also to use someone’s person or property when there is no possible way for you to find out whether she has consented or not. (Consider this an argument to the effect that the State cannot be legitimate because it has no reliable procedure for determining whether its rule over any given subject is in fact legitimate or illegitimate. Take that, Robert Nozick.) But, secondly, and more to the point, I think that there is a stronger interpretation of Sartwell’s argument, on which the worry is logical rather than epistemological, because the lack of clear signs of a distinction is not just a lack of diagnostic symptoms, but rather a lack of necessary criteria.

Think of it this way. The claim that a seeming expression of consent does not count, when given under duress, is usually justified by something like the following principle:

Principle of the Alternative: If Norton wants to place Twain’s person or property under a condition C, then Twain’s performing an action A expresses consent to C only if there is some alternative action B, which Twain could have performed, which would have counted as refusing consent to C.

I take this principle to be a necessary condition for a performance to meet the concept of expressing consent. An expression of consent is necessarily a choice among alternatives; if there is nothing that would even count as a refusal, then what we have is just not a matter of consent. Whatever Twain’s personal feelings about A or C may be, what he’s doing when he does A may be an expression of deference, or of obligation, or of some other similar sort of commitment. But whatever it is, it’s just not an expression of consent.

More strongly, and more importantly for the purposes of our argument, it is not enough that there just be something that would count as refusing consent. Consent is a property of transactions between two or more parties, and for you to have it, there must not only be something that would count as a refusal; your partner must also be willing to count that performance, whatever it is, as a refusal which she is bound to respect. An alternative must not only be available; there must be some reasonable expectation that the alternative would be practically effective.

Opt-Out Principle: If Norton wants to place Twain’s person or property under a condition C, then Twain’s performing an action A expresses consent to C only if there is some alternative action B, which Twain could have performed, which would have counted as refusing consent to C, and which Twain can reasonably expect Norton to accept as a decisive reason not to place Twain’s person or property under C.

Again, I take this principle to be a necessary condition for a performance to count as expressing consent; just as the lack of a possible refusal makes the issue one of obligation rather than consent, if Twain performs an expressive act without any expectation that there is some expression of refusal that Norton would consider himself bound to respect, then the issue is no longer one of consent, but rather of unilateral command. And again, it hardly matters what Twain’s personal feelings about the command may be. Maybe he’s into that kind of thing. But whatever he is doing, he is not succeeding at doing anything that would count as expressing consent. You can’t consent if you’re never asked, and if there really is nothing that Norton would count as a binding refusal, then Twain has never even been asked, in any meaningful way.

I think the Principle of the Alternative and the Opt-Out Principle, or something a lot like them, are central to Sartwell’s worry about the difficulty of telling a genuine willingness to accept the state’s terms apart from a willingness simulated only under duress. I also think that these principles, or something a lot like them, provide the only reasonable explanation for why, as a general thing, we should disregard a seeming expression of consent that was only given under duress, and would not have been given but for the threat. (It might seem important that such seeming expressions are not sincere reflections of the utterer’s inner state. But that by itself is not enough. I might freely give an insincere expression of consent — say I consent to let you use my car, but I secretly intend to call the cops on you and report it stolen. But then the expression, even though insincere, is still genuine consent; given my expression of consent to you, it would be false for me to claim that you had stolen my car from me, no matter what I may have whispered to myself in the dark recesses of my soul.) But if both principles, or something a lot like them, express necessary conditions for a performance to genuinely express consent, then it looks like Principle (2) follows without much delay. And it follows in its full logical force — the worry here, remember, has nothing to do with whether or not Norton knows that Twain is genuinely expressing consent; it has to do with whether or not necessary criteria have been met for Twain’s expressions to count as expressions of consent. If the state rigs the situation in such a way that there is nothing it would count as opting out, then it has also rigged the situation in such a way that there is nothing it could really count as opting in; opting just isn’t part of this game. Neither expressing consent nor expressing dissent are even options that are on the table; if the state gives non-negotiable, unilateral commands, merely being cheerfully responsive to those commands is not enough to count as consent in any meaningful sense. And if this is the case, then it ought to be clear that it immediately defeats any claim that, for example, voting, or paying taxes, or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, or anything of the sort, could count as giving your consent to be ruled by the government that you vote for, or pay taxes to, or pledge your allegiance to. If not voting, not paying your taxes, not reciting the Pledge, or whatever, would exempt you from the terms that the United States imposes on you, then those who chose to do so anyway might well be counted as consenting to be ruled by the United States. But anarchist activism would also be an awful lot easier than it is, and the United States would not, in fact, even amount to a State — at least, not in any sense of the word that anarchists use when they proclaim all States to be illegitimate (because nonconsensual). In the real world, where government taxes and government prohibitions fall on the heads of the voters and the non-voters alike, there is, as Lysander Spooner argues, no way that an performance under such conditions can count as consent to government.

In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, be finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot – which is a mere substitute for a bullet – because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition. But it would not therefore be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to.

Therefore a man’s voting under the Constitution of the United States, is not to be taken as evidence that he ever freely assented to the Constitution, even for the time being. Consequently we have no proof that any very large portion, even of the actual voters of the United States, ever really and voluntarily consented to the Constitution, even for the time being. Nor can we ever have such proof, until every man is left perfectly free to consent, or not, without thereby subjecting himself or his property to injury or trespass from others. — Lysander Spooner (1867), No Treason no. 2, § II ¶¶ 12–14

Spooner, for his own reasons, couches his argument in epistemological terms — or, more specifically, in terms of legally cognizable proof. But, once again, the argument that he frames epistemically can be reframed in terms of the conceptual criteria for a public expression of consent by means of the Principle of the Alternative and the Opt-Out Principle.

I suspect, then, that someone who wants to defend the claim that it is possible to consent to the state’s authority — in spite of the background threat of coercion against anyone who attempts to refuse — will ultimately have to fall back on rejecting Principle (3). That is, in order to defend the claim the claim they are trying to defend, they will need to make some kind of distinction between the property of consenting as such, and the property of expressing consent. In fact I think it’s likely that this is the real core of Morris’s and Narveson’s intuitive sense that of course there must be some people who are consenting to existing states. It may seem like we just know that it’s possible to consent to the state, because we think we see it in people all around us, in their everyday practices and beliefs — whatever attitude the state may have towards them, their personal attitudes involve an acceptance of the state. We might have the same feelings ourselves, or even if we do not, we might imagine that we have them. We might even express this attitude of acceptance with a form of words like I want the State to rule me, or even I consent to the authority of the state. But if the discussion is about consent, and not merely about acceptance or desire, and if consent is supposed to have any kind of weight in ethical deliberation about the transactions between two or more agents, then I doubt that such a notion of private attitudes of consent — attitudes which might not only be unexpressed at the moment, but might not even be expressible in principle, under the prevailing circumstances — is likely to be coherent. That is, I doubt that private acceptance of the state can be understood as consent, at least in any sense that would preserve the connection between consent and political legitimacy, which is after all what inspired us to introduce the question of consent into the discussion of political theory in the first place.

If there is no effective possibility of refusal, then there is no possibility of publicly expressing consent, and if there is no possibility of publicly expressing consent, then there is no possibility of consenting. If existing states make a standing threat to force people to submit to their terms, even if they do not agree to those terms, then governments cut off any effective possibility of refusal, and thus nobody can do anything that would count as consenting to be ruled by an existing state — even if she wants to do so, and even if she sincerely says that she agrees to the terms. Since all existing states do make that standard threat, no existing state rules by consent over any individual subject. And if governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then no government has any just powers at all. Even the most patriotic pledger or the most dutiful voter has not consented to be bound by the terms the state imposes, even if she tried to get herself bound by them; she is not bound in conscience to pay taxes, or to obey government prohibitions, or to obey the government’s requirements in any other way, for even one second longer than she wants to. And no existing state has either the duty or the right to enforce those terms on her.

Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s various publics. A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged.

Ross Kenyon’s essay, “Choice, Consent, and Voluntaryism After the Death of Neutrality,” raises some critical questions about what we consider a free choice, notes a few problems with voluntaryism, and points to some potential coping strategies for our condition’s quagmire. Responses from TBA.

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“The customs of different lands and the palaces of princes are good as long as they don’t cause any pain, but the custom of washing that they have here is worse than being flagellated.”

- Sancho Panza, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, trans. Grossman, 675.

I’d like to pose a few questions to our readers and my colleagues in the hopes of receiving some enlightening responses, ideally with more brevity than my own grappling with this problem.

Imagine you are raised in a household and community which teach that the highest good is something we would generally consider to be unjust, such as being totally submissive to your spouse and where your minute deviations are punished with physical violence.

You might choose it in some nominal sense, being honored at entering your society’s most honored institution, but to what extent can we really say you made a free choice?  The temptation to say that you were brainwashed is almost overwhelming, and despite the obvious risk of existential bad faith, this charge regarding the influence of socialization still seems to hold quite a bit of weight and cause rightful concern in the hearts of outsiders.

However, could not the newlyweds cast the same charge against us? We’ve been brainwashed (or the less pejorative ‘socialized’) into thinking that some voluntary social combinations are acceptable and some are not, so how can we avoid seeing this dilemma through a prism of prejudice composed of our own habitus and facticity? There is no objective position of which I know where we can all step back and evaluate these claims neutrally, and our trying to do so may be a deceptive way of denying our epistemic limitations.

Before stating some of the options I think are available with regard to this problem, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to preempt some of the arguments that I expect from voluntaryists.

Thoughts such as those above are one of the major reasons that I have come to find voluntaryism to be inadequate at best and, as we’ll see later, propagandistic at its worst, at least as it is typically framed. The idea that we should respect whatever someone has chosen regardless of the cultural institutions they have been socialized into is a tenuous agnosticism that makes “non-violent” (we’ll address this later) social relations virtually unassailable. It is for this reason that people call the Hayekian obsession[1] with spontaneous order nihilistic, because if no one ever has the local knowledge necessary to effectively evaluate the choices of another, we are paralyzed in critiquing anything that is cultural, that is, outside of what voluntaryists consider physical acts of aggression. Outside of theoretical abstraction, this approach gives us no real guidance regarding social relations beyond “don’t hit, don’t steal,” which pretty much everyone on the planet seems to already agree with, but they really just disagree on who should hit who and when depending on what sort of political paradigm they support.

Furthermore, I entertain some serious doubts about the ability of social order to be completely voluntary even if we grant that the spouses’ choices were taken with full autonomy. While I enjoy how David Hume empathizes with but problematizes voluntaristic society for practical reasons in Of the Original Contract, on a more abstract level, I don’t think voluntaryism is as useful an idea as people try to make it.

Consent is an important political principle, dare I claim it’s one of the most important. Indeed, we want a social order that people can give authentic commitment to; I want people to respect what I believe I’ve earned not because of the social capital or physical force that I can muster against them, but because my possession is in accord with a principle of justice which they find acceptable. However, I do not think that consent can do all of the philosophical work necessary for organizing society nor for totally validating the choices of others as demonstrated above. If consent/all things being voluntary is our ultimate political principle, then a few primitivists could legitimately halt the civilizing of the whole world.

You want to build a house there on that “unused land?” Sorry, primitivists don’t consent. Property is not voluntary in the minds of voluntaryists: respect it or meet their gun in the room. They linguistically manage this turnabout because they use the word “coercion” not merely to denote the imposition of an external will as the word is commonly understood, but instead conflate it with aggression, which is the unjust imposition of an external will. Property is a coercive act which they don’t consider coercive via their linguistic schema, and thus a major involuntary institution gets smuggled in under the header of “voluntaryism” in a deceptive way.

If these questions were not already difficult enough with stable concepts, all of these terms come with plenty of semiotic baggage, are best understood when used in specific social contexts, and are often very indeterminate. “Productive/active/unused/abandoned/land/property,” “rationality,” and even coercion and voluntary are all domains for discourses of power with much (though possibly not all) of their meaning absent except for what ideology produces for them.

The good news for voluntaryists is that there is no way around this for any political philosophy unless everyone agrees about politics. The primitivists might hurl a javelin into your gut for clearing some woodland for a sedentary home, and thus require their own brand of political carnage to prevent settling in accord with their vision of good and evil, same as we all do.[2] This is what humans do, and it may be time that we look social cooperation in the face and acknowledge that at its base, it’s less pleasant than our politics would like us to believe.

Realizations such as this have reinforced my sentiment that political philosophy is very difficult. I understand why Rousseau hated civilization (though he should have applied his suspicion equally to “primitive” social organization), and why Freud theorized that our having to suppress many of our desires just to get along in society takes a significant mental toll.

My statements so far are not arguing against the tenets of voluntaryism per se, but are meant to serve as an encouragement for voluntaryists to stare squarely at their particular application of political violence. If one disagrees with their deductive system of private property rights, then violators will be met by coercion, and one does not have the option to opt-out of that social contract regardless of consent.

In other words, social structures being absolutely voluntary is not actually what voluntaryism is about, and thus its proponents should probably refer to themselves as market anarchists, liberal anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, or if I may coin a neologism, “mostly-voluntaryists,” or at least communicate in a way that doesn’t obscure voluntaryism’s coercive nature.

Okay. Enough about voluntaryism. How do we treat choice?

I see a few options for where to go with the case of the spouses:

• Due to the alleged impossibility of intersubjective utility comparison (the inability to measure utility between persons in commensurable units), it ultimately comes down to preference, as it is epistemically impossible to know what is best for someone else. I think this principle broadly has a lot working in its favor, but believe a weaker version of the statement more closely hews to our perceptions. For people choosing an outcome like the spouses, it would probably be best to dangle better options in front of them in a pluralistic society, than to just “liberate” the dominated spouse by force of arms. I think defaulting to the problematic nature of free choice is better than the alternatives because it avoids the bad incentives of centralization, paternalism, and being a busy body, but if we don’t have our limits, this approach just becomes a validation of the status quo.
• We might say, like Sam Harris, that some forms of behavior generally provide for good results, such as basic norms of respect for different sexes, genders, races, etc., but I’m generally hesitant to endorse a one-size-fits-all cultural policy for the world, even though I seek that my cultural preferences be established as more desirable than the spouses, for example.
• I’d certainly like to hear from the Proudhonian mutualists on this case. I’m not sure how the principle of reciprocity would play out in the case of the spouses, though I am wary of such a principle because both spouses could conceivably be willing to trade places with one another and thus fulfill the Golden Rule. In addition, if every act should be striving toward reciprocity, I tend to think that those whose needs were most hard to meet on the level of mass society (like agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, etc.) almost must be overridden in a non-reciprocal manner if we are to have effective social cooperation at all. This might just be a part of the tragedy entailed in social cooperation, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about it.
• I’m certain that other comments will come in not corresponding to one of these archetypes, and I would welcome those as well.

This problem has been a very difficult one for me to work my way through. If there are no objective criteria to judge what is an acceptable or “free” choice, and terms such as “freedom” and “coercion” are embedded in social contexts and are thus almost inevitably domains for discourses of power, then it seems that we ought to be very concerned with the empirical nature of social relations as they actually operate. As Elinor Ostrom has noted, no longer does it make sense to dichotomize and talk about “the state” and “the market” as monolithic trends, but far more important is it to discern the actual workings of social institutions which exist. I think this insight of new institutional economics should be applied to the concepts of “coercion” and “voluntary” before I perish from conceptangst and the loathing of language. Perhaps this regrounding of our floating concepts can lay the foundation for analysis more closely linked to the social worlds which we are continuously reproducing.

In any case, I’d love to hear responses regarding the choices of the spouses thought experiment relating how to evaluate similar cases, how/if we ought to do anything about them once evaluated, as well as anything else I’ve mentioned in this recent struggle to make sense of the world around me.

Vale.[3]