Imagine three individuals who each wish to relieve you of
the burden of the contents of your wallet that they might bear this load
themselves.
The first individual approaches you and says “I hate to ask
this, but I’m in a real pickle, I owe Vinnie and Guido $50 and if I don’t pay
it by the end of the day they are going to break my legs, would you be a pal
and help me out.”
The second individual comes up to you wearing a bandana,
pulls a gun, and says “stick em up” and then grabs your wallet and runs.
The third individual says to you “I want you to give me all
your money. It is your choice if you do
or not, but if you don’t I’ll see to it that you can never work, travel, or
participate in any community events again.”
Which of these individuals was guilty of robbery?
The first individual may be guilty of having made very poor
choices but is not guilty of robbery.
The second individual is clearly a robber and a
stereotypical robber at that, going so far as to wear the traditional uniform
of the robber, a mask covering the lower face.
The correct answer to our question, however, is that both
the second and the third individuals were guilty of robbery. Robbery is theft – the unlawful taking of
another person’s possessions – through the means of coercive force, either
actual or threatened. Both the second
and the third individuals used threats to force you to hand over your money. The nature of what they threatened to do
was quite different but the difference does not make what the third individual
said any less of a coercive threat.
Is it ever right, or at least morally permissible, to use
coercive force?
This ethical question is more complex than it might at first
seem, due to a number of complicating factors.
One such factor is the nature of the coercive force. Consider our illustration above. The threats used by the second and third
individuals differed in two ways. One
of these was in their level of credibility.
The stereotypical robber’s threat was made believable by the presence of
the gun. The credibility of the other
robber’s threat depends upon who the robber is. If he is in a position of sufficient power
to actually carry it out then his threat is credible, otherwise he is obviously
a nut and his threat can be disregarded as empty and crazy. The other way, which is the one that is
relevant to this discussion, is in the nature of what was threatened. The stereotypical robber threatened the use
of lethal force. The other robber
merely threatened to make your life miserable, not to take it from you. Historically, this distinction has been
very important in discussions of the ethical question at hand. While there has been no answer to the
question which could be said to have the support of a universal consensus,
there has been wide agreement that lethal force is the least justifiable or
permissible form of coercion.
Another complicating factor is that of the distinction
between the state and private individual persons. It
would be extremely difficult if not impossible to conceive of the enforcement
of law and the administration of criminal justice that does not in some way or
another involve the use of coercive force.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has also been wide agreement – although
not nearly as wide as with lethal force being the least justifiable or
permissible – that it is more justifiable or morally permissible for the
state, the institution whose raison d’etre is to enforce the law and administer
criminal justice, to use such force than for private persons. Again, support for this idea while broad,
has not been as wide as for the one with which we ended the previous
paragraph. The liberal tradition, that
is to say, the tradition that over the course of the Modern Age became dominant
in what used to be Christendom but is now Western Civilization, has produced many
different views on the matter. One such
view, which is evident today among those liberals or progressives who would argue
that you should never fight back and defend yourself, your loved ones, or your
property when these are under criminal attack, but allow yourself to be victimized and let the
professionals, the police, take care of it, is that the state ought to have an
exclusive monopoly on all use of coercive force. Conversely, some although not all of the
liberals of the kind who began calling themselves libertarian in the last
century to indicate their retention and emphasis on the individualism and
suspicion of government that were predominant in the liberalism of the
nineteenth century, hold that force is only justifiable when used by private
persons to defend themselves, their families, and property and that the state
is illegitimate. Although these views,
each the polar opposite of the other, are both supported by their proponents
from ideas that belong to the mainstream of the liberal philosophical-political
tradition, neither could be said to itself represent the mainstream liberal view
on the matter of how much coercive force is permitted to the state and the
private person. That the use of force
on others, whether on the part of the private person or the state, is ethically
permissible only under certain circumstances, which are broader for the state
than for the private person, with lethal force being permitted to the latter
only in circumstances of self-defense, is much closer to what historically
would have been the liberal mainstream.
In this, the mainstream of the liberal tradition was itself much closer
to the mainstream of the tradition that preceded it, or, if you prefer, the
mainstream of the Western tradition as a whole, including both liberal and
pre-liberal strands, than in many other areas.
There is one way in which liberalism did depart from the
pre-liberal Western tradition that warrants consideration in the context of
this discussion, especially in that it had a direct bearing on the way the
factor examined in the last paragraph was framed. Distinguishing between the private person
and the state is fairly universal in the ethical debate over the boundaries limiting
when force is permissible. Restricting
the distinction to these two, on the other hand, is rather unique to the
liberal tradition. Conservative
sociologist Robert Nisbet stressed throughout his career, beginning with his
seminal The Quest for Community
(1953), the importance of a plurality of institutions. He
described such other institutions as the family and the local community as
“intermediate” between the state and the private person. That liberalism had come to largely
disregard these is evident in the radically opposite views both emerging from
the liberal tradition mentioned in the previous paragraph. What the ideas that the state should have a
monopoly on force and that the state is illegitimate and only the individual
person is justified in using force in self-defense have in common is that they
both see the state and the individual as the only players worthy of
consideration. The other institutions
that Nisbet called “intermediate” traditionally possessed a significant amount
of authority. Authority, which is the
respected right to lead, is different from power, which is the ability to
command obedience. For society or
any institution within it to be functional authority must take strong
precedence over power but, human nature being what it is, authority cannot long
exist without power backing it up. This
necessarily means that those who exercise the authority in Nisbet’s intermediate
institutions must be morally able to use some kind of force, to some kind of
degree. Another way in which
liberalism’s reduction of everything to the state and individual is evident has
been in the way in which the liberal tradition, which in the interwar period of
the last century largely abandoned its anti-statist libertarianism from the
century prior and then sharply veered into statism after World War II, has been
attacking the authority of all of these institutions, especially the family, by
having the state strip them of their power. (1)
The ability to back up an order with force is the essence of
power, which to some degree or another is necessary to support authority. The force needed to support authority
differs from institution to institution in both kind and degree. That lethal force is limited to the state,
except in situations where the individual needs it for defensive purposes is
something to which virtually everyone in Christendom would have agreed around
the time that liberalism began to convert Christendom into Western
Civilization. This consensus did not exist in the classical
civilization that preceded Christendom.
In ancient Rome, the pater
familias, which meant the patriarch of a household consisting of a large
extended family, rather than merely the father in a domestic unit, held
authority, the pater potestas, over
his family that was not equal to that exercised by the Senate over the Roman
city-state, but certainly comparable to it.
Classical literature abounds with stories featuring the abuse of such
authority – Oedipus, the king of Thebes who features in several of the extent
tragedies, bears a name (“swollen foot”) that testifies to his having been a
victim of a botched attempt to end his life while an infant, carried out at the
orders of his father when the latter heard the prophecy that the child would
kill his father and marry his mother.
While Oedipus’s father Laius was a king, the order to have the child
exposed was an expression of what would have been regarded as his patriarchal
rather than his civil authority at the time.
The spread of Christianity and the conversion of classical
civilization into Christendom led to the elimination of the practice of
infanticide by exposure and stricter limits being placed on the pater potestas leading to the Christian
consensus that the legitimate use of lethal force is limited to the state
except in instance of self-defense on the part of private persons. While this meant that the power and
authority of the family patriarch was no longer comparable to that of the state
and that in temporal terms the civil power was now unquestionably the highest
authority, the mainstream point of view in Christendom did not regard all other
institutional authority as falling in the intermediate position between the
state and the individual of which Nisbet spoke. The mainstream point of view in Christendom
was that there were two realms in Christian civilization, the temporal and the
spiritual, the membership of which overlapped, but in which different
institutions were vested with the highest authority. In the temporal realm, the state was the
highest authority. In the spiritual
realm, the church was the highest authority. The bishops, as citizens of the temporal realm, were under the authority of the king as his subjects. The king, as a member of the church, was
subject to the authority of his bishop in the spiritual realm. The king and the bishop, each possessing the
highest earthly authority in his respective realm, required power to back that
authority up, and this power was conceived of as two “swords”. These swords were metaphorical, of course,
although much less so in the case of the king, whose sword included the use of
lethal force to punish crime. (2) The
bishop’s “sword” was the “keys”, given to the Apostles by Christ after St.
Peter’s confession of faith, which included the power to exclude people from
the Sacraments and the fellowship of the church.
Disagreements about the “keys” were involved in fracturing
the ecclesiastical unity of Christendom in both the eleventh and the sixteenth
centuries, which contributed to liberalism’s takeover of Christendom and transformation
of it into modern Western Civilization.
While the specifics of these disagreements is not relevant to our
discussion here, it is important to note that in the Christian orthodox
mainstream of Christendom neither the king nor the bishop was thought to have
the right the wield his sword whenever he saw fit to serve his own selfish
purposes. Liberalism maintained
otherwise, of course, because it wished to weaken the king or replace him with
a republic and to reduce the church from the institution of highest earthly
authority in the spiritual realm to one of many intermediate institutions in
the temporal realm, but the concept of the divine gifting of the “swords” in
Christian orthodoxy clearly implies that both kings and bishops were held
strictly accountable to God for the right use of the swords, and a great deal
of space in the writings of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas was devoted
to spelling out the limits on when these swords could be rightly used. The importance of this lies in the fact that
despite the significant differences between the orthodoxy of Christendom and the
liberalism of modern Western Civilization both agreed that there were limits on
when force could be used, whether by the state or by private persons, and that
these limits were written in the language of ethics, of what is right and what
is wrong.
The idea that there are limits on the right use of force
even for the state is an ancient one, going back to the earliest of
civilizations. Even before the Socratic
philosophers wrote the dialogues and treatises that laid the foundation of the
long tradition of Western political science, Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays that begins with
the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, continues with his being
avenged by his son Orestes, and concludes with Orestes escaping the vengeance
of the pursuing Furies by placing his fate in the hands of the patron goddess
of Athens who establishes the first jury to adjudicate the case, resulting in
an acquittal. The trilogy illustrates
how the civilized justice system with its laws and courts is superior to
pre-civilized blood “justice” because it limits the violence rather than
letting it continue to spiral and escalate.
The myths behind the plays are much older (Homer had drawn from the same
source material in his Illiad and Odyssey three centuries prior to
this). Indeed, even the Lex Talionis
that is featured prominently in the ancient Code of Hammurabi (Babylon of the
eighteenth century BC) and the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament, can be
understood as a limit on the permissible use of force (under it if someone puts
out your eye, the maximum that you can demand as just repayment is his own eye). That the ancients saw the force of law,
exercised by the state, as being subject to the limits of morality is also
attested to by manner in which they categorized their philosophy. While modern totalitarians, who reject
limits on the power of the state, have sometimes claimed Plato as an ancestor,
to do so they must rely entirely upon a dialogue that is fantastical in nature,
in which Socrates and his friends engage in an entirely theoretical exercise in
city-building that is clearly set in a world other than the one they actually
live in. The purpose of the exercise
is not to create a model for the builders of city-states in the real world to
use, but to examine further an ethical question about the nature of justice. The totalitarians’ claim on Plato,
therefore, is very tenuous. By
contrast, modern constitutionalists, that is to say those who believe in
constitutional restraints on the powers of government which ought to include
everybody of every political stripe who is not a totalitarian, can rightly
point to Plato’s disciple Aristotle as their ancestor. Some of these have agreed with the totalitarians
in assigning Plato to the latter camp, but where Plato and Aristotle were
clearly in harmony was in making politics in the sense of political science,
the theory of states and statecraft, a subcategory of ethics, the theory of
human habits and behaviour as evaluated by the standards of what is right, good
and virtuous versus what is wrong, bad, and vicious. This is spelled out by Aristotle, who
introduced politics as a subdivision in his treatise on Ethics, then wrote a sequel devoted to Politics, but it is also the obvious implication of Plato’s having made
his most famous political discussion as part of a larger ethical debate. The subordination of politics to ethics is
consistent with the constitutionalist rather than the totalitarian point of
view.
Over the course of the pandemic that was declared early last
year and has continued to the present day it has been very disturbing to see
this subordination of politics to ethics that has been so important to every
phase of our civilization (or to our civilization and its two immediate
predecessors depending upon how you look at it) disregarded or, worse, inverted
(the use of shame and guilt to coerce people into obeying every public health
order – “you are a bad selfish person who cares only about yourself if you
object to being forbidden all social interaction for two years straight” – is the
use of a twisted form of ethics to serve the interests of politics, not in the Platonic/Aristotelean
sense of the word but in a sense of the term that is usually if, perhaps,
unfairly, associated with Machiavelli).
At the beginning of the pandemic, the citizens of Western countries
basically acquiesced as their governments imposed unprecedented restrictions upon
them. In imposing these restrictions
Western governments overstepped the limits their constitutions place on their
powers and essentially took away what for centuries Western people have
regarded as their most basic civil, if not human, rights. Telling people they can have only a limited
number of people over to their house is a restriction that limits their freedom
of association, but telling them they can have no visitors over to their house,
as the province of Manitoba did from November of last year until this July, is
taking away that freedom altogether. This
is a freedom that is identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that was added to the Canadian constitution in
1982, the rights and freedoms in which the Supreme Court of Canada has
previously ruled that governments can limit, but only if the limitation is
minimal, as this one obviously was not.
Nevertheless, the province was somehow allowed to get away with
this.
Having gotten away with these experimental severe
restrictions on our freedoms, our governments then began to add mandates on top
of these. The first of these was the
mandate that we wear lower face masks in indoor spaces. The mask mandates were controversial for a
number of reasons, many of which I have discussed in other essays in the
past. What is most significant for our
purposes here is that while many have seen the masks as being a lesser
imposition than the lockdowns, and in one sense they are right, they represent
the transition from the government
forbidding us to do things that we had previously been free to do to the
government requiring us to do
things. Throughout history, the laws of
the freest countries have been mostly if not all prohibitions rather than
requirements, and the more requirements a government has added the less free
the country has become. The laws that
have been the most universal – the basic laws against such things as murder and
theft – are prohibitions.
We have now arrived at a point where, if polls are to be
believed – and this is a big “if” – the vast majority of Canadians support a
different – and far worse – mandate, mandatory vaccination. The rapidly developed vaccines for the bat
flu have spawned much more controversy than the masks. Much of the heated discussion has been over
such matters as the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. I will leave these matters to others
because the ethical problem with vaccine mandates would be the same if they
were 100% safe and effective.
Some would distinguish between mandatory vaccination and
forced vaccination. The distinction is
false, however, and involves no real difference. By the latter, these people would presumably
have in mind a situation where someone ties you to a chair and injects you with
a vaccine without your consent, either freely given or coerced. A mandatory vaccine, however, is as much a
forced vaccine as a vaccine in the circumstance just described. The only difference is in the nature of the
force used, which difference is essentially the same as that between the two
robbers in our illustration at the beginning of this essay.
Let us use a slightly different illustration.
There are three young men.
Each has a young lady of whom he is in pursuit.
The first young man woes her with flowers, and chocolates,
and sappy love poetry.
The second young man, clubs her over the head, drags her off
to his cave, and forces himself upon her.
The third young man is the young lady’s immediate
supervisor. He tells her that if she
wishes to advance in her career, it would be in her best interests to sleep
with him, and hints that she will be fired and blackballed in her profession if
she does not.
As with the original illustration, the first young man is
innocent. The second young man, also
corresponding to his counterpart in the first illustration, is a stereotypical
rapist.
Is the third young man as guilty of rape, assuming his ploy
to be successful, as the second?
If your answer is “no” you might be wise to keep your
opinion to yourself in the presence of the ladies. As Rudyard Kipling so aptly said “the female
of the species is more deadly than the male”.
The reason for this second illustration is that the crime
involved is much closer in nature to forced vaccination than robbery. In both rape and forced vaccination someone’s
body is penetrated, without that person’s voluntary consent, by a foreign tube
which injects a substance into the body.
The similarities far outweigh the differences and include all the
elements of rape which make the act a heinous crime.
The rhetoric we have been hearing from political leaders,
like the Prime Minister, who have imposed vaccine mandates on certain sectors,
has been “it is your choice not to be vaccinated, but there will be
consequences”. Imagine a man saying to
a woman “it is your choice not to sleep with me, but there will be consequences”. It would be one thing if by “consequences”
the Prime Minister meant something like “you won’t be as protected against the
virus as somebody who chooses to take the vaccine.” This is obviously not what he meant. It was a threat of the imposition of additional negative consequences apart from whatever ones might be inherent in the choice
itself on those who reject the vaccine.
This is an unjustifiable abuse of government power. Indeed, it is ethically unacceptable for any
institution to abuse its authority and power in this way. Rather than issuing vaccine mandates for
their own employees, and those of certain private sectors, governments ought to
be forbidding everyone else from imposing private vaccine mandates. The latter would be a proper and ethical
use of government power.
That so many people have indicated their support for vaccine
mandates, government or private, demonstrates just how badly our ethical
thinking, which was not exactly in great shape prior to the pandemic, has
deteriorated over the course of the last two years.
(1) This
is what the so-called Culture War, or at least the moral aspect of it, has
really been all about.
(2) The
imagery comes from the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans in
the New Testament.
