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Coercoin, Aggression, and capitalism
Abstract
Capitalism is not incompatible with coercive acts in the Nozickian sense. In fact the notion of coercion developed in Robert Nozick’s 1969 article ‘Coercion’ bears no special relation to capitalism, has no place in libertarian theory, and is completely absent from Nozick’s libertarian work Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Contrary to the claim in Alan Haworth’s (1990) recent article ‘What’s so special about coercion?’, this concept of coercion is far from being central to the libertarian case for capitalism. What does characterize capitalist society is the absence of aggressive action, that is, action which violates property rights.
... 'Exploitation' and 'coercion' are notoriously slippery concepts that can give rise to a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations (Aarstol 1991;Howarth 1990Howarth , 1992Nozick 1997;Wertheimer 1996), but in the context of the present discussion it is possible to arrive at definitions of each that satisfactorily express the sense in which they are used when referring to power and choice within a market economy. Following Wilkinson (2004) and Wertheimer (1996), exploitation may be defined as 'taking unfair advantage', for example as has been claimed occurs when workers are paid less than the true value of what they produce or are paid less than the salary that a 'perfectly competitive' market would allocate. ...
The Ethics of the Market makes a distinctive contribution to the literature on the morality of the market by synthesizing the work of a number of liberal scholars into a systematic defence of the free market on ethical grounds. This defence addresses questions of social justice, the moral pre-requisites of a market economy, the nature of the needs that the market satisfies and the appropriate boundaries that should be placed around the operation of the market.
There is a certain form of libertarian argument accordingj to which there is something essentially uncoercive and therefore freedom-respecting about the ‘free market’. The most obvious way to counter this is to meet it head on, to try to show that the market is, on the contrafy, coercive. But I do not think the obvious approach is the right approach here. The trouble with this particular libertarian view is that it expects the concept is loose enouth to permit a number of interpretations, and I concentrate mainly on Robert Nozick's article, ‘Coercion’, which is is unusual for being an attempt by a political philosopher to come to grips with the concept in detail. In the first section, I consider the broken-backed relationship between Nozick' main guiding assumptions, and the consequent possibility of pursing different ‘strategies ’ when trying to explicate coercion. In the second, I explore some of the implications of this for the libertarian view. In the third, I argue that the pursuit of a ‘baseline’ dividing cases of coercion from others is futile. In conclusion, I suggest that if we really want to understand the relation between capitalism and freedom (or its lack) it is a mistake to focus too closely on coercion alone.
The Ethics of Liberty
- Murray Rothbard