It is not at all uncommon for people to advocate dictatorship and otherwise straight up exerting coercive control over the lives of others for both their own good and the collective good of society. People like this are often called ‘internet authoritarians’ and are often accused of doing it as much to sound edgy and cynical as out of any serious intellectual effort they’ve put into reasoning themselves to that position. This accusation is often correct. There is a reason why we have systems of democracy and concepts of basic rights. Coercion is harmful to the subject’s physical and psychological welfare in most any circumstance, and outside of extreme situations any good caused by forcing them to act ‘correctly’ is far outweighed by the damage it causes.
Broadly speaking, Sandel recognizes three concepts of ethics: liberty, utilitarian and respect for persons. Contrary to the text’s claim that utilitarian and deontological ethics are “two rival approaches to justice” (Sandel 23) these three overlap: as shown above respecting someone’s happiness and well-being requires allowing them to make free choices for their own lives and conduct. Utilitarianism is the idea that ethics is about promoting as much happiness for as many people as possible. Again, you cannot do that without concepts of liberty because coercion is inherently antithetical to happiness. Similarly, the idea that people being happy is good and desirable is predicated on the idea that people have some sort of inherent value that means we should want them (and ourselves) to be happy. First principles in ethics have to come from somewhere, after all, and there is a reason why most of us privilege human happiness over the happiness of other animals. Even the minority who support strong conceptions of animal ethics will rarely claim that all animals are created equal and that a crawfish’s happiness is equal to that of an adult human or a dolphin. Something has to give happiness weight, and directly or indirectly that weight comes from personhood, sometimes referred to as sentience or sapience.
This can be also be seen in Mill’s addition of the so-called “liberty principle” to the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham. Whereas Bentham cheerfully advocated coercive measures for the greatest happiness of all involved such as temporarily turning beggars into indentured servants Mill not only advocated that “government may not interfere with individual liberty” so long as the individual is not somehow harming anyone else but that “the case for individual liberty rests entirely on utilitarian considerations” (Sandel 30). Mill took a long-term, holistic view of the utility principle. Take a beggar off the street, confine him to one of Bentham’s hypothetical workhouses and force him to learn useful skills and engage in productive labor until he has paid off the debt incurred by being there and you may well achieve the goal of making the people he would have harassed or discomforted in the street happier, and you might be able to rehabilitate and send him on his way with money in his pocket, his addictions broken and having learned a trade, but in the process you will traumatize the beggar and render him permanently scarred. It may even backfire completely by making him resentful of the society and government that so violated him and inspire him to commit criminal and terrorist acts of revenge far worse than anything he would have done as a beggar.
The flipside is that coercion is necessary for a functioning society. Without the possibility of coercion by others people will feel free to run amok robbing and murdering people all willy-nilly anytime they think they can get away with it. The libertarian objection that government coercion in the form of taxes and regulations on things like employment and building codes runs afoul of the fact that those things are needed for a society and government to exist to begin with, and no one can ultimately be happy in the aforementioned state of everyone being about to rob, rape and murder as they see fit. A market is not a naturally occurring phenomenon and is inherently shaped by laws and governmental policies.
Works Cited
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Worker’s Educational Association, 1848. Print.
Sandel, Michael. Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, n.d. Print.
