I’m mostly offline for a while so I won’t be taking part in the labor discussions for a while yet. I haven’t had time to properly think about Kevin Vallier’s attempt at resolution at the level of the moral order– and I still haven’t read Gaus’ Order of Public Reason, which I suspect would help in that task. But, as Kevin knows, I tend to think at both a very different level of abstraction and in a mood that’s more about things going wrong than about things going right.

Accordingly, as much as I like John Holbo’s post on freedom and coercion (a post which has earned John a mention in my book manuscript for a point he makes about Hayek), in this context I’d especially like to recommend two of the other replies in this conversation: Belle Waring and djw.

I indicated in my initial contribution that, as far as I’m concerned, one of the key merits of unions– whatever their other demerits– is their protection of procedural fairness against managers, their protection against personalized forms of abuse and domination in the workplace. If we’re going to import political concepts into the workplace, this is more like the rule of law than it is like liberty per se.

I also said there that a lot of workplace abuse can’t be collapsed into action by the firm or the employer. The separation of ownership and management, and the dispersal of managerial supervision all through a complex organization, mean that in a big firm there are countless local, specific opportunities for one higher-ranking person to abuse one lower-ranking person. Something gets lost in these discussions when we imagine that abuse as some kind of general, publicly acknowledgeable term of employment. This is why a serious discussion has very close to nothing to do with the question of whether prostitution should be legal. Firms don’t, and wouldn’t be willing to, post ads that said: “duties include typing, filing, and submitting to your supervisor’s sexual advances at his sole discretion,” and the thought experiments about wage-vs-sex tradeoffs are entirely misleading.

Bertram et al say that the open-ended character of the employment contract means that this kind of distinction will not be able to do everything that needs to be done; bosses will always have a lot of discretionary authority over employees and no amount of careful enumeration of duties will ever suffice to rule abuses out. I hope to develop something to say about that. But I think this kind of distinction between publicly-acknowledgeable hard terms that it would make sense for the firm to endorse and the phenomenon of managerial abuse and domination has to be the place to start, and I wanted to resurface long enough to recommend Waring’s and djw’s posts on the latter. Libertarians should be especially interested in the moral psychology of power. We understand that the man with a uniform and a gun isn’t just a stand-in for laws we may or may not like, he’s also a human being with human flaws, which all too often include too much love of dominating others. (The job both selects for and reinforces that trait.) Indeed, we treat it as a criticism of some laws that we don’t like that they unavoidably put a lot of power into such people’s hands. But it’s not only state laws that do that, and not only state offices of power that have those effects. We can and should draw distinctions, but we shouldn’t apply different methodological and psychological rules in our analysis of the state and our analysis of the rest of society. If “power corrupts,” we shouldn’t imagine that the moral psychology of that corruption just happens to stop at the public-private divide.

While I’m here and linking, I’ll also link to these comments (38 and 39) by Jim Henley. They make a broader claim than the one at hand about employment, so I think it’s a topic for another day. But Henley is someone I suspect a lot of us BHL bloggers have learned from and admired over the years; his criticism of (if I may put it this way) the BHL project or mindset is not the kind that comes from a hostile enemy but the kind that comes from a self-aware friend. I hope that at some point we return to it for a separate discussion.