This is going to be a quick impressions post– and I hope that getting the conversation started in a public setting will lead me (or someone) to develop the arguments in greater depth soon.

I think that there are some oddities in public debate right now about attitudes toward gratitude and debts to big impersonal institutions and social forms such as states and markets. I think I’ve seen something like this on both sides– Elizabeth Warren’s speech and the associated commentary, anti-OWS essays and snark, the 99% tumblrs and the 53% tumblrs and the anti-entitled-college-student blog post, and more.

Everyone who isn’t a paleolithic hunter-gatherer has benefited from countless actions by other people, organizations, and institutions. Some of these have been provided by the state that currently governs the territory where the person resides. Some have been provided by markets in which currently-existing corporations have played important roles. Some have been provided by scientists and engineers inside the society the person inhabits. And these are not mutually exclusive (or jointly-exhaustive) possibilities.

But many have been provided by markets and market processes from around the world and from across centuries of history. Many have been provided by the political acts of other states, or other armies, or states that governed the same territory but are morally and organizationally discontinuous with them. The relative material wealth enjoyed by most inhabitants of western liberal societies has contributing causes from democratic governments building roads to markets organizing financial capital to long-dead empires expropriating land and killing its inhabitants. Establishing but-for causation and counterfactual history is even more complicated than establishing all the causal contributions that got us to where we are in this universe.

None of this mean that anyone “owes” the whole difference between their lives and the paleolithic one to some particular contemporary organization or person. Neither some particular local state nor some particular manifestation of the market can legitimately stand in for everything outside the individual’s [comparatively meager] contributions, nor present a bill on behalf of the rest of human society and human history, nor claim duties of gratitude and loyalty for unasked-for and unintentionally-conferred benefits. When, to the best of our current ability to reason, we think that some part of the processes or institutions that brought about the current world were or are or will be unjust or unsustainable or counterproductive, we have no duty of gratitude or loyalty to refrain from criticizing them or trying to reform them. When we live in the world as it exists now and enjoy its benefits, we do not owe debts of loyalty or gratitude to the whole mix of forces that brought it about. To take what I hope is an easy example: a white man in the antebellum or Jim Crow south who *genuinely has* benefited greatly from the oppression of blacks– and surely there were some such, even if many whites benefited not at all or much less than racial ideology led them to believe– has, I believe, no duties of loyalty or gratitude or repayment or maintenane on that basis. None. Not duties that are outweighed, or defeasible duties where the threshold of defeasibilty has been met; no duties. The benefits were unasked-for, inadvertently provided to the particular person, and illegitimate; pointing to their reality for the person who benefited doesn’t create a duty.

But note, too, that the descendant of such a person may continue to benefit. The hypothetical factory-owner Elizabeth Warren addressed, or the hypothetical iPhone-using middle class OWS protester occasionally mocked by market-oriented bloggers, might owe what they have not only to the democratic state that built the roads or the marketplace in which Steve Jobs operated, but also to past processes of grave injustice. If they owe nothing to those past processes, then they don’t automatically owe anything, not even a duty of grateful non-criticism, to the present institutions. And, of course, since our lives have been massively and complexly affected by states and markets, at home and abroad, there can’t really be duties of loyalty or gratitude or repayment to any one of those to the exclusion of the others. In short, it can’t really be an argument against any position in a states-vs-markets argument that “you owe so much to” [the state] [the market]. Any living person has been causally affected, and probably benefited, by many states and many markets. Using the causal effect of one to generate a moral debt to it, and certainly a moral debt that excludes the other, doesn’t make sense.

The fact that many people have benefited from an institution has epistemic relevance: it tells me that there’s some good from it, that it maybe shouldn’t be lightly cast aside, that there are benefits to keep count of in my balance of reasons. But the fact that I’m one of the people who has benefited in an unasked-for, inadvertent way doesn’t have direct moral relevance

We should be humbly aware of how little our efforts amount to as a share of our own overall lives… and skeptical of anyone else purporting to stand in for the other share.