At a recent PPE Society author-meets-critics sessions, I asked whether Estlund’s new book Utopophobia is compatible with his Democratic Authority. Utopophobia argues at length, among other things, that we must not dumb down the requirements of justice to accommodate bad human motivations. Officially, it remains officially agnostic about the content of justice. But it is puzzling why one would think that good people who never act wrongly would need a state. If everyone were willing to contribute voluntarily to public goods, no one ever wanted to violate anyone else’s rights, no one ever wanted to do anything unjust, etc., why would we need a state?

Greg Kavka has a famous argument that even angels would need a state. You can read a systematic, and I think decisive, response to Kavka from Chris Freiman.

In the abstract, Kavka’s argument is that we can imagine morally flawless people who nevertheless have legitimate conflicts of interest, or legitimate moral disagreements, and are willing to fight violently over what to do. We have to imagine, for this argument to work, that they are morally permitted to fight or have such conflicts, and are not morally required to voluntarily, and without coercion, adopt a peaceful resolution procedure. At the same time, we have to imagine that other people are not merely permitted to intervene to stop the by hypothesis permissible and not unjust violence, but further that their best option for doing so is to create a state, rather than using any lesser method of stopping the by hypothesis permissible and not unjust conflict.

It’s a fine needle to thread. It’s one thing to say we can imagine bizarre circumstances where even angels would need a state. (E.g,, Thanos uses the Infinity Gauntlet to make 95% of people believe that everyone else is a sociopathic mass murderer who must be killed immediately or the world will end. Since they are forced into this belief, they are blameless for holding it. They start fighting violently. The remaining 5% can stop them from killing each other only they organize a state.) But under normal circumstances, you’d expect a world full of moral angels/morally perfect people would recognize that others are angelic/perfect, and would therefore have the knowledge they need to overcome any blameless disagreements without violence or the need for centralized coercive mechanisms.

At any rate, in chapter VIII of Democratic Authority, Estlund motivates the need for a state with binding moral authority by describing an anarchic society, Prejuria, which is “tenuously” held together despite lacking a criminal justice system.

Here’s a problem Estlund thinks the state needs to solve:

Ms. Powers, who owned one of the community’s general stores, was seen by at least a dozen people (so they say) sneaking out the back of Faith Friendship’s general store, with which Ms. Powers’s store competes for customers, just before Mrs. Friendship’s store burned to the ground. This struck many people as less than surprising, Ms. Powers being a ruthless businesswoman when she isn’t busy entertaining one man or another. This was a year ago, and Ms. Powers has since found it impossible to live a decent life in Prejuria, since no one will talk to her, do business with her, or intervene when she is verbally or even physically accosted, which often happens if she goes out in public. She reasonably fears leaving her house now, and lives on the meager provisions she makes herself. It so happens that this roughly corresponds to the pun- ishment that is known, in the public rules, to be associated with the crime of which she is accused: extended imprisonment. Everyone real- izes, though, that she is also in danger of being killed by some of the community’s rougher elements. (p. 138)

Now, even with this case, it takes real work to show you need a state to solve the problem. An anarchist doing non-ideal theory would think Estlund doesn’t do a fair job describing anarchic alternatives, even if we suppose people are their normal jerk selves. I won’t get into that here,

The interesting thing is that these people are, well, not angels or morally perfect. They seem to have a general moral suspicion of each other which is unlikely to arise if everyone were morally perfect. Powers is described as poorly behaved. And everyone mistreats her after some suspicious things happen, rather than doing any of the many nice things good people would do instead. So, even if we think Prejuria could use a state, we are asking whether a state would be useful to solve a problem a bunch of bad people face in virtue of their badness, not a problem that good people would face. Most of the discussion in chapter VIII is about the need for a centralized criminal justice system, but presumable a society full of morally perfect people would not need one, period, except under very bizarre cases like the Thanos case above. No termites? No need for exterminators.

Estlund hints at some other cases here and there. But the general challenge is to show that morally perfect people would, under normal rather than bizarre circumstances, face problems so severe that the best way to solve them would be to create an institution with centralized coercive power over all of them. Yet it’s hard to see why coercing good people would be necessary. Good people do the right thing without having to be threatened.

More on this issue later. I’ll re-read chapter IX and later chapters to see if there is something there that saves the case for the state.