Beyond the Invisible Hand by Basu Kaushik;

Author:Basu, Kaushik;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Coercion and Voluntariness

In trying to understand coercion and voluntariness, the risk that many an analyst has succumbed to is that of falling into the tautological or near-tautological trap: seeing virtually all human behavior as examples of free choice or all behavior as an illustration of coercive action. The conservative neoclassical economist often bends over backward to show that virtually all choice is noncoercive. This is because, as David Zimmerman (1981, 122) pithily puts it, “Socialists and laissez-faire liberals alike . . . have embraced the conviction that coercion is prima facie morally wrong.” Given this, to admit coercion is to concede the need for government intervention. As Zimmerman notes on the same page, “If capitalist wage bargains did involve coercion, that would be one moral strike against them.” Yet it is equally possible to err on the other side by jumping to conclude that coercion has occurred.

Suppose some workers choose to work in a low-paid hazardous industry. Did they choose this voluntarily? The correct answer is: We cannot say; we need more information about the circumstances before we can pronounce a judgment. So let me add to the above description the fact that these persons’ only other option was unemployment, which would leave them abysmally poor. To some social scientists, this is enough information to be able to say that they did not make a voluntary choice because, effectively, they had no choice, since being unemployed is not really something one chooses (Macpherson 1973). On the other hand, there is a liberal position, best exemplified by Robert Nozick (1974), that argues that if other agents acted voluntarily and within their rights, then the worker can be described as having chosen voluntarily and without coercion. This is also wrong but for more complex reasons.

I am asserting here that both these positions are flawed (which shows that while my position will be Nozickian in some ways, it is not that of Nozick). With the information we have thus far, strictly, we cannot say whether the workers were coerced or not. The qualifier ‘strictly’ is important here. If we did indeed have this much information and no more, and we had to take a position on this, I would be inclined to treat this as a case of voluntary choice, since the accompanying conditions that we need for this to be construed as coercion (as we will presently see) seem empirically unlikely.

Those who race to conclude that this is a case of coercion, usually take the view that the ‘choice’ of being unemployed is not a serious one. They feel that no one should have to take a miserable job. But the mistake with this is its implicit tendency to assume that if “no one should have to take such a miserable job,” then “someone taking such a job” must imply coercion. This and the opposite error of quickly concluding that this is voluntary can curiously stem from the same basic mistake: the tendency to equate “having choice” with “not being coerced.”

Since I

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