Article

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

2022, Vol. 21(4) 415–436
Why not anarchism? © The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/1470594X221098098
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Jason Brennan
Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Christopher Freiman
Department of Philosophy, William & Mary,
Williamsburg, VA, USA

Abstract
Recent debates over ideal theory have reinvigorated interest in the question of anarchy.
Would a perfectly just society need—or even permit—a state? Ideal anarchists such as
Jason Brennan, G.A. Cohen, Christopher Freiman, and Jacob Levy argue that strict com-
pliance with justice obviates the need for a state. Ideal statists such as David Estlund,
Gregory Kavka, and John Rawls think that coercive political institutions serve indispens-
able functions even in ideal conditions. This paper defends ideal anarchism. Our argu-
ment begins by describing a camping trip inspired by Cohen that illustrates why an
anarchist form of cooperation is more intrinsically desirable than the statist alternative.
After detailing Rawls’s ideal theory and Estlund’s “nonconcessive” moral theory, we
argue—contrary to Rawls, Estlund, and Kavka—that large-scale societies without
moral imperfection do not need a state.

Keywords
ideal theory, Utopophobia, anarchism, John Rawls, David Estlund, Gregory Kavka

Robert Nozick (1974, p. 3) famously opens Anarchy, State, and Utopia by asking, “If the
state did not exist, would it be necessary to invent it?” Whether the state should exist in
the first place is, in Nozick’s view (p.4), “the fundamental question of political
philosophy.”

Corresponding author:
Jason Brennan, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
Email: jb896@georgetown.edu
416 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

Recent debates over ideal theory have reinvigorated interest in the question of
anarchy. Would a perfectly just society need—or even permit—a state? Ideal anarchists
such as ourselves, G.A. Cohen, and Jacob Levy argue that strict compliance with justice
obviates the need for a state. Ideal statists such as John Rawls, David Estlund, and
Gregory Kavka think that coercive political institutions serve indispensable functions
even in ideal conditions. This paper defends ideal anarchism.
At stake in the debate between anarchists and statists is the very concept of a just
society. (Compare “If this were a just world, the government would really punish
those Wall Street crooks instead of placing them in a cozy white collar prison” with
“If this were a just world, Wall Street wouldn’t be crooked—or wouldn’t even exist—
in the first place.”) Moreover, the debate spotlights the possibility that political philoso-
phy has been beset by unnoticed moral complacency. Both Cohen and Estlund argue that
philosophers and others make improper concessions to human nature. People could
behave well, though predictably they won’t because they don’t want to. Rather than
curving or dumbing down morality, we should instead conclude people are morally
flawed and most societies fall far short of justice.1
Consider, for instance, that we have little expectation that those who are well off will
willingly share enough of their spare resources with the poor; the state has to resort to
force. Or, as Cohen notes, we’ve resigned ourselves to a world in which the talented
demand higher wages to put their talents to work for the common good. But perhaps
we should hold ourselves to a higher moral standard. We might have no choice but to
tax the rich or compensate the talented extravagantly to motivate them to do what we
want; still, this response is only required because the rich aren’t behaving as they
should. To borrow Cohen’s memorable analogy (2008, part 1), it’s like paying a kidnap-
per’s ransom to secure the release of your child. You ought to do it, but the kidnapper was
wrong to take your child in the first place. In this paper, we examine how most arguments
for the state take this form—they presuppose people act quite badly and that the state is a
necessary response to their bad behavior. But if people were consistently decent, let alone
ideally just, the state would not be necessary or valuable.
Although ideal theory asks which institutions would be best under a rather narrow and
special set of conditions, it has a point. Many theorists insist that a central task of political
philosophy is to identify which institutions could in principle fully realize justice.2
Political philosophy is normative, not descriptive. It tells us how societies ought to func-
tion, not how they in fact function. Moreover, that a perfectly just society is infeasible
does not make it any less intrinsically desirable. As Cohen (1995, p.256) says, grapes
do not become any less tasty just because they are out of reach. Contrary to Rawls,
Estlund, and Kavka, we argue that a state is only needed in conditions where people
are morally defective and is therefore, by its nature, a nonideal institution.
Previous defenses of ideal anarchism tend to be noncomprehensive or impressionistic.
For instance, Cohen focuses his attention on the claim that ideal egalitarians would be
motivated to share the wealth without taxation. Brennan argues that ideal capitalists
would not exploit their workers or withhold help from those in need. Levy (2016,
p. 319) notes that a strictly compliant society would be without crime and “the limited
beneficence that sits at the base of theories of justice in property and in the coercive pro-
vision of social welfare, and more generally the failings that make politics and justice
Brennan and Freiman 417

unavoidable.” Freiman’s earlier arguments for ideal anarchism go into greater detail but
leave a variety of objections unaddressed. In this paper, we offer a more comprehensive
defense of the position.
Our preliminary argument for ideal anarchism begins by describing a case inspired by
Cohen—call it “the anarchist camping trip”—that illustrates why fully just people would
cooperate without coercion (§1). We then detail the assumptions of Rawls’s ideal theory
and criticize his claim that a state is needed to solve assurance problems in ideal condi-
tions (§2). Next we explain Estlund’s arguments against dumbing down the requirements
of justice to accommodate people’s bad moral motivations and show why a consistent
application of Estlund’s “non-concessive” assumptions undermines his own case for
the state (§3). We then address Kavka’s argument that a state is required to resolve
moral conflicts among morally blameless but zealous people (§4). We conclude that
none of the major arguments for why strictly compliant societies would need a state
are successful and that the case for ideal anarchism stands (§5).

§1 The Anarchist Camping Trip

Cohen (2009) famously argues for socialism with a thought experiment that has us
imagine a camping trip among friends. First, he has us imagine people living together
while abiding by (purportedly) socialist principles of community and equality. Then he
asks us to imagine people start behaving in ways common in real-life capitalism, such
as refusing to use their talents unless they are paid more than others, or gloating over
having more than others. Nearly everyone agrees the “socialist” version of the
camping trip was morally superior to the “capitalist” version.
Cohen then asks whether it would be desirable if the entire world could be run like the
socialist version—on the basis of community spirit and equality—rather than the capit-
alist version—on the basis of fear and greed. He tells us to be careful to distinguish
what people won’t do from what they can’t do. That people are predictably selfish,
callous, indifferent to others’ welfare, willing to exploit one another, and overly con-
cerned with promoting their own status does not show that they could not act otherwise.
Sure they could. Instead, it shows that they are morally flawed people. If people were
good—not necessarily even ideal, but simply consistently decent—they would not act
in these ways. Cohen thus concludes that the motivational impediments to socialism
do not show that socialism is undesirable. Given what we know about how people will
choose to act, we may have reason to not try to instantiate socialism in the real world.
But on Cohen’s view, socialism nevertheless remains the best way to live together.
In this section, our argument and our language will often mirror Cohen’s. So too does
our conclusion. Our claim takes no stand on the feasibility of anarchism. Rather, our
claim is that fully just people would be anarchist If we should have a state, that’s a reac-
tion to our moral shortcomings. Later, we will consider the possibility that, pace this argu-
ment, even ideal people would need the state.
Now for the anarchist camping trip: Imagine that we go camping. We have no hier-
archy and no one in charge. We have different goods, such as matches, fishing rods,
and coffee, among us. Some of these might be collectively held; some might be privately
418 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

held. We are largely free to do as we please, and no one tramples on anyone else’s rights.
Everyone treats everyone else with respect and kindness.
There is peace. Everyone respects each other. People observe rules that lead to the
common good. No one steals. If anyone is in need, someone always pitches in.
Everyone does their fair share to maintain common facilities.
People also abide by rules that make coexistence better. Some rules are just the trad-
itional rules of the campsite, which evolved over time from experience and from people
copying functional behaviors they witness in others. In some cases, rules are decided on
by discussion. If there is insufficient time for everyone to discuss rules, then a few of the
campers, with great care, will suggest good rules, and everyone accepts useful, functional
rules. People recognize the value of cooperation and loathe the idea of violent conflict.
Accordingly, there is no such conflict.
No coercion or threat of violence is needed to maintain order and community.
Everyone understands that she would be able to violate others’ rights or the rules with
near impunity, if she so chose. However, out of moral motivation alone, campers
respect each other’s rights, play fair, and abide by the rules.
Now suppose that people begin behaving as they do in real-life statist societies.
Suppose that Sylvia says she needs assurance that others will do their fair share.
She says we should not count on other campers’ good will. Thus, Sylvia demands
that some people be armed with sharp sticks and charged with enforcing the rules.
Harry and Leslie are tasked with the job and subsequently demand that all campers
provide them a set amount of goods as compensation, to be collected at regular
intervals.
Meanwhile, Morgan has been happily sharing her apples with the other campers when-
ever they ask for one; that is, until a bunch of apples goes missing. She sees Nina snack-
ing on what looks like one of her Granny Smiths and, without any further evidence,
publicly accuses Nina of theft. The rest of the campers ostracize Nina. Some even con-
template violent retribution. They are only deterred by the prospect of being stabbed by
Harry and Leslie and locked in a makeshift cage.
Campers also start having significant disagreements about the social norms, and
organize into factions. They give their factions names, such as “the Social Justice
Party” or “the Honored Tradition Party”. They compete for the right to hold the sharp
sticks and tell others what to do.
At this point, the campsite resembles a state. But notice that when the campers had no
moral failings, they were anarchistic, while the introduction of the state here was moti-
vated by their moral failings, distrust, and animosity. (Again, we will consider below
whether even angels would need a state.)
Non-coercive anarchism may not be feasible given how bad people are, but our claim
is not about feasibility. We claim that a fully just society would be anarchist rather than
statist The campers’ proto-state was only needed when unjust behaviors were introduced
—when the campers were unwilling to voluntarily do their fair share, entertaining the use
of violence against other campers on the basis of a mere suspicion, or opting to resolve
honest moral disagreements through war rather than peaceful compromise. However, as
we will see below, these are precisely the sorts of behaviors that ideal statists believe give
rise to a need for the state. Rawls, Estlund, and Kavka see themselves as arguing that even
Brennan and Freiman 419

ideal people would need a state, but in fact their arguments rely on the assumption that
people will act in decidedly nonideal ways.
Still, there is disagreement on how, exactly, we should expect ideal moral agents to
behave. Perhaps situations similar to those described in the later stages of the camping
trip will arise even within ideal conditions. In reply, we argue that nongovernmental solu-
tions will work as well as governmental solutions. And since there is a moral presumption
in favor of respecting people’s liberty, noncoercive, nongovernmental solutions are
morally preferable to coercive, governmental solutions.
Following Gregory Kavka (1995, p.5), we understand a government or a state to be the
subset of a society which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion, and which
has coercive power sufficient to maintain that monopoly. Many arguments for the state
take the following form: “In the absence of a state, people will do X or fail to do Y,
and so we need the state to stop them from doing X or help them/force them to do Y.”
But any such argument which appeals to bad motivations or a morally blameworthy
lack of good motivations is nonideal. For instance, if someone says the state is necessary
to stop mutual predation, this presumes people will act badly. Statist arguments can also
be nonideal when they appeal to people lacking information or certain skills, if the reason
they lack such information or skills is that they make morally bad choices. Such argu-
ments may well justify having a state in the real world, given people’s actual bad behav-
ior, but it does not thereby show that a just society full of just people would have a state.
They at most show that a state is a just response to unjust people’s pervasive injustice.
In the real world, we rely upon institutionalized threats of coercion because we think
we must, given human limitations. We tax the rich and impose emissions caps because
flawed people will act unjustly otherwise. But if people were good—not perfect, just
good—they would do the right thing without coercive threats. They would act like
people on the anarchist camping trip. To be clear, a morally good society would no
doubt include institutions—roughly, rules structuring social cooperation—but these insti-
tutions would not include a coercive, monopolistic state. In this anarchistic situation, each
person abides by norms and rules that serve the common good, promote justice, and solve
coordination problems. No one free rides on public goods. No one engages in rent
seeking. No one seeks to abuse institutions for private ends. No one takes advantage
of, exploits, or preys upon others.
As noted, statists might rightly complain that cooperative anarchy would not succeed
in the real world.3 Yet at the level of ideal theory—in which everyone does what is right
—it appears cooperative anarchy would work. As Levy notes (2016, p. 319), “Taking
‘strict compliance’ seriously would mean assuming away the crime that justifies the
state’s control of the means of violence.” Freiman elaborates (2017a, p.6), arguing that
criminal justice institutions are unnecessary in a fully just society: “We need laws
against, say, shoplifting—and not simply polite suggestions—because some people
would be tempted to shoplift if not for the threat of punishment. The state’s function is
essentially remedial. But in a fully just society, there’s nothing to remediate. A fully
just person doesn’t want to shoplift.”4
Similar observations apply to redistributive taxation. Cohen (2009, p. 211) says that
“in a truly just society, with full compliance, taxation on behalf of equality would not
need to be coerced.” Since citizens are assumed to be morally just, they will voluntarily
420 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

organize and contribute to charitable endeavors without the need for state-enforced
taxation. Labor market regulations would also be superfluous. As Brennan puts it
(2014, p. 86), an ideal capitalist “would never exploit anyone, because she is too nice.”
Perhaps, despite this, there are other reasons why ideally just people need a state. In
what follows we will examine arguments from Rawls, Estlund, and Kavka against
cooperative anarchy. We contend that these arguments fail and that ideal agents don’t
need a state. More specifically, we offer internal critiques of their arguments. That is,
we criticize their cases for the state by showing that a consistent application of their
own assumptions about the nature of an ideal society favors anarchism.

§2 Rawls
To clarify up front: Rawls understands “ideal theory” differently in different contexts.
Sometimes ideal theory aims to discover which fundamental principles of justice
would be justified were society to comply with those principles (Rawls 1999, p. 8, 126).
We set this sort of ideal theorizing about basic principles of justice to the side. Instead,
we focus on the variation of ideal theory that concerns itself with institutional design.
Here we seek to discover which institutions would be justified if, in Rawls’s terms
(2001, p. 13), everyone exhibits “strict compliance” with the basic principles of
justice. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls (2001, p. 137) is explicit about
evaluating different political regimes according to an “ideal institutional description,”
that is, “the description of how it works when it is working well, that is in accordance
with its public aims and principles of design.” This style of institutional analysis
permits us to forgo empirical inquiry given that an ideal description of an institutional
regime is one that will “abstract from its political sociology, that is, from an account
of the political, economic, and social elements that determine its effectiveness in achiev-
ing its public aims” (Rawls 2001, p. 137). As Rawls puts it (2001, p. 137), his question is
“What kind of regime and basic structure would be right and just, could it be effectively
and workably maintained?”
To illustrate exactly what ideal theorizing about institutions involves, consider the fol-
lowing two questions:

Question 1:

What kind of regime would be best if people were motivated by a nearly perfect sense of
justice and were fully competent to play whatever role they have in society, if institutions
always work as intended, and if there were favorable background conditions?

Question 2:

What kind of regime will be best in the real world, given that people’s willingness and ability
to comply are imperfect, given that people are sometimes incompetent and corrupt, and given
that institutions are not guaranteed to work as intended?
Brennan and Freiman 421

Question 1 asks about what are in some way “ideal” circumstances; question 2 asks
about realistic circumstances. When someone says she favors or disfavors a particular
political or economic system, we need to know at what level of idealization she claims
to favor or disfavor that system. We need to know whether she is asking question 1, 2,
or something else.
Rawls must be asking question 1. He tells us to ignore, for instance, criticisms of the
welfare state based on the idea that the safety net might lead to moral hazard. He has us
imagine that people have such good motivations and so strong a sense of justice that
so-called “conservative critiques of the welfare state” automatically fail, because
people would never engage in free-riding or take advantage of one another’s generosity
or sense of fairness (2001, p. 137).
More specifically, Rawls asks which institutional arrangement would best realize
justice under these four conditions:

1. People have as strong a sense of justice as humanly possible. They might not be
perfect, and they might experience strains of commitment if social institutions
demand too much of them. However, everyone is as good as real human being
could be, if not as good as an angel. Assuming that the strains of commitment
are sufficiently modest, people fully comply or nearly fully comply with the prin-
ciples of justice.
2. Everyone is competent to play their role.
3. The basic institutions of society achieve their announced public aims and ideals
(Rawls 2001, pp.136–137).
4. There are favorable background conditions.5

The first three conditions are highly idealized. Rawls idealizes human motivation and also
certain human abilities. We are to imagine that people are competent to play their role in
society, and that if institutions are intended to produce some end, then the institutions will
in fact produce that end (Rawls 2001, 137, §41.3). We are to imagine that government
bureaucrats are competent and immune to corruption and rent seeking. So, in these cir-
cumstances, which institutions would be best?
Rawls argues that ideal moral agents need coercive political institutions to solve assur-
ance problems. As conditional cooperators, ideal moral agents are motivated to contribute
their fair share conditional on others doing the same. (This needn’t be because they are
immorally selfish, but instead because they recognize certain goals require collective
action.) Virginians are happy to spend a little more on hybrid cars to do their part for
the environment so long as Arizonans buy them too. Alaskans want to send in their dona-
tions to the social justice redistribution fund—but only if Texans put their own checks in
the mail. Since these two groups cannot monitor each other’s activities, they cannot know
whether the other is making their own contributions. So both refrain from contributing.
Thus, even ideally motivated actors might fail to provide public goods. Rawls (1999,
p. 236) points to situations like these to justify the need for a state in ideal conditions:

The sense of justice leads us to promote just schemes and to do our share in them when we
believe that others, or sufficiently many of them, will do theirs. But in normal circumstances
422 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

a reasonable assurance in this regard can only be given if there is a binding rule effectively
enforced. Assuming that the public good is to everyone’s advantage, and one that all would
agree to arrange for, the use of coercion is perfectly rational from each man’s point of view.
Many of the traditional activities of government, insofar as they can be justified, can be
accounted for in this way. The need for the enforcement of rules by the state will still
exist even when everyone is moved by the same sense of justice.

The state is justified as a means of assuring conditional cooperators that their contribu-
tions to public goods will not go unreciprocated.
Before we detail our own response, we’ll note a number of replies we could offer to
Rawls that we nevertheless won’t pursue.6 Perhaps Rawls’s ideal theory is too conces-
sive to human limitations. We could assume that ideal agents are unconditional coopera-
tors and thus don’t need assurance of reciprocity. Or maybe they are conditional
cooperators but don’t face the knowledge limitations that Rawls assumes they do and
therefore know that all others will cooperate conditionally. These criticisms may be
correct, although there are some reasons for doubt. For instance, one could argue that
conditional cooperation is morally better than unconditional cooperation because moral-
ity shouldn’t ask you to allow your contributions to be exploited by others. Furthermore,
knowledge limitations due to human finitude plausibly don’t count as moral failings and
thus shouldn’t be imagined away by an ideal theory that assumes we’re as good as
humanly possible.
In any case, our reason for focusing on Rawls’s strict compliance view here is simply
because it makes our job harder. Under more extravagant idealizing consumptions, the
assurance problem doesn’t even arise in the first place and thus the objection can be dis-
missed easily. However, we aim to show that the objection can be addressed even if we
assume Rawls’s own more moderately ideal conditions.
Rawls’s argument overlooks the ways in which noncoercive, nongovernmental insti-
tutions can solve the collective action problem. Many projects are now “crowdfunded”
through assurance contracts—benefactors pledge money to a cause or campaign but
are not charged unless sufficiently many others pledge as well. Thus, the Alaskan can
pledge her share to the redistribution fund knowing that the money will only be taken
in the event that Texans pledge their share, too. Such assurance contracts function
fairly well in non-ideal conditions; presumably they would function even better under
ideal conditions.
Dominant assurance contracts are even better.7 To illustrate, consider Hume’s (1978,
p. 538) meadow case:

Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common: because it is
easy for them to know each other’s mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate con-
sequence of his failing in his part, is the abandoning of the whole project. But it is very dif-
ficult, and indeed impossible, that a thousand persons should agree in any such action; it
being difficult for them to concert so complicated a design, and still more difficult for
them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expense,
and would lay the whole burden on others.
Brennan and Freiman 423

Suppose an entrepreneur calculates that $100,000 is enough to drain the meadow and turn
a profit, thus compensating her for taking the risk. So she needs each of the “thousand
persons” to contribute one hundred dollars. (Notice also that a state—an institution
with a monopoly right to coerce—is not necessary to determine which public goods
ought to be provided.)
To obtain the contributions, she proposes the following arrangement. If you contribute
the $100 and too few others contribute to meet the $100,000 threshold, your $100 is
returned with a bonus of $10. Thus, if you expect too few others to contribute, you
ought to contribute. Alternatively, if others contribute and you’re nearing the threshold,
you ought to contribute to ensure the threshold is met and the good is provided given that
good’s benefit to you exceeds the cost of your contribution (by hypothesis). Contributing
is thus the dominant strategy. You profit by contributing in the “no one gets it” scenario
because of the refund bonus. You also profit by contributing in the “everyone gets it”
scenario because the personal benefit provided by the public good exceeds the personal
cost of your contribution. The public goods problem is solved without coercion.
Of course, dominant assurance contracts don’t work as smoothly for larger scale
public goods. There is still an incentive to withhold a contribution if the pool of prospect-
ive contributors is unknown. You might not contribute if you expect the next person to
contribute, thereby enabling you to receive the benefit without paying the cost To take
an artificially precise case to fix ideas, suppose some ecologically-minded entrepreneur
seeks contributions from five million people to fund widescale deployment of carbon
capture technology to fight climate change. You see that 4,999,999 people have
already contributed. Even though, let us suppose, the welfare gain to you of mitigated
climate change is greater than the welfare loss brought about by contributing to the
project, you suspect that another person will make that final contribution. In this case,
you get the benefit of a healthier climate and you get to keep your money.
Yet dominant assurance contracts may self-correct for this sort of problem. If you
think that contributions will stall as the threshold nears because of the free rider
problem, then you have an incentive to contribute in the expectation of receiving the
bonus refund that results from the failure of the project. But of course if the prospect
of free riding incentivizes people to contribute in this way, the free riding problem is
thereby solved. Furthermore, the contract could incorporate features that ameliorate
this problem—perhaps the person who makes the threshold-meeting contribution
receives a lucrative bonus prize.8
In any case, this problem would not arise in ideal conditions, however much of a worry
it would be in the real world. Remember: just agents prefer to contribute. They don’t want
to free ride. They will do their fair share “to promote just schemes” when they “believe
that others, or sufficiently many of them, will do theirs” (Rawls 1999, p. 236). So if they
see others contributing and getting close to the threshold, they’ll gladly pitch in their fair
share.
Maybe expecting millions of people to contribute a pledge to pay for a public good via
a dominant assurance contract seems far-fetched. But once again, it’s important to
remember that we are considering ideal conditions that are themselves far-fetched—
we’re considering a scenario in which hundreds of millions of people are assumed to
be fully compliant with justice. More to the point, expecting millions of ideal moral
424 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

agents to contribute a pledge to pay for a public good via a dominant assurance contract
seems no more implausible than expecting millions of ideal moral agents to contribute a
vote for a tax that will pay for that same public good.
Here’s another objection: prospective contributors will withhold contributions out of a
concern that the entrepreneur won’t make good on her plans and will take the money and
run.9 We have several replies.
First, the relevant agreements can be structured in a way that mitigates this sort of risk.
For one, the entrepreneur could start with low-cost, small-scale projects where the poten-
tial loss is small (e.g. a single carbon capture device) and build trust with repeated inter-
actions. It might be objected that prospective contributors won’t contribute even in this
scenario because the possibility of any loss is enough to dissuade them from contributing.
The problem with this objection is that it applies with equal force to ideal statists. They
face the same assurance problem, but in the political realm.10
To see why, consider the predicament of the Virginian at the dawn of a presidential
election. She is happy to spend time and resources becoming an informed and unbiased
voter so long as Arizonans do the same. But there’s the rub: she has no assurance that
Arizonans will do the same, just as she had no assurance that they will buy hybrids or
donate to redistribution. Thus, she decides not to put in the work to cast a thoughtful
vote out of a fear of having her contribution to a public good go unreciprocated and
wasted. Alternatively, if she figures that enough other voters will contribute their thought-
ful vote for effective climate change strategies, then she can reap the benefits of their con-
tributions without contributing herself (just as the prospective dominant assurance
contract contributor could withhold her contribution in an effort to free ride). Or she
might withhold her informed vote because she worries that the candidates are untrust-
worthy and will not make good on their promises (that is, the same worry that applies
to the entrepreneur). In short, for the statist solution to work, it must be the case that
people are willing to accept some risk of a small loss, in which case the anarchist solution
would work as well.
It could be the case that voting well in ideal conditions will not be very costly.11 After
all, we assume that everyone is just and so there’s little need to inspect the justness of any
of the candidates. However, voters would still need to acquire empirical information to
judge the comparative effectiveness of each candidate’s proposals (e.g. whether
nuclear power is a better bet than solar and wind for combatting climate change).12
Moreover, the assurance problem resurfaces here: if people are unsure about the
motives of others, then voters would need to research the track record of candidates to
ensure that they have a history of following through on their campaign promises. In
any case, the ideal anarchist could simply stipulate that the cost of people’s voluntarily
contributions to a dominant assurance contract will be no greater than the cost of
people’s voluntary votes under ideal statism.
So, at most, ideal anarchists and ideal statists find themselves at a stalemate. But this
uncertainty weighs against the establishment of a state in ideal conditions. The reason is
because institutionalized coercion of the sort that characterizes the state is presumptively
wrong. When all else is equal, we should prefer voluntary cooperation to state coercion.13
Indeed, as Rawls himself argues (2001, p. 44), “There is a general presumption against
imposing legal and other restrictions on conduct without a sufficient reason.” Samuel
Brennan and Freiman 425

Scheffler (2010, p. 154) elaborates on this idea, writing, “Coercion always requires jus-
tification, and this requirement is particularly urgent with respect to the coercive political
power of the state . . . [G]iven the status of individuals as free and equal, the establishment
of coercive institutions poses a special justificatory problem.” Although this is not the
place for a full-fledged exploration of the presumptive wrongness of coercion, we’ll
suggest that it has something to do with the way in which coercion clashes with the
basic moral equality of all persons in virtue of subordinating the will of the coerced to
the will of the coercer.
In reply, one might argue that the presumption of liberty is only a tiebreaker if the
severity of the assurance problem is roughly the same in anarchist and statist conditions.14
If we expect that the problem will be significantly worse under anarchism than statism,
then the presumption of liberty could be overridden.
However, there is good reason to doubt a significant difference in severity. For one,
it’s assumed that people will be equally trustworthy and motivated to cooperate in the
two scenarios. Moreover, contributions in both scenarios risk going unreciprocated or
exploited. Indeed, if anything, the prospect of a payoff in the event of inadequate contri-
bution supplies actors in the anarchist condition with a stronger incentive to contribute
than voters in the statist condition.
Lastly, we take seriously the possibility that the assurance problem wouldn’t even
arise in the first place. In ideal conditions, the entrepreneur won’t be motivated to run
off with the contributions—the objection is that prospective contributors won’t know
this and thus won’t contribute. However, we think it’s likely that in ideal conditions
people would become aware that everyone is fully compliant with justice even if they
don’t possess superhuman cognitive powers. It would be strange if every human being
in society were fully compliant with justice but this fact was lost on everyone. By
analogy, human beings with their existing cognitive limitations are aware that all other
humans are mortal. We see little reason why human beings with their existing cognitive
limitations wouldn’t become aware that all other humans are fully compliant with justice.
Thus, it’s plausible that the assurance problem that troubles Rawls would simply not arise
in ideal conditions.

§3 Estlund
David Estlund has recently produced a systematic defense of non-concessive moral the-
orizing. (He avoids using the word “ideal theory”.) Estlund notes that most political the-
ories make demands of people which we know are unlikely to be met. Just war theories
ask leaders to forbear from offensive action, but we know ahead of time world leaders
will initiate aggression and claim they were justified even when they are not. We
know most people are too selfish to donate most of their income to the poor. We
know that people will indulge racist biases rather than overcome them. And so on.
Nevertheless, Estlund argues, none of these foreseeable behaviors prove that our nor-
mative theories demand too much or that the theories are defective. As Cohen argues,
everyone agrees that “ought implies can”; if a person cannot X, they are not obligated
to X. But we should avoid confusing the claim that a person very much does not want
426 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

to do X, or finds X demanding, or is inclined against doing X, with the claim that he

cannot. “I do not want to X” rarely implies “I cannot”.
In Utopophobia, Estlund looks more carefully at the issue of motivation, trying to
determine under what circumstances people’s attitudes and motivations constitute
genuine barriers which block or otherwise relieve them of what would have been motiva-
tions. He argues these situations are rare. Here, we will briefly review the cases he con-
siders and his arguments against them.
For one, Estlund argues that positing human selfishness typical adds nothing in esti-
mating people’s moral requirements. Bill might be too selfish to clean up his mess, but
that does not by itself excuse him from cleaning. His selfishness does not explain
away his obligations; rather, it merely explains why he fails to meet his obligations
(Estlund 2020, p. 102).
Estlund adds that nothing changes if we note such selfishness is common and typical.
If most people are too selfish to clean up the mess they impose on others, it does not
follow they have no obligation to clean. It follows that most people act badly, and the
reason they act badly is that they are selfish (Estlund 2020, pp. 102–3).
Estlund admits that conflicting motives might be part of an explanation about why a
person is relieved of a duty, but then contends these motives matter only in special cases
where a person has other obligations which trump the putative obligation in question. For
instance, he says, imagine a case where if a psychiatrist divulges her patients’ medical
secrets, this will somehow promote socially just outcomes. Suppose the psychiatrist is
strongly motivated not to divulge such secrets. Here, the psychiatrist may have no
such obligation to promote social justice by divulging secrets. But her unwillingness is
not what justifies her per se, but rather her pre-existing obligations to her clients which
enjoy lexical priority over the demands of social justice (Estlund 2020, pp. 103–4).
Estlund also warns us not to confuse the question of personal moral prerogative with
questions of motivation. Many theorists15 argue that individuals have a wide sphere of
personal prerogative to live their lives as they see fit; they are not required to spend all
of their time and effort dedicating themselves to promoting utilitarian ends, human
welfare, or the ends of justice. Though Estlund officially remains neutral about the
content of morality and justice in Utopophobia, he accepts that prerogative might well
block what otherwise could have been duties to act in certain ways. For instance,
perhaps we the authors would have better served social justice or human welfare by
becoming medical researchers, but it was in our prerogative to choose less
utility-enhancing jobs as philosophers. Perhaps Bob would somehow promote social
justice by marrying Tom, but it is his prerogative to marry Ed instead. And so on.
However, the grounds for thinking people have such prerogative is not that they are
callous, selfish, or unwilling to do what’s right. Rather, theories of prerogative generally
hold that people’s interests in living a free and autonomous life of their own design
grounds such personal prerogative. Once again, “I don’t want to X” is not a general
reason to hold “I have no duty to X”.
Estlund claims that contrary motives block obligations only in special cases, i.e., only
when the motive is “clinical”. If a person genuinely cannot choose to do something, due
to some psychological disability, the obligation is blocked. But the person must be genu-
inely disabled. We the authors do not want to donate half our incomes, but we certainly
Brennan and Freiman 427

could. If a person could choose to do something, but due to a psychological condition,

this would impose severe hardship, then the person may be excused. For instance,
perhaps a person might normally be obligated to pull a child from a well, but is at
least partly excused when she refuses due to her severe phobia of enclosed spaces and
the dark (Estlund 2020, pp. 107–111).
Overall, we must be careful not to treat contrary motives as if they disable people
from performing various actions. Otherwise, we threaten to cast people as if they
lacked the appropriate kind of free will or moral agency. Rich could give to poor,
even though he does not want to. People could avoid free riding on public goods,
though they are tempted to cheat. People could work for others’ benefit without
expecting a selfish return, though they do not want to. Business owners could play
fair and avoid shady practices, though they are tempted to behave badly (Estlund
2020, p. 112). Appealing to contrary motives, such as wealth, status, self-interest,
bias, leisure, love, or fear does not block a moral obligation, Estlund says, unless
the person is genuinely disabled by these motives, or unless there is an independent
principle of justice showing that obligations arising from such motives trump other
principles of justice.
Though Estlund has written a systematic critique of concessive political philosophy,
he is not an anarchist, even at the level of non-concessive theory. This seems strange,
as it burdens Estlund with articulating grounds for the state which are not based on or
reactions to people’s moral failings.
Estlund’s only developed argument for the state appears in Democratic Authority,
which, among other things, defends a democratic state against an anarchic alternative
(Estlund 2008). Estlund first argues that we should choose whichever of three decision-
making methods—anarchy, random lotteries, or the democratic nation-state—tends to
produce the overall most just outcomes. He then argues that the democratic nation-state
will outperform the other two.
Here’s what we find puzzling about Estlund’s argument for statism: the central case he
uses to motivate the need for the state involves distinctly morally bad behavior. Consider
this excerpt:

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 phys-
ically 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 punishment that is known, in the public rules, to be associated
with the crime of which she is accused: extended imprisonment. Everyone realizes,
though, that she is also in danger of being killed by some of the community’s rougher ele-
ments (Estlund 2008, p. 138).
428 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

From here, Estlund goes on to say we need a fair and reliable way to ensure that Ms.
Powers is protected, and further, that if she is accused of a crime, that the crime be
tried fairly and in an equitable fashion. He argues, following moves much like
Locke’s, that due to various inconveniences of the state of nature, private anarchic
enforcement or private trial methods would be unreliable and biased, or would lead
to violence, or would fail in various ways. The state would handle the criminal case
better.
Yet Estlund’s description of anarchic Prejuria is decidedly not utopian. It describes
people who are not merely imperfect, but apparently downright nasty, worse than most
people we personally know.16 They act in morally deplorable ways. Their suspicions
of one another make sense only if they have a long history of moral vice. Indeed, it
would make little sense to accuse Ms. Powers of arson if people were always morally
good—in this case, no one in Prejuria would be motivated to perform an injustice like
arson.
Accordingly, if Estlund intends, as he should, to do non-concessive theorizing, he
should describe the situation more like this:

Ms. Powers, who owned one of the community’s general stores, was seen by at least a dozen
people walking out of 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 a total coincidence since Ms. Powers is well-known for being a kind,
honorable, and honest businesswoman when she isn’t busy entertaining one man or another.
[We don’t see any reason to change her social life in this non-concessive example, since we
don’t regard having an active sex life as morally problematic.] This was a year ago, and Ms.
Powers has since continued to lead a wonderful life in Prejuria, with everyone continuing to
talk to her and do business with her, and with no one ever verbally or physically accosting
her or anyone else. Since everyone in Prejuria always acts rightly all the time, the citizens of
Prejuria quickly dismissed the possibility that Ms. Powers burned down her competing store.
Indeed, subsequent investigations showed that she was indeed invited by her competitor over
for a friendly discussion, much as two athletes might be friendly to each other despite
working for rival teams. Instead, her rival store had a freak electrical problem. Her rival
store owner was of course perfectly conscientious and already had insurance, but if she
had somehow faultlessly gone bankrupt, everyone would have chipped in and gotten her
back on her feet, all without any need for coercive taxation.

This is a better description of how the problem might go in non-concessive theory. If

everyone is motivated to do the right thing, then people will presumably learn over
time that everyone is so motivated, and so will dismiss it as unlikely that someone has
acted wrongly when something bad happens. They will be motivated to act rightly in
response to any accident or crisis. The kinds of behaviors which Estlund uses to motivate
the need for state-controlled criminal justice simply would not arise.
Indeed, even when Estlund goes on to explain why a state would handle criminal trials
better than anarchy, his argument works only because he describes the people in anarchy
as suffering from various self-serving biases, vengeful attitudes, free-riding behaviors,
and so on. But if we are doing non-concessive theory, then we imagine no one would
Brennan and Freiman 429

act in these ways because these behaviors are, by Estlund’s own hypothesis, bad and
wrong. We will not belabor this point, though, because the problem of criminal punish-
ment would not arise in the first place.
Estlund might reply that properly motivated people may nonetheless have honest dis-
agreements, thus justifying the move away from anarchy. In contrast to anarchic Prejuria,
Estlund (2008, p. 138) proposes Juristic Prejuria:

A group of citizens has invented a system whereby a panel of six citizens is randomly chosen
and asked to hear the case against any accused person and the case in that person’s defense,
and to make a decision as to whether the named punishment shall be imposed or not.

Estlund (2008, p. 129) argues that the juristic alternative is superior to the anarchic
alternative because, “in Prejuria, there is no qualified disagreement with the proposition
that the jury system will be more likely to promote substantive justice than the anarchic
arrangement, and also better than a random procedure for choosing decisions.”
Estlund, like Rawls, overlooks non-governmental institutional solutions. He presumes
that anarchism implies the absence of judicial or decision-making institutions, despite
ample empirical work showing that even real-life, morally flawed people can create
and maintain non-governmental dispute resolution mechanisms without relying on the
state, even as a reserve or final arbitrator.17 Powers and Friendship could, for instance,
agree to private arbitration whenever they find themselves with an honest disagreement
that they cannot resolve themselves.
Estlund thus must provide an example of a dispute morally flawless people would have
that they could not resolve without being subject to a monopolistic institution which
threatens them with violence, and, further, must show this case is so important that
people would want a state. It must therefore be the case that these supposedly ideal
people would, in the absence of such violent threats, choose to act in such ways that it
would be justifiable to subject them to state violence. It’s a tall order. It appears that
the best parts of Estlund’s argument for the ideal state largely dissolves into or relies
on Kavka’s argument, which we consider in the next section.
As noted above, private arbitration is successfully used in the real world with flawed
people. The case for this sort of nongovernmental solution is even stronger when we
make no concessions to people’s predictable moral failings. (We could even imagine
that private arbitrators undergo intensive debiasing and educational training to correct
for epistemic flaws.) Creating a monopolistic institution which threatens people with vio-
lence in order to ensure their compliance is presumptively wrong. We would want to
refrain from issuing threats of violence unless we absolutely have to. Just and good
people, presumably, would recognize this point, and further, would recognize that they
are morally obligated to seek peaceful, fair, and non-violent means of dispute resolution
rather than to come to blows or to demand a violent Leviathan rescue them.
You may still have your doubts. But as was the case with Rawls, uncertainty about the
comparative effectiveness of ideal statism and ideal anarchism weighs in favor of anarch-
ism. Estlund himself (2008, p. 33) argues that “no one has authority or legitimate coercive
power over another without a justification that could be accepted by all qualified points of
view.” In the case of morally flawless private arbitration, forming a state that exercises
430 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

coercive power without compelling reason to believe that it will outperform the voluntary
alternative is subject to qualified denial.

§4 Kavka
Like Estlund, Kavka argues that the state is needed for dispute resolution. Even in ideal
conditions, people might retain reasonable disagreements about what justice requires
(Kavka 1995, p. 3). People can be honest and fair-minded and yet still arrive at different
conclusions. Kavka is skeptical that they could satisfactorily resolve these disagreements
without the state.
Before giving our reply, we’ll once again note a response that we could—but won’t—
make to Kavka. In brief, there’s a case to be made for the claim that morally perfect
people would never have moral conflicts. Kavka seems to equate moral perfection
with something like moral blamelessness. Two people could be perfectly motivated to
find the truth about morality and act in accordance with it but nevertheless disagree
about what the moral truth is simply because they’re fallible beings.
But an alternate conception could specify moral perfection in terms of acting in a
morally flawless way. Suppose a severely dehydrated person knocks on your door in des-
perate need of water. You give them a bottle of clear liquid marked “water” from your
refrigerator with the intention of saving their life. It turns out that the manufacturer mis-
takenly filled this bottle with clear poison instead of water. You had no way of knowing
this, but your action nevertheless results in the death of the stranger. Perhaps your action
was morally wrong even though you are not to blame for performing it.
Here again, the reason we don’t pursue this line of objection is simply because it
would make our job too easy. If morally perfect beings always get things right and
never disagree, then Kavka’s argument for the state never gets off the ground. We aim
to show that even on Kavka’s own account of moral perfection, his argument for the
state is unsuccessful.
As an initial point, we’re more optimistic about nongovernmental methods of dispute
resolution than Kavka seems to be. There are plenty of strategies for resolving disputes
that do not require the state’s involvement. Suppose your neighbor runs a small wood-
working business out of her garage.18 All of that sawing is loud, though, and it interferes
with your nap in your hammock. How will this conflict be resolved?
Maybe you really value napping in hammocks and your neighbor just barely prefers
woodworking over, say, oil painting. In this case, you could offer to pay your neighbor to
switch to painting. If you value the nap more than she values woodworking, you’ll offer
enough financial compensation to motivate her to switch. If, on the other hand, she values
woodworking more than you value the nap, she won’t accept the offer. Either way, we
have a nongovernmental resolution of the conflict.
In reply, one might argue that it’s unfair that you have to pay your neighbor to stop
woodworking to get a nap, while your friend who lives in a quiet neighborhood does
not.19 However, your neighbor could lodge a similar complaint if, say, the state forces
her to stop woodworking—it’s unfair that she has to stop whereas her woodworking
friend whose neighbor doesn’t mind the noise doesn’t. So it’s unclear how a governmen-
tal solution will help here. Moreover, if these inequalities are unjust, then presumably
Brennan and Freiman 431

ideally just people will rectify them via voluntary redistribution because they are, by
hypothesis, fully committed to justice.
Or consider again the possibility of private arbitration. Sometimes baseball players
and their teams cannot agree on what would count as a fair salary. This disagreement
need not be due to any blameworthy character traits—the parties may just have an
honest difference of opinion about the value of the player’s contribution. Thus, this
is the sort of conflict that may arise among ideal agents of the sort envisioned by
Kavka.
Here again, the dispute is resolvable within anarchist conditions. The way that such
disagreements are in fact settled in the real world (let alone a world of moral angels) is
to allow each party to present their case to a panel of private arbitrators, who then
render a salary decision. Thus, the parties could resolve their dispute by submitting to
the decision of a mutually agreed upon, nongovernmental arbiter. Indeed, if they are
moral angels as Kavka assumes them to be, we should expect them to peacefully
accept the decision. Perhaps, in Kavka’s words (1995, p. 9), ideal moral agents have a
“willingness to settle voluntarily practical disagreements by discussion and
compromise.”
In response, Kavka argues that there will still be instances where ideal moral agents
could value some other moral principles more highly than they value peaceful comprom-
ise, in which case disagreements may become intractable and violent. Furthermore, even
if most of the ideal agents do value compromise more than anything, they’ll be vulnerable
to invasion by an “uncompromiser”—that is, an agent “who will not settle a first-order
dispute except on his own terms” (Kavka 1995, p. 11). Over time, uncompromisers
will defeat compromisers in cases of moral conflict and eventually being uncompromis-
ing will displace compromising as the guiding strategy for the population. Here Kavka
(1995, p. 11) assumes that “if (and to the extent that) a disposition works, more people
tend to adopt it. That is, either people tend to convert from less successful to more suc-
cessful strategies, or new members of the population are more likely to adopt the strat-
egies that have been more successful (or both).” The result, then, is a population of
uncompromisers locked in conflict with one another. Kavka (1995, p. 12) laments,
“How sad that this decline, from the benign anarchy of compromise to the painful con-
dition of festering disputes, is inevitable.”
Kavka argues that a government-imposed resolution of a dispute will end social con-
flict among angels. For one, the government is the final authority for enforcing settle-
ments, “ensuring that if one acquiesces in a compromise arrangement, one can
reasonably expect others to follow its terms so that the elements of the compromise
you approve of, as well as those you do not, will materialize” (Kavka 1995, p. 16).
Moreover, even morally flawless humans will be incentivized to relent by threat of
legal punishment. Lastly, their knowledge that their opponents will be similarly
coerced intro agreement assures them of receiving at least part of their preferred terms
(Kavka 1995, p. 16).
Before offering a criticism of Kavka that addresses his argument on its own terms, let
us register an initial worry. Kavka’s scenario differs from Rawls’s and Estlund’s along a
crucial dimension—the introduction of uncompromisers suggests that we are no longer
contemplating ideal conditions that make no concession to moral imperfection. We
432 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

suspect that truly ideal conditions would exclude those who steamroll everyone else to get
their way.
The puzzle here is that in order to motivate the need for a state, Kavka has to describe
apparently angelic people who have such intransigent conflicts that they are willing to act
in ways so horrific or bad that other angelic people would find no superior mechanism to
stop such horrors other than creating a monopolistic institution would threatens everyone
with violence. Further, Kavka has to say that the original uncompromising angels would
not themselves recoil at this result and take it as strong evidence they are acting in morally
bad ways. They would not say, “Wow, we are acting in such a bad way that others have to
create a state to stop us. We should simply stop.” This seems like an incredible result. On
the contrary, the conflicts Kavka describes seem morally bad and morally good people
would want to either avoid those conflicts or resolve them in peaceful ways.
Thus, the challenge for Kakva is to describe a situation in which it is morally permis-
sible for people to steamroll each other or come to blows, and yet also morally permis-
sible for other people to create a state to stop them (rather than using other means). But
even if he could show all this is indeed permissible, that would not be enough. He has to
also show that morally good people would not find this situation so undesirable—for the
very reasons Kavka offers on behalf of a state—that they would voluntarily choose to
avoid it in the first place.
But perhaps we’re wrong about this and such uncompromisers would exist among
moral angels. The case for statism remains in doubt, as the introduction of uncompromi-
sers comes back to haunt Kavka’s own argument for the state.20 The creation of a state
merely shifts the fight between uncompromisers from the private sector to the ballot
box. The zealots the state was introduced to tame are the very agents most motivated
to take control of the state itself—either to force others to comply with their moral prin-
ciples or to avoid being forced to comply with others’ principles. Geoffrey Brennan and
James Buchanan (2008, 10.4.53) write:

Suppose that a monopoly right is to be auctioned; whom will we predict to be the highest
bidder? Surely we can presume that the person who intends to exploit the monopoly
power most fully, the one for whom the expected profit is highest, will be among the
highest bidders for the franchise. In the same way, positions of political power will tend
to attract those persons who place higher values on the possession of such power. These
persons will tend to be the highest bidders in the allocation of political offices […] Is
there not the overwhelming presumption that offices will be secured by those who value
power most highly and who seek to use such power of discretion in the furtherance of
their personal projects, be these moral or otherwise?

Thus, we arrive at yet another dilemma: if moral angels are willing to compromise their
principles to find common ground, then the state is not needed as a mechanism of conflict
resolution. If moral angels are unwilling to compromise their principles to find common
ground, then the state itself becomes an object of conflict, in which case statism gains no
theoretical advantage over anarchism.
To illustrate, take a simple case. Suppose that members of the Social Justice Party and
the Honored Tradition Party find themselves locked in an intractable moral conflict. An
Brennan and Freiman 433

election is held to determine which party will take hold of their society’s political institu-
tions and thus get their way in the disagreement. Suppose further that the vote count indi-
cates that the Social Justice Party has won. Would the zealous members of the Honored
Tradition Party passively and peacefully accept the results of this democratically-decided
conflict resolution procedure? If so, then it’s unclear why they wouldn’t passively and
peacefully accept the results of a nongovernmental democratic decision.
On the other hand, we might expect that the zealots’ commitment to their own moral
agenda will override their commitment to compromising and abiding by the results of a
democratic election. After all, they are, by hypothesis, more committed to getting their
own way than they are to peaceful compromise. In this case, the ideal statist is not entitled
to assume away the possibility that the Honored Tradition Party will, for instance, vio-
lently contest the election results that would prevent them from zealously pursuing
their moral agenda. The proposed solution to the conflict can itself become an object
of conflict, and potentially a violent one at that.
Here again, we believe that a “tie” between statism and anarchism goes to anarchism.
Establishing an institution that exercises a monopoly right to coerce is, we’ve argued, pre-
sumptively wrong. The burden of justification is on the statist to provide compelling
reason to believe that the formation of a coercive state will provide a significant advan-
tage over anarchy. Indeed, we think that the presumptive wrongness of a state is particu-
larly clear in the case of Kavka’s uncompromisers, given that it will predictably become a
tool used by the more powerful to subordinate the less powerful for the reasons men-
tioned above.
As noted earlier, though, if we expect the problem of moral conflict to be signifi-
cantly more severe under anarchism than statism, then the presumption of liberty
may be overridden. But there’s reason to doubt that the problem of moral conflict
will be significantly more severe under ideal anarchism. Indeed, there’s reason to
believe that the creation of a centralized institution with monopoly right to coerce
will worsen moral conflict. Attempting to acquire that monopoly right is the dominant
strategy for both/all sides of a moral dispute. By way of example, if uncompromising
proponents of secular schooling don’t enter the political fray, uncompromising advo-
cates of intelligent design ought to lobby the state in order to impose the moral agenda
to which they are zealously committed. If uncompromising proponents of secular
schooling do enter the political arena, uncompromising advocates of intelligent
design still ought to lobby the state if only to avoid being imposed upon by the secu-
larists. And vice versa.
Under ideal statism, citizens have an incentive to fight for control of the political
apparatus that picks the “winners” and “losers” of moral conflicts to ensure that
they’re among the winners (indeed, truly zealous citizens may literally fight over the pol-
itical apparatus, for instance, in the form of violent contestation of election results). In the
absence of a centralized institution with monopoly right to coerce, both sides may be
more likely to retreat to their own separate corners and thus minimize the chances of a
moral conflict.
Of course, the argument that a state will exacerbate rather than alleviate moral conflict
is admittedly speculative. But so too is the argument that a state will alleviate rather than
exacerbate moral conflict. Thus, we’re left with speculation on either side. We contend
434 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 21(4)

that in the absence of anything close to a decisive victory for other side, the presumption
against coercion ought to tilt us toward anarchism.

§5 Conclusion
A fully just society is one in which all contribute to public goods voluntarily, donate gen-
erous sums to charity from the goodness of their hearts, and seek peaceful ways to
cooperate with one another. It would not rely on coercion or threats of coercion.
Whatever one thinks of its feasibility, a fully just society would operate in accordance
with anarchist principles rather than statist principles.
Rawls’s argument for ideal statism overlooks the ways in which nongovernmental
arrangements can solve assurance problems; moreover, he overlooks the possibility
that assurance problems wouldn’t arise in the first place in ideal conditions. Estlund’s
case for the claim that a society without moral failings would not be anarchistic is unsuc-
cessful in part because he unwittingly invokes moral failings when motivating the need
for a state. Lastly, Kavka assumes that the state is needed to solve moral conflicts among
even morally blameworthy people, but doesn’t recognize that the state itself may worsen
rather than improve conflict.
To the extent we have reason to be skeptical of nongovernmental solutions to pro-
blems that may arise in ideal conditions, we have equal reason to be skeptical of govern-
mental solutions. But we have argued that the “tie” goes to nongovernmental solutions:
establishing a monopolistic institution that threatens people with violence to secure their
compliance is presumptively wrong and the burden of justification rests with those who
would establish it. We conclude that a theory that concedes no space for our moral fail-
ings concedes no space for the state either.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank David Estlund, Geoff Sayre-McCord, and the PPE Society for
their helpful comments on the ideas in this paper. We are also grateful to three anonym-
ous reviewers for this journal for their excellent feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

Notes
1. To be clear, Cohen explicitly endorses this position. See Cohen (2008). Estlund generally tries
to avoid making substantive claims about what justice requires, and so remains officially
Brennan and Freiman 435

agnostic about how demanding justice and morality actually are. See Estlund (2008) and
(2020).
2. E.g., see Estlund (2008), chapter 14; Cohen (2008), chapters 1 and 6.
3. But see, e.g., Leeson (2014) and Stringham (2015).
4. See also Freiman (2017b).
5. For example, there is not too much scarcity to make society impossible. However, conditions
are not so favorable so as to make society unnecessary (as it might be if there were no scarcity
at all).
6. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising these concerns.
7. See Tabarrok (1998).
8. We recognize that the use of a dominant assurance contract might not satisfy those anarchists
who object to bureaucracy or large-scale conformity. However, our aim here is narrow—to
simply show that a nongovernmental solution to assurance problems is available in a society
that is fully compliant with Rawlsian justice. Furthermore, we note that people would
remain at liberty to experiment with non-conformist, anti-authoritarian communities in other
contexts. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
9. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting the need to address this possibility.
10. On this point, see Freiman (2017a, pp. 11–12).
11. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
12. On the difficulty of comparing such proposals, see Brennan and Freiman (2022) and Freiman
(2020, pp. 60–63).
13. For relevant discussion, see Huemer (2013, 1.4).
14. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this concern.
15. See, e.g., Scheffler (1992).
16. It’s worth noting that some of the moral failings in this example might not count as failures to
comply with justice, specifically. However, we contend that others do count as failures to
comply with justice—most notably, physically accosting and threatening to kill Ms. Powers.
We thank an anonymous referee for emphasizing this distinction.
17. See, e.g., Ostrom (1990).
18. For this sort of case, see Coase (1960).
19. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
20. This argument elaborates on Freiman (2017a), pp. 17–19.

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Author biographies
Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy
at Georgetown University. His research interests include democratic theory, incentive problems,
and taboo markets.

Christopher Freiman is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at William & Mary. His research
interests include democratic theory, distributive justice, and immigration.