Meet Stan Kazan and his Clan

Bravo! Thanks for this posting!
I disapprove of the sexism in the Kazan household, the forcing non-believing children to attend religious ceremonies, and probably much of the yelling (though that last may need more description to be sure). And I disapprove of the town’s response.
Similarly, I (think I) disapprove of Laura Dekker’s parents’ decision but I also (think I) disapprove of the Dutch response.
This seems to me the proper liberal view, but I suspect most “liberals” don’t endorse it.

Collective shaming and collective non-cooperation are non-state options, but I have a hard time seeing on what grounds some neighbors see it as preferable. Presumably they expect it to be an effective form of social control, but if they where to apply it generally to secure social cooperation and it was in fact effective I think the neighbors would find it to be somewhat inferior to the state approach in terms of individual liberty. Presumably concerns over liberty are why the neighbors are worried about coercive policies in the first place.

The neighbors would do better to just admit that it is worse to coerce the Kazan’s than it is to let the family to continue as it is. It is of course unfair that the Kazan kids suffer from their parents’ behavior, but the harms are just not serious enough to warrant the kinds of individual sanctions being proposed. In fact, the neighbors should also admit to themselves that the only reason they even considered fines, shaming, and non-cooperation is because it was a simple response that places blame squarely on someone specific bad person, Stan Kazan. The response is a way for the neighbors to avoid reflecting over reform of larger social conditions that could actually help but would also implicate the entire neighborhood. If the neighbors could admit this to themselves they might see the connection between the neighborhood’s culture of status consumption, long working hours, tax aversiveness and the Kazan’s division of labor. After all if the labor market was organized in such a way that employers expected their employees to be the primary care givers for children and if the neighborhood financed parental leave and daycare in such a way that encouraged both men and women to do the work of caring for children while giving men and women more equal opportunities to pursue work outside the home the community could actually make some progress on the issue of equal labor division in the family.

ps. I approve (I think) of the Dutch response. Thirteen is light years away from 16; the Dutch government is correct not to treat is as a grey zone.

Well given the extent of international economic interdependence I would still argue that organized non-cooperation is coercion. Such organized and collectively grounded coercion by an international community can I think be justifiable. In other words it is not always forbidden because the ‘Society of Peoples’ has had a political culture where sovereignty is primary, as one might conclude following the LoPs. The question is what kind of state behaviors you think are bad but don’t warrant or demand a collective and coercive response on the part of just states.

It is not too clear from your story, but I do worry about the bias of equating a state religion with the treatment of women as second class citizens or as effectively non-persons before the law. Few argue that the aforementioned treatment of women could warrant international sanctions but I have a hard time seeing how a society that does not treat women as genuinely persons differs from one that does not genuinely see blacks as persons such as apartheid South Africa. Organized collective non-cooperation enjoyed wide support in the South African case and I am not sure what kind of argument could show that the case is different in a morally relevant way when women are not treated as persons.

I’m not sure how extensive the analogy between Stan Kazan’s clan and Kazanistan is though. There are too many differences between the case of an illiberal patriarch in a just state and the case of an illiberal state in a just society of peoples to draw many lessons about toleration from the one to the other. In the family case, it’s not clear that anyone’s rights are being violated (at least not in ways that cannot be redressed by them), even if the various practices are objectionable in various ways. But in Kazanistan, important liberal democratic rights are being violated. Parents have the right to divide their domestic labour along gender lines and instruct their children in a religion, whatever others think about it, but I don’t think we can [at least just as easily] say that regimes have the right to rule without democratic election and accountability. So I oppose an aggressive community stance against the Kazan clan’s practices, but I support the (pragmatic and effective) sanctions of an international community of democratic states against Kazanistan’s hierarchy (in principle, at least).

Hi David — my worry is not so much whether there is an analogy to be drawn between nation states and families, but rather whether it can be drawn in a way that supports Rawls’s position on Kazanistan.

I do think that legitimate governments have the right to rule in ways that are morally wrong, and that even violate the rights of their citizens. The example I use here is of a democracy (”Apostolica”) with an established religion that prohibits elective abortion and any form of assisted suicide, which I take to be inconsistent with what justice requires. Nevertheless, the government’s rule is legitimate because it is consistent with a basic democratic principle of political equality. The democratic legitimacy of its rule creates a right to recognition and to non-interference on the part of foreign governments with its practices. It would be wrong for a secular liberal state to impose sanctions on Apostolica on account of its abortion and euthanasia policies.

But I also think that a regime cannot have a right to recognition and non-interference on the part of foreign governments unless it is a legitimate democratic regime.* So I would want to run domestic and recognitional legitimacy together in a way that Rawls wants to keep apart. One of the reasons why he wants to keep them apart, I think, is that he has a pretty demanding conception of domestic legitimacy in the liberal principle. But I think he goes too far in the opposite direction when it comes to recognising foreign regimes as the representatives of decent peoples, as with Kazanistan. I don’t think we can settle questions about when regimes are entitled to recognition and non-interference by appeal to generic considerations of toleration. I think we ultimately have to appeal to a conception of when they actually do have the right to rule within the society. Otherwise I think we’ll forever be at sea with the hard question about where to draw the limits.

*Where a right to non-interference would be only one of the many moral considerations that bear on the question whether a regime ought to be recognised.

The link should work now; if not, it’s P&PA 37 (2). I’ll definitely look at the Mandle, although it doesn’t strike me as right. Rawls does mention that the Kazanistan citizens do believe that they have genuine obligations to obey the law, but I don’t think that is that same as the regime actually having legitimacy. Then Rawls would be committed to a very ugly relativism (?) about legitimacy, such that one bunch of governments have to abide by the liberal principle and another bunch of governments don’t. Well, maybe he is. : ( He does say something in the reply to Habermas about kings and queens having legitimacy, which I take to be something a liberal democrat really oughtn’t say.

Yes, I misremembered the part about belief. There may be something about believing that they have bona fide duties somewhere, but I think I was thinking about the “sincere and not unreasonable belief on the part of judges and officials … that the law is governed by the common good idea of justice.” Nevertheless, I don’t know if it affects the point about legitimacy, because there could be a variety of reasons why Rawls might think those citizens are morally obligated by the system of laws short of thinking that it because the constitutional order is properly legitimate.

One possibility is to have degrees of legitimacy. Compliance with the LPL would be a condition of full legitimacy, although other kinds of regimes can be more or less legitimate. So Rawls could think that my religious democracy is not fully legitimate, since it violates the LPL, but it is more legitimate than Kazanistan, since that is not democratic, and Kazanistan is more legitimate than a military dictatorship, which may have none at all, or some small measure if it is relatively benign. In this case, the moral obligations of the Kazanistan citizenry arise from the partial or imperfect legitimacy of the system.

Alternatively, a Rawlsian could think of legitimacy as a discrete notion, so that the Kazanistan regime has no right to rule as such, but nevertheless has sufficient other moral qualities to give rise to the moral obligations of the citizens. So the fact that it does implement a common good conception of justice, as opposed to a system of naked exploitation and oppression, may warrant compliance, or at least respectful and orderly disobedience.

I don’t know how to square Mandle’s take with the LPL. The relativism I worry about is that since one group of societies has a certain kind of history and cultural baggage, the LPL is appropriate there, whereas other kinds of societies are subject to different principles of legitimacy. So I agree that it either applies everywhere or nowhere (and I think nowhere). But I really can’t see how an illiberal and undemocratic regime could satisfy the LPL. In principle, there is a small gap between the LPL and secular democracy, but I think that gap is closed when we ask whether citizens could reasonably be expected to accept a system in which they are disenfranchised (albeit consulted) and governed in accordance with a religion they may reject. Perhaps in some exceptional circumstances, the answer would be yes, but surely not often enough to treat as a general rule. And then I don’t think there is much room to regard the objections of Kazanistan citizens to their regime as less reasonably compelling than the objections of the citizens of liberal democracy to the possibility of comprehensive moral legislation. Rawls would really have a lot of explaining to do if the LPL required the excision of Kantian or Millian morality from the exercise of basic political power in one part of the world, but did not require a similar excision of Islamic reasoning in another part of the world. That would have been a significant issue in the exposition of political liberalism. I don’t know how it could be supported without reintroducing relativism, this time about reasonableness.

So I think that Rawls advocates a single master principle of internal or domestic political legitimacy in the liberal principle. In effect, this liberal principle requires a secular democracy to be satisfied. But on his view that fact does not determine the standard of external or recognitional legitimacy. If an undemocratic or illiberal regime meets the standards of decency, then it has enough moral quality in whatever form to entitle it to recognition from the international community. This seems a plausible view to me. I just think it is too demanding in the domestic sphere and too weak in the international sphere, and that anyway we need to premise recognitional legitimacy on domestic legitimacy.

I just read the Mandle piece last night. I think the basic idea that legitimacy shields states from coercive intervention even if they are internally unjust is right, but there is no discussion of the liberal principle of legitimacy in the paper. So it strikes me that Mandle far too quickly asserts that decent states are legitimate on Rawls’s view in virtue of having the moral qualities they do. They surely have something that blocks coercive external treatment, but I don’t see how it can be full legitimacy as such, when they clearly violate the liberal principle. [Where I assume that the liberal principle of legitimacy really is advanced as a principle of legitimacy, and not as a standard of reasonableness or suchlike.] So I guess I stand by what I wrote above.