What is slavery? Is jury duty? Is conscription? Is income tax? This essay seeks to examine whether three apparently diverse phenomena – jury duty, conscription and income tax – can be regarded as manifestations of slavery. The views of prominent philosophers – Hobbes, Kant and Nozick – are examined on the implicit question of coercion and whether they deem coercion to be a form of slavery.
The conclusion is reached that the non-consensual and forced nature of the three State duties in question, where no better options other than compliance are achievable, make them forms of coercive subjugation. The view is taken that this bondage impinges upon freedom and is intrinsically wrong. It raises prima facie ethical and mental health issues, and threatens autonomy and our rightful state of Nozickian ‘self-ownership’.
‘What is slavery? Is jury duty? Is conscription? Is income tax?’
Jury duty, conscription and income tax seem on the surface to be very disparate things, but they have one thing in common: they are all manifestations of slavery. Slavery is defined as the condition of being forced to work by threats of violence for little or no pay[1]. Slavery, therefore, is non-consensual, both in what the slave is coerced to do and what payment, if any, he/she receives. Refusal is inconceivable on the grounds of a threat of punishment which would leave the victim in a worse position than if he/she had consented to do the work. The slave, therefore, has no better option than to yield.
Non-consensual; forced under a threat of violence; no better conceivable option: each of these defining factors of slavery will be examined in relationship to the three other apparently diverse phenomena listed in the essay question, with a view to showing how these factors can define and characterize them. I will assess the views of three prominent philosophers - Hobbes, Kant and Nozick - on the question of coercion that is implicit in jury duty, conscription and the payment of income tax, and whether or not these philosophers also judge such coercion to be a form of slavery.
A brief perusal of the description of jury service on the current gov.uk website[2] underscores the non-consensual and forced nature of the duty (the italics are mine):
‘ If you get a jury summons in the post, you must respond within 7 days […]
‘ You’ll be part of a jury of 12 people to decide the outcome of a criminal trial’.
‘You’ll need to arrive at court earlier on your first day’.
‘ You will not be paid for doing jury service’.
The vocabulary used here could not be described as deferential nor persuasive. It is imperious and dictatorial, demonstrating no regard for human choice or freedom. It makes authoritative commands - ‘summons’, ‘you must’, ‘you’ll need’. It decrees what the summoned person will or will not do, without providing any room for negotiation: ‘you’ll’, ‘you will not’. There is an undercurrent of threat, even though the ‘threat of punishment’ from non-compliance is not explicitly stated here, its omission seeming to suggest its unfeasibility. This threat is stated in categorical terms, however, in the Criminal Justice Act of 2003, where it is enshrined in law that failure to report to jury duty is punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. To add insult to injury, the authority behind the de rigueur imperatives of the citations quoted above presupposes another dictator in this autocratic mechanism: the employer who himself may, legally, it would seem, oppose the summons and disallow his employee to attend jury service, which lands the person summoned in an even greater state of powerlessness. One notes here how the language softens to ‘you can’ and a hypothetical ‘you may be able’, betraying a recognition of potential and non-renumerative harm:
‘If you’re not allowed to take time off work for jury service, you can complain to an employment tribunal’.
‘If you’re sacked because you do jury service you may be able to claim unfair dismissal’.
The ‘no better’ – indeed, the ‘worse off’ - scenario depicted here is capped with references to the employer’s choosing to pay or not to pay the potential jury person, and with rubrics on ‘loss of earnings’, ‘child costs’, ‘travel, parking and maintenance costs’ incurred, for which derisory amounts of compensation are quoted.
The jury server is also enslaved to suffer the emotional distress of, sometimes harrowing court cases, or remains fettered to the idea of having helped to punish someone against whom the evidence was not conclusive. The jury service department seems impervious to the recommendation for ‘mental health’ which has invaded every other sector of modern society, offering advice amounting only to ‘you could talk to your GP or to the Samaritans’, and then only to report ‘feelings’, as one cannot by law ‘discuss any details of the case’. This imposing of and shackling to emotional and psychological trauma could be regarded as immoral, and a serious infringement of an individual’s rights to maintain the mental stability and emotional security they have acquired up until that point of time.
Although conscription has been abolished in many countries, the UK included (the last national servicemen being discharged in 1963) there are a host of countries worldwide in which it is still mandatory and non-consensual. Technically still at war with North Korea, South Korea, for example, has a rigorous system of national military service, whereby all able-bodied males are required to complete 21 months of national service in the army, 23 months in the navy or 24 months in the air force. In Eritrea, men and young, unmarried women are forced to undertake 18 months of national military service. In contravention to human rights, this service is frequently extended for years, and in some cases, it continues indefinitely. Indeed, in 2015, Amnesty International announced that the Eritrean system ‘continues to amount to forced labour’,[3] and it is the recognised cause of requests for political asylum. Other countries with enforced national service are Switzerland, Austria, and Israel (where it is compulsory for both men and women), Turkey, Greece, Iran, Cyprus and Cuba. Brazil and Syria provide good examples of there being ‘no better option’ than the enslavement of conscription: very poor Brazilians accept the slavery which provides them with a small salary, food and accommodation, in order to escape a life of starvation on the streets; and in Syria, State workers evading the conscription are threatened with the loss of their jobs. Amnesty International has observed that those fleeing military service have been jailed for 15 years. Apart from the forced labour and involuntary servitude which conscription represents, once again, as with jury duty, the mental health issues are serious and largely overlooked, and those conscripted often remain psychologically enchained to the horrors of combat, and the guilt of forcibly injuring, maiming or killing another human being.
Two prominent philosophers, while not commenting directly upon jury or military service, would disagree with my judgement of the deleterious effect of the coercive dimension of these duties. Hobbes, for example, acquires renown as a political theorist precisely for the central role he gives to coercion as a necessary part of a state's function. He believes that coercion is an essential factor in the justification and operation of the state or commonwealth, and that man needs the protection of the coercive powers of the Leviathan in order to avoid the hazardous conditions of the state of nature (Hobbes primarily has in mind individuals who would kill, injure or rob others). ‘Where there is no coercive Power erected, that is, where there is no Commonwealth, there is no Propriety’. [4] Kant, on the other hand, begins by making clear that coercion borders on slavery in that it acts as a hindrance to freedom, in which respect it is comparable to all violations of a person's rights. However, he goes on to add an important codicil in defence of coercion, observing that it can be used to prevent other rights’ violations, and thus may be condoned on the grounds that it counts as a hindrance to a hindrance to freedom. From this, he concludes with a sweeping statement that overlooks his initial yoking of coercion and rights’ violation, that ‘Right and authorization to use coercion therefore mean one and the same thing’. [5]
The ‘Kantian’ argument that coercion, rather than existing as a form of slavery, prevents society from being enslaved by violations of the law and obstructions to freedom, is, as I have indicated, a plausible one. So how does one negotiate this paradoxical notion of the two coercive phenomena of jury duty and conscription as forms of slavery to prevent enslavement? In his Doctrine of Right Kant also differentiates between two different incentives to follow the law: ethical and juridicial.[6] By ‘ethical’, he means the way in which man responds voluntarily to the requirements of the law on moral or rational grounds. By ‘juridicial’, he intends the needs of the state to force its citizens to follow the law by creating punishments for non-compliance. In my view, jury and military service, currently ‘juridicial’ requirements, should, in order not to be classified as enslavement, be reformulated as ‘ethical’ incentives in the Kantian sense, thereby showing respect for the individual’s freedom of choice. It is this need and respect for the individual’s freedom of choice which underpins my criticism of income tax as a manifestation of slavery.
The correlation between income tax and slavery has been famously and fittingly pronounced by the twentieth-century American philosopher, Robert Nozick. Nozick’s libertarian society justly advocates a serious respect for individual rights and self-ownership, a self-ownership which naturally pronounces slavery of any kind as immoral since it involves the stealing of a person from himself. Within this libertarian world view, largely inspired by Locke’s doctrine of natural moral rights, [7] the redistributive taxation which funds the programs of the bureaucratic welfare state, is morally illegitimate, amounting to a type of forced labour. As Nozick explains in his Anarchy, State and Utopia: ‘Taxation of earnings from labour is on a par with forced labour […]: taking the earnings of N hours labour is like taking N hours from the person; it is like forcing the person to work N hours for another’s purpose’. [8] In other words, the number of hours which produces the wealth taken from you forcibly by taxation, is time during which you work involuntarily, in a non-consensual capacity, for the state. This taxation amounts to partial slavery, for in giving other citizens an entitlement to the benefits for which you are paying – for example, welfare or social security – those citizens have a property right in that part of you which is constituted by your labour, and this contravenes the concept of self-ownership. A modern liberal welfare state therefore makes slaves of the citizens of its state. Nozick’s does posit a ‘better option’ to a tax-paying state in the form of an ‘ultra-minimal state’ [9] with protection firms which clients would pay voluntarily for (not therefore engaging in any kind of taxation), but since such minimal states are unlikely to come into being, one is left, once again, with no better option that the tax-extracting state.
Naturally, there will be those who claim that just as jury service and conscription do not enslave but rather exist to prevent the highly potential risk of enslavement resulting from crime and wars, so too income tax is necessary to prevent the poverty which would ensue from a non-existent welfare state. All three phenomena are, in other words, part of what Rousseau called ‘the social contract’. [10] But, in my view, the non-consensual and forced nature of these state duties where no better options other than compliance are achievable, make of them forms of coercive subjugation. This bondage impinges upon freedom and is intrinsically wrong. It raises prima facie ethical and mental health issues, and threatens autonomy, that inner state of orderly self-directedness, and our rightful state of Nozickian ‘self-ownership’. As Cohen puts it in Justice and Equality Here and Now:
Each person is the morally rightful owner of himself. He possesses over himself, as a matter of moral right, all those rights a slaveholder has over a complete chattel slave as a matter of legal right, and he is entitled, morally speaking, to dispose over himself in the way a slaveholder is entitled, legally speaking, to dispose over his slave. [11]
As such, Cohen concludes, self-ownership imposes extreme limitations on legitimate government authority [12]. But government authority on the issues of jury duty, conscription and taxation continue to exist in spite of all the philosophical arguments against them, and not much has changed since the age of Enlightenment for man is still ‘in chains’ whilst being ‘born free’. [13] But is it not time that the coercive and subjugating powers of the State, like a famous Oxford statue, should be turned to face the wall?
1. Definition provided by the Cambridge English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
2. https://www.gov.uk/jury-service
3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-44646267
4. Hobbes, Thomas (1651) Leviathan, Chapter 15. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Hobbes%2C+Leviathan&submit_search=Go%21
5. Kant, Immanuel (1996 [1797]). The Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 26.
6. Kant, Immanuel. Ibid 5, 20. The Doctrine of Right is the first section of The Metaphysics of Morals.
7. Locke, John, Second Treatise of Civil Government. In his Two Treatises of Civil Government (https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/john-locke-two-treatises-1689) Locke pronounced that ‘every man has a Property in his own Person’. Locke also said that the individual ‘has a right to decide what would become of himself and what he would do, and as having a right to reap the benefits of what he did’. Quoted respectively in Olsaretti, Serena. 2004. Liberty, Desert and the Market. Cambridge University Press. p. 91; and Dan-Cohen, Meir. 2002. Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. Princeton University Press. p. 296.
8. Nozick, Robert, (1974) Anarchy, State, Utopia, New York: Basic Books, p. 105.
9. Nozick explains how his minimal state would operate by means of voluntary protection associations which would eventually develop into a federation of private protection firms in lieu of a government. Nozick goes on to posit the minimal state as a type of utopia where three principles of distributive justice would prevail in accordance with the principles of acquisition, transfer and rectification, and where the prevailing ethos would be that nothing is imposed by force upon another person without his / her consent. Ibid 8, p. 110.
10. Rousseau, John, Jacques, (1998 [1762]) The Social Contract. London: Wordsworth Editions.
11. Cohen, G. A., ‘Self-ownership, World-Ownership, and Equality’ in (1986) Justice and Equality Here and Now, ed Lucash, Frank. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986, 109.
12. Here Cohen is largely concerned with the concept of property rights embodied in the notion of ‘self-ownership’, and with what John Thrasher in his article ‘Self-ownership as personal sovereignty’ defines as the ‘scope thesis’ where self-ownership justifies strong individual property rights, which severely limit the scope of legitimate government action. J. Thrasher, ‘Self-ownership as personal sovereignty’, published online by Cambridge University Press, 10 Feb., 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and- policy/article/abs/selfownership-as-personal-sovereignty/AC465E09ED4B63D6B649B7DEA34EA89C
13. Rousseau, ibid. 10, p. 5
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- Quote paper
- Gabriele Suvini (Author), 2022, What is slavery? Jury duty, conscription and income tax as manifestations of slavery, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1316054