The Indian Rope Trick

Published on November 1, 2024

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David Gordon
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Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick

by Anthony de Jasay. Liberty Fund, 2014; 200 pp.

The political theorist and economist Anthony de Jasay has given us a large number of interesting arguments in his book and in what follows I’d like to discuss a few of these.

The Indian rope trick features an Indian fakir who throws a rope high into the air and then climbs up it, disappearing without visible means of support. De Jasay suggests that the demand for equality likewise lacks support. It is taken for granted that equality is a good thing; but why is it good?

It’s not self-evident that it is good: if you have a painful blister on your left foot, it isn’t good to have an equally painful blister on your right foot as well. To shore up the argument for equality, its defenders try to take advantage of another linguistic phenomenon. There are words that are always better than their opposites, such as “beautiful” and “ugly.” “Just” and “unjust” are another such pair, and the defenders claim that equality of the sort they want is better than inequality because equality in these cases is in line with justice and inequality is not. For example, they say, it is just that we give to the poor and take money from the rich, and unjust if we let this inequality persist.

Here is where the Indian rope trick comes in. If a critic responds, “You are right that justice is always better than injustice, but why is the equal result you favor more just than leaving the inequality in place?” The egalitarians reply in a surprising way. They say that it is more just because it is more equal. In other words, equality is good because it is just, and a just outcome is one that leads to equality. “Equality” and “justice” are being defined in terms of each other, and this is precisely the Indian rope trick.

De Jasay, it is evident, is not afraid to challenge the conventional pieties of the Left, some of which are held by so-called “moderates” as well. Almost everyone favors equality of opportunity, but the moderates do not accept equality of result. According to the moderates, people should begin at the same starting point but what they do with the equal opportunities they start with is up to them, and these results should not be equalized.

De Jasay notes a simple but devastating problem with this position. Equal starting points lead to unequal outcomes, but what happens then? The new generation that comes into existence after the unequal outcomes does not begin from an equal starting point. Unless the moderates abandon equality of opportunity, they must now eliminate the unequal outcomes and restore the equal starting point. Equality of opportunity at most postpones equality of result; it does not eliminate it.

John Rawls and Amartya Sen are vastly influential, but to de Jasay, there are glaring weaknesses in their accounts of justice. Both begin by asking, how are resources to be distributed? Rawls postulates an original position in which people do not know their abilities and conceptions of the good. Sen starts with a particular asset and suggests that there are several plausible but incompatible principles of justice to determine which person should get the asset. De Jasay suggests that both theorists wrongly assume that resources are at the disposal of “society” or the collective decision-makers. In fact, resources don’t start out unowned. Somebody has made the asset that is to be distributed by the collective or occupied the land by a first possessor principle. Why is the collective allowed to oust that person or take away the asset?

De Jasay argues that all societies known to us from prehistoric times to the present have adopted a presumption of liberty and the first possessor principle. The presumption of liberty means that you can do anything that hasn’t been explicitly prohibited by the state or society. If this presumption is denied, then you are free to do something only if the state or society explicitly allows you to do it. Anything else is prohibited. This is a recipe for totalitarianism.

Following David Hume, de Jasay makes a point about the presumption of liberty and the first possessor rule that Rothbardians will find of great value. These principles are self-enforcing, especially in small societies, in the sense that people will subject violators to such sanctions as banishment from the group. Furthermore, people have a natural incentive, even apart from the sanctions, to accept these principles.

Why is this so? The answer is that accepting them greatly extends the circumstances in which people can make mutually beneficial gains from trade. If I exchange apples that I possess now because of a contract with you that you will supply me with oranges in the future, I need to be confident that you will fulfill the terms of the contract. If people come to regard such confidence as natural, they will very substantially increase their justification for it. Also, of course, if people accept the first possessor rule as natural, they will reduce the chances that others will try to steal their property and can thus devote more time to productive activities.

These self-enforcing principles, de Jasay maintains, preceded the state. Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, he views the state as predatory; and, though he fears that its emergence is inevitable, he thinks that people would do well to get along without it.

I have stressed areas in which de Jasay agrees with Rothbardians, but one area in which he does not concerns natural rights. De Jasay rejects natural rights. We should, he thinks, just take them as natural and leave the “rights” part out. To speak of rights wrongly insinuates that the state has granted these rights. To the response that these principles are natural in the sense that they are objectively true principles of morality, de Jasay would answer that morality is not objective. He is, I fear, a moral skeptic, a view that many economists wrongly take to be obvious. But despite this disagreement, Rothbardians will find de Jasay a thinker of great power and insight.

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About David Gordon

David Gordon is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in intellectual history. He is the author of Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Exploitation, Freedom, and Justice, The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics,An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, and Critics of Marx.

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