Life-Saving Immorality?

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

Brad DeLong thinks that taxing people in order to prevent an asteroid from destroying the human race is entirely appropriate and moral. He quotes Bob Murphy, on the other hand, as disagreeing:

[T]here is a general moral prohibition against violating another person's rights.... Volokh's... point should be obvious: Just because an asteroid threatens to destroy all human life, that alone is not sufficient to justify violating people's rights. [...] The reason DeLong finds Volokh's views "insane" is that Volokh has elevated his precious political principles to such a height that they trump the survival of the human race. What an ideologue!

DeLong summarily rejects this sort of thinking, summarizing his view as follows:

[...] the sabbath was made for humanity; humanity was not made for the sabbath.

Commentor Daniel Kuehn has a lot to say in response to this position, and particularly to the logic of the position:

If you start where they do - axiomatically defining what a "right" is and defining "immorality" as being the violation of that right - then both the Volokh and Murphy version of the argument follows naturally.

The problem is not the logic itself - that logic is simple enough. The problem is their decision to apply that logic to this circumstance. Deductive logic is a tool - we have long since passed the point where we can claim that it deserves any deeper epistemological priority. [...]  Logic is not a tool for them, as most careful thinkers know it should be. For them it is a path, not to truth contingent on assumptions [I would prefer to refer to this as consistent reasoning or logical validity - N], but to some deeper absolute truth. [...] So to expand on your concluding thought, deductive logic is a tool for humanity, and not the other way around.

Tad Brennan points out that, far from being a primarily political debate, the conflict here is between purely deontological ethics and purely consequentialist ethics, and that the latter lends itself to some problems, as well:

If you eschew lexically-ordered side-constraints, then you have a very pure form of consequentialism. And that's not a bad thing! Some of my best friends espouse pure consequentialism! 

But pure consequentialism can generate some pretty repellent hypotheticals of its own (catalogued by Bernard Williams and others: false conviction of the innocent; harvesting organs from the unwilling; torture of children; etc. etc.).

When people recoil from the consequences of pure consequentialism and consider adopting categorical prohibitions on, e.g., the torture of children, this does not seem to me ipso facto insane.

Finding the right balance of ethical views for the Christian is never as simple and easy as it seems, which is why Christian maturity is a big deal. But this is a circumstance when, again, I don't think Christianity came come down on the side of moral libertarianism.

PS - For those looking for a quick summary of deontology vs. consequentialism in terms we can all understand, may I suggest Mark White, aka The Comics Professor, on the morality of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spiderman!