Part 4: Lysander Spooner
WEBLINK: Begin by reading Spooner's Article. Click here to view the article.
Lysander Spooner was a nineteenth century lawyer, abolitionist, entrepreneur, legal theorist and political radical of his day. His writing, “Vices are Not Crimes—A Vindication of Moral Liberty” (1875), is quite relevant to the subject matter of this course. Below is a brief synopsis of this assigned course reading.
Spooner describes vices and crimes as follows:
“Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property... Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice towards others, and no interference with their persons or property... Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.”
By his account, what makes crime different from vice is that crime involves a plan or intent to injure someone else. Given this distinction, he thinks that it is a mistake for the state to punish vice as if it were a crime. For Spooner virtues and vices are agent-relative such that what is a virtue and leads to happiness for one person may be a vice leading to unhappiness for another. This idea is similar to Aristotle, who held that different people required different paths to virtue. Unlike Aristotle, Spooner thinks that the lines between virtue and vice are so dependent upon the individual that we are best served by leaving it to each individual to draw the lines rather than the state through criminal law. Aristotle's position is an admission that different people achieve virtue in different ways, Spooner's claim is that different people have entirely different sets of virtues.
Spooner's primary concern is to counter anyone who declares that they have determined the virtues and vices for everyone. Such a claim is the foundation for criminalizing vice and is for Spooner a form of tyranny and rejection of freedom. Spooner argues that it is a legitimate function of government to punish crimes as each person has a right to defend themselves against the transgressions of others, but it is not legitimate for government to punish vice as that is an infringement upon our basic freedom to pursue happiness. Where punishing crimes is protecting me from others (which government should do), punishing vice is protecting me from myself (which government has no business doing).
This course will look at a variety of topics relating to the limits of government power to criminalize behaviors associated with vice. Though we won't formally look at vice crime issues until the end of module 2, the following video touches on several of the topics covered in the course (and a few not covered).