Can an act be virtuous if it is compelled? Can a society be considered moral if an action deemed impermissible for one person becomes permissible when performed by another? If authority alone can transform vice into virtue, morality loses its claim of universality, and what remains is a doctrine of exemptions.
Writing in the first century, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher, treats moral action not merely as a question of what an agent does, but of whether the act reflects their voluntary exercise of reason. For Seneca, the outward form of an action is not enough to establish its moral character. In his letters to Lucilius, Seneca argues that an honorable act must be voluntary. In Letter LXVI—On Various Aspects of Virtue, he writes:
Let me tell you: it is because no act is honourable that is done by an unwilling agent, that is compulsory. Every honourable act is voluntary. Alloy it with reluctance, complaints, cowardice, or fear, and it loses its best characteristic—self-approval. That which is not free cannot be honourable; for fear means slavery.
While Seneca uses compulsion in a broad sense, coercion, as used here, refers to the use or threat of force to compel an individual to act against their will. Thus, coercion introduces precisely the condition that Seneca identifies as incompatible with honorable action: unwillingness. Where action is compelled in this manner, its moral character is altered. Yet Seneca goes further, casting compulsion in terms of good and evil.
For every honourable act is done without commands or compulsion; it is unalloyed and contains no admixture of evil.
Nearly two millennia later, Auberon Herbert, the English individualist, confronts the moral problem of compulsion from another angle. While considering the implications of force for political life and the organization of society, Herbert reaches a strikingly similar moral conclusion, denouncing the use of force to compel action against an individual’s will as fundamentally abhorrent. In his essay, A Plea for Voluntaryism, he writes:
Force rests on no moral foundations; you cannot justify it; it rests on no moral basis; you cannot reconcile it with reason and conscience and the higher nature of men. It lies apart in its own evil sphere, separated by the deepest gulf from all that makes for the real good of life—a mere devil’s instrument. Even if force tomorrow could lay at your feet all the material gifts which you rightly desire, you may not, you dare not, for the sake of the greater good, for the sake of the higher nature that is in all of us, for the sake of the great purposes and the nobler meanings of life, accept what it offers.
Herbert’s condemnation of coercive force is inseparable from his conception of voluntaryism, a comprehensive philosophy of individualism grounded in freedom. For Herbert, freedom of choice and freedom of action serve as prerequisites for morality. In his essay, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, he writes:
It is impossible for us to make any real advance until we take to heart this great truth, that without freedom of choice, without freedom of action, there are not such things as true moral qualities; there can only be submissive wearing of the cords that others have tied round our hands.
With this moral premise established, Herbert turns his attention to those who would defend compulsion in limited circumstances, challenging them to account for its legitimacy.
If you really think that for some purposes we may rightly compel men, and for other purposes we may not, you are bound to arrange your perceptions on the subject and discover what is the dividing line between “the may” and “the may not.”
Herbert’s demand is not merely rhetorical. Any defense of compulsion must explain where the line is drawn and justify its application. Self-defense, however, exposes a tension. While Herbert generally condemns direct force as morally illegitimate, he nevertheless holds that a party that initiates such force places itself outside the “moral relation” and into a “force-relation.” In the interest of self-preservation, Herbert regards the aggrieved party’s use of force as a “justified usurpation.”
Approaching the question from natural-rights theory, Murray Rothbard provides a principled moral boundary through the non-aggression principle (NAP). Defining aggression as the initiation of physical violence against another person or their property, or the threat thereof, Rothbard writes in For a New Liberty:
The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.
The NAP establishes a moral prohibition against the initiation of aggression. Applied universally and without exception, it condemns aggression while preserving the moral permissibility of employing violence defensively. At the foundation of this principle are the natural rights of self-ownership and property rights.
From these rights, voluntary exchange logically follows. If every individual has the right to control property they legitimately own, they necessarily have the right to exchange or give it away without interference. Freedom to contract emerges as a corollary of voluntary exchange. Once aggression is prohibited and property rights are respected, exchange is left to individual choice.
Where freedom gives way to coercive intervention, Rothbard distinguishes three forms. Autistic interventions consist of direct commands that restrict an individual’s use of their person or property, without involving an exchange; binary interventions compel transfers between the intervener and the individual; and triangular interventions interfere with peaceful exchanges between other people. Though these categories differ in their targets and manner of execution, they share the same underlying moral deficiency: each substitutes command for voluntary action.
Rooted in distinct philosophical foundations and shaped by different historical contexts, Stoicism, Voluntaryism, and Rothbardianism address a common moral question. For Seneca, the absence of voluntariness compromises honor; for Herbert, compulsion undermines freedom of choice; for Rothbard, the initiation of aggression violates natural rights. Taken together, their arguments illuminate how compulsion fractures the moral landscape.
No Exemption from Moral Judgment
A universal moral standard cannot recognize exceptions simply because of who performs the act. Political authority therefore must remain subject to the same moral judgment as the citizens it governs.
When applied to modern liberal democracies, this moral standard has far-reaching implications. Autistic interventions manifest when the state prohibits speech and infringes on religious freedom. Binary interventions take the form of expropriation through taxation and the forced surrender of self-sovereignty through conscription, by which the State claims the authority to command human bodies into war. Triangular interventions constrain voluntary exchange, ranging from state-imposed licensing requirements to outright prohibitions on exchanging certain goods and services. Thus, beneath the symbols of freedom and the language of liberty, modern liberal democracies have institutionalized coercion. In the words of Murray Rothbard, “. . .whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery.”
A society sustained by coercion contaminates its morality by institutionalizing acts that lack the voluntariness honor requires. By aggressing against its citizenry, the state violates natural rights while denying individuals their freedom of choice and action. The normalization of coercion may produce obedience and maintain order, but it cannot transform compelled action into virtue by merely calling it law, duty, or necessity.
