maybe you should read the part that said yielding your body to police is compliance, hence imprisonment is compliance. The ignorant just love to throw around the word ignorant, don't they ?
Imprisonment is not compliance. Seeing as it can be forced and does all the time. Look at your complete lack of reason and logic? LOL. You are objectively ignorant. And the ignorant love to argue, for the sake of arguing.
Actually genius, one complies with the apprehending police or faces death. Let me know when your reason, logic and lack of ignorance appears
Actually people run, and fight constantly to avoid it, and are forced into imprisonment. Literally happens everyday, someone runs from and fights to avoid imprisonment and fail. So yes, you are completely lacking in even the most basic of not just reading comprehension but basic logic and reasoning. Lolol
Yes, the OP said they have a choice, comply or die. Kudos on your reason and logic, the poster told you as much.
If I were to make an argument for the legitimacy of laws being justified as a death threat, I'd say that lawmaking would have to balance whether the law would prevent death or cause more death thru non-compliance. It may seem odd that Jane doesn't want to service Dicks in her front yard, but I think it is reasonable and acknowledged that unchecked discrimination can lead to lethal consequences in a society. Hypothetically, if it was completely legal for Jane to deny servicing Dicks, all the Jane's could decide to stop servicing Dick's. Jane's won't sell to Dick's, rent to Dick's. It's unfair, but legal, so all the Dick's would just have to start servicing each other in their own little Dick economy. Unfortunately, the Jane's simply have more economic clout from the beginning, and by simple attrition and economic competition, edge Dick's out of society. Dick's have to live in their own neighborhoods with their own businesses, at least, until Jane wants to expand there and shove all those Dick's out thru Janetrification. Jane's economy simply monopolizes Dick's. Eventually, the pressure builds and some Dick is going to blow and get in a fight with Jane over their increasing marginalization. Thus, if a government has an interest in preventing the seeding of Dick/Jane warfare, it behooves them to enforce a law that cuts it off at the head, allowing no Jane to ever discriminate against a Dick. The only economic warfare that is justified is that which doesn't rely on inherent qualities, like being a Dick.
An evil may be justified only if it can be shown that it will prevent a greater evil. Forcing one person to serve another person (AKA slavery) is definitely an evil. Unless Jane has some overriding obligation to Dick, in the absence of some moral principle obligating one to serve lemonade to another, her refusing to serve lemonade to him, for any reason, is not an evil. The following applies to nearly all consequentialist justifications for evil, which is what you offered. We would need perfect and complete knowledge of all human responses to any human act to quantify the evil that will result from Jane refusing service to "Dick"s. Therefore, the partial slavery some would like to foist on the "Jane"s of the world, is definitely unjustifiable. That being said, we don't need complete, perfect knowledge or any analysis of consequentialism to know that such a prediction of an economic war between "Dick"s and "Jane"s is unrealistic given that Jane stands to benefit from the sale of lemonade to Dick even if she doesn't like what he plans to do with it.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to equate it with slavery, given that the value of the exchange is identical, no matter who you're serving, whereas slavery implies having your labor taken for free. It would bear quantifying "evil," I suppose, how exactly you'd define it, and how you'd measure it. We don't need complete, or perfect knowledge of the world to know firsthand that people are seldom rational, especially in large numbers. We also know that market inelasticity means that a more efficient, egalitarian competitor doesn't always appear. I also don't think it's a speculative stretch of consequentialism to assert that mass discrimination leads to segregation which leads to violence. As with all speculation, it's not about certainty, but probability. What matters are least likely to promote social strife?
My point was that we don't have enough information to justify using the force of law(which entails potential deadly force, let's not forget) to coerce one person into serving another. I don't see anything in your response that even tries to deny that except this: "I also don't think it's a speculative stretch [] to assert that mass discrimination leads to segregation which leads to violence." I disagree. I find it a wildly speculative assertion in need of defense. Not that defending it would justify forcing one to serve another.
Alright. I'll try a fanciful thought experiment, and if it doesn't work out, I'm perfectly willing to concede. Let's assume a universe with only Jane and Dick. Jane owns everything there is to own, and, for her own reason, chooses to not give anything to Dick. Dick cannot survive without necessarily taking something of Jane's thru force. Is passive-aggression addressed in the NAP? If, for some reason, Dick decides to curl up and die as opposed to violate his firm belief in NAP, is Jane guilty of anything by denying him access to all he needs to live by virtue of her simply owning it? Would Dick be justified in use of force? Would we assume Dick would use force, whether justified or not?
That's a shame. I've enjoyed your challenges. First, no, the NAP does not address passive-aggression in that sense. Jane would only be responsible for not acting if she were somehow responsible for Dick's situation. The NAP, though, should be understood as a maxim for what is actionable, and not as a summary maxim for morality. The lifeboat scenario you introduce is a good one, I think, because it introduces a conflict between those two. On the one hand, we shouldn't rule against Jane because it assumes an obligation on her part that we don't have a right to confer on her(to preserve Dick's life). If a ruling against her does not defeat the purpose of law(which is to minimize conflict, not to maximize happiness, utility, or well-being), it definitely does not fall under its purview. On the other hand, we can't say she did the right thing because letting him die like that is obviously cruel(if we assume she experiences empathy). I would have a hard time not ruling against Dick if he stole from her, but I wouldn't blame him; I'd probably pay the judgment myself; and I'd steal from her if I were him.
your fable is flawed because very few physical confrontations with law enforcement end up with someone's death
I think this requires getting into the semantics of "actionable." Can inaction be defined as "action?" Trolley problem: Dick is tied to the tracks. Jane has a lever to control the incoming train. A. If she pulls, he dies. If she doesn't, he lives. Clearly Jane's is culpable for Dick's death if she pulls. B. If she pulls, he lives. If she doesn't, he dies. Is Jane culpable for his death if she doesn't pull? Does this simple binary flip of the lever's mechanism change so much? Normal semantics would indicate the quandary we've already described. But, let's do away with the idea of "willful" action for a bit, and consider the set of all reactions possible from Jane. Jane knows that a certain portion of that set will result in Dick's death, and the remaining portion will not. Given this knowledge, wouldn't any willful choice of the lethal set, whether it's "action" or "inaction," constitute willful aggression? The purview sentence confuses me with all the negatives, not sure I understand. But I assume the state, in the interest of minimizing conflict, would have an interest in this situation. The "right" thing is quite subjective here. Is "not wrong" equivalent to "right"? If you cannot blame him for violating this strict interpretation of NAP, it follows that something in your values and NAP must be incompatible.
Now I'm sure you have a background in philosophy. I hope you stick around. I think opting not to take a given action can be classified as action. But action, in this sentence, "The NAP, though, should be understood as a maxim for what is actionable, and not as a summary maxim for morality." , was intended in its legal sense, where something is "actionable" if it comprises sufficient grounds for legal action to be taken. Reading my last response with that in mind will probably leave you with a very different understanding than the one you first took out of it. If it helps, you could actually substitute "actionable" for "illegitimate" in the NAP: Aggression is inherently actionable. Note that these particular lifeboat scenarios don't fall into the category of "trivial things", so they don't bear on the OP. Say she pulls on A, and doesn't pull on B. The difference between pulling and not pulling is legally trivial. If it can be established that she murdered him on A, then, all else being equal, she murdered him on B. Notice, though, that, by classifying her decision to leave the lever where it is on B as action, we are not conferring an obligation to preserve his life on her. Rather, we established her as the efficient cause of his death. Yes. Usually. Only if we conflate what is immoral with what is actionable.
Ah, I did not know "actionable." Well, it is my hope that extrapolation from these hypotheticals leads back to the trivial; that inaction, and naturally, refusal, is willful aggression between Jane and Dick. Wouldn't you say that it is the goal of a legal system to conflate the immoral with the actionable, as much as immorality can be universally agreed upon? And the law is indeed to minimize conflict, but that is not mutually exclusive with happiness, well-being, and/or utility, as conflict-resolution generally involves optimizing for the others. No obligation, sure. But isn't willfully choosing his death an act of aggression, despite that? It feels to me that the NAP in its simplest form is insufficient to ground an entire philosophy upon, given the subjectivity of what "aggression" is, beyond the superficial. I notice several Libertarian articles that ponder the same. What is aggression? I'd define it as willfully taking any action that goes against the will of another. This leads to peculiar conclusions, mainly being that any decision-making amongst people involves some degree of aggression, and that the best decisions, or compromises, are those with the minimum amount of aggression, or where all wills are aligned in agreement.
I don't think you can get there from here. The element of an opportunity to rescue(potentially saving a life) is not present in the OP. When I said "trivial things", I meant just that, things like refusing service for whatever whimsical reasons(though they may be important to the one refusing service) one may choose. Once we add that element, we're raising the much deeper, older, and more difficult question of a duty to rescue. No duty to rescue has been established in common law. Why is it that so many judges over no less than 500 years have failed to reason that we all have a legal obligation to aid another person in need if the opportunity arises? Is it that they all share a callus disregard for human life? I doubt it. I think the more likely explanation is that they tend to recognize a danger in establishing a precedent that would infringe on the property right one has in one's own body. If you could finally settle the question of whether we have a duty to rescue one another, you would have to go several steps further to show that we all have a duty to serve one another. How would you do that without also showing that we are all slaves to each other, and building a recipe for legal chaos? I don't think that should be the goal of any legal system. I think it's a huge mistake which leads to things like the war on drugs, affirmative action, forced integration, witch burning, "spreading democracy"; and, on a larger scale, fascism, communism, socialism, ethnic cleansing, and democide. I see that which is actionable as a subset of that which is immoral, and I think we should beware of that subset, keeping it as small as possible. The only reason we need law is to resolve and prevent disputes(minimize conflict). Once we start using it to mold society into what we would like it to be, we set a precedent that not-so-nice people can use to do very evil things on a very large scale. I find the definition given in the wikipedia entry for the NAP pretty clear: " "Aggression", for the purposes of NAP, is defined as initiating or threatening the use of any and all forcible interference with an individual or individual's property. " But the NAP is just a summary of libertarian legal theory. It only makes sense once we have a coherent theory of property rights.
I think all those are simply poor implementations of the ideal, given that all those things are not universally agreed upon. Murder, force, we have all agreed upon. But none of the rest. Minimizing disputes is practically equivalent to maximizing agreement. I'd still consider the ideal as making the subset of actionable equal to the subset of that which is immoral, either thru expanding what is actionable or shrinking the subset we consider immoral. I think that the ideal, reframed that way, aligns with libertarian ideals. Some things shouldn't be illegal, because they are not immoral, shrinking the immoral sphere while also shrinking the actionable, but ultimately aligning the two. Eventually, the leftover space, that which is immoral, but not illegal, will be decided to be not immoral or illegal. Well, rewriting everything from a ground-up philosophy would involve legal chaos regardless, given that law comes after philosophy, so I'm not too worried about that. After all, rewriting everything according to libertarian ideals would involve short-term legal chaos, as well, no? Brainstorming... Let's say Jane and Dick rely solely upon a machinery that provides them with all their needs. However, the machinery requires two people to work it. Dick falls into danger, and Jane can decide whether to rescue him. Obviously, the self-interested would rescue Dick, seeing as he is necessary to her survival. However, perhaps Jane is suicidal, and believes she has no obligation to Dick. But, does she have an obligation to Dick? It is, after all, their joint efforts that have enabled her existence up until now. I'm unclear on what libertarian property rights entail, but I have these thoughts: Let's say Jane and Dick will both fall into a room, where there is a single machine of sustenance. However, Jane gets to fall in first, and reaches the machine first, claiming ownership of it. It took no skill for Jane to get there first, merely chance that she got there first. Yet thru this chance, it is Dick that will be disadvantaged, despite them both crossing the same distance and exerting the same raw effort. Is this fair? I think this is the root of many liberal arguments, recognizing the role of luck in affecting the advantages a person has, as well as many broad environmental and privilege-based disputes.
What a horrible world. I think I'd rather die than live in it. Anyway, libertarian legal theory literally begins with recognition of facts about the actual world. In other words, it assumes the actual world. There are plenty of possible worlds without it, as with any other legal theory. Here's a thread about it. I don't think I understand what you mean about changing what we consider immoral. It doesn't seem possible to me. One person having lucked into possession of a thing does not entitle another person to take it away from the first. We all know that making a change in something in the possession of another against will of the other is to provoke a fight, that fights are an evil, and that evil requires justification. Even people who don't think taking other people's stuff is wrong know that(except maybe the part about evil. but we can disregard the opinions of psychopaths on this, right?) The first user of a thing doesn't need to offer any such justification when he appropriates it. I'm not sure what you mean by "rewriting everything from a ground-up philosophy", but, taking it at face value, it's not what libertarians are doing. Most of what we say is already assumed and enshrined in old, entrenched legal traditions. We just apply it consistently. Also, if "rewriting everything from a ground-up philosophy" means establishing a new legal system, then it doesn't entail legal chaos: The legal systems of most states(they all have constitutions which rewrote everything from the ground up) on this continent were established without legal chaos. You mentioned universal universal agreement with respect to murder and force. What you're pointing at when you say that is Natural Law. It makes legal chaos, a Hobbesian playground where nobody recognizes anything as the law, nearly impossible. There are wars, but only when a well established government gets pissed at a people or just feels like invading. We don't see legal chaos when people first settle an area with no prior established government. The gold rush is a good example because it was a bunch of people of different backgrounds and ethnicity all going after the same very scarce resource in the same place(where there was no "government") at the same time. If we assume Hobbes' description of human nature, we would expect a blood bath, but that's not what happened. Laws and systems for resolving disputes and enforcing rulings emerged very smoothly. It happens that way because there really is law that we all agree on. Libertarians just like to figure out what that is and then reason consistently from there.
I think this should be true of anything that is a product of labor, but that an exception would have to be made for anything which is not. What are your thoughts on carbon taxes, and what we owe others thru deprivation of natural resources? - - - Updated - - - I think this should be true of anything that is a product of labor, but that an exception would have to be made for anything which is not. What are your thoughts on carbon taxes, and what we owe others thru deprivation of natural resources?
I might agree with you there. What is labor? How does something become the product of labor? What is an exception? Who has a right to decide in the event of an exception? (That party is the de facto owner unless there are two disputing parties having agreed to submit to arbitration of that party, and that party has no claim to the object in dispute.) It's an idea of Milton Friedman that is destined to be exploited and abused by statists. Who are those others? Did they acquire a property right to the resources in question? If so, how?
Well, I'm sure others have written on "labor" enough, but if I were to take a stab at it, I'd qualify it as human effort, and that something becomes a product of labor when a natural resource becomes a product thru human effort. Natural resources being the exceptions, and the arbiters of such decision-making would depend on whether you're a statist or not, and your view of property rights. Whether you think the State should own it, the People should own it, or Nobody should own it, invariably we can conclude that taking other's clean air or water is a cost that should be accounted for. Rothbard apparently even advocated a full ban; not being able to pollute at all without an arrangement. But then, wouldn't all people eventually have to be on the other side of such an arrangement? Wouldn't we all owe each other for the natural resources we necessarily deprive each other of?
So, just a common sense, face value understanding of labor, okay, good. And the exception you had in mind is just any natural resource not having been appropriated by labor(you can correct me if I'm wrong). Given that we agree on the above, it seems to follow that you and I agree that nobody should own unappropriated resources. If someone(who agrees so far) wanted to say that the state should decide all disputes over property in a given geographic area, that someone would have to explain why an exception to the rule of appropriation by labor should be made in the case of the state. I don't think saying everyone owns something is a meaningful legal proposition. Actually, I doubt it's even a coherent idea.
Well, I'm just barely getting my feet wet with reading up on property rights ranging from communist to anarchist ideals, but regardless of the argument for a statist's point of view on the matter, I was just aiming at the idea that, regardless of the structure, if someone takes a natural resource, they are indebted to you in some way, whether it's directly, or thru your social cooperative, or your state. Thus, the only use of those resources that doesn't involve theft would be the use that everybody cumulatively decides upon, whether that hypothetical agreement is even possible.
How do you justify your position that people who have never touched a thing have a better claim to it than the first person to actually use it?
