Brainpolice said:For example, one's ownership over their home, even if it is a just case of ownership, does not give you the right to assault and murder people just because they are in one's home. In other words, property rights do not trump life and liberty.
That strikes me as odd. I thought... well, I remember reading two very poignant scenarios in which consistency in justice must prevail over liberal morality if consistency is to be maintained.
One example was that a man who has been lost in the woods for days and is on the verge of dying comes onto your cabin property and begins shuffling through your kitchen. You shoot him. Are you in the wrong or the right? The article said in the right -- for you were defending your property.
If you invite a friend over for dinner and then shank him as soon as he enters the door, well, that certainly feels different, but why is one okay and not the other (at least according to my understanding of BP's statements)?
Daniel Waite:For example, one's ownership over their home, even if it is a just case of ownership, does not give you the right to assault and murder people just because they are in one's home.
yes, it does not give you the right to assault and murder people JUST because they are in ones home.
but it does give you the right to be violent (possibly deathly so) becase they are in ones home AND they had no right to be so (and are aggressing by their presence)
its only a troubling question because it misses out whether the people who may be 'assualted or murdered' have initiated aggression, or not. tresspassers by definition have aggressed, this is not so for 'guests' who have not aggressed by being present.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
Daniel Waite: I thought... well, I remember reading two very poignant scenarios in which consistency in justice must prevail over liberal morality if consistency is to be maintained. One example was that a man who has been lost in the woods for days and is on the verge of dying comes onto your cabin property and begins shuffling through your kitchen. You shoot him. Are you in the wrong or the right? The article said in the right -- for you were defending your property.
I thought... well, I remember reading two very poignant scenarios in which consistency in justice must prevail over liberal morality if consistency is to be maintained.
And the only pheasible way to defend your property is to shoot the perpetrator?
Suppose I drop a coin and a man comes along, picks it up, and runs away with it. I now have right to shoot him? The taking of someone elses life is only merited when life is being defended, not petty ownership.
banned:Suppose I drop a coin and a man comes along, picks it up, and runs away with it. I now have right to shoot him? The taking of someone elses life is only merited when life is being defended, not petty ownership.
im interested to study this topic. are there journal articles, books, an intellectual thread that i can pick up that goes into the history of this 'proportionality' argument. because its definitely a principle in adddition to Not initiating aggression and understanding what private propoerty is.
it seems to me the 'problem' of proportionality/strength of force for a given act of 'defence' is more to be worked out by the security agencies and private law courts we would have, and the consumers patronising services and voting for a form of 'common law' that is broadly libertarian, and gives judges a way for adjudicating , weighing evidence, surrounding such 'dilemma stories' if the consumers of law that we are concerned with want to perhaps bind themself to non-lethal methods of defence in certain low danger threshold circumstances and are willing to do this because of the assurance they will get that they might not suffer the wrath on the other end when the shoe is on the other foot.
but i admit its an area i havent thought of as deeply as others. hence the request for reading... do rothbard? mises? hoppe? have stuff on proportionality?
Here you go.
If someone is on your property, you are allowed to use the force necessary to remove them from your property, and to defend yourself/your possesions. So if that starving hiker puts his hands up, drops everything, turns and run, you are not justified in shooting him in the back and killing him.
banned: Daniel Waite: I thought... well, I remember reading two very poignant scenarios in which consistency in justice must prevail over liberal morality if consistency is to be maintained. One example was that a man who has been lost in the woods for days and is on the verge of dying comes onto your cabin property and begins shuffling through your kitchen. You shoot him. Are you in the wrong or the right? The article said in the right -- for you were defending your property. And the only pheasible way to defend your property is to shoot the perpetrator? Suppose I drop a coin and a man comes along, picks it up, and runs away with it. I now have right to shoot him? The taking of someone elses life is only merited when life is being defended, not petty ownership.
That's exactly the point. If someone violates your property rights, this doesn't mean you have free license to take their life. You only can take their life in a genuine case of self-defense, but if they are not actually threatening you in that way and there is no escalation then you are the initiator of force if you just arbitrarily cap someone for being on your property. So I'd like to be clear that my principle does not oppose genuine self-defense. What it proposes is proportionality in terms of how one reacts to property violations. If you steal a gumball from my gumball machine, I can seek you out and seek restitution, but I can't just arbitrarily start initiating force on you or make you my slave as a response.
It is actually the initiation of force on people on the slim basis that they happen to be on your property that would be inconsistant justice. The entire point of what I said is to consistantly apply the non-aggression priniple. To use an extreme example, shooting someone just because they are standing on your lawn clearly violates the non-aggression principle. The only qualifier for the right to use force in such scenarios is when there is escalation in light of a consistant refusal to get off the property. Otherwise, we're just misusing property rights theory to justify violations of the right to life and liberty. The fact that you have private property by itself is not a sufficient justification for arbitrary force on others.
Also, in normal situations, it simply is not necessary to use force to get someone to get off of your property. People generally aren't going to arbitrarily tresspass onto people's homes and whatnot or insist on squatting on your home. It's only in the less normal situation in which they persistantly refuse to leave your property alone that questions of violence start becoming more relevant. But generally people will leave if asked, and more than likely they don't even have to be asked. It just seems to me that immediately jumping to questions of violence represents a pre-existing motivation to use violence when there isn't likely any necessity for it given most situations. It seems like some people are simply looking for an excuse to initiate violence by using a less-than-fully-integrated property rights theory.
For one thing, this situation involves incomplete knowledge - all you know is that some guy just busted into your cabin. But in either case I would question why one should immediately jump to the use of force as the FIRST option. If one encounters this person, and they clearly are not violiently threatening you, and they establish what their dire situation is, I would think that given the more full information noone in the right mind would shoot this person. So if the person clearly is not threatening you beyond this point, if they just tresspassed onto your home because they are dieing, if they've attempted to rationally explain the situation and interact wit you, then sorry - I think you're in the wrong for shooting them.
The use of force would only become an option if this person threatened you and if they persistantly refused to leave if asked. But I somehow doubt that most people, upon finding out about the situation, would ask the person to immediately leave. They'd more than likely call the hospital or something. At best, the person owes you restitution for any damages encountered during their tresspassing, but they certainly don't lost their right to life.
This is similar to Walter Block's scenario of a guy hanging on a flagpole and the only way for him to survive is to break your window and crawl in. Technically, in order to save his life, this guy has to minorly violate your property rights. There are two basic routes you can take: you can value the property right over the window over this guy's life and let him fall, thus leading him to his death because of your neglect, or you can choose to value the guy's life over a petty window, thus saving his life.
Common sense says that most people would allow the guy to break the window and crawl in, and what's more: it'd be the right thing to do ethically. This also implies that there is a heirarchy of rights in a sense - life and liberty is much more fundamental than a property right in a window. Your property right in a window is not more important than someone else's very life. Property rights are NOT axoimatic and the non-aggresion principle is a principle, not a contextless axoim.
Petty ownership? I must be mistaken again then, because I thought property rights were paramount in all of this.
Anywho, I found the article I was referring to: http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html
I read most of the link banned provided; it makes sense, but how would you juxtapose the articles together? Are they different beasts? That is, the scenarios described by Dr. Block and Rothbard; are they different enough so as not to trample on each other?
Let's talk about that coin. Say the coin was a gift from your now-deceased father. Additionally, it's pure gold and worth quite a sum of money, though you probably couldn't tell just by looking at it.
How does that change your opinion?
Brainpolice:Common sense says that most people would allow the guy to break the window and crawl in, and what's more: it'd be the right thing to do ethically. This also implies that there is a heirarchy of rights in a sense - life and liberty is much more fundamental than a property right in a window. Your property right in a window is not more important than someone else's very life. Property rights are NOT axoimatic and the non-aggresion principle is a principle, not a contextless axoim.
Ah, yes. This is covered. I'll excerpt it for you:
(I believe this is the most relevant portion, but please read the whole thing).)
They misunderstand the nature of libertarianism. These arguments implicitly assume that libertarianism is a moral philosophy, a guide to proper behavior, as it were. Should the flagpole hanger let go? Should the hiker go off and die? But libertarianism is a theory concerned with the justified use of aggression, or violence, based on property rights, not morality. Therefore, the only proper questions which can be addressed in this philosophy are of the sort, if the flagpole hanger attempts to come in to the apartment, and the occupant shoots him for trespassing, Would the forces of law and order punish the home owner? Or, if the owner of the cabin in the woods sets up a booby trap, such that when someone forces his way into his property he gets a face full of buckshot, Would he be guilty of a law violation? When put in this way, the answer is clear. The owner in each case is in the right, and the trespasser in the wrong. If force is used to protect property rights, even deadly force, the owner is not guilty of the violation of any licit law.
Daniel Waite:They misunderstand the nature of libertarianism. These arguments implicitly assume that libertarianism is a moral philosophy, a guide to proper behavior, as it were. Should the flagpole hanger let go? Should the hiker go off and die? But libertarianism is a theory concerned with the justified use of aggression, or violence, based on property rights, not morality. Therefore, the only proper questions which can be addressed in this philosophy are of the sort, if the flagpole hanger attempts to come in to the apartment, and the occupant shoots him for trespassing, Would the forces of law and order punish the home owner? Or, if the owner of the cabin in the woods sets up a booby trap, such that when someone forces his way into his property he gets a face full of buckshot, Would he be guilty of a law violation? When put in this way, the answer is clear. The owner in each case is in the right, and the trespasser in the wrong. If force is used to protect property rights, even deadly force, the owner is not guilty of the violation of any licit law.
And that is exactly where Block is in error. He removes the non-aggression principle from its proper context (the derivative of a deeper moral philosophy), and tries to establish it is a stand-alone axiom.
Market anarchist, Linux geek, aspiring Perl hacker, and student of the neo-Aristotelians, the classical individualist anarchists, and the Austrian school.
The Wikipedia article on libertarianism says something to the effect of: nobody agrees on what it means to be a libertarian, but there are a few common principles.
I didn't understand why this was so, because everything I've read to date seems fairly clear and stable. Now, however, I think I see why. People keep trying to inject their own opinion of morality into these principles. Like that one poster who recently "defeated" the NAP by way of a scenario in which a person steals a boat to save a drowning child. Everyone pounced on him, denouncing his scenario as a no-brainer -- the NAP applies regardless of how moral your actions might feel to you. Rothbard said justice must be the ultimate desire of the libertarian.
So now I wonder... is the same thing happening in this thread? Is the dropped coin banned's personal morality linchpin? His personal bullet-proof scenario that renders property rights "petty" and "morality" golden?
I like the Austrian perspective because it's consistent. It's all those hazy areas that allow wiggle room for statist tendencies. Note that I am not advocating that you shoot the little girl who mistakenly wanders into your flower patch; I ask myself whether I would shoot her and the answer is a resounding no, but I would try to inform her, and possibly her caretakers. But would I be in the wrong if I did? Well, that depends on the situation. Did she have a device that looked like a bomb strapped to her back? Did I engage her in conversation and teach her about the flowers she was looking at? In the former I'd say it's okay I shot her -- I perceived an imminent threat; in the later, no, by conversing with her and not asking her to get off my property I implicitly gave consent to her being there.
I believe there is a disconnect in what people perceive themselves doing in a situation and expecting or wanting or coercing others to do the same thing. But isn't that how the state gets a foothold? Wanting others to do as you wish them to do?
wombatron:And that is exactly where Block is in error. He removes the non-aggression principle from its proper context (the derivative of a deeper moral philosophy), and tries to establish it is a stand-alone axiom.
Praytell, what is the deeper moral philosophy?
Daniel Waite: wombatron: And that is exactly where Block is in error. He removes the non-aggression principle from its proper context (the derivative of a deeper moral philosophy), and tries to establish it is a stand-alone axiom. Praytell, what is the deeper moral philosophy?
wombatron: And that is exactly where Block is in error. He removes the non-aggression principle from its proper context (the derivative of a deeper moral philosophy), and tries to establish it is a stand-alone axiom.
In my own cases, neo-Aristotelianism. However, the problem is that Block divorces the NAP from any ethical context, which is a problem whatever your views on philosophy.
Daniel Waite:Praytell, what is the deeper moral philosophy?
It's pretty much the only thing that can be used to justify left-libertarianism, anarcho-libertarianism anarcho-socialism as being even remotely compatible with anarcho-capitalism.
First we create an area of subjectivity. Then we claim it is the base from which rational behavior arises. And so we end up with the perfect doublethink.
Subjectivity is reason. Reason is subjective.