As always, explain your answers.
Not whatever measures are justified. All law involves coercion. We typically use the terms "initiation of force" or "aggression" for what is unjust. If someone initiates aggression against you, pulls out a gun and threatens you for instance, you can coerce or use force against them in response.
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.—Karl Kraus.
Coercion (pronounced /koʊˈɜrʃən/) is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation, trickery, or some other form of pressure or force. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercion
I can think of two situations:
1. Your neighbor is building a nuclear weapon for no apparent or disclosed reason. Though actually this represents aggression in itself. Just like reckless driving is.
2. Someone who is killing all the fish in the sea. The schools of fish who are being caught by other people but sustained through calculated fractional fishing are actually do have property rights over them, so killing those fish would again really be aggression. Killing un-fished schools of fish would then be the most grey-area. Luckily, this doesn't really happen a lot because people aren't really destructive for no reason, and if something was really valuable then people would create valid property claims.
So really no, I can't think of cases where coercion is justified when people are acting non-aggressively. Psychological aggression is a tricky, particularly regarding children. So far, the most effective way of helping those victims is by general education of the population through freedom of information.
Per freedom of information, is allowing individuals to be exposed to coercive and aggressive ideas a form of coercion? Is it aggression when people adopt those philosophies? Freedom of information seems counterproductive to a coercion-less societal ideal, at least envisioned by Libertarianism.
Per freedom of information, is allowing individuals to be exposed to coercive and aggressive ideas a form of coercion?
No.
Is it aggression when people adopt those philosophies?
Not if you mean learning or preaching them. If you compel me to be part of your commune it is though.
Freedom of information seems counterproductive to a coercion-less societal ideal, at least envisioned by Libertarianism.
I don't see how. Restricting what information people have access to is a blatant contradiction with a "coercion-less societal ideal"
Also from the wikipedia entry for Coercion:
Libertarian economist and philosopher F.A. Hayek defined coercion as "control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another (so) that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another"; and also states "Coercion occurs when one man's actions are made to serve another man's will, not for his own but for the other's purpose."
I'm not sure freedom of information could constitute coercion inself. Simply making the information available does not compell one to seek it, therefore it does not contradict or supercede a coherent plan of one's own.
So the beauty of Libertarianism, essentially, is that it has absolutely no enforcement mechanism? Well that's productive.
cognitivist wrote: Per freedom of information, is allowing individuals to be exposed to coercive and aggressive ideas a form of coercion? Is it aggression when people adopt those philosophies? Freedom of information seems counterproductive to a coercion-less societal ideal, at least envisioned by Libertarianism.
I think you have a misunderstanding. People who adopt aggressive ideas aren't learned them by freedom of information. Instead, people who adopt aggressive ideas have absorbed a morality of aggression when they were young.
If you raise a child kindly and with reason, then there is no chance it ends up holding aggressive ideas later in life. Or if they do, only very superficially and they will adopt cooperative ideas very easily if exposed to them.
Cha-ching. ;)
Though, certainly the ability to fight back could be considered a balancing effect, but, then, the spoils go to the victor (usually the more aggressive and more coercive), which, surely, was the whole problem in the first place.
So, essentially, if I learn an idea that doesn't agree with yours it wasn't done in an free information environment. Hmm, the plot thickens.
You seem to be not understanding. Coercion or the use of force is acceptable if it is justified. How is it justified? It is justified only in response to aggression (the initiation of force). Threats are aggression as well.
I don't see how you are getting that from what Nielsio wrote. Is English not your native language?
Coercion or the use of force is acceptable if it is justified. How is it justified? It is justified only in response to aggression (the initiation of force). Threats are aggression as well.
Your words contradict themselves. If aggression is the initiation of force, then a threat cannot be considered aggression as it does not initiate force. Obviously, we do consider it aggression, and therefore the given definition of aggresstion cannot be upheld.
This is not idle semantic play. This is the basis upon which 'justification' is derived.
Surely you see where this road leads? If the mere threat of unfavorable circumstances is considered aggression, then force is justified in response to any number of things, including an unfavorable employment contract. After all, if you are offering a wage less than the employee is willing to accept, you are coercing him to either leave your employment, thus depriving him of income and making his conditions worse, or endure the conditions you have set. In response to your threat, your 'aggression', he must then be justified in using force in response.
Similarly, the employer is equally justified in using force against an employee who threatens to leave unless they are paid more, since the demand would make the employer's situation less favorable than before!
Who is right? Who is wrong? No-one can tell, and so a battle is necessitated. One will submit to the other. That is coercion.
Coercion, even as defined by Hayek, does not revolve around force, and therefore it is not rendered valid merely by the existence or the threat of force. It is rendered valid by responding, under such conditions as detailed above, by responding to anything you don't like. Obviously, this is a ludicrous policy for any society to adopt, but that is why we have laws to decide justification for us.
Otherwise, no 'justification' can ever be considered more valid than another, because ultimately, such justification is derived from the bottom line of force anyway, and the purpose of removing coercion and aggression is defeated.
Jungle Law thus prevails, arising from the very effort to defeat it that Libertarianism makes. How would you deny this?
I don't see how you are getting that from what Nielsio wrote.
To hazard a guess, I suspect he was referring to the fact that almost immediately after encountering differing opinions on a couple of threads, Nielsio posted a new thread to highlight the 'problem' of 'socialists' posting on the Forums. If my analysis is accurate, then surely you can see why such action would not inspire respect?
Not really my business, but, meh.
Fair is relative, coercion is also relative. Therefore this question must be relative from person to person. I would say no.
There are a near infinite amount of scenarios which I would support the use of coercion to solve. There are a few likely scenarios which I would use coercion to solve. I would consider the great majority of coercive actions, with coercion defined as the initiation of violence according to general property standards resembling most modern western nations.
There's no contradiction at all. It sounds like by the underlined claim of yours you are caught up in a mechanistic definition of force.
When I wave a gun at you and tell you to drop to the ground, what is really happening? I'm stating that I intend to bring about a state of affairs where a bullet enters your body if you don't act as I am compelling you to. Although threats issued by governments (think taxation) are not as proximate and thus harder for the general populace to comprehend, the nature of this category of actions is identical. For more on this, read Kinsella on threats and Mises on a contractual society versus a hegemonial society here.
There are two different kinds of social cooperation: cooperation by virtue of contract and coordination, and cooperation by virtue of command and subordination or hegemony. Where and as far as cooperation is based on contract, the logical relation between the cooperating individuals is symmetrical. They are all parties to interpersonal exchange contracts. John has the same relation to Tom as Tom has to John. Where and as far as cooperation is based on command and subordination, there is the man who commands and there are those who obey his orders. The logical relation between these two classes of men is asymmetrical. There is a director and there are people under his care. The director alone chooses and directs; the others--the wards--are mere pawns in his actions. [p. 196] The power that calls into life and animates any social body is always ideological might, and the fact that makes an individual a member of any social compound is always his own conduct. This is no less valid with regard to a hegemonic societal bond. It is true, people are as a rule born into the most important hegemonic bonds, into the family and into the state, and this was also the case with the hegemonic bonds of older days, slavery and serfdom, which disappeared in the realm of Western civilization. But no physical violence and compulsion can possibly force a man against his will to remain in the status of the ward of a hegemonic order. What violence or the threat of violence brings about is a state of affairs in which subjection as a rule is considered more desirable than rebellion. Faced with the choice between the consequences of obedience and of disobedience, the ward prefers the former and thus integrates himself into the hegemonic bond. Every new command places this choice before him again. In yielding again and again he himself contributes his share to the continuous existence of the hegemonic societal body. Even as a ward in such a system he is an acting human being, i.e., a being not simply yielding to blind impulses, but using his reason in choosing between alternatives. What differentiates the hegemonic bond from the contractual bond is the scope in which the choices of the individuals determine the course of events. As soon as a man has decided in favor of his subjection to a hegemonic system, he becomes, within the margin of this system's activities and for the time of his subjection, a pawn of the director's actions. Within the hegemonic societal body and as far as it directs its subordinates' conduct, only the director acts. The wards act only in choosing subordination; having once chosen subordination they no longer act for themselves, they are taken care of. In the frame of a contractual society the individual members exchange definite quantities of goods and services of a definite quality. In choosing subjection in a hegemonic body a man neither gives nor receives anything that is definite. He integrates himself into a system in which he has to render indefinite services and will receive what the director is willing to assign to him. He is at the mercy of the director. The director alone is free to choose. Whether the director is an individual or an organized group of individuals, a directorate, and whether the director is a selfish maniacal tyrant or a benevolent paternal despot is of no relevance for the structure of the whole system. The distinction between these two kinds of social cooperation is common to all theories of society. Ferguson described it as the contrast [p. 197] between warlike nations and commercial nations[2]; Saint Simon as the contrast between pugnacious nations and peaceful or industrial nations; Herbert Spencer as the contrast between societies of individual freedom and those of a militant structure[3]; Sombart as the contrast between heroes and peddlers[4]. The Marxians distinguish between the "gentile organization" of a fabulous state of primitive society and the eternal bliss of socialism on the one hand and the unspeakable degradation of capitalism on the other hand[5]. The Nazi philosophers distinguish the counterfeit system of bourgeois security from the heroic system of authoritarian Fuhrertum. The valuation of both systems is different with the various sociologists. But they fully agree in the establishment of the contrast and no less in recognizing that no third principle is thinkable and feasible. Western civilization as well as the civilization of the more advanced Eastern peoples are achievements of men who have cooperated according to the pattern of contractual coordination. These civilizations, it is true, have adopted in some respects bonds of hegemonic structure. The state as an apparatus of compulsion and coercion is by necessity a hegemonic organization. So is the family and its household community. However, the characteristic feature of these civilizations is the contractual structure proper to the cooperation of the individual families. There once prevailed almost complete autarky and economic isolation of the individual household units. When interfamilial exchange of goods and services was substituted for each family's economic self-sufficiency, it was, in all nations commonly considered civilized, a cooperation based on contract. Human civilization as it has been hitherto known to historical experience is preponderantly a product of contractual relations. Any kind of human cooperation and social mutuality is essentially an order of peace and conciliatory settlement of disputes. In the domestic relations of any societal unit, be it a contractual or a hegemonic bond, there must be peace. Where there are violent conflicts and as far as there are such conflicts, there is neither cooperation nor societal bonds. Those political parties which in their eagerness to substitute the hegemonic system for the contractual system point [p. 198] at the rottenness of peace and of bourgeois security, extol the moral nobility of violence and bloodshed and praise war and revolution as the eminently natural methods of interhuman relations, contradict themselves. For their own utopias are designed as realms of peace. The Reich of the Nazis and the commonwealth of the Marxians are planned as societies of undisturbed peace. They are to be created by pacification, i.e., the violent subjection of all those not ready to yield without resistance. In a contractual world various states can quietly coexist. In a hegemonic world there can only be one Reich or commonwealth and only one dictator. Socialism must choose between a renunciation of the advantages of division of labor encompassing the whole earth and all peoples and the establishment of a world-embracing hegemonic order. It is this fact that made Russian Bolshevism, German Nazism, and Italian Fascism "dynamic," i.e., aggressive. Under contractual conditions empires are dissolved into a loose league of autonomous member nations. The hegemonic system is bound to strive after annexation of all independent states. The contractual order of society is an order of right and law. It is a government under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) as differentiated from the welfare state (Wohlfahrtsstaat) or paternal state. Right or law is the complex of rules determining the orbit in which individuals are free to act. No such orbit is left to wards of a hegemonic society. In the hegemonic state there is neither right nor law; there are only directives and regulations which the director may change daily and apply with what discrimination he pleases and which the wards must obey. The wards have one freedom only: to obey without asking questions.
There are two different kinds of social cooperation: cooperation by virtue of contract and coordination, and cooperation by virtue of command and subordination or hegemony.
Where and as far as cooperation is based on contract, the logical relation between the cooperating individuals is symmetrical. They are all parties to interpersonal exchange contracts. John has the same relation to Tom as Tom has to John. Where and as far as cooperation is based on command and subordination, there is the man who commands and there are those who obey his orders. The logical relation between these two classes of men is asymmetrical. There is a director and there are people under his care. The director alone chooses and directs; the others--the wards--are mere pawns in his actions. [p. 196]
The power that calls into life and animates any social body is always ideological might, and the fact that makes an individual a member of any social compound is always his own conduct. This is no less valid with regard to a hegemonic societal bond. It is true, people are as a rule born into the most important hegemonic bonds, into the family and into the state, and this was also the case with the hegemonic bonds of older days, slavery and serfdom, which disappeared in the realm of Western civilization. But no physical violence and compulsion can possibly force a man against his will to remain in the status of the ward of a hegemonic order. What violence or the threat of violence brings about is a state of affairs in which subjection as a rule is considered more desirable than rebellion. Faced with the choice between the consequences of obedience and of disobedience, the ward prefers the former and thus integrates himself into the hegemonic bond. Every new command places this choice before him again. In yielding again and again he himself contributes his share to the continuous existence of the hegemonic societal body. Even as a ward in such a system he is an acting human being, i.e., a being not simply yielding to blind impulses, but using his reason in choosing between alternatives.
What differentiates the hegemonic bond from the contractual bond is the scope in which the choices of the individuals determine the course of events. As soon as a man has decided in favor of his subjection to a hegemonic system, he becomes, within the margin of this system's activities and for the time of his subjection, a pawn of the director's actions. Within the hegemonic societal body and as far as it directs its subordinates' conduct, only the director acts. The wards act only in choosing subordination; having once chosen subordination they no longer act for themselves, they are taken care of.
In the frame of a contractual society the individual members exchange definite quantities of goods and services of a definite quality. In choosing subjection in a hegemonic body a man neither gives nor receives anything that is definite. He integrates himself into a system in which he has to render indefinite services and will receive what the director is willing to assign to him. He is at the mercy of the director. The director alone is free to choose. Whether the director is an individual or an organized group of individuals, a directorate, and whether the director is a selfish maniacal tyrant or a benevolent paternal despot is of no relevance for the structure of the whole system.
The distinction between these two kinds of social cooperation is common to all theories of society. Ferguson described it as the contrast [p. 197] between warlike nations and commercial nations[2]; Saint Simon as the contrast between pugnacious nations and peaceful or industrial nations; Herbert Spencer as the contrast between societies of individual freedom and those of a militant structure[3]; Sombart as the contrast between heroes and peddlers[4]. The Marxians distinguish between the "gentile organization" of a fabulous state of primitive society and the eternal bliss of socialism on the one hand and the unspeakable degradation of capitalism on the other hand[5]. The Nazi philosophers distinguish the counterfeit system of bourgeois security from the heroic system of authoritarian Fuhrertum. The valuation of both systems is different with the various sociologists. But they fully agree in the establishment of the contrast and no less in recognizing that no third principle is thinkable and feasible.
Western civilization as well as the civilization of the more advanced Eastern peoples are achievements of men who have cooperated according to the pattern of contractual coordination. These civilizations, it is true, have adopted in some respects bonds of hegemonic structure. The state as an apparatus of compulsion and coercion is by necessity a hegemonic organization. So is the family and its household community. However, the characteristic feature of these civilizations is the contractual structure proper to the cooperation of the individual families. There once prevailed almost complete autarky and economic isolation of the individual household units. When interfamilial exchange of goods and services was substituted for each family's economic self-sufficiency, it was, in all nations commonly considered civilized, a cooperation based on contract. Human civilization as it has been hitherto known to historical experience is preponderantly a product of contractual relations.
Any kind of human cooperation and social mutuality is essentially an order of peace and conciliatory settlement of disputes. In the domestic relations of any societal unit, be it a contractual or a hegemonic bond, there must be peace. Where there are violent conflicts and as far as there are such conflicts, there is neither cooperation nor societal bonds. Those political parties which in their eagerness to substitute the hegemonic system for the contractual system point [p. 198] at the rottenness of peace and of bourgeois security, extol the moral nobility of violence and bloodshed and praise war and revolution as the eminently natural methods of interhuman relations, contradict themselves. For their own utopias are designed as realms of peace. The Reich of the Nazis and the commonwealth of the Marxians are planned as societies of undisturbed peace. They are to be created by pacification, i.e., the violent subjection of all those not ready to yield without resistance. In a contractual world various states can quietly coexist. In a hegemonic world there can only be one Reich or commonwealth and only one dictator. Socialism must choose between a renunciation of the advantages of division of labor encompassing the whole earth and all peoples and the establishment of a world-embracing hegemonic order. It is this fact that made Russian Bolshevism, German Nazism, and Italian Fascism "dynamic," i.e., aggressive. Under contractual conditions empires are dissolved into a loose league of autonomous member nations. The hegemonic system is bound to strive after annexation of all independent states.
The contractual order of society is an order of right and law. It is a government under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) as differentiated from the welfare state (Wohlfahrtsstaat) or paternal state. Right or law is the complex of rules determining the orbit in which individuals are free to act. No such orbit is left to wards of a hegemonic society. In the hegemonic state there is neither right nor law; there are only directives and regulations which the director may change daily and apply with what discrimination he pleases and which the wards must obey. The wards have one freedom only: to obey without asking questions.
...
Lodatzor: This is not idle semantic play. This is the basis upon which 'justification' is derived. Surely you see where this road leads? If the mere threat of unfavorable circumstances is considered aggression, then force is justified in response to any number of things, including an unfavorable employment contract. After all, if you are offering a wage less than the employee is willing to accept, you are coercing him to either leave your employment, thus depriving him of income and making his conditions worse, or endure the conditions you have set. In response to your threat, your 'aggression', he must then be justified in using force in response. Similarly, the employer is equally justified in using force against an employee who threatens to leave unless they are paid more, since the demand would make the employer's situation less favorable than before!
Your "argument" is nonsense. The attempted reducio ad absurdum fails because it relies on your semantic trick of referencing "unfavorable circumstances", which is a strawman you've proceeded to attack.
Kindness and reason are so fundamentally relative in meaning. I could be a kind socialist just as I could be a kind Libertarian. Freedom is not the intellectual property of Libertarians, nor is it of the socialists.
The perceptual relativity of force is epistomological a priori. Parties have their inherent perceptions that are non-empirical and affect the conditions of a contractual society.
Pardon me for being arrogant as all hell. I know I'm not right and I'll get back to actually input use for these threads momentarily. I love controversy, though.
There's no contradiction at all. It sounds like by the underlined claim of yours you are caught up in a mechanistic definition of force. When I wave a gun at you and tell you to drop to the ground, what is really happening? I'm stating that I intend to bring about a state of affairs where a bullet enters your body if you don't act as I am compelling you to.
When I wave a gun at you and tell you to drop to the ground, what is really happening? I'm stating that I intend to bring about a state of affairs where a bullet enters your body if you don't act as I am compelling you to.
That is indeed a contradiction. The implication of intent does not constitute initiation. That is the flaw in the statement which I highlighted, Merely saying that a mechanistic definition is irrelevant works against your own argument, because if the 'threat' of implication is sufficient to warrant aggression, then all threats, of any nature must be considered such.
Why? Because all threats are underlined by the willingness to use force to back them up. There is only a varying degree of seperation between the threat and the action. If I threaten you by saying: "STOP POSTING HERE OR ELSE", then the implication is that you will suffer by continuing to post. My ability to use force to effect this suffering may not be high, in which case you may well consider this an idle threat and not worth taking seriously, but the fact remains that any conditions I would seek to impose on you would be backed up by ability (or lack thereof) to use force.
So, to handwave this away as mechanistic distraction and then try to claim justification for response to other threats, is counter-intuitive.
It is far from nonsense, and far from absurd.
By what measure of enforcement will either the employee or the employer carry out their implied actions? If the employee refuses the offered wage, by what means will the authority of the employer to fire the employee be upheld? Property law will be invoked, and enforced through, wait for it, force. If force is implied by the threat of unemployment, the employee, by your terms of aggression, is justified in using force to fight back.
And, who exactly determines property laws?
This is the key illustration which must be addressed. Without laws, there is no authority to appeal to (no legal use of force), and only might makes right.
That is indeed a contradiction. The implication of intent does not constitute initiation.
Putting a gun in your face is initiation. Compare the two situations:
- I'm walking down the street
- I'm walking down the street and some thug has a gun pointed at me and just said, "Give me your money or else."
You fail to see the difference between something that is unfavorable due to bad luck, human error, technological insufficiencies, or voluntary (political, extra-juridical) measures versus those which are due to aggression or property rights violations.
If the employee refuses the offered wage, by what means will the authority of the employer to fire the employee be upheld?
The employer does so by the corollary to the non-aggression principle known as free-association.
Property law will be invoked, and enforced through, wait for it, force.
You might try starting over at step one, where I distinguished between the use of force in response to the initiation of aggression and using force out of the blue (initiating aggression).
If force is implied by the threat of unemployment, the employee, by your terms of aggression, is justified in using force to fight back.
Ridiculous strawman.
I think we could do a little better than a popularity contest every 4 years. Do you know enough about polycentric law to answer your own question?
The idea that loss of employment is 'force' is so ludicrous. An example of force would be for example if force was necessary to keep a worker away from a desk that they wanted to sit and type at and that was not their desk but rather their employers desk; but the mere cessation of a relationship is not any kind of 'force'
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
The idea that loss of employment is 'force' is so ludicrous.
These are usually the same people who say that taxation is a legitimate form of profit.
In that, of course, these are the very same people who talk about the relative stagnation of middle-class wages in places like the United States. What reply would you have to that sentiment, I'm curious? This phenomenon is of course the result of some chain of events, be they entirely consensual, partially, or non-consensual.