A question for anarchists

Economics Political Theory
61

I refer you to my earlier answer. I am certainly not advocating squatting. As for your assertion that I’m arguing some sort of libertarian socialist position, that’s nonsense.

Of course they do. A mentally impaired person has an absolute right to life, just like every human being. They possess this right*. No one else does.* Their right to life cannot be taken away or given to someone else. It belongs to them and them alone. They cannot be killed. This does not mean that they have a right to be fed, clothed etc; it’s just that no one can take their life from them.

Nonsense. They’re alive aren’t they? They’re using their life.

No. A person can have custodial rights over the individual. But they emphatically do not have possession of the individual’s right to life. We get back to the fact that these are two different kinds of rights!

I would be happy to discuss abortion, but I think you should start another topic.

62

I refer you to my earlier answer. I am certainly not advocating squatting. As for your assertion that I’m arguing some sort of libertarian socialist position, that’s nonsense.

Of course they do. A mentally impaired person has an absolute right to life, just like every human being. They possess this right*. No one else does.* Their right to life cannot be taken away or given to someone else. It belongs to them and them alone. They cannot be killed. This does not mean that they have a right to be fed, clothed etc; it’s just that no one can take their life from them.

Nonsense. They’re alive aren’t they? They’re using their life.

No. A person can have custodial rights over the individual. But they emphatically do not have possession of the individual’s right to life. We get back to the fact that these are two different kinds of rights!

I would be happy to discuss abortion, but I think you should start another topic.

63

I refer you to my earlier answer. I am certainly not advocating squatting. As for your assertion that I’m arguing some sort of libertarian socialist position, that’s nonsense.

Of course they do. A mentally impaired person has an absolute right to life, just like every human being. They possess this right*. No one else does.* Their right to life cannot be taken away or given to someone else. It belongs to them and them alone. They cannot be killed. This does not mean that they have a right to be fed, clothed etc; it’s just that no one can take their life from them.

Nonsense. They’re alive aren’t they? They’re using their life.

No. A person can have custodial rights over the individual. But they emphatically do not have possession of the individual’s right to life. We get back to the fact that these are two different kinds of rights!

I would be happy to discuss abortion, but I think you should start another topic.

64

I refer you to my earlier answer. I am certainly not advocating squatting. As for your assertion that I’m arguing some sort of libertarian socialist position, that’s nonsense.

Of course they do. A mentally impaired person has an absolute right to life, just like every human being. They possess this right*. No one else does.* Their right to life cannot be taken away or given to someone else. It belongs to them and them alone. They cannot be killed. This does not mean that they have a right to be fed, clothed etc; it’s just that no one can take their life from them.

Nonsense. They’re alive aren’t they? They’re using their life.

No. A person can have custodial rights over the individual. But they emphatically do not have possession of the individual’s right to life. We get back to the fact that these are two different kinds of rights!

I would be happy to discuss abortion, but I think you should start another topic.

65

I don’t know how to use the quoting feature, so unfortunately I have to resort to numbering my responses to the order in which you wrote your comments.

  1. Your definition of the word ‘right’ was: “Right” A just claim or title whether legal, prescriptive or MORAL

  2. Yupp. I quite literally meant that I didn’t understand what you were saying about replacing the word right with claim. Perhaps you could explain that further such as which cases you were specifically talking about.

  3. If I have received certain rights due to a contract, I cannot use those rights to violate the contract. If I have received certain rights by taking a custodial role over them, I cannot violate the terms of custodinship. If I own property, I cannot use that property to violate another person’s rights. It seems to me that to call the right to property more “absolute” than the other two is simply semantics. It seems to be a distinction without a difference.

  4. You asserted: “all natural rights must be similarly applied.” My question to you is why? Keep in mind, I agree that the right to ones body must be equally applied. I also agree that all rights which you call natural must be equally applied. But my question is, if you say this is not because of a social contract, then why?

  5. If a person stills retains the contractual ownership over a piece of property, then isn’t it entirely subjective at what point the individual has suffieciently abandoned the property? How can you justly claim that the intent of the owner was to forfeit ownership over a piece of property without contacting the owner? It seems that he could justly claim at any time that he never had the intent of forfeiting ownership.

  6. To be honest, I’ve always been perplexed by the usage of the term nature in regards to rights and their origins. In a recent Mises.org blog posting by Lew Rockwell entitled "Land Socialism: Playing With Fire ", Lew describes nature as “mean, dangerous, cruel, and often thoroughly evil.” He goes on to state “We thrive and rule nature, or nature rules and eats us alive.” Why then do we allow nature to dictate our rights? Why does nature determine justice? I’ve never understood it.

  7. Do you know of any non-utilitarian rights theorists who do not claim that rights are derived from god or nature? I’d really appreciate it if you could recommend me a few thinkers. I know that Hans Hermann Hoppe has attempted to do this with his version of “argumentation ethics”, but do you know of anyone else?

66

Oops. Didn’t see the continuation of your email. Number 6 of the last email is in response to your general usage of the word nature and natural rights. 7 is not related directly to anything you said.

  1. Aren’t you describing squatting on abandoned property that was previously privately owned? I don’t see how that is different from squatting. I said that you seemed to be describing libertarian socialims because if the definition of abandonement is left to subjectivity, then what is to stop society from devolving into libertarian socialism? Over time, it is likely that the definition of abandoned will become broader and broader.

  2. In response to your assertions about the mentally impaired’s right to life, I would simply bring forward two examples. Let’s say that an individual is physically injured or contracts a disease that leaves them in a vegetative state. This individual is alive, and therefore, according to you, using their right to life. Does this then mean that they must be kept alive in perpetuity? Assuming that the individual is not married, can a member of the hospital staff choose to pull the plug? It seems to me that this case is very similar to that of a parent with a child. The mentaly impaired individual is not in a position to give their consent, and therefore, another individual may assume custodial possession of their rights.

Another example, an individual becomes terribly stricken by a psychological disease that renders them unable to control their actions in any way that remotely resembles how they would act if they were behaving rationally. Isn’t this case also like that of the child? The individual in question is unable to give their consent any more than the child can (possibly less). Therefore, they forfeit their own rights.

This is not at all the same as saying that they can be killed by anyone who chooses to do so. They can be killed by the individual who maintians custodial possession of their rights, insofar as that individual is acting in accordance with what the mentally impaired individual would consent to if they could. This of course is subjective, but it can be known to a reasonable degree.

If a person maintains custodial rights over an individual (as you assert) then they implicitly maintain the custodial right to life of that individual. You seem to be arguing that individual rights does not encompass the right to life (which it must). This is what confuses me with your assertion. For instance, when we say that someone owns a slaves, that means that the master owns the slaves basic individual rights. The master can dictate what actions the slave can take. Is that not the same thing as saying that the master owns the slaves right to life, right to their body, right to speach, right to property, etc.?

  1. It is certainly reasonable to say that the abortion issue has become tangential. I agree that it makes sense to leave it at that for now.
67

Jan Narveson in his The Libertarian Idea (contractarianism) and Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice, Nozick in his Anarchy, State and Utopia (deontology), Rothbard in his Ethics of Liberty (natural rights), den Uyl’s and Rasmussen’s Norms of Liberty (Aristotelean ethics), Peikoff’s Objectivism, Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness, Kelley’s The Logical Structure of Objectivism, and of course Hoppe’s The Economics and Ethics of private property all deal with rights. These works all deal with non-religious justifications for rights. Anthony Flew, Roderick Long, Geoffrey Alan Plauche etc. also have articles available online. These are all good places to begin looking.

Also, you asked something about why we allow nature to ‘dictate’ what our rights are. That is a misunderstanding of the term ‘natural’ right. A natural right is one which man possesses in accord with his nature qua rational being. It is not one ‘dictated’ by nature, at least in the sense that nature is anthropomorphised. Moreover, be aware that Rockwell is evoking the term in a specific sense there, namely in contradistinction to how environmentalists see nature as more important than humans.

To quote, you use the tags quote tag , putting any text you want quoted between the tags and the tags themselves in brackets (e.g [/x], where x is the tag).

68

Thanks BrainPolice! That’s what I had in mind.

69
70

If human rights do not come from nature, god, or some part of the environment and universe in general, it seems to me that they must come from other humans. Saying that rights come from man’s nature qua man is nice, but it doesn’t seem like it accomplishes anything to me in itself. Rights are rules by which humans treat each other, and so must be recognized by all parties in order to be rights. In other words, they must come from a shared ethic, although the means by which this ethic is spread can naturally be through normative, philosophical argument.

Since you’ve got to convince other people of your system of rights for them to mean anything, I think any system of rights not being derived from god or nature will always boil down to consequentialist arguments (i.e., “why should I accept your system of rights, what will it do for me?”). Fortunately, most people who argue about this sort of thing are concerned about the consequences of far more than their immediate needs.

71

DW89, I’ll try to keep this short. A person has an absolute right to life. This means their life cannot be taken away (except if they aggress against another). They cannot be killed, for example. This does not mean they have a right to be kept alive (fed, clothed, kept on life support,etc). If you decide not to provide life support, and they die, this is not killing. You have not violated their right to life, nor have you taken over their right to life. You have simply asserted your right not to have to keep them alive. There’s a big difference.

As regards property rights, if a person abandons property, at what point does it become unowned and free to be homesteaded again? It’s subjective, like many things in life. There are no hard and fast rules. Common sense has to apply. This has nothing to do with collectivism or socialism. Just the opposite. In a Libertarian society all property is privately owned or it’s not owned at all. There is no public property.

72

Thanks so much for the reply. I greatly appreciate it. I’d just like to clarify a bit further though, so that I may begin my search at the most useful place. I am essentially interested in finding an argument for “natural” rights that is able to circumvent the “is-ought problem”, “naturalistic fallacy”, “fact-value distinction”, or whatever else you’d like to call it. The only arguments I know of that successfully do so are derived from argumentation ethics. Do the other theorists you suggested also successfully accomplish this feat? I don’t know the answer to this, but I’m assuming they don’t, so I’d ask which of them do.

You are certainly correct in your explanation of what constitutes ‘natural’ in the term ‘natural rights’ insofar as many libertarians do may that claim. However, if I’m not mistaken, there are in fact other libertarian thinkers who attempt to look at nature (in a more general sense), and derive rights from the patterns that they find within it. Perhaps I am incorrect in that none of these thinkers are in fact libertarian or classical liberals. I realize that Rockwell was certainly attempting to draw the distinction you described, but I suppose I had in mind the latter conception of natural that I outlined above, in which case I do think a libertarian would be contradiction his/herself. Of course, I’m guessing that Lew Rockwell himself does not espouse that position.

73

Fortunately, most people who argue about this sort of thing are concerned about the consequences of far more than their immediate needs. True, but if the basis of rights does not effectively circumvent the is-ought problem, then it seems the theory can quickly devolve into a sort of utilitarianism. What I mean is, what is to stop a person from subjectively choosing different long term needs (or desires) than another individual, purely based upon the real or percieved utility of those long term needs? For example, libertarians generally believe that law serves only to promote and ensure justice, rights, and individual liberties. Most libertarians believe that morality should be seperated from the law because the creation of moral law (or law that promotes equality) comes at the direct expense of liberty. But what is to stop an individual from arriving at the conclusion that law should indeed be moral, and that the loss of liberty is an acceptable consequence of a moral society?

Granted, you correctly pointed out that argument and debate could provide a libertarians a way to succeed in convincing others that individual liberty is indeed the only sensical basis of law. One could use economics to prove this. However, it seems that we’re having a difficult time winning that battle at the present time. I therefore believe that if libertarians were able to present a case for an ‘objective’ basis of ‘natural’ rights, we may well be far more successful than we are currently.

74

To my knowledge Aristoteleans do not see the fact-value dichotomy as valid, and so any of the Aristoteleans (and thus Objectivists) I mentioned might offer arguments for it. I think den Uyl and Rasmussen specifically do so in their book, though I haven’t read it. Narveson’s contractarian ethics also try and circumvent the whole problem, much like Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, of which I think the stronger is the second, though it needs some work still.

Do you perhaps mean social darwinist types?

I agree with you on your response to Grant for the most part - if anything, it is economics that illumines why laissez-faire is the way to go. The rights theories can be used to justify the ethical structure necessary for it against all other structures. Something important to keep in mind, most libertarians separate what is one’s right to do and what it is moral to do, and also see positive law, specifically, as pernicious; law in accord with libertarian principles would be seen as both desirable and righteous.

75

I think there are several issues not addressed. One is understanding slavery. In history slavery was an option to prisons. If one stole, was caught, and could not repay that which he stole he was sold into slavery to pay his debt. If one came into any financial problems in which he could not pay his debt, he was sold into slavery to pay it. This was not generally for a lifetime, but until the debt was paid. In ancient Sumer slaves were able to own property, and conduct business in their own name, much like the slaves, oops I mean citizens, in the United States. When your labor is taxed, i.e., part of it belongs to another entity, be it a person, company, or government, you are slave to that entity.

Parents most definitely own their children, until they reach the age at which they can support and provide themselves. Until then the parents have a right to their labor. Parents, which is inclusive in ownership, have a resposnibility to maintain that property. If the owner wants his property to perform at its peak, he needs to make sure the property has what it needs. In the case of a child, that means proper nutrition, and good examples of good behavior. In getting the child to perform slave labor, e.g., taking out the trash, etc., the child is learning to take care of him or herself. In performing this slave labor, or chores, the child helps pay for his upkeep.

About the drugs, a question that was not addressed was, do the parents consume the drug? My mother was like most, taking over the counter drugs. Early in my life, about 13, I decided I did not want to take them. When I got a cold I did nothing for it. I let it run its course naturally. After a number of years the severity of the cold lessened, until I did not get them anymore. The last time I had a cold was in 1982. I cannot remember the last time I had the flu. I do not get flu shots, or any other shots. I do not even take aspirin. I do not get headaches.

As much as one may want, he does not have the authority to tell another how to treat his property. If the owner abandons that property, then another, if he wants to take the responsibility for ownership, may claim it. However, because the owner is not in the immediate presence of the property does not constitute abandonment. Just because the owner is not on his real property does not give others the right to homestead it.

I do not do meth, therefore I would not give it to my child. I do not take man made drugs, therefore neither would I give them to my children. I do drink beer, and if my child at age 5 wanted a drink, I would likely give him a taste. I would not give him own his own bottle or can. In years past in Europe, and probably today, children were given wine mixed with water to drink, the younger, the more water.

The child learns from its parents through imprinting. Raising a child is a job, not a hobby. By looking after the best interest of your property, you are looking after your own best interests.

76

Yes. This is the difference between negative and positive liberty. But, access to land (to exist IS TO occupying land somewhere - they can’t be separated) is not something that is “provided” to you because there is no labor involved from the landowner. Land is a freely “created” good. It is access that is provided via exclusive use.

The use of the word “public” is unfortunate because it means two different things in common usage.

  1. common property

  2. collective property

Classical liberalism’s negative liberty framework is built off of the concept of common property and rights.

Collectively owned property requires the consent of all the other joint owners (consensus) or their delegated authority PRIOR to access/use.

Common property does not. You are free to act so long as in your acting to access or use you do not infringe on the individual equal access rights of anyone else.

77

No they don’t.

Parents have a right to their children’s labor until they can support themselves? Running away to live with someone is supporting themselves, isn’t it? So parents have a right to their child’s labor so long as the child agrees to give it to them? Doesn’t sound like a right to me.

78

How is having a right to one’s labor different from owning that one? That is part of the definition of ownership, that you have a right to use the possession.

The very essence of running away suggests the runner cannot support himself, especially if he or she has to find someone with whom to live. If the runner can support himself, then he is merely leaving home, flying out of the nest. Supporting oneself involves more than just finding a job and earning money. There is laundry to do, meals to cook, etc.

I said ownership was until the child could take care of himself. You say until the child refuses to give his labor. If the child refuses to give his labor because his labor can sustain him, then he is able to take care of himself. If the child refuses to labor period, then where will he go to get someone else to take care of one who refuses to work. And if he refuses to labor at all, he certainly cannot take care of himself. If this then breaks the ownership contract, then kick his ass out in the cold, because you have no responsibility to something you do not own.

Slaves were not to be mistreated, unless they refused to labor. With ownership comes responsibility. If you want something you own to perform well, you must care for it, as with a car, so with a child, or a slave. Not all car owners, not all parents, not all masters treat their responsibilities equally.

All men, and women are created equally, one sperm, one egg. After that first split of the cell, the equality is gone. Each person is a unique individual. The right to life includes the right to ownership. Ownership can only be over something that cannot take care if itself, e.g., domesticated animals, fruit and nuts from a tree, a car, a child who cannot take care of himself.

79

That children who run away are returned to their parents means that the parents do legitimately own the child. Only when the child can challenge that ownership does he become emancipated.

80

Roger Daugherty, out of curiosity, do you consider your ‘theory’ about slavery to be, uh, libertarian ? Or are you rather arguing for ‘natural’ slavery ?