The online resources I can find right off the bat on this issue are remarkably scant. Do you have anything you suggest reading on the subject?
Shelly Kagan’s Normative Ethics.
Online? Haven’t really checked. Coverage of it was limited even on my uni courses. I’d recommend you read Rasmussen’s and den Uyl’s Norms of Liberty if you want a full-blown exposition on its importance and relation so far as the NAP goes.
-Jon
If I’m not mistaken, though, this entire argument has implied the distinction from the beginning. In what way are you hoping that the distinction will be informative to the conversation? I mean, obviously we’re talking about whether promotion of “the good” can be used as justification of a rights infringement, but defining “the right” to answer that question would simply beg the question.
Unless I, too, am mistaken, I believe you’re right. We just haven’t been using the same words for it.
I’m not faced with it now? I thought that was the whole point of this exercise? Am I not suppose to assume I AM in that situation and determine how I might act? Liar? I think not sir. Please show me where I’ve lied about anything. Fraud? Dream on! Hypocrite? No more than yourself or anyone else. I can only assume, based on how I think I might react, that I would try to save the life of the man on the mountain and if that meant violating my own “moral code” – gee…I wonder if I’m the only one whose ever done that? – then I guess I would. Get off your high horse man. No one is perfect and in imperfect situations I can only guess as to how I would act. You’d rather be right than honest. At least I’m honest about what I MIGHT do. I didn’t know moral perfection was a requirement in order to be an anarchist.
What the hell are you talking about? Identical answer to what? Whether or not it is right to steal someones property just because you think it’s ok to do so?
No its not. The NAP is already disproven when he stole the transporter, remember? I’m simply improving my utility.
Hold on, Jon, you don’t want to say that. What you need to argue is something like the idea that once someone violates the NAP, it does not count as aggression to use force against them. But you need to say more than that, since there are some things you can do to someone who violates the NAP which would count as aggression: if, for example, I stole a twinky from your store, you would not be justified in approaching me twenty years later and shooting me in the face. So the theory gets a little more complicated, especially when you factor in procedural justice, proportionality, and the debate between punishment and restitution.
You’re mistaking me. I was not responding within the confines of the NAP. I was acting free of the limitations of the NAP. Because, as was said, it had been obsoleted.
Of course I wouldn’t actually kill someone who stole a transporter. I was attempting to point out the absurdity of using a hypothetical, complete with a “happily everafter” ending, to prove utility. I was asking if he would still violate the nap if it resulted in a reduction of utility.
Okay yea, I misunderstood. Sorry about that.
I agree Jon. This seems to be the issue and to me it seems the way to frame it. Sometimes wording can be confusion though. To me the idea of property rights is to devide the moral question, i.e. what is good, from the rights question. I do not think that the right dominates though, it is only the least common denominator and moral is in an other realm. Like if you talk about biology you usually do not mix it with engineering roads.
Have a great day
It is indeed, I think. First, I believe, that one of the challenges is the term crime itself. We are used to identify this term with something that is immoral because it is used by the law givers exactly in that way, for what I think to be of obvious reasons. Avoiding taxation is a crime so it is immoral, right?
From my perspective crime is therefor a bad term for the basic relationships between humans and their rights to their own property. What about using the term contract instead? Jut for the sake of the argument. A contract is an agreement between two or more parties. Now if someone doesn’t fullfil his part of the contract, what is he supposed to do? Right, he is supposed to heal the contract by whatever it takes to do so. As no third party is involved, no third party has any reason nor any right to interfere neither by punishment nor by any other way.
From my perspective, laws indeed do not have a moral basis. People should respect the right to self ownership, because it allows them to cooperate, and cooperation is the most effective and safe way to survive.
It is counterproductive to violate contracts as it increases the always risk of ones position to be successful. And, frome the perspective of the violated, it makes no difference if you violate a right intentionally or not.
Only when you start to involve third parties, groups that is, that claim, because of superior knowledge (moral, ethics), they now can decide not only if the contract was violated but also what kind of punishment is appropriate, you can make a measurement on this. The yardstick you use to measure, is the groups morale or ethics. If you think that road is valid, you open the door wide for collectivistic ideas regarding the law.
I can not see how this is legal positivism, but if you like to call it that way I don’t mind, neither can I see how that would set me outside of libertarianism. Isn’t this view actually the only applicable way to prevent group law and group think, i.e. collectivsm?
I’m not trying to prove utility. I know it looks that way, but I’m not a utilitarian. No, I say the person should take the tranporter because it that action is compassionate (saves a person’s life), brave (faces off against a callous foe who is in a position of advantage, already possessing the life-saving device), and therefore, good and virtuous. Your shooting the person in the face, regardless of the utility you think you increase, is petty, vengeful, and murderous, and therefore evil.
Come to think of it, I think Niccolo’s argument implicitly brought in the distinction. So maybe you’re right.
-Jon
Anarcho-Capitalism, inasmuch as it depends on the NAP (though many here have said it does not, and it is not my purpose to dispute this latter point), is defeated. One of the great benefits of anarchy is that, under it, there is no huge institution that will punish people for good deeds that somehow violate unbending and simplistic rules. Only statist-type legalists, for whom utter predictability and order is the highest end, would prosecute a person from taking a life-saving tool from someone being simply callous and miserly and using it to save a life.
Only under the state is the right warped away from the good.
Well but hold on. “The right” is not the same thing as the “rights” that people have. Only with a Nozickian side constraint-style view, where rights always trump, would the two be identical. No?
No, for the last time, it is not defeated, because you are making the illicit move that aggression in emergency situations (which still demands restitution) somehow is licence for violation of the NAP in non-emergency circumstances. If this assumption is not made, anarcho-capitalism is not “defeated”, and the argument is bunk. All it does show is that, as a matter of personal morality, one might be impelled to violate the NAP at certain junctures. It says nothing of whether they are, by way of right, entitled to do so without expectation of restitution for the victim.
-Jon
And on the political level, they do always trump. Every single violation of the NAP that is morally permissible mentioned so far is a matter of personal morality, which the aggressor can expect to be forced to compensate the victim for.
-Jon
No, I’m not saying that violating the NAP is OK in non-emergency situations. I am saying that a principle which is a principle except in situations x, y, and z is no principle at all, and that we should, rather than contenting ourselves with flawed pseudo-principles, work to find true and consistent principles, even if to do so we must move away from deontological rules proscribing particular actual behaviors. I am also saying that when aggression is the proper and good sort of action to take, you should aggress, and that, given that it was, in fact, a good deed, you should face no penalty whatsoever for it.
Another aspect that perhaps you overlook here is that the other party, the one you aggress against, is being evil; thus, the good shall be his enemy. If the other man needed the teleporter, with only one charge, to save his loved one, and you stole it and used that one charge to save your loved one, you would indeed owe restitution. The motivations of both parties matter.