Why do we make distinct emergency and non-emergency situations in relation to the NAP?
The NAP is an absolute and does not go on a “case by case” approach.
What political, Jon? Why would we want politics in our stateless society? Why do so many “anarchists” want to have so many institutions? Anarchy should be a radically individualistic “system”, not a system of private government.
True, and since ancap does not depend on the NAP whoatsoever, it is not defeated at all - it loses no ground whatsoever. And things would play out the way we want them to in ancap without some sort of magical force commanding everyone to follow NAP absolutely.
The only way for the most people to benefit in the best way for every situation, is to go the utility route - that’s what utility is. Unfortunately utility can not be implemented. Someone would have to decide what is best for everyone and we all know how well that works out 
Following the NAP results in better utility overall than if you tried to implement pure utility. There may or may not be another principle that is practical and achieves a higher utility than NAP overall but it has been a looooong time and no one has come up with one. There may even be philosophical reasons for why it is impossible to have a principle that achieves higher utility than NAP. But if you want to go on some quest to find, that’s fine, but don’t expect people to throw something away if you have nothing better to replace it with - oh and if you do go on that quest, be prepared to throw away the rest of your life because it is unlikely you’ll find anything.
NAP is still a principle even though it may not achieve the best results in situation x, y or z, it just means that that principle didn’t achieve the most optimal results possible in that situation. Just because it doesn’t work in every situation doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be applied absolutely in law. Even when applied absolutely in law, in an ancap society, the hero is likely not punished, the victim is compensated and the child is saved. The reason for applying it in an absolute manner in the law is so that people can follow it. When you have a millions different laws where everything is different for every situation (e.g. any country right now), then you can’t possibly keep a check on things, you couldn’t possibly stop all the bad laws, you couldn’t possibly know all the laws and you can’t possibly follow all the laws. Consistent laws are needed even though life is not consistent. The NAP is the best option for that. Agreed?
I qualified my statements elsewhere to state that I’m not arguing that AnCap ideas are dependent upon the NAP. I reject the Cap bit for other reasons, but that really wasn’t what I was trying to argue.
Your statements are irrelevant to me. I reject law in general, and do not see why we are having a discussion about such a thing in an anarchist context. What law? Who says? Whence this law? Millions of different laws? Where are you getting all these laws in a society where no man has official power over another?
Again, I am neither a deontologist nor a utilitarian. We never truly know the ends of our actions. You may save a boy who will one day kill thousands. You just can’t know. Utilitarianism is the height of hubris. Deontology is by definition too simplistic; a possible (albeit sometimes implausible) situation could always be contemplated where it would be good to violate the rule.
You don’t need rules. In an anarchist, individualist society, each action can be evaluated individually, and put in terms of good or evil.
Let’s take a for instance. You, and several others, watched a man kill your child in cold blood. The man then escapes. You catch up to him only years later, when he has a dependent child for whom he is the only support. You take your vengeance upon the man, killing him. His child is left without any obligated support. Surely, utility is at best neutral in this situation, and realistically, the situation is probably worse than it was before. Yet, was it not good that you avenge your child? Should a man be able to hide behind his dependents from the horrors he committed? Were you not honorable and determined in your steadfast pursuit, brave in your confrontation of a known murderer? And if that child now starves, is it not truly just a further crime of the father, who was irresponsible enough to have a child when he knew his life was forfeit?
I know you’re not arguing that ancap is dependant on NAP. That’s why I agreed with you 
Just because it is an anarchy doesn’t mean you won’t have rules. Maybe you don’t want to call them laws, call them whatever you want. For example, you will probably have an agreement between you and your protection agency that you will not go around randomly killing people. My point was that even if those agreements are arranged to align completely with the NAP, in this situation, the hero is likely not paying restitution, the victim gets compensated and the child is saved. So this situation is no excuse to not apply the NAP in the rules, agreements or whatever you want to call it. There is going to be some rule for this class of situation and if you break the rules whenever you want then the agreements mean nothing. That’s why I say the NAP should be followed absolutely when put into the rules of an agreement.
There may be situations where the NAP is better not put into the rules of an agreement or the rules violate the NAP and then there would be no need to follow the NAP absolutely for that situation. You would instead follow the rules that are laid out in that agreement. If this is what you’re getting at then I’ll agree with you but I take it to mean you are saying to abolish all rules and agreements and everything is determined on a case by case basis. That, I don’t agree with.
You may not agree with it, but who are you to say otherwise? In an anarchic society, you have no power over how others conduct their affairs or live out their ethics, you have the power over your own actions, and to defend yourself from others. If you want rules, go ahead and live by rules. But there is no central authority to agree with you.
There doesn’t need to be a central authority to agree with me.
Really, I find it hard to believe that you think you could live in an ancap society without ever entering into an agreement that contained rules as to how the agreement was set up. You could try to get by like that if you wanted but I can’t see it working out.
That’s basically a statist argument. You think we need some sort of higher authority, some institution, albeit mayhap the choice of which is free, to follow the rules of. Of course, since the people under that institution need to interact with each other, we need some sort of cross-agency agreements, which will require some sort of multigroup arbitration/coordination group. And so on and so forth.
Now, if you want to agree to follow certain rules, I can respect that. It would then be dishonorable for you to violate the rules you freely agreed to.
Now, of course any contract has terms, to which the signatories would be bound. However, overall rules (such as the NAP) are different agreements than the contract to buy a car.
By political, I would assume he means the properly Aristotelian conception of politics: as equals cooperating in joint pursuit of eudaimonia.
Well I’m not sure the representatives of a corporate entity are ever justified in initiating force on behalf of that entity against the corporation’s own customers without some contractual justification for doing so…so it seems like all justified aggressive force would need to be initiated by individuals on their own behalf. No? That doesn’t really settle the question, though, because we’re not dealing with public actions. We’re talking about individuals determining what would be morally acceptable.
It seems to me that in order to call something morally wrong, we’d need to believe that someone doing it would be deserving of at least some level of condemnation. And honestly, I’m not sure that I’d condemn the guy who initiated force to save the kid. Perhaps if he had to use a lot of force, I’d be a little uneasy with the situation, but if all he had to do was shove the boat owner out of the boat and use it to save the kid, I think I’d come down on his side (though, for strict liability reasons, I’d say he might have to compensate the boat owner for any damage he caused in the process). And if he didn’t actually have to physically harm the boat owner, but rather had only to take the boat without permission, that seems even more clear to me.
It is my belief that Ancap legal systems would revolve around common law or customary law, which is far from being a set of unbending and simplistic rules. I believe that it would tend towards an objective system of law based on the NAP precisely because of this flexibility, including the ability to focus on economic costs and feedback. It would be much more humane and realistic than you give it credit for.
Another point is that rights and the NAP do not prevent aggression and rights-violations from occurring. While this might seem obvious at one level, what it means is that a principle like the NAP is a principle of society, and not necessarily an individual principle. The difference is that society should never veer from the principle, even though some individuals invariably will.
If someone violates someone’s right to save someone’s life, it may indeed be the “right” thing for the individual to do, and yet, still require that he be prosecuted for violating the right. But the Ancap legal system, as a common or customary system, and thus much more flexible than authoritarian legislation, would take the reasons for the rights-violation into consideration, and most likely would come up with a light or lenient decision in recognition of such. The reason society should not veer from the principle is precisely to discourage individuals from violating it without the best of reasons. People are free to violate it, but must suffer the consequences if they are wrong, or have bad reasons for doing so. Is that not truly a more individualistic, anarchistic society than one where people are expected to never violate the principle?
I’m not sure how coherent this is, so gimme a break! But surely there is a meaningful distinction between the individual and society that would apply, even in anarchism.
And I am saying that is nonsense. The principle is absolute in the contexts it applies. It is you who is operating on the basis of a deontic view of principles (i.e. being applicable to any and all contexts, universally.) not me.
What is more evil is the fact that one is willing to render another a slave to their needs, even though this victim had no prior obligation to the aggressor in question. One wonders where the limits of such “obligations” end, and why it would not be legitimate to tear the victim’s heart out if it were a heart the sufferer required.
-Jon
Political = interpersonal. The post you quoted earlier noted this. It refers to the legal aspect of any system, and specifically conflict-resolution.
-Jon
That’s what I thought you meant; wombatron’s post got me confused. In any case, I don’t think that’s a reasonable position. Can you not think of a case where you would think it odd to condemn a person for using force for a reason other than self-defense?
I can see some merit in the idea that situations like these involve a suspension of the ethical. But my objection to that characterization would be that these kinds of situations wouldn’t permit you to do anything in order to save the child. That is, we might imagine that you didn’t know how to use the boat; I don’t know if you’d be able to torture the boat owner until he went out to save the child, at the threat of you killing him if he didn’t go through with it. So it’s not a suspension of the ethical. I’d simply think of it in terms of people being normally entitled to being treated in certain ways, such that you need a really significant reason to treat them otherwise, and this situation represents one of those “extreme situations” in which we can contemplate doing things that would normally be disrespectful to others’ individuality.
You’ve read my paper on the Rich Victim Problem, right? What did you think of my analysis of Thomson’s idea that in some situations, it might be disrespectful to insist that one’s rights be respected? I ask not because I think that point was obviously correct, but rather because it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to me, and it seems like it would be a useful point to discuss in the context of this debate.
Why should legal impermissibility necessarily entail moral condemnation? I mean I might consider it morally commendable that a mother went to great lengths to insure her daughter’s survival, even if it involved theft, but that doesn’t mean I would not consider her action theft. I’d still think she had to make her victim whole, even if I thought given the circumstances it was the right action. I only view the NAP as a principle necessary to bring about the conditions necessary for self-directed moral activity, i.e. to prohibit the initiation of force at the legal level. I’m still ambivalent to the notion of the suspension of the ethical (i.e. emergency situations in which rights do not apply, as Rand pretty much argued, and so do Rasmussen and den Uyl following her), though, and you may be right that some of the circumstances described to not come under it (but I’d argue they don’t negate the NAP, given that one can still expect restitution on part of the aggressors.) Wombatron is correct in what I meant, but I am just avoiding any use of vocabulary specific to Aristotelianism for the moment to put the argument in more general terms.
I haven’t seen it - could you link to it?
-Jon
What does “legal permissibility” mean, though? Are you saying that aggression should be the only positive defense? Are you working in a framework of restitution and strict liability, or punishment and the duty of care doctrine?
Here’s the link: http://libertarian-left.blogspot.com/2008/02/respecting-rich-victim-boundary.html
By legally impermissible, I mean an action that one has right to defend themselves against and expect (on part of the aggressor) restitution to compensate for the harm. I lean towards the former doctrine.
I’ll give it a read.
-Jon
Hahahaha
Don’t you just LOVE the extreme, absurd and bizarre hypotheticals people launch as an “attack” on anarcho-capitalism?
But just to entertain your post, I’ll put myself in fantasy land for a moment and explain what I’d do…I’d steal it from him, “zap” the friend to safety and face the consequences. Stealing still would have it’s repercussions in an anarcho society, and I’d be glad to face them for something like that.
Jon, do you think that force can be justified not only in repelling an attack at the specific time that the attack is launched, but also in enforcing justice after the fact (i.e., taking back stolen property)? Or to enforce a contract? If so to either, would the person having the force used against them be justified in defending themselves?
Quick, related question, for anyone in the know: is a duty of care, or something similar, compatible with a framework of pure restitution?