Good replies imo.
EmperorNero,
Great post on wealth redistribution. I understood the principles already but after reading your post I think I will be able to better articulate the argument. I usually just say “how can the poor buy more goods if the goods are not produced?”, which usually just confuses people lol.
Get voluntarily raped by paedophiles in an extremely unlikely scenario or get involuntarily raped by the State on a regular basis?
I’m sorry, but this passes as a difficult question?
She cannot enter into a contract as she cannot consent. That was easy.
"What if the 100 paedophiles had found that girl scavenging on a rubbish tip, close to death from malnutrition, and offered to pay her just enough to buy food for a week in return for a spot of torture and violent sex?
According to your libertarian philosophy, this girl has now voluntarily entered into a contract with the paedophiles – she has freely chosen to be tortured and gangbanged – while the paedophiles are to be morally praised for acting selfishly (but without coercing the child into anything)."
I am not ready to accept this conclusion, so I consider the elements of the situation one at a time in an effort to find the loophole that will enable me to escape the conclusion.
To keep things simpler, assuming the ‘victim’ is 25 years old, not a child. Why are you not ready to accept this conclusion?
It’s true that it would be strange to ‘morally praise’ the would-be torturers, since they haven’t done anything exceptionally praiseworthy. But they have potentially improved the situation of this person by offering them an extra choice that they wouldn’t otherwise have–they certainly haven’t made her situation worse.
So if the torturers are to be morally condemned, it can only be because they haven’t done enough to help this person. But in this case, since they’ve already done more to help than all the others who haven’t intervened in any way, all the non-interveners must be condemned even more severely–all the people who aren’t scouring the rubbish heaps, looking for people in trouble.
I agree. The trap I fell into was confusing benefit giving actions and moral praise.
The transaction is mutually beneficial, but that does not mean we have to morally praise the torturers. It would have been morally praiseworthy to simply help the woman, rather than add perhaps the least beneficial additional choice to her options. However, it is certainly correct that this is better for her than doing nothing, by her own subjective criteria if she accepts the offer.
thing is.. it is NOT mutual beneficial transaction. Pedophiles get pleasure, and girl gets food and shelter AND torture and rape. One has to be INSANE to call it beneficial. At least, according to my use of word “beneficial”. Some libertarians tend to think in black and white terms too much, as if everything is ruled by logic and reason.
thing is.. it is NOT mutual beneficial transaction.
If it was not, why would the woman accept the offer? Given that she’s free to reject it, acceptance indicates that she prefers it to the available alternatives.
Any voluntary transaction is by definition mutually beneficial, otherwise it would not be entered into voluntarily. Clearly this is one of the most extreme cases possible, but if the proposed “trade” were not considered beneficial by either party then they would simply turn it down and be in the same position as if the “trade” had not been offered.
Clearly it is not a good transaction in the moral sense and everyone would morally condemn the torturers, but the alternative to the offer is certain death. It is not illogical to value being tortured and raped more highly than being dead. (Although some would clearly make a different choice)
The point I am making is that when faced with the ultimate negative consequence (death) even really horrible alternatives can be beneficial.
she is forced by the circumstances, and the rapists acknoledge that and are using their temporary power to abuse her. That’s it.
she is forced by the circumstances
Everyone is influenced by factors beyond their control, all the time. That’s neither here nor there. This doesn’t change the fact that acceptance of the offer reveals that the accepter believes it is to her benefit to do so. The agreement, assuming it is made, is mutually beneficial.
Right, there’s no question that it wasn’t mutually beneficial. Each party suffered a detriment and gained a benefit. The child/woman acted and so swapped a set of unfavorable circumstances for a set of more favorable circumstances in order to remove unease.
Now the real question is whether this is moral or just (in terms of positive law) or not.
I’m not very familiar with how it is in common law countries, but over here even when disregarding the content of the contract and the age of the child, such contracts would still be thrown out of the court due to it being an abuse of circumstances. Agreements made through an abuse of circumstances lack consent in the same way an agreement made through deception,intimidation and such lack consent. If I were to convince you to sign a contract because I kept nagging you to do so right after you heard a loved one died, or because you happen to be a brilliant supermodel heiress who is smitten with my masculine charms who I convince to put a signature at the bottom of the document because my hands are caressing erogenous zones it would get thrown out for the same reason.
Another reason why a judge could throw it out is that it can be thrown out based on what I believe in English is called either equity or natural justice. If the judge considers the contract unreasonable he can ammend it or throw it out. It happens quite a lot with pre-nups where there is a seperation of goods but the judge decides that because the wife has been a housewife for a while she has a right to a share of the wealth, because she gave up her career for the well-being of children or something else that can’t be transfered into wealth. Or because the pre-nup was signed too close before the wedding. If those agreements get thrown out then I assume you have done the math and realised that the example the person gave is rubbish.
While societies based on libertarian philosophy would have slightly different laws than current ones, I doubt it would: 1) Allow children to agree to contracts unfit for their age, 2) Have legalized pedophilia, 3) Allow civilians to torture 4) Not consider an abuse of circumstances a defect of consent, 5) Have a judge that is unwilling and/or unable to throw out unreasonable contracts.
Again, still a ridiculous hypothetical. It’s like Molyneaux answering the “what if some maniac pulled a shotgun on me for accidentally stepping on his property?” situation. People just do not do this sort of thing in any kind of society, and that sort of person would probably already have been dealt with by enjoying the persona non grata status.
If there’s a chance there’s a roving horde of pedophiles, there’s more likely a chance that one or two charitable people will find the child first. These situations don’t happen in a vaccuum.
Say, “Prove that it increases utility.” There you go.
Dangit, bitbutter beat me to the response.
When considering a libertarian scenario, always consider the alternatives and see which is better:
She gets tortured but is able to survive and live on (because there is no one else around, apparently)
She is simply left to die
Would these leftists now argue that it is better to let her die?
Plus, the same exact argument can be made against democracy: If 75% of people vote to kill all black people, is it moral and just? Obviously not. Hence, democracy is disproved!!! No, not quite. See how such hypotheticals break down?
As someone else mentioned, none of this happens in a vacuum:
Why is the girl by herself and starving?
Why are there no other decent people around?
How come there is a marauding gang of pedophiles walking about randomly?
Is there really literally no food around her? (No roots, berries, anything?)
Does she have no cell phone?
Has she entered a contract with her guardian that prohibits her from entering into such contracts with pedophiles? (because this could very well happen in a libertarian society)
If the leftists want to put you in a corner, they will say this: The girl fell out of a van in the middle of the desert with no food or water or clothes or cell phone, doesn’t have a guardian who has taken the precaution of letting her know what contracts she cannot enter, and is mysteriously found by a group of 100 pedophiles who search random deserts for helpless girls (and these girls, I might add, always have no food or water or clothes or cell phone, and don’t have a guardian who has taken the precaution of letting them know what contracts they cannot enter). Also, these pedophiles do somehow have a source of food and water to support the entire nomadic army of 100 pedophiles that the girl magically has no access to. Furthermore, there happen to be no nomadic groups of nice people in this desert, which appears to be occupied by only gangs of pedophiles who obviously find this barren desert to be the best spot for finding helpless girls.
And in this case, the leftists conclude that they should not save her from the desert, but should instead let her die.
Cool story, bro.
Throw out libertarianism for an unpalatable yet voluntary and mutually-beneficial example so that you may live a thousand years in slavery to the state. Alright, then sir, you win this debate. I shall now go back into my corner and cry for the fate of humanity.
I would point out that any ‘utilitarian’ would also agree that its better for the girl to be raped and saved from starvation (or whatever it was that was going to kill her), so I am not sure what the point of his arguement is. Its not like the options are the girl gets raped or angels come in and save her.
I think the biggest argument agaisnt utilitarianism is that you cannot do interpersonal comarisons of utility. This means the only thing you can really argue for is pareto efficiency Then your task simply becomes establishing the burden of proof, and showing that anarchy is the natural default and that interventionists are the ones in fact arguing for a special case, and then ask for them to think of any single intervention which would be pareto efficient.
Such a statement requires interpersonal utility comparison, which is impossible.
So then there is a different between what is right (exercising just property rights) and what is moral?
Someone argued that:
“Redistributing from the wealthy to the poor increases overall utility.”
Such a statement requires interpersonal utility comparison, which is impossible.
It requires a clarification of what “overall” means. If they mean a sum of all utilities, then you are correct from an Austrian perspective. If it means more people have increased utility than the number of people who have decreased utility, then the statement is probably true since there are usually fewer rich than there are poor.
I think what people usually mean when they make such claims is that they think the “general welfare” of society is higher under some level of wealth redistriubtion. Usually they don’t mean egalitarianism, they usually mean something akin to modern western taxation schemes.
Absolutely. Someone might consider lying to be morally wrong behavior but not wrongful behavior in terms of what the law ought to be.