So now you are saying that children have rights?
That makes no sense.
Who is the arbiter of such an absurd criteria any how?
Property has not rights. It cannot spontaneously wake up and decide it has rights one day without it never have been property in the first place.
How does a being that has no rights present its case? It has no ethical, economical, or otherwise any reason to assume that it would have rights in the first place. It is nearly an object for ownership. That relationship of who owns it does not change until a trade occurs.
The definition of property must change in order to support such claims.
Yes. It’s a land question. It would translate to “everything that crosses onto my land becomes my property” (and, by implication, “everyone”). As in the control that the property right grants extends over to other people without limit once they are on your turf. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t believe in absolute land property rights - I don’t think, simply by virtue of being on someone’s land, that there is some sort of legitimate claim over people’s lives or that the owner has license to do whatever they want to others. I think that’s just using the concept of property to justify authoritarianism.
When we’re talking about land, we’re dealing with a space or surface that contains other things that we may also call “property”. So there is no redundancy once we establish the different kinds of property that we’re talking about - a particular physical object (we could include people in this if we want to) can be on land, but land can’t be on a particular physical object. To say “your land property is on my object property” or “your land property is on my person property” would obviously be silly. What I’m rejecting is land property that is absolute to the point of effectively making other people your property for being on your land.
Really? There is such thing as an “age of consent” in an an-cap society? I thought people couldn’t be owned. The argument that you have no choice, but to be a slave until you have lived a number of minutes is bizzaro in itself.
Sorry, this was the quote I was replying to.
Obviously, lost causes..
Spidey all your post did was re-iterate the exact same garbage again, you cherry pick.
Caley, how’s ignoring my post & questions going? lol.
For others who seek to use the above justifiers of slavery / torture as a case example of showing the “absurdity” of a rational axiomatic-deductive objective ethics, that doesn’t pass muster and you’ll have to do better than that.
“Another common charge is that natural-law theorists differ among themselves, and that therefore all natural-law theories must be discarded. This charge comes with peculiar ill grace when it comes, as it often does, from utilitarian economists. For economics has been a notoriously contentious science — and yet few people advocate tossing all economics therefore into the discard. Furthermore, difference of opinion is no excuse for discarding all sides to a dispute; the responsible person is the one who uses his reason to examine the various contentions and make up his own mind.[22] He does not simply say a priori, “a plague on all your houses!” The fact of man’s reason does not mean that error is impossible. Even such “hard” sciences as physics and chemistry have had their errors and their fervent disputes.[23] No man is omniscient or infallible — a law, by the way, of man’s nature.” - MNR
[22] And there is a further point: the very existence of a difference of opinion seems to imply that there is something objective about which disagreement can take place; for otherwise, there would be no contradictions in the different “opinions” and no worry about these conflicts. For a similar argument in refutation of moral subjectivism see G.E. Moore, Ethics (Oxford, 1963 [1912)), pp. 63ff.
[23] The psychologist Leonard Carmichael, in “Absolutes, Relativism and the Scientific Psychology of Human Nature,” in H. Schoeck and J. Wiggins, eds., Relativism and the Study of Man (Princeton, N.J.: 1). Van Nostrand, 1961), p. 16, writes:
We do not turn aside from what we know about astronomy at any time because there is a great deal we do not know, or because so much that we once thought we knew is no longer recognized as true. May not the same argument be accepted in our thinking about ethical and esthetic judgments?
Well, you were wrong.
What your post amounts to is this:
" "
Naturally, the dude in the pic acted as if he could own people too, as well as murder, torture & enslave them. It was also considered “legal”.
I just think a decentralized tort law, natural ethics (in the classic greek sense of the word: custom, manners, etc), and most importantly individual action kind of solve all of this. We don’t have to have a set centralized system (which to me seems the most insane “solution”) , anything can turn into a gruesome lifeboat situation.
Fortunatly we have experiences, customs, and methods from the past we learn from and can use to our advantage. Also fortunatly we have some ethic/customary checks in society to have some safe gaurds, such as common law. However, when some one wants to worship such institutions and make them sacred and consider them the definition of “right” and “wrong”, it can lead to unwarrented disasterous consequences.
So I have the right to enslave you against your will so long as you are only so many minutes old?
I didn’t see any questions. Only statements followed by question marks.
Err… it appears you don’t know what a question is. Nor a question tag. So again…
If you are his father or mother, sure. Better yet, you don’t just have minutes - you have 9 years. According to him anyway. Is that correct Spidey?
How can a minutes-old baby be enslaved? In what kind of alternate bizarro universe does that work?
I think it is funny that you seem to be evading your own position.
You say that it doesn’t make sense for a child to have rights. Then, to you, some rights-having adult can do whatever they like to the child. Slavery means the right to punish. That an infant can’t pick cotton is irrelevant.
(I wrote up a bit and will try to finish it now. I think that I am coming down with a cold, so sorry for the slow pace.)
This is quite the entertaining and disturbing thread.
Question: If a child has been beaten, molested etc… it’s whole life (legally as spidey and stranger claim) but later reaches the “age of consent” and has been able to demonstrate their rational ability before a court, can this child, now legally recoginzed as an adult, seek restitution for damages and harm done while they were “property”? If they are now suffering physical and psychological trauma as a fully cognizant and rational adult, are they able to seek remuneration in any way, or is this non-sensical because the violent acts were administered to property?
Are you telling me that you really want an answer rather than trolling?
So now not only are you an expert on child development your also hold the authority of over what an Ancap society is?
Despite the fact that very few take your mistaken belief seriously this type of haughty aditude only discredits your argument.
I don’t see what this really has to do with the topic. Can you answer my questions?
Yeah, I don’t really see much that I need to respond to still (except the charge of legal positivism). They can’t answer simple questions or have an honest debate. If someone else reading feels that Spidey or Stranger made some wonderful point somewhere which I ought to address, please point it out. (and thanks Conza/others for some good quotes)
We believe that people can form voluntary slavery contracts (see the paper on inalienability I posted earlier today). Keep in mind that slavery, or the full right to punish a person in any way possible, is different than “partial slavery”. It seems more likely to me that anything near voluntary slavery contracts would be limited in terms of time or the allowable methods of punishment (by what people choose to be part of, not a legal limit). By aggressing on an innocent person, a criminal can’t then object to being treated the same (basically, twice over if the act is intentional). So, this is another way in which a person can become owned.
What keeps getting ignored is that different things can only be owned in different manners. Children are definitely special cases, as Kinsella says, because they are potential actor-producers.
Spidey then said that the distinction must be made somewhere and this implies that potentiality is important. What still isn’t clear is how he decides that the mere act of “having once reasoned” (it still isn’t clear either how a child becomes a freeman) means that they are entitled to be “taken care of” while asleep or in a coma, yet the child can still be raped/murdered.
This is why I keep saying that “the ability to consent” or “one must escape (or state the intention to) one’s parents” is not a sufficient criteria for one establishing a set of basic, negative rights to not be aggressed against. The mere fact that a child is a potential actor-producer is sufficient to establish the initial segment of human rights. (What I termed as anterior, contingent rights, the right to exclude anyone from influencing an individual decision to commit suicide, for instance, makes up the latter segment. I think that to go beyond this verges on the ethical-aesthetical and can’t be applied consistently, given Man’s innate variation in abilities and desires.)
This does not mean that there exists intrinsic positive obligations on either party. For instance, a mother may evict a fetus, but if there existed technology (or even one wished to attempt to develop it, as some are trying to make artificial wombs out of a pig’s uterus) which might allow the fetus to survive, the mother would need to allow someone else to appropriate the baby. The mother only has the right to her own property (herself), not the right to murder.
Another thing to consider is that there are 2 parts to this term, actor-producer. This only becomes important for the evaluation of a child’s complete freedom. I think that some don’t realize how young children are when they might be argued to be able to reason (Piaget is one perspective on this). As much as a child might understand “how the world works”, they might not be capable of of being self-supporting, if they are even interested in leaving home.
By asserting their guardianship over a child (limited, trustee-ownership), the parents become obligated to meet certain essential needs (hopefully soon, we can start focusing on what these might be). If the parent fails to meet his/her obligations, he can’t forestall other would be homesteaders (this is covered in the paper by Block a few pages back). Since there is no doubt that a child will become an adult, a subsequent owner may bring charges against a previously negligent parent. Because of the temporary nature of the child’s impairment, an otherwise legitimate guardian could not squander the child’s restitution. It must remain in situ, as is the case that a will or other contract still has force after an adult’s death or impairment.
If parents meet their obligation, but the child is otherwise unhappy and expresses the cogent desire to leave the home, they or a willing guardian would need to prove the capability to sustain the child. Otherwise, the right to constrain the child in its own interest has been violated. These requirements must be general and universalizable.
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Does anyone have any comments on the paper by Long which I mentioned? I think that people are overestimating the “ability to reason” as a justification for rights. I think what is more important is this quality of man, the ability to reason, expressed in the human way of life.
Is it important, viz., is it initiating aggression to not understand the process of coffee-making by your barista? No, quite clearly their obligation is only to serve you a proper cup of coffee (and things like not stab you in the neck). If children are to be held to the same standards, they must have some legal protection from violent parents.