It’s not much of a religion, if you want to call it that. I don’t see what you are getting at by calling it “an unquestioned position”. Everyone has starting positions concerning their viewpoints about the world. There are people who believe it is okay to aggress against one person to benefit another. What else can I say about it? That’s their starting point. I can’t show them why that is wrong. Those people have to figure it out for themselves, if they even can. Some of those people may come around through a better understanding of economics, but they still might not. These people always turn to outliers and say, “Even if society is better off as a whole, what about X who is still sick and dying? Don’t we have to aggress against others for his benefit?”
So I really don’t know what else to say. I think aggression is wrong. Why? Because I do. Why do you not want people to aggress against you? Because you do. When others aggress against you, it diminishes or entirely removes your capability to achieve your satisfaction of wants. So you then go the next step and say that you want other people to not aggress against others too. Okay. But your starting point is your starting point, and must be assumed at some point. For me, I just happen to find aggression wrong.
It’s the same thing (ethic of reciprocity), just one is a positive statement and the other is a negative statement:
They both describe the same action, just in different ways.
Yeah, I actually watched that when you originally posted it.
LOL, that is an interesting statement to me. So first you said that whether somebody deserves to die is the difference that decides if killing them is murder or not. But now you have went on to say that whether you would consider somebody deserving of death may be dependent on whether this would save you from his threats on your life. In other words you freely admit that to save your life you would be ready to engage in what should be to your system moral acrobatics. If deservingness of death is so important in your system then you should judge it on a more objective criteria than proclaiming which judgement is more benefital to your situation.
In fact we have nonetheless seen that whether the agressor in this instance “deserves to die” is irrelevant. Whether you killing him is murder has nothing to do with whether he “deserves to die”, clear from the fact that you yourself do not consider this question and answer terribly pertinent, but would easily proclaim that he does in order to save your life, ie based solely on the question what it took to end the threat against you.
Reality is such that whether somebody “deserves to die” is subjective and as such has no bearing on the questions we’re dealing with here.
What is objective here is that you may not live if the aggressor who is in your face does not die, and since it is him rather than you who has acted illegitimately to construct this situation it is right for you to save yourself and kill him. It has nothing to do with what the aggressor deserves. Actually he may be a guy who is real nice to his mother, or else he is a jerk even to her, it doesn’t matter.
Ouch, the implications! You’re wrong, but at least you’re consistent, I’ll admit that.
The problem is that you are confusing the question of what signs people would take into account to know if something has been abandoned with the question of what constitutes abandonment. Obviously if I have thrown something into the trash by accident then I have most empathically not abandoned it. Neither have I abandoned land that I have been absent from for longer than the society deems it permissible to be absent from or whatever. In fact if there is some kind of obligation placed on the farmers that each 20 years they must cultivate their land for a year or else it shall be taken away from them, then we can not talk about freedom and property rights at all. Then we enter into the realm of serfdom and of positive obligations. As we now sometimes say that there is no real private ownership to land under the current system because failure to pay property taxes will result in your claim to your land being stripped from you so it would be in your case, only instead of a monetary tax each year, the positive obligation would be one of corvee, of forced labor once every 20 years.
I can abandon something without saying so, but I do not know how you can be absolutely sure that I have unless I say so, and even then…
The context was comparison of being stopped for speeding while you’re actually speeding by people who will confront you to your face, and recieving a bill in your mail three weeks later. In the first instance you may hope to explain yourself and also hear out the other side. In the second you can not, plus it adds the added tension of never being home safe, most everyone speeds every day, but conventionaly once you’re out of the car you are safe from fines for the day. Not in the case of stealthy vans and automated cameras, even should you not drive for two weeks, you may stil not know if there isn’t a bill arriving through the mail even as you go on with your life unsuspecting.
The point was exactly that in a free market system where all the roads wouldn’t be owned by one and the same jerk people would gravitate toward the roads where you may eventually get pulled over for speeding, but would never have to worry about unmarked vehicles and automated cameras recording your speed for the purpose of sending you bills by mail.
If you put your trash out onto the side of the street, you are designating to the community that you are abandoning it.
Customs allow for this. If you accidently throw something in the trash, then go take it back. If someone else has beaten you to it, then you have a dispute. Go to an arbitrator and resolve it. The results regarding disputes of how long something can be in the trash before being considered abandoned will become the custom. Perhaps if it is only in the trash for 30 seconds, it is still yours. But if it is in the trash long enough so that it goes to the landfill, then perhaps it is not yours anymore. Perhaps it is. But this is what law is for. Don’t throw things out if you want to maintain your claim to them.
I don’t see why there would be an obligation for a farmer to farm his land, but if he doesn’t farm, why are we calling him a farmer? If a landowner does not use his land in any way, how can he say that he has the best claim to it? If a man goes to Antartica and claims a piece of land, and then he never goes back, charge rent, or use it in any way whatsoever, by what right does he have to claim the land as his own? I don’t believe he does. He has abandoned it, even if he doesn’t formally state this.
Right, we can’t always be absolutely sure, and even if everyone vowed to never aggress, there would still be disputes that need to be resolved. If people are both claiming to own a specific piece of property, then they have a dispute that must be resolved one way or the other. I believe I linked to What Law Is and A Praxeological Account of Law by Clayton, and he covers this topic in those two posts.
Well, we can only speculate on this matter. I think it is likely that people would prefer the convenience of electronic surveillance over being pulled over by a man with a gun and have their travel interrupted. You think the opposite. Though I think I’m right, this is really a matter for entrepreneurs, and we really cannot know for sure until there is a free market in roads.
Also I should say this. If he held a gun to your head while having a conversation with you and you lived to tell the tale then the one thing he can not be guilty of is attempted murder. Surely if he had actually tried to kill you you would be dead.
Second of all even should he be ‘guilty’ of attempted murder that would have no bearing on anything at all. No harm, no foul. Attempted anything is a victimless crime and as such doesn’t fall under the jurisprudence of law in the sense that it would authorise lawful retribution (not defense). These are libertarian ABCs.
What he is guilty of in relation to you is threatening murder, and in relation to the third person of using illegitimate actions to get the third person murdered which is the same as murder, both of which are a lot more serious crimes than attempted murder, which is after all a non-crime in itself (that is notwithstanding any, real rather than just attempted, violations of property rights commited in the commision of the attempt).
In fact, why are you calling him a farmer? First you call him a farmer, then you use this designation of your own making against him. Perhaps as far as he is concerned he should be called absentee owner.
I believe it’s called first use.
Talk about relativism. No arbitrator or whoever decides what the truth is. The truth is the truth is the truth. I either in my mind severed the link to that which ended up in my thrash or I did not. The judges’ stated opinion on whether I did this doesn’t change the facts. The judge may find that I had abandoned my property, where I did not, in which case he is wrong and I am right, and I am within my right to defend my property against his court. And it is he then who is a renegade to law, not I.
We don’t say that is customary that if there has been a murder and you’re holding a smoking gun that therefore you are guilty of murder. We don’t say that if you are found with a smoking gun that you therefore have a dispute in which the question of whether you are a murderer depends on how hot the gun is. If it is hot as if it fired 30 seconds ago then you are a murderer, but if it is colder than that then perhaps you are not. We don’t say that because it would be idiotic. The court may only say it thinks you are the murderer, but their verdict doesn’t establish the fact. The fact establishes the fact. Whether you are a murderer depends on whether you murdered somebody, not on what the local custom says about people found standing above the victim with gunpowder residue on their hands. A custom can not make non-murder into murder, or non-abandonment into abandonment.
What a cruel and inconsiderate thing to say. Maybe Smith lives in an environment where it is customarily permissible to rape somebody when they have dropped a bar of soap. Would you say to Smith: tough luck, but that’s what the law is for. Don’t drop soap if you don’t want to be raped?
Block writes that “[one] cannot (logically) abandon something if [he] [does] not notify others of its availability for their own ownership”. The question then is, what constitutes such notification of others? It seems possible to me that e.g. neglecting a plot of land for 20 years is considered to constitute it.
I actually do judge it on a more consistent/universal (in place of “objective”) criterion than proclaiming which judgement is more beneficial to my situation. Namely, if a person is aggressively threatening another’s life, and if killing him is necessary to end the threat, then such killing would not constitute murder IMO. That is to say, I’d consider such killing to be legitimate and hence that the person who was killed deserved to be killed. Where are the “moral acrobatics” here?
The important thing to me is that the threat against my life is aggressive. I presumably did not threaten his life or the life of anyone else. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear on this before.
I agree with the first part but disagree with the last part.
The converse of “it is right for you to save yourself and kill him” is “it is right for him to be killed by you”, which to me is another way of saying “he deserved to be killed by you”. Furthermore, I figured you were attributing the same meaning to “he deserved to die” as “he deserved to be killed by you”. Please let me know if I was mistaken here.
I think I can see your reasoning here. For example, if a person breaks into my house in the middle of the night and tries to murder me, but I’m able to defend myself against him and he runs off, then he’s not guilty of attempted murder, but he is guilty of breaking and entering as well as assault and battery. Those were presumably the harms he actually committed against me while trying to murder me. So I agree with you here and retract my earlier statement that he could be guilty of attempted murder. Thanks for pointing this out.
Yes, I agree that he’s guilty of at least threatening murder, and I now agree with your characterization of attempted murder as a non-crime, along with the caveat you provide. Thanks again.
Don’t forget threats. If someone is attempting to murder you, he most certainly is guilty of the various and actual crimes that you listed, but is there not an implicit (or maybe sometimes an explicit) threat of murder? For instance, if I aim a gun at you and then shoot at you, but somehow I miss you, would I not also be guilty of a threat to murder even if I did not explicitly state it?