It is absolutely amazing to me that people are not able to understand the simplest of positions.
Aggression is the initiation of force. Voluntarism is for non-aggression. Period.
Coercion isn’t relevant at all. If coercion is aggressive, it is bad to a voluntarist. If coercion is defenseive, it is not.
The word coercion has nothing to do with libertarianism or voluntarism or ancap at all. Something is either aggressive or not. Period, end of story.
After reading Autolykos’s reply to this post, I realized I should take the time to reply more thoroughly here. You are misrepresenting my “definitions” of these words. So let me lay them out for you, since they seem to be causing us problems here.
Can you accept these definitions for these words?
@Herodotus: “A voluntarist must be against coercion, which is about breaking the will of another in some fashion.”
I’m not sure about voluntarists, but I think many libertarians would restrict “coercion” to physical coercion (or the threat thereof) directed against another person’s body or property. E.g., if Mrs. Smith tells Mr. Smith, “Do what I say, or else I’ll leave you,” this might well “break Mr. Smith’s will,” but it’s not coercion in this sense.
“I issue commands: Write this, say that, sit down, stop talking, stop playing, etc. I cannot see that that is aggressive or defensive, but it is certainly coercive.”
I think it depends. Do you threaten to hit your pupils in case they don’t obey your commands? If so, then you coerce (and, what is more, aggress against) them. Do you threaten to give them detention? If so, what would you do if one of your students simply tried to leave? Would you physically prevent him from leaving? If so, then you would coerce (and aggress against) him. If not, your behavior probably doesn’t amount to coercion.
Autolykos,
I have certainly wondered about whether coercion is necessarily an act of force or violence, but when speaking of a child, I am not sure that really holds water. What about, do this or I will belittle you? Or, what about, do your homework or I will withhold food or clothing from you in some manner? What if I say, if you do your homework, you will become rich, famous, happy? Or, since that never works anyway, what if I construct a kind of myth to give the child the impression that doing his/her homework or otherwise obeying me is somehow “good”? What if I tell him/her stories about people who didn’t do their homework and ended up in jail? Parents and teachers do those things (to one degree or another) all the time, and it is easy to slip into the habit of it. Is brainwashing a child coercion? I can see how somebody could argue themselves into holding that it wasn’t, but the intent behind the action is to get the child to do something they would otherwise be unwilling to do, so I think it is coercive.
As for the etymology of voluntarism, assuming that it stems from the word “voluntary”, you can look up the word at (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=voluntary). It says that “voluntarius” means “of one’s free will”.
As for “aggression”, I regard it as an assault or attack, often hostile and for the advancement of one’s own interests. That is my take of the definition at (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aggression).
Also, you said that ther is no such thing as “heutral coercion”, but what then is breaking up a fight?
I wouldn’t say that’s coercion - for children or adults.
I’m honestly not sure about this one - at this point, I think it could go either way.
My answer here is the same as my answer to your first question.
For one thing, it depends on how you’re defining “brainwashing”. For another, I think a distinction should be made between coercion and persuasion. Motivating someone to do something that he was unwilling to do beforehand is persuasion IMO if it doesn’t involve the use or threat of physical force. Otherwise, if it does involve that, it’s coercion.
Right, but my point was that “voluntaryist” doesn’t itself mean literally “one’s free will”.
I think “aggression” can be defined as “unjustified coercion” for the purposes of our discussion. Do you agree?
I’d say it’s technically an instance of helping the victim ward off the attacker.
Ladyphoenix,
I appreciate your taking the time to make plain your meaning. I dealt with some of the issues you raise here in my response to Autolykos, but my initial reaction to your definitions is that I could only agree with the first one. In a nutshell, I cannot confine coercion to violence, particularly in regards to children. I haven’t thought about it much in this context, but blackmail comes to mind in the case of adults.
To take a more off the wall case, what about the stranger who knocks on your hotel door in the middle of the night and says, “I’m not packin’, I’m not packin’”? He wasn’t, but I certainly regarded that as a threat, and that’s how it was meant.
Also, I am not sure the emphasis in the word “aggression” is on initiation. I think that it is possible for one not to be the initiator and yet still be aggressive. The issue in that case, I think, would be proportionality. If I stepped on your foot, and you then went about killing my dog, smashing my car windows in, having 20 pizzas deliverd to my house, etc, I would probably consider that aggressive. I guess you could say that that is initiating a new level of violence or something, but as far as I can tell, the key point in aggression is intent, and is always negative whereas coercion has benevolent, defensive, and malevolent (or aggressive) forms.
Ok, then how about this…
It’s not the labels that matter to me. The labels are shortcuts. What matters to me is that you get the ideas. Since I’m no longer using the words you claim to have sole dominion over the definitions of, we should no longer have a problem. Do you understand, at the very least, the concepts I’m trying to convey to you here?
There is no point in continuing the discussion of painting when you cannot accept the concepts of color and texture. What I mean is, you have alot more wrong going on here then accepting voluntaryism. You have to figure out how you percieve the world around you first, and your understanding of reality first. You just seem at large confused about a number of things.(No offense)
This is where your understanding of aggression differs from the accepted understanding of aggression when discussing voluntaryism. This has already been mentioned to you before but you continue to admit this strawman into your argumentation. (The same strawman that has been pointed out a number of times)
If a man driving a car hits and kills someone in a voluntarysitic society then the culprit would be responsible for paying restitution to the family that lost the loved one. Intent doesn’t even have to enter into the equation. your responsible for yourself and your property, more often then not intent is not malacious but that doesn’t mean your not responsible when you make mistakes.
This is something children learn growing up, it shouldn’t be something we’re discussing as adults.
Autolykos,
“Unjustified coercion” sounds like a good definition of aggression to me, although I wonder what we’re packing in the word “unjustified”. I also agree that voluntaryism/t doesn’t mean “one’s free will”. I was doing a poor job of trying to argue that voluntaryism is about will rather than aggression.
But, like me, I assume you’d break up the fight even without knowing who the “attacker” and “victim” were, which is not at all uncommon. Usually, both students are attacker and victim.
As for the persuasion/coercion distinction, let’s go back to the pedophilia. If I tell a kid, perform this favor for me, or you grandmother will die of her cancer, is that “persuasion”? In any case, when I refer to the dictionary, I don’t see any reason to confine coercion to physical force or threat of physical force.
Well, then, I think Carol sounds like a lot of fun, and Denise sounds pretty wild, too, but Alice and Betty sound a bit too crazy for me.
Ladyphoenix,
You guys are now telling me that voluntaryists have their own definitions for words. I agree that we shouldn’t get lost in semantics and should worry about the underlying meaning, but it was the lot of you who have accused me of conflating words and confusing meanings. I think I have disproven that claim, and so I certainly understand if you want to move beyond that, as I have for some time now, but I cannot see how referring to Alice, Betty, Carol, or Denise will solve these issues for us, nor do I believe I have to conform to your sect’s definitions of words in order to attain the truth.
I saw in this thread or another the claim by an anarchist-socialist (or whatever they call themselves) that ancap was a kind of Marxism of the Right. I grew up a fundamentalist, and all those same bells are ringing.
Pity we poor people who wander into a Newbie forum here without having conformed to your church’s prefabricated definitions. I think it ironic that a clique of you on a website think you have the authority to dictate the meaning of words for voluntarism. This is the exact same route the Marxists and Jacobins and every secular fundamentalism goes down. Positively Orwellian.
…
Edit - above post got screwed up somehow, can’t be bothered to fix it…
All I will do is to reassert my market leanings and non-socialist beliefs
We ofcoarse encourage you to read up on the topic prior to making arguments and assertions. Given that nearly all of the material needed to understand this position(Including its flaws) is free there is little excuse to remain in ignorance. However if you do choose to remain in ignorance, then stop arguing against or about positions you do not understand. Especially if you do not understand your own position.
Otherwise take the words given to you here as something to contemplate, then go do some homework and read up on the points we’ve raise.
I don’t think you understood my stance at all.
However, rather than participating in the usual standard of nauseating argumentation with anonymous antagonists on the internet I shall learn the true voluntaryist stance on child rearing myself through personal reading time.
Have fun.
@OP:
Yes, I agree with you that the human family entails some coercive elements. However, I think the mistake is in thinking that an ideal society is completely devoid of coercion rather than that it achieves a minimum of coercion. Parents have a completely legitimate interest in coercing their children and the delegation of that coercion to a teacher, tutor, governess, etc. is also completely legitimate. What makes this legitimate are the following considerations. First of all, children may complain about what they have to do (eat your vegetables!) but they generally don’t complain about having to do things. In other words, children themselves are wired by nature to generally accept the coercion of their parents. If there’s no complaint, then what’s the problem? Second, where coercion is pushed too far, i.e. where parents become abusive, Nature has provided a first line of defense in the form of grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. who care about the welfare of the child and can intervene. Usually, this intervention is handled through social peer pressure within the family… the abusive parent is forced to stop being so lazy in child-rearing and scale back the abusive behavior by their desire to not be ill-perceived by their own family members. But when push comes to shove, this can erupt into litigation and this is the proper channel for child welfare to be protected, that is, by family advocacy, not State advocacy or nosy-neighbor advocacy.
The problem I’ve run into is that the same reason we should say that normal coercion within the family context is legitimate (namely, children don’t complain about it) leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that coercion within the social context is also legitimate for the same reason, namely, people don’t complain about it. People generally accept that they “have to” pay taxes. They generally accept the prerogative of the State to override laws with its legislation and to monopolize courts, police, defense, roads, utilities and other goods and services. I still think there is a defining distinction between these two forms of coercion and I’m still in the process of trying to tease them apart.
Clayton -
Wow. I’ve just totally lost any lingering hope I had that you truly just misunderstood what was being advocated by voluntaryists.
I think we’re done here.
Nothing, as of yet.
Ah, I see. I’d say that voluntaryism is certainly not about letting everyone do whatever he wants, period. So it is more about aggression than about will per se - after all, it can be one’s will to commit aggression.
Only one person ever starts a fight, IMO. You have a valid point, though - a third party often (usually?) doesn’t see how the fight starts, so he’s not sure which person started it.
I’d say it’s certainly an attempt at persuasion - it depends on whether you’re defining “persuasion” to include the result (i.e. the person does end up motivated to do what you want).
Do we have to rely on a dictionary (which one?) for definitions of words used in our discussion? If not, it doesn’t really matter what the definition is that we use for “coercion”, as long as we agree to it. But if you insist on adhering to the “dictionary definition” of “coercion”, I can simply distinguish between “physical coercion” and “non-physical coercion”. It doesn’t really matter to me - the underlying concepts stay the same.
I have a question for you; what if a small family (e.g. nuclear family unit) lives in an isolated geographical area or if they simply do not live near aunts, uncles, grand parents, etc. How do you prevent child abuse then without some form of intervention?
Cheers.
Why is it constantly the task and responsiblility of anarcho-capitalism to accomplish the impossible? Meanwhile people’s own political philosophies fall far shorter?
I really dislike double standards.
Keep in mind that there are no correct definitions for words, only different definitions. Of course, you don’t have to conform to “the voluntaryist sect’s” definitions of words in order to attain the truth, but if you want to understand what voluntaryists talk about in their own terms, I think it would help to understand the terms they use and how they use them.
I agree with you that it seems belittling of “non-members’” intelligence to demand they conform to certain word usages. I think it’s better to find a way to explain the underlying concepts that one holds to be true in terms another can best understand. In other words, I think it’s important to look past the semantics and find common conceptual ground.