There is no way around it: An act is legitimate if and only if the majority considers it justifiable. So pick your ‘majority’ wisely.
On NPR this morning:
January 14, 2011
Following the assassination of a governor in Pakistan last week, some people hoped the shooting would galvanize opposition to religious extremists. The governor had been killed for opposing a blasphemy law, under which a Christian woman was sentenced to death. Instead, the assassin has turned into something of a national hero. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid talks to Steve Inskeep about why hundreds of lawyers have sided with the killer.
Following the assassination of a governor in Pakistan last week, some people hoped the shooting would galvanize opposition to religious extremists. The governor had been killed for opposing a blasphemy law, under which a Christian woman was sentenced to death. Instead, the assassin has turned into something of a national hero. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid talks to Steve Inskeep about why hundreds of lawyers have sided with the killer.
While I don’t agree that might makes right, might certainly makes. My point is, while there’s no necessary correlation between power and values, there is a correlation between power and actions. I daresay that, even in an anarcho-capitalist world, there might be martial contests between people with such widely disparate views.
An act will generally be considered legitimate in a libertarian system if enough people consider it legitimate and enough ‘might’ can be accumulated to defend the act. This is true and very trivial.
It doesn’t follow that it ‘is’ in fact legitimate. People can be wrong.
The crux is this: ‘the state’ is not the enemy. It’s just an (important) subdivision of the fact that ‘aggression against innocent people’ is the ‘enemy’. The absence of the state doesn’t mean the presence of a general libertarian ideology.
Wait, not the ‘majority’ but just enough clients to make its upholding by private arbiters profitable. There need not be a single law of the land, and as long as some law’s customer base is not overly small to make its enforcement unprofitable, all will be served in a market.
Otherwise I agree that there is no such thing as an objectively just law.
I agree, of course, that there’s no such thing as “objectively right”. So we’re actually on the same page. I didn’t think we were, since earlier you wrote:
Since you wrote “is” instead of “is considered to be”, I assumed you meant that legitimacy can/does exist obectively.
Splitting hairs. In the OP example, upholding something that conflicts with the majority seems to be not only not profitable but outright deadly. Hence, the thousand profit-seeking (and life-loving) lawyers supporting the killer.
Actually it’s of massive importance. See, if what the majority thinks is always inescapable as law, than democracy is indeed the best we can get. I don’t think that’s the case.
Allow me to take a similar example: Saudi Arabia. I don’t think one can find a more fundamentalist population anywhere on earth, yet westerns come together in their enclaves and follow their own law in there. One could do that in Pakistan too. Its not hard to see that such enclaves could be easily defended from attack form a private contractor and, in time, attract by example, more clients.
What I’m trying to say is that if you live amid, say, luddites you need not condemn yourself to a life in the middle ages, but, for a price, could live by your rules under some PMC’s protection.
I do not understand a concept of legitimacy outside of the realm of humans’ subjective values (justifications). Hence, I used ‘if and only if’ to propose that the majority’s verdict on justifiability is both a sufficient and necessary condition for the legitimacy of an act or outcome.
Merlin,
Yes, but at what cost? The Saudi Arabian enclaves (and the whole kingdom, for that matter) are hardly results of a free market, and the Pakistani one’s wouldn’t come cheap either. Hence, as I said, choose your ‘majority’ wisely.
Now you seem to be equivocating. Either you think legitimacy exists objectively (i.e. outside of human minds) or you don’t. If it doesn’t exist objectively, then a majority’s verdict on justifiability is only that. It does not mean that anyone and everyone who’s not part of that majority will or must also consider the act or outcome legitimate.
Yes, but at what cost? The Saudi Arabian enclaves (and the whole kingdom, for that matter) are hardly results of a free market, and the Pakistani one’s wouldn’t come cheap either. Hence, as I said, choose your ‘majority’ wisely.
Now, emigration is probably often the best, i.e.. cheapest, solution. But staying and fighting will be a possibility too, and sometimes a necessity. After all oil will not emigrate with you.
And enclaves are actually a creation of the free market. Enclave sin third world countries, i.e. Nigeria, are financed by oil corporations. Back in the XIX century so-called ‘capitulations’ where common in the Ottoman Empire and China, evenbefore the rise of European colonial empires.
But essentially we disagree on predictions: whether enclave swill flower or not. I believe they would, but we’ll never know until we try.
Yes, ‘majority’s verdict on justifiability’ is only that, and that is ‘legitimacy’ . Nothing more, nothing less. A definition. How else would you define legitimacy?
I don’t disagree. We had already mentioned the Swiss cantons, Lichtenstein, Singapore, Hong Kong. Seems that the most realistic (least costly) road to more freedom everywhere is via fragmentation of democracies into critically homogenous enclaves reflecting the subjective values/beliefs of the majorities within them. Hopefully, as Mises envisioned, advances in technology and human consciousness would make it feasible (or cost effective) for this fragmentation to converge down to single-human enclaves. In the meantime, even within your enclave, the individual has no choice but to submit to the majority’s judgment on legitimacy.
Why is it merely the majority that makes ‘right’? The 51% cannot necessarily force their will over the rest. I think that customs and laws embedded in society have much greater support than simply the majority.