They’re both actions you can take to avoid something; both have the exact same result, but you want only to punish one.
How about this: what if I throw something at you and it bounces off you and hits a glass window, breaking it? Should you have to pay for it?
According to you, if you have “only negative obligations” in regards to ducking, why wouldn’t the obligation be “don’t duck, you know someone will get hurt”?
In reality, the only person who should be punished is the one throwing the brick.
No. Obviously something bouncing off of you is not an action and cannot be considered a crime.
Vicitms of crimes should have the right to punish anyone who commits a crime against them, regardless of whether that person is a victim of another crime. People do not have the right to externalize their costs of defense onto innocent parties. Why should someone be let off the hook if their defence includes aggressing against an innocent party? Why should the innocent parties rights by circumscribed? After all, they have done nothing wrong. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to punish both aggressors?
Because, I only look at the issue from a property rights perspective. A person only has the right to not have their property invaded. They do not have the right to not get “hurt” apart from their property titles.
When a person homesteads scarce standing room, they also homestead all unowned property necessary to make use of that property except what has already been homesteaded by someone else. If he feels threatened by someone who plans to throw a brick at him and stands behind a barrier that is unowned, he homesteads the barrier (temporarily at least). No one else has the right to remove that barrier. Now if that barrier happens to be another person’s property, such as their body, it can not be homesteaded. The person can move freely about and dodge if they would like to.
See it all comes back to first principles.
Right to own body => Right to homestead
((Right to own body)AND(Right to homestead)) => NAP
NAP => (Right to duck)AND(NOT(Right to deflect))AND(NOT(Right to shoot through hostage))
NAP => (NOT(Right to cause collatoral damage))AND(NOT(Right to hit trolley switch)
NAP => Punishment theory
Punishment theory => (Right to self-defense)AND(Right to proportional restitution)AND(Right to proportional retribution)
So there’s my case. What’s yours? Why should resulting harm be considered the basis for rights instead of property?
I thought about this for a while and it does seem like it’s unpunishable. But I think the main reason why it is difficult to imagine this being criminal is that it wouldn’t be an effective method of putting a hit on someone. For one, the information is public immediately. Bob could go into hiding. Also there may be alot of ppl who don’t think that Bob will die next month and bid the price down. Another possibility is that some bodyguard or security agency may just decide to buy the contract at the high price and then protect Bob. It seems very hard to proove causal connection in this case because the causal connection is rather weak. You might as well fire a gun in the air and hope that the bullet will fall back on Bob.
What if you throw your hands up to shield your face and it bounces off of your forearms? I know that exact thing has happened to me!
Regarding homesteading: If you’re in someone’s room or on someone’s property, you can’t homestead anything. I don’t really understand where you were trying to go with that point…
I’m not trying to be dense, but could you explain the difference between ducking and deflecting again? I’m not saying that you didn’t give a perfectly good answer, but I didn’t get anything from it.
In both cases, inaction will harm you; in both cases, you are taking action to avoid harm; in both cases, taking action will harm someone else; and in both cases, the person throwing the object should be the only person punished.
The action was blocking yourself, not deflecting it.
I’m a bit late to this thread, but I wanted to mention something regarding the original idea of the Trolley Problem.
My normal response to this ethical question is that you are morally required to not act at all unless you are fully informed of all the variables. For instance, you do not know if the five guys on the track are planning to violently gang-rape and then murder a woman later that evening. You also don’t know if that one person on the other track might cure cancer in 10 years. You cannot simply state that five lives are worth more than one life because you do not have sufficient data to calculate the worth of those lives.
This also adds something to the current debate. If that brick is coming at my head, and I need to determine whether to duck or not, I have an easy calculation to make. I know the brick will hit me and cause harm. I do not know what will happen if I duck…it might just hit a wall. The current data suggest that ducking is a better solution.
Now if I know there is a baby behind me, and ducking will cause the baby to be killed when the brick hits it, I now have more data with which to make my decision. I can still decide to duck, but my moral footing has changed with the new information.
No, that action was deflecting it, too.
If you want to use that logic, though, Stephen’s entire argument falls apart.
I’ve been arguing that if someone holds a spinning chainsaw next to your genitals and coerces you into commiting a crime, that person should be charged with the crime instead of you; he has argued that any action taken by an individual should be punished, regardless of the reason behind taking it.
I’m having trouble following your logic:
Ok, but then:
Seems to me that, by your previous statement, a better thing to say here is that you are morally required to not act at all unless you are fully informed of all the variables. In the trolley case, ignorance was a reason that I must NOT act, but now ignorance is being given as a reason that I may act.
Or, we can work it back the other way. In the trolley case, I don’t know what the 5 people are planning to do tonight. Current data suggests that I should act - without any further information, all I have is 5 lives vs. 1. Why do we give special consideration to the possibility that the 5 are bad and the 1 is good? Why not worry that the 1 is Hitler, by that token?
Yea, sorry. Probably not the best analogy. In the trolley example, you are not in any risk yourself. So you have no need to act out of self preservation. Not like the brick example at all.
We don’t worry about either possibilty. We can’t know if the one is good, or the five is good. It is exactly this unknown that means we should not act, since if we interfere in an existing situation we are doing so with incomplete data.
And I would argue this scenario is impossible. Unless you were somehow tied down, you could just run away or fight back. And if you were tied down, you would not be able to commit a crime.
Just shedding responsibility. Moral cowardice in the first degree.
explain how it what you responded to is ‘shedding responsibility’
is asking for consent to do X shedding responsibilty over X ? or is it perhaps a responsible approach to at least find out if you have the consent of someone who is at the moral centre of what is at stake…
Spoken like a true statist who doesn’t even have a coherent theory of morality or justice in the first place.
I read only three pages or so, but only Brainpolice’s arguments are most consistent and I actually share the same (or very similar) opinion on this issue. No action, no obligation. That’s it. Problem solved.
If one wants to ask what I would personally do (even though it’s like asking, what super power you would like to have), then there is a matter of speculation and preferences. I think that everybody wants to survive, to some degree at least, so many would KILL innocent instead of being killed themselves. If there is no risk to one’s life, then the answer becomes even more easier. Just don’t kill directly (pushing a button I concider also a direct killing).
Which passengers of a two cars you should save first? A family with kids in one car or lonely driver in other car? I would choose (personally) the bigger chance to save as more as I can. It’s the car with family inside. What if that lonely driver was my father or mother, or brother? Again, I would go only with my personal preferences, so MY familie’s member is worth to me more than some other familie’s members. It has nothing to do with “utalitarianism” now. Well, I saved my family member, but there wasn’t enough time to save a passengers of the other car, so what? Not my problem, not my fault.
Really? The man you’re addressing is a great libertarian economist, and one of the first LRC writers I read when I began reading LRC.
He was a libertarian economist, now a conservative economist as far as I can tell.
What has economics to do with this?
Really? The man you’re addressing is a great libertarian economist, and one of the first LRC writers I read when I began reading LRC.
I’m pretty sure that Mr. Callahan does not consider himself a libertarian, at least he doesn’t seem to agree with most of the theory. I responded to his blog post on homesteading here. As far as I know he doesn’t “have a coherent theory of morality or justice”, just like most who take swipes at libertarianism. I’m not sure what he is even responding to here.
I didn’t read this thread but, given the person who is faced with this choice isn’t responsible for hte people being on the tracks, I think the right answer is to do nothing in order to avoid culpability. Still, I think that a person in a hypothetical free society might be able to switch from the track with 5 people to the one with 1, having some knowledge of how justice firms have codified law, without much fear of prosecution. While we are typically concerned with theoretical, praxeological law, jurisprudence, or law in action, is a separate discipline. What I’ve termed the via negativa of libertarian justice is that a judge might simply refuse to act on a crime.
An example I’ve used along with this is a hypothetical person who trespasses while fleeing a mudslide. Since it’s somewhat time consuming to figure out what an appropriate punishment for trespass is, we’d typically see monetary fines, but either way, a judge who stands to gain very little from doling out this fine might stand to lose a lot more from the publicity of being the cruel judge who punishes the poor guy who almost got smothered in a landslide. The case in this pathological hypothetical is more severe since 1 person will die, but I couldn’t see many judges handling it in any other way.
“I didn’t read this thread but, given the person who is faced with this choice isn’t responsible for hte people being on the tracks, I think the right answer is to do nothing in order to avoid culpability.”
Yeah, that’s what morality is about – “avoiding culpability”!