That is a common view, but not a necessary one, as I will show when I get to your argument later.
Not all obligations are or should be morally enforcable, and not all obligations are correlative to rights. So it is perfectly possible to say that people have positive obligations to help others or to protect them without saying that it is right that they be forced to do so, or that those others have rights that they do so.
No, they would become thieves if they forced you to contribute the products of their labour. The fact that your mother shouldn’t steal, say, my food if you are hungry, does not imply that I am not under any moral obligation to give it to you. All it implies is that you shouldn’t take it without my say so.
Precisely. What’s the point of positive obligations if they are unenforcable? People will do whatever it is that they do then. It no longer is really a matter of morality at that point. It reduces to a personal preferance as to wether or not to fulfill such alleged obligations. If that’s the case, then it doesn’t matter.
In my understanding, all rights claims entail obligations. Positive rights claims entail positive obligations, while negative rights claims entail negative obligations (I.E. the absence of certain actions with respect to others).
Right. Or if they had a 3rd party force you to do so. In other words, as soon as such unchosen positive obligations are enforced they become negative rights violations. That’s precisely my point and is why I consider unchosen positive obligations to be incompatible with liberty. As soon as they are enforced the NAP is breached.
But then if it truly depends on my say so, I may say “no”. If I truly have the right to say “no”, then it is not an obligation. A meaningful one at least. If you can exclude it from others, then by definition you have no unchosen positive obligation to give it up to them.
In such a case, mayhap your obligation would actually be to do nothing, for the good of the species, that we are no longer polluted by such idiots as would take a nap on railroad tracks.
Add in JCFulsome’s proviso, that the death of the mass murderer is causally connected to the death of the innocent person, and the answer is yes. Remove it and the answer is no.
The consequences of inaction have no effect on whether the action is ethically justified. There are no positive obligations, only negative ones.
First off, your ad hominem attack in the misspelling of my name is uncalled for and childish.
Secondly, do you need to be certain that another will die automatically for it to be murder? What if it is a 90% chance, or a 50% chance? You can never really be certain it’s not the case, can you? Is it ever, then, permissible to use lethal force in self-defense?
Even more, what if, say, there’s a pressure sensor on a person’s forearm to detect that you’ve blocked the stroke of a sword (getting a little outlandish here, I know) which will automatically kill another if you do. Are you then obligated to allow the blow to fall?
If you say yes, your philosophy is even more outlandish than my scenario. The culpability for the murder here belongs to the sword-swinger alone.
No one is saying that anyone has any positive obligations (aside from Richard A Garner).
Why should JC’s modification matter? If it’s clear from history that an innocent person will die, why does it matter whether or not it’s a machine doing the killing? In any event, let’s assume that JC’s modification in effect.
Do you realize that you are creating a system which rewards gangs who hold someone hostage? Fellow gang members know that people will be afraid to kill any of their murderers because people like you will want to prosecute and punish the heros.
I don’t want to this to come across as snarky, rude, or insulting to any former leftist, but did you use to be one?
Only with the resources you’ve given them under a duress you state does not exempt you from culpability. You might as well pay your taxes in bullets. It is the same as giving an axe to a known axe-murderer. Are you saying that such an action does not make you an accessory to murder, but defending yourself from an attacker with a human shield makes you a murderer? Preposterous!
Sorry, I didn’t mean to misspell your name. I’m trying to respond to too many posts at once and I make mistakes. There would be a lot more if I wasn’t typing everything up in Word first to make sure the spelling and grammar is incorrect. I don’t take exception to anything you have said. I’ve rather enjoyed arguing this topic. We’re all libertarians here. Nobody on this forum would advocate something like a minimum wage. All we are arguing over is the finer points of our political philosophy.
There is always uncertainty in every action. The intent of the action is divorced from the result. You are only guilty of murder if the person dies. If you take that chance it’s your proper assumption of risk.
I think that culpability lies with the sword as well unless the person put the pressure sensor on their own forearm.
Why is it no longer a matter of morality? And what people will do is irrelevent to the question of what they ought to do.
This may be true, but it doesn’t address the question of whether all obligations are correlative with rights. The fact that the rights I hold against you entail obligations you owe to me does not in anyway have anything to do with the possibility that you owe obligations to me without my having rights correlative to those obligations.
But it is the enforcement of the obligation that violates the NAP, not the presence of it. Why can’t I have an obligation it would be immoral for you to enforce?
Sure it is an obligation. You can have the power to choose what you should do with you property and it still be true that one option be the one you should be chosing as opposed to others.
I have not encountered many libertarians who think that morality only encompasses what it is OK to force people to do or not do.
To start, I can see how a spell checker could lead to that mistake. It’s kewl.
I must assume you mean the swordsman, not the sword itself. In that case, please explain to me how taking one action, killing the life-monitored killer to save yourself, is morally different from blocking the killer with the pressure sensor? I suspect there may be some misunderstanding here.
Do you differentiate what is immoral for one to do from what one may enforce as a matter of rights? E.g., would you say that it reflects poorly on the character of one who failed to live up to such an obligation (demonstrating a lack of gratitude) but that they may not be forced into such an action?
If it is just the case that the mass-murderer is hooked up to a machine, then if one kills the mass-murderer, they have set off a causal chain of events which leads to the hostage’s death. If the mass-murderer has a friend who kills the hostage on his behalf after you kill the mass-murderer, you are not culpable. He is freely acting and responsible for the hostage’s death.
It is not heroic to use an innocent third parties person or property against their will in any quest for justice. If the results of what I’m advocating encourages hostage taking, so what? It would also encourage the development of greater precision and non-lethal weapons and tactics. And the incentives for hostage taking would be far lower in a free society. Insurance/protection agencies would put hits out on hostage taker’s heads, because they would pose a serious liability to the insurance agency if they used their hostages as human shields while they are committing crimes. The insurance firm would be liable to pay up for any damages the gangsters committed on the one hand, or liable if any of their own agents ended up killing any of the human shields. There would be a large incentive to find more sophisticated methods of dealing with hostage takers.
And yes. I used to be a lefty, a consequentialist, a liberal.
I think that for one to be an accessory they must both actively support and sanction the perpetrator of the crime. Both conditions are necessary and neither is sufficient. Giving an axe to a known axe-murderer might make one an accessory. I’m not sure. But a taxpayer definitely doesn’t qualify. He doesn’t give his support willingly, as is demonstrated by the fact that coercion is used to extract funds from him, so the fact that he gives support does not mean that he also gives a sanction.
Yes, kind of like that. Although I would say that both obligations that are correlative to rights and obligations that aren’t are moral obligations, but only the latter should be enforced (because enforcing the former requires breaking the latter sort obligations owed by the enforcers to the enforcee - eg. you have an obligation to save a drowning man, but forcing you to do so would violate your rights, which also involves breaking an obligation).
The swordsman still has the option of ending his swing at the last minute, after the victim raised their arm to block. So the swordsman’s action is the last in the causal chain of events leading to the hostages death. I think it is always the last action which starts a causal chain of events which leads to harm which is the criminal one.