I think Walter Block isn’t that insane to suggest that it’s ok to murder or rape someone if he disagrees (despite the conract that person signed). If he suggest that, well then… I disagree with him just like any other absolutist propertarian or contractarian.
you are confused. Murder by definition is a violation of NAP. Same with rape. If I pay money to be killed by someone, it is not murder, but a voluntary suicide of some kind. Rape too, isn’t rape if it is voluntary payed sex. Then it’s just a service. No suprise statists look at libertarians as insane fringe group when some of them try to legitimize rape and murder. Forget the fact that state does exactly the same. It’s about percieving things.
Today, if a company doesn’t follow FDA regulations and a person dies because of that, some employees might actually be put in jail, even for long periods. In a free society, it should be possible for private regulators to sign contracts with doctors that would stipulate physical punishment for lack of compliance. It makes sense to me.
The problem is in your use of the word “rape,” I think. Rape implies it is involuntary. Yet if there was a contract signed, according to you, then it is voluntary. Hence, not rape, by definition.
@BP: Why did the woman sign the contract in the first place?
Well, yes. I want to know why those things are objectively so, and not subject to individual valuations.
Right, I just want to know how much greater rape violates rights than theft does.
Let me give an example of what I’m thinking. You steal a family heirloom from me that was previously appraised at $100. But I personally value that heirloom so much that I wouldn’t give it up for anything less than $100,000. You are caught within a few days (because pda’s are much more efficient than cops) but you had melted the heirloom down for its gold content and sold it for $75. I grab my copy of The Ethics of Liberty and say “you owe me two times the value of the heirloom, so $200,000 plus the costs of chasing you down.” Of course you are also a good Rothbardian and say “I know that the heirloom appraised at $100, so I’ll pay the $200 plus the legal costs, anything else would be disproportionate and a greater violation of MY rights.”
So here’s the issue: if you rule in favor of the thief’s argument, you either fail to make the victim whole according to how he values the item, or set yourself up in a position to try and claim that the value of the item is objective (trying to justify that it is “actually” worth less than what he values it at). If you rule in favor of the victim’s argument, you have an unworkable system (“I value everything that was stolen from me at $5 trillion”). Additionally, to recognize that these things are subjective is to allow for the case that rape is not a greater violation of rights than theft if the victim doesn’t thinks so. But none of this is an actual problem once you stop trying to make objectively ethically rules like proportional punishment that are inconsistent with value subjectivism.
Wеll, if murder can be justified (i.e. murder parks), surely rape can be too.
Neither can, by definition.
Look, no matter what way you shake it, or how subjective you want to be about definitions, whatever murder and rape may mean (and I think most of us ought to be smart enough to have a general picture) they have been seen as among the most serious of crimes from the dawn to the dusk of human history.
If you are trying to use some hermenutics to tap dance around that very obvious fact (which no matter how much you wish so you can sound “hard nosed”, is based neither on reason or science, but custom) you are intellectually masurbating into a vacuum and speaking gibberish outside the scope and language of law.
And once again all this really begs the “who cares” question. Is this really that pressing a line of inquiry? I call BS and dubious intent.
If murder parks are illegal, is assisted suicide also illegal?
I don’t understand the question.
Suicide does not imply much legally. It is like asking if peanut butter is illegal - it depends on place, time, custom…the word is not always a legal word nor does it automatically imply a stigma, but a word of custom, which has had a variety of different ways being looked at in culture (ex: Rome it was seen as honorable, America not so much).
So: “should assisted suicide be illegal” is a vacuous question that can not be answered or asked and mean anything in our case
And : “is suiced illegal” is a question that can be easily answered by looking at the laws of whatever legal system you find relevant to your life.
Once again it is in the very definition of law that if someone is claiming you murdered or rapped someone it is considered a breach of expectations, no matter what type of bat shit crazy tunnnel vision Walter Block may have - you are either a) commiting a grammatical error and hence speaking gibberish b) talking about something I can verify or falsify in relevant extant reality. If it is talk of the NAP, it is the former - a world concieved by the seeds of intellectual masturbators, fertilizing a vacuum, propagating nonsense.
“is suiced illegal” is a question that can be easily answered by looking at the laws of whatever legal system you find relevant to your life.
Is your whole argument “hey guys, check your local rulebooks to see if this is legal or not?”
What we’re trying to do is derive a morality and ask “is this policy in accordance with this morality?”
“should assisted suicide be illegal” is a vacuous question that can not be answered or asked and mean anything in our case
Still don’t see how you arrive at that conclusion.
Using your logic, rape may be legal according to your customs and culture.
Is your whole argument “hey guys, check your local rulebooks to see if this is legal or not?”
I don’t even have an argument. Thus far, all I have been is something like an elementary school teacher correcting bad grammer. I see no propositions made.
I speak tautology. All X are Y’s, all Y’s are Z’s, hence all X’s are Z’s. Logic is not a science that discovers truth, rather it is a series of tautologies - which are not a picture of reality. This is all I am saying what can be said, hence there can be no argument. I concern myself by what can only be said, not shown.
“It is raining or not raining” is always true - hence tautological, therefore this form can be talked about logically and in a void. You know something of my language, not about the actual weather. This can only be shown or expressed.
As for it being a moral question
- A proposition is a thought (which in turn is a logical picture of facts) that is an expression of reality which uses sign (something physical and perceptible - words on paper, expressions from mouths, etc). A sign is what can be percieved of a symbol. One and the same sign can bethe same for two different symbols
so Rape is:
a) in my case a legal word - which can only exist as a tautolgical structure (which automatically due to it’s grammer = illegal)
b) A word in common grammer which automatically indicates a heavy social/ existential stigma that grammatically demands it being a “hard hitting” word. If I call the Universe “big” while at the same time calling my house humungous due to the nature of the grammer I am either being
-poetic, and hence out of our scope
- subverisive - hence skeptical - hence nonsensical to any form of expected conversation
c) a word of living custom that can only be experienced in actual existence
d) a moral question
In the case of rape as a moral question:
-
Logic is tautoloic
-
All propositions are of equal value
-
A proposition is something that must be expressed, if it can not be expressed - the question does not exist, or else it could be answered
The rest I’ll just quote Wittgenstein:
- [6.41](http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/t641en.html)
- The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. *In* it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
- [**6.42**](http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/t642en.html)
- Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher.
- [**6.43**](http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/t643en.html)
- If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.
- [6.44](http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/t644en.html)
- Not *how* the world is, is the mystical, but *that* it is.
And to restate
So long as we are speaking of legal terms: Rape by definition, must be illegal. Suicide, no - it is just a way of saying how someone died - by definition
In the fact that you wish to speak of them grammatically and within the void
By definition rape = bad. Suicide, simply does no automatically do so in a universally grammtical tautological sense that I am aware of - it is a declaration of death. That is all that can be said. I can not state what rape is, but that it is - and that is all
let’s call it “Voluntary Suicide Parks” shall we?
I’m pretty sure both Nozick and Block would reject the illustration in the OP so I don’t see the point in analyzing it. Why don’t you start with something that Nozick/Block would conceivable agree is correct but which you find problematic?
Clayton -
In regards o the OP:
It is probably best to look at us liberals (Miseans. subjectivists, Austrians) as not caring so much about these words as left libs seem to. We are liberals after all, they are not.
At the heart of it I think - we view everything as a “process” and not as a thing. All this morality and talks about words like “freedom” and “anarchy” are red herrings which are bound to trip things up. As liberals when we talk, we are mostly concerned about what can and can not be said in a world of asserting facts within a logical structure - we are not concerned with these “things in themselves”
To support “freedom from” or “freedom to” is false nonsense that can not be stated and nothing can support them - as is the word “non - hierarchical”, etc. Everything is there to assert it’s presence/ will we are just there to talk about the logical structure of such things. It is best to look at your labels as nothing more than a consequence and a by-product of your actions, nothing that you actuall “support”, favor, or consider “moral” - that stuff is just jive
It may be best to view liberalism as the inevitable lukewarmnes of the temp of the water in the glass, be it hot or cold, will turn to eventually..
let’s call it “Voluntary Suicide Parks” shall we?
So you think they’re legal? I agree.
@vive - either you are not saying much or I do not understand you. Likely the second. Now it seems like you are simply arguing determinism.
“Murder parks” are not a very good example, because they don’t present a chance to retreat from the original agreement. But what if you sign an agreement such as in the merchant of venice, that if you fail to pay the debt, you lose your life? Can you retreat from this contract? I believe not. Otherwise what the sense in having contracts at all?
Holy fucking christ.
Unless you think self-ownership (the basis of your entire absolutist take on contracts) is somehow alienable, then your entire scheme falls apart. If this hypothetical woman decides not to have children with this hypothetical man that she signed a contract with, (by your theory) then he can sue for damages. But you’ve taken it to the point of justifying rape.
This is no more than another petty attempt by Eugene to justify misogyny. Hell, he’s gone beyond Rothbard’s arguments that I find inherently authoritarian and just gone to a whole new extreme where rape is not a violation of NAP or self-ownership.
I maintain that anyone who holds a position similar to yours or Eugene’s is a misogynist docuhe bag who should go fuck an active road flare as a valid and logical point. To hell with being civil. No justification of rape is civil. When you’re taking your philosophy this far for the sake of consistency, to hell with your idea of “freedom.” You’re nothing more than a prick looking for an excuse to rape and pillage a world that (rightfully) hates you.
I’ll ignore the insults.
I’ll explain my position. I don’t care about property, I just believe that contracts (that were not signed in duress) are voluntary by nature and thus should be enforceable, whatever the conditions of the contract are.
How else, can a regulator make sure the doctor performs his duties? If you are responsible for lives of people, it makes sense for you to fear physical retalitation if you are being criminally negligent. Today doctors are criminally liable, and I believe that sometimes its a good thing. But according to you, such arrangement would not be possible in a free society. I think that’s wrong.
Another insult, and you’ll be given a temp-ban, Birthday Pony.
It’s rape when there is no consent. The contract gave consent. The question is whether you may take away consent from a contract like you can without a contract. As in, in life you can say “well, I’ve changed my mind” right before you start. If the contract says “I agree to do such and such”, then it is akin to real life, where you can agree but later retract your agreement. I don’t know what an un-retractable consent would look like in a contract…
not sure what type you are advocating, but I think it’s possible to have legitimate and voluntary suicide parks (whith contracts etc), but I strongly disagree against the particular version (advocated by some libertarians) when entering a park by default makes you a “member”. It’s the same bullshit that statists try to pull with their social contract. However, it would truly be stupid to enter such park without expectation to be killed once you’re in. But mistakes happen (just like with capital punishement) so there gotta be much more safe-guards than anywhere, meaning that, if a person, who entered such park decided to leave, he should be able to leave despite what the contract says.