Let’s let the “market decide” all things pertaining to justice and ‘rights’. Dump argumentation ethics and the negative rights doctrine.
There is so much confusion in this thread that it doesn’t seem worth it to try and sort it out here. Here are some questions that should get there own seperate threads:
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What is the difference between rights, liberties, and privileges? How do these relate to obligations and duties?
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Can good/bad consequences be meaningfully distinguished from judgments of value (by individual persons)?
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Is property a right or a liberty?
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What is (and what should be) the difference between things that are legal and things that are moral (or ethical)?
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Is the negative/positive rights distinction a helpful one to make?
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What is justice?
Unless you already agree on the answers to two or more of these questions, it is unlikely that you will have helpful discourse about the others. There is too much disagreement on these fundamentals to get anywhere in this mess of comments. I advise the rest of you to abandon this thread and continue to discuss these smaller, more manageable, questions elsewhere on the forums.
I endorse what Trulib said in his previous statement.
What is this thing called Justice, which you wish the ‘market to decide’ ? Why should any person let market anarchists decide ‘justice’ on the market? Is your position that there is no reason for this aside from your preference?
Have I said anything confused?
I wish that you would answer my questions about your notion of justice.
I wish that you would answer my questions about your notion of justice.
Justice is a formal system whereby acts are classified into admissible/inadmissible - right/wrong - just/unjust and the doers of said acts innocent/guilty
How is justice objective?
If you cannot set about disputing the formal system without presupposing that very formal system thereby undermining your attempt, then you must presume the formal system to be true.
How do you know?
Presuming that self-contradicting formal systems are true, or that irrefutable formal systems are indeed false, seems ‘unpragmatic’ at best…
I was referring to you less than to others, but yes I believe that some of what you said is confused. For instance, you claimed that:
thereby implying that people are misunderstanding the notion of “negative rights” and misapplying it (rather than using an incoherent notion to tie themselves into knots). Accepting Isaiah Berlin’s distinction in the first place is erroneous, but I’m not interested in debating this issue in the context of the present thread.
My impression is that this is true of about 3/5 of the people that post here.
You’re just begging the question — you can’t define justice in terms of synonyms. My question has to do with what brings about these distinctions (like right/wrong) in the first place. Is there some theory of ‘rightness’ that you’re suggesting? Or are we speaking only of the law?
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
if you can’t say that I’m wrong without presupposing I am right, then lets assume you are wrong and I am right.
You’re just begging the question — you can’t define justice in terms of synonyms.
You asked me what Justice is and I gave you a possibile description of it that is not incorrect. if you admit to ignorance about the terms which I introduced then say as much but don’t throw my answer back in my face for not being an answer to a question you had not asked. Do you deny that Justice is a formal system that classifies acts into the categories I mentioned? I am wrong about that am I? Objectively wrong?
Rights and justice are most definitely interpersonal and ad-hoc, but that doesn’t mean they’re meaningless. They have a use in coordination. It is because we can discuss morality, and because we can (usually successfully) predict how others will follow them, that the market is able to form.
I believe there is even such a thing as a “moral market”, or a market for deciding the course of interpersonal actions. This thread is very much part of it. With that said, I would be interpersonally content with roughly any libertarian view of rights, natural, rothbardian, argumentative, whatevs’! Peace.
I find it amazing that within Libertarianism we have a person (de Jasay) who has provided entirely consistent and coherent answers to practically all of the issues raised in this thread, and yet we are STILL citing Rothbard who was blinded into irrationality by his emotional attachment to his subject.
With the exception of Solid Choke, very few people mentioned de Jasay around here until 6 months ago.
I don’t want people to stop reading Rothbard, but to simply substitute a little more Jasay on the margin. I think, to a very limited extent, that has begun to happen here.
My reply in this thread was heavily, heavily, heavily influenced by de Jasay’s outlook on rights. Just saying - he’s become my favorite modern libertarian thinker next to David Schmidtz and Roderick Long.
Gee how this forum changes lol I can’t keep up