A hermit is murdered in the woods, who has no friends or family (i.e., there are no surviving victims). Who, if anyone, is justified to use Force against the murderer?
Remember, the basics of the case are thus: a). The hermit has no friends or family, or anyone who could be considered a victim of his death. b). The hermit is not a criminal himself; his murder was entirely unjust. c). The hermit’s death is discovered. (We’ll say a hiker found his body). d). The murderer is identified (due to a DNA test, perhaps).
Anyone who cares to. The hermit had no friends of family in life, but a stranger may in a sense posthumously adopt him as his friend by taking up his cause.
However this does not apply in the case that the hermit had precisely one friend or family member and it was precisely this person who murdered him. A perfect stranger who has posthumously adopted the hermit actually has a much weaker link to him than the murderer does. If the murderer says that the hermit would not want to see force being used against him by this stranger how can the stranger know that not to be true?
There is a similar principle behind this as there is behind holding property. Someone can have what seems like a very weak claim on certain property, but if he is the only person with any claim to it whatsoever then he will indeed be recognized as the owner of this property without complication. (The principle behind homesteading virgin land.) Another someone can have what seems like a much stronger claim on property, but if someone else has an even stronger claim, then the claim of this first person is totally invalid and he will not be recognized as the owner. (Making it impossible to “homestead” through squatting or renting.)
So in these types of questions, the important thing is not that the person interested in pursuing the murderer demonstrates that his connection to the victim surpasses some arbitrary treshold, but that he demonstrates that his connection to the victim is greater than that of anyone else.
Any claim whatsoever will ultimately be subject to arbitration.
Strong claim? Weak claim? Claims can not be measured, quantified nor compared. A strong claim would be more properly called a claim that persuades you and a weak claim should be called a claim that does not persuade you.
One major legitimate role of the state is the pursuit of impersonal justice within society. The state exists to uphold the NAP and individual rights by using responsive coercion to end initiation of coercion–because coercion can only be ended by coercion.
Initiation of coercion is an immoral thing.
Responsive coercion to end initiation of coercion is a very good thing.
With that rubric in place, we see that an ideal society limits its government’s use of coercion to responsive coercion.
Now back to the murder.
When a homicide appears, what’s needed is a fair process of investigation, proof of evidence, and public trial to determine guilt or innocence. Because this is impersonal justice, we must prove a case to neutral third parties before we can justify carrying out a coercive punishment so that the government is kept honest and cannot simply pass judgment against people at will (which is why the jury of your peers was created).
Agents of the law then can investigate the homicide, gather evidence, and arrest those for whom they have probable cause and suspicion.
Why is it useful to have a state then to do all this, rather than any 3rd party?
Because in an anarchist society the 3rd party has no controls, doesn’t have to justify his conclusions to anyone. Since he didn’t see the murder happen in process, he isn’t directly involved. Should we allow people to simply investigate a murder, conclude on their own that X did it, then execute them? Judge, jury, and executioner?
That sort of whim-violence is what we’ve been trying to get away from. Such would be a return to barbarism and tribalism. Right back to Hatfields and McCoys.
The only alternative is to have a written procedure, guarantees of rights of the accused, objective rules of evidence and proof, and judgment passed by neutral 3rd parties. All of which presumes law.Anarch
Anarchists will never be able to get away from the need for law, and the state thereby. Nor can an anarchist find means to attack my definition of the ideal state. If it’s good for an individual to use responsive coercion to stop aggression, even if they’re a 3rd party to the event, then it’s equally legitimate and good for an organization to do the same thing. And this defines the limits of an ideal state’s actions.
So there’s no one who can claim restitutive damages from the murderer. There’s no private claim in tort for wrongful death, or whatever.
Now, to my mind, this does not necessarily mean that there are no actions vis-a-vis the murderer, by 3rd-parties, which can’t potentially be justified as a proportional response to his initiation of force against the dead homeless person.
Consider a situation where a convenience store is operated wholly by its owner. One day you’re in there shopping, and some hood comes in, shoots and incapacitates the owner, and starts loading up on cash from the register. Are you, as a patriotically armed bystander who happens to be in the store at the time, justified in using force to interrupt this unfortunate series of events? If you shoot the guy after he shoots the owner, can he claim in court that you had no reason to shoot him because his illicit beef was entirely with the owner of the store in which you have no vested interest, and he never so much as looked at you that day, leave alone point his gun at you? In other words, you shooting him was an initiation of force on your part, because the force that he had admittedly initiated had, apparently, been directed entirely at someone else with whom you shared no legal relationship of any relevance at the time?
Surely this is not a legal argument he is making? It will result in absurdity if you can only justify force as a response if you also have to prove that the initiation in question was directed against you specifically or personally, or that you had a vested interest in whatever it was directed against. I do not think it’s necessary to establish that one has a vested personal interest in order to justify one’s use of force as a response to an initiation thereof. I only think it’s necessary if you wanted to claim damages in litigation of your own.
To my mind, there is no requirement to establish a personal link in terms of an initiation of force, in order to justify a proportional response. The only requirements are that there was an initiation of force, and that the response was proportional.
Basically my answer is that no one has a private claim for restitutive damages - this is essentially stated in the question - but it would be a mistake to infer that restitutive damages is the only conceivable or justifiable reason someone might have for responding with force, or that a desire to obtain restitution is the only metric by which a response can be considered ‘proportional’.
---- and that is a problem, why? He is not going to get repeat business if he has a track record of passing unfair judegements. That is the basis of market anarchy. Everybody knows that.
That is a very insulting statement but reflects your misunderstanding of the anarchist philosophy. Sure, everybody wants law. We anarchists simply want the freedom to have choice in law.
The need for the state does not follow logically from the need for law.
This scenario reminds me of how child abuse would be handled.
Who would protect children from being abused by their own parents? Some anti abuse agency. Who would apprehend and prosecute the murderer of the lone hermit? Some anti murder agency.
(1). If the justified use of force is something that can be determined a priori without any information about the norms, conventions and laws operating in this hypothetical, then it is either (a) a physical restriction on what is capable of being performed or (b) a normative claim on how things ought to be done. If (a), then there is no need to worry about this question because the unjustified use of force can never come about, it is a physical impossibility. If (b), then there is no need to worry about this question because the answer has no bearing on the actual outcome, people can chose to act contrary to what the may justifiably do.
(2). If the justified use of force is something that must be determined a posteriori by observing the norms, conventions and laws operating in an actual case, then your question is impossible to answer.
It’s not retarded, it’s the ideal, the ideal state, and the only legitimate role of the state. If you mean retarded in the sense that no current states actually limit themselves to responsive coercion, I’ll agree that that’s a retarded state of affairs, but it is in principle fixable. Nothing about the state itself requires that it be aggressive, even if it tends towards it.
The founding of the United States was a massive step forward in upholding rights compared to all previous governmental organizations. It came close, but not close enough.
What’s needed is the ability to found new states with the knowledge and theory we have now about rights, freedom, and the NAP. I will show you such a state when I myself found it Or maybe someone will beat me to it. I think we should build floating, waterborne states in international waters which would be a prelude to states in space.
Who’s hiring him to solve the murder of the guy with no friends/relatives? You’re comfortable with one guy being judge, jury, and executioner? Let’s say he executes someone for stealing, what then? How do you ensure justice is commensurate. What happens when he executes someone and it’s later proved that another guy did it?
You don’t know the can of worms you’re opening by reverting to pre-trial mechanisms of justice. Trying to reinvent the legal wheel won’t work. You must at some point have a court of law judging trials, with standards of evidence and procedure, etc.
You say so, but let’s think it out.
Law, by nature, has a jurisdictional monopoly. It cannot be bought and sold like a good. If you want to talk market anarchism for law, what’s needed is the ability to move freely between states competing for citizens, because a jurisdiction will always be in effect, as law can only be consistently applied where there is a jurisdiction.
I tried for a long time to conceive of a situation where two sets of law could exist side-by-side in the same jurisdiction and was forced to give it up under the weight of its own contradictions.
And when you have law you must also have law enforcement. Anarchists love to tell me that law enforcement can be privately maintained, and this is true, but in practice private law-enforcement will have to exist alongside public law enforcement. Why? Because only an agent of the law can carry out coercive punishment.
You can have private security that tracks down and stops criminals, but they then have to be delivered to a criminal court. And because a criminal court is always coercive, and the law/state has a monopoly on coercive punishment by nature, you will need it to do things like lock people in jail. If a private court tried to lock someone in jail without legal sanction they’d be aggressing (false imprisonment).
An anarchist society fails as soon as we need a legal solution to a problem that includes coercion.
Without a government, the only one that can coerce a wrong-doer is one of the parties involved in the dispute and the result is Hatfields vs McCoys.
How do we return stolen money from Madoff in an anarchist society? We don’t–the only soution anarchists provide is excommunication. A coercive solution is required–namely legally freezing his accounts and returning the money. Were a private bank to simply give away people’s money without a court order, people wouldn’t trust that bank. And the only court worth trusting is one that has the consent of the governed.
A private court will not have jurisdiction over anyone that doesn’t agree to allow jurisdiction by it. But a legal court will have automatic jurisdiction via its association with the state and with law.
Are you talking government agency or some anarchist private agency? I do see a need for an agency that seeks impersonal justice within the bounds of the law. Outside the law it’s vigilantism.
If the proper role of government is the protection of individual rights, and people have a right to life, it follows that protecting the right to life is a proper role of government.
I think it’s pretty clear that laws against murder would exist in any rational legal system.
This is ridiculous. This is seriously your answer? This is an evasion, not an answer. If an anarchist society’s only answer to this question is “nothing can be done” then there will never be an anarchist society.
If (b), then there is no need to worry about this question because the answer has no bearing on the actual outcome, people can chose to act contrary to what the may justifiably do.
And? People must act within the Non-Aggression Axiom. My question was if the usage of force would be justified here as retaliative aggression. Not whether there is any “physical restriction.” (Of course there is not).
People can choose to persecute Michael Vick for his dog fighting, but that does not mean that they are justified within the inviolable NAA.* They are indeed objectively wrong in using force, for Morality is objective. Aggression can only ever be used justifiably in proportion to some original crime. (Assault, theft, or slavery, or an overt threat thereof, against man). Michael Vick did not Initiate Aggression. Hence, his persecuters initiated aggression against him, which is of course Immoral.
*Note that I am using the above as an example to illustrate my point about the NAA, and it has no bearing to the Hermit case.
And why must they? If this is some sort of stipulation you are placing on your hypothetical, then thats fine. But my point is that if your hypothetical were to ever take place, whether or not the NAP was the rule which determined what sort of actions are justified is something that could only be figured out by looking at the norms, conventions and laws in place at that time and place.
Morality isn’t objective, and Rothbard and company are very wrong about this–but for the sake of argument, lets say it is. You want to find out who may justifiably use force against the hermit’s murderer, where “justifiable” is synonomous with Rothbardian ethical theory. Here’s the problem: if no one cares about natural law ethics in this hypothetical world, then the actual people involved in such a problem are going to resolve it however they see fit, morality be damned. If the hypothetical world is a moral place and everyone knows how to proceed, then we needn’t worry about what’s justified because its going to happen anyway. So if you want to sit around and figure out every permutation of the NAP, thats fine. But you can’t reach any sort of useful conclusions without examining an actual case in an actual universe because the way that things are going to proceed will be determine by the norms, conventions and laws of that place and time, and not according to natural law (unless of course, the norms, conventions and laws coincide with natural law).
Or maybe someone will beat me to it. I think we should build floating, waterborne states in international waters which would be a prelude to states in space.