No empire will allow foreign citizens or immigrant workers into markets unless through slavery.
All known good land is occupied by foreign empires or you are completely surrounded by foreigners
Your country had one resource in which it survived on (1 edible type of fish or plant I guess), that resource went extinct you can no longer trade with other empires and the people of rock island can no longer be fed properly.
In your opinion is it acceptable to invade other land in these conditions?
I think I know what you are getting at with the question. NB. I am only a newbie and am interested in the Austrian ideology but I wouldn’t describe myself as an Austrian yet, though I do think many of their ideas hold water.
It is more likely that as the food source runs low, the birth rate falls and the death rate rises until a balance is found. The citizens would first compete amongst themselves for the food. However, given the question ‘Do I think it is acceptable to invade another country?’, I think that the question is irrelevant, as invasion would be innevitable when the survival of a people is put at risk.
So you think ethical questions are made invalid if they are decided?
The question of whether slavery is unethical is invalid because it exists? The question of whether the purges were unethical is invalid because they happened? The question of whether we should have invaded Iraq is invalid because we did?
We weren’t forced into taking slaves through starvation nor we were forced into invading Iraq, there was no threat to our survival in those instances. When your mortality is put at risk, you do what you can to survive. Do you think that if all other routes had failed in the (unrealistic) theoretical scenario, that a civilisation will just give up and starve to death because of ethics?
Right, I see the error in my earlier post: “Do you think it’s acceptable to invade another country?”, this question neglects the matter of survival that was suggested by the OP, which is what I was trying to address.
i dont understand what you are saying, does a claim to ‘survival rights’ override all other moral concerns?
its absurd on its face, if your survival allows you to murder people that own the food you need. what of their survival right, to not be killed by you taking their food?
That’s not what they were saying. They are saying that if your survival depends on it then you aren’t going to be worried about whether or not it violates other people’s rights, and the point is moot.
yes, often desperate people are wicked, so what? its hardly moot if wickidness is a key concern. of course by definition of your premise morality doesnt enter into the calculation… i think this is a problem for those that presuppose morality doesnt matter when they face X circumstance. it shows them to be the shallowest of libertarians.
And you are different? Everyone does this, it’s just a matter of degrees. Suppose you wouldn’t kill someone for food if you were going to starve (I’d like to think I wouldn’t either), but what about just stealing some food from them if you were going to starve? If you wouldn’t do that, how about if you’re going to starve unless you cross someone’s corn field to get to food, and they have a no tresspassing sign up in sight? At some point, you’ll violate someone else’s rights in order to survive, it’s just a question of how important those rights are on your scale.
there is a paradox, because the question is whether such NAP breaking survial tactics are justified. well justified could mean to the means rationally enable thends decided on then yes. this is quite different from justified, as a moral term. to morally justify a violation of justice is a contradiction.
perhaps , perhaps not, but if it was so, and i was a rights violater, i would be bad, i would not be justified. it would be wrong. a person that claims to be a libertarian that does not agree with this, is misusing libertarian. perhaps you hold that no-one is libertarian in my sense and you might be right. it seems you must hold this if you are to be consistant.
Yes, you would be a rights violator, but if you were in the (bizarre, theoretical) situation described above you would still do it, the situation the OP is enquiring about is ‘do or die’. Is is justified? There is no right answer, but you would need to survive. Likewise, anyone being invaded would have a right to protect their property.
Such a situation could only occur when there are not enough resources to support a population and let’s face it, the invasion could not occur as (as pointed out earlier) an attack by a starving army could easily be fought off. In fact, so could an army fed exclusively on ‘one type of fish’. [:)] And what sort of a civilization could settle in such an arid hell-hole as the one described in the first place?
You’re telling me that you would rather starve? If ever (God forbid) there is a ‘post-apocalyptic nightmare situation’, I hope you are one of my competitors for survival[:)].
(I think) The idea of the theoretical situation is that you are pushed to the absolute limit, ever heard of ‘the will to survive’?
Unlike animals, who are dominated by their instincts, man can die for what he believes to be right. In fact, that’s one of the traits exemplifying man from the other members of the animal kingdom. Saying that man must kill, and steal when he is pushed to the limit robs him of his humanity.