Is it possible to:
exert physical force on another’s body, to restrict their movement or to inflict pain in order to direct their actions.
???
“Control” in this sense is control by the person holding title to an external thing. The term for this is “indirect control” versus the “direct control” of an individual to blink their eyelashes or whatever. The type of voluntary slavery contract we are concerned with is only a legal transfer of rights to indirectly control. This is possible, look up videos of prisons if you don’t believe me.
I think that I have done more than enough to prove why such transfer is legitimate and anyone opposing it holds an internally contradictory theory. I will, nonetheless, “concede” two points:
-
It is highly unlikely that anyone would agree to such contracts, so whatever theory is adopted will have little application anyhow. Therefore continuing to debate this again is a waste of my time.
-
Even though I am right, people’s preferences will shape the “landscape” of polycentric legal institutions regardless. Any judge can conceive of the correctness of a certain punishment yet refuse to act on it. This is what I term the via negativa of libertarian jurisprudence. I would take issue with Block on this part:
Gordon maintains that to give or sell yourself (not merely your physical property) to someone else would be a per se violation of self-ownership. I claim, very much to the contrary, that to forbid this and to fail to legally enforce such contracts would violate the rights of self-ownership of the person.
Forbidding voluntary transactions (1) is unjust. Failing to act on rights violations (2) is not unjust. To claim (2), leads to support of positive rights. A judge could refuse to prescribe punishment for a “roving band of voluntary slavery abolitionists”, if he fears what he stands to gain runs so counter to public opinion that his reputation, and thus his livelihood, would suffer.