I asked the question because you have so far failed to grasp the whole concept of libertarian justice and show no signs of grasping it in the near future without a change in approach from trying to be the grunt’s lawyer.
Im here asking questions. You dont want to answer for some reason. It should be simple to show where I have gone wrong. I am not trying to be anyones lawyer. The things I have tried to discuss here applies to more than just the “grunts”.
I don’t see any question marks in the OP. What I see is finding every slippery slope and blurring of distinction to get around the common stock army grunt being culpable for anything. As for legal definitions, it should be obvious that the existing legal system is based on revenge and penalization rather than compensation and risk control. Murder, manslaughter and the like are nothing more than classifications by which to determine how much penalty to inflict upon the indicted.
I don’t see any question marks in the OP.
You did not involve yourself in the conversation untill a few posts ago. Made some statements and I asked some questions in order to clarify your point. You decided to not clarify what you meant untill now.
it should be obvious that the existing legal system is based on revenge and penalization
It is.
rather than compensation and risk control.
Which would be what a libertarian legal system would be based on.
Murder, manslaughter and the like are nothing more than classifications by which to determine how much penalty to inflict upon the indicted.
Or in the case of libertarian legal system how much and what type of restitution would be due. A convicted murder in a libertarian society would most likely be segregated from the rest of society in additon to having to make restitution to the vicims family. Someone who falls asleep at the wheel of a car and kills a pedestrian would not be seen as a danger to be isolated, however would still owe restitution to his victim. If I am mistaken please explain why.
What I see is finding every slippery slope and blurring of distinction to get around the common stock army grunt being culpable for anything
I have not done this. I have drawn distinctions between differing situations. These circumstances should determine whether someone is guilty of outright murder. In which case they should be segregated from the general public in addition to owing restitution. Or are they acting under duress.
I am not talking about any specific war or time period. Only trying to establish a base line which we can examine different conflicts froma common point.
How does it feel to be an apologist for institutionalized murder?
How does it feel to be an apologist for institutionalized murder?
I wouldnt know, I have done no such thing. If you believe I have I request that you show where I have justified states waging war.
What I have done is attempt to discuss differing circumstances that would apply differing levels of culpability for actions. Even in the paper you linked me in the other thread, passes are given to different agents of the state. These passes are based on the actions taken by those individuals, the damage done to others by those individuals, and their power over the state. These are circumstances. They were used to clear some of wrong doing and condemn others. For some reason most here would not like to use the same process when it comes to soldiers. It is much easier to just categorically condemn all soldiers as murderers.
There are some clear cut cases of murder. There are some clear cut cases of selfdefense. Most fall somewhere in between. I have tried to look at the individual actions and weigh them against individual circumstances. Or I could use smug one liners that appeal to an emotional response.
How did you know I was addressing you?
When someone breaks into my house, they generally don’t have a right to self-defense. I also don’t see where what is said in that paper “passes are given to different agents of the state.” Please explain/cite.
How did you know I was addressing you?
Oh, I dont know… just a hunch.
When someone breaks into my house, they generally don’t have a right to self-defense.
Yes. How is it determined that they do not have the right to self defense? The circumstances. Which are he has broken into your house. How we determine if an action is just or not is the circumstances surrounding the action.
I also don’t see where what is said in that paper “passes are given to different agents of the state.” Please explain/cite.
From Page 23 of the PDF. Here
The point of this analogy is to blame the officers of the government,
but not the common soldiers. Just as the Nuremberg trials went after the
general and colonels, not the privates and corporals, the libertarian authorities
will make a similar distinction with respect to the minions of the state.
Well, then, who are the leaders of the modern state, or the officers,
and who are the followers, or the common soldiers? There are no hard-andfast
conclusions; there are gray areas; there is a continuum, perhaps, between
guilt and innocence; there are complications. Nevertheless, through the
clouds and fog, there are principles that can help us shed light on the issue.
Here he explicitly addresses my point. Section 5c of the paper addresses the distinction between those who can be considered part of the ruling class and those who are subjects. How does he decide who is a member of the ruling class and who is not. Thier circumstances.
By and large, the military actions of the US and many other countries in recent history are equivalent to “breaking into a house” rather than as actions of self-defense. This is the circumstances for the Iraq war, Afghanistan, etc.
Here he explicitly addresses my point. Section 5c of the paper addresses the distinction between those who can be considered part of the ruling class and those who are subjects. How does he decide who is a member of the ruling class and who is not. Thier circumstances.
You are referring to the historical analogy he later applies only to those actions which would be just in a market economy (i.e. not murder). Keep reading.
Let us first divide governmental activities into two categories: those things that are intrinsically evil, and those which would occur even in a free society, but which are improperly taken over by the bureaucrats. In the first case, for example, it is wrong, plain wrong, to incarcerate people for engaging in prostitution, drug sales, paying wages below legal minima, or charging more than allowed by a rent control law. Everyone, everyone, directly involved in such viciousness, without exception, would be considered guilty of a rights violation, and punished appropriately by a libertarian court. This includes, but is probably not limited to, the police who capture such people, the wardens who jail them, the attorneys general who prosecute them, the judges and juries who find them guilty, etc. However, it would not include people only indirectly involved in such activities, such as those who sweep the floors in the court houses which find guilty such innocent (but actual) violators of these unjust laws, nor in the jails which later house them.
Members of the coast guard and soldiers fighting in defensive wars would have nothing to fear from the libertarian court.16 Matters would be completely otherwise for those who have taken part in foreign wars of aggression, when there was no attack from them on the shores of the U.S. But members of the Federal Reserve System, that is, those from the professional “officer corps” and above certainly would, since there could be no such thing as a central bank in the pure free market.
By and large, the military actions of the US and many other countries in recent history are equivalent to “breaking into a house” rather than as actions of self-defense. This is the circumstances for the Iraq war, Afghanistan, etc.
Agreed, I have never contended otherwise. So why this is relevent I dont know. And the aggression on the part of the state is one of the circumstances surrounding the actions of individual soldiers. There are other circumstances that need to be considered.
Keep reading.
Ive read the whole thing.
A war of aggression is illegitimate. I have never said otherwise. However that does not mean that all participating in the war is equally culpible for the crimes commited during the execution of the war. Some are more guilty than others. Some are guilty of nothing. What I cited was not meant to clear all of the “grunts”. If that is the way I presented it, I appologize. It was only meant to show that the paper clearly makes a case for drawing distinctions between participants in unjust state action and not convicting all agents for the crimes of the state. Which the passage you have cited continues to make the same case.
Indeed a murderer should fear a libertarian court. However, I am not making the assumption that all who participate in an unjust war are murderers. Not even all soldiers, or even all combat soldiers. Many would be. Some would not be. I also dont make the assumption that all who participate in just wars are only killing in self defense.
States don’t aggress upon others, just like countries don’t “have gold”. This is a false organismic analogy. You did mention the actions of individual soldiers correctly, then we add the actions of those who administer the war and those who provide material support.
Think of it in relation to the analogy of breaking into a house. Person A breaks the window, goes inside, and kills the owner, but B was the one who hoisted A up to the window, and C directed their actions.
Surely some of these people kill others, and some of them kill none, but all of these people are guilty. There is more to a justifiable maximum punishment than “A killed B”.
If you take Block’s explanation of proportionality and put it more in context of Mises’ praxeology, you get something more like this:
- First “tooth” - looking at the victim of an involuntary transaction; “a life was taken”.
- 2nd "tooth - looking at the transgressor, more on this below.
- Costs of capturing the criminal; moreover, costs of the process of recapturing losses from the criminal
- “Premium for Scaring” - walking through my yard with a machine gun
I haven’t read this in a while, but here is Kinsella’s paper on proportionality. He mentions that what is fit for the victim is not necessarily fit for the criminal, in terms of “turning back the hands of time”. A violent rapist might not feel the same felt unease as his victim from a symmetrical set of events. When we’re dealing with a homogenous good, such as an ounce of silver, it is easy to say that what was taken is the same as what must be replaced. In cases like murder, we’re at a loss to describe, as a juror and historian with imperfect knowledge of the future, what adequate restitution for this loss of a life is. The best we can do is threaten to take the criminal’s life in response. If some legal systems prefer to never follow through on the threat, but instead prefer to judge what the convicted would have bartered in exchange for his own life, the same principle is at work.
I honestly believe that many soldiers feel their actions are justified, in defense of nation or democracy. Believing that I am a secret agent, and seeing Russian spies all around, does not make it so. In both cases the killer intended to do what they’ve done. The only use for terms like “manslaughter” in contrast to “murder” is to say that only one “tooth” is owed. The second is thrown out on the basis of the transgressor’s actions being accidental. There is no in between.
Basicly, your point of veiw is that there are only 3 possiblities categories for killing. Murder (the intentionally taking anothers life without justification), manslaughter (the accidental taking of anothers life without justification), or lastly self defense (the justified taking of anothers life). And by extension only 2 categories of punishment or restitution. Up to and beyond the killers life for murder, and something less than taking the killers life for manslaughter. Because all soldier engaged in a war of aggression puposely take the lives of others without justification they can only be murderers.
I want to make sure I understand your point of veiw before I go any further. Please clarify anything I may have misunderstood.
Can you expand on this?
Can you expand on this?
Deaths of innocents as a result of collateral damage (artillery fire at military targets that miss and hit civilian homes), Indescriminate killing of civilians (ie firebombings of population centers). It may be just for them to wage war, but it dosent give them free range to kill anyone on the other side of the battle lines.
When you put it like that yes. I certainly think there are degrees to it. Connected to the level of force or fraud it took to get somebody into participating in an unjust war.
When you put it like that yes. I certainly think there are degrees to it. Connected to the level of force or fraud it took to get somebody into participating in an unjust war.
Lol, awesome. Glad to see I not completely out in left field.
Those words are not defined appropriately for that.
Those words are not defined appropriately for that.
Murder and Manslaughter? What words are? Without the state a will the legal system use different words to describe differing situations?
Basicly, your point of veiw is that there are only 3 possiblities categories for killing. Murder (the intentionally taking anothers life without justification), manslaughter (the accidental taking of anothers life without justification), or lastly self defense (the justified taking of anothers life). And by extension only 2 categories of punishment or restitution. Up to and beyond the killers life for murder, and something less than taking the killers life for manslaughter. Because all soldier engaged in a war of aggression puposely take the lives of others without justification they can only be murderers.
I want to make sure I understand your point of veiw before I go any further. Please clarify anything I may have misunderstood.
First of all, you need to understand that I am coming at this from the point of view that there are actions which, basically speaking, respect the property rights of others or do not respect them, similar to Reinach’s pure theory of right. This approach is similar to, but possibly more complex, than that used in Austrian economics. The difficulty in reconstructing sets of concrete historical facts belongs to the discipline of juriprudence, or law in action. This incorporates all types of knowledge from other nomothetic disciplines such as geology, psychology, military strategy, etc. guided by whatever legal theory.
The legal theory, what you are asking about here, is entirely separate from individual actor’s values, how far they choose to pursue a claim, or how certain a judge is of an individual actor’s intentions or past actions. Since we are trapped in the present, we use Gedankenexperiment (thought experiments), to outline certain general sets of circumstances, to hold certain factors constant, and evaluate how another factor changes the hypothetical event in relation to the underlying axioms.
With this in mind and that we are talking about the intentions of one party, I would say that you are basically right about these three categories, except you missed one (and there is at least a 5th outside of what we are talking about). I suppose a person could be justified in killing someone, but not intend to (“accidental outlaw wrangling”?). Within what typically concerns me, this doesn’t have much value; however, it brought to mind the military’s use of the term “collateral damage” used to wash their hands of civilian blood.
Now you say:
And by extension only 2 categories of punishment or restitution. Up to and beyond the killers life for murder, and something less than taking the killers life for manslaughter. Because all soldier engaged in a war of aggression puposely take the lives of others without justification they can only be murderers.
I don’t see how what you are saying is “by extension” or even could follow. I’ll only give a superficial treatment of the whole process of punishment and restitution, unless you have specific questions.
Keep in mind Block’s heuristic device of the revolver with 1000 chambers and the hypothetical life-transfer machine. Obviously, as a practical constraint, there will be no life-transfer machine any time soon, but if there was and you intend to kill me while not being justified in doing so, you owe me two lives right there and we aren’t even done yet.
There is a very good reason for the primacy of punishment over restitution, but I want to go back to something basic and more broad than soldiers and murder. The result of a crime, generally, is some combination of “theft” and “destruction” (we’re concerned here only with the “teeth”). Pure theft is just what it sounds like, you run away with my box of chocolate bars; pure destruction you eat them all; then as in many cases there is a combination of the two where you eat a couple before you get caught.
So while a victim of murder (the kin or heirs) is already faced with a total loss (the destruction of the deceased), they only stand to gain a measure of satisfaction from killing the murderer. They also have the right to imprison (quite literally “enslave”) one who owes a life to recover restitution. How I’ve used “manslaughter” is ‘one life’, and “murder” thus ‘two lives’. This is again only considering the two “teeth” from the first two bullet points above. So, this is inaccurate:
Up to and beyond the killers life for murder, and something less than taking the killers life for manslaughter.
The last part isn’t stated correctly, but I will give you a chance to respond before going any further.
Because all soldier engaged in a war of aggression puposely take the lives of others without justification they can only be murderers.
Not all soldiers engaged in an unjust war kill people. All soldiers who kill innocent bystanders or troops/civilians acting in self defense are murderers, given the war is one started unjustly.
Let me finish by echoing the disclaimer in Block’s paper. I don’t advocate violence against anyone and am discussing this purely as part of a philosophical discussion.
The whole concept of “war” in the way people bizarrely arrange themselves under the mythology of statehood is rather foreign to libertarianism. As we’ve agreed before, the practical limitations in today’s world make a “libertarian Nuremberg” seem rather distant, but it is possible. Now, I am sure that many take what I am saying as “anti-American” or whatever. I’m not a victim of war, but if I was I would likely prefer tangible remuneration rather than vengeance. I feel that I support the troops much more than a typical war protestor or war hawk. The victims of American aggression could be repaid. Military power could be used to protect from statism and troops could possibly be paid quite a bit more than they are now for such a high risk activity. We’re always discussing a theoretical maximum punishment and forgiveness in the name of ending statism is something I would support.
And this proves he is an apologist for institutionalized murder?