Hypothetical case:
Let’s say I’m a fundamentalist muslim living in a Libertarian country and I keep in my fridge samples of anthrax, malaria, smallpox and several other deadly bacteria strains. They suspect I might be setting up a terrorist attack (and I really am, but they’re not sure).
Are my christian neigbours entitled to send their protection agencies to raid my home and dispose of the dangerous substances? Is pre-emptive strike justified?
If not, what other solutions are there?
Of course not. (But your own protection agency might well disallow you storing such things, and have a clause allowing it to send people to make sure you’re not violating that agreement if there’s any reason to think you are, etc.)
Now Mr. X, being the clever entrepreneur that he is, recognizes the market niche: insurance and protection policies for terrorists in the making. So he provides policies which explicitly allow possession of hazardous substances.
One day, one of his clients indeed releases a bio weapon, resulting in mass death and destruction. Some people survive and demand compensation. Mr. X however manages to “negotiate” a compromise: no compensation for no further WMD releases (Mr. X, being the shady businessman that he is, could easily purchase various WMDs from his customers). The demanding party, still afraid of all the mayhem around them, gives in.
Sure, Mr. X might as well exist in a world where private ownership of WMDs is against the law. However, in such a world, there’s at least the likelihood of Mr. X being disarmed before any damage is done. The ‘intimidation’ trump card of X’s WMDs can only be played out in an anarchist society, as far as I see.
Just curious - how many more times will this alleged exception be brought up? There are many threads that have discussed this concept to the death.
-Jon
The landowner has the right to evict you, but then again he would have to be aware of your activities.
With the original problem remaining unsolved, as far as I understand.
Sure, you have a variety of indirect options to expel an unwanted individual from his property, thanks to the “order without law” character of anarchy. That’s all fine. However, if just one covenant or community considers the terrorist’s behavior acceptable or even supports it, you’re likey to end up with a murky swamp of potentially suicidal misanthropes who can’t think of anything better than “cleansing the world of unbelievers”.
In a statist society, the danger of terrorist attacks is supposed to be reduced by intrusive government policies and preemptive police activity. Does that make terrorist attacks impossible? Certainly not. Does it indeed diminish the possibility of a terrorist attack occuring? Yes, maybe just slightly, but yes. Is it worth the cost? Depends on your valuations.
I have to confess I’m a utilitarian concerning that matter. So we might get into fundamental trouble discussing it.
Still, I consider the topic an elephant anarchists pretend not to see. In an anarchist society, there is no way of effectively preventing a terrorist assault. The only way to work against terrorist attacks in an anarchist society is to expel terrorists directly from your or indirectly from their property, or to refuse doing business with them.
Now imagine a young jihadist being refused everything for people dislike his views. Such a person is most gladly going to engage in a suicide bombing or a WMD assault. He neither needs insurance nor defense companies to do that. He just needs a bomb or WMD, and the anarchist society is not going to bar him from getting it, while a statist society at least places some obstacles in the way. Plus, a statist society could expropriate him of his bombs before he can do any harm. Anarchists could not.
Conclusively, an anarchist society is completely unable to take preemptive action in order to prevent disproportional damage from being done. They may just stand by and watch (see the trolley problem). Maybe I’m wrong, but I consider that anarchism’s biggest blind spot.
A PDA would not be entitled to do that, but it could. However, if right, one and the PDA could be fined for invasion regardless. If evidence of a terrosit plot, either the finding PDA can punish you, our your own, if you violate their “dangerous substance” clause on your contract
However, if wrong, and depending on contract, one could be thrown in prison by yourself or by your PDA.
That is why I think there needs to be a lbertarian legal code or constitution. But I prefer to judge things by their situation, according to fundamental laws of invasion of property and person.
Yes, oh the horror. [8-)] Exactly why would this person not simply associate with others who share or tolerate his views? Why would he be inclined to blow up others who’ve done nothing wrong, and merely do not want to associate with him? I can conjure up any number of hypothetical absurdities. Oh, what if the aliens land on Earth? THEN WHAT?!
It can’t, because…?
-Jon
There is no way of preventing a terrorist assault in any society.
Your premise is that everybody acts rationally. Sure, a rational person is not going to blow anybody up, but is going to resolve arguments verbally or by using the market, non-aggressively. But if we base our predictions on solely rational acts of purely rational individuals, we may as well use Keynesian formula magic to determine the outcome of economics.
Let’s assume my highest goal in life is to gather a ticket to paradise which, as my holy book or my holy interpreter explains, can only be achieved by blowing up some not-so-religious folks. I’m therefore rationally inclined to blow people up by an irrational demand from my religion. Rational thinking, when being misused, does not prevent violence, but may actually stir it. Man’s ability to use his mind is no panacea against violence and bloodshed.
The scenario of a fanatic engaging in terrorist activities is still somewhat more probable than “what if the aliens land on Earth”, I think.
Of course, in an anarchist society, one could still expropriate the terrorist. However, this person would be committing theft and, depending on the value of the bomb / WMD, is likely to encounter high compensation charges. A statist society could mandate government theft to uphold peace and order.
I’m aware that government theft is not the height of moral action either, but as I said, I’m a utilitarian on that matter. I’d rather have a government violating rights than a terrorist killing masses of people. Of course, it always depends on the degree and usefulness of rights violations as well. One shouldn’t fall for slippery slopes.
As I said. But it’s possible to lower the chance of an attack by using government force.
The question is whether the means of an anarchist society are as powerful in preventing terrorist violence as those of government monopoly of force. I’d say no, due to the non-aggression principle which bars individuals from preventing disproportional damage in spite of possibilites (e.g., I may not rob the terrorist of his hazardous substance even though it may be beneficial).
Should you be allowed to shoot someone if he/she points a loaded gun at you? Or should you be forced to allow him/her to shoot you first? If the answer is “yes, you can shoot”, the question becomes, “if someone stores WMDs in his/her basement, is that equivalent to pointing a loaded gun at you?”.
My premise is that individuals who have little to no reason to blow each other up will not do so, unless given reason to, say like a State interfering with their domestic affairs. It’s also silly to base predictions on what are exceptions, I’d think.
This is rational in the most instrumental sense of the word.
Not if they were intending to use them to harm others, and this could be proven. Compensation would only be necessary if this were not the case. The PDA (or anyone more generally) would bear the burden of the proof.
Right, let’s ignore all the problems governments face, such as the calculation problem, pressure groups within them, a tendency to expand control over the areas they monopolize and to strengthen domestic controls. Must generate a veritable profusion of utils.
-Jon
Stop being ridiculous.
You see, your neighbors either know for certain that you are setting up a terrorist attack or they do not. If they know for certain, they have every right to stop your attack. If they do not know for certain, well, they would have a hard time proving their self-defense after the fact.
That is not to say that they may not just trample you nevertheless like vigilantes. There is nothing within the non-aggression principle that prevents crazy people from acting crazy.
Replace your “keep in my fridge samples of anthrax, malaria, smallpox and several other deadly bacteria strains” with “The Bible or The Koran sitting on the shelf beside your prayer bench” in your hypothetical example and ask your same questions. If your neighbors have no proof that you are preparing an attack, well, they may as well assume your Bible is an evil magical book and your incantations are actually causing them harm.
Do your neighbors have a right to attack you if they suspect you are praying for their destruction?
Possession doesn’t equal use. Just because you keep a shotgun in your basement doesn’t mean you intend to kill somebody (that’s quite a leftist point in favor of gun control, isn’t it, sir? [:O] ).
The same is valid for WMDs. I may be a WMD collector; not the most common lifestyle, but hey, we’re libertarians after all. As soon as I threaten to eradicate humanity with my super virus, people are in a position to defend against me, but I would be pretty stupid to proclaim my plans before implementing them.
A philosophy that only works for a certain norm of people is unlikely to thrive. If libertarianism only works with rational people doing rational things, we might as well give socialism another shot because “people need to adapt first”.
At no point did I recommend to start worshipping government. I’m well aware of the dangers an institution such as government entails. I just don’t see how anarchism would fare better in preventing terrorist violence than government.
And yes, I know about blowback. I’m against foreign interventionism, as well as market interventionism. While government sure is responsible for almost every form of terrorism or sectarian violence there is, I still don’t think elimination of the main culprit is going to stop irrational violence completely. More reasons exist for violence than oppression.
On the other hand, empirical data on the effectiveness of ‘voluntary’ crime / terrorism prevention within communities is pretty scarce due to overbearing government control. So I concede that my assumption about the superiority of government concerning the embankment of terrorism is just that - an assumption.
AFAICT there isn’t a problem to begin with; it’s just another silly “what’s to stop parents putting hooks in their kids’ faces” scenario.
I rather think it enormously increases the probability of terrorist attacks (from basically zero to…well, not much more than zero in most places today)
In an anarchist society there is no way of effectively launching a terrorist assault! Terrorism is a tactic in war against a much stronger opponent…implying the existence of some opponent…
It makes no such assumption. My point is that the reverse, i.e. justifying a state based on thought-experiments predicated on local irrationality, the potentiality of which it does much to realize often, is not sensible.
-Jon
Keeping a loaded shotgun in your basement isn’t threatening anyone, but pointing a loaded shotgun at someone is.
Nobody ever claimed it would. But why does anarchy have to be perfect before you support it? Isn’t it sufficient that it’s just better than now? (Or even no worse?)
I would imagine that in a stateless society, people would still want to form communities with certain rules and policies governing the sorts of things that they would want to have done (for example, services for the poor, police services, streets, etc). I would gladly volunteer to give up my right to store anthrax in my house if everyone else in my community would do so as well, and would be happy to work out some policy for dealing with violations with my fellow community members, according to a decision-making procedure that we had all agreed upon when forming the community. So in the community I lived in, I would imagine that keeping anthrax would be against the rules.
But there’s a further question of whether or not keeping anthrax is unjust; that is, whether we’d be justified in coercively stopping you from keeping it. I think the answer of the question will depend on what you think the anthrax-storer is doing. Is the problem that he’s exposing others to risk of being infected? In that case, it might be fair to demand that he store the anthrax in a secure manner, so that there was little or no chance that it could accidentally get out and harm others.
Alternatively, the problem could be that the storer was preparing to attack people with the anthrax, and so intervention would be a preemptive measure in the spirit of self-defense. If that’s how we look at it, I think the issue becomes about when pre-emption is justified. Clearly if someone tells us that they’re going to shoot us, and begins loading a gun, we are justified in using some force to disarm them, even though they have not actually attacked us yet. I think that if your neighbor were explicitly a terrorist, and obtained some anthrax with the explicit intention of infecting others with it, you would surely not have to wait for him to actually start infecting people before you stopped him. But consider alternatively that we would not seem to be justified in coercively depriving our neighbor of his gun, even if we knew that he didn’t particularly like us, on account of the fact that he could use it to harm us. If we just suspected that someone might be “a terrorist” (without proof beyond a reasonable doubt), and saw that he had anthrax, it might end up that we can’t legitimately interfere, even though it’s conceivable that the anthrax could be used to infect people.
One interesting argument I’ve heard someone bring up is that certain weapons cannot reasonably be used for any legitimate purpose, and could be justly prohibited. The example was an atomic bomb, which cannot reasonably be used in self-defense against a particular aggressor without inflicting enormous collateral damage on a multitude of innocent people. But it seems like this description could conceivably apply to anthrax, if there were no other use for anthrax and if it could not be used in a way that would not violate rights. I’m not sure what I think of this argument, but I think its plausibility can be seriously augmented by thinking about it dialogically. That is, what could a possessor of anthrax say in his own defense if confronted by such an argument?
You may become somebody’s enemy without actually working towards that aim. A religious fanatic may consider you unclean. A political fanatic might see you as a reactionary obstacle. And so on.
Opponents are often chosen very subjectively.
I consider anarchy in general to be the vastly superior form of “rule” concerning economic and private conduct. Otherwise, I’d probably be writing on the Red State forums.
However, the matter in question was “How does anarchy solve the conflict between privacy and property rights versus disproportionate, but shadowly threats?”. You may consider that a silly “hooks in kids’ faces” scenario, but I think anarchy should have some adequate solution to counter such behavior, or else the state, as rough and uncomfortable as his actions may be, does scrape a victory.
I see it as part of an individualist mindset to concern oneself that every individual, not just “the majority” is able to maintain its wellbeing within a society. Kids with hooks in their faces or smallpox cowboys don’t really contribute to that.
The state is most certainly no utopia, you’re right. Maybe I was not clear enough here. My questioning behind the scenario referred to how state and anarchy would behave towards the extremes of society, and which of both would be able to fare better in resolving them.
I never intended to gloss over the state’s disadvantages, which have revealed themselves very blatantly over the course of time.
I don’t see how that contradicts my statement (if it was related to my statement).