Hello,
I understand that according to anarcho-capitalism, the law should be private. I like the idea but I am struggling with the case where one individual murders a whole family, leaving no victim alive. Would that murderer get away with his crime? Could someone who is not a victim of that crime go after that murderer? Or maybe, the murder would just get away with it, but suffering possible bad reputation.
Thanks for helping me clear up my fog on this issue
In this hypothetical example, it would be in the interest of the community, the family’s private protection agency, and the family’s life insurance company to seek out the killer.
First of all, the community would be greatly appalled at the murders, but worse yet, fearful that they could be next. This alone would move the protection agencies of the community to go on the hunt for the murderer.
Secondly, the family’s protection agency (or agencies) wouldn’t want a bad reputation for not finding murderers. When people find out hat Protection Agency A is doing a worse job finding murderers than Protection Agency B, people will go to Agency B with their money.
Lastly, insurance companies don’t want to be putting their customers at risk prematurely. It would be in their interest to help aid the protection agencies on the murder case, as to prevent more murders (and therefore higher costs) in the community and elsewhere.
I don’t see why either the extended family of the victims or other concerned people couldn’t “go after” the murderer, nor why any private police agency couldn’t. It would be good for the reputation of the police, anyway.
Thanks for answering on that topic.
What does “seeking out the killer” mean practically? Since the law is private, the killer might very well argue that to him, this was not murder. Actually, “murder is not a crime under my private law” would be the standard defense, wouldn’t be?
Some anarcho-capitalists like to think they could drift over the landscape in an autarchic bubble, just them and their Contract With The Entire Rest Of The World. In practice, you would subscribe to a set of covenants that would be deemed binding on everybody living, sojourning or doing business in or with members of the fee. The fee heads would likely have treaties with each other that would ensure reciprocity of enforcement in the event of breaches by their subscribers.
Then he would have to prove it. And, since it isn’t murder, the proposition could be raised that the exact same action could be perpetrated against this silly aggressor, as it isnt “murder” (supposedly.)
-Jon
Well, the protection agencies of the family/community would naturally try to apprehend the murderer. If the protection agency of the murderer refuses to let him be apprehended, the two agencies, instead of duking it out, would naturally want to settle the dispute with a third party (violence is never profitable). That third party would be a private court. No court wouldn’t view murder as a crime, or else they’d never get any business from protection agencies. There, the trial would proceed, where it would convict the murderer (if sufficient evidence is present) and then exact some kind of punishment.
I suggest you purchase Anarchy and the Law edited by Edward Stringham.
Then he won’t mind if he’s branded an outlaw (outside the law), so that anybody who “murders” him would not be punished for it, eh?
No, because you’re confusing “personal feelings” with “private law”.
No, because it would violate the non-aggression principle.
Duh.
If no one cares about the victim nothing happens.
Infanticide, et cetera.
And who says the private law enforcement companies are going to adhere to that principle?
The standard Lockean natural rights view is that only victims have right of restitution, everyone has right of restraint (which can potentially range up to the necessity of killing the criminal if he is a serious enough on-going threat).
As for the case of the victims being murdered with no immediate family, or no family at all, for the right of restitution to fall to, I favor the suggestion that others have made before me of the right of restitution being homesteadable.
Similarly, poor people in anarcho-capitalism can sell their right of restitution to wealthier people who could then pursue the case, thus eliminating any disadvantage they would otherwise have in the legal system owing to their poverty.
This requires a long answer…
In a normal situation, the victims insurance company would have to pay the victims family whether they caught the guy or not so they have a great incentive to catch the guy. So that is standard procedure. Because this would be the most common situation, I imagine the agreements among insurance companies would be that if a company’s client was murdered, they could go after the criminal’s insurance company for the money. So to the criminal’s insurance company, it wouldn’t concern them what the details are of the contract between the victim and the victim’s insurance company - there is an agreement between the insurance companies and that is that. If the victim did not specify anybody to leave the restitution money to, then the victim’s insurance company won’t leave it to anyone. They will keep it to themselves (i.e. major profit). This gives the victim’s insurance company a great incentive to go after the murderer (maybe even more so than the typical situation).
This would be a wildly efficient system because bounty hunters would spring up all over the place. Think about it, you catch a murderer and you can offer them to the insurance company that’s hunting them and make a huge profit. I imagine restitution would be in the millions (more than an ordinary death). Once someone was labeled a murderer, they would have nowhere to hide. Even normal every day people would check the “most wanted” posters and dream about running into one of these criminals because catching them would mean early retirement. People would be so anxious to catch these guys that everyone would start packin 9s if they heard any rumor that the criminal was in their town, just in case it was their lucky day.
Now of course the next question is, what if the criminal doesn’t have insurance? Well, guess what? He still has organs and organs are expensive. Since he has no insurance, no one is going to stop the insurance company from doing this. Hey, they gotta make money, right? They’d go kill the guy and put him on ice. Actually, they’d probably keep him alive until all the people who need his organs are in the hospital and ready to go then it’s slice and dice and the criminal gets to save lives. Now talk about efficient: the criminal is no longer a threat to society, 10 people’s lives are saved and the insurance company made out with a huge profit.
Oh but that got you thinking didn’t it? What stops the insurance companies from going and stealing anyone’s organs that doesn’t have insurance? What stops them from dropping their own clients and then harvesting their organs for a better profit? Charities. That’s what stops them. All these insurance companies are going to want to fund insurance charities to cover the uninsured and even the criminals that aren’t donig anything too serious but have premiums too high to pay.
Of course, if it is obvious you have money (or that you haven’t been working for a long time and could easily get a job if you wanted) and you go to these charities, they are not going to cover you and so you are SOL. This ensures that people that can pay do pay. That is the main reason why pay-for insurance companies will want to be the ones funding these charities: that way they can enforce the “if you can pay and don’t you’re SOL” rule so then they get more premiums for their pay-for company rather than leave it up to inefficient bleeding heart charities that give money to anyone. So you’ve got competition in this area of charities and the insurance companies will want to promote them to their customers and encourage paying into them for those that can. People will want to pay at least a little to these charities because that makes it a lot more likely that a charity would cover you if you ever needed one. Although you’d probably be covered if you lost your job or something, it’d be an uncomfortable situation and so people wouldn’t be unemployed for long. It’s great motivation being in the unknown zone.
But you’re still not satisfied, right? What if the victim and the criminal are in the same insurance company? Or what if people really don’t like the organ harvesting idea and fund charities to cover ALL criminals? Well, in that case, the client has to be a little intelligent. I imagine a common practice might be to leave your money to a charity so that way you don’t end up in that situation.
You’d have to have a contract that if your insurance company ever bought that charity or had some kind of financial connection that would screw up this arrangement, then you would have to be notified within 60 days before they bought them out or something like that. And then you would switch to some other charity (or whatever other kind of institution). Maybe you’d have the restitution go to their competition.
So there you have it. There are many ways to resolve this just off the top of my head.
Excellent question.
Acting on behalf of another person, even if you don’t have their explicit consent, can be allowable. If I see someone getting robbed I can assume they would consent to help, so I will help them. I’m okay so long as the person actually did want my help. If what I thought was a robbery was actually a family fight, the person could hold me liable for beating up their family member.
In the case of a murdered person its safe to assume that they did not want to be murdered, unless the murderer can provide evidence that the victim wanted to be killed.
So in your scenario anyone could avenge the murdered family.
In addition, if a person with no family or friends was murdered the creation of justice would not depend upon charity alone. The property of the murdered person, if in the position of the murderer, would be available to anyone who could take it; as the criminal does not lawfully own it and no rightful owner exists. This would add economic incentive to find the murderer.
If the victim was insured, maybe the insurance companies would be pushing to get a clause in that they have the rights to their property if retrieved in the case of a murder. If the person didn’t care enough to specify a charity or something for restitution to go to, then they’re probably not going to make a big fuss about a clause like that unless I’m missing something.
This all assumes that the victim has enough assets to make it worth the resources it would take to go after the murderer. If not, it is going to be up to charities to cover them.
So would a PDA have the authority to apprehend people who were accused of murder before they are in trial? Who gets to decide which private court will be used? What if the accused doesn’t want to use certain private courts or doesn’t agree with the sentence they receive? What option would they have?
I’d really like more explanation on the whole possible system of private courts and who gets to decide which one has true authority.
Yes, but the person ends up being innocent they will have been kidnappers.
There would exist a body of “Common Law” between courts. Competition would create industry standards. Which court was chosen would likely make little difference.
Courts would not enforce the decision themselves, they would inform individuals about who was in the right. If multiple courts ruled on an issue then people would have to choose which to accept.
So the question is: Would anyone have a financial incentive to stop the PDA from apprehending the murderer? You might say the criminal’s PDA would have an incentive to stop the other PDA from apprehending them perhaps because of an agreement between the criminal and the criminal’s PDA. But think about this. If all the PDAs always tried to stop all other PDAs from apprehending their clients, it would get messy. What would the PDA protecting the criminal do? They would have to kill the people from the other PDA that came to take the criminal away. Same situation on the other end: the PDA hunting the criminal down would have to kill the protecting PDA. So they would do battle and whichever PDA put the most resources into the battle would win (so whoever it was most important to). It would be worth more to the PDA hunting down the criminal because it reduces their exposure (risk of future claims) to have him off the street and so that is the PDA that would normally win in that kind of situation. You might say the PDA with the most resources would win but a battle that brought the destruction of one of these PDAs would be pretty ridiculous over one criminal, don’t you think?
More than likely, rather than do battle, since they would both lose in a battle (lose financially that is). Since the company protecting the criminal would eventually find themselves on the other end of the table, they would agree that the criminal should be locked up until trial since overall that practice would be the most financially appealing.
If the murderer doesn’t like this arrangement, really all they could do is try to fight off both agencies or try to hide or whatever and efforts such as that would be futile so they are just stuck until court and that is that.
Now, you ask who gets to decide who has true authority. The answer is that nobody has a monopoly on authority. That question doesn’t make sense in this type of society. Who had authority above? They both agreed on what to do.
Yes, but the person ends up being innocent they will have been kidnappers.
So how do you justify ex ante kidnapping?
One school of thought is that an individual would have no obligation to submit himself to any court of any jurisdiction - even one over which his own PDA presides (since he is free to void the contract with said PDA at any time). This might sound like some Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome situation, but I assure you, it’s not.
An individual thus accusued would quite likely, not be allowed on anyone else’s property, trespass then being sufficient reason for apprehension, the “outlaw” could either imprison himself on his own property (if he rents an apartment, he’s SOL), or he could turn himself in, or he could wait to be apprehended on someone else’s property. Since other people would rarely want to maintain dealings with a man of outlaw status (or would probably be prohibited therefrom), self-sufficiency would be an impossibly daunting task.
But I think you’re crossing a dangerous line, when you imagine that bounty hunters or PDAs would have the moral authority to apprehend someone merely accused of a crime, by kidnapping him from his own property and against his will.
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