No, he got it right.
It’s good that you should reveal you are a “minarchist”. Else I may have wasted time on you.
I am not a “minarchist” which is why I did not use that term. I am a minimum-government capitalist. It’s a new term, since I refuse to ever call myself an anarchist. What I accept as minimum government is much more than the minarchs are willing to accept. Such as a place for law, courts, military, and police. But I think the gov should do no more than that, should be limited just to the enforcement of individual rights and no more.
That’s not an argument. It’s just an assertion.
What do you consider to be a “solution”?
Maybe I’m confused then. When do you think it’s legitimate to kill the bike thief in order to get your bike back?
When that’s the minimal amount of force required to get it back.
Suppose it’s a bubble gum. When killing a bubble gum thief is justified, Marko?
When that’s the minimal amount of force required to get it back.
Would you in turn answer, why can anyone place a demand on me to forsake my stolen property should the property be sufficiently value-less, or should recapturing it take too much force? How that doesn’t involve arbitrariness, and why that isn’t Tolstoyanism?
Assuming killing someone is worse than raping them, is it OK to defend against rape with lethal force when the rapist does not leave you with any other way? Can you explain why the same principle does not apply when a bubble gum thief does not permit you any other way of recapturing it?
Assuming killing is worse than trespassing, how come we make movies that portray resistance fighters who shoot occupying soldiers in a sympathetic light? Isn’t the resistance way out of line?
Okay Marko, I think I understand you better now.
If someone steals my bike, and proceeds to threaten lethal force against me in my attempt to retrieve it, I’d be justified in using lethal force against him to get my bike back. Does that sound like what you’re saying?
The same amount of force used to steal it, or just enough to regain your property. You can stop them, tackle them, physically take your bike back, but you should not use a weapon and certainly not deadly force.
If they escalate the situation, that’s different.
I don’t work in hypotheticals. Propose an actual situation.
The principle of justice is represented by the scales, because it is an apt metaphor for commensurate force. The punishment must fit the crime, they say. Well, so too must the amount of force used be commensurate with the initial transgression. You wouldn’t call the SWAT team on a kid who stole a pack of bubblegum. Neither should you murder someone who stole some bubblegum. A bike is just more multiple of bubblegum. Losing a bike is not life-threatening, generally. So you should not put the thief’s life at risk as a function of getting that bike back.
The courts generally have accorded it a crime to use a vastly larger amount of force to recover a stolen value. So that, if someone steals gum from you, and you beat him to within an inch of his life, you have commited a crime, because simply taking the gum back is what was commensurate, the beating was going above and beyond recovering your value into new-crime territory.
The idea of commensurate force is an attempt to avoid giving you carte blanche the minute your rights have been violated, no matter how miniscule the violation. You’re basically arguing (absurdum) that you can murder someone to get a stick of stolen gum back.
As for Tolstoyanism, you’ll have to define that for us and how it applies to this issue; I won’t bother guessing at your take.
Of course. If someone attempts to over power you, that is to put you completely in their power, giving them the power of life and death over you when they do over power you, then you can use lethal force to regain control of your person.
By doing what, eating it? In that case, they would owe you compensation for the stolen good, plus the hassle of litigating it and the aggravation. That -is- commensurate compensation, in a case where the good cannot be recaptured.
Occupying soldiers, assuming it’s an aggressive occupation not a legitimate one, are attempting to overpower an entire nation. Thus resistance is legitimate.
However, if the point of the occupation is to throw a tyrannical government off the people, the people aren’t likely to attack the troops, not in their interest. The tyrannical government will, obviously.
Americans don’t invade in order to take over and rule, we do so to uphold pinciples like freedom and individual rights. That’s why we make movies portraying our soldiers as the good guys, and people invading the US as the bad guys 
No, that’s not it. That is how it would go down in most real life cases, but it has nothing to do with the principle itself. There is no requirement for your legitimate attempts to retrieve your bubble gum to lead you into mortal danger before you can use lethal force. Whether your life is threatened has nothing to do with it. The only relevant question is, is there another — less forceful — way for you to recapture your property, or not?
Theorethically there could be a foreign military occupation which would shun the use of lethal force, and rely on imprisoning and tasering alone. Such an occupation would not threaten lethal force against the resistance and offering resistance to such an occupation would not bring your bare life in danger. Are you saying in such circumstance the resistance would be wrong in using lethal force against the occupation, even if it were in fact the case that nothing less could bring an end to it?
Are you saying a rape victim is justified in stopping an ongoing rape with lethal force only if attempt to resist it via non-lethal means would bring it into mortal danger? Do you think a victim of rape unable to stop the rape with non-lethal means, but being raped by a rapist who shuns lethal force along with threats of thereof and against whom it is then perfectly safe from the position of bare life to offer non-lethal resistance, should subject itself to rape and would not be justified in using lethal force to stop it? Or is it in fact OK for her to use lethal force though none is threatened against her?
If you click on a post’s “replied on” link it will take you to the post the post whose link you clicked on is a reply to.
Okay, I think I see now. If I now understand it correctly, it’s a subtle change to the proportionality principle advocated by Rothbard et al.
Going with MaikU’s example, say a kid steals a pack of bubblegum from a store. The store manager summarily shoots him in the head as he runs off, killing him instantly. The legal question then would be whether the store manager’s lethal actions were necessary for him to retrieve the bubblegum. I, for one, would certainly conclude that they weren’t, and I think you’d conclude the same thing.
Come to think of it, isn’t this notion essentially the same as estoppel? If I steal your TV, and you in turn break into my house and retrieve it, I could well be estopped from suing you for the damages you caused to my house, if the break-in was considered necessary for retrieving the TV.
When it comes to lethal force, I prefer incapacitating force over that, as incapacitating force is not necessarily lethal.
Rothbard applies proportionality to punishment, not defense. I’m not in conflict with him as you claim.
From The Ethics of Liberty, chapter 12, which is titled “Self-Defense”:
Thanks. I stand corrected.
I actually must have known this seeing I used the exact same example here but somehow forgot about it over time.
Mind you I don’t so much think there is contradiction as I think Rothbard didn’t pan out his views in great enough detail, he didn’t envision or tackle situations I talk about.
I think that ultimately the best explanation is hidden in the question of who created the situation in question. If I create a situation where you may either take a beating or shoot me in the chest, I can not complain when you opt to shoot me.
In reality I effectively shot myself because I as an aggressor have no ground to demand you take a beating to spare me a bullet to the chest.
In fact I can not demand any sacrifice from you on my behalf. And so I can not complain even if you shoot me over the tiniest thing you have a right to, if it was in fact me who created the situation where you either shot me, or forsake your rights to a tiny extent.
There can be no obligation to let go of your property in favor of an aggressor, ever.
I think Rothbard should have been clearer in that chapter. But I think his views come out to this:
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There must be proportion in self-defense
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There must be proportion in punishment
So, for lethal force to be used, the situation must escalate to a point where it would be justified. Rothbard lays out what he thinks the criteria should be in that chapter as well.
Could you explain that a little more? If I understand you correctly, it would seem that you are arguing for a maximalist or propertarian position, which is something Rothbard was dead against (also stated in chapter 12, maybe chapter 13 if not 12).
What do you mean by “take a beating”? Nobody said they have to fight you. If you steal the gum/bike/whatever and then resist the person trying to take the gum back, then they would have a right to violently defend themselves since you’re committing battery. Stealing a bike and running away isn’t a threat to your life, but an escalating physical fight could be construed as such. So the act of stealing and running, I believe, doesn’t require lethal force.
I think this is something Rothbard would say, but at a close reading he actually does not write so in the Self-Defense EoL chapter. Ergo why I think he did not sufficiently refine his position.
The part you quoted “How extensive is a man’s right of self-defense of person and property? The basic answer must be: up to the point at which he begins to infringe on the property rights of someone else.” is not an argument against what I am talking about. Since it is the assailant who forced the choice and since he has the right to shoot himself no infringing of property rights took place. My scenario is little different from one where somebody tries to “extort” something by threatening to off themselves otherwise. It is fine to hold your own rights hostage, it is holding other people’s rights hostage that involves infringement of property rights.
Rothbard prefaces his own bubblegum thief scenario with “Secondly, we may ask: must we go along with those libertarians who claim that a storekeeper has the right to kill a lad as punishment for snatching a piece of his bubblegum?” The title of the chapter may be Self-Defense, but Rothbard is in fact here talking about punishment instead, so there is only superficial similarity but in fact this does not tackle what I am talking about. This too is perfectly compatible with what I am saying and I in fact wholeheartedly agree. My whole point is that prescription for what force is justified in defense, the “minimal amount of force needed” prescription, may in a certain cases involve greater amount of force than the one prescribed by principle of proportionality we use for deciding on appropriate punishment. There are two different caps on maximum justified force involved and it is not always the case that one and the same is always higher. Either of them may be higher.
“I propose another fundamental rule regarding crime: the criminal, or invader, loses his own right to the extent that he has deprived another man of his. If a man deprives another man of some of his self-ownership or its extension in physical property, to that extent does he lose his own rights.” Again true, but not relevant to self-defense. Rights being absolute you can defend them with that force which will let you preserve them. As long as you’re using the minimum amount of force needed to defend yourself you really have no need to worry about what rights the assailant has. But if you really wanted to construct a similar rule for self-defense I suppose you could say “For the duration of the aggression the criminal, or invader, loses his own right to the extent needed to thwart his aggression or repair the consequences of thereof.”
No that isn’t the case. I’m in agreement with everything Rothbard put in there, it is rather the case there is one thing he didn’t tackle in there.
I’m being asked to explain myself more a lot here. I try, but it doesn’t seem to do a lot of good. Why don’t you do me a favor and give me your anwser to the earlier stated rapist-who-shuns-threat-of-lethal-force scenario first? Is it OK to shoot a rapist thus potentially killing them in order to stop an ongoing rape when the rapist leaves you with no other choice? (Lets say that you are a bystander rather than the victim and the rapist is unresponsive to your warnings that you will shoot, lets say he is also on some platform you can not reach thus eliminating the possibility of you restraining him without the gun, and eliminating the possibility of a shot you could be certain of would incapacitate the rapist but not result in his death.)
I’ll remind you the victim is not herself in immediate mortal danger from the rapist. So, if proportionality in defense is valid then the only way you can be certain of not breaking any rights is by letting the rape finish. Or am I wrong?
It is a little bit silly for you to define things about my examples. Nobody said they have to fight, but I said they have to take a beating or shoot me. As the person creating this hypothetical scenario I probably have the power to construct it in the way this will in fact be true. Maybe I’m a big guy and have them in a corner and they have a busted leg. Also I won’t respond to warning shots and actually since they wasted time on warnings I’m already on them so they may not shoot me in the leg for fear I will succeed in wrestling the gun from their hands if they don’t put one in my chest at this very moment.
I agree this is an extremely unlikely scenario. Just what sort of an imbecile would it take to gamble with their life for the privilege of dishing out a severe beating? I think this is why there is so much resistance to what I am trying to say. It takes some very unexpected and downright unexplainable behavior for someone who is interested only in as relatively minor infringement of rights as beating someone up or stealing from them, to be ready to put their life on the line to do it.
That this is downright absurd scenario does not, however, mean that it does not happen regularly in a different setting. Think of non-combat, non-command military personel part of an occupying force. It is probably fair to say the only infringement of rights they are involved in is trespassing. Despite that, however, it is almost impossible to make them leave. They will not respond even to warnings that they may be shot. The only way to get them out of the country is to actually shoot them, and even then they won’t leave if it is only a light wound. Only a severe wound that requires medevac or kills them will do.
Well I agree, but whether your life is threatened has nothing to do with it. The bike may be a unique artifact or hold great emotional value to you and therefore represent a greater value to you than your life. It may be your life is worth nothing to you without the bike. As we know valuation is subjective and can not be argued with.
The reason this act probably does not require lethal force is that even if the bike itself should be lost the owner can probably be compensated for both the bike itself and the time he was without the bike. So even if there is no other way of stopping the thief in the act than shooting and potentially killing them, there is no real harm done by letting the thief escape for the moment. But if we are talking about someone running away with a dialysis machine, or a bike that holds great emotional value and whose loss, even temporary loss, would bring pain to the owner worse than death then maybe lethal force is required. You can’t make sweeping statements like that. You can say, however, that in practice it would be then up to the shooter to prove he couldn’t live without the bike, which is again a ridiculous, but not theorethically impossible preposition.