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If the parents murdered their child, who has the right to punish them? The child can’t sue, and there are no other relatives.
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If I subscribed to a PDA/court that punishes people for using heroin, and then when I got caught I immediately subscribe to another court that doesn’t have anti-heroin laws. Would that be legal or accepted in a libertarian society? I’ll generalize: Can people sign a contract that stipulates physical punishment for certain things yet bail out of this contract (by paying fine or so) when it is the time to accept that punishment?
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What do you think about the current definition of a legally insane person as a person who can’t tell good from wrong. How do you think insane people should be punished for murder (if at all)?
“If the parents murdered their child, who has the right to punish them? The child can’t sue, and there are no other relatives.”
Anyone can punish them, but they will likely be tried by another PDA, especially since the crime is against a child, and people LOVE children, likely for evolutionary reasons.
“If I subscribed to a PDA/court that punishes people for using heroin, and then when I got caught I immediately subscribe to another court that doesn’t have anti-heroin laws. Would that be legal or accepted in a libertarian society?”
Depending on the contract termination clause with your heroin-prosecuting “PDA/court” it may be legal, but I view the likelihood of drug criminalization in a free society as low. People are not demanding the criminalization of alcohol and cigarettes. The same would likely be true of other drugs. They may not like them, but they do not hate them enough to spend money to arrest people who use them.
“What do you think about the current definition of a legally insane person as a person who can’t tell good from wrong. How do you think insane people should be punished for murder (if at all)?”
Libertarian Sheldon Richmann rejected the insanity defense when applied to John Hinckley, Jr. who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan:
Could he [John Hinckley, Jr.] have chosen otherwise? To answer no, one would have to believe that Hinckley had no choice but to purchase a gun, book a flight, board an airplane to Washington, ascertain the whereabouts of President Reagan on March 30, 1981, wait for him to exit the Washington Hilton, and pull the trigger several times. Are we to believe that an illness made him do all this?
Thomas Szasz, the foremost psychiatrist-critic of psychiatry, has been a relentless critic of the insanity defense and verdict for 50 years. He writes, “Regardless of whether a person is deemed sane or insane, a person has reasons, not causes, for his actions. If we reject the actor’s reasons as absurd, crazy, or meaningless, then we consider and call him mentally ill. That, however, hardly constitutes proof that his alleged condition caused him to commit the forbidden act.”
The unsubstantiated claim that the insane suffer from a brain disease cannot salvage the insanity defense. “A brain disease may, indeed be a cause,” Szasz writes. “But a cause of what? Typically, of a functional deficit, such as weakness, blindness, paralysis. No brain disease causes complex, coordinated behaviors, such as the crimes committed by John W. Hinckley, Jr.”
Well, their insurer would probably want to prove that it was them so that it could cancel their contract without offending its other clients. No one can claim weregeld on behalf of the victim, because the purpose of blood money is compensation of the victim, which is impossible if they’re dead and don’t have any heirs.
The effective sanction placed against such people would be an organic, community-imposed exile in any community that I, personally, would care to be a part of. Exile is harsher than you think when real-time community is essential for survival.
Don’t forget that the state system encourages the erosion of actual, living community. People delegate their personal sense of justice to the state, which they feel is prudent because they consider violence to be the only form of exercising justice, and that private justice therefore equates to dangerous vigilantism. It’s an illusion.
The simple answer is ‘yes’. You can’t force specific performance of a contract - especially one like that - without offering a claim for damages in the alternative.
But I don’t really understand why a dispute arbitration service would concern itself with matters which don’t actually involve a dispute between two or more parties. They are only concerned with 3rd-party liability, aren’t they?
Of course your 1st-party insurer for health, life etc would probably limit their liability if they found out you were doing heroin, just as they would nowadays. You can sign up with a new one if you want to, and if they want to, but I’d hate to see what your premiums would be.
I agree with Gero. There’s no such thing as “insane” for legal purposes. Truly incapacitated persons are not capable of complex, cleverly-planned actions, such as assassinating the President of the USA.
Of course there are people who have considerably dimished or completely extinguished legal capacity for developmental or neurological reasons, who aren’t capable of complex planning and action. They need a curator or legal guardian of sorts to handle their legal responsibilies on their behalf. In the situation that someone doesn’t have such a person to take care of their legal needs, I think it is better to rely on human kindness and charity than the state.