I am my body, I can type - there is no “authority to type”, it does not exist.
This is my last response to you until you answer the above; quite honestly, I have been more than amicable in responding to you, and, frankly, I’m not going to continue this until you show the same courtesy to my assertions. Feel free to justify this as a victory for your views, how I never answered your questions - feel free to delude yourself, but I’m simply not going to argue against a wall.
Yes, it does. You demonstrate it by typing. That you’re being deliberately evasive is your problem. And that you’re so pig-ignorant as to not grasp the difference between you and things external to you only shows how low your intellectual acumen truly is.
Feel free to continue to demonstrate your stupidity.
The life-boat scenario is not an ethical argument. It is an analysis of what would happen in a particular situation. It should be perfectly clear that anything expected to happen would happen regardless of the of whether concerned observers are natural rightists or utilitarians or otherwise. If by that criterion any one idea about what should happen is “unsound” then all ideas are unsound.
Are you seriously implying that an action implies moral authority, or perhaps even assumes it? Does a cat who chooses between a limited set of means to pursue its ends also have “self-ownership” in the moral sense, IE exclusivity?
Cats aren’t moral agents, although they do own everything they see. My cat believes I’m not only daddy but a servant. And he’s right.
I love cats.
Isn’t this just begging the question? The whole point is if action is what establishes self-ownership in the Rothbardian sense, or if action is impossible without self-ownership. This is what you are implying in your questions to laminustacitus,I believe. If so, why are other beings that act excluded from self-ownership and thus moral agency?
No. Cats have no concept of rights, and of course think they own everything (said in mock-seriousness). Cats cannot communicate with us their rights, and they do not respect ours. While they are mind-bogglingly cute, and beat us into submission with the soothing sound of the purr, they simply have no concept of rights nor of morality. Dealing with a cat is a technical problem. Or a cute one.
This discussion has sort of relocated to the other thread, but in order to pursue the specific argument being made in this one, can it be assumed that your justification of self-ownership by action is the same as the one put forward in TEoL?
Mostly.
“Inviolable” means the right ought not to be violated. You can recognize that, under some circumstances, you will do something you feel you ought not to do. That doesn’t mean you can’t go on to call such actions wrong; it just means that you recognize that you (as most people) will do wrong under some circumstance. Hypocrisy is inconsistent but it is not contradictory. We are all human, and most of us will cast our moral compunctions aside in conditions of extremity. Morality is not “refuted” when it is flouted.
A father of a dying girl might individually steal, and use the situation to justify his act to himself. But, if he is like most people, I think in his heart he will feel that his daughter’s illness is not really his victim’s problem. Of course the paternal instincts of many people would override that guilt (this is another lifeboat situation), but the guilt is still there nonetheless. Again morality is not refuted when flouted.
A jury deciding the man’s guilt or innocence may very well sympathize with him. But I believe a jury not brainwashed with the statist left’s artificial utilitarian “morality” may well sympathize with the desperate thief, and may even recognize that they would do much the same in his situation. However, they would probably feel that the desperate thief still owes his victim restitution.
An individual advocating redistributionist health care that would provide life-saving operations is in a different category altogether. He perhaps believes that without redistributionist health care, he or someone he loves might someday suffer. He would thereby be casting moral compunctions aside. Also he has likely been inculcated into an artificial morality by public schooling and other cultural influences. This artificial morality mutes his natural moral compunctions regarding theft.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time… a moral code that justifies it.”
-Frederic Bastiat
You’re putting to much stock into this. It’s a child’s argument. No philoshopy can be formulated on extenuating circumstances. In order to see this fallacy just apply it to other situations and ask your friend to do the same. People bring up points like this to try and prove a philoshopy unsound. Let’s just apply it across the board. I’m sure there are circumstances where you might run a stop light given a certain emergency. Does this prove that stop lights are unsound? Or suppose the arugment was changed and that instead of simply stealing the bread you had to kill to get the bread. Does that prove that laws protecting life are unsound? That is the argument your friend is making whether he realizes it or not. Rights are rights, regardless of the circumstance. Just as you recognize the bread owner’s right to life in the one senario you also recognize his property rights in the other. Your actions don’t change the fact that those rights are just and sound regardless of whether you are willing to betray your belief in his rights to stay alive.
The point is that no matter what creed a man subscribes to, there are usually extenuating circumstances where he would go against his own principles. This is true of libertarians, socialists, modern liberals, fascists, communists, etc. The man with the bread still has his rights as do you. Your right can’t cancel out his. What’s the point of the argument? That under certain circumstance we should take away the bread owner’s property rights? If that is the case then you have just given the lawmaker the power to be arbitrary. Once that happens it will reign supreme. Arbitrariness is a natural manure to tyranny allowing governments to make winners and lossers.
Just accept the fact that you both have rights that can’t be violated. If you violate his you must be punished. It’s good law. The only alternative is to introduce a system where under the right conditions your rights are superior to his. Once this happens it will expand beyond what you would ever want or hope.
Cute cat, looks just like my kitten.
No, the dispute has to be resolved is all.
So if a homeless guy in New York City attacks a working man and robs him of his lunch- that’s perfectly fine for the defenders of the “its ok to steal to eat” line of thinking?
I think that perhaps a good question would be is:
Is instinctual behavior without the realization of self-ownership possible? Can I instinctual move my body out of the way of a bus without having to contemplate self-ownership dilemmas? And if so and animals being instinctual creatures then I think it would be possible to actually act in a manner in which self-ownership is not realized yet one acts.
Feser says nobody can own themselves. That you can somehow then claim to build any coherent theory of rights or even think of speaking of justice, is a great embarrassment to you laminus.
Rothbard is wrong though about alienability, mainly from failing to make the distinction between will and body IIRC.
He has violated the victims property rights. And initiated violence. The thief now owes the victim, his lunch + again + fear factor + capture costs etc.
“If, then, proportionality sets the upper bound to punishment, how may we establish proportionality itself? The first point is that the emphasis in punishment must be not on paying one’s debt to “society,” whatever that may mean, but in paying one’s “debt” to the victim. Certainly, the initial part of that debt is restitution. This works clearly in cases of theft. If A has stolen $15,000 from B, then the first, or initial, part of A’s punishment must be to restore that $15,000 to the hands of B (plus damages, judicial and police costs, and interest foregone).”
…
"But how are we to gauge the nature of the extent? Let us return to the theft of the $15,000. Even here, simple restitution of the $15,000 is scarcely sufficient to cover the crime (even if we add damages, costs, interest, etc.). For one thing, mere loss of the money stolen obviously fails to function in any sense as a deterrent to future such crime (although we will see below that deterrence itself is a faulty criterion for gauging punishment).
If, then, we are to say that the criminal loses rights to the extent that he deprives the victim, then we must say that the criminal should not only have to return the $15,000, but that he must be forced to pay the victim another $15,000, so that he, in turn, loses those rights (to $15,000 worth of property) which he had taken from the victim. In the case of theft, then, we may say that the criminal must pay double the extent of theft: once, for restitution of the amount stolen, and once again for loss of what he had deprived another."(6)
“But we are still not finished with elaborating the extent of deprivation of rights involved in a crime. For A had not simply stolen $15,000 from B, which can be restored and an equivalent penalty imposed. He had also put B into a state of fear and uncertainty, of uncertainty as to the extent that B’s deprivation would go. But the penalty levied on A is fixed and certain in advance, thus putting A in far better shape than was his original victim. So that for proportionate punishment to be levied we would also have to add more than double so as to compensate the victim in some way for the uncertain and fearful aspects of his particular ordeal.[7] What this extra compensation should be it is impossible to say exactly, but that does not absolve any rational system of punishment – including the one that would apply in the libertarian society – from the problem of working it out as best one can.” - Punishment and Proportionality - Rothbard
Soon, it should become pretty damn clear, that instead of robbing someones plasma television, getting caught and then having to work to the extent you essentially could have bought your very own plasma television, you now give that money to the victim. Even the dumbest criminal will begin to ponder, maybe I should just get a real job. Aye? Especially when in a free society, security agencies are going to be far more effective, and I’d say prevention would be a key factor as well.
In essence, the bum should get a job, or make funny signs that provide amusement to others who then voluntary give up their money to support the ‘artist’. [:)]
That reminds me of a kitten I helped foster from the humane society.
And, we haven’t started to discuss feral cats. My family fostered some feral kittens, and they hid, and spat when we came near.
