I read about the boat problem when a ship is sinking and have some questions. Rothbard said that the first ones to come would homestead the boat, but, what if someone was tired and laid down at the boat, occupying many seats? Does he has a right to do that?
this works with fat people better since they can’t just sit up.
the opposite would be a child only taking up 1/2 slot.
what if the first person on the boat claims ownership of the whole thing?
this is one of the reasons I don’t believe in natural rights. in the real world rights are governed by force.
Edit: Rothbard implies that “women and children first” can not be justified. I can justify it. The women and children first attitude can be ascribed to the group increasing its inclusive genetic fitness. When you are living in a tribe of 150 people, losing women does a lot more to limit the growth of the tribe than losing men. the other men in the tribe can just pick up the slack, the same can not be said in the reverse situation.
Well, i once read about something Walter block said , if i remember it right, about how much someone needed to mix his labor with the land to claim ownership of it depended on the normal usage of the place, did anyone else read about it and understood?
About someone homesteading the whole boat, i think he can’t do that because he can’t use the whole boat, like someone in an island not using all of it can’t claim to own the whole island just because he was there first.
But i having problems about the person who lays down in the boat, he is using the seats he is laying down at. It leaves you with a feeling that he is been greedy and taking more than his fair share (yeah, i know).
You need to understand that lifeboat situations are often used to critize natural rights theories. Thus when Rothbard mentions the lifeboat situation in Ethics of Liberty it is because he is addressing his opponents. A lifeboat situation is just a euphemism for any kind of situation of an ethical dilemma. Now, Rothbard’s argument is that hardly any theory of rights handles lifeboat situations well. He mentions the example of a mother and two of her children drowning; she can only save one and has to choose. Would we then fault her for not saving the other child even though most people would say parents have a moral obligation to save their children? Also, he says that natural rights don’t really make lifeboat situations worse.
To your own question the answer would be: It depends.
If the guy has contracted to be saved with the option of occupying multiple seats in order to rest then he has a right to do so. He could also be the captain or owner of the ship in which case he would have a right to occupy all the seats he wants. If, as you say, the boat was unowned it could he has a right to homestead as many seats as he could occupy. A question remains, nonetheless, i.e. would he be able to keep all the seats? Chances are he wouldn’t. Other people in the boat would probably think it more fair if some of his seats were used to save others. Hence the boat would be loaded with the maximum amount of passengers regardless. So, if there were 50 passengers on a wrecked ship and a lifeboat with seats for 20, only 20 would be saved regardless of natural rights or any other rights.
Of course, if they make it home safely the guy could take his issue to an arbitration agency and find out if they would press charges against the passengers who robbed him of his extra seats. The case would then be to establish whether a lifeboat is really supposed to be used to save the maximum of passengers or not? How do you think they would rule?
PS. Next time you could ask what if he was so large/fat he had to occupy more than one seat. Could be a hard case to crack [;)]
The lifeboat clearly has an owner, why not let him decide. He may very well decide to only let white protestants into the boat. And if that’s what he wants, very good.
But what if you apply this to other situations?
What if a guy has a lot of land but some hungry people think it is more fair to share some of his land with him?
Also, i using Rothbard examples here that the boat has no owner.
Then they’re going to die complaining I suppose.
And what about the lifeboat situation. Is it the same case or there is something else that is different?
I’m a bit unsure about where you are going with this. First of all, it doesn’t necessarily sound like a lifeboat situation; how do they all of the sudden find themselves in a situation of hunger? In any case, if you define it as such then of course it is a lifeboat situation. Now, rights or no rights. These people are gonna steal his crops provided the land owner doesn’t stop them. If we assume he has hired a defence agency to protect his property how would they do it? Kill them? Hardly. Imprison them? Perhaps, and if so, they would be provided with food and work to pay for their prison bill. Chase them off? Perhaps, thus sending them on to other land owners and other agencies. Perhaps when that has been done a couple of times, multiple defence agencies might work out a common strategy of imprisonment, containment, whatever…
It is impossible to exhaust the possibilities of what would happen, but please remember that cruelty, in this case, is not to keep what is yours; it is to steal what is not. Also, just because anyone wishes to defend his property, this has nothing to do with his ability to help people in need. You seem to be under the assumption that the land owner wouldn’t, under any circumstances, help the hungry people if they asked him politely.
Again, they have no positive right to steal while the land owner has a negative right not to be stolen from. This doesn’t change the outcome of what will happen in lifeboat situations. It might change the outcome of the “after play” in courts etc. but then the lifeboat situation is not in effect anymore. For instance, if the hungry survive shouldn’t they pay restitution? After all, had it not been for the land owner an his efforts to grow crops they would have been dead.
You misunderstand Rothbard. His point is that we do not treat natural rights by considering all manner of lifeboat situations and then apply this knowledge to everyday life. We do the “opposit”, so to speak. The point is NO right theories do well in lifeboat situations. They are exactly the same because you have setup your lifeboat situation so that people are forced to fight for their lives.
Let us say you are a proponent of social rights or social entitlements as we know them in my social democratic country, Denmark. The land owner and the hungry people sign a social contract à la Rousseau. The land owners property is now the property of a democracy. Then they put the lifeboat situation to vote. The land owner loose the vote and the hungry people now have a right to crops, i.e. he gets robbed just like he would in the situation with natural rights.
Fast forward. Now more people come to sign the social contract and on and on it goes until someday the landowner, the previously hungry people and all the newcomers are starving, because apparently it is okay to steal from this land owners property. Now what? Go to war? Steal more property? No matter what, people are gonna die, because you have set up the lifeboat situation where people must fight for their lives. These lifeboat situations are zero-sum games, but as we know the free market is a plus-sum game.
What you mean to ask is: would my answer be the same for any situation that is likely to get an emotional response from some. Yes, it would.
What i want to ask is that, can he homestead the boat that way? The other people can force him out of his laid down position at what rights?
What do you mean? The owner has already homesteaded it.
But at the example the boat has no owner.
No, they’re not. They are enforced or they are not enforced, not “governed”. That is it. I’m not sure why this canard is perpetually repeated, when it is irrelevant. Standards of what must be done to appropriate something (i.e. what kind of alterations must be made &c.) are set locally, and will vary from situation to situation (this does not differ from courts counting some things as self-defence, and other things as not.) So long as it is fully consistent with a negative right, any set of arrangements can come about. There is no “problem” here. Aristotle was ahead of you on this, about 2300+ years ago.
That isn’t justifying it. Justifying it would be to show the principle of governing society according to natural selection is correct.
Then how did it manage to get onto the ship?
I’m using Rothbard’s example that the owner died and didn’t put any rules for dividing the seats at the lifeboat and the lifeboat is therefore an abandoned property.
Right, in which case first user gets it. Simple. If he wants to kick people off it to save space for his imaginary friends, so be it.
I would just climb into whoevers boat.