It would still be an intitiation of force against me. I’d be an awfully big jerk not to give it back to you and then just have the two of us go after the thief, but it’s not an obligation under the ethics of non-aggression.
Are you claiming then that it’s no longer my property. By being a “awfully big jerk” and not giving it back, you are depriving me of my property. You are, not the thief. You are the agressor. If I use force, it is in defense of my property. On the other hand, you are the victim of fraud. Just as you said, “There is no justification for the victim to compel anyone else to share the harm that is done to him except for the one who caused it,” you are not justified in depriving me of my rightful property simply because you were defrauded by someone else. You gave the thief money and did not get what was promised. That is between the two of you. My hardship is that my car was stolen. I am not sharing my hardship with you. Your hardship is that you were a victim of fraud.
Put it another way. Driving away in my car without my permission is stealing. By refusing to return my property to me, you are now a thief. I have every right to treat you as such. The fact that you paid some other thief does not change the fact that the car is mine, and no one else has any right to it.
EDIT: After thinking through this a few times, I’m changing my position. I was coming from the position that the forceful retrieval of stolen property from a third party is “collateral damage” - but I was missing a rather obvious difference. And unlike some people in this thread, I can admit when I’ve been wrong.
“Surely physical labor is something expended or not, ig it its expended and the potatos are made, great, if the potatos get stolen, does a magic fairy go back in time and destroy the physical labor that had happened?”
I hope you understand how utterly ridiculous your argument is when translated into materialistic terms.
Well, what do you mean by property rights, as a general concept?
“And I have never observed a farmed undergo physical death brought about from the corporal damage of someone stealing his potatos, nor is his ability to physically labor or not affected in any way.”
Again, when translated into materialistic examples I hope it becomes obvious to you how insane your argument is.
Onar, by changing the word “stolen” to “copied” you completely destroy your own analogy. The potatoes would not have been stolen in a true analogy, but duplicated. You are not thereby deprived of any potatoes. You should stop trying to argue with analogies, it isn’t working for you.
The thief caused the hardship; it is through the thief that your justice must come. It is not an act of aggression to obstruct that process. I would have no obligation to testify against the thief, nor to allow access to my property if he were hiding on it. You could publish the fact that I am someone who collaborates with outlaws, if you wished - and in a society with a well-established reputation rating system that should be sufficient incentive in most cases to prevent such obstruction of justice from occuring.
We’ve established that I know you have my car, and that it’s my car. I’ve proven it to you. I’m not asking for testimony. I’m asking to be allowed to drive away unmolested. You are being a jerk and not giving it back, as you’ve said. My simply driving away in my car, without laying a hand on you, would not be agression, correct? Would your use force to prevent me be agression? If you attempted to drive away, would that be agression? If you answer no to any of these, tell me how it would be different had you not paid the thief.
How does paying a thief allow you to drive my car or prevent me from driving my car.
what? the theory that evidence of being the owner of scarce physical property better involve some objective fact of a relationship between you and said property that is prior and superior to claim of latecomers? that’s relevant to non-scarce non-physical property how? besides which the labour in the theory is that which acts a demonstration of ones act of homesteading, it is not what ‘requires protection’ itself
I hope you understand how utterly ridiculous your argument is when translated into materialistic terms.
ha no, since you have switched from mental labour to the product of mental labour. way to equivocate ! besides which if you originally had meant to say the ‘product’ of mental labour requires protection, protection from what? what is tangible is protected under standard property right theory, what is intangible does not require protection, because nothing can harm it, it is impervious to attack, damage, degradation. it is an idea that exists as it ever did before or after someone else instantiated their own thought of it.
Well, what do you mean by property rights, as a general concept?
I’m all for protecting physical property as a general concept, but you recoil from broad protections against mental harms, because you have some mystical theory of mental harms due protection and mental harms which are not.
“And I have never observed a farmed undergo physical death brought about from the corporal damage of someone stealing his potatos, nor is his ability to physically labor or not affected in any way.”
no but you have experienced the dissapearance of his potatoes ! his ability to labour would not form any part of my argument in why depriving him of his potatoes so that he no longer has them is wrong. its the deprivation that is wrong…but see… this is where things differ when they are non-scarce intangibles, there is no such lack of potatoes to point to.
verily; there are examples of physical action resulting in physical death… so there !
ok, that’s it. I give up. I knew in advance that many libertarians are so stuck in their materialistic thinking that they are completely incapable of thinking outside their own conceptual framework. Therefore it doesn’t matter how much I am pointing to the elephant in the room. You’re still going to not see it. In short, I see no hope for you. I am perfectly capable of understanding your materialistic viewpoint, but you have no way of seeing the non-materialistic viewpoint, and hence this is not going to be a fruitful debate.
Me: “there’s an elephant in the room?”
You: “I see no elephant.”
Me, pointing incessantly: “there! there! Right in front of you!”
You: “where?”
Me: “that grey blob in front of you!”
You: “you mean that the world is morally grey?”
Me: “no, no, the elephant is grey. It’s standing right there in front of you with a trunk and big ears and a very long nose.”
You: “Are you saying that I have big ears?”
Me: “no,no, the elephant!”
You: “What’s an elephant?”
Me: “gaaaaaaaagh!”
In short, I don’t want to torture myself any longer with trying to talk reason to people who have mentally blocked out a significant portion of reality and refuse to see it.
So even if we can’t reach agreement on who is right and who is wrong in the wider matter, you cant even bring yourself to admit that the analogy you advanced as one of your attempts to elucidate your position, is flawed? you cant admit that potatoes when taken without permission disappear from the stock of the original owner, whereas ideas and information do not by necessity disappear when another instantiates a copy of them (with or without permission)?
That’s okay Onar, the purpose of a debate is not to convince the other side, but the spectators. This thread will stand forever as a monument to pro-IPers inability to even acknowledge the most basic flaws in their reasoning, whilst their opponents pry their position to pieces by indicating those flaws.
Onar, by changing the word “stolen” to “copied” you completely destroy your own analogy. The potatoes would not have been stolen in a true analogy, but duplicated. You are not thereby deprived of any potatoes. You should stop trying to argue with analogies, it isn’t working for you.
That perfectly illustrates the untenability of alleged intellectual property. Even if one were to conceed that a theft had happened, the victim could hardly claim any damages. Propery rights covers the property itself, not the value of said property. My making a million copies of a book would certainly lower the valure of the author’s copies, but the author would still have all of his copies, in the same way that my openign a burger joint next door to another burger joint would devalue the latter’s burgers.
You have not convinced me that it won’t be a waste of time. From what I can tell you’re a very bad thinker, and it does not serve me to waste my precious scarce mental resources on debating someone who is completely oblivious to his opponent’s viewpoint. If you can demonstrate that you can manage to see one inch outside your materialistic viewpoint, I will debate you. Otherwise it will just be like banging my head into a wall. I’ll be understanding all your arguments (because I understand materialism), but you won’t have the foggiest idea of what I am talking about.
Just like how Marx and Engles completely understood bourgeois logic, but the bourgeoise themselves were incapable of understanding proletarian logic! Teach us more, Father Onar!
So? The debate will end. People will vote. If your arguments are better, people will vote for you. Vice versa. There are very few anarcho-capitalist-“IP Communist” libertarians over there.
And I assure you, I’m not stupid. I don’t know how I can prove it to you. My fellows can vouche for me, and you can read my past posts. Up to you though. You’ve wasted a lot more time trolling kinsella on this thread… figured you could give it a few last back and forths.