It would be silly for Frank to pay Jim so as to buy from Jim an entity Jim does not own and cannot own, namely, Sue. Since Sue is the rightful owner of Sue and since Sue cannot sell herself, Jim can never be a rightful owner of Sue. Assuming Jim enslaved Sue, Jim would be guilty of stealing Sue’s body from Sue. For Frank to buy Sue from Jim for any purpose other than freeing Sue, Frank would be just as culpable in the crime of enslavement. If Frank purchases Sue from someone who does not own Sue (i.e. Jim), Frank is just giving money away to a criminal. All that is needed to free Sue from Jim is for Frank and everyone else to acknowledge that Sue and only Sue owns Sue, and to recognise that Jim has no rightful control or ownership over Sue whatsoever.
My apologies if I failed to make this as clear as I could have.
You claim:
Alas, the slave-trader absolutely is an enabler of slavery, for its the trader’s recognition of the slave as somehow justly owned by the slave-master that enables the slave-master to continue his/her authoritarianism over the slave.
If I say that I own my neighbour, it changes nothing. I can’t actually control my neighbour in any way because everyone around me refuses to recognise my supposed ownership over him. If everyone, or at least a very powerful organisation calling itself “government,” recognises me as the actual and just owner of my neighbour, then and only then can I pose any contol over my neighbour.
You can’t be a slave by contract. If you don’t like your employer, quit. Likewise, if you don’t like having consensual sex with Sally, stop having sex with Sally.
If they’re slaves, they’re slaves. There is no such thing as a slave by contract, for contracts are only valid when exchanging a claim to an alienable property. My will and my body are inalienable. This is the Rothbardian position I am espousing.
It is this “silly theory” that makes slavery innately unjust. If you didn’t have innate self-ownership, then I could come across you at any time and “appropriate your body from the state of nature,” thereby making myself the rightful owner of your body. It is only the axiom of self-ownership that makes such an occurrence a form of theft, a barbaric violation of natural Liberty.
The Rothbardian position is simply: your “promise” to have sex is meaningless. “Promisory contracts” are invalid. The only valid contracts are those that transfer property, and I obviously can’t own your sex. If you fail to have sex with me, then all you have to do is give back to me what I gave you–and if neither of us gave the other anything, then neither of us owe the other anything.
Your question here is valid. Block came up with an idea which Rothbard adopted, the notion of “two teeth for a tooth.” Something similar could be used here.
As for the exact just amount, that could be decided by the market through privately-hired arbitors. Any arbitor who decreed that you owe me a quadrillion dollars simply since you didn’t pay me my $10 for, say, a decade would surely lose credibility and customers. Further, you would have the right to appeal that decision. Good question.
I don’t know what to say. I’m dumbfounded how you could possibly make such a statement.
A) Rothbard would not and could not “come to the conclusion that a holocaust is justified for his own liberty’s sake.”
B) If Rothbard did come up with such a conclusion, it would be in total and complete contradiction with any and all other conclusions he ever came up with, and in complete defiance of his understanding of human nature.
C) If someone comes up with a “conclusion that a holocaust is justified for his own liberty’s sake,” the person is wrong because of the innate self-ownership that Spooner, Rothbard, Long, and others have championed.
D) Value? Value is subjective, and not a basis of ethics which, by its very nature, must be objective, as it regards the treatment of entities external to the self based on the innate nature of those entites. (Morality, conversely, is subjective, as it deals with the conduct of the self as subject.)
E) Humans have certain inalienable rights, such as self-ownership, because it is in the objective nature of humanity that humans possess this equal right. Subsequently, any argument “that a holocaust is justified for his own liberty’s sake” is obviously invalid.
Anarchism is not the same thing as nihilism.
Had you read The Ethics of Liberty, you would see that the very opposite is true. He explicitely argues AGAINST egoists who claim that it’s okay to sacrifice the lives of others so as to save one’s own. His arguments aren’t based upon the assumption that his own life is objectively valuable, but rather on the importance of human Liberty as expressed by our equal natural rights.
Had you read The Ethics of Liberty, you would see that Rothbard makes the clear distinction between ethics and morals. “Right” and “wrong” are moral terms, while “just” and “unjust” are ethical terms. It seems highly probable that he would find this to be “wrong,” but not unjust unless coersion were applied. But, further, had you read The Ethics of Liberty, you would see that Rothbard makes the argument that this sort of act would be extremely rare, even rarer than it is now.
Rothbard was not the nihilist you wish to make him out to be. Read his work, see for yourself.
I noticed this while reading about his life. If you are trying to use this as an example of why Rothbard was not concerned with human ethics, it fails, as this simply describes his silly habit of burning bridges.
If something is a violation of natural law, then it’s naturally criminal, government or sans government. Slavery is the theft of one’s body from the rightful owner of said body (i.e. the self), and is therefore a violation of the natural law of self-ownership. It is therefore criminal, by its very nature.
They would be wrong to do so. Children, by their nature as human beings, are equal to their parents, and are therefore free to secede from their parents’ household any time they wish. Any establishment of rules made by the parent are to be made under the assumption that it’s “their way or the highway,” not under the assumption that children are not inherently sovereign and free individuals possessing all the same, equal rights as other humans.
That is correct, Allixpeeke. That will be a he by the way, although I won’t hold you accountable (lol). My name can lead to confusion . I’ll update my profile.
(I don’t know your philosophy here but I found this a curious place.)
Let’s say I am a very wealthy capitalist. And I find a new way to undercut labor cost in our future world market. I ran the numbers and found that I could create my widget with a new labor methodology.
I create a genetic engineering program and grow children in artificial wombs. I take the child after they are born and I educate and train them for very specific roles. I give them the most basic needs necessary to complete the labor I need done. They are never taken outside, know nothing of the outside world and are educated to respect my staff, my rules and myself. Those that cause trouble are allowed to leave. Those that remain continue to receive the benefits of my system.
Overtime I weed out those that desire to leave. I continue to use this genetic program to adapt and make this work force more efficient. They receive a fairly boring existence but they make widgets that benefit the entire free market cutting prices dramatically.
They can leave anytime they want if they really want to. But they can never return if they choose to leave. Neither my staff nor I ever tell them that they can leave.
I have a question. Do children even have the capacity for free will to make a rational choice of value in a free market? If a child is willing to sign a contract at the age of 12 who can stop them and should that contract be upheld? Or does the contract end as soon as someone says, “Stop” even if the obligations in the contract have not been met?
Obviously the greatest fault I see here is that there is a belief that a free market will operate without coercion. And if serious coercion does occur who will step in? Or is it up to the party that was coerced to deal with the problem? And who will step in if the local people get together who are sick of my slave shop and remove me from the community? That is a government of people who made a choice, why should they be allowed to interfere in the free market? Would you stand up and fight those people from interfering in my free trade or simply see it as proper justice?
To assume that current humans would operate a market without any coercion is dangerously foolish. Like most philosophy, especially regarding that of liberty, it only works when both parties agree and uphold the philosophical social contract. And when it comes to profits and power many people will use coercion to achieve their goals. In fact if there is profit to be made while trampling a contract, the contract will not be upheld but dumped for more lucrative profits. At the same time the other party will want to uphold the contract but the other party won’t.
It seems guaranteed there will be a lot of people out there using coercion to achieve their goals in a free for all market. If the coercive business is predominately successful they will undermine the non-coercive business and in time eliminate them from existence. Then the free market would likely be changed into a regulated market and then back into some form of oligarchy. That seems to be the way of those who attain power from wealth through out our history.
What about coercive elements of the market itself such that economic situations thrust people into situations that they would not agree to normally. They can choose to starve or submit to a slave contract for life? Of course the economy picks up and the person leaves, the owner wants to keep his other slaves and kills the person that left making an example of them. Let’s even say it was written into the contract that life was forfeit upon leaving without permission.
A criminal act is defined in law. There was such a thing as unwritten common law way-back-when, but nowadays all laws are written (with the probable exception of the so-called “income tax law”). Coercion is understood to be theoretically illegitimate in a theoretical libertarian markekplace. Actual coercion is prevalent in the present-day marketplace because government control is ubiquitous. Your discussion of “a natural law” in such abstract terms as “slavery is the theft of one’s body from the rightful owner (i.e., the self)” & “self-ownership” & “criminal by its very nature” may be interesting albeit not very enlightening.
Ownership is an interesting concept. Whether or not claims to ownership are valid is beyond my purview. I can only guess as to who claims owership to what.
So what? Laws don’t have to be written to be laws. The UK doesn’t even have a written constitution, for example.
Coercian is illegitimate. It’s not theorectical whether in a “theoretical libertarian marketplace” or otherwise.
Yes.
It’s not abstract to talk about slavery as being a violation of Natural Law. Everyone has a property right in their own body. Indeed this is the most fundamental right there is, which is why slavery violates Natural Law.
I would say the simplest way to stop you from exploiting the children in this manner would be to just not buy your products and made it be known far and wide what sort of business practices you resort to to undercut the competition. I really can’t really see even a tiny fraction of the people finding this practice acceptable under any form of market so most likely you would go bankrupt soon after the information leaked out to the public.
Any of the children would also have a pretty much ironclad lawsuit against you which any halfway decent lawyer could easily turn into a class action suit that would eat up any remaining capital you would have accumulated from engaging in such a practice.
You would end up poor, hated and utterly broken, shunned from any decent community and have no hope for a livable future all without any force or coercion being used against you.
That’s the politically correct version. Personally, I’d just take you out to the desert and bury you…but then again, I’d make a really bad anarchist.
No, no, no. Free Market not ‘free for all market’. In a Free Market there are means to protect against coercion, theft and fraud. A Free Market can’t exist without these protections for precisely the reasons you state.
I believe the proper term for that is a ‘social contract’. Under this ‘contract’ you are forced to give the rewards of nearly 50% of your labor to ‘society’ because you consented to this contract by the very act of being born. Kind of like a shrink wrap EULA when you buy software at a store I suppose.
That one’s called ‘Selective Service’ if I’m not mistaken.
Trading in something does not mean to acknowledge that it is just, any more than I acknowledge that government is just by voting or paying a traffic fine. The trader’s recognition one way or the other has no effect on the institution of slaver itself, it is only the recognition of the slavers (the people who do the inslaving) and the government (which keeps the slaves from being able to run off) which keeps slavery going. A reduction in the number of slave traders would just make the less market less liquid.
I do agree with you, although not for the reasons you state. A less liquid slave market would decrease the demand for slaves, so slave traders retiring would help to reduce slavery. That would make participating in slave trading immoral.
You do those things only because you are backed up against a wall by the state. Who’s forcing you to buy and sell people, especially in a stateless society? No one, therefore if you do it, you are fully culpable in enabling the hypothetical system of slavery.
The point I’m trying to make is that, without a state, virtually no one would recognise legitimacy in the ownership of one man by another, and therefore slavery could not persist in a free society. Those few (if there even are any) who engage in enslavement or in the slave trade would be considered criminal elements, and rightly so.
We’re here dealing with the hypothetical (and unrealistic) idea of slavery in the state of nature. Obviously the government was the major protector of slavery, in a way only a Leviathan could. But the only theoretical way slavery could exist in a state of nature is if the masses recognised legitimacy in the ownership of one man by another. Slave traders, once again, would be fully culpable in enabling slavery through the promotion of the appearance of legitimacy. And if we can establish that slave-traders would be fully culpable in a state of nature, then we must logically conclude that engaging in slave trading is a violation of natural law and is thus unethical, whether in a statutory or a free society.
Laws are written nowadays because there is now a comparatively very low level of illiteracy.
The libertarian marketplace, being a theoretical construct, is virtual. The present-day marketplace, on the other hand, is objective in that the elements of it can be empirically detected. One can theorize what effects would result in the libertarian marketplace from a given coercive act, but nothing could be empirically detected, however, those results that are measurable could be empirically detected in the present-day market.
I contend that concepts such as “natural law” & “rights” can’t be empirically detected as one can empirically detect the concept of say, gravity. Such high abstractions are, however, the stuff of theoretical constructs as in the arts, religion and philosophy. Confusing high abstractions with concepts that are empirically verifiable leads one to be illogical. (I use ‘concept’ as ‘concept/word’ because words, afterall, are concepts.)
I should have written ‘reification’ but at the time all I could think of was ‘anthropomorphization’:
"Reification (also known as hypostatization or concretism) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it represented a concrete, real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a “real thing” something which is not one. When people describe natural events (like a geyser) or social institutions (like government) as alive, they are committing a reification fallacy.
Note that reification is perfectly acceptable in literature, where it is often used as a metaphor. Its use in logical arguments is a mistake (fallacy). In rhetoric it may be sometimes difficult to determine if reification was used correctly or incorrectly.
Pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic fallacy (in literature known as personification) is a specific subset of reification, where the theoretical concepts are not only considered alive, but human-like and intelligent.
Reification often takes place when natural or social processes are misunderstood and/or simplified; for example when human creations are described as ‘facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will’. Reification can also occur when a word with a normal usage is given an invalid usage. Such ‘mental shortcuts’ lead to ascribing substance or real existence to mental constructs or concepts, particularly treating them as a live beings. When human-like qualities are attributed as well, it is a special case of reification, known as pathetic fallacy (or anthropomorphic fallacy).
A reification circle refers to the event when a norm, first seen as artificial and forced, in time becomes so accepted that even its creators start to think of it as a natural law." - http://www.answers.com/topic/reification-fallacy
But does that really matter? Don’t all laws that govern the actions of human beings have to be based on some kind of ethical system? And if you’re going to create an ethical system, what better place to start than by recoginzing that all human beings have a property right in their own body? What more fundamental right can there be? In fact you can’t envisage an ethical system without recognizining this. And once you do, you have to recognize other property rights as well. The Natural Law, which is derived from these rights is obviously not law that can be empirically proven in the same way that gravity can be proven. It is derived from basic axioms that are deduced a priori and is apodictic and self-evident. Nevertheless, in some sense we do use our knowledge and experience of what it means to be human to know that it’s true, and it is useful in its application in the real world as it applies to human beings. And far from being illogical, I would say that such concepts are very logical because they conform to human nature and the logical structure of our minds. Would you not agree?
You imply that “human nature” is known, so let’s look at a few facts: during the 20th century at least 100 million people were deliberately killed in 1) WW1, 2) WW2, [during the period of WW2 there were mass slaughters by British Bombers obliterating Dresden, by the Nazi SS “ethnic cleansing,” the rape of Nanking China by Japanese occupiers and U.S. Air Force atomic bombing of two civilian cities and firebombing other civilian cities including Tokyo in Japan] 3) Korean War & 4) Vietnam War. Civilization was on the brink of destruction during the last half of the 20th century during the Cold War. In 2003 the U.S. armed forces invaded and occupied, to this very day, the small defenseless country of Iraq at an estimated total cost of at least 2 trillion dollars. It appears to me that “human nature,” if anything, is savage, bloodthirsty & beastial.
Ah, but if you could’ve seen the faces of those who lived their whole lives under tyranny and oppression who were suddenly Free you could see that there is A Better Way™.
It all went to hell in a hand basket due to incompetence and greed of course but for a very brief moment in time there existed a truly free peoples on this here earth.
. I’ll update my profile.