Except it’s not, so for all intents and purposes you just provided a wrong analogy. Last time I checked you couldn’t change your mind after committing suicide.
Violating a contract based on a promise would simply merit lying, not an act of aggression.
You’ve introduced new information into this scenario which doesn’t translate to youf first claim. First you had exchange of promise, now you have exchange of property, two completely different concepts.
one can change ones mind if one remains alive, but one may have given someone a contractual right to act upon one with violence if one deviates from following a set of contracually agreed upon behaviours…if this responsive act is deathbringing and this was prior consented to, then the above analogy is made
how about, if you promise to chauffer someone in your car, or pay a 100£ penalty to finish the contract, in exchange for the other party taking you dog for a walk or paying a 100£ penalty to finish the contract. what should happen here, if the first party doesnt drive when he should, or the second party doesnt walk when he should?
Indeed you cannot in either case - thus any discussion about your autonomy is a useless. Your signing away your liberty removes from you the ability to choose otherwise as was the case with the suicide.
No at all. Signing a slave contract does not remove your abillity to will. The only thing you could say is it removes your ability to have legal recourse.
If the first party drove the other, and the other party failed to walk the first party’s dog, or vise-versa, the party that didn’t proform their service would have aggressed against the other party by recieving a service and not paying for it. It would effectively merit theft.
If neither party proformed their service, and one party decided to terminate the contract the other party would have no enforcable claim to 100£ since an exchange never took place.
but if only one wanted to break the contract, then that one would have to pay the 100 to the other?
If an exchange already took place, yes.
If not, no.
Stupid nonsense. You can’t sign away your liberty – it is ‘inalienable’. I’m getting rather fed up with ‘libertarian’ legal positivism.
Also, the fact that we can commit suicide doesn’t mean that our right to life is alienable. When X commits suicide he’s not transferring his right to life to someone else – the suicide analogy is doubly stupid.
Alienable
Al"ienable, a. [Cf. F. ali['e]nable.] Capable of being alienated, sold, or transferred to another; as, land is alienable according to the laws of the state.
not helpful, liberty is an anti-concept. its simply a description of a lack of political coercion. you dont have liberty positive, you have a right not to be coerced. but if you give a permanent consent for someone to do any phsyical act to your body then where would coercion next enter into your story?
(i think it would be super foolish to permit someone to forever do whatever they would to your body, but its possible)
its not so much that you are ‘signing away your liberty’ - ‘signing away your right to be coerced’ - you are rather signing an agreement that interprets another persons actions towards you as never being illegitimate so you would never be coerced, since you explicity consented to all that would follow
I thought contracts helped solidify these meandering states of man’s mind so that man can find agreement or truth and understanding. Everyone keeps talking about the right to change their mind. Aren’t contracts drawn up for this very reason, to help counteract the mercurial nature of man?
If you want someone freed from a contract, shouldn’t you be required to purchase the contract (assuming the other party doesn’t agree to nullifying it)?
Also, if someone agrees to a contract but then wants out of it and they do this constantly, how many times should a libertarian society see to it that they are allowed to do so? It’s one thing to say, “this ought to be and this ought not to be”, but words are empty unless there’s force to back them up.
How many times can someone want out of a contract before you say enough is enough?
Keyword here being permanent.
But you are still interpreting the actions. And you can change your mind. So the moment you decide you are being coerced, well, you are.
You can voluntary play the slave all you want, but you can’t transfer your will to someone else, just like you can’t transfer your life.
Is it possible to voluntarily give up your life with suicide? Yes.
Why then is it impossible to give up your liberty - as life is arguably less alienable than liberty.
That is anything but nonsense.
I already explained that you can’t transfer your right to life. It is not alienable. Did you fail to read my post ? Or did you fail to grasp it ?
It is philosophical nonsense and is of course practical nonsense as well.
In a nutshell, some ‘libertarians’ are worried because in a free society slavery might not be properly enforced…
Because you literally can’t contract away your will. You can’t transfer away your right to make your own decisions and actions, as it isn’t something that you control. It is an inherent part of being a human being. Part of this also stems from the fact that you can’t compel specific performance in a personal contract; all you can due is reclaim your rightful property, if any was exchanged. What you could do is pay someone $X in exchange for a lifetime of servitude and then reclaim the $X (plus damages, perhaps) if and when the contract is broken; you cannot, however compel someone to work for you, whatever a purported contract says.
IMO, voluntary slavery is one of the problems that flows from the deeper problem of taking non-aggression as an “axiom”, instead of thinking of the NAP as a principle that relies on deeper ethical concerns.
Practically I agree it is absurd right now. However philosophically it holds as reasonable as there may be in the future a way in which to practically sell yourself (I am thinking of a “being john malkovich” type of situation - before you call THAT absurd check out the advances in transhumanism and the overcoming bias blogs).
In this case, in the future, anarchists would still hold that liberty is inalienable which I would argue it is not and would be a choice that a person should be free to make.
People do this all the time. I can grant you the right to my life and, as such, you may do with my life as you see fit and still have the right of contract. This can be done by doctors who are contracted to kill their patient, etc.