What Law Is

[Dondoolee]

@ThorsMitersaw

Still not quite sure why revenge/retribution ought to be considered primitive or why one ought to be opposed to it. It seems that restoration of the person and his/her endeavors to their previously undamaged state is not the only thing that should be obtained in a legal framework

I think it may be better to look at revenge as a strictly personal thing and justice as a strictly legal social system in place by defenition. So you could use whatever justice system is in place to get revenge on some one, if that suits your desires.

[ClaytonB]

@Brainpolice

@ThorsMitersaw

@Brainpolice

I don’t find estoppel theory very persuasive. It makes the false assumption that you are justified in doing anything to someone so long as he did it to you first. If someone did something monstrous to you, you can do it right back. I don’t think this flies at all.

That’s exactly the problem I had with it. It can be reduced to an arbitrary justification for the most ridiculous retribution doctrine. I don’t see how it constitutes anything other than primitive revenge.

still not quite sure why revenge ought to be considered primitive or why one ought to be opposed to it.

Because it isn’t justice in the sense of restoring anything to the victim, other than to appease some psychological desire. It just seems to be a re-enactment of the crime, an escalation or doubling of violence. It doesn’t seem to accomplish anything productive. We’re just beating the shit out of someone to make ourselves feel better - but that does seem like a rather primitive urge to me (obtaining satisfaction by inflicting violence). The rationale? “He did it first!”. That sounds rather childish to me and dissolves any high-ground that one can have in terms of behavioral norms.

When the punisher is removed from the victim themselves, that seems to be even worse in a sense, because we’ve granted legitimacy to a 3rd party to do what amounts to initiate violence, since they can’t be claiming to be defending themselves. But even in the case of the victim being the punisher, the violence is ex-post-defacto and can’t really be called defense.

I agree that a rationale must exist for the use of justifiable violence. However, I disagree with the attempt to categorize violence used in restitution as something other than violence. It is, in fact, violence. So, the difference between my position and your position is not whether the use of violence in response to violence is justifiable but what kinds or amounts of violence can be justified in response to violence.

A thorough-going libertarian legal philosophy places the freedom of the will of the individual as the value of paramount importance. But only in a society consisting solely of libertarians can we expect such a philosophy to come to dominate law. In fact, most people are not and never will be libertarian, so the law itself will never be libertarian, per se. That is, the law will never take preservation of the individual’s freedom of will as its highest value. It may really be the case that a law system without retribution would be the most libertarian but I doubt that such a law system would emerge even in a natural order. The reason is that the law is bound by the facts of nature and nature is not concerned with maximizing the individual’s freedom of will. Nature is concerned with maximizing the reproductive success of individuals. Maximal liberty of the individual does not necessarily maximize reproductive success, hence, nature is not necessarily libertarian. When I put my ethics hat on, I advocate for libertarianism. When I put my science hat on, I observe that a natural order will not be perfectly libertarian (though I expect it would be a great deal more libertarian than the statist order we live in today).

Clayton -

[Amanojack]

So in essence, all central planning is an attempt to improve on the natural order. It seems to most people that we ought to be able to improve on the natural order. However, highly counterintuitively, so far all attempts have indicated that improving on the natural order in any way at all is impossible and makes things much worse, without any exception throughout history. (Natural order: the order than grows spontaneously over time through the interactions, disputes, and resolutions among individuals in the absence of central planning.)