Where criminal penalties are concerned, my quick sketch of an answer might look something like this:
* In general, the better course of action is to confer benefits on those who have benefitted you (to enable them to do so again, and to motivate them) but to confer harms or threats on those who harm harmed or threatened you (to avoid the Danegeld problem).
* This sort of exchange can be viewed as a market, and one that may have a market clearing price of a kind. If your penalty for stealing a sheep is to be fined a sheep, you have an incentive to steal sheep. As the penalty becomes steeper, fewer sheep are stolen. If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
* Our sense of what is a fair penalty is shaped by experience with penalizing over the years or centuries.
"If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly"
More costly to whom? Executing someone is less costly than imprisoning him if you don't count costs to the criminal. Penal slavery is less costly still, where it can be done at a profit, on the same assumption.
> If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
I don't think we should assume that. E.g. enslaving someone is a harsh punishment that might have a negative cost, while keeping someone locked up in a five-star prison is a less harsh punishment that is very costly.
That's not necessarily an unsound point. On the other hand, part of the cost of enslaving someone is the need to defeat them in a fight, when they know that being enslaved is a possible outcome of losing. Enslaving people under conditions other than war may be risky.
Even when you have a state, slavery seems to be limited to a few cases: enslavement of prisoners of war or captives after a war, enslavement of debtors, and enslavement of family members sold to raise money (usually children). It doesn't seem to be a common penalty for a crime.
1. Did the criminal actually become the property of another person, or of the state? Or is "slavery" being used here in a broader sense?
2. Here we seem to be talking about penalties imposed by states, and sometimes by rather powerful ones (see Wasserschweinchen's remarks about North Korea and the Soviet Union below). I was proposing an approach to determining penalties in a society of autonomous individuals. Such penalties may have limitations that a totalitarian dictatorship is not subject to.
The criminal was transported to the British New World colonies. He was an indentured servant, a temporary slave, I believe for seven or fourteen years, depending on details of the legal process. I am pretty sure the usual system was to sell him to a private employer he would then work for.
Indenture was also used as a way in which a voluntary immigrant could pay the cost of coming to the New World. I think the usual system was that the ship captain charged a fixed price for transporting the immigrant, then auctioned him off to whatever purchaser would pay that price in exchange for the shortest term of indenture.
My impression is that slavery for crimes is widespread in North Korea and was widespread in the Soviet Union. Inmate labour (and community service) in other countries fall somewhere on the spectrum between free labour and slavery.
Those are conditions unlike a "market," though. Rather than penalties being a result of many people with roughly commensurate power coming to terms with each other in exchanges of threat for threat, they're imposed by a single entity with overwhelming power. Relative to such an entity, individuals are already effectively slaves whether or not they've been formally decreed to be slaves as part of a punishment.
I am a libertarian because I'm an utilitarian, and I think libertarianism gives the best outcomes today. There's no universal law saying that must be true though, that's just how it is. If we lived in a world where there was a supernatural higher being that regularly interfered, perhaps living in a theocratic authoritarian state where we ensured no one violated that higher being's rules would result in better outcomes, to get that higher being's favour. If we lived in a world with superintelligent AI, perhaps centrally planning the economy around that AI's advice would result in better outcomes. There are probably other examples of other circumstances where alternative ideologies result in better outcomes than libtertarianism according to utilitarianism.
But in general, I think libertarianism long term result in the best outcomes for humanity. All the problems we pose, I think can be solved by saying libertarianism is just a tool of utilitarianism, not its own terminal value. And we stop using that tool when it's not useful. We can find another method to best fund and run a military that results in the best outcomes, we can find another method for law enforcement, for property rights, and so on, there is no reason we should need to bind our entire society to libertarianism.
I had a revelation with your very insightful words:
"If we lived in a world with super-intelligent AI, perhaps centralized planning of the economy around the guidance of that AI would lead to better outcomes"
It is a response to reservations about the superiority of the market over the centralized economy.
Indeed, AI can solve coordination problems on the production side (supply). We can also imagine that AI will be able to know the desires of individuals (demand). After all, this is what algorithms are used for on the internet. But there will remain the problem of the aggregation of preferences (Arrow's theorem).
I think I agree with this. It seems to me that libertarianism is an ideology, and it’s dangerous to get obsessed with ideology to the exclusion of all else. The way I’d put it, liberty is a Good Thing; but, if the single-minded pursuit of liberty leads to bad outcomes, we may need to remember that there are other Good Things in life. This is particularly true in the real world that we actually live in, as opposed to a future utopia that we can dream about.
Meh ... I'm a libertarian because I am a Kantian about rights, and like the Kantian ideal of trying to articulate universal moral principles to explain particular moral judgments. No doubt that seems too "absolutist" to some, and indeed "ideological" if you like, but I find mix-and-match approaches to resolving specific moral questions suspicious and unsatisfying. It is too easy to hide prejudices in what is not articulated.
Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb that we have individually decided to adopt to simplify our decision-making. I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live; but there’s no guarantee that this can be achieved by strictly following any particular rule of thumb. Furthermore, the welfare of society is a vague concept that cannot be precisely defined or measured, so we’re trying to optimize something without really knowing what it is, and without really knowing what ‘optimize’ means in this context.
Yes, it is satisfying to formulate and follow a rule of thumb that seems good to you, and in our personal behaviour it may be quite feasible to do so. Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
"I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live;"
What does that mean? Principles are not people, don't have objectives. Do you mean that as analogous to "the objective of evolution is reproductive success"? If so, what is the invisible hand mechanism that results in principles that are as if designed for that purpose?
People choose which principles they wish to follow, and I suppose they choose with some objective in mind. I chose my principles with the admittedly vague aim of optimizing the welfare of society, because it seems to me that it’s an objective that other people might share and agree on. If I chose with the aim of optimizing only my own welfare, I’d choose different principles (but I’d hope that other people didn’t share them). If I chose with the aim of maximizing the sales of a certain brand of toothpaste, I’d choose different principles again. And so on.
A central problem of all societies is the conflict between individual self-interest and the general interest and you seem to be assuming it away. Why would you have any more reason to act for the general interest in choosing principles than in choosing actions?
>Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb
I guess that's where you and I disagree. I do think that there are moral principles that apply universally and are not the expressions of some legal system, that are not just "rules of thumb", and so that puts me in the so-called "natural law" tradition. Thus, some acts of gratuitous torture are wrong, even if all societies approved of them. True, I don't claim to /know/ the principles I am inclined to assert in these comments, but I conceive my task to be one of trying to figure out what they are.
>I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society
Fine, but this seems like one of those universally applicable principles, depending on what you mean by the expression "ultimate objective". In one reading, this makes it sound that there are objective purposes in nature, which is the type of thing I am talking about. Of course, if it does not mean that, if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective", then I am simply going to disagree that we /do/ have such an objective—I certainly don't, for example. People (quasi-utilitarians) seem to think that they can escape commitment to some transcendent moral principles by talking about "the welfare of society as whole", but the commitment to that specific goal is itself an example of a transcendent commitment. (Not to mention that, as you say, the notion of optimizing such a thing is far from clear.)
>Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
I agree with this, but it is consistent with what I say. I think there is right and wrong independently of specific societies, but there is—obviously—much dispute about what these are. Still, we all agree that we need to make some decision or other, and so we need to come to some practical way of doing so, and that is where compromise comes in. We have good practical reasons to compromise, even if we are not convinced that what we are doing really is the best thing (after all, if we thought we /were/ doing the best, then that would hardly be a /compromise/, would it?).
" if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective""
There is a third alternative, an invisible hand theory in which some mechanism analogous to evolution produces a pattern of principles that is as if designed for a purpose. I sketch one such in an old piece:
Do you distinguish between the natural law approach to morality and moral realism? I think the former tries to deduce principles from facts of reality, which runs into Hume's is/ought problem. The latter doesn't, treats them as observations not deductions from objective fact.
The core of my thinking on this matter is encapsulated in two claims, that (a) in many situations, it is morally wrong to (eg) kill people [insert other libertarian prohibitions to taste], and (b) this is true NOT just because some (perhaps different, perhaps the same) people made it so. When I use the term "natural rights" in these comments, that's all I mean. I'm more certain of this than I am of any philosophical theory.
So anything more than this is non-core. Thus—to wax ontological and epistemological—exactly /what/ makes it wrong to kill people, and how can we know when it is and it isn't? FWIW, I have no considered view about the ontology of moral facts (apart from insisting that there /are/ some), but I do think we can come to reasonable (≠ true, necessarily) moral beliefs about the moral facts only through (Rawlsian) reflective equilibrium, as I try in my comments.
Now I think most people believe it is wrong to kill people, and not just because people made it so. That is, /real/ Hobbesians are rare. And so, if /they/ want reasonable moral beliefs, then they too must engage in the process of reflective equilibrium, which is to say frustrating and tedious casuistry about the content of natural rights.
OK, I need to clarify. The ultimate objective of my own moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of society, and I guess that this vague objective is shared by many other people; but of course there are also plenty of people who would reject it (not just you!). For example, some people’s only objective is to optimize their own personal welfare, which is rational enough.
I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence, morality, and political principles of human beings. We are just a funny little lifeform on the surface of one little planet in a vast, uncaring universe, and whatever we do to each other matters only to us. The laws of nature govern how we function and prevent us from flying to the moon by flapping our arms, but how we choose to behave (within our physical limits) is entirely up to us.
>I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence ... whatever we do to each other matters only to us.
And what if it doesn't matter to some of us? There are people in world who literally treat others as /things/, to be used in ways (enslavement, rape, torture, murder) no different to physical objects. They don't care. I think that what they do is wrong, and would still be wrong if everyone (including myself) thought otherwise. Do you?
This essay would have annoyed me greatly in 1982. And probably for a few years after that. That's true even though I did not come to my libertarian views through Rand. (I did stop off the path for a year or two before being convinced of the flaws in her thinking.) It's surely not uncommon for young, idealistic, intelligent people to want a system that provides clear answers to all questions. Especially if they have given up religion, the usual source of certainty.
In my early libertarian years, I was attracted both the Rothbardian approach and to your approach. Over time, I moved to your approach. I also recognized that the need for certainty is a huge intellectual sin.
I think this is a general problem, not specific to libertarianism: this idea of solving problems in a universal way, by logical deduction, starting with an axiom.
If you start with "A=A", it is most obvious. It is completely empty. And any logical deduction cannot, by definition, give it additional content. So any logical conclusion remains empty.
What libertarianism confuses is a concept (definition) with a solution to a problem. For example, what is "property"? Is it a general, universal solution to every conflict? No, it is a dirty, partial, temporary way out of a concrete conflict. Property is a relationship between people, a "right" or a bundle of rights, the permission of others to do something with something, a promise that they will not interfere with such an action. But why should they allow me to do something with something? This is the essential point. Property as a concept only creates the possibility to talk about conflicts and a form of resolution, but does not provide any concrete content.
Take a concrete right. To fish in a pond, for example. They allowed me to do that. So it becomes my right or my property. But it is not universal, it depends on others. If there were no others, I would not need a right to fish in that pond, I would just do it if I wanted to.
The libertarian now invents the story that this right comes into the world because I am the first to find the pond and start fishing there. This creates a universal property right that everyone has to respect. Why should they? Maybe the pond is quite big with lots of fish, why should I be the only one fishing there? Why should all the fish be "mine"? This is where Locke's proviso kicks in. I should leave enough fish for the others. How much? Here begins the real content and conflict. How much do they allow me to take from the world and exclude them from this part of the world? In short, there is no universal solution to this.
So to speak, there are no rights in the world from the beginning, but potentials (possibilities of the physical body guided by the personal mind). These potentials -maybe- lead to concrete rights, concrete boundaries, property and so on. Libertarianism and similar schools of thought turn this on its head by proclaiming a fundamental right from the very beginning.
I think I will assign a value between 0-1 to the culpability of the human shield in that crime when they end up becoming human shield. Clearly in libertarian perspective this value might be subjective but this is how I see it.
Random Joe goes to 7/11 to buy a pack smokes and then is held as hostage by a deranged person who then commits crime. I would assign a value of 0 to Joe's culpability here.
In a village religious zealots catch a lady and her child who belong to a disliked group, the child is killed and the mother is made to watch. The mother is than raped and killed too. The people who did this, continue to live in the village as respected members of the society. I might assign a value of 1 to the culpability of the village in this regard. It might be fine to harm the village to some extent to get to the bad guys.
In the case of Gaza there is undoubtedly a major subset of the population that supports Hamas. But there is also going to be a subset that opposes them or is too young to be morally culpable. This group has no way to leave the strip (to my knowledge, no other country would accept them).
So in this case, do we just spear Hamas to protect that last group?
I am a little surprised you are so... uncertain I suppose... on the matter of killing people who steal. While I would recommend not using high explosives to deter people stealing sticks, seeing as how they might not have known they were stealing for starters, the fundamental root of enforcement is a violent death. As Walter Williams put it "If I get a speeding ticket and refuse to pay it, there will be a warrant out for my arrest to make me appear in court. If I refuse to appear in court or be arrested I will be taken to jail. If I refuse to be arrested and taken to jail, I will be shot.... You should never make anything illegal you are not willing to kill people over."
In the story, the firewood was assumed to be in a wood pile on the owner's property, not sticks out in the forest, so the theft was deliberate.
In the speeding ticket case death isn't for speeding, it is for speeding plus refusing to go along with the normal legal process for punishing speeders. Do you really have no problem with the police simplifying the transaction by shooting anyone they catch speeding?
Regarding the firewood, before blowing someone up I would say put a little sign saying "These are my sticks; don't steal them." Just to be on the safe side, you understand; I grew up where property lines were non-obvious and pile of sticks might just be a brush pile. Generally it is worth while to ensure that the crime is being intentionally committed (or at least willfully negligently) before punishing I think. Whether or not one goes right to high explosives is a question of distributive justice rather than commutative justice I would say. I think it would be proper to spend some effort to find out who is doing it, perhaps why, but if someone got hurt knowingly stealing from someone else I wouldn't have a ton of sympathy for them. The main problem with the explosive is that you might hurt a bystander when it went off, I would say. I personally wouldn't kill someone for stealing sticks unless I really needed them for some reason, like I couldn't cook food without them or keep warm at night, but I wouldn't presume to make that decision for someone else, either.
I don't know that I exactly agree that the death penalty isn't for speeding but for refusing to go along with the process, or rather that it is a distinction that is relevant. The process is downstream of the initial punishment, but that doesn't mean that it isn't what backstops the whole deal. While there a distinction between getting a ticket for speeding and getting summary execution, the power to enforce speed limits comes from the power to impose fines, which is imposed by the rest of the process. The state is saying "If you do what we don't like, we are going to take some of your stuff, by force if necessary."
I certainly do have a problem with the police shooting anyone they catch speeding; in fact I have a problem with them giving people tickets for speeding. I don't think punishing people for potential harm caused to others is just. I think we have gone rather overboard with protecting from potential harm. (I know there are arguments to be made that the state owns the roads, and so they can set the limit at whatever they want and demand that those who use the roads abide by those rules. I don't think we should allow our state to do that, for much the same reason that other victimless crimes are a bad idea, even though in this case there is a stronger argument for it not being a violation of individual rights.)
I suppose my general argument is there are certainly plenty of crimes that are justifiable to stop by killing the perpetrator, a slightly smaller set of crimes that justify killing the perpetrator afterwards (more lenient considering that proving they are the perpetrator is trickier), and a set of things I really don't like people doing but that are not violations of another person's rights (no harm) and so I am not willing to kill someone to prevent them and wouldn't recommend making criminal law about.
Part of the problem is my use of "sticks." I was imagining something like a log that had been split into several pieces. "Faggots" might have been a better term. It has to be large enough so that you could drill a hole in it and fit a stick of dynamite in without it being obvious.
Ah, yea if it is was split wood, obviously worked a bit and stacked, that makes a lot more sense. I still wouldn't jump right to "boom, dead", in part because of the possible collateral damage and in part because I might not mind so much if I found out more (I can imagine reasons I would prefer to share the split wood, or at least come up with a trade even if the person were a thief initially.) Still, I can also think of times when I would not look down on someone for putting a bullet into the perpetrator, either, even in cases where I might not. Say if selling split lumber was how that person made their living.
I was asking not what you would do but what you were entitled to do if you so chose. Putting aside the collateral damage, do you think the victim is entitled to use lethal force if that is the most convenient way of protecting his property? If that is the only way?
Sorry, I meant to make it clear that I thought the answer was "yes" that he was entitled to use lethal force to protect his property. Whether or not it was morally proper in the sense of being worthy of praise, that is a different question. I wouldn't say so unless it was necessary, rather blameworthy in fact. Not punishable, however.
I am making the distinction between what one is entitled to do and what one ought to do, commutative vs distributive justice in the Smithian sense.
Yes, libertarians have historically focused on "persons" (= those with a sufficiently full capacity to be self-determining, "sufficient" being given by the "age of majority" as Peter has it), and some—like me—make the distinctive claim that persons are self-owners. Since, I assume, children are not persons, libertarians have historically left it as an open question what their rights are.
It seems to me that libertarians have a free choice on the issue. For while children are not /actually/ persons, they are /potential/ persons (in the sense that, in the normal course of events, they turn into persons). If you think that only actual persons have rights, then you get Peter's position, that children are simply property—presumably, in the first instance, of the mother, who created them ex nihilo. But that has unpleasant implications—Peter mentions "tell[ing] them to go to bed or eat their broccoli", but, of course, if they really are property, then a parent may do these things with the intention of fattening them up for market. So, if you do think that such implications are to be avoided, then you might be attracted to an alternative position, that /potential/ persons have all the rights of persons /that they can have/. Infants can want not to be tortured, so they have a right not to be tortured. Infants cannot enter into agreements, so they have no right to enter into agreements (and that is why they are not self-owners). Still, I'm not sure that libertarianism, as such, commits one to either choice.
Yes, parents have a duty to provide for their children. Suppose, because of something you did, you reduced a pre-existing adult to the level of an infant, who could be nurtured back to adulthood by providing intensive support. Since you are responsible for their vulnerable situation, you have a duty to provide that support to them, and they the corresponding right to receive it from you. But, as I say, a child has all the rights of an adult that it can have. Since this infant-like "adult" has a right to support, clearly the actual infant themselves also has a right to support. And since, in this case, /the parents/ are responsible the infant's vulnerable situation, /they/ have a duty to provide that support.
Not sure the first two questions raise any special difficulties. More interesting, however, is the third:
>What if the mother doesn't even know precisely who the father is?
I noted in passing above that IF infants are property, then /the mother/ would be the owner of the infant, since she created the infant. And so I say right now that, even though infants are NOT property, /the mother/ is in the first instance the one responsible for providing the care, for the same reason, that she is the one who created the little bundle of obligation. Of course, often, she agrees to do so with the male who impregnates her, and /this/ is the basis of /his/ obligation to care for the child. But sometimes she does not, as in the case you mention, in which case she is the /sole/ person responsible for providing care to the child.
And if she is unable or unwilling to provide care? I said in a previous comment that, libertarian though I am, I accept a duty of easy rescue, that there is an enforceable duty to help others when it costs us little and benefits them greatly. So, if the mother is absent, it seems to me we all together are obliged to see to it that the child gets the care it has a right to, since, if we all share the cost, then the cost to each of us will be little, for an obviously great benefit to the child.
That isn't a problem, none. What rights to rocks have? Libertarianism, like most systems, rights are only coffered upon reaching the age of majority. Children are simply property like rocks hence parent's ability to tell them to go to bed or eat their broccoli on pangs of damage or disposal.
I do not believe that position is shared by most libertarians, and it raises the problem of defining the age of majority and justifying that definition.
How is your claim less arbitrary than restricting rights to men, or to women, or to the kiing?
What is there to stop a parent from putting their children in a well the day before they turn 18. Then the day they turn 18 anfld can engage in contracts, they offer to pull their child out of the pit in exchange for lifelong slavery.
Volokh Conspiracy had a case where a union shined messages on to a restaurant's wall. Without reading it again (WaPo is behind a paywall, last I checked), my memory sez the union and restaurant were at loggerheads over some kind of labor dispute.
When it comes to some of these questions -- such as what you may do to protect yourself from a threat -- I distinguish between what the law says you're allowed to do in a libertarian system, and what you are morally justified in doing. Many libertarians (like even more people with different views) seem to think the two should be the same. Maybe that makes sense to a Kantian. I don't see why it should follow for a utilitarian -- a popular moral view that I dislike greatly. Nor for a virtue ethicist (closer to my thing).
Edit: I see that you mention a point very similar to this at the very end with regard to Rand.
- Can a court issue a subpoena to a third party? Or is that slavery?
- Can a court issue a temporary injunction to (e.g.) prevent you disposing of the property in dispute? Or is that definitely wronging someone - albeit we don't know who until the trial is over!
- How do you feel about juries?
Obviously these are mostly aimed at minarchists, an an-cap can reply that my insurance company's private courts can do anything I've signed up to.
"An answer offered by some libertarians is that you are entitled to get your property back plus as much again, the hundred dollars he stole from you plus another hundred. That is a simple rule but I have not yet seen a good argument for it."
As I understand it, if you demonstrate with your actions that you don't respect my right to a television set by stealing it, you can be estopped from complaining if I also take your television set from you (or whatever property you have of equivalent value) after retrieving what you stolen from me.
I'm not a philosopher (no matter what my friends think) nor am I a political scientist, but for me it's less that I'm a "libertarian" so much as I think in many (not all) cases more government involvement/more corporate power/less individual freedom is on average "bad" in some important sense specific to that case. Privacy is an area I'm especially interested in, but there's others for sure.
I understand the appeal of wanting a coherent philosophical framework to work off, it can be a great way to limit hypocrisy or contradiction (which are both good in themselves and also strategically useful), but I think at the end of the day we're all working off intuitions. We should interrogate those intuitions, and where they lead to unacceptable contradictions or abhorrent results we should limit them, but rigid adherence to a pre-established framework seems like it's always going to run into these kinds of problems?
Again, I'm not saying these frameworks are bad. They are not, they can be extremely useful in a range of ways. But saying 'libertarianism leads to these silly conclusions in these cases' to me suggests 'well, maybe we shouldn't be rigidly libertarian in those situations'
I have since turned away from any restitution in criminal or indeed civil cases: the harmed party stays harmed, the harmer is punished and any ill-gotten gains confiscated (but not returned to the harmed party). Otherwise no one will ever buy locks again, or will buy a suboptimal quantity.
I dare say that few over 30s still cling to apriorism, of they are libertarians at all.
On defense, though I don't think it would be enough to turn a profit, a private defence form could credibly promise to retaliate against an attackers troops in an unrelated place if and only of they hurt one of their client. More Guerilla than army, but if you are doing Guerilla anyways...
There's a long standing problem I wrestle with, involving libertarianism and secrecy.
Suppose that in order to provide a service you are willing to pay for, I have to hide some information from you. (I think the reason for hiding it won't matter, but I haven't been able prove it in the general case. One specific case I think about involves defense from outsiders.) That information will need to be protected; that protection may necessitate protecting the means by which it was acquired. That means may require an ongoing cost, and that cost may be high.
Consequently, I am now in the position where I have to charge you a fee for that service, I can't tell you exactly what it's spent on (either means or what is discovered using it), and a similar argument suggests I can't give you a full report on the quality of my service, as that would imply some of the information I have to hide.
Normally, uncertainty in your supply lines could be mitigated with competition - you don't have to know all the details of your supplies; what you give up and what you get in exchange are enough. But this is not a normal situation; anyone else offering a similar service would have to promise hiding of its own, forcing you to choose between two suppliers whose parameters you cannot know. And if the information involves defense, the cost of choosing the wrong one could be final. The incentives of the respective players appears to enforce this problem.
If I recall correctly, the last time I read your chapter in The Machinery of Freedom on defense, or similar chapters, it did not discuss the secrecy problem. (I think it was the second edition; I'm sure I'm at least one edition behind.)
The current edition is the third. It has a new chapter on national defense but does not discuss your secrecy problem, which I do not think I understand.
Hmm. I thought I laid out enough above. Was there part of it you didn't follow? Or did I leave something out, maybe?
When it comes to defense, part of the job involves keeping an eye on the people who might want to harm your group. Some of their plans will involve surprise, and it's impossible to defend against every potential plan they might carry out, but often possible to defend if you know what their plan is. That means espionage, and it also means not sharing a lot of how you do that - where you've hidden the surveillance, which way your antennas are pointed, or even what you currently know of their plans - if they knew what you know, they could figure out how you could have known that, and plug leaks.
Generally, this means that a group of citizens pooling resources to hire a professional defender (via subscriptions, say, in an ancap society) has the usual interest in defenders sharing their methods in order to compare different competitors in a free market, but also an interest in *not* sharing those methods, because it would necessarily impair the quality of the product.
I've tried on occasion to figure out how a libertarian society might handle this, with not much success.
One approach is to limit the things that need to be kept secret and share everything else, but that doesn't completely eliminate the problem, and in some ways it makes it worse; the less secret stuff there is, the fewer the places a bad guy has to focus on to find it. Another approach I considered was for competitors to share their secrets and compete on everything else, but it kept leading to cartel problems.
Meanwhile, one approach to comparing service providers for which you have limited information is by hiring a service to test them - empirical information about which product performs better under known conditions is often useful enough. But in the case of defense, this looks like hiring an entire army to go up against one of your providers, which seems far too expensive to be practical.
You can also judge by results, although that is hard if the danger they protect against is a very uncommon one, works better for defense against criminals than for defense against states. I gather the latter is what you are thinking of?
Correct. Ideally, you invade a sandbox version of your own society, and see whether the security provider can handle it. In practice, this is utterly infeasible. In practice, a common approach is to merely observer whether we feel safe from external harm.
But there's another hitch here as well. Suppose everyone proceeds to subscribe to some collective defender for some set amount of time, and during that time, your society is indeed not invaded. Was it because the defender was competent, or because no one was ready or motivated to invade? The party most qualified to answer that question is often the defender - who has every incentive to answer with the former. They'll say they put down X threats, and deterred Y more - that the average citizen wouldn't even know about had the defender not mentioned them.
Observing that there exist rival societies with comparable apparent militaries is not enough to infer readiness, as readiness also requires an intent (or better, a detailed plan) to actually send an invasion force. Russia and China each possess militaries that could plausibly do grave damage to the US if the US Navy did not exist. But neither Russia nor China can simply invade at any time; they would have to move a lot of equipment to a staging area to prepare, and that would take weeks or months and is virtually impossible to hide. OTOH, it may be very possible to plan something that isn't an invasion but still harmful, and a competent defender might be able to detect such plans and thwart them before they become apparent to everyone. The outward appearance of a defender squashing one secret offensive after another is... nothing happening. Again, did nothing happen because no one plotted harm, or because lots of people did and their hired defender has worked continually but quietly to defeat such plans?
An independent private investigation might be able to verify whether anyone was ready, but won't necessarily have the same investigation methods the defender does. If an investigator reports no one planned to invade and the defender says someone did, there's no way to tell (due to aforementioned secrecy) which of them is the most accurate. Indeed, the defender has an incentive to say they thwarted multiple plans to harm our society, but may have an incentive not to say anything more about those plans, since revealing that may reveal how they knew, which often costs them an avenue for learning about future plans.
The ways of defending an A-C society that I have discussed are basically kludges, as are most private solutions to public good problems, relying on hard to analyze factors such as patriotism and trust. I don't think you can get the sort of market mechanism that we use to produce most goods and services in that context, unfortunately, which is why I regard defense against nations as a hard problem.
Even aside from your problem, how do you solve the free rider problem?
Your characterization of it as a hard problem is indeed one of the things I most remember about your framing. A good sign, I think; I agree it's hard, though maybe for slightly different or additional reasons, but either way the caution seems wise.
Unfortunately, I have no great solution to the free rider issue either. I do notice that the patriotism factor - or maybe something adjacent - appears to address it, at least in the US; despite the risk, thousands of Americans nevertheless agree to enter the armed service. Even if it's hard to analyze numerically, it seems to be enough. (I'd bet it helps immensely that our military is easily #1. Everyone wants to be on the winning team. So maybe the correct response is "good - now make sure you stay #1".)
Patriotism has a different meaning in an A-C society, but it doesn't necessarily disappear. I suspect an A-C society will need some sort of underlying culture, an arbitrary set of beliefs about property, wealth, and voluntary exchange over which there could be wide diversity of object-level customs. Belief in those ideals might be enough to drive a motivation to defend them. I don't know.
I do notice that while free markets don't fully solve such problems, they still appear to solve them at least as well as any alternative. A government, for example, appears to replace the free rider problem with a large negative externality.
>The bad guy grabs a convenient bystander, pulls out a gun, points it at you, and starts shooting with the bystander held in front of him. If you shoot back you might kill the innocent shield. Are you entitled to do it?
Yes, the bad guy is responsible for the bystander’s death. If we cannot defend ourselves in this way then there would be more bad guys doing this and so less liberty.
>That problem is dramatically visible in the current war between Israel and Hamas. The Hamas troops are embedded in the civilian population of Gaza. There is no way the Israeli military can fight them that does not kill civilians.
It is not clear to me that this is a good analogy. It looks more like a gang of murderers who live on a particular housing estate. It is libertarian to go in to search for them and shoot them if they start shooting. It is not libertarian to keep bombing parts of the estate hoping to kill some of the murderers.
>The same problem arises with nuclear deterrence. Nuclear retaliation by the US to a Russian attack would kill large numbers of Russians, many of whom have no responsibility for the initial attack.
1) Stop trying to put NATO forces on territory bordering Russia, then a Russian attack is highly unlikely.
>The alternative is that you have a right to defend yourself. If the only way of defending yourself violates the rights of other people, you are still entitled to do it; your violation of their rights is the fault of the attacker you are defending against. That seems the obvious position, short of pacifism, for a libertarian to take.
If you can only defend yourself by killing innocent people, then you are still not entitled to kill more of them than you are defending.
>Arguably, defending against aggressive neighbors requires taxes.
Taxes seem more often used to start wars than to stop them. Voluntary contributions seem a safer option.
>There are good arguments against a military draft under most circumstances but imagine a war so dangerous that no wage would be high enough to recruit enough volunteers to keep the enemy from conquering you. You wouldn't want to violate the rights of people by drafting them, but if it is the only way of defending your rights …
How likely is it to be “the only way of defending your rights”? Voluntary militias seem more libertarian and safer.
>If I own something it's mine. If I am not willing to sell, there is no way anyone else can find out how much it is worth to me in order to compensate me for their taking it, since there is no way of measuring values externally.
>… there is also no way of estimating the damages owed for violating someone’s rights.
There is the same CHCL way. Imperfect, but the most libertarian than we can do (at least, for now).
>A neighbor who lives a mile away informs you that you need his permission to turn on your lights. The fact that he can see your lighted window from his house demonstrates that photons you produced are trespassing on his property.
The CHCL precludes needing his permission.
>If I take off in a small plane ... I am inflicting a risk of damage to person or property on everybody within 200 miles of the airport I take off from ... Do I need permission from all of them before I take off?
No, because the CHCL implies that it would initiate a vastly greater imposition to ban all flying than it would to impose a tiny risk on people that one’s plane lands on them.
> there is the additional problem that a lot of it, probably most of it, is by now stolen property.
It is maximally libertarian to assume ownership is legitimate unless and until proven otherwise in a libertarian court and returned or appropriately dispersed. But after sufficient generations of people any claims by other people may become vanishingly small.
>National defense, defense against nations, is also a public good.
National defence as operated by most states does not appear to be a public good. It makes a country far more likely to start a war and the state presents an Achilles’ heel that independent private militias don’t. Hence the failure of superstates to conquer peasant societies fighting guerilla wars.
>There are a number of ways that libertarians, and others, can avoid thinking about hard problems. One is to claim that the facts that create the problem don't exist. An example, for national defense, is the claim that nobody wants to attack us or that we can defend ourselves adequately without taxing or drafting anyone. That might be true for the U.S. at the moment but it is not true for all countries all of the time, as the Russians are currently demonstrating in Ukraine.
That NATO proxy war is a disaster for the Ukrainians. They should stop fighting and agree to keep NATO out.
>A stronger version is the claim that such situations not only do not exist for us at the moment but cannot exist, that somewhere in Human Action or Capitalism the Unknown Ideal there is a proof that the free market always solves all problems.
Charity and voluntary cooperation are also parts of liberty. And it is sufficient that liberty is likely to be less bad than what a state would do.
>Lots of economists sympathetic to the market have looked for such a proof and not found it.
Proofs are for mathematics and logic, not (social) science (but those “proofs” still rest on assumptions). And there is no “proof” that the state is needed either.
>Suppose it turns out that … one or more of the situations where there is a conflict between respecting rights and surviving is real, what are you to do?
In a sufficiently disastrous situation, you override normal libertarian rights.
>Even if you think that is not the case, how can you claim that someone who disagrees, who is in favor of, for example, taxation for national defense, is morally wrong when you would agree with him if you shared his factual beliefs?
He is usually irresponsibly badly informed and reckless about resorting to authoritarianism.
>None of these are knock-down arguments against libertarian conclusions, … They are arguments against the claim that libertarian conclusions can be adequately defended by the sorts of simple arguments with which libertarians often defend them.
Yes, and they work against those simplistic arguments. Luckily, there are better philosophical arguments available.
>Quite a lot of libertarians base their libertarianism on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. One problem with the objectivist derivation of ethics as I understand it is the person who says “Yes, I agree, most of the time I should respect rights, but once in a while I get a really good chance to steal and it serves my life qua life to steal under those circumstances.”
Yes, neither psychological nor moral egoism appear to withstand critical scrutiny.
Where criminal penalties are concerned, my quick sketch of an answer might look something like this:
* In general, the better course of action is to confer benefits on those who have benefitted you (to enable them to do so again, and to motivate them) but to confer harms or threats on those who harm harmed or threatened you (to avoid the Danegeld problem).
* This sort of exchange can be viewed as a market, and one that may have a market clearing price of a kind. If your penalty for stealing a sheep is to be fined a sheep, you have an incentive to steal sheep. As the penalty becomes steeper, fewer sheep are stolen. If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
* Our sense of what is a fair penalty is shaped by experience with penalizing over the years or centuries.
"If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly"
More costly to whom? Executing someone is less costly than imprisoning him if you don't count costs to the criminal. Penal slavery is less costly still, where it can be done at a profit, on the same assumption.
> If we assume that inflicted harsher penalties, or penalties with greater certainty, make penalizing more costly, there will eventually be a point where punishing the thief is more trouble than it's worth.
I don't think we should assume that. E.g. enslaving someone is a harsh punishment that might have a negative cost, while keeping someone locked up in a five-star prison is a less harsh punishment that is very costly.
That's not necessarily an unsound point. On the other hand, part of the cost of enslaving someone is the need to defeat them in a fight, when they know that being enslaved is a possible outcome of losing. Enslaving people under conditions other than war may be risky.
Even when you have a state, slavery seems to be limited to a few cases: enslavement of prisoners of war or captives after a war, enslavement of debtors, and enslavement of family members sold to raise money (usually children). It doesn't seem to be a common penalty for a crime.
In England in the 18th c. transportation was a common penalty. It resulted in temporary slavery.
Strictly speaking it was usually imposed not as a penalty but as something the criminal agreed to in order not to be executed.
1. Did the criminal actually become the property of another person, or of the state? Or is "slavery" being used here in a broader sense?
2. Here we seem to be talking about penalties imposed by states, and sometimes by rather powerful ones (see Wasserschweinchen's remarks about North Korea and the Soviet Union below). I was proposing an approach to determining penalties in a society of autonomous individuals. Such penalties may have limitations that a totalitarian dictatorship is not subject to.
The criminal was transported to the British New World colonies. He was an indentured servant, a temporary slave, I believe for seven or fourteen years, depending on details of the legal process. I am pretty sure the usual system was to sell him to a private employer he would then work for.
Indenture was also used as a way in which a voluntary immigrant could pay the cost of coming to the New World. I think the usual system was that the ship captain charged a fixed price for transporting the immigrant, then auctioned him off to whatever purchaser would pay that price in exchange for the shortest term of indenture.
Another example of penal enslavement is galley slavery, which was common in Mediterranean powers starting about the end of the 15th century.
My impression is that slavery for crimes is widespread in North Korea and was widespread in the Soviet Union. Inmate labour (and community service) in other countries fall somewhere on the spectrum between free labour and slavery.
Those are conditions unlike a "market," though. Rather than penalties being a result of many people with roughly commensurate power coming to terms with each other in exchanges of threat for threat, they're imposed by a single entity with overwhelming power. Relative to such an entity, individuals are already effectively slaves whether or not they've been formally decreed to be slaves as part of a punishment.
I am a libertarian because I'm an utilitarian, and I think libertarianism gives the best outcomes today. There's no universal law saying that must be true though, that's just how it is. If we lived in a world where there was a supernatural higher being that regularly interfered, perhaps living in a theocratic authoritarian state where we ensured no one violated that higher being's rules would result in better outcomes, to get that higher being's favour. If we lived in a world with superintelligent AI, perhaps centrally planning the economy around that AI's advice would result in better outcomes. There are probably other examples of other circumstances where alternative ideologies result in better outcomes than libtertarianism according to utilitarianism.
But in general, I think libertarianism long term result in the best outcomes for humanity. All the problems we pose, I think can be solved by saying libertarianism is just a tool of utilitarianism, not its own terminal value. And we stop using that tool when it's not useful. We can find another method to best fund and run a military that results in the best outcomes, we can find another method for law enforcement, for property rights, and so on, there is no reason we should need to bind our entire society to libertarianism.
I had a revelation with your very insightful words:
"If we lived in a world with super-intelligent AI, perhaps centralized planning of the economy around the guidance of that AI would lead to better outcomes"
It is a response to reservations about the superiority of the market over the centralized economy.
Indeed, AI can solve coordination problems on the production side (supply). We can also imagine that AI will be able to know the desires of individuals (demand). After all, this is what algorithms are used for on the internet. But there will remain the problem of the aggregation of preferences (Arrow's theorem).
I think I agree with this. It seems to me that libertarianism is an ideology, and it’s dangerous to get obsessed with ideology to the exclusion of all else. The way I’d put it, liberty is a Good Thing; but, if the single-minded pursuit of liberty leads to bad outcomes, we may need to remember that there are other Good Things in life. This is particularly true in the real world that we actually live in, as opposed to a future utopia that we can dream about.
Roughly my view as well, but I wouldn't go as far as doopilidoo because utility is not the only thing I value.
Meh ... I'm a libertarian because I am a Kantian about rights, and like the Kantian ideal of trying to articulate universal moral principles to explain particular moral judgments. No doubt that seems too "absolutist" to some, and indeed "ideological" if you like, but I find mix-and-match approaches to resolving specific moral questions suspicious and unsatisfying. It is too easy to hide prejudices in what is not articulated.
Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb that we have individually decided to adopt to simplify our decision-making. I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live; but there’s no guarantee that this can be achieved by strictly following any particular rule of thumb. Furthermore, the welfare of society is a vague concept that cannot be precisely defined or measured, so we’re trying to optimize something without really knowing what it is, and without really knowing what ‘optimize’ means in this context.
Yes, it is satisfying to formulate and follow a rule of thumb that seems good to you, and in our personal behaviour it may be quite feasible to do so. Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
"I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society in which we live;"
What does that mean? Principles are not people, don't have objectives. Do you mean that as analogous to "the objective of evolution is reproductive success"? If so, what is the invisible hand mechanism that results in principles that are as if designed for that purpose?
People choose which principles they wish to follow, and I suppose they choose with some objective in mind. I chose my principles with the admittedly vague aim of optimizing the welfare of society, because it seems to me that it’s an objective that other people might share and agree on. If I chose with the aim of optimizing only my own welfare, I’d choose different principles (but I’d hope that other people didn’t share them). If I chose with the aim of maximizing the sales of a certain brand of toothpaste, I’d choose different principles again. And so on.
A central problem of all societies is the conflict between individual self-interest and the general interest and you seem to be assuming it away. Why would you have any more reason to act for the general interest in choosing principles than in choosing actions?
>Moral and political principles are not laws of the universe that we have discovered. They are rules of thumb
I guess that's where you and I disagree. I do think that there are moral principles that apply universally and are not the expressions of some legal system, that are not just "rules of thumb", and so that puts me in the so-called "natural law" tradition. Thus, some acts of gratuitous torture are wrong, even if all societies approved of them. True, I don't claim to /know/ the principles I am inclined to assert in these comments, but I conceive my task to be one of trying to figure out what they are.
>I suppose the ultimate objective of moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of the society
Fine, but this seems like one of those universally applicable principles, depending on what you mean by the expression "ultimate objective". In one reading, this makes it sound that there are objective purposes in nature, which is the type of thing I am talking about. Of course, if it does not mean that, if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective", then I am simply going to disagree that we /do/ have such an objective—I certainly don't, for example. People (quasi-utilitarians) seem to think that they can escape commitment to some transcendent moral principles by talking about "the welfare of society as whole", but the commitment to that specific goal is itself an example of a transcendent commitment. (Not to mention that, as you say, the notion of optimizing such a thing is far from clear.)
>Unfortunately, in real-world politics it’s generally necessary to compromise in order to get anything done at all.
I agree with this, but it is consistent with what I say. I think there is right and wrong independently of specific societies, but there is—obviously—much dispute about what these are. Still, we all agree that we need to make some decision or other, and so we need to come to some practical way of doing so, and that is where compromise comes in. We have good practical reasons to compromise, even if we are not convinced that what we are doing really is the best thing (after all, if we thought we /were/ doing the best, then that would hardly be a /compromise/, would it?).
" if it really is code for "/our/ ultimate objective""
There is a third alternative, an invisible hand theory in which some mechanism analogous to evolution produces a pattern of principles that is as if designed for a purpose. I sketch one such in an old piece:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Less_Law/Less_Law.html
Do you distinguish between the natural law approach to morality and moral realism? I think the former tries to deduce principles from facts of reality, which runs into Hume's is/ought problem. The latter doesn't, treats them as observations not deductions from objective fact.
The core of my thinking on this matter is encapsulated in two claims, that (a) in many situations, it is morally wrong to (eg) kill people [insert other libertarian prohibitions to taste], and (b) this is true NOT just because some (perhaps different, perhaps the same) people made it so. When I use the term "natural rights" in these comments, that's all I mean. I'm more certain of this than I am of any philosophical theory.
So anything more than this is non-core. Thus—to wax ontological and epistemological—exactly /what/ makes it wrong to kill people, and how can we know when it is and it isn't? FWIW, I have no considered view about the ontology of moral facts (apart from insisting that there /are/ some), but I do think we can come to reasonable (≠ true, necessarily) moral beliefs about the moral facts only through (Rawlsian) reflective equilibrium, as I try in my comments.
Now I think most people believe it is wrong to kill people, and not just because people made it so. That is, /real/ Hobbesians are rare. And so, if /they/ want reasonable moral beliefs, then they too must engage in the process of reflective equilibrium, which is to say frustrating and tedious casuistry about the content of natural rights.
OK, I need to clarify. The ultimate objective of my own moral and political principles is to optimize the welfare of society, and I guess that this vague objective is shared by many other people; but of course there are also plenty of people who would reject it (not just you!). For example, some people’s only objective is to optimize their own personal welfare, which is rational enough.
I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence, morality, and political principles of human beings. We are just a funny little lifeform on the surface of one little planet in a vast, uncaring universe, and whatever we do to each other matters only to us. The laws of nature govern how we function and prevent us from flying to the moon by flapping our arms, but how we choose to behave (within our physical limits) is entirely up to us.
>I don’t believe in natural law in this context. I’m not religious, and I believe the universe is completely indifferent to the existence ... whatever we do to each other matters only to us.
And what if it doesn't matter to some of us? There are people in world who literally treat others as /things/, to be used in ways (enslavement, rape, torture, murder) no different to physical objects. They don't care. I think that what they do is wrong, and would still be wrong if everyone (including myself) thought otherwise. Do you?
This essay would have annoyed me greatly in 1982. And probably for a few years after that. That's true even though I did not come to my libertarian views through Rand. (I did stop off the path for a year or two before being convinced of the flaws in her thinking.) It's surely not uncommon for young, idealistic, intelligent people to want a system that provides clear answers to all questions. Especially if they have given up religion, the usual source of certainty.
In my early libertarian years, I was attracted both the Rothbardian approach and to your approach. Over time, I moved to your approach. I also recognized that the need for certainty is a huge intellectual sin.
I think this is a general problem, not specific to libertarianism: this idea of solving problems in a universal way, by logical deduction, starting with an axiom.
If you start with "A=A", it is most obvious. It is completely empty. And any logical deduction cannot, by definition, give it additional content. So any logical conclusion remains empty.
What libertarianism confuses is a concept (definition) with a solution to a problem. For example, what is "property"? Is it a general, universal solution to every conflict? No, it is a dirty, partial, temporary way out of a concrete conflict. Property is a relationship between people, a "right" or a bundle of rights, the permission of others to do something with something, a promise that they will not interfere with such an action. But why should they allow me to do something with something? This is the essential point. Property as a concept only creates the possibility to talk about conflicts and a form of resolution, but does not provide any concrete content.
Take a concrete right. To fish in a pond, for example. They allowed me to do that. So it becomes my right or my property. But it is not universal, it depends on others. If there were no others, I would not need a right to fish in that pond, I would just do it if I wanted to.
The libertarian now invents the story that this right comes into the world because I am the first to find the pond and start fishing there. This creates a universal property right that everyone has to respect. Why should they? Maybe the pond is quite big with lots of fish, why should I be the only one fishing there? Why should all the fish be "mine"? This is where Locke's proviso kicks in. I should leave enough fish for the others. How much? Here begins the real content and conflict. How much do they allow me to take from the world and exclude them from this part of the world? In short, there is no universal solution to this.
So to speak, there are no rights in the world from the beginning, but potentials (possibilities of the physical body guided by the personal mind). These potentials -maybe- lead to concrete rights, concrete boundaries, property and so on. Libertarianism and similar schools of thought turn this on its head by proclaiming a fundamental right from the very beginning.
> The Human Shield Problem
I think I will assign a value between 0-1 to the culpability of the human shield in that crime when they end up becoming human shield. Clearly in libertarian perspective this value might be subjective but this is how I see it.
Random Joe goes to 7/11 to buy a pack smokes and then is held as hostage by a deranged person who then commits crime. I would assign a value of 0 to Joe's culpability here.
In a village religious zealots catch a lady and her child who belong to a disliked group, the child is killed and the mother is made to watch. The mother is than raped and killed too. The people who did this, continue to live in the village as respected members of the society. I might assign a value of 1 to the culpability of the village in this regard. It might be fine to harm the village to some extent to get to the bad guys.
In the case of Gaza there is undoubtedly a major subset of the population that supports Hamas. But there is also going to be a subset that opposes them or is too young to be morally culpable. This group has no way to leave the strip (to my knowledge, no other country would accept them).
So in this case, do we just spear Hamas to protect that last group?
I am a little surprised you are so... uncertain I suppose... on the matter of killing people who steal. While I would recommend not using high explosives to deter people stealing sticks, seeing as how they might not have known they were stealing for starters, the fundamental root of enforcement is a violent death. As Walter Williams put it "If I get a speeding ticket and refuse to pay it, there will be a warrant out for my arrest to make me appear in court. If I refuse to appear in court or be arrested I will be taken to jail. If I refuse to be arrested and taken to jail, I will be shot.... You should never make anything illegal you are not willing to kill people over."
In the story, the firewood was assumed to be in a wood pile on the owner's property, not sticks out in the forest, so the theft was deliberate.
In the speeding ticket case death isn't for speeding, it is for speeding plus refusing to go along with the normal legal process for punishing speeders. Do you really have no problem with the police simplifying the transaction by shooting anyone they catch speeding?
Regarding the firewood, before blowing someone up I would say put a little sign saying "These are my sticks; don't steal them." Just to be on the safe side, you understand; I grew up where property lines were non-obvious and pile of sticks might just be a brush pile. Generally it is worth while to ensure that the crime is being intentionally committed (or at least willfully negligently) before punishing I think. Whether or not one goes right to high explosives is a question of distributive justice rather than commutative justice I would say. I think it would be proper to spend some effort to find out who is doing it, perhaps why, but if someone got hurt knowingly stealing from someone else I wouldn't have a ton of sympathy for them. The main problem with the explosive is that you might hurt a bystander when it went off, I would say. I personally wouldn't kill someone for stealing sticks unless I really needed them for some reason, like I couldn't cook food without them or keep warm at night, but I wouldn't presume to make that decision for someone else, either.
I don't know that I exactly agree that the death penalty isn't for speeding but for refusing to go along with the process, or rather that it is a distinction that is relevant. The process is downstream of the initial punishment, but that doesn't mean that it isn't what backstops the whole deal. While there a distinction between getting a ticket for speeding and getting summary execution, the power to enforce speed limits comes from the power to impose fines, which is imposed by the rest of the process. The state is saying "If you do what we don't like, we are going to take some of your stuff, by force if necessary."
I certainly do have a problem with the police shooting anyone they catch speeding; in fact I have a problem with them giving people tickets for speeding. I don't think punishing people for potential harm caused to others is just. I think we have gone rather overboard with protecting from potential harm. (I know there are arguments to be made that the state owns the roads, and so they can set the limit at whatever they want and demand that those who use the roads abide by those rules. I don't think we should allow our state to do that, for much the same reason that other victimless crimes are a bad idea, even though in this case there is a stronger argument for it not being a violation of individual rights.)
I suppose my general argument is there are certainly plenty of crimes that are justifiable to stop by killing the perpetrator, a slightly smaller set of crimes that justify killing the perpetrator afterwards (more lenient considering that proving they are the perpetrator is trickier), and a set of things I really don't like people doing but that are not violations of another person's rights (no harm) and so I am not willing to kill someone to prevent them and wouldn't recommend making criminal law about.
Part of the problem is my use of "sticks." I was imagining something like a log that had been split into several pieces. "Faggots" might have been a better term. It has to be large enough so that you could drill a hole in it and fit a stick of dynamite in without it being obvious.
Ah, yea if it is was split wood, obviously worked a bit and stacked, that makes a lot more sense. I still wouldn't jump right to "boom, dead", in part because of the possible collateral damage and in part because I might not mind so much if I found out more (I can imagine reasons I would prefer to share the split wood, or at least come up with a trade even if the person were a thief initially.) Still, I can also think of times when I would not look down on someone for putting a bullet into the perpetrator, either, even in cases where I might not. Say if selling split lumber was how that person made their living.
I was asking not what you would do but what you were entitled to do if you so chose. Putting aside the collateral damage, do you think the victim is entitled to use lethal force if that is the most convenient way of protecting his property? If that is the only way?
Sorry, I meant to make it clear that I thought the answer was "yes" that he was entitled to use lethal force to protect his property. Whether or not it was morally proper in the sense of being worthy of praise, that is a different question. I wouldn't say so unless it was necessary, rather blameworthy in fact. Not punishable, however.
I am making the distinction between what one is entitled to do and what one ought to do, commutative vs distributive justice in the Smithian sense.
Another major problem is what to do about children, what rights do they have?
Yes, libertarians have historically focused on "persons" (= those with a sufficiently full capacity to be self-determining, "sufficient" being given by the "age of majority" as Peter has it), and some—like me—make the distinctive claim that persons are self-owners. Since, I assume, children are not persons, libertarians have historically left it as an open question what their rights are.
It seems to me that libertarians have a free choice on the issue. For while children are not /actually/ persons, they are /potential/ persons (in the sense that, in the normal course of events, they turn into persons). If you think that only actual persons have rights, then you get Peter's position, that children are simply property—presumably, in the first instance, of the mother, who created them ex nihilo. But that has unpleasant implications—Peter mentions "tell[ing] them to go to bed or eat their broccoli", but, of course, if they really are property, then a parent may do these things with the intention of fattening them up for market. So, if you do think that such implications are to be avoided, then you might be attracted to an alternative position, that /potential/ persons have all the rights of persons /that they can have/. Infants can want not to be tortured, so they have a right not to be tortured. Infants cannot enter into agreements, so they have no right to enter into agreements (and that is why they are not self-owners). Still, I'm not sure that libertarianism, as such, commits one to either choice.
Do the parents have a duty to provide for their children for starters?
Yes, parents have a duty to provide for their children. Suppose, because of something you did, you reduced a pre-existing adult to the level of an infant, who could be nurtured back to adulthood by providing intensive support. Since you are responsible for their vulnerable situation, you have a duty to provide that support to them, and they the corresponding right to receive it from you. But, as I say, a child has all the rights of an adult that it can have. Since this infant-like "adult" has a right to support, clearly the actual infant themselves also has a right to support. And since, in this case, /the parents/ are responsible the infant's vulnerable situation, /they/ have a duty to provide that support.
How is this duty to be enforced?
What if the parents disagree on some aspect of raising the child?
What if the mother doesn't even know precisely who the father is?
Not sure the first two questions raise any special difficulties. More interesting, however, is the third:
>What if the mother doesn't even know precisely who the father is?
I noted in passing above that IF infants are property, then /the mother/ would be the owner of the infant, since she created the infant. And so I say right now that, even though infants are NOT property, /the mother/ is in the first instance the one responsible for providing the care, for the same reason, that she is the one who created the little bundle of obligation. Of course, often, she agrees to do so with the male who impregnates her, and /this/ is the basis of /his/ obligation to care for the child. But sometimes she does not, as in the case you mention, in which case she is the /sole/ person responsible for providing care to the child.
And if she is unable or unwilling to provide care? I said in a previous comment that, libertarian though I am, I accept a duty of easy rescue, that there is an enforceable duty to help others when it costs us little and benefits them greatly. So, if the mother is absent, it seems to me we all together are obliged to see to it that the child gets the care it has a right to, since, if we all share the cost, then the cost to each of us will be little, for an obviously great benefit to the child.
That isn't a problem, none. What rights to rocks have? Libertarianism, like most systems, rights are only coffered upon reaching the age of majority. Children are simply property like rocks hence parent's ability to tell them to go to bed or eat their broccoli on pangs of damage or disposal.
I do not believe that position is shared by most libertarians, and it raises the problem of defining the age of majority and justifying that definition.
How is your claim less arbitrary than restricting rights to men, or to women, or to the kiing?
Even if you set the age of majority at day 18,
What is there to stop a parent from putting their children in a well the day before they turn 18. Then the day they turn 18 anfld can engage in contracts, they offer to pull their child out of the pit in exchange for lifelong slavery.
Volokh Conspiracy had a case where a union shined messages on to a restaurant's wall. Without reading it again (WaPo is behind a paywall, last I checked), my memory sez the union and restaurant were at loggerheads over some kind of labor dispute.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/08/17/is-projecting-a-message-onto-the-wall-of-a-building-a-trespass-a-nuisance/
When it comes to some of these questions -- such as what you may do to protect yourself from a threat -- I distinguish between what the law says you're allowed to do in a libertarian system, and what you are morally justified in doing. Many libertarians (like even more people with different views) seem to think the two should be the same. Maybe that makes sense to a Kantian. I don't see why it should follow for a utilitarian -- a popular moral view that I dislike greatly. Nor for a virtue ethicist (closer to my thing).
Edit: I see that you mention a point very similar to this at the very end with regard to Rand.
In your view are you morally justified in doing more than is legal or less? I can imagine arguments each way.
The obvious cases are ones in which you have information that the court does not have and you cannot believably give it.
Some others I like:
- Can a court issue a subpoena to a third party? Or is that slavery?
- Can a court issue a temporary injunction to (e.g.) prevent you disposing of the property in dispute? Or is that definitely wronging someone - albeit we don't know who until the trial is over!
- How do you feel about juries?
Obviously these are mostly aimed at minarchists, an an-cap can reply that my insurance company's private courts can do anything I've signed up to.
"An answer offered by some libertarians is that you are entitled to get your property back plus as much again, the hundred dollars he stole from you plus another hundred. That is a simple rule but I have not yet seen a good argument for it."
The most convincing justification of the above I've seen is Stephan Kinsella's estoppel approach to justification of rights https://www.stephankinsella.com/2021/05/estoppel-a-new-justification-for-individual-rights-1992/
As I understand it, if you demonstrate with your actions that you don't respect my right to a television set by stealing it, you can be estopped from complaining if I also take your television set from you (or whatever property you have of equivalent value) after retrieving what you stolen from me.
I'm not a philosopher (no matter what my friends think) nor am I a political scientist, but for me it's less that I'm a "libertarian" so much as I think in many (not all) cases more government involvement/more corporate power/less individual freedom is on average "bad" in some important sense specific to that case. Privacy is an area I'm especially interested in, but there's others for sure.
I understand the appeal of wanting a coherent philosophical framework to work off, it can be a great way to limit hypocrisy or contradiction (which are both good in themselves and also strategically useful), but I think at the end of the day we're all working off intuitions. We should interrogate those intuitions, and where they lead to unacceptable contradictions or abhorrent results we should limit them, but rigid adherence to a pre-established framework seems like it's always going to run into these kinds of problems?
Again, I'm not saying these frameworks are bad. They are not, they can be extremely useful in a range of ways. But saying 'libertarianism leads to these silly conclusions in these cases' to me suggests 'well, maybe we shouldn't be rigidly libertarian in those situations'
I have since turned away from any restitution in criminal or indeed civil cases: the harmed party stays harmed, the harmer is punished and any ill-gotten gains confiscated (but not returned to the harmed party). Otherwise no one will ever buy locks again, or will buy a suboptimal quantity.
You are assuming that, in a system where victims are fully compensated by offenders, locks are desirable. That is not clear.
I discuss a version of this issue in Chapter 18 of _Law's Order_ under the subhead "Why Burglary Should be a Tort and Denting Fenders a Crime."
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Laws_Order_draft/laws_order_ch_18.htm
I dare say that few over 30s still cling to apriorism, of they are libertarians at all.
On defense, though I don't think it would be enough to turn a profit, a private defence form could credibly promise to retaliate against an attackers troops in an unrelated place if and only of they hurt one of their client. More Guerilla than army, but if you are doing Guerilla anyways...
There's a long standing problem I wrestle with, involving libertarianism and secrecy.
Suppose that in order to provide a service you are willing to pay for, I have to hide some information from you. (I think the reason for hiding it won't matter, but I haven't been able prove it in the general case. One specific case I think about involves defense from outsiders.) That information will need to be protected; that protection may necessitate protecting the means by which it was acquired. That means may require an ongoing cost, and that cost may be high.
Consequently, I am now in the position where I have to charge you a fee for that service, I can't tell you exactly what it's spent on (either means or what is discovered using it), and a similar argument suggests I can't give you a full report on the quality of my service, as that would imply some of the information I have to hide.
Normally, uncertainty in your supply lines could be mitigated with competition - you don't have to know all the details of your supplies; what you give up and what you get in exchange are enough. But this is not a normal situation; anyone else offering a similar service would have to promise hiding of its own, forcing you to choose between two suppliers whose parameters you cannot know. And if the information involves defense, the cost of choosing the wrong one could be final. The incentives of the respective players appears to enforce this problem.
If I recall correctly, the last time I read your chapter in The Machinery of Freedom on defense, or similar chapters, it did not discuss the secrecy problem. (I think it was the second edition; I'm sure I'm at least one edition behind.)
The current edition is the third. It has a new chapter on national defense but does not discuss your secrecy problem, which I do not think I understand.
Hmm. I thought I laid out enough above. Was there part of it you didn't follow? Or did I leave something out, maybe?
When it comes to defense, part of the job involves keeping an eye on the people who might want to harm your group. Some of their plans will involve surprise, and it's impossible to defend against every potential plan they might carry out, but often possible to defend if you know what their plan is. That means espionage, and it also means not sharing a lot of how you do that - where you've hidden the surveillance, which way your antennas are pointed, or even what you currently know of their plans - if they knew what you know, they could figure out how you could have known that, and plug leaks.
Generally, this means that a group of citizens pooling resources to hire a professional defender (via subscriptions, say, in an ancap society) has the usual interest in defenders sharing their methods in order to compare different competitors in a free market, but also an interest in *not* sharing those methods, because it would necessarily impair the quality of the product.
I've tried on occasion to figure out how a libertarian society might handle this, with not much success.
One approach is to limit the things that need to be kept secret and share everything else, but that doesn't completely eliminate the problem, and in some ways it makes it worse; the less secret stuff there is, the fewer the places a bad guy has to focus on to find it. Another approach I considered was for competitors to share their secrets and compete on everything else, but it kept leading to cartel problems.
Meanwhile, one approach to comparing service providers for which you have limited information is by hiring a service to test them - empirical information about which product performs better under known conditions is often useful enough. But in the case of defense, this looks like hiring an entire army to go up against one of your providers, which seems far too expensive to be practical.
You can also judge by results, although that is hard if the danger they protect against is a very uncommon one, works better for defense against criminals than for defense against states. I gather the latter is what you are thinking of?
(sorry for the late response; was ill)
Correct. Ideally, you invade a sandbox version of your own society, and see whether the security provider can handle it. In practice, this is utterly infeasible. In practice, a common approach is to merely observer whether we feel safe from external harm.
But there's another hitch here as well. Suppose everyone proceeds to subscribe to some collective defender for some set amount of time, and during that time, your society is indeed not invaded. Was it because the defender was competent, or because no one was ready or motivated to invade? The party most qualified to answer that question is often the defender - who has every incentive to answer with the former. They'll say they put down X threats, and deterred Y more - that the average citizen wouldn't even know about had the defender not mentioned them.
Observing that there exist rival societies with comparable apparent militaries is not enough to infer readiness, as readiness also requires an intent (or better, a detailed plan) to actually send an invasion force. Russia and China each possess militaries that could plausibly do grave damage to the US if the US Navy did not exist. But neither Russia nor China can simply invade at any time; they would have to move a lot of equipment to a staging area to prepare, and that would take weeks or months and is virtually impossible to hide. OTOH, it may be very possible to plan something that isn't an invasion but still harmful, and a competent defender might be able to detect such plans and thwart them before they become apparent to everyone. The outward appearance of a defender squashing one secret offensive after another is... nothing happening. Again, did nothing happen because no one plotted harm, or because lots of people did and their hired defender has worked continually but quietly to defeat such plans?
An independent private investigation might be able to verify whether anyone was ready, but won't necessarily have the same investigation methods the defender does. If an investigator reports no one planned to invade and the defender says someone did, there's no way to tell (due to aforementioned secrecy) which of them is the most accurate. Indeed, the defender has an incentive to say they thwarted multiple plans to harm our society, but may have an incentive not to say anything more about those plans, since revealing that may reveal how they knew, which often costs them an avenue for learning about future plans.
The ways of defending an A-C society that I have discussed are basically kludges, as are most private solutions to public good problems, relying on hard to analyze factors such as patriotism and trust. I don't think you can get the sort of market mechanism that we use to produce most goods and services in that context, unfortunately, which is why I regard defense against nations as a hard problem.
Even aside from your problem, how do you solve the free rider problem?
Your characterization of it as a hard problem is indeed one of the things I most remember about your framing. A good sign, I think; I agree it's hard, though maybe for slightly different or additional reasons, but either way the caution seems wise.
Unfortunately, I have no great solution to the free rider issue either. I do notice that the patriotism factor - or maybe something adjacent - appears to address it, at least in the US; despite the risk, thousands of Americans nevertheless agree to enter the armed service. Even if it's hard to analyze numerically, it seems to be enough. (I'd bet it helps immensely that our military is easily #1. Everyone wants to be on the winning team. So maybe the correct response is "good - now make sure you stay #1".)
Patriotism has a different meaning in an A-C society, but it doesn't necessarily disappear. I suspect an A-C society will need some sort of underlying culture, an arbitrary set of beliefs about property, wealth, and voluntary exchange over which there could be wide diversity of object-level customs. Belief in those ideals might be enough to drive a motivation to defend them. I don't know.
I do notice that while free markets don't fully solve such problems, they still appear to solve them at least as well as any alternative. A government, for example, appears to replace the free rider problem with a large negative externality.
>Someone steals your television set. …. How much more are you entitled to do to him?
You are entitled to any immediate loss with a risk-multiplier that is proportional to the chance that the thief could have evaded libertarian rectification (but any proportion of it can be taken in the form of punishment at the victim’s choice). https://jclester.substack.com/p/libertarian-rectification?utm_source=publication-search
>Punishment aside, what are you entitled to do to protect your property?
You are entitled to protect it up to the point that you are likely doing more damage to a criminal’s libertarian property (but including any risk-multiplier) than he would be doing to you. https://jclester.substack.com/p/liberty-maximisation-a-libertarian?utm_source=publication-search
>The bad guy grabs a convenient bystander, pulls out a gun, points it at you, and starts shooting with the bystander held in front of him. If you shoot back you might kill the innocent shield. Are you entitled to do it?
Yes, the bad guy is responsible for the bystander’s death. If we cannot defend ourselves in this way then there would be more bad guys doing this and so less liberty.
>That problem is dramatically visible in the current war between Israel and Hamas. The Hamas troops are embedded in the civilian population of Gaza. There is no way the Israeli military can fight them that does not kill civilians.
It is not clear to me that this is a good analogy. It looks more like a gang of murderers who live on a particular housing estate. It is libertarian to go in to search for them and shoot them if they start shooting. It is not libertarian to keep bombing parts of the estate hoping to kill some of the murderers.
>The same problem arises with nuclear deterrence. Nuclear retaliation by the US to a Russian attack would kill large numbers of Russians, many of whom have no responsibility for the initial attack.
1) Stop trying to put NATO forces on territory bordering Russia, then a Russian attack is highly unlikely.
2) If Russia were to start an attack, then targeting the political operatives as precisely as possible is legitimate libertarian self-defence up to the point that one is likely to kill more people than one would save. https://jclester.substack.com/p/liberty-maximisation-a-libertarian?utm_source=publication-search
>The alternative is that you have a right to defend yourself. If the only way of defending yourself violates the rights of other people, you are still entitled to do it; your violation of their rights is the fault of the attacker you are defending against. That seems the obvious position, short of pacifism, for a libertarian to take.
If you can only defend yourself by killing innocent people, then you are still not entitled to kill more of them than you are defending.
>Arguably, defending against aggressive neighbors requires taxes.
Taxes seem more often used to start wars than to stop them. Voluntary contributions seem a safer option.
>There are good arguments against a military draft under most circumstances but imagine a war so dangerous that no wage would be high enough to recruit enough volunteers to keep the enemy from conquering you. You wouldn't want to violate the rights of people by drafting them, but if it is the only way of defending your rights …
How likely is it to be “the only way of defending your rights”? Voluntary militias seem more libertarian and safer.
>If I own something it's mine. If I am not willing to sell, there is no way anyone else can find out how much it is worth to me in order to compensate me for their taking it, since there is no way of measuring values externally.
A reasonable assessment of its value (not just the normal market value but including any sentimental value, etc., to some degree) is the most libertarian that can be managed. And it is libertarian because that rule is the most likely individual Choice in Hypothetical Clashes in Liberty (CHCL). https://jclester.substack.com/p/avoiding-interpersonal-utility-comparisons?utm_source=publication-search
>… there is also no way of estimating the damages owed for violating someone’s rights.
There is the same CHCL way. Imperfect, but the most libertarian than we can do (at least, for now).
>A neighbor who lives a mile away informs you that you need his permission to turn on your lights. The fact that he can see your lighted window from his house demonstrates that photons you produced are trespassing on his property.
The CHCL precludes needing his permission.
>If I take off in a small plane ... I am inflicting a risk of damage to person or property on everybody within 200 miles of the airport I take off from ... Do I need permission from all of them before I take off?
No, because the CHCL implies that it would initiate a vastly greater imposition to ban all flying than it would to impose a tiny risk on people that one’s plane lands on them.
>Initial Appropriation
The relevant rule would be chosen in a state of nature before property even existed: https://jclester.substack.com/p/liberty-in-a-state-of-nature-a-libertarian?utm_source=publication-search
Property then comes later: https://jclester.substack.com/p/liberty-in-propertarian-practice?utm_source=publication-search
> there is the additional problem that a lot of it, probably most of it, is by now stolen property.
It is maximally libertarian to assume ownership is legitimate unless and until proven otherwise in a libertarian court and returned or appropriately dispersed. But after sufficient generations of people any claims by other people may become vanishingly small.
>National defense, defense against nations, is also a public good.
National defence as operated by most states does not appear to be a public good. It makes a country far more likely to start a war and the state presents an Achilles’ heel that independent private militias don’t. Hence the failure of superstates to conquer peasant societies fighting guerilla wars.
>There are a number of ways that libertarians, and others, can avoid thinking about hard problems. One is to claim that the facts that create the problem don't exist. An example, for national defense, is the claim that nobody wants to attack us or that we can defend ourselves adequately without taxing or drafting anyone. That might be true for the U.S. at the moment but it is not true for all countries all of the time, as the Russians are currently demonstrating in Ukraine.
That NATO proxy war is a disaster for the Ukrainians. They should stop fighting and agree to keep NATO out.
>A stronger version is the claim that such situations not only do not exist for us at the moment but cannot exist, that somewhere in Human Action or Capitalism the Unknown Ideal there is a proof that the free market always solves all problems.
Charity and voluntary cooperation are also parts of liberty. And it is sufficient that liberty is likely to be less bad than what a state would do.
>Lots of economists sympathetic to the market have looked for such a proof and not found it.
Proofs are for mathematics and logic, not (social) science (but those “proofs” still rest on assumptions). And there is no “proof” that the state is needed either.
>Suppose it turns out that … one or more of the situations where there is a conflict between respecting rights and surviving is real, what are you to do?
In a sufficiently disastrous situation, you override normal libertarian rights.
>Even if you think that is not the case, how can you claim that someone who disagrees, who is in favor of, for example, taxation for national defense, is morally wrong when you would agree with him if you shared his factual beliefs?
He is usually irresponsibly badly informed and reckless about resorting to authoritarianism.
>None of these are knock-down arguments against libertarian conclusions, … They are arguments against the claim that libertarian conclusions can be adequately defended by the sorts of simple arguments with which libertarians often defend them.
Yes, and they work against those simplistic arguments. Luckily, there are better philosophical arguments available.
>P.S. The Prudent Predator
Thank you for, here at least, writing “prudent” rather than “rational”, with all the confusion that implies: https://jclester.substack.com/p/rationality-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
>Quite a lot of libertarians base their libertarianism on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. One problem with the objectivist derivation of ethics as I understand it is the person who says “Yes, I agree, most of the time I should respect rights, but once in a while I get a really good chance to steal and it serves my life qua life to steal under those circumstances.”
Yes, neither psychological nor moral egoism appear to withstand critical scrutiny.