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225 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 16 Mar \ parent \ on: Tough Questions for Libertarians 3/15 libertarian
Maybe there is no set of institutions consistent with peaceful dispute resolution and it really is just might makes right. I'm not ready to give up on the idea that society can be rooted in consent though.
This whole project is a search for a set of norms that provide an unambiguous resolution to any dispute over scarce resources, so that violence doesn't have to be employed. Anyone objecting to such a system would therefor be asserting a right to violently expropriate someone else.
Saying you don't consent to a system is sort of a category mistake. None of us consented to the reality we're born into. There needs to be some particular interaction that you didn't consent to and where your desired course of action wasn't victimizing someone else.
I don't even think I need to address your question 10, because the point of my post was that the property owner in your example is wrong about points 2 and 4. It is his problem to find somewhere for this person to go (or at least it might be, if I'm right in my conclusion).
The last point I'll make in response is that libertarianism is specifically a legal philosophy, not a full moral philosophy. There are plenty of moral philosophies that are fully consistent with libertarianism and that require a more humane intervention on behalf of these unfortunate people. Any realistic hypothetical society is going to have services to help desperate people like the ones stipulated here.
I don't even think I need to address your question 10, because the point of my post was that the property owner in your example is wrong about points 2 and 4. It is his problem to find somewhere for this person to go (or at least it might be, if I'm right in my conclusion).
Ah, I didn't fully grasp that the first time through. So the idea is that the property owner takes on an additional obligation -- to produce a place to 'relocate' the trespasser that he will find palatable to relocate to?
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a place to 'relocate' the trespasser that he will find palatable to relocate to?
Not quite. It needs be somewhere without an owner who objects to the relocation. It's not required that the person being relocated finds it palatable. I'm not sure it's an additional obligation. It's more just a recognition that if something unwanted (person or otherwise) is on your property, your options are to either tolerate it being there or find somewhere to remove it to. The difference between a person and a downed tree, say, is that you aren't allowed to just incinerate the person on site.
I think the relocation needs to be plausibly survivable, because self ownership is the first established principle, with these external property rights coming from subsequent arguments. Basically, you can't just relocate someone to the inside of a volcano or toss them out the airlock, if they're only guilty of trespassing.
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As you partially point out above, there will be and has never been any such thing as a society that has zero individuals or orgs willing to help those who are starving to death and have nowhere to go.
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