Juan:I have a right as owner of my property to discipline it as I please within reason obviously. Children. Are. Not. Your. Property. Maybe you need to be beaten up by a guy four times your size until you get it ?
I have a right as owner of my property to discipline it as I please within reason obviously.
Red Herring.
Irrelevant from the topic at hand but actually proves my point that child abuse is completly subjective. A swat on the butt is not equivilent to beating your child up. Thanks for revealing however the common liberal doctrine that any physical encounter with your child is evil whether affectionately or disciplinary.
Stop trying to derail the topic.
Statism is a religion.
For Juan.
This topic is about arbitrary use of law enforcement. Not about what is or is not child abuse. As the degree to what is child abuse is subjectively decided. You've made it apparent what your opinion is but we do not care. Go start another thread about it.
Irrelevant from the topic at hand but actually proves my point that child abuse is completly subjective.
A swat on the butt is not equivilent to beating your child up.
Thanks for revealing however the common liberal doctrine
February 17 - 1600 - Giordano Bruno is burnt alive by the catholic church. Aquinas : "much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death."
Juan: bullshit
yes your posts so far have been as much.
Juan: the thread is about 'child molestation' or child abuse,
Wrong the thread is about what your going to DO about child abuse. Not about whether it's morally wrong or not. Please read the thread before post.
Juan: So, the wrong premise that you seem to hold - that children are property,
I actually don't beleive that children are property but again it proves how you've completly missed the point of my posts and have attempted to derail the topic into whether or not children are property or not. Why not start a new thread to support your fixation on this topic?
Juan: is central to the thread whereas your theories on non-aggressive rights-enforcement are NOT.
TO restate, the thread is not about whether or not child abuse is right or wrong. Its about what are YOU going to do about it. Try again, you can start with reading the thread.
Epic Fail. Juan. lol
This post is for Juan. I have conveniently re-posted the opening statement from Spidey so that you can stay on track.
Spideynw:If I molest my baby/toddler, what are you going to do about it, if anything? If you are going to do something about it, why do you think you have any right to do anything about it?(I am starting this one over. I will copy over any of the other posts from the other thread that I believe were relevant.)
filc: Accept that if you attacked the criminal without my consent or the consent of the bar owner you would be instigating the aggresion, not him... So if you took action without consent you would be aggression.
Accept that if you attacked the criminal without my consent or the consent of the bar owner you would be instigating the aggresion, not him... So if you took action without consent you would be aggression.
Possibly, if there was a knowledge problem. I might accidentally be committing aggression, in which case, yes I would be doing something wrong. I would hope that your friend-in-disguise would forgive me, given that you and he tricked me.
The question is: how do you give your consent? You yourself said a verbal contract was sufficient. Do you have to say "I hereby give you my permission to defend me from this hoodlum"? Or just "help me"? Or give me a nod? Or a facial expression which demonstrates to me that you could use my assistance? The courts would have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether consent was there. I think in this scenario, regardless of whether it was all a joke or not, a court would find that (given that I was sitting with you, and you and I are friends) I was using defensive coercion on your behalf, rather than committing a random act of aggression.
filc:Also, in this scenario lets say the thief made it to his home. Even with my consent if you broke into his house and took my phone you would be just as much of a criminal as him.
If the hoodlum wants to take me to court for house-breaking, he can do so. The court will have to decide whether my actions were proportionate to the crime (so my actions constitute merely defensive violence on your behalf) or disproportionate (so my actions constitute aggression).
filc:I wish this were true but if our current culture is a representation of how perverted the idea of defense is then your statement is wrong. As republican's currently think its entirely OK to aggresse against others. My example is the war in the middle east.
What % of Americans support the war? How many of these would do so if they had to pay the full cost themselves (rather than using government to steal it from everyone)? Would the soldiers of a PDA-army be as willing to murder innocents as those of government-army? The head of an aggressive PDA-army would be guilty of mass murder, and would have to face justice. What happens to mass murdering Presidents and Generals? If the invaded region is anarchic too, PDA's would be highly incentivized to protect the innocent people living there. If those people are poor, people would give more to charities that provide them with protection and aid.
PDA's are far less likely than government to engage in war, so the war in the middle east does not at all suggest that most people prefer violence, or that aggressive PDA's would be a major problem in a free world.
Truth and Liberty
"No army can stop an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
filc:I actually don't beleive that children are property
Wrong the thread is about what your going to DO about child abuse.
Spideynw:regardless of what you or anyone else may think, people will kill and molest their children.
So what? We don't suggest that Man will suddenly become angels without government, nor that such a miracle is necessary for private defense, security and justice to thrive. History shows that it has at times and nothing suggests that it can't again. First you were plain wrong about children's rights, now this is bordering on delusional, and you need to stop with the arguments from ignorance. I was skeptical and wrong about defense under anarchy at one point too. There is no reason to be ashamed to admit it.
PDAs will not exist. Individuals do not need massive protection, only government do.
without a government, you will have no way of punishing them for it, unless you take action yourself. So again, what are you going to do about it?
Unless you are very wealthy, your chance of having anything close to like a "personal army" is slim. You will be cowering with your pea-shooter as the local Pervhunt Inc. tactical unit swarms your home. Raise your gun to them and they won't think twice about dropping you. No other PDA will take action since Pervhunt has a wonderful reputation, while you ignored several requests to give DNA that was eventually shown to match what the school nurse found on your young daughter's underwear.
Voluntary, collective action is not the pervasive, coercive collectivism we regularly and justifiably demonize. It reminds me of statist or pseudo-libertarian, minarchist fearmongering when you repeatedly focus on what I, as an individual, will do. The provision of justice, police security, and defense against external states are services and nothing more. When I go into an unfamiliar grocery store to get a box of cheap popsicles in America, I expect to find they are orange, cherry and grape. Maybe there will be lime, banana, root beer, or something, but I don't expect to find a wall of toilet water popsicles earning shelf space. People won't pay for toilet water unless they are forced to. People will pay for police that punish child molesters.
Who gets to "assign a punishment" in a stateless society? There would be no rulers to enforce such a thing.
Ever hear the phrase, "The consumer is king."? PDAs will not be your private mafia unless you fully fund them yourself. You might think it nice to be able to get away with your crimes, but this simply can't be profitable in most cases. As a consumer, you will be funding a small portion of the security firm. They can't maintain their reputation or simultaneously protect the other customers when they assist you in your crimes. You aren't going to have much in the way of options if you don't want to pay for a firm that will punish you as well. Taking on the world isn't as easy as dipping your ice cube tray in the toilet. Anyhow, what we are really talking about is you forcing someone else to take your crap.
For the most part, all someone has to do is want to live their life in peace and decide to be patrons of police who punish molesters. Some of us will choose to be the police and put our lives on the line to protect the school nurse from the deranged dad. To paraphrase Rothbard: our primary task as libertarians for the foreseeable future is to educate people. Only some will ever need to be activists or take action against states or individual criminals.
You can advocate stuff like taxes or punishing abortions and think you are a libertarian, or one can think children have no rights and no law should protect them, but none of this is true. The statist take on equality is utopian because it is a literal impossibility. Part of this mythology supports the widespread acceptance of democracy and governmental violence. Our stance is that the only equality we should pursue is equality under the law, and reason tells us that children are human beings deserving similar rights to adults. So, you can tell me to shut up when I explore what rights one ought to have all you want. Doing that would set back the whole movement because a stateless society which I would personally want to live in will rest upon intersubjective agreement. These are the laws or guidelines I would pay for to be upheld, and possibly fight for.
No, because the baby/toddler would be unable to bring a case to court.
Libertarian law, as I explained earlier, accounts for guardianship. You have already been proven wrong about rights, as seen by most people, coming from "the ability to protest or object". If such a view was widely accepted, people would be regularly robbed when they are away at work or asleep, and nobody would act against it. Guardianship is a subset of ownership and these are juridical statuses which private courts are likely to uphold. Libertarians don't object to the use of aggression in response to the initiation of aggression. A guardian owns a child insomuch as he can represent the child like he was representing himself against someone who stole or damaged his property.
You can't continue to ignore what I said about how things become 'owned'. I appreciate that someone posted Block's paper on abandonment, because it uses the same idea. Raping a child can be said to be purely evil, because it in no way aids the child in their development to a status of moral agency. You just can't own a child in that manner under libertarian law. Likewise, locking a child in a closet would be forestalling their development, specifically their ability to learn language. This is a parallel to Block's donut example. Once you have done certain things, the child would be seen as either unowned or by default under the guardianship of the other parent or "co-owner".
You need to grasp these simple concepts before we deal with partial moral agency and divergent anarchic legal systems. You can't just shrug off reason because what we propose is not today's reality. Some of us have a genuine desire to end institutionalized violence and all of these ideas must be explored accurately. Libertarian law prescribes punishment for guardians who rape, murder, or permanently injure their child. It says nothing about what language a child learns, parents who force a child to go to bed, or similar things. This much is clear and these would be our widely accepted common law. There may also be grey areas for instances such as feeding a child something along the later part of the continuum from a healthy diet, to a regimen of McDonalds, to a non-fatal diet including rat poison. This is the arbitrary realm within which arbitrators work.
@filc: Much of what you said at first was sensible and much of this inquiry requires imaginative speculation. I don't want to go into the greatest detail on certain things like homeowner associations in this thread yet I have a few issues with what you wrote:
"The loophole here is, while it's great that you signed up with PDA_A in which you agree to not have any domestic violence within your premise. This neighber could decide not to hire that PDA or hire a different PDA that turns a blind eye to such activity. Now this may not be the case in all situations."
This is a genuine problem for any justice system, anarchic or not. Among people there is a fair consensus that molestation is wrong, to the point of making disagreements on its criminality almost a non-issue. For more divisive topics like abortion or capital punishment, we're left with an even more pressing need to complete the task below and a few categories of possibly outcome
We must determine and agree upon, as libertarians, the universal indicia of our legal philosophy. In other words, we use logic to decide upon an aspect of the philosophy that child molestation is clearly wrong and use proportionality to help determine what the maximum punishment ought to be with regards to the details of the crime. Of course, these are mere guidelines, and whatever arbitration systems that actually come about will at times have differences based on economic factors and/or cultural mores.
Then understanding this eventuality, we can observe some scenarios play out:
Libertarianism is not an all-encompassing philosophy, intended to assign rightness or wrongness to every action or explain the "meaning of life". It is a legal or political philosophy, and by political I mean dealing with interactions among people and things. Noumenal abstractions like "god" or "natural rights" hold some value but are beyond the limits of the logical model of our legal system. Our singular law is the non-aggression axiom. Concepts like property rights and homesteading are just elaborations we can use to uphold the doctrine.
"My argument is punishment need not be violence at all."
How would "punishment" be non-violent ever? As I mentioned before, the justification for the primacy of punishment over restitution is well founded. Let's lay that debate to rest for now. Only so much can be accomplished through 'extra-juridical' measures. The importance of these measures and parties besides disputants in a claim or the arbiter does exist though. When I say it is lawful to abandon guardianship of a three year old or evict a fetus who will almost certainly soon perish, this does not mean I would ever do or advocate such actions.
"Public scrutiny" or whatever extra-juridical measures would be ineffective in cases such as the polygamist, Mormon, self-sufficient warlord who also likes to enjoy young girls in the privacy of his compound. Can we then say justice has been served when the crime goes unpunished? The gaze of libertarian law is not confined by place or time. No criminal is safe from justice ex post facto, or after the fact.
Libertarian law would be in line with the ancient common law practice with regards to evidence, contrary to the 4th amendment of the US constitution. If I trespass and find evidence sufficient to convict you of child abuse, I've committed no crime. If I execute whom I believe to be a murderer and he is later found to be innocent, I've left myself open to the risk of being myself convicted of murder. How things might play out because of this is a lot more interesting than whining about subjectivity, so I am done for now. The non-aggression principle is a priori. We can find certainty without empirical definitions of "child abuse".
Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write. ---Karl Kraus.
Juan: Fine, so what's your justification for child abuse in the form of 'corporal punishment' ?
Cual es tu problema chico? No puedes leer ingles? Porque me ataco especificalmente? I'm not sure if it's your english messing you up here or what but I never made an attempt to justify child abuse. As that has nothing to do with what we are talking about.
Juan: Since, according to you, 'child abuse' is 'subjective' your question doesn't make much sense.
It doesn't make much sense because you read a post entirely out of context and apparently are too lazy to get caught up on the entire topic at hand.
I have no justification for child abuse, we arn't talking about that. The topic isn't about whether it's wrong or right and in whos eyes, it's about what are you going to do about it. Porfavor, aprende como leer.
Juan:Anyway, what I'm going to do is whatever I 'subjectively' believe that is the 'subjectively' right thing to do.
And you should. You should demonstrate your discontent with such behavior, only you cannot stoop to his level by becoming a criminal yourself. What are you going to become batman and start breaking into supposed criminals homes at night and bring justice to those harmed? Please give me a break. You will get shot on your first night.
Why the personal attack dude?
Thanks for the non-hostile Post Truth and Liberty.
Truth and Liberty: The courts would have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether consent was there.
I agree.
Truth and Liberty:If the hoodlum wants to take me to court for house-breaking, he can do so. The court will have to decide whether my actions were proportionate to the crime (so my actions constitute merely defensive violence on your behalf) or disproportionate (so my actions constitute aggression).
Exactly. The court is going to rule in the direction that will mirror whatever is currently culturally accepted. If the court rules outside of what is culturally considered norm people would abandon that arbitrator. So we are in agreement.
filc:The court is going to rule in the direction that will mirror whatever is currently culturally accepted.
i think most of us libertarians here are agreed that what passes as currently culturally accepted norm is evil and unjust and is what we are all about changing.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
Corporal Punishment. Myself personally find that corporal punishment is both necessary and beneficial to the child.
filc: Juan: And you are the one whining about some solutions being 'coercive' ? Maybe you should be beaten up. Check my premise and my argument. I have not contradicted myself. I have a right as owner of my property to discipline it as I please within reason obviously.
Juan: And you are the one whining about some solutions being 'coercive' ? Maybe you should be beaten up.
You should demonstrate your discontent with such behavior, only you cannot stoop to his level by becoming a criminal yourself. What are you going to become batman and start breaking into supposed criminals homes at night and bring justice to those harmed? Please give me a break. You will get shot on your first night.
nirgrahamUK:i think most of us libertarians here are agreed that what passes as currently culturally accepted norm is evil and unjust and is what we are all about changing.
I'm kind of coming from the idea that over a period of time culture can change, especially after people get comfortable. Obviously just after immediately starting a libertarian society I think most people will probably agree strongly to the protection of private property rights. That doesn't mean that over the coarse of 100 years that won't change.
Although it could be that in the absence of government cultural cancers like modern liberalism and conservatism would never be realized. My concern is that a PDA could assume a political roll and exploit itself on a minority that chose not to purchase an equivalently sized pda. Additionally the PDA in an effort to maximize profits and please it's consumers will be steared by it's customer base and those views may be radical depending on what is culturally expected.
I may be completely off basis and thats fine. ER has posted alot of good material and what I have read so far has been very beneficial. I appreciate him for writing up all of that.
Great post E.R.
E. R. Olovetto:As I mentioned before, the justification for the primacy of punishment over restitution is well founded. Let's lay that debate to rest for now.
Start a new thread on this subject when you're ready. I have not read much about this, and most of what I've read emphasizes restitution over punishment. Where can I find the arguments for the opposite?
nirgrahamUK:are you guys assuming the norms of a libertarian society, or of a collectivist society, or both or neither? just asking....
I'm assuming an anarchic society that is broadly libertarian, which is what I think anarchic society will tend towards.
E. R. Olovetto:How would "punishment" be non-violent ever?
The same way the market punishes a business for making a bad decision.
ER I need to fully read your post and havn't had a chance yet but should in a few minutes here. To respond to that specific quote however my remark would be as follows. Non-violent punishment is the same thing that happens to a business that makes a bad business decision. The free market punishes people not by slapping their wrist but by voluntarily choosing not to do business with them.
In our case the abusive father that was publicly scrutinized may find that he no longer has a job one day when he goes to work. And that the local markets choose to no longer do business with him. The criminal may in fact be aware of insurance provider criminal lists and be given a notice that his name will be posted unless his actions change. Everyone acts entirely voluntarily without violating anyone's property rights.
Truth and Liberty:Start a new thread on this subject when you're ready. I have not read much about this, and most of what I've read emphasizes restitution over punishment. Where can I find the arguments for the opposite?
Thanks and I tried my best. [edit again: This is the thread and I think this is Kinsella's important post, but I need to read over it again.]
I have been thinking most about the ethics of recapture or "costs of capture" recently. I think that more has been written about history and theory of private law than proportionality. I see little problems with both Kinsella and Block's takes on it, but they both supposedly have works coming out soon/next year specifically on law.
filc: E. R. Olovetto:How would "punishment" be non-violent ever? The same way the market punishes a business for making a bad decision. ER I need to fully read your post and havn't had a chance yet but should in a few minutes here. To respond to that specific quote however my remark would be as follows. Non-violent punishment is the same thing that happens to a business that makes a bad business decision. The free market punishes people not by slapping their wrist but by voluntarily choosing not to do business with them. In our case the abusive father that was publicly scrutinized may find that he no longer has a job one day when he goes to work. And that the local markets choose to no longer do business with him. The criminal may in fact be aware of insurance provider criminal lists and be given a notice that his name will be posted unless his actions change. Everyone acts entirely voluntarily without violating anyone's property rights.
I see what you are saying but this is just another semantics problem. What I mean is juridical punishment or using coercion justifiably. What you mean is what I kept referring to as 'extra-juridical measures', not using coercion. We need a better term maybe for these market pressures. Again, I don't think extra-juridical measures are sufficient at all. They will be a great aid in accomplishing restitution and discouraging crime though. Our hope is to make the victim whole and merely changing the criminal's future actions is insufficient. Imagine a destitute murderer who refuses all arbitration and will stubbornly refuse to attempt any restitution. Sometimes we'll have to just write off such people as a loss. Keep the estoppel thing in mind along with why criminals of different sorts might have any rights to violate at all.
ER. Your post was awesome. I can't thank you enough for posting something so insightful.
My assumption is that under 'extra-juridical measures' as you call it the criminal should extinguish his pool of staple goods and needed items, like food, and therefore out of sheer hunger be forced to comply with the local arbitrator or die from starvation. I see your argument however and indeed it points mine out as being to passive for some cases. Truth and Liberty has pointed out to me as well. It certainly does not get people who are held hostage, like an abused child, out of a home any faster.
Perhaps Extra-Juridical measures would be an augmentation and used prior to the use of force depending on situation.
Thanks filc. I don't think that using coercion as part of a proper legal system is incompatible with voluntarism. There we are concerned with political coercion under a different definition of "political". We're conditioned to think of politics as the quest for the reins of a monocentric legal order. What I had meant by libertarianism being a political philosophy too was more along the lines of the Aristotlean definition. That has its own flaws, but some helpful ideas as well.
Literally laying siege to a suspect's home would be forestalling and coercion. Implementing a boycott or or hiring ban on convicted molesters would be non-coercive, extra-juridical measures. These have their place and we would hope that the need to use coercion over time would decrease. I came across this article again that explains what we could expect fairly well I think, Benson's Customary Law with Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description of a Modern System of Law and Order without State Coercion.
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