I have been reading up a lot on libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, and there are several situations that have come to my mind that would be permissible under an anarcho-capitalist society, but would appear to be disadvantages of such a society and would be strikes against it. I'd like to discuss the following scenarios:
Situation 1--------------
During the early morning, a woman is walking home from a subway station and gets raped and left for dead outside an office building. It is winter and the temperature is below freezing. She is behind some shrubs so can't be seen from the street. The next day the employees arrive at work. One of the employees sees the naked woman from the window. She's alive but unconscious, and will surely die if she doesn't receive help. The employee reports the situation to his boss, who immediately instructs him not to get involved as he doesn't want the company to be liable for anything that may occur.
We have two possible situations here: The employee helps the woman and in turn is fired by his boss for insubordination, or the employee leaves the woman to die but gets to keep his job. It is wrong to most people to just let someone die when they are in need of help, but this seems to be permissible under anarcho-capitalism.
Situation 2---------------
A woman has been performing well at her job as an accountant for several years. She is a single mom raising two children and cannot afford to be without employment. One day, a new executive comes in, notices her, and asks her to either perform sexual favors for him or to be fired.
The woman can perform the sexual favor to keep her job, in which case it would seem she has no recourse since she did it voluntarily. On the other hand she can be fired for refusing to perform the sexual favor, and again this seems to be permitted under anarcho-capitalism since employment is voluntary and can be terminated by either party at any time. Again, she has no recourse and is left to fend for herself.
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I don't want to make this post too long, so let's start out with these two morally ambiguous situations and how they could be dealt with in an anarcho-capitalist society.
This is less of an intellectual excercise than a situation designed to invoke a strong emotional responce. In any world, including an anarcho-capitalist one, there are situations in which one's own moral pricinple must dictate one's actions no matter what the consequences. Individuals are respncible for their own behavior and must take initiative for their own actions and not just rely on an employer's command or whatever path is easier. Who cares what society says? If your moral beliefs dictate that you do something, whether it is refuse to serve in the Tsar's army as followers of Tolstoy did or accept being fired as individuals above may very well have to, then do it! Don't expect society to be on your side; rather, if you believe you obey higher moral principles than just mundane self-interest prepare to have society against you!
I am becoming a Burkean Whig.
- F.A. Hayek
Ultima: Situation 1-------------- During the early morning, a woman is walking home from a subway station and gets raped and left for dead outside an office building. It is winter and the temperature is below freezing. She is behind some shrubs so can't be seen from the street. The next day the employees arrive at work. One of the employees sees the naked woman from the window. She's alive but unconscious, and will surely die if she doesn't receive help. The employee reports the situation to his boss, who immediately instructs him not to get involved as he doesn't want the company to be liable for anything that may occur. We have two possible situations here: The employee helps the woman and in turn is fired by his boss for insubordination, or the employee leaves the woman to die but gets to keep his job. It is wrong to most people to just let someone die when they are in need of help, but this seems to be permissible under anarcho-capitalism.
Why would anyone be liable, why would anyone get fired, and why would not helping be more permissible in Market Democracy(that sounds cool). Helping would probably be great publicity, and not helping would probably result in negative publicity. Everyone benefits from helping her, why wouldn't they?
Ultima: Situation 2--------------- A woman has been performing well at her job as an accountant for several years. She is a single mom raising two children and cannot afford to be without employment. One day, a new executive comes in, notices her, and asks her to either perform sexual favors for him or to be fired. The woman can perform the sexual favor to keep her job, in which case it would seem she has no recourse since she did it voluntarily. On the other hand she can be fired for refusing to perform the sexual favor, and again this seems to be permitted under anarcho-capitalism since employment is voluntary and can be terminated by either party at any time. Again, she has no recourse and is left to fend for herself.
This could be permissible, if the new executive has the power to make such requests. Although highly unlikely and uneconomic. Again, if the woman told that the executive sexually threatened her, it would make the business look bad, and make the other employees feel less comfortable, less safe and less efficient, and many would probably quit. But if they both consented to it, what's the difference between that and "regular" sex. If it's the executive's job to decide who gets fired or not, then hey, let him do it his way. The market will decide if his methods are out-competed or not by businesses that don't threaten and sexually harass their employees.
*sighs*
When will the emotive pleas ever stop? Seriously: stop confusing aesthetics with morality and rights.
Life is full of emotions... get used to it. Dismissing a scenario just because it is an emotional scenario is not justified.
In the first scenario, I like your answer and generally agree that it should be good publicity that they help the woman out, but life does not always work out that way. It is entirely conceivable that the employer would wish to prevent the employee from assisting the woman (this is based on a real scenario).
As for the second, yes, I agree with you that if the woman agrees to have sex with the executive it is consensual, and it is most certainly the executive's job to decide who gets fired or not.
However, something that's not being mentioned is that there is a vast imbalance of power here. If the woman agrees to have sex but only does it because of the threat of losing her job, is the action still voluntary? Through the use of "government-enforced laws at the point of a gun", the woman could sue the employer based on sexual harassment laws, but in an anarcho-capitalist society the woman would have no such recourse. The employer could easily spin the story to slander and defame the woman, and there is little she could do about it because she wields so little power compared to the company. Sure, her family and friends might believe her, but that is little consolation. Tell me why the market would necessarily even care that one woman claimed to be sexually harassed by her executive? How many people would know or care about this one event that doesn't concern them?
Good thing then I dismissed it because it had nothing to do with rights and ethics, and everything to do with aesthetics.
It's time for people to Learn. The. Difference. Please note that for future reference. The aesthetics of a situation are different from morality/rights/ethics. It may look gross to put ketchup on eggs, but it's that person's right. And it may be a breach of etiquette to tell your employee to have sex with you or she's fired, but as long as it's either the business owner or the owner is ok with that, there's no rights violation. How long that business would remain in business is a different story.
So please: let's never have any more conflation of aesthetics with morality/rights/ethics, OK?
While you're arguing about words you're still ignoring my scenarios. Please discuss them or please don't jack my thread. We can argue about the "conflation of aesthetics with morality/rights/ethics" in another thread. Thanks :)
I'm not threadjacking; I'm critiquing your scenarios by noting how wrong-headed your approach is. If you do not like that, feel free to not offer your opinion for others to critique.
The moral error that you seem to endorse is enforcing what an individual can and cannot do with his money: you object to the "disbalance of power" that emerges if an employee hires those only willing to perform sexual favors on him and an employer firing an employee if he cares to someone in need of help. However, though you may object to how each of the employers utilizies his property, an employee has no right to that job for it is the employers propety and his to give out as he sees fit, you cannot legitately utilize force upon the employer to force him to use his property as you see fit and that's what you seem to want to do in these situations.
Quite honestly, the two employees should grow a spine and do what they believe to be right, the "balance of power in society" influences neither their free-wills nor their moral culpability in each situation.
I don't see what's "wrong-headed" about discussing two different scenarios and how they could play out under an anarcho-capitalist society. I'm not discussing an activity that has no impact on anybody else (i.e. putting ketchup on eggs), but on the relationship between different players of society.
You said "And it may be a breach of etiquette to tell your employee to have sex with you or she's fired, but as long as it's either the business owner or the owner is ok with that, there's no rights violation.". Even if on the surface there is no "rights" violation, but does that make it right? Morality aside, I'll also disagree with you that there is no rights violation here. Even if the woman does agree to the sex, then although it was technically "voluntary", was it truly voluntary?
She's not a prostitute, she's an accountant; having sex with the employer or with anyone else for that matter is not part of her job description. If she decides to have sex with the executive based on his commanding it on threat of being fired, she is only doing so under the threat of losing her job and the hardships that would entail. Does that not make the employer guilty of invading her property rights to her own body through the use of force and extortion?
Ultima: She's not a prostitute, she's an accountant; having sex with the employer or with anyone else for that matter is not part of her job description. If she decides to have sex with the executive based on his commanding it on threat of being fired, she is only doing so under the threat of losing her job and the hardships that would entail. Does that not make the employer guilty of invading her property rights to her own body through the use of force?
She's not a prostitute, she's an accountant; having sex with the employer or with anyone else for that matter is not part of her job description. If she decides to have sex with the executive based on his commanding it on threat of being fired, she is only doing so under the threat of losing her job and the hardships that would entail. Does that not make the employer guilty of invading her property rights to her own body through the use of force?
What use of force? Are you speaking of him bartering with his own property to acquire her sexual favors? There is no coercion whatsoever in either of these scenarios - the position of accountant in this firm has now some prostitution in it, so what?
And its not "her job", the job is a relationship between the employer and the employee in which the employer buys the labor of the employee, whether that labor is in accounting or whoring, for the price of the wage of the employee. Both the employer and the employee here do this transaction vountarilly, and if the employee values her labor more than the wage, viewing the cost prostituting herself not worth the benefits of the wage, then she will simply quit the job and find a new, more suiting job.
What's so difficult to understand here?
Ultima: Life is full of emotions... get used to it. Dismissing a scenario just because it is an emotional scenario is not justified.
Unfortunately, it is. We try to rationally argue here. Emotion and subjectivism never leads to a conclusion and less rarely leads to any truths.
I appreciate you are new and curious, but every week someone arrives here, and makes the same arguments. What if X bad thing happens, What if Y starving person needs food.
The Newbie forum is loaded with this stuff, maybe you could take a look see, and perhaps some of these sorts of examples have already been answered.
I'll tell you right now, anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism and anarchism do not promise you utopia, or perfect solutions. What they offer, is a rational, consistent alternative to the status quo that is based on human action, and geared towards providing as much liberty as possible. But if you are going to offer specific scenarios ad infinitum, then these ideas will never be able to satisfy you, because the world will always have violence, and poor, and people dying. The goal is to limit that naturally, as morally as possible.
If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North
Ultima, I'm not sure that your second example really applies to a radically decentralized social order any more than it does to any other system of social organization. It seems to me that under most conceptions of just treatment, the boss would be recognized as having acted inappropriately and abusively towards the employee; sexual harrassment is not an artifice of centralized government. If, however, generally accepted legal norms in a particular place somehow didn't protect women from abuse of that kind (which could occur in a state-ordered society as well as a decentralized one), we might expect that women would begin to demand clauses in their employment contracts which stipulated that sexual acts could not be required by superiors. Or maybe nothing would be done about it; there's no guarantee that, in the absence of social norms which empower and dignify women, there would be any protection against this sort of thing. But that has nothing to do with anarcho-capitalism; that's a problem with oppresive, mysogynistic cultures in general.
The first example is more interesting, I think. The point you seem to be making is that there are situations in which people have moral duties to actively do things for other people, even though there's no issue of rights violation going on (that is, no one's being deprived of some condition or state of affairs to which they have a right). I think that this is a serious problem for "hard-libertarians" who believe that there can never, under any condition, be such a thing as an unchosen positive moral duty. I'm not one of those people, so I can agree that this case is a genuine problem for that view. However, I will point out that again, this isn't exactly a problem with anarcho-capitalism. There's no reason that a decentralized social order would be inherently incapable of enforcing positive duties, if it were the case that enforcing them were appropriate. The real issue seems to be one about the proper way to think about our ethical obligations to other people, and not about the way that a social order could accomplish a particular task.
Hopefully that helps.
http://libertarian-left.blogspot.com/
liberty student: Ultima: Life is full of emotions... get used to it. Dismissing a scenario just because it is an emotional scenario is not justified. Unfortunately, it is. We try to rationally argue here. Emotion and subjectivism never leads to a conclusion and less rarely leads to any truths.
I am not talking about arguing rationally, I am saying that we should not dismiss a scenario just because the scenario itself happens to be an emotional issue. We can argue rationally about the scenario, but we should not dismiss it, just because some people find it controversial or emotional. That is what I meant. Too often people immediately dismiss something and refuse to discuss it because the person is "playing to emotions". Well, some topics simply are touchy and controversial. You shouldn't be afraid to discuss them just because of that reason.
It's not my intention to bring up topics of discussion to simply debunk anarcho-capitalism; these are issues that concern me personally as I try to come to grips with different philosophies and as I try to determine for myself if government does some things better than the free market, or if leaving everything to the market truly would result in a more just and humane society.
That being said, I'll be sure to check out the newbie forum and see what's been posted there.
Donny (Danny?),
Your post has helped answer some of the issues for me, and also opened up some new avenues for discussion.
For the second example, I would tend to agree with you that this is not necessarily an issue of central govts vs decentralization but has a lot to do with the underlying culture itself. In a tolerant culture, we could expect to see this treated as an abuse on the part of the employer. The employer/employee contract may be voluntary, but because of the imbalance of power it is less voluntary on the part of the employee and more on the part of the employer. Unless the employee is a wealthy individual, she NEEDS the job... the employer in most cases does not have the same need. It can be contested that the demand itself was an abusive behavior on the part of the employer and constitutues a coercive action - coercive because the employer is demanding the favor upon penalty of losing her job. The imbalance of power is what renders the action coercive to a certain degree, and some societies may decide to codify this based on employment contracts, while less tolerant societies may not, but then these less tolerant societies don't enjoy these protections now, anyways. I can accept that answer.
For the first example: Does the employee, or the employer for that matter, have the duty to assist someone who is clearly in need? Do they have the right of doing nothing and letting the person die? This is a gray zone of which we could come up with many situations where doing nothing may be ok (a person is inside a burning building about to collapse and you may very well be committing suicide), and other situations where doing nothing clearly would be repugnant (a toddler is in a subway station and is walking toward the tracks, but the mother is distracted. You are nearby and see the child is about to fall onto the tracks. Do you just watch it happen and do nothing?). I agree with your take on things that this is more about moral duties and ethical obligations. This is something I would love to discuss more, in regards to our ethical obligations, mechanisms and means of dealing with these issues in a decentralized, free society.
I think the point is being made that you can 'what-if' any type of government all day long, but it isn't exactly relevant to the form of that government.
How about if either of the situations occured under a communist government? I should think that disobeying your employer would be like disobeying the law under that system- which would mean that you would be legally obligated to violate moral principles.
Under a government like ours, you might be able to sue your employer for asking you to not help somebody or have sex with your boss, but either way your employer is paying you to be his employee. That means that he is paying you to do what he asks. If you don't like what he asks, then you may find employment elsewhere. Suing your employer for asking you to do something is infriniging on his rights.
Asking your employee to have sex with you would be considered wrong by most people. Most people would not work for an employer that requested sex. What about asking your employee to be more polite, or to say 'Happy Holidays' instead of 'Merry Christmas'? Most people wouldn't consider that wrong, but some would be deeply offended by that. Who should decide if it is wrong or right? Should it be some court somewhere? A bureaucrat? A legislator? If we have to consult one of the aforementioned before each and every request made to an employee would running a business even be possible?
The answer is that the only parties that should be able to decide if an action is appropriate at work or not are those directly involved, i.e. the employer and the employee. If the employer doesn't view it as appropriate, then he won't ask it of his employee. If the employee doesn't view it as appropriate, then the employee may refuse and/or seek employment elsewhere. An employer may not make any employee do anything, he can only compensate an employee for an activity.
Aside from all that, society would likely be less tolerant to that sort of activity, as people would have to learn to be responsible for themselves. Both the situations you mentioned would have the same moral consequences in an anachro-capitalist society as they do in any other.
Ultima:She's alive but unconscious, and will surely die if she doesn't receive help.
If the employee find it inconvenient to assist her, he could summon a third party to assist her. The local detective agency, the church, the hospital, the Red Cross, the crisis/suicide hotline.... anybody!
Ultima:A woman has been performing well at her job as an accountant for several years.
If she is any good at her job, she should have little difficulty finding employment with a boss who isn't a scumbag.
"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable."
We can replace all the words 'employer' and 'boss' with any title of politicians or bureaucrats in goverment.
And it doesn't make the scenarios better,
unless we hypothesize that people work in goverment would be blessed and holy.
Even a church doesn't guarantee this.
Ultima:I am not talking about arguing rationally, I am saying that we should not dismiss a scenario just because the scenario itself happens to be an emotional issue. We can argue rationally about the scenario, but we should not dismiss it, just because some people find it controversial or emotional.
If you wanted to discuss ethics then why did you present the scenarios as maudlin sob stories? More to the point, why did you bring in ethically irrelevant details like "She is a single mom raising two children and cannot afford to be without employment" and "left for dead outside an office building. It is winter and the temperature is below freezing"? It sounds like you're making an emotive plea to get us to reconsider the absolutism of libertarian priniple.
At any rate both situations have the same boring answer: no one has any moral obligation to keep any one employed, sans any self-imposed legal contracts prohibiting termination.
Diminishing Marginal Utility - IT'S THE LAW!
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