principles vs reality

[assasin7]

In theory anarcho capitalism is great, but reality is much muddier and confusing for example:

A starving person steals to feed himself, is it a crime against property?
Same with refusing to aid a person choking to death in front of you, is it murder?
Or having a starving person become a slave to you in exchange for food, is it fraud?

as long as ancaps stick to a "party line" of principles without reason or real world analysis I can't be one of you.

[ff42]

Have you read/listened to Stephan Molyneux's answers to this?

And the real world would use/encourage force to remedy these situations?

If you are not willing to initiate force/fraud then you are 'one of us', if you are willing to initiate force/fraud then you are not one of us.

[assasin7]

In general I wouldn't be willing to initiate force, but I have a broader definition of force then you.

force: any action calculated to cause harm to another that is taken any way (not helping a drowning child is as bad as pushing his head under)

[Seth King]

In general I wouldn't be willing to initiate force, but I have a broader definition of force then you.

force: any action calculated to cause harm to another that is taken any way (not helping a drowning child is as bad as pushing his head under)

So, does this mean you're guilty of murder for not donating all of your discretionary income to starving African children?

[braindead0]

In general I wouldn't be willing to initiate force, but I have a broader definition of force then you.

force: any action calculated to cause harm to another that is taken any way (not helping a drowning child is as bad as pushing his head under)

So, does this mean you're guilty of murder for not donating all of your discretionary income to starving African children?

More than that, one must strip down their existence to the bare essentials and use that money to help others.  

What about failure to stop our military from killing innocent people?

Force is a positive action, not a lack of action IMO.  For example, if some idiot does something stupid putting himself in danger there is no way I would put myself in danger to save him/her.  

If the child in the previous example walked out on thin ice in the winter and fell in, only an idiot would follow unless maybe the child is really fat/heavy and the would be rescuer seriously thin..

[JustSayNoToStatism]

In theory anarcho capitalism is great, but reality is much muddier and confusing for example:

A starving person steals to feed himself, is it a crime against property?
Same with refusing to aid a person choking to death in front of you, is it murder?
Or having a starving person become a slave to you in exchange for food, is it fraud?

as long as ancaps stick to a "party line" of principles without reason or real world analysis I can't be one of you.

Don't confuse anarcho capitalism with the NAP. I consider myself a market-anarchist and I don't have any strong attachment to the NAP "party line." Consider this old content I wrote (and frequently repost):

The homesteading principle (which is necessary for the NAP because it establishes property rights) as a whole is very sketchy. If I drive stakes into the ground of some unoccupied land, and then leave, do I still have the right to claim it? What if I put a fence around it? What constitutes mixing someone's labor with something? How much time do I have to spend?
If I own the land of a road stretching across the entire continent, can I charge tolls for people to pass OVER it...not talking about using the road, just getting over it. Can I initiate violence against someone who trespasses on my road to get across it? How much of the air space above my land do I own...If you say a plane can fly over my house, then can a hovercraft float 20 inches off the surface of my land without it being trespassing? If all land is privately owned, and I am disowned by my parents' and kicked out of the house, I would have no option but to trespass on someone's property to move around, and staying still would also be trespassing...So could I be shot for this?
If a 5-year old tells his parents that he wants to stay at his friends' house and isn't going home, can the parent initiate force?


There's a whole flood of questions like this. The fact is that the NAP and related ideas are values that I consider good for people to hold. I cannot claim absolute moral superiority for holding them, because their is no perfect philosophy, and hence no objective morality.

In general I wouldn't be willing to initiate force, but I have a broader definition of force then you.

force: any action calculated to cause harm to another that is taken any way (not helping a drowning child is as bad as pushing his head under)

However, your drowning child example does not work. I may find someone disgusting for doing nothing to prevent the death, but it's very different from doing the killing. I think it's similar to the concept of positive and negative liberty (I've linked the classic essay on the subject, "Two Concepts of Liberty"). When we use the term freedom, we mean freedom from being dunked under water, not "freedom" in the sense that everyone has to help you, because that violates the negative (true) freedom of others to do as they please.

Again, I'm not saying that we should let the kid die. What I'm doing is explaining how I conceptualize liberty. That says nothing about how a market anarchist society could work, and little about how I would want it to work. So don't think that principles such as this could conflict with reality, since I haven't really defined them in a way to make a comparison such as that meaningful.

[MAM]

There is a difference between harming someone and failing to provide benefit. Under your definition of harming someone then watching someone get shot is the same as pulling the trigger yourself. Or if you see someone accelerate to hit someone and don't try to save that person it is the same as if you ran them over yourself.

Basically what you are saying is that everyone who fails to stop a crime is guilty of that crime. So if I fail to keep someone from breaking into my neighbors house and robbing them I might as well be the burglar?

Seem really silly to me. Almost to the point that I wonder if this is just a troll post.

[assasin7]

Preventing harm is a necessity when their is no serious danger to yourself (theirs a difference between the danger of an asteroid hitting you if you take a step into a museum and the danger of one hitting you in an asteroid storm.)

[assasin7]

In general I wouldn't be willing to initiate force, but I have a broader definition of force then you.

force: any action calculated to cause harm to another that is taken any way (not helping a drowning child is as bad as pushing his head under)

So, does this mean you're guilty of murder for not donating all of your discretionary income to starving African children?

Within reason, it depends on the ease of the action, and the action can be the minimum required, say pointing a homeless guy to a food shelter instead of feeding him.

[JustSayNoToStatism]

In general I wouldn't be willing to initiate force, but I have a broader definition of force then you.

force: any action calculated to cause harm to another that is taken any way (not helping a drowning child is as bad as pushing his head under)

So, does this mean you're guilty of murder for not donating all of your discretionary income to starving African children?

Within reason, it depends on the ease of the action, and the action can be the minimum required, say pointing a homeless guy to a food shelter instead of feeding him.

No. Read my post.

[Aegidius]

In general I wouldn't be willing to initiate force, but I have a broader definition of force then you.

force: any action calculated to cause harm to another that is taken any way (not helping a drowning child is as bad as pushing his head under)

So, does this mean you're guilty of murder for not donating all of your discretionary income to starving African children?

Within reason, it depends on the ease of the action, and the action can be the minimum required, say pointing a homeless guy to a food shelter instead of feeding him.

I get into this discussion all the time with statists (they like to use this sort of argument to justify income tax).  The biggest problem I see, setting aside for the moment the fact that they're laughing in the face of the NAP, is that there's no objective line between a crime and noncrime here.  What level of required action is "reasonable"?

Is a farmer obligated to feed me if:

1. I show up inside a farmer's house and ask him for food?
2. I show up at his front door and ask him for food?
3. I contect him and ask him to deliver the food?  I live next door.
4. As 3.  I live a block away.
5. As 3.  I live across town.
6. As 3.  I live in another city.
7. As 3.  I live on another continent.
8. You get the point by now.

You can  substitute extremity of need, number of needy, wealth level of the farmer, or whatever you like for distance. The point remains the same.

For that matter, what of food production?  Is a farmer commiting murder by leaving a plot fallow?  Am I commiting murder by not becoming a farmer?

The obligation has to end somewhere, but *where*?  Most people that support the morality in question would probably agree that 2 is reasonable and 7 isn't.  Where does it end?  Between 1 and 2?  2 and 3?  And what of the infinitely many unlisted cases that lie in between each of the listed ones?  More important than where does it end, why? What is the real ethical distinction between case n and case n+1? I've never been given a satisfying answer to this; it's always something like  "you're obligated within reason".  I had a guy tell me once that he supported "60%" property rights, balanced with a "right to aid."  As far as I can tell he pulled the 60% out of thin air.  Without a non-arbitrary threshold, positive obligation morality grants supremacy to the whims of the enforcer.

I agree with the notion that we should save people from starvation when we can, though where possible trade is the best means to do so.  It is important, however, to make a distinction between "should" and "must".  If you presume to dictate what we "must" do, and try to enforce it, you're a government.

A good rule of thumb: if you can do it without existing, it's probably not a real crime.

[Disengage]

A starving person steals to feed himself, is it a crime against property?

Yes.

Same with refusing to aid a person choking to death in front of you, is it murder?

No.

Or having a starving person become a slave to you in exchange for food, is it fraud?

No.   It may not be a valid contract depending on what you mean by "slave", but it isn't fraud.

People can throw "what if" questions at anarchy and every other system of rule until the end of time.    I like to strike the root.   So let me ask some questions of my own.

Do I own myself?

If I do own myself, then do I own the product of my labor (assuming I also own the raw materials and other means of production)?  If I don't own the product of my labor, how does this not violate the previous answer?

If I don't own myself, then WHO owns me and how did this state of ownership come about, considering that I didn't voluntarily agree to it.

[assasin7]

Try telling death you own yourself, and its more like your borrowing your body while you occupy it

[Seth King]

Try telling death you own yourself, and its more like your borrowing your body while you occupy it

To be honest, I sympathize with this. I actually don't believe in ownership either. Only claims.

Private property is a useful chimera, but at the end of the day all things belong to God.

[MAM]

Try telling death you own yourself, and its more like your borrowing your body while you occupy it

To be honest, I sympathize with this. I actually don't believe in ownership either. Only claims.

Private property is a useful chimera, but at the end of the day all things belong to God.

I see a slippery slope.

On top of that if all things  belong to God everyone steals from this God because how can they possibly have been given permission to use it. Therefor everyone is a theif. Or if one is merely borrowing from this God what is the contract? What exactly can you do with this God's property? What can't you do? Who says what the terms of this God are? Do I decide? Do you? Does someone in a fancy hat?
Point is there is no point from which to make judgments about anything save from ourselves, throwing deities into the mix only confuses the matter and is beside the point.

The question is a) Do property rights exist b) Are postive obligation ethics correct? The answer to a is yes the answer to b is no, but for the sake of arguement we say that they are valid where do we draw the line between crime and not crime? I mean if CO2 causes harm and producing said is a crime than breathing is a crime. This gets really silly really fast.