A Critique of Rothbardian Natural Rights (sorta long)

[applejuicekid]

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[censored] your stupid laser crap.

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lol...I agree with this sentiment, but I think it is important to establish natural rights as absolute. All of the things you mentioned can be justified if we say even though we are ignoring the rights of people it is necessary because it will make society better. His draft example is the most obvious case of such disregard of people's rights. He is basically saying a draft is wrong unless we REALLY need one. How do we know if we really need a draft? While I guess that his point is that such decisions are completely subjective, it does nothing to protect natural rights.

[applejuicekid]

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I really get the impression people here are missing the point; Friedman knows his examples are ridiculous

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The problem with his examples aren't that they are ridiculous, it is that they are not analogous.

A laser that will damage your property isn't the same as a flashlight. And it has nothing to do with the concentration of the light.

Shooting a gun at someone is a violent act. Flying a plane over someone's land isn't.

[DrunkHamster]

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A laser that will damage your property isn't the same as a flashlight. And it has nothing to do with the concentration of the light.

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Do you believe in the subjective theory of value (like, I would've thought, all the ACers on this board do)? Because if so, please tell me how you can objectively tell whether something is damaging my property? If the STV is right, all value is in the eye of the beholder, and so if I decide that a couple of photons spilling over to my land is damaging it, who are you to say any different?

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Shooting a gun at someone is a violent act. Flying a plane over someone's land isn't.

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Again, missing the point - the violence isn't what matters, the risk of death is. I'm sure I can come up with other examples of non violent situations which cause a 1 in 6 chance of you dying - do you think you are within your rights to stop these occuring? If so, your violent/non violent dichotomy won't help you one bit.

[ConstantineX]

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This is just a string of ridiculous, nonsense, pointless, grey area null zone scenarios designed to hurt the cause of freedom. Why does anyone anywhere care about the possibility of a photon hitting my door when there are millions dying through the corruption of a bloated evil violent coercive state, trillions of dollars in debt and wasteful spending forcing people to spend half their time working for no pay and hundreds of thousands in gulags being beaten and raped for the mere "crime" of setting fire to a plant and putting it in their mouth. [censored] your stupid laser crap.

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This guy has written countless articles about the feasibility of private enforcement agencies and various ideas that appeal to ACists. He's making an honest point, and your post just makes you look like another robotic libertarian, spouting slogans.

I think he makes a good and simple point. He's just pointing out reducto Rothbardian libertarianism doesn't square with our instinctive moral intuition at all, and to pretend so leads to philosophical contortions.

I personally don't think absolute natural rights should be enforced. But the market mechanism seems the only tool humans have ever invented for positive-sum gains. As it's so useful, it makes sense to guide our morality by that tool, just as a Native American might have his morality guided by his way of life. That might be a better case for legal libertarian absolutism.

EDIT: I have repeatedly made this point several times.
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Perhaps we should replace a statement about what one should do ("never initiate coercion") with a statement about what objective one should seek ("do whatever minimizes the total amount of coercion").


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[Phil153]

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Shooting a gun at someone is a violent act. Flying a plane over someone's land isn't.

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What if it's a helicopter, meant to intimidate the owner into selling their land to the local monopolist?

The point which all you fine AC intellects are missing is that a million scenarios can be thought of (many of them realistic) where your absolute rights mantra gets shown up as a logical and practical farce.

[applejuicekid]

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Because if so, please tell me how you can objectively tell whether something is damaging my property?

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I can't. But there are certain cases where I can tell for sure that you are damaging my property. Eliminating all cases where it is obvious that my property is being damaged or interfered with would be a good start. For those other subjective cases a reasonable man argument would be a decent solution.

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non violent situations which cause a 1 in 6 chance of you dying - do you think you are within your rights to stop these occuring?

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Of course I am, as those infringe on my right to live. You are free to do what I want as long as it doesn't interfere with my rights. I don't see why I am not allowed to defend myself because you decide to do something incredibly dangerous. I suspect you will comeback with something about what probability is acceptable. And the answer is I don't know, but this isn't a natural rights problem. It is a subjective question for any society.

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Again, missing the point - the violence isn't what matters

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Yes, it is. In Friedman's article he asks what if the gun had a million chambers and then switches to the plane example. This is why it is a bad example, he should have stuck with the gun. If he had, it would be quite clear that it is still not right to shoot the gun at someone.

I think we are stuck on different things. You are saying since what constitutes damage to property is subjective it means that it is ok to damage people's property sometimes. While this may be true it does not mean that it is ok to damage people's property in cases where it is not subjective. Friedman uses the stealing of a gun to stop a madman as an example of when it is ok to steal (which would always be wrong according to absolute rights supporters).

[Money2Burn]

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What if it's a helicopter, meant to intimidate the owner into selling their land to the local monopolist?

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That would seem pretty coercive to me (and not that realistic).

In any case, nothing brought up in this article seems that compelling to me. Of course people are going to have different ideas of what affects their property, these all seem like trivial disputes that would arise between individual property owners that could be settled by arbitration. I think that would be the whole purpose of arbitration in the frist place, to settle these "grey area"
disputes.

I know the article was about absolute property rights, but I wouldn't consider it too damning if the best argument someone can come up with against this idea is that there is a 1 in 1 x 10^10 chance that a plane flying overhead might crash into your property therefore your rights aren't absolute!

[vulturesrow]

For those of you who arent getting the poin:

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A second problem is that simple statements of libertarian principle taken literally can be used to prove conclusions that nobody, libertarian or otherwise, is willing to accept. If the principle is softened enough to avoid such conclusions, its implications become far less clear. It is only by being careful to restrict the application of our principles to easy cases that we can make them seem at the same time simple and true.

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The obvious response is that only significant violations of my property rights count. But who decides what is significant? If I have an absolute property right, then I am the one who decides what violations of my property matter. If someone is allowed to violate my property with impunity as long as he does no significant damage, we are back to judging legal rules by their consequences.

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I am not claiming that libertarians who argue from rights rather than from consequences believe that you cannot light a match on your own property, or fly an airplane, or breathe out; obviously they do not. My point is that simple statements of libertarian rights taken literally lead to problems of this sort.

One can avoid such results by qualifying the statements: saying that they apply only to "significant" violations of my rights, or violations that "really injure" me, or that by breathing and turning on lights and doing other things that impose tiny costs on others I am implicitly giving them permission to do the same to me. But once one starts playing this game one can no longer use rights arguments to draw clear conclusions about what should or should not happen. People who believe in taxes can argue just as plausibly that taxes do not really injure you, since the benefits they produce more than make up for the cost, or that everyone implicitly consents to taxes by using government services.

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Our response to such questions demonstrates that we do not really believe in simple single values. Most libertarians, myself among them, believe that a libertarian society is both just and attractive. It is easy enough to claim that we are in favor of following libertarian principle whatever the consequences--given that we believe the consequences would be the most attractive society the world has ever known. But the claim that we put individual rights above everything else is, for most of us, false. Although we give some value, perhaps very great value, to individual rights, we do not give them an infinite value. We can pretend the contrary only by resolutely refusing to consider situations in which we might have to choose between individual rights and other things that are also of great value.

My purpose is not to argue that we should stop being libertarians. My purpose is to argue that libertarianism is not a collection of straightforward and unambiguous arguments establishing with certainty a set of unquestionable propositions. It is rather the attempt to apply certain economic and ethical insights to a very complicated world. The more carefully one does so, the more complications one is likely to discover and the more qualifications one must put on one's results.

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[ianlippert]

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This is just a string of ridiculous, nonsense, pointless, grey area null zone scenarios designed to hurt the cause of freedom. Why does anyone anywhere care about the possibility of a photon hitting my door when there are millions dying through the corruption of a bloated evil violent coercive state, trillions of dollars in debt and wasteful spending forcing people to spend half their time working for no pay and hundreds of thousands in gulags being beaten and raped for the mere "crime" of setting fire to a plant and putting it in their mouth. [censored] your stupid laser crap.

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But whose gonna run the lighthouses!!?!?!??

Seriously I dont get the statists in this thread. If property rights are a problem for AC then its an ever bigger problem for statism. If there are no property rights then we should be satisfied with the madmax type anarchy. Obiously the statists wont go this far. They just want their particular preference of property rights enforced, but there is nothing more inherantly objective in the statist definition of property rights.

[ianlippert]

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But that's not his point. His point is that if you take a natural rights approach there is no dividing line between the two cases. To take his aeroplane example: no one here seriously questions that you should be able to forcibly disarm someone playing russian roulette with you against your will (1 in 6 chance of dying), just as no one here questions that someone flying a plane over your land is legitimate (say a 1 in 10 000 chance of dying). The problem that Friedman raises is that this seems entirely arbitrary if you look at it from a natural rights point of view.


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And the answer is the exact same as it is now. Its determined by how much people value the enforcement of their property rights. So some guy shines a light at my house, am I gonna pay the $100 to call the cops up and get him to stop? Or would I do what most people do now when minor infractions occur to their property? I'm going to go over to his house and have a discussion with him, and since most people dont have a incessant need to annoy their neighbours he's probably going to stop.

To say that there are some grey areas to property rights and therefore there are no property rights is pretty insane. We need to spend our time on the real important areas of property rights. Where people are stealing and murdering are far more important than some theoretical that is never going to happen in real life.