218 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 16 Mar \ parent \ on: Tough Questions for Libertarians 3/15 libertarian
I didn't get into the more standard libertarian response to the slightly different "What would happen in this case?" question, because I thought that would really be ducking the question. As you'll see libertarianism comes to some odd conclusions on the edges, I don't think that means the axioms are wrong, so much as life is strange and our intuition is tuned towards the median. Physics gets real weird on the edges too.
The standard answer to what would happen in this scenario is that you pay some one to remove the trespasser. It would be part of however the prison system operates in such a world. For the sake of taking the question head on, though, I stipulated that there was no one who would take this person voluntarily.
While it may have been an unsatisfying answer to you, I am actually pretty intrigued by where the answer took me. It's not the answer I anticipated giving when I started writing the post.
What do you see as the fundamental problem, in this case? My answer to the question is basically "Yes, but you can be removed from your current location if someone has a better claim to it and there's somewhere to remove you to." I've never seen a libertarian grapple with that second part, as far as I recall.
Zooming out, I do like your point about how our social systems can take certain factors for granted and be ill-equipped to handle changes to those factors. Having a wilderness to remove people to is one of those. I tried to think about an answer to this question that would require there to be some wilderness, but I just don't think that follows.
What do you see as the fundamental problem, in this case? My answer to the question is basically "Yes, but you can be removed from your current location if someone has a better claim to it and there's somewhere to remove you to." I've never seen a libertarian grapple with that second part, as far as I recall.
I may be getting too wide, as I understand that you are addressing very targeted questions posed by Murphy, and I'm more riffing on things that your writing provoked in my imagination. But to answer your question:
To me, the fundamental problem is that there's no clean answer to what to do in a situation like this that does not violently collide principles together in some fundamental and unresolveable way. If a dude shows up on your property, starving and exhausted (let's say), you can say: get off my lawn, bro, it's private property.
And so it is. But this very reasonable and fundamental way of architecting a social system (your legitimized right to control your private property) is now running up against the guy's need to simply exist in the world in a reasonable way.
More briefly and dramatically, this scene, between the starving and exhausting guy, and the landowner:
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What am I supposed to do? I am starving and exhausted.
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Not my problem. Go somewhere else. This is my yard, not some homeless encampment.
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Where? Every 'somewhere else' is owned by someone else. This same scene will just play out again.
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Buy your own property if you want somewhere to go, like I did.
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First, you bought your property under way more favorable circumstances. And anyway, you're assuming I want to do that. I never agreed to be bound by these rules or this system.
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Too bad, that's the system. It works for us. If you don't like it, leave.
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Where can I leave to? See point #3.
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Again, not my problem, bro. We have arranged the affairs of the world to our liking.
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Isn't that the exact same argument that proponents of the current system make? Like, I literally remember you telling me that you never agreed to be taxed, and so it's immoral for you to be taxed, despite taxation being part of the system that you are inhabiting.
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???
So perhaps the heart of my deep dissatisfaction with ideologies like this is that I have never heard anything compelling (or even anything at all) that goes into slot #10. What would you say? Or have you said it with your existing answer?
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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.
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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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