Susan Hogarth wrote: BH) Saying that nobody has the right to do X is not an assertion that nobody may have the authority to do X. (BH
SH) Wait. Let me get this straight. You think some*one* can have legitimate -authority- to do what they don't have a *right* to do? That's pretty fantastic mental gymnastics!!! (SH The rights I was talking about are the rights that inhere in all peaceful honest adults. By "nobody has the right to do X", I was saying that X is not a right that anyone acquires by virtue of simply being a peaceful honest adult. In this context, saying that nobody has the right to do X is not the same thing as saying that everybody is always forbidden under every circumstance from doing X. Individuals qua individuals do not have the right to carry out retributive killings, but an individual may still acquire the morally legitimate authority to administer a death penalty under the right institutional circumstances. Thus all I'm doing here is rejecting the simplistic voluntaryist argument that says the reason that the state cannot have the right to initiate force is because 1) all rights are individual rights and 2) being an individual does not confer a right to initiate force. That argument fails because an individual can acquire the authority to initiate force on the basis of an analysis of individual rights involving individuals other than him. We each have the individual right to have our life and liberty be protected, we each have the individual right to due process, etc. Such rights are hollow if everyone is absolutely exempt from all force initiation, since that would allow the strong to systematically exploit the weak in a way that we know can be sharply mitigated through minarchism. Indeed, it's not just that the strong would be allowed to exploit the weak, but rather that the rationally self-interested strong can be confidently predicted to exploit the weak. I've never heard of a single case in the entire history of organized crime across hundreds of cities in scores of nations over multiple decades in which the unregulated market for protection behaved as predicted by anarcholibertarian theory. This track record becomes even more dismal if you include all the cases in history in which there have been regions lacking effective sovereignty by a central authority. This amounts to an empirical falsification of the anarcholibertarian theory of protection markets that by the standards of social science is spectacularly conclusive. Since anarcholibertarian theory posits no special conditions for protection markets regarding cultural respect for law or historical path-dependence or technological development or ethnic homogeneity etc., every single episode in which there wasn't a monopoly on force-initiation over a region becomes a test case for the theory. Despite the literally hundreds of such test cases, the only purported successes advanced for the theory involve a few thousand pre-industrial farmers sprinkled sparsely across medieval Iceland and the frontier of colonial Pennsylvania. In contrast to how even bastard forms of minarchism have been so spectacularly successful compared to all other significant social experiments, the track record of anarcholibertarianism is simply embarrassing. BH) It's silly to suggest that not adhering to simplistic deontological absolutism is the same thing as being amoral. (BH SH) Right! I keep forgetting! You morality is so superior it even encompasses killing innocents for 'the greater good' (as YOU conceive it, anyway) as a moral right. (SH I've never ever claimed that anyone has the right to kill innocents for a generic "greater good". Instead, what I've said is that the specific circumstances of the Trolley Problem show that one has the right -- nay, obligation -- to kill innocents if doing so is sure to result in a non-trivial reduction in the number of innocents killed. You already told us that in the Trolley Problem "I might even, despairing, make the choice you seem so excited about - to kill one person rather than let five others be killed if I could imagine no alternative." Are you now saying this was an announcement that you would knowingly make a choice that you have no "moral right" to make? If so, it's not a very big accomplishment to achieve moral superiority over someone who announces their willingness to commit what she admits is an immoral act. SH)You would apparently rather see innocents murdered one at a time than see evil people mowed down wholesale. (SH BH) If you know of a way to disallow all and only weapons that murder innocents, I'm all ears. (BH SH) I do not. (SH Then you have no basis for your inference that I would "rather see innocents murdered one at a time than see evil people mowed down wholesale". You're confusing the possible with the likely, just as you confuse abstention from force initiation with its minimization. BH) We minarchists have a ready answer for what should be done when evil people need wholesale mowing down. I'll give you three guesses what it is. (BH SH) Government, government, and more government. Ask a hard one. (SH I apparently already did. I'll give you three more guesses which word in your answer is inconsistent with the "min" part of my term "minarchist". Do you have all the mountains of straw for your strawmen delivered, or do you grow your own? SH) You may live long enough to discover that feeding a demon in the hopes that it will protect you is a losing proposition. (SH Ah yes, this most free and prosperous polity in the history of human civilization is a teetering house of cards, and the End Times are nigh. The irony here is that doomsayers like you by definition can never live long enough to find out that they are wrong. Such unfalsifiable beliefs are the telltale sign of religious dogma. SH) Unfortunately you are putting MY life at risk with your support of the greatest/worst WMD ever imagined or constructed - the state. (SH As I've told you before, the institution of the state is indeed a very powerful tool, but (like a gun) it can be designed to minimize the chance of it causing arbitrary or random harm. States are also like guns in that people who fetishize their potential for harm allow their blind fear of them to prevent enjoyment of the the protection that a sober competence with such tools can afford. America offers more safety from death by aggression than virtually any human society in human history ever has, and (ironically) the institutions that ensure that safety depend critically on your freedom to publicly and bitterly deny both their morality and their efficacy.
