Brandon Berg:

But by the very same logic, you’re not allowed to throw innocent people in jail to create the sort of society you want to live in.

But Brandon, you’re not entitled to do that.

Incarceration of the innocent is a moral crime and the victims of it are owed both release and proportional compensation from their victimizers.

That does not, contrary to your claims, entail that you can’t incarcerate anybody. “You can’t morally incarcerate the innocent” doesn’t entail “You can’t morally do anything that risks incarcerating the innocent.” But it does entail that you’re under some obligations of restraint.

First, you’re obliged to use violence only to the extent that it’s necessary to defend yourself and others from the threat posed by the individual person you’re using it against, since anything further involves not only taking a risk that you’ll harm the innocent, but taking a gratuitous risk that’s neither justified nor excused by the right of defense. You’re entitled, sometimes, to risk harming innocent people in order to defend against a concrete threat. You’re not entitled to risk harming anybody in order to preemptively ward off alleged future dangers posed by unspecified and unrelated third parties.

Second, you’re obliged not to use violence so as to make it impossible for you to compensate any innocent people that you may hurt, if you can possibly avoid it. If you’re going to risk hurting innocent people then you had better be prepared to do what you can to ameliorate or make up for the damage that you’ve caused, should it turn out that they were innocent after all.

Incarcerating people for crimes doesn’t categorically violate these obligations. Incarcerating alleged criminals just to serve as a “deterrant” to anonymous third parties does violate the first obligation, and you have no right to do that. Deliberately killing prisoners as a “deterrant” directly violates both of these obligations.

Either it’s okay to accept a certain false positive rate in the justice system because it ultimately makes us safer on average, or the rights of innocent people are sacrosanct, and we have to avoid punishing criminals altogether.

“A certain false positive rate?”

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

—George Orwell (1946), “Politics and the English Language”

Dauntless: “You assert that a business owner would be breaking the ‘law’ by not withholding their employee’s taxes. I challenge you to post that law to this message board. Good luck finding it, though.”

Let’s say that tomorrow morning the United States Congress and the several states all pass a Constitutional amendment, stating that Congress has the power to impose an individual income tax, and each individual citizen is legally obliged to pay it. If they did this, would you recognize the authority of Congress to take your money from you by force?

If so, why do you think that the demand is made any less arbitrary just by putting it in writing?

If not, then why does it matter whether the government is working from written law or not? The “law” would be a naked usurpation without any moral excuse, whether or not it was formally written down.

Brandon Berg: Doesn’t the same logic apply to imprisonment? The state imprisons far more innocent individuals than it executes, and while it’s worse to be executed than to be imprisoned for twenty years and then released, imprisonment is still irreversible. A person may be released from prison, but one who has whiled away his youth in a cell can never really be made whole again.

I’m not a big fan of arguments from the possibility of innocence (plenty of innocent people are killed; but I think the death penalty is morally indefensible even when the condemned is clearly guilty as hell). But I don’t understand the argument that you’re making here. It’s true that you can’t get back the time lost while you were unjustly incarcerated, or undo the pain that was inflicted on you by the incarceration itself. But it’s not true that nothing can be done toward making you whole again: besides being released, you can also be compensated for the wrongful harm that was done to you. Whether or not that can ever fully make up for the wrong done you, it’s more than can be said for judicial murder of the innocent: there’s no possible compensation for the wrongfully executed. (Their estates can be paid off, but so what?) So how do you go from pointing out that no policy offers 100% restoration to the wronged to a defense of a policy that absolutely guarantees 0% restoration of the wronged?

Or, to put an AnCap spin on it, suppose you’re choosing between two privately-governed communities: One in which you have a .01% chance of being murdered and a .001% chance of being executed unjustly, or one in which you have a .02% chance of being murdered and no chance of being executed unjustly. Which do you pick?

I don’t know; I figure it depends in part on what you value in a society. But I think that this question actually changes the subject rather than responding to Sean’s point, anyway. He is not making a claim about what sort of society you should prefer to live in if you had to choose one. He’s making a claim about what you, personally, are or are not entitled to do: you are not entitled to commit premeditated murder, whether or not it helps produce the sort of society in which you would like to live. Now, maybe you think that he’s wrong about that; if you’re a strict consequentialist, for example, then one of the things you probably have to reject is the idea that, body count being equal, there’s any moral difference between doing murder and failing to prevent murder. But if so, that’s the point at which the argument needs to strike; offering two hypothetical societies for choice is just going to sidestep the point that Sean was explicitly trying to make.

Stefan,

Well, as I mentioned above, I don’t have a decisive opinion on the moral status of accepting a tax-funded salary; all I’m saying is that if there’s a moral problem, it has to do with the requirements of justice on your individual conduct, not with the sort of consequentialist calculation that was being suggested. I’m not positive that there is a moral problem.

As for Universities, I’m not sure precisely what question you’re asking. If you’re asking about the payments that governments make to some Universities at an institutional level, then it may well be true that justice obliges University administrators not to profit from the looting. Whether or not this is an obligation of justice, I think it would be wise not to lay claim to the loot: government money means government control, and the freer that Universities are from political power, the better. (Autonomy from political power is historically one of the most important values of the University; when Universities are reduced to branches of the civil service it debases them and undermines their purpose.)

If, on the other hand, you’re asking about salaries for faculty or staff at government Universities, I’m not worried much about that at all. The reason being that the money for those salaries isn’t solely tax loot. Some Universities are tax-funded but all are at least partly funded by voluntary contributions and fees from individual students. So what you’ve got here is accepting a salary from a tax-subsidized institution, rather than accepting a tax-funded salary. (The same would apply to, say, employees of firms that benefit from corporate welfare.) Now, you could argue that, if you accept position (2) as I outlined above (that nobody has a right to any tax-funded salary or benefits), then a professor would be morally obliged to return to net tax-payers whatever portion her salary comes from tax funds. But how could you calculate the portions, even in principle? The cases that worry me, and which push me towards position (3), are different ones, in which people are doing similar kinds of work but receiving a 100% tax-funded salary (e.g. teachers in K-12 government schools).

Ryan,

Granted: if you have unique skills to contribute (or not to contribute) to a position that’s especially demanding of them, then your co-operation or refual to co-operate with the government may make some concrete difference on the margin. Being in that position may create some special obligations for you, if your co-operation will make crimes possible that would otherwise not be possible. But this is not the position that most people on the government payroll are in, and it’s not the position that Ron Paul in particular or anybody else in the United States Congress is in. If Ron Paul resigns tomorrow, he will be replaced; and even if he were never replaced it would make absolutely no difference to the prospects of the U.S. Congress (plenty of seats have been vacant for various lengths of time). Whatever moral obligations Ron Paul has, as far as his seat and his salary are concerned, they have very little to do with the (effectively nonexistent) power that he has to sway the course of the federal government one way or another by those sorts of actions.

T.J. Madison: If by partially (or totally) withdrawing my support from the State I can decrease the number of such crimes, …

But T.J., you can’t.

If Ron Paul resigned tomorrow, his seat would promptly be filled. Outside the military, the government is not facing any kind of staffing shortage; every resignation or refusal means nothing more than that the seat will be filled by somebody else. Speaking strictly from the standpoint of consequentialist calculation, your personal refusal to fill any given government post, or to accept any particular salary from the government, is completely irrelevant, either on the whole or on the margin, to the prospects for the government’s ongoing cannibal feast.

I do think that there may be moral problems with accepting a government salary. But if there are any such problems, the reasons for them have nothing in particular to do with its practical effects.

Well, Roberts seems to be suggesting a couple of different directions in his comments. One of them is radically reducing the amount of energy consumed; another is lifting government subsidies that heavily favor big, centralized power generation over decentralized production (at the level of neighborhoods or individual homes). I think actually the latter has a lot more practical potential than the former: rewiring homes to draw electricity off a local source requires quite a bit of capital up front, but drastically overhauling lifestyles to drop energy consumption by 2/3 will involve a lot more of a cost upfront. There’s also good reason to think that, once the current regime of subsidies and government-granted privileges is knocked down, the market will quite naturally adjust to more decentralized production, without needing to get people to fundamentally change their attitudes towards power consumption. (That’s leaving aside the question of whether getting people to fundamentally change their attitudes would be a good thing; maybe it would be, but I wouldn’t count on that alone, or even primarily, to solve pressing environmental or economic issues.)

I couldn’t disagree more. This would only result in an even higher chance of being incarcerated for crimes that you didn’t commit, or crimes that were never committed at all by anyone.

Oh, well then, let’s bring back something really embarassing for the government to foul up. For example, we could kill people like this:

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned ‘to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris’, where he was to be ‘taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds’; then, ‘in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds’(Pièces originales …, 372-4).

— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 3

With these kind of punishments in place, I’ll bet the politico-legal system would be really careful not to convict the wrong person, right? Let’s hear it for de-abolition of public torture!

Trygve: “Second, I agree that brick walls are a waste of time, but plenty of people who are not brick walls could nonetheless use an education on the subject.”

People who are earnestly interested in learning something about sexism and feminism would be better off picking up one of the many fine books on the topic and reading it. Quite frankly, feminist activists have enough to do already without having to spend more time trying to educate the well-intentioned but clueless. There’s lots on this topic that men can look up on their own time, and indeed they ought to be expected to look it up before they go around making confident pronouncements about the existence of sexism, or about where it is or isn’t an active force. If they have not made the effort to make themselves less than ignorant about something before flapping their yap about it, then I can’t see why it would be obligatory or even useful for feminists to treat them as anything more than a waste of time and energy, unless and until they actually do make some effort to learn the basics on their own time.

Larry,

I don’t think it’s true that Hoppe is “as far from a collectivist as can be imagined.” His positions on immigration and ethnicity being exhibit A for that charge.

It’s true that in a free society people will have the right to create intentional communities where they can do stupid things like require new residents to sign on to contracts curtailing immigration on the basis of ethnicity. It’s also true that in a free society people will have the right to close privately-owned roads, town squares, and other thoroughfares to immigrants on the basis of ethnicity if they want to. However, a couple of points need to be made. Although politically people have the right to engage in this kind of nonviolent segregation, it is frankly stupid, and the premises that it operates from are nothing less than pure tribalism. In a free society people will be free to indulge in nonviolent tribalism of whatever sort they like, but there’s no reason why that kind of bigotry deserves anything but the contempt of rational people.

Further, Hoppe’s policy prescriptions don’t even qualify as peaceful in the first place. Even if it were true that, under a “natural order,” residents of San Diego would make a community covenant obligating residents to sharply limit immigration from Tijuana, in the actual world there is no such covenant and no resident of San Diego has ever agreed to, or been asked to agree to, those terms. Invading their property, or public property in which they arguably have a stake in the rightful ownership (e.g. roads near their house, town squares, etc.), on the excuse that you’re enforcing the terms of this counterfactual covenant that they never agreed to, is as obvious an invasion of people’s rights as you can think of.

Finally, economically speaking Hoppe’s proposals are absurd. Continent-spanning government’s can’t approximate the outcome of free control over private property. In a free society people wouldn’t own continent-spanning swaths of land, and socialist calculation of the outcomes for a dispersed network of land-owners is impossible, for the usual Misesian and Hayekian reasons. At this point Hoppeans typically appeal to poll numbers on attitudes towards some form of immigration or another to justify the idea that if land were free of government control, immigration would be more tightly restricted; the sight of Hoppeans, of all people, suddenly rushing to defend a centralized, democratic plebiscite as a way of calculating hypothetical market outcomes is one of the most grimly funny things in the current libertarian movement.

Just as a side note, I don’t reject the concept of public property per se. I think there is rightful public property; I just deny that “public property” means “government property.” Cf. Roderick Long’s essay A Plea for Public Property. This has some bearing on immigration: private owners of roads (for example) can exclude whomever they want for whatever reason they please, but there may be cases where roads, paths, etc. are rightfully public property, and where (because of the sort of public ownership in question) there’s nobody who really has the right to bar immigrants from using the road, as long as they are using it safely and their use is not excluding others from using it. Of course, whether things would actually pan out this way, or whether people would choose to keep road ownership strictly private, in the hands of single proprietors or contractually defined firms, is something that we’ll need an actual free society to discover.

Patrick,

Nobody in the feministing post is “categorically declaring positions and people as beyond the pale prior to investigation,” as far as I can tell. You’re talking about this as if feminist activists were unfamiliar with anti-feminist arguments or positions. By and large, that’s not so; most of us have had a great many anti-feminist arguments and positions thrown at us. Here’s what Alice Tiara was quoted as saying in the post you linked to: “I’ve been studying gender politics for more than a decade, and I want to talk about feminist issues on a fairly high level, which is not possible when you are constantly having to repeat yourself to men who don’t see sexism because of male privilege.” In other words, she’s studied the issue for quite some time, come to some decisive conclusions (say, that sexism does indeed exist and is in fact a social force), and isn’t interested in constantly revisiting the topic when there are other, less rudimentary issues that she’d much rather discuss.

I don’t see how this is any different from a 20th century historian who says she’s not interested in “debating” the Holocaust or the moon landing, or a serious evolutionary biologist who says she’s not interested in “debate” with Young Earth Creationists. This isn’t a matter of marking off some hoary dogma as unquestionable; it’s a matter of having some confidence in your conclusions after a lot of study and having better things to do with your time than try to enlighten the ignorant about such elementary matters. If earnest but ignorant people want to learn the basics about sexism or feminism, there are after all plenty of introductory books that they can pick up and read on the subject before they start demanding that feminists spend their time on arguing with them.

As for the means by which feminists can end male oppression of women, persuading sexists not to be quite so sexist is only one means among many, and not always the most useful. Building battered women’s shelters, staffing rape crisis centers, organizing co-operative childcare, disseminating information about reproductive healthcare, setting up abortion funds, clinic escorting and clinic defense, providing illegal abortions, refusing to do housework, etc. are just a few examples of the sorts of nonviolent direct action that feminists have employed to undermine sexism, which have little to do with either debating sexists or shooting at them. Labor unions don’t exist to persuade bosses to be pro-labor; they exist to organize workers for their own benefit. Similarly, feminist activism doesn’t exist to convince men to be anti-sexist; it exists to organize women for their own liberation.