Comments Elsewhere

Let’s imagine that, in a democratic society, they hold a referendum on the question of whether non-libertarians should have the right to hunt libertarians like animals. 95% of the population votes that yes, they should. Now they get the rifle and the hounds and come after you.

Questions: (1) is this law “more legitimate” than a law for hunting-libertarians-like-animals that was passed by a tyrant? (2) When the hunters pound on your door, do you have an obligation to “work through the system rather than outside it” to change the law, or do you have the right to defy it by picking up a gun and defending yourself as best you can?

“I believe in facing the consequences of your actions no matter what they are. You dont want to die? Dont kill people.”

Of course precisely the same argumentative maneuver could be used to defend any kind of tyrannical law whatsoever. For example: “You don’t want to be sent to the gulag? Don’t publish poetry critical of Comrade Stalin.”

You could say “But hey, people have a human right to publish poetry critical government officials. They don’t have a human right to kill other people. So you should have to face whatever consequences the government chooses to impose for the murder, but not for the poetry.” Well, then the issue isn’t The Law; it’s that you think it’s O.K. to punish murderers by killing them, independently of what the law is. You may or may not think that it’s the best policy, or you may even be unsure about it, but you clearly think it’s morally permissible for the government to do it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be acting as if the contents of the law proved anything at all.

As for abortion clinic bombers, it is the fact of the matter, not the motivation that matters. If abortion really were murder, then blowing up clinics to stop it would be perfectly justified. (There are well over 1,000,000 abortions every year in the United States alone. If one honestly believes that abortion is murder then he or she is logically committed to believing that we are living through the worst holocaust in all of human history. And if she or he honestly believed that, what excuse could there possibly be for not trying to end it by any means necessary?)

But since abortion is, in fact, not murder, clinic bombers aren’t right in destroying property or killing people. In fact they are terrorists and murderers.

Whatever the answer to the question is, though, it has to do with the correct account of what human rights people have, not with motivations and certainly not with the contents of the law.