self defense from non-violent threats
by Vinay Gupta • May 11, 2008 • The Global Picture • 6 Comments
Arto has been humoring me through an insanely long comment exchange on natural rights in Libertarianism.
I’ve come up with something that I think is worthy of consideration particularly as it deals with the case of economic coercion.
Here’s the notion. People have the right to do what it takes for them to stay alive. The natural right to self defense comes from this. But in a straight Libertarian context, the right to property is typically thought to be inviolable, giving people the “right” to, for example, shoot people who try and steal food they need to live.
That never sat right with me. If starving the poor to death, and shooting them when they try and steal to live is legal, we have a problem: the right to property makes a mockery of the right to life.
It took me a while to see an option. But I think I found one, which is the possibility of a “self-defense” claim which applies to non-violent threats to life. Here’s how one practical implementation of that might look.
1> People claiming a “right to life” defense basically hoist a white flag stating that they believe their life is in danger and they will not use violence. If they do attempt violence, the white flag can be safely ignored – shoot the bastards.
2> Anybody who uses force to prevent this person doing what they feel they need to do to survive is answerable in court for their actions in exactly the same way as if they had interfered with another person’s self defense in a simple case of violence.
3> The person operating under a white flag is answerable for their actions in court at a later date if crimes are committed in the course of their “right to life” defense in the same way they would be liable if they injured an innocent bystander in a self defense by violence situation.
The closest analog I have seen is the Clameur de Haro, which is an absolutely bizarre but rather appealing bit of feudal nonsense from the Channel Islands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clameur_de_haro
Anyway, what’s interesting about this is that it raises the prospect of groups of hungry people raising white flags and heading for the fields to eat what they need to live without being shot for stealing, but it still allows people to gun down carjackers if they choose to.
I think it also covers a broad class of medical emergency situations, where the patient cannot pay, quite nicely. Groups could carry “white flag insurance” to protect them against expenses incurred dealing with “white flag” losses which cannot be reimbursed after the fact by the person who made the white flag claim.
I think this is a satisfying answer to economic coercion in a libertarian context.
PS: Arto’s suggestion from the other thread is that this be called “self preservation” in which case I’d regularize the use as “self preservation” via arms for what we call “self defense” and so on.
Well, to recap my position from the other thread: I don’t agree in theory, because I don’t recognize the “right to live at someone else’s expense” that you are positing, nor do I think much of the posited basis for a priori natural rights in general; a stance well-elucidated by the following article:
http://www.spectacle.org/0400/natural.html
In practice, though, I think we’re pretty close in terms of how to practically implement the scenario. The main difference being that in my view, the starving guy gets his food *in practice* without *in theory* having a legal loophole for obtaining it. (The sentencing for “stealing for self-preservation” being probably *in practice* exactly as lenient as in your system, though.)
After all, any sane society will ostracize a man shooting down unarmed people who are waving a white flag with their last strength, and any sane starving man aware of strong property rights will ask/beg for the food before attempting to steal it. Such a travesty might happen once, but it would be unlikely to happen again.
So, I don’t think this is a problem in practice, and even if it were, the natural rights derivation of a legal loophole against being able to shoot invaders of your property is not a compelling answer to me. But this is all amply covered ground in the other thread, no need to rehash it here.
In practice, gunning down starving people has been the sport of governments for at least 200 years, since the British mass-starved the Indians in the 1880s or so. I’d hate to go to all the trouble to reform a political system just to move the power to gun down the starving from the governments to the individual!
That’s a kind of fatalism. Don’t you think that if your society in question consisted of people who would so cavalierly endorse, or turn a blind eye to, acts like that, you would have many much larger troubles than the mere unlikely-to-begin-with case of stealing for self-preservation?
It’s all about edge cases. A good answer to starvation and medical emergency from under-insured people handles what are, to me, two of the most dangerous edge cases in conventional Libertarian thinking.
Auction-based geolibertarianism handles the edge cases around land-as-property and environmental law.
There aren’t that edge cases left. I’ve got maybe two more to bag, and then I’m ready to write a constitution.
Well, as I’ve elaborated on ad nauseam, I don’t think those are actual problems for libertarianism (the “edge cases” you come up with all presume that people act like robots). Nor do I think the axioms that you are using as a basis for tackling them are correct in any wider sense of the word.
But let’s leave it at that, and looking forward to seeing the document