Тег: Law

The Question of Emancipation

According to the principle of self-ownership, a person owns their body and its derivatives. Does it not follow from this that the mother (or both parents) owns their child?

анонимный вопрос

Under ancap, under what conditions does a sentient being/program that is not human cease to be property and obtain rights equal to human rights?

Dmitry

Indeed, according to the principle of self-ownership, both a child and an artificial intelligence are the property of their creators. But the very concept of property is a convention. And exactly what rights the right of ownership entails is also a convention. Some sentient beings agree to tolerate certain behavior of other sentient beings if, for some reason, they believe those others have the right to do so. Generalizing the countlessly diverse behavior of the most varied sentient beings, wise lawyers formulate legal principles which, in particular, state:

  • which set of rights is called the right of ownership
  • what constitutes a human
  • that a sentient human possesses the right of ownership over themselves
  • that since a child almost inevitably grows into a sentient human, it makes sense to recognize part of the rights of a sentient human in advance
  • how a growing child will obtain those rights that they were not yet entitled to at birth
  • how a sentient being that is not human can obtain rights equal to human rights

The conclusions of different lawyers may not coincide. Different people may share the opinions of different lawyers to varying degrees. Some people are ready to use violence for the sake of asserting their ideas about legal doctrine, while some are not.

And ancap, as applied to the issue under consideration, is simply such a legal doctrine which asserts that there is no one whose opinion on this matter is uniquely and a priori correct, and subject to imposition on all others through the unlimited application of force.

The moment you declare that ancap is the principle of self-ownership raised to an absolute, or the principle of non-aggression raised to an absolute, or the principle of freedom of contract raised to an absolute—you are deviating from the principles of ancap. Keep your absolute away from children (and other borderline legal phenomena).

Keep the absolute away from children!

Restrictions on rights

1. Imagine a situation: a local epidemic of some infection suddenly breaks out in a hospital, and the doctors forbid you from leaving the quarantine zone. But in doing so, they are restricting your right to freedom of movement. How would such situations be resolved under ancap?

2. Consider this situation: in the summer, a child is lying/sitting in a car, crying, possibly suffocating from lack of air and heat; the parents went somewhere on business and forgot about them, and a passerby sees this and wonders what to do. Can they or the police break into the car or smash a window without permission, if the car is private property (which is inviolable under ancap)?

3. Is it permissible to cause damage to a person’s property that clearly threatens other people? Examples: a car with the handbrake on starts rolling toward another car, a tower leans due to age and is about to collapse onto neighboring buildings, etc. The nuance: there is no contact with the owner of the threatening property, or there is no time for it (the car is rolling).

I decided to combine three similar anonymous questions into one to avoid writing three similar answers.

In the first case, it turns out that exercising your right to freedom of movement could lead to significant harm to third parties, so you are asked not to insist on its exercise until it can be ensured that the threat has passed. In the second and third cases, causing damage to private property prevents harm to a third party. In all cases, you are simply presented with the fact of your rights being violated.

Where do rights come from? Rights arise from the interactions of some members of society with others. Some people agree to tolerate certain behavior of other people because they believe that those people have a right to such behavior.

Doctors believe they have the right to restrict your movement; they only need to convince others of this, and for this, they can use various methods. The most obvious and correct one: when you are admitted to a hospital, you sign a contract that outlines various boundaries, including force majeure situations like quarantine. Again, to ensure quarantine, doctors usually bring in specialists specifically for enforcement. Who will pay for this? As already mentioned in the post about epidemics, the most obvious interested party is insurance companies. They are the ones interested in ensuring the epidemic is prevented and the volume of insurance claim payouts is minimized; for this purpose, they can pay both those who enforce the quarantine and those caught in the quarantine—as compensation for the inconvenience. Or the insurance company may decide that the danger is small and will not introduce restrictions—those are its risks.

A passerby believes they have the right to encroach upon your private property to save a person; they only need to convince others of this. This is quite simple: they only need to demonstrate the rescued child to other passersby, and they will join the rescuer’s sincere indignation toward the jerk who left the child in the car, and perhaps even help in searching for the car’s owner.

General principles emerge from the generalization of private practice. They work well for typical situations and allow for the saving of mental effort. When two conflicting general principles collide in one head, a mental effort must still be made. It’s nothing terrible; the ability to think is always useful.

What will happen to the world ocean under ancap? Will anyone have ownership rights to it?

Ashot

Right now, international neutral waters represent a curious space of partial ancap. While not being anyone’s property, they allow a vessel to remain almost entirely extraterritorial (a vessel is considered the territory of the flag state, and therefore the market has decided in favor of convenient flags—such states have large merchant fleets, sometimes without even bothering to have access to the sea).

That is precisely why, when ancap arrives on land, the changes at sea will be minimal. A vessel will remain the private property of its owner, fishing grounds will be jointly operated by fishing companies (and if they fail to carefully read Elinor Ostrom, the market will punish them), there will be an increased likelihood of encountering pirates in the straits (but a rich set of tools can be used against them), the water will remain salty, and the great garbage patch will remain localized in the Pacific Ocean, existing by the will of the prevailing currents.

As wild fish becomes more expensive, humanity will increasingly switch to farmed fish; as plastic becomes more expensive, there will be a growing temptation to fish it out of the ocean for recycling; as the population grows and seasteading becomes cheaper, a considerable part of the ocean may become the territorial waters of new floating islands; until then, it is unlikely that anyone will start carving it into small plots.

Modern ancaps see the future of the ocean, while states persist on land, something like this

Is abortion justifiable from a libertarian perspective?

анонимный вопрос

The topic of abortion is the subject of heated debates that flare up from time to time within the libertarian community, and I get the feeling that the cause is not the acuity of the problem, but rather that it is a convenient scholastic exercise allowing one to examine the phenomenon from various positions while continuing to be considered a libertarian.

Arguments for abortion

  1. According to the principle of self-ownership, a woman has property rights over her own body, including the embryo that appeared there, regardless of whether this happened by her will or against it. The embryo is thus viewed as a part of the woman’s body, possessing no legal personality. At the same time, however, the interests of the father or other parties may be taken into account: if they provided the woman with resources from the moment of conception under the promise to carry the child to term, and she has an abortion, they are then entitled to require her to pay the agreed-upon liquidated damages.
  2. Even if the embryo is considered a person and its legal personality is recognized, its presence inside the womb is lawful only with the mother’s permission; otherwise, it must leave the organism upon first request, or else the woman has the right to remove it from the organism by force. As is easy to see, the discussion here is raised to a more abstract level, where the relationship between the woman and the fetus in her womb is interpreted as a relationship between two independent subjects, which may be considered a certain kind of casuistry.

Arguments against abortion

  1. If abortion is prohibited in a community with a free exit, the rules of which the woman accepts by virtue of her presence in it at the moment of conception, then the act of abortion will be a breach of contract on her part, and therefore the agreed-upon sanctions should be applied to her. The legal personality of the embryo is entirely irrelevant in this case. This position, however, is vulnerable to the woman’s claim of her right to freely leave the community and only then have an abortion, and therefore it is mentioned infrequently in disputes.
  2. By the fact of conception, parents commit violence against the child, because, firstly, they change its state from non-existence to existence without its consent, and secondly, they forcibly cast it into a state of helplessness. This entails an obligation for them to compensate the child for the harm caused, that is, to ensure an unobstructed birth, and then to provide resources until the child acquires the ability to exist independently. This position is vulnerable to the thesis that if changing the state from non-existence to existence is violence, then the reverse change of state back to non-existence would be quite adequate compensation; also, if conception is violence, then it is the duty of every responsible citizen to prevent such violence, meaning the very fact of unprotected sex should already be considered an attempt at conception and punished with the full severity of the law for violators of the non-aggression principle. It is not hard to guess that a community consistently practicing this approach would survive for exactly one generation.

An attempt to reconcile the parties

If you consider abortions to be aggressive violence against prenatal children, then you presumably would want children not just to be born, but also to grow up in love and affection. But it is easy to guess that if a woman wanted to have an abortion, and she was stopped only by the fear of your harsh sanctions, it is not a given that she will feel warm emotions toward the child, not to mention the temptation to use various ways to starve the fetus or kill the infant in such a way that the causes of death seem natural. Therefore, it would be very ethical on your part to offer a desperate woman, ready to get rid of an unborn child, financial assistance and your guarantee to take the child into guardianship immediately after birth in exchange for a firm promise to carry the child to term and give birth to it. In this way, you will not only prevent what you consider a crime, but also ensure the child a truly loving and responsible family.

If, however, you prefer to remain in the position that your business is to demand punishment for crimes rather than prevent them, then be prepared for the fact that quite a few will consider this bad faith behavior; for if you know that a helpless prenatal child died, although a shred of your effort could have saved it, then according to the principle of estoppel, you cannot demand punishment for another person who also allowed this death, although a shred of their effort could have saved the child.

You didn’t take the child into guardianship, how could you!

What punishment could a hacker receive under ancap for their deeds? And a pentester, if they perform a hack to help, without warning the potential victim/person being saved?

ℛØ௶Ꭿℒ ℋᎯℭᏦℰℛ (question paid in the amount of 0.00119699btc)

Thank you for broadening my horizons, now I know what a pentester is))

Who is a hacker or a pentester from a legal point of view? They are a trespasser, that is, a violator of the boundaries of private property. Such a violation in itself does not yet cause damage to the property owner, but the owner has every right to oppose it.

At the same time, the owner’s arbitrariness in choosing means of opposition is limited. It is one thing to repel the break-in itself (I opened your gate and peeked inside, you glare at me fiercely, as if to say, “what are you staring at,” I close the gate, turn around and walk past), and another thing to pursue the person who carried out this break-in. You are no longer on your own territory, the intrusion is not currently happening, so what are your grounds for using violence?

Such grounds could only be a property claim. The right to shoot a real physical trespasser who has violated the boundaries of your private property arises only because you have strong reasons to assume a real threat to your property. And even then, in most cases, the court considers that such grounds arise only when the property boundary is clearly marked, a “Trespassers will be shot” sign is installed on the boundary, and the violator saw and ignored it.

Thus, even if, by putting in some effort, you managed to reliably determine the identity of the hacker who broke into a particular network resource of yours, you will not be able to legally demand any compensation from them until you explain exactly what damage was caused. At the same time, copying information, even if it is very dear to you, does not cause damage. Now, if, for example, the hacker caused a server malfunction and your online store did not work for two hours—that is already real damage, the size of which can be assessed. As for how property damage is handled under ancap, I have already described that extensively.

Obviously, few people will undertake to spend a vast amount of resources on searching for a hacker and bringing them to court; most, of course, will prefer passive defense, as it is ultimately cheaper. And here, pentesters with their profit motive are the first friends of business. By arranging penetration tests followed by detailed information security recommendations, they will cheaply provide owners of information resources with prevention of hacker attacks.

Of course, the market is unlikely to “solve” hackers completely; this will remain a niche for enthusiasts of exciting intellectual earnings for quite a while. But, having settled down, a hacker will, of course, move into more profitable sectors.

And how is libertarianism in terms of sex?

анонимный вопрос

As is well known, economic theory does not provide quantitative predictions, so let us not guess exactly how many days you will be unable to walk; instead, let’s actually reflect on how libertarianism stands in terms of sex.

Sex between legally competent persons

Anything is permissible here, provided that voluntariness is observed. I will specifically note that voluntary consent can be withdrawn at any moment. If a penalty was provided for this by contract, then the penalty is paid. Post-coital disagreement is a legal nonsense; any sane court would tell you to get lost with such claims. A demand for a penalty for inadequate quality of services is permissible if such a possibility was agreed upon in advance.

If one of the subjects was bound by a contract with a third party, and the sex violates this contract, then the second subject, who did not enter into the contract, is not a party to the conflict and cannot be held liable. So stop pulling the hair of the vile home-wrecker and focus on the divorce from the husband.

The existence of a subordination relationship between subjects is not, by default, an obstacle to sex. Thus, if a department head promotes their sexual partner, or conversely, refuses a bonus nomination for refusing sex, that is the business owner’s problem.

Sex between non-legally competent persons

The participants of the act themselves remain legally uninvolved, just as a dog is not subject to trial for mating with someone’s bitch without permission while the owners were looking away. All possible claims regarding the excess are settled between the guardians. Moreover, the fact that one of the guardians disapproves of what happened while the second has nothing against it is irrelevant. Justified claims may arise only if this disapproval was known in advance and the guardian of the second party incited the ward to act. Otherwise, post-factum claims make no more sense than the post-coital disagreement of one of the participants of the act.

Sex between a legally competent and a non-legally competent person

A simple combination of considerations from the two previous sections applies here. Everything performed by mutual consent is permissible; a justified claim may arise only if the legally competent party was aware in advance of the guardian’s disagreement regarding sex with the ward.

Sex with an incapacitated person

Here, there is a firm presumption of disagreement. If consent is not expressed in an explicit form (for example, if the girl is dead drunk and asleep), it means there is no consent.

Don’t even think about it, kitty!

Why, under ancap, will courts follow libertarian principles of law?

анонимный вопрос

Answering this question is not just simple, but very simple. If people only apply to a court voluntarily, and the court has no means of coercing the execution of its decisions—which is precisely the kind of pathetic existence courts might lead under ancap—then courts have no options left but to follow libertarian principles of law.

Alice, based on the principle of self-ownership, voluntarily turned to a court to resolve a conflict with Bob. The court denies Alice self-ownership and issues a verdict stating that she has no right to own any property, so that Bob has the right of exclusive disposal over all disputed property, starting with Alice herself. Bob, in accordance with the court’s decision, appropriates all the property, including Alice, whom he keeps on a leash and beats for any disobedience.


Under ancap, there cannot be a sad girl on a leash!

What will stop Alice from sabotaging the court’s decision and actively resisting Bob, seeking any outside help? What will stop any outsider who, seeing a violation of the NAP, asks what is going on, is told it is the execution of a court decision, and responds that he doesn’t give a fuck?

Since the question itself postulates that it is ancap all around, it means the vast majority of relationships in this society are voluntary and market-based. This is precisely what everyone perceives as the norm, and any deviation from the norm must be hidden or very carefully justified.

One can ask “what would be the typical reaction under ancap to such-and-such a deviation from libertarian principles,” and in response, those typical reactions will be described, demonstrating the feedback mechanisms in an anarcho-capitalist society that make deviating from basic principles unprofitable. But it is pointless to frame the question as “how to fight mass deviations of courts from libertarian principles under ancap?” If they are mass deviations, it is no longer ancap, and one must look into why they are mass and which feedback mechanisms were lacking.

The question of whether a pure anarcho-capitalist society is stable has no theoretical solution today. Societies considered precursors to ancap in legal terms (Ireland, Iceland) were historically defeated by external forces, but this is not an argument for internal instability.

What are the drawbacks of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist theories?

анонимный вопрос

The main drawback of both libertarian and anarcho-capitalist theories is that they do not exist.

There is an economic theory developed by the Austrian school of economics, which took on a relatively cohesive form thanks to Mises. This is praxeology, that is, the theory of human action; catallactics, that is, the theory of exchange; the theory of money, the theory of interventionism, the theory of the business cycle, and so on. The logic of the libertarian doctrine’s presentation is built upon economic theory, and it is used to verify various fantasies regarding the possible structure of society. Austrian economic theory does not provide quantitative forecasts and postulates the fundamental impossibility of doing so, which gives many followers of other schools reason to criticize it for uselessness in this regard.

There is a libertarian legal theory, also known as institutional or sociological. Russian libertarians generally tend to rely on it in their legal constructions, which is not least because it was developed by Vladimir Chetvernin, who is Russian and still alive. In the English-speaking world, natural law theories are more common.

There are various ethical libertarian teachings: some take natural rights as their basis, others derive ethics from the idea of a contract, and some rely on consequentialism—that is, evaluating actions by their consequences. In short, in the field of ethics, libertarians experience considerable fragmentation and instability.

As a result, libertarianism is a rather broad and pluralistic current of thought, which can be seen as both a plus (there is internal discussion, there is development, but there is also agreement on the fundamentals) and a minus (there is no unambiguous opinion on a number of specialized questions, some of which are quite serious—for example, whether an institution such as the state has a right to exist).


Cool little tree, and Chetvernin isn’t even here yet…

Update: after the post was already written, a video with Alexei Tereshchuk was released on SVTV, which deals precisely with similar issues.

Hey, Ancap-chan. Can you explain step-by-step and in detail how the judicial system will work in the wonderful Ancapistan? And how will private prisons make a profit?

anonymous question

In addition to this post, I also recommend reading all posts tagged “court,” at least this one and this one.

To start, let me roll out a bunch of definitions related to your question. Often, providing clear definitions is enough, and the answer to the question becomes completely obvious.

  • Property  – the relationship of an object to a subject, within which the subject disposes of the object at their discretion, and other subjects refrain from similar actions without the owner’s sanction.
  • Ancap – a system of relations between people based on the principle of self-ownership, that is, ownership of oneself. In common parlance, we will also call an “ancap” a person who is ready to adhere to this system of relations.
  • Law – a complex of practices for resolving conflicts between people.
  • Court – a legal institution within which a conflict between parties is resolved by a third party. Under ancap, a court can resolve conflicts only within the scope of the authority delegated to it by the parties to the conflict.
  • Prison – a legal institution within which the party that caused damage is isolated from the party that suffered damage. Under ancap, isolation can occur only with the sanction of the isolated party and only on terms agreed upon with them.

Now let’s provide a few examples of how law works in Ancapistan.

  1. Two ancaps disagree with each other regarding which of them owns a certain object. They have stated their claims to each other, and after discussion, they agreed on who gets the disputed object, and who, for example, in exchange for waiving their claims, receives an agreed-upon compensation. The conflict is resolved.
  2. Two ancaps disagree with each other regarding which of them owns a certain object. They have stated their claims to each other but have not reached an agreement. Then they agree with a third party in one way or another and delegate to them the authority to resolve the conflict. The court examines the situation, issues a decision, and the parties to the conflict execute the decision. The conflict is resolved.
  3. Two ancaps disagree with each other regarding which of them owns a certain object. In an attempt to exercise their property rights over the disputed object, the parties begin to cause each other some damage. Not wanting the conflict to escalate, one of the parties finds a shelter where they are out of reach of the second party, and after this, the parties begin to negotiate about a court. The court examines the situation, issues a decision, and the parties to the conflict execute the decision. The conflict is resolved.

The shelter appearing in the third example is, in essence, a prison. For the service of providing security during the period of imprisonment, the prison owner may charge a fee from the client, that is, from the person who wishes to obtain shelter.

I do not think that under ancap, the service of imprisonment will be in such high demand that it would be profitable to build special, well-protected structures to provide it. Most likely, the service of providing shelter will be provided decentrally and will be more declarative in nature.

A guy is running down the street, all disheveled and bruised, and another guy is behind him, very agitated and wanting to bruise the first one even more. The first guy rushes to me and asks for help. I shield him from the second one and suggest that he move toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict. I have isolated one participant of the conflict from the other, and, in essence, this is no different from putting him in a pretrial detention center. The only thing that prevents the strong side in this conflict from continuing the crackdown on the weak side is the unwillingness to enter into a conflict with me as well. In the vast majority of situations, this is quite enough.

Will I take money for the service provided? I don’t know, it depends on the circumstances, depending on how much it distracts me from my own affairs.

In describing this example, I proceeded from the implicit assumption that ancap developed in a peaceful society through the gradual withering away of the state, which is why the described conflict, within which the need for shelter arose, looks quite “vegetarian.” Of course, if some Venezuela arrives at ancap through the complete and rapid bankruptcy of the state, then conflicts between people in the first stage will be significantly more numerous, and there may indeed arise a sufficiently stable, solvent demand for solid fortified shelters where the client would be provided with armed security services. But the probability of such a scenario seems very small to me.

Hi! How do things stand with animal rights in libertarianism? Can a person buy a kitten for the purpose of cruelly killing it? Can people create a community like Ancient Rome with the annual crucifixion of dogs?

anonymous question

What is the right to certain actions? It is a state of affairs in which others agree to tolerate these actions. In other words: you have the right to do something from the perspective of certain external subjects if they agree not to oppose these actions.

For instance, one kitten may have the right to sleep on a person’s face, while another may not even have the right to enter the person’s room.
Libertarianism is a legal doctrine asserting that no legal subject has the right to initiate violence against other legal subjects and their property with impunity. Thus, libertarianism reduces the question of acceptable treatment of animals to a question of legal personality. A stranger who has come from beyond the village outskirts—is he a subject of law? Then no one has the right to initiate violence against him with impunity. A woman—is she a subject of law? Then no one has the right to initiate violence against her with impunity. A child—is he a subject of law? An embryo—is it a subject of law? A dog—is it a subject of law?

In other words, purely logically, libertarianism can serve as a basis for defending animal rights—but only among those who recognize the legal personality of animals. As for those who consider animals to be objects, while remaining within the framework of the same libertarian doctrine, they may act toward the animals they own at their own discretion.
A problem arises when the positions of people who consider animals to be at least partially legal subjects (for example, at the level of children) clash with those of people who consider animals to be objects of property. The most stubborn disputes are always conducted precisely over definitions.

In essence, from the perspective of their opponents, animal rights advocates make claims against them for the suffering that the advocates themselves experience while realizing the suffering of animals in the hands of their tormentors. How should one react to such claims? As with any claims of an ethical rather than legal nature: take them into account, weigh the possible costs of fulfilling or not fulfilling the claim, and then act.

The better organized the groups applying moral pressure are, the sooner the corresponding morality becomes mainstream in society. So, those who nonetheless wish to crucify dogs without hindrance in a libertarian society need to start promoting this hobby of theirs in advance—under the banner of preserving cultural traditions, or some other way.

the kitty is sad(((