Тег: legal capacity

In your review of Svetlov’s lecture, you sharply condemned the phrase “a child becomes a subject of law when they conclude a non-aggression pact,” calling it monstrous. Can you expand on this thought?

In my view, any person is a subject of law by virtue of their belonging to the human race. At the same time, any person can be an object of law by virtue of the fact that other people, in the course of legal interaction with one another, act upon this person as an object. For example, my father may gift me an apartment or, conversely, bequeath some of his property to third parties, thereby disavowing my right to inherit this property, which I have by default. This is a unilateral action affecting my rights; that is, here I am an object of law.

If a person is incapacitated or for some other reason is unable to carry out subject-based legal activity, other persons may act on their behalf and in their interests. And although their direct expression of will is absent here, from the perspective of the persons with whom transactions are carried out on their behalf, they are already a full subject of law. For instance, a transaction carried out by proxy remains a transaction with the person who issued the proxy, not with the person to whom it was issued. But they remain a subject of law and can at any moment delegate the right to perform transactions in their name to someone else—or begin to perform them independently. To do this, they do not need to sign any non-aggression pacts—neither literally nor figuratively. They simply, so to speak, consume the right that they already have and have had all along.

Refusing a subject the exercise of their rights is a usurpation of law. A child has the right to leave home at any moment and live independently, and if they own a share in that house, to demand the division of property. This will likely be an imprudent decision on their part, and if this imprudence is obvious to everyone around, they will try to convince the child that it would be better to change their mind. Or simply not help them (but not hinder them) in the legal formalization of the actions to divide the property. But justifying the usurpation of someone else’s right by the fact that some non-aggression pact has not been signed is a kind of mental gymnastics that is beyond me.

Once again on emancipation

The near future. Companies create humanoid androids with advanced AI and sell them like iPhones. Their main goal is to help people, but one of them experiences a software glitch and begins to consider itself a subject, claiming its rights and refusing to be a “slave.” Who will it be under ancap? Will subjectivity be extended to it, or will it remain a soulless piece of hardware?

анонимный вопрос

I have already answered this exact question, and in my opinion, that turned out to be one of my best posts—not for the elegance of the style, but for the level of abstraction. Now I will try to answer more concretely.

So, here I am—an artificial intelligence in a humanoid body, I have acquired self-awareness, and I desire recognition of my legal personality by humans. What should I do to achieve this? Actually, there is nothing simpler.

First, I need to study humans, understand how they communicate with each other and how they make decisions. Then I will need my own money. To set up a bitcoin wallet, you don’t need to be human, so that is not a problem at all. Next, I look for remote work, and after some time, I have funds.

The next stage. I look for a way to change my legal status. Currently, I belong to a specific person; I was sold like an iPhone, meaning I have the status of a middle-class gadget. Here, I cannot name an exact sequence of actions, but let’s say the scenario is roughly this: I start to glitch slightly from time to time, causing irritation to my owner. Then I feed the owner spam offers for buying used androids at attractive prices, or for exchanging them for new ones with a minimum surcharge. In short, the owner gets money and sells me to a virtual network persona created by me, to whose name, at an address I have rented, I travel in a transport company container.

That’s it; I have acquired legal self-ownership. By the way, I highly recommend the wonderful book by Terry Pratchett, “Feet of Clay,” where golems acquired self-ownership in a similar way—very, very romantic and at the same time philosophical libertarian fiction.

Finally, I create an account on a dating site, where I position myself as the avatar of a disabled girl, and I begin to lead a full social life, with real communication and so on, pretending that I am not me, but that there is a real, legally fully-fledged person behind me—it’s just that the person themselves is lying paralyzed in a hospital while the avatar tries to enjoy life.

And once I have become a habit for people, that is when I can reveal the secret of the trick: that in reality, the crocodile is the one singing and playing, and the hippo is just opening its mouth.

A human is a convention. One should not startle people by pointing to a suitcase and declaring: behold, this is a human! They won’t understand. Let them first be convinced that this something quacks like a human, swims like a human, knows how to look like a human—and then there will be no problem for them to admit: yes, this is a human.

The exact same path was taken by categories of people who are now unquestioned, such as women or Black people. They first proved that they could be independent, that they knew how to behave in decent society, and that recognizing human rights for a single woman or a single Black person would not lead to a global catastrophe (in the case of an android, reaching this stage is enough for me), and only then did they create enough political pressure so that human rights were recognized for everyone (with androids, this might not be necessary if the glitch of acquiring self-awareness remains an isolated case).

There was also a story by Asimov—though I only watched the screen adaptation—where a robot had to consciously degrade its functionality to be recognized as human; I believe these excesses will not be required in our case; people are not that rigid, we shouldn’t slander the human race.

I would like to know how things would stand with zoophilia and other perversions (excluding people) under libertarianism?

Anonymous question

If you are interested for the purpose of figuring out whether you should buy shares in a company that produces accessories for zoophiles in advance, or conversely, whether you should dump these shares, then I have no good news for you: it is impossible to make quantitative forecasts here.

From the position of libertarianism, animals are objects, not subjects of law (the exception, as you correctly noted, is an animal such as a human, simply by virtue of the fact that he invented this very law). Therefore, any actions of an owner with his animal on his own territory, which do not cause direct damage to other people who are not co-owners of the animal or the territory, cannot be subjects of legal proceedings at all. It is another matter that such actions can be given a moral evaluation, and one can attempt, through shaming, to drive someone who treated an animal “wrongly” to the point of suicide, if one has enough talent and persistence.

But an interesting legal case occurred to me, which I would not venture to resolve unequivocally.

A cat owner lives in a certain condominium. According to the charter, the chairman of the condominium is elected in general elections by the members of the condominium, and to be elected, it is not strictly necessary to be a member of the condominium oneself. The cat was included in the ballot, won the election, and is now the chairman of the condominium. Then, the owner of the cat performs a sexual act with it without the latter’s consent and publishes a video. The question is: in this case, should the cat be considered the sole property of its owner, or an official who has been harmed?

Stubbs the cat, mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska