Тег: Justice

“Citizen-Avenger”: Not a Libertarian, but a State in One Person

After the release of the movie “Citizen Vigilante,” some viewers saw the main character as almost a libertarian avenger: the state is failing, the courts release criminals, and an armed citizen takes the protection of society into his own hands.
 
It sounds impressive. But this character has about as much in common with libertarian philosophy as a sea pirate does with the protection of private property. The external attributes are similar: distrust of the state, weapons, independence, and contempt for bureaucracy. But inside, there is a completely opposite system of values.
 
Libertarianism begins not with a pistol, but with the recognition of every person’s right to life, liberty, and property. From this follows the non-aggression principle: violence cannot be used against someone who has not initiated it themselves. And this is where the image of the “people’s avenger” falls apart. The vigilante kills not only criminals. He executes the relatives of a rapist—people who did not participate in the rape. Yes, they say disgusting things, justify the crime, and blame the victim. Their words are loathsome. But libertarianism does not presume the death penalty for vile views.
 
A person is responsible for their own actions, not for the crimes of a son, brother, father, or neighbor. Collective responsibility is a favorite practice of authoritarianism. Today, a family is shot for the act of a relative; tomorrow, property is seized from the “wrong” class; and the day after tomorrow, people are sent to camps for having an unfortunate last name. The path is well-trodden, and the signs have long been in place.
 
Even more terrifying is the scene with the oncoming car. The hero intentionally drives into the opposite lane, forcing an innocent driver off the road. The car falls into a ditch and explodes. People die simply because the vigilante needed a vivid illustration for another monologue. This is no longer “private justice,” but the murder of innocents for the sake of a political spectacle.
 
At the same time, the film tries to endow the hero with a moral code. On the bus, he pays the fare for teenagers and gives them a lecture: if some do not pay, the costs are shifted to others. Everyone must follow the rules! The thought itself is clear. Only it is preached by a man who entered the country illegally, did not legalize his status, hides the real owners of real estate behind a network of holdings, and raises questions with tax authorities. The result is a surprising moral compass: if you don’t pay for a public transport ticket, you undermine society. If you hide your business, money, and legal status—well, that’s something else, that’s an “extended vacation.”
 
Of course, a libertarian is by no means obligated to consider state law just. Immigration restrictions violate natural human rights, taxes are theft, and financial regulation is a violation of property rights. Breaking any law that punishes “crimes” without a victim does not make a person a villain and is entirely permissible.
 
But then one must be consistent. You cannot declare yourself an opponent of the system when the rules hinder you, and become a stern defender of order when a teenager doesn’t buy a ticket. This is no longer a philosophy of freedom, but the good old “everything for friends, the law for everyone else.”
 
“Citizen Vigilante” could have raised an interesting question: what should society do when the state justice system truly fails to protect victims? Where is the line between self-defense, civil resistance, and vigilantism? But instead of a complex conversation, the film presents the viewer with a man who has appointed himself investigator, judge, and executioner. Moreover, evidence, proportionality of punishment, and the rights of the innocent interest him about as much as a cash receipt interests a bank robber.
 
The film’s protagonist does not protect individual freedom. Instead, he creates his own pocket state: he writes the laws himself, determines the guilty himself, passes sentences himself, and exempts himself from the rules. This is not libertarianism, but the dictatorship of one man—just without a coat of arms, a parliament, and boring meetings.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Prisons have become tiresome for everyone – even for Americans

Imagine you are stuck in an elevator with a stranger who believes that putting people in prison for longer is a great idea for solving all of society’s problems. He believes that people should live in fear of such an outcome, and then crime will vanish. Rolling your eyes, you reply: “Sure, that helps a lot, especially if you need a new criminal buddy or a free survival course for when everyone around you is a wolf.”

And now for the surprise: more and more people are starting to think like you. For example, as a recent study by the University of Cincinnati shows, Americans who for decades believed that prison was the best remedy for crime have finally stopped being fans of mass incarceration. The study confirms: most US citizens prefer to direct non-violent offenders toward rehabilitation programs, treatment, or community service.

Now Americans do not want to build more prisons, and many of them consider the prison system unfair. Yes, the very people who once voted for laws like “Three Strikes and You’re Out” now admit that mass incarceration is not cool, is expensive, and is completely ineffective.

And how about other countries? Even better! Look at the Netherlands. Over the last 20 years, they have closed about 20 prisons. The Dutch literally don’t know what to do with the empty prisons anymore. They are opening hotels and creative spaces there. Imagine: a tour of a former prison with cocktails and modern art. Why is this happening? Because they realized that sending a person to prison for petty theft or drugs is roughly the same as putting out a fire with gasoline. A person rarely becomes a saint after prison. More often than not, prison doesn’t reform a person; it ruins them completely.

In Germany, most offenses are already punished with fines. The Germans reason simply: why spend taxpayers’ money on maintaining petty offenders? It’s better for offenders to replenish the budget with fines than to sit behind bars at our expense. And the Scandinavian countries have gone even further. There, prisons are even called “schools of life”: prisoners are helped to socialize, given education and work, and when crime decreases, the prisons are simply closed.

In our case, of course, we have our own atmosphere. Historically, incarceration was a common occurrence in Russia. In 2000, we had more than 700 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants—a record level for a developed country. Fortunately, by 2023, the figure had dropped to 300. That is already better, although still very high!

Why is society turning its back on prisons? There are many reasons. For example, prisons cost an insane amount of money. It is much cheaper and more sensible to invest funds in education and crime prevention. Also, prison does not reform people, but more often turns them into recidivists. A person comes out with a ruined resume, a damaged psyche, and criminal connections. Not exactly the result society needs. Additionally, humanism is an important reason—people have realized that a criminal is also a human being and should not be tortured in prison. Punishment should not be revenge, but an opportunity to fix something.

What are the alternatives? There are plenty of good solutions. First and foremost is restorative justice—where the offender directly compensates the victim for the damage. It works better than prison and costs less. Probation and community service should also be considered—the person is under strict control but remains in society. This way, they do not fall out of life and are more likely to be reformed. Furthermore, treatment would be an excellent alternative—even violent criminals do not deserve inhumane treatment, and instead of a repressive approach, it would be far more effective to correct the dysfunction of the violence inhibition mechanism using therapeutic methods, thereby completely eliminating recidivism.

Prisons already look like an old-fashioned punishment from past centuries. Spend billions and get a bunch of embittered people back? Even former ardent supporters of punitive measures are beginning to understand: to combat crime, it is not enough to simply lock people up and forget about them!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

What children’s rights does anarcho-capitalism provide for?

Can parents commit an act of aggression against their children, or do they have full ownership rights over their child?

Is it an act of aggression against one’s child to stop feeding them, condemning them to death by starvation? Probably not, but if so, from what age to what age?

If parents have full ownership rights over a child, does this ever end, and if so, at what age does a person gain the ability to become a full member of society and sign the NAP?

Is it possible to intentionally kill one’s own child without violating the NAP?

Is selling one’s own child into sexual slavery aggression?

From what age are children allowed to work and consume alcohol/substances?

Andrey Fridges

The author of the question prefaced it with a quote from Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty about how a free market for children should be developed in a free society (I omitted this fragment), and it seems appropriate to me to supplement this deontologist with the utilitarian Friedman, who in his The Machinery of Freedom dedicated one entire chapter to the rights of children.

Now, I will express my own opinion on the specific questions asked. To start, of course, I suggest re-reading the chapter of my ancap manual that I have to refer to most often—the one on conflicts, morality, and law.

A child, being a human, possesses self-ownership from a libertarian point of view, and therefore the NAP is fully applicable to them—no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity. If a parent acts against the interests of their child, there is clearly a conflict between them. Libertarian morality dictates intervention in a conflict on the side of justice. Therefore, any third-party libertarian, driven by their own morality, will attempt to delve into the observed conflict between parent and child to determine which position is more just.

Justice, I remind you, is the feeling of proportionality between the damage caused and the value of the subject of the conflict. Therefore, a third-party adult, putting themselves in the place of the damage being caused to the child and comparing it with how valuable they perceive the subject of the conflict between the child and parent to be, may quite possibly conclude that the child should be protected.

Not feeding a child is not violence. But violence is preventing them from obtaining food, or preventing others from feeding the child.

Selling the rights to preferential guardianship over a child (that is, parental rights themselves) is not violence. If the buyer turns the child into a sexual slave, that would be violence.

Allowing a child to be hired for work or consume harmful substances is not violence. But violence is forcing them to work under a stick or imposing harmful substances upon them.

In all these cases, the guardian finds themselves in a situation where they can cause indirect harm to the child without direct violence. To what extent compensation for indirect harm can be recovered is impossible to predict under ancap conditions (decentralization of law plus the market); a unique solution may be found for every conflict, or a standard one may be consistently adopted if it generally satisfies everyone.

In short: here are the principles, and from there, decide for yourselves; books of ready-made recipes have some value, but they should not be perceived as dogma.

Can corporations create their own army, police, and so on, thereby subjugating the people?

анонимный вопрос

Of course they can. The most vivid example of this is the British East India Company. Therefore, the question one must actually answer is “how to prevent corporations from doing this?”

Political philosophers have long been chewing over a related question about how to prevent a government from descending into tyranny. The proposed solutions can be divided into two categories. The first is technological. These are various schemes for the separation of powers and other types of institution-building. The second is ideological. This is the promotion of a readiness to resist any attempts to slide into tyranny.

It is roughly the same with corporations. One can build schemes for exactly how conflicts will be resolved in a distributed mode under ancap. For example, I am quite fond of the Friedmanite, or the related Molinieu scheme. Or one can simply postulate that, firstly, it is always the individual who decides whether to abide by a particular contract or leave it, and secondly, that man is the measure of all things, and if he believes he sees an injustice, it is up to him to decide whether to help eliminate it. There is no magic non-aggression pact that is mandatory for universal compliance; there are only private notions of what is right. Has a corporation crossed the line? The corporation should be punished.

Anarchy is not viable without the constant readiness of people to take direct action to uphold justice. Certain structures, such as dispute resolution organizations, simply allow for the division of labor. A small and tight-knit corporation of evil is capable of terrorizing a small territory and squeezing it dry. But under conditions of anarchy, it has little chance of building on that success and expanding beyond a certain limit: the accumulation of a critical mass of coordinated adversaries will drain all the corporation’s strength into containing them.

So, if I wished to assert myself under ancap through coercion and the seizure of others’ property, I would do so with a small group, anonymously, and vanish into the night as soon as the opponent regained their senses. In a developed information world, this would most likely mean hacking attacks—it is harder to cover one’s tracks after raids on physical objects. Yes, this kind of criminality is entirely possible and even viable under ancap. But all those speculative cases in the vein of “your grandfather installed a pirated version of Windows half a century ago, interest on the penalty has accrued since then, and therefore by the decision of our pocket court, you are consigned to contract slavery for thirty years”—these are attempts to imagine an anarchy in which everyone remains afflicted by statist brain rot. As long as they are afflicted, there will simply be no anarchy, and once the disease is overcome, such cases will become impossible.

How to build mutual aid in terms of justice and fairness under anarcho-capitalism?

Vladimir

Thanks to the influence of Mikhail Svetov, many perceive ancap as a stateless society for the most morose individualists—and contrast it with the bright world of contractual jurisdictions, territorial and extraterritorial, where people gather into communities, agreeing to live by common rules, and where the most sacred right of every member of such a community is the right to leave it.

But for a human being, it is actually quite uncomfortable to completely enclose oneself within the framework of a narrow community, perceiving the world beyond the fence as a habitat for cynocephali. Rarely does any community in the world outlive its founder. Even the ideologues of left-wing anarchism, who generally adhered to collectivist values, such as Kropotkin, noted that a bleak existence in a closed collective on the sidelines of life is absolutely not what the vast majority needs.

Therefore, for a person wishing to live in a just society, the most important thing is the ability to build it without falling into self-isolation. Does one have such opportunities under ancap? Let’s figure it out.

Only the most hardline communists or theocrats are willing to expect that humanity will entirely adhere to identical notions of justice; therefore, we can start from the premise that under ancap, these notions will vary among different people.

So, you have certain notions of justice, and you would like the arbitrator to adhere to them specifically in the event that you encounter conflicts, even if the other party to the conflict holds different views. To me, the most workable David Friedman model seems to be the one that assumes competition and natural selection between law enforcement agencies, between arbitration agencies, and between legal systems. Thus, the client only needs to ensure one small thing: that the law enforcement agency they approached for a specific conflict uses the services of a court that operates within a specific legal system that meets the client’s notions of justice.

What do you need for this? To conduct effective propaganda of the principles you follow. The more popular your ideas are, the easier it will be to insist that the court rely on them. In turn, in a free market, ideas will be most widespread in those areas of activity where their application is most convenient and provides the maximum economic gain. So, the less your ideas are detached from reality, the easier it will be for you to promote them.

Finally, if there are not many supporters of your notions of justice, you may prefer not to bother with a court, but to attract like-minded people for mutual aid. In doing so, you will earn a reputation as a community that stands firmly by its own. This has advantages: people will be afraid to touch you without a significant advantage in strength. But there are also disadvantages: people will be afraid to enter into contracts with you. Do you need such a reputation? Decide for yourself. There is no state under ancap that would treat everyone with a one-size-fits-all approach and make things equally inconvenient for everyone.

A small, cohesive community with its own notions of justice

Uber-retribution and uber-justice

It seems that no other post of mine has sparked as much discussion as the description of the uber-retribution concept. Perhaps it is worth breaking down the main arguments of the opponents.

Scientific novelty

It was rightly pointed out to me that similar functionality has already been implemented in Hydra and other similar darknet marketplaces, so I find it necessary to emphasize the differences from existing services, since they proved to be insufficiently articulated in the original post.

  1. Ads placed on the service must be open. Why?
    1.1. While classic hitman exchanges aim not to scare off the target, here the target’s knowledge of the pending retribution is part of the retribution.
    1.2. The more widely a specific injustice becomes known, the greater the likelihood that third parties will add their own money to the prize pool (both those affected by similar actions of the target of retribution, and simply those who are not indifferent).
    1.3. The target of retribution is given a chance to settle things amicably.
  2. The already mentioned possibility of crowdfunding the prize pool (although a similar mechanism is used by prediction markets, where a large number of people can place a bet on a death).
  3. Third parties can apply their own expertise to the provided proofs—both proofs of injustice and proofs of the completed retribution.

And beyond this, such an aggregator of retribution requests must possess far more powerful usability than just a message board; otherwise, it will fail to gain sufficient popularity, without which there will be no network effect, and without a network effect, most requests in the service will remain a voice crying in the wilderness.

Ethics

It was pointed out that this tool could easily be used to carry out attacks on the innocent: all sorts of freaks, gays, drug addicts, lovers of voluntary sex with minors, and so on.

To this, I can say that in a society where such attacks find mass demand, people do not need a special application; they will happily stone an undesirable person anyway, or demand that their relatives commit an honor killing. In our case, the possibility of public retribution is organized against those who would be difficult to deal with without hiding: primarily, people like the hypothetical Petrunko.

At the same time, one must realize that the executor of the retribution risks getting hit back from the target, from state representatives, or even from random passers-by—if they act carelessly and get caught. At the moment the retribution is carried out, they look like the criminal to all witnesses. But, by the way, such an executor could perfectly well be a state representative, for whom it would be easier to evade responsibility.

Retribution is not justice

Retribution, normally, is only part of the justice process, while the proposed mechanism somehow ignores the judicial process: the sentence is passed by the initiator of the request themselves.

It seems to me that designing a universal instrument of justice, where investigation, trial, and punishment are all provided within a single service, is excessively cumbersome. I also want to point out to the public that there are currently no major problems with investigating injustice: this is handled by projects like Scanner and Russian Elephant, FBK, Bellingcat, and a huge number of other independent agencies. Problems arise at the stage of issuing and implementing sentences, because this area, unlike investigation, is monopolized by the state.

So I focused on expanding exactly this bottleneck. Let diligent journalists provide the facts and the evidence base—and through Wanted, a third party, having no direct connection to the hypothetical FBK, organizes the retribution. Meanwhile, by the way, several competing requests can be created for the same case. For example, one person might order a splash of green ink in the eye of the aforementioned Petrunko, while another orders acid. Which contract will more people support? Which contract will be executed? The market will decide that. Let’s trust the market.

Or perhaps no one will order this patriot-statist at all: what a brave young fellow he is

Uber-retribution

In the video about anarcho-capitalism, I fantasized about the possibility of Uber-police providing security on the streets.

Of course, right now such a service has little prospect of being implemented because the state jealously guards its monopoly on police functions. Nothing would stop police provocateurs from DDoS-ing the service with false calls, or even using paramilitaries to deal with well-meaning people rushing to help upon a call—whether driven by the heart or by profit. And the service itself would unlikely be able to gain a sufficient number of users while remaining illegal.

However, certain anarcho-capitalist services for the private production of security can be organized today within the framework of purely agorist practices. And first and foremost, I am talking about Uber-retribution.

Imagine a mobile application with the following functionality.

A user launches the app and anonymously uploads information about a certain injustice, accompanying it with a proper evidentiary base: photos, videos, links to independent testimonies, and so on. Then they specify exactly what punishment they consider acceptable for the perpetrator, as well as the amount they are willing to offer to whoever undertakes to ensure this punishment.

Another user has the opportunity to see in this application what injustices fill the world and, if they wish, add their own funds to those already promised for particular cases.

A third user has the opportunity, after choosing a case to their liking, to carry out the requested retribution—and provide proof. Then anyone wishing to do so can independently verify whether the retribution actually took place and leave their opinion on it. Those who reserved their money for the administration of justice can either perform the verification themselves, trust the opinion of third-party experts, or grant the right to manage the prize fund to someone else, for example, the author of the original description of the injustice—though not necessarily to them, and more on that below.

As everyone who placed their money in the prize fund becomes convinced that the retribution has indeed occurred, they release their funds, and their bitcoins go into the wallet of the person who identified themselves as the one who carried out said retribution. One could get fancy here with smart contracts and multi-signatures, use the principle of how OpenBazaar works, or a banal centralized escrow mechanism, although the latter is undesirable as it would mean the prize money is stored in the service’s wallets, which is potentially unsafe. I am not competent enough in crypto-technologies to unequivocally point to the best desired implementation of this specific mechanism.

And as additional functionality, the application could include the possibility of private messaging between service users, a rating system for those who administer retribution, a system of various medals and other pats on the back for those who help co-finance the restoration of justice, search by map, by categories of villainy, and so on.

As is easy to see, the service is quite universal and, with proper quality of execution, allows everyone to remain anonymous except for the object of retribution and the victim (who, however, can claim they had nothing to do with it and ordered no retribution, which may well be true). Also, the object of retribution, upon finding an announcement calling for all sorts of punishments upon their head, can anonymously contact the claimant and try to reach a friendly agreement. Although one cannot rule out attempts to reach an agreement through threats or to eliminate the claimant altogether—and for this very reason, it would be useful to be able to delegate the right to authorize payment to a third-party auditor via the app; then additional violence against the victim would in no way protect the aggressor, as the victim would no longer have the right to stop the launched mechanism of retribution.

Finally, nothing prevents any law enforcement officer, upon discovering information about a certain crime, from treating it as a criminal report—and making some extra money on the side. This would be quite in the spirit of the agorist doctrine of corrupting government servants so they get used to working for people rather than official superiors.

At the same time, it will be extremely problematic by law to hold anyone in the chain of application users accountable, provided, of course, they are not caught red-handed.

Of course, such an application would unlikely be placed in official stores, so one would have to limit it to the circle of Android users and suggest downloading the APK from the project’s website—but this is a trivial inconvenience. Again, all functionality can be perfectly provided via a website to avoid being tied to a phone altogether.

All that’s left is to come up with a name. Without straining my imagination too much, I would call it something simple and clear to all consumers of Hollywood products, meaning all inhabitants of the globe: Wanted.

Besides a service that allows organizing decentralized retribution, it would also be useful to have functionality for collecting evidence: a way to start recording video to the cloud with literally one button, and preferably to stream it, and to do all this in the background with the screen off. Of course, it is important to record the filming time and geolocation, and to have the ability to send a distress signal via SMS to a group of contacts. Various decoys would be useful, allowing the simulation of deleting information from the phone, fake passwords, secret disk space, and so on. Similar applications exist, and nothing prevents them from being posted in the store—but I haven’t heard of all such functionality being gathered into one convenient product yet. I would name such an application vividly: They’re beating our people!

If you have heard of anyone developing something similar, please let me know. If there are ideas for implementation—we can discuss them.

What to do if those whom I respect and support do not respect and support me, and at the same time I do not respect and support those who respect (or pretend to respect) and support me?

In short: I am approved by dishonest people, while honest people dislike or hate me. This is very sad and makes life feel meaningless.

анонимный вопрос

Honest people are not obligated to respect and support other honest people. They are not necessarily intelligent, not necessarily far-sighted, and not necessarily have a material interest in supporting you; on the contrary, they may have a material interest in disapproving of you, they may be conformists, and they certainly do not possess all the information, because no one possesses all the information. In other words, the world is unfair.

Nevertheless, people are usually interested in creating a society where certain behavior is rewarded, and sometimes they even succeed in this. Behavior that is rewarded in such a society is called honest, and this standard of honesty, of course, does not have to coincide with the standard of honest behavior in another society. One society will value and respect a clever intriguer, another one someone prone to observing moral norms at the expense of material gain. Moreover, these two societies may even partially consist of the same people. In other words, people build their own little just worlds, and they do a pretty good job of it, but in this activity, there is a strong negative effect of scale that prevents the implementation of a single universal standard of justice.

You might admire some “honest scoundrel” who skillfully undermines his colleagues, and in an attempt to win his respect, you skillfully undermine his mother. That is when it will turn out that for the mother, the honest scoundrel follows different standards of honesty. You might admire the generosity of spirit of your colleague, only to find out that for work, he requires competence and adherence to instructions from you, and he would rather appreciate your generosity of spirit in a non-work setting. Or, conversely, you might demonstrate that very professional competence at work, yet be disliked in the office because you don’t wash your cup or you laugh at jokes at the wrong time.

The ability to understand what actions who expects from you and at what moment is called emotional intelligence. It seems to me that this is a combination of ordinary intelligence (the ability to analyze) plus empathy (the ability to sympathize). Mirror neurons in the brain are responsible for empathy, and where there is a neural network, there are techniques for training that neural network. Try copying other people’s manners, voice, movements, and intonations. Pay attention to the sensations that arise in you while doing this. Model other people’s behavior in your head, striving to make the model as close to reality as possible. Try copying the writing styles of different people. Over time, you will sharpen your perceptiveness.

Unfortunately, I cannot boast that I possess high emotional intelligence myself. I am the type of person who would rather pass a PE exam by writing a paper on running technique than run a hundred-meter dash for a grade. So, I won’t be able to inspire you with a personal example, but you weren’t looking for an example from me, but rather advice. I am good at giving advice.

Let’s get pumping!