- 10 Sep 2017 00:43
#14842250
Suppose a billionaire has a quickly progressing lethal heart disease, and there are no donators. Suppose he wants to make sure he gets a healthy heart in time, and so he invites 1,000 completely broke people with healthy hearts to participate in "a lottery with only one loser" and to sign a contract according to which 999 of them, the lottery winners, will get one million USD each from the billionaire. The one lottery "loser", picked by a provably perfect randomizer, will be seized, kicking and screaming, and killed by the billionaire's staff, after which the billionaire's medical team will transplant that person's heart into the billionaire's chest.
This would be unprovoked murder, and so it seems it would violate the non-aggression principle of right-wing libertarianism. After all, the victim most likely won't consent to getting killed once it's clear he is the one who is going to get killed.
However, on the other hand, the loser did, prior to losing, consent to the conditions. He signed a contract, and contracts should be honored. So, wouldn't stopping the billionaire's staff from enforcing the contract violate the non-aggression principle, by preventing the billionaire from executing an initially mutually voluntary contract that makes him lose a lot of money for nothing if it's not executed both ways?
How does libertarianism solve this dilemma?
I know most countries have laws that limit the legitimacy of contracts such that a contract of said kind would be considered "unreasonable" and thereby invalid. However, those countries are not libertarian (there is no purely libertarian country today as far as I know), and also, the lottery described above wouldn't be anywhere near clearly unreasonable to participate in. Think of it: if you're broke, it's entirely plausible that it would be rational for you to take a 0.1 percent risk of dying within the hour for a 99.9 percent chance of becoming a millionaire, isn't it? Life is not only about minimizing risk of premature death, but also, and even more, it's about life quality, and life quality can definitely be thoroughly enhanced by a million dollars if you are broke. And even if you personally wouldn't participate in such a dangerous lottery even if you were broke, you might be willing to admit that perhaps the decision in the lottery case should be up to each lottery participant as an intelligent, mature, informed adult, rather than being up to you, or a court, or the majority of the people, or anyone else but each lottery participant? People are legally allowed to deliberately risk their lives by far more than 0.1 percent for far smaller gains than a million dollars, in all sorts of ways, including many ways which most people think are stupid, in most countries today, and this would presumably be the case *especially* in a libertarian society.
Still, when the loser of the above described death lottery goes from "Yes, of course I want to take a 0.1 percent risk of dying for a 99.9 percent chance of getting a million dollars" to "Er... now that I lost, I change my mind! I don't want to die! Please don't kill me!", it somehow tends to make enforcing the contract feel morally repulsive to most people, including most libertarians, I would presume. And hey, it's *murder* - and murder is incompatible with the non-aggression principle of (right-wing) libertarianism, isn't it? On the other hand, so is the act of forcibly preventing a mutually voluntarily entered contract from being executed, something the police might have to do to save the lottery loser's life. It seems to be a dilemma. What's its proper (right-wing) libertarian solution?
This would be unprovoked murder, and so it seems it would violate the non-aggression principle of right-wing libertarianism. After all, the victim most likely won't consent to getting killed once it's clear he is the one who is going to get killed.
However, on the other hand, the loser did, prior to losing, consent to the conditions. He signed a contract, and contracts should be honored. So, wouldn't stopping the billionaire's staff from enforcing the contract violate the non-aggression principle, by preventing the billionaire from executing an initially mutually voluntary contract that makes him lose a lot of money for nothing if it's not executed both ways?
How does libertarianism solve this dilemma?
I know most countries have laws that limit the legitimacy of contracts such that a contract of said kind would be considered "unreasonable" and thereby invalid. However, those countries are not libertarian (there is no purely libertarian country today as far as I know), and also, the lottery described above wouldn't be anywhere near clearly unreasonable to participate in. Think of it: if you're broke, it's entirely plausible that it would be rational for you to take a 0.1 percent risk of dying within the hour for a 99.9 percent chance of becoming a millionaire, isn't it? Life is not only about minimizing risk of premature death, but also, and even more, it's about life quality, and life quality can definitely be thoroughly enhanced by a million dollars if you are broke. And even if you personally wouldn't participate in such a dangerous lottery even if you were broke, you might be willing to admit that perhaps the decision in the lottery case should be up to each lottery participant as an intelligent, mature, informed adult, rather than being up to you, or a court, or the majority of the people, or anyone else but each lottery participant? People are legally allowed to deliberately risk their lives by far more than 0.1 percent for far smaller gains than a million dollars, in all sorts of ways, including many ways which most people think are stupid, in most countries today, and this would presumably be the case *especially* in a libertarian society.
Still, when the loser of the above described death lottery goes from "Yes, of course I want to take a 0.1 percent risk of dying for a 99.9 percent chance of getting a million dollars" to "Er... now that I lost, I change my mind! I don't want to die! Please don't kill me!", it somehow tends to make enforcing the contract feel morally repulsive to most people, including most libertarians, I would presume. And hey, it's *murder* - and murder is incompatible with the non-aggression principle of (right-wing) libertarianism, isn't it? On the other hand, so is the act of forcibly preventing a mutually voluntarily entered contract from being executed, something the police might have to do to save the lottery loser's life. It seems to be a dilemma. What's its proper (right-wing) libertarian solution?