taxizen wrote:2. Moral Education - meaning the offender needs to experience the equivalent suffering that he caused in order to learn why he should not do it.
The pragmatic aspect of this theory (rehabilitation) has been discredited by decades of failed attempts to create penitentiaries in which criminals be made to suffer, learn and do no more evil.
As a matter of principle, I would argue that moral education is not a requirement of justice. Humans have a natural tendency for revenge, and that is all that's behind the call to "punish" offenders. Now there is nothing wrong with that tendency, provided force is not used beyond the minimum required to restore (as much as possible) the victim to his pre-crime state.
To the extent that society continues to feel outrage against the criminal, it can express that sentiment very effectively without the need to use force, through boycott and similar means.
However there are always people who are so emotionally and morally numb that the only way they can learn why their crime is a crime is for them to physically experience something of what they did.
I know of no evidence to suggest that physically punishing offenders reduces recidivism. On the contrary - people become desensitised to violence when violence is visited upon them. Abused children tend to grow and become abusive adults (though obviously not invariably so).
Further, to the extent that the concern is regarding recidivism, my system includes very effective means for its prevention, primarily access-control to developed land areas and, in rare cases, preventative incarceration.
As I detailed above, most serious criminals are unlikely to be able to discharge of their debt outright. They would be both forced and motivated to work productively. That experience will prepare them for lawful life.
Moral education is vital as it serves to reform the character of the perpetrator such that he is less likely to repeat his offence and it can deter other would be perpetrators from doing it in the first place. - your system does nothing for this .. 0/10, F for fail.
The current system in which punishment in the sense of "let them suffer" dominates is the one that has completely failed.
3. Satisfaction - who is justice for? The injured party (you forgot about them didn't you?). If the injured party is not satisfied with the results then no justice has been done at all. - No sensible person is going to be satisfied with your non-existant punishment of Dorian - 0/10, F for fail.
Compared with both the current system and the one your anarcho-cummunists suggested, my system is the only one that doesn't forget about the injured party. In fact, the injured party has all the power. The criminal owes them compensation. Not to "society". No system of justice can give the injured party unlimited power of revenge. In such system, people who have been slightly slighted may choose to inflict severe punishment on the criminal. Justice requires a proportionate response to the crime. My system offers that.
Hubert is a very skillful pickpocket but even Hubert gets caught occasionally.
I get the sense that you haven't really read my previous posts. Where does Hubert operate? He operates in a street or on public transportation. Having been caught once, Hubert is notified that he is no longer welcome on the street or bus. Further, street-owning companies and bus-operating companies share information about pick-pockets (just as Las Vegas casinos share information about card counters, and credit card companies share information about bad credits).
Next time Hubert is even observed on the street, he is given a final warning by a private security guard. He is immediately ejected and given a suspended fine - one that will become effective if he ever shows up again.
Further, Hubert's crime liability insurance companies is notified, and pulls Hubert's coverage. Without the coverage, Hubert is unable to shop, walk the streets or use most roads. His only means of survival is to accept employment in a medium-security agricultural or industrial work facility which accepts non-insured people. Life in that facility is not fun. Knowing that, the Huberts of my society are very careful not to lose their coverage.
The point is that society has effective means for crime prevention - means that do not require categorical incarceration or excessive punishment.
Who is the murderer, the doctor or the robber? You would say the doctor and expect him to pay $3,000,000 to his patient's corpse. Any sane person would answer the robber even though no harm was done in the end because it was the robber's intention to kill.
The difference between the two isn't intent. It is consent. The patient agreed that the doctor operate on him, and thus accepted the consequences (assuming no malpractice). He didn't agree to the robber.
If the doctor operated without the patient's consent (say the patient arrived to the hospital unconscious), he is potentially liable for the death. However, the doctor carries insurance such that if an arbitration court later finds the doctor guilty, he suffers no ill-effects, as his insurance covers the fine.
Emotions are good, they exist for a reason....
If you despise the intelligence of the heart you are an idiot and have no business formulating justice systems.
I value emotions greatly. In fact, I belong to the school of thought that sees emotion behind every human action. I don't want us to confuse emotions with justice. Justice, as I see it, is not emotional. Justice is about restoring the world (as much as possible) to its just state - a state that would exist if people didn't violate each other's rights.
Once justice has operated, emotions can come in. People are free to express their emotions both to further "punish" a criminal (by not wanting to have anything to do with him, by shunning him, by preferring not to allow him to their neighbourhood or job, etc.) or by helping to mitigate the lot of a person for which the imposition of just restitution feels wrong (by contributing money to help him pay).
Nothing wrong with emotions - except emotions are not an excuse to initiate force, or to use excessive retaliatory force.
it is not for you to give life-and-death power to anyone that power already belongs to each and every one of us. Should they choose to excercise it is the individual's perogative not yours.
Let me understand. Say somebody slapped me on the face in a public place. I an enraged. My honour was hurt. My girlfriend so me humiliated. Do I then have the prerogative to kill my assaulter? If not, please explain yourself.
same could be said of reason, rhetoric, statistics, observation and accounting. Should we dispense with them as well?
As you should now understand, nobody is calling to dispense with emotions. Rather, I want to avoid situations in which physical violence against other people is excused and justified emotionally.
Phred wrote:Why is it better to have a justice system run by multiple competing businesses rather than a single entity?
Despite having failed repeatedly, I am not tired, and would love to engage in the question again. However, as you correctly pointed out, the question above is orthogonal to (independent from) the question of the purpose of punishment.
The system I described in detail is one in which physical force is only used to extract restitution from the criminal or (in rare cases) to prevent them from causing irreparable harm. A secondary feature is the much more flexible ability to limit access by criminals or suspected criminals due to private ownership of most developed land.
Both features can as easily be applicable to a true minarchy ("true" referring to comprehensive private ownership of streets, roads, parks, etc.). The former, in fact, can start being applied even in our own society.
I thus submit, Phred, that we can have not one but two discussions, not serially but in parallel. One will address the question of monopoly vs. competitive right-enforcement mechanisms. The second will address the question of the purpose and nature of sanctions authorised against criminals.
Since the topic of this thread is appropriate, and assuming you haven't tired from the topic, I will renew it my briefly (in retrospect, not
that briefly - apologies) summarising my position. Perhaps you can refresh my memory as to which points you find least persuasive:
1. The very same reasons we libertarians call for private competition in food, education, health-care and (most of us) roads applies for dispute resolution and right-enforcement (two separate functions roughly equivalent to judiciary and police / prisons). Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. It allows for customised rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.
Placing a function in private rather than public hands makes people internalise the cost of their choices.
2. Minarchists typically claim that authorised use of force is different from other services within society. As I understand it, two primary arguments are put forward:
a. Unlike, say, education, for which diversity of options is a plus, justice requires a uniform legal code.
b. Absent a monopoly organisation with the ultimate authorisation to use force, society will not be stable.
My answer to the first objection is to separate legal principles and legal procedures. Justice does indeed require a uniform set of legal principles. The society I am calling for does share that set of principles, encapsulated in the NAP, together with the principle of non-violent property-acquisition.
This principle is "meta-legal" in the same sense that the principle of supremacy of the US Constitution is in America (or the supremacy of Parliament is in Britain). To elaborate the point slightly, the supremacy of the US Constitution, for example, isn't codified. Sure - the Constitution announces itself as the supreme law of the land, but that announcement is circular. If we didn't respect the Constitution, that announcement would be worthless.
Every stable and peaceful society requires shared understanding of basic, fundamental legal principle of this nature. That principle is not determined or given by government - it is logically prior to government as it articulates what it is that makes government legitimate in the first place.
I suggest that the NAP (a shorthand which should be understood to also incorporate property-acquisition principles) would have to be broadly (but not necessarily universally) accepted within society in the same way that the US Constitution is accepted in today's America. The NAP would, in fact, become the unwritten constitution of the ancap society.
Once the principle is broadly accepted, specific legal codes need not be uniform. The US already has at least 51 separate legal codes (the states + Federal). At least two of which are in effect at any geographic location. Legal plurality is greater if you take into account specialised areas of law (family, military, marine, etc.). The fact that the very same offence will result in different legal sanctions depending on whether it took place in California or just across the border in Nevada doesn't seem to destabilise or cause great anxiety over issues of fairness.
So my system would have a uniform set of legal principles, and a diversity of legal codes all consistent with those principles. If you question what happens if a rogue agency refuses to apply the basic principles, I will explain that the broad acceptance of those principles is a
precondition for the ancap society. The scenario of a rouge agency is equivalent to that of a rogue Army general who decides not to obey the US Constitution.
Before I dive into the issue of stability, I'd like to point to two (relatively short) papers. One is Alfred Cuzan's
Do we ever really get out of anarchy?. His main point is that while most of us live under government rule, within government itself, anarchy prevails. The various personalities and institutions within government have no supreme ruler over them. They negotiate and settle disputes amongst them peacefully and without the need for an outside party.
The second is John Hasnas's slightly longer
The Obviousness of Anarchy. In that brilliant paper, Hasnas demonstrates that, as a matter of practice, the vast majority of human interaction proceeds peacefully without recourse to government. He gives many examples, from everyday disputes, too minor to bring to government courts, to international relations.
OK - stability.
My line on the stability of an ancap society is to first look at the form of governance we are all familiar with - democracy. We all know stable democracies can and do exist. At the same time we should recognise that such stability is far from obvious. No stable representative democracies existed before the 18th century. Since then, we have seen many instances of failed attempts to establish democracies as nations with formally-democratic institutions deteriorated into other forms of government.
Why are some democracies stable, and others aren't? I claim that a prerequisite for a stable democracy is for the principle of democratic legitimacy to be broadly shared within society. That principle is that only legally-elected government can legitimately rule. Usurpers are illegitimate regardless of the physical power they temporarily wield. In societies in which this principle is indeed shared, circumstances that would otherwise tempt powerful and ambitious individuals to take over do not lead to military coups. There can be several mechanisms to ensure that, but I think the most important one is that any group wishing to take over government will either be too small to succeed against other forces within society, or too large to expect its members to all betray their strongly-held principles.
IF (and I admit it is a big IF) a society comes together in which NAP is broadly accepted as the only legitimate principle governing the use of force, a society, in other words, in which the NAP is the (lower-case) constitution, any attempts to violate it would be deterred or fail for parallel reasons. Either the group in question is small, in which case it would be crushed by the rest of society, or it is large, in which case most of its members will decline to betray their strongly-held principles.
In fact, comparing a modern democracy with a hypothetical ancap society, there is every reason to expect the ancap society to be more, not less stable. Here are some reasons:
1. Government already has a supreme leader (the US President, say) who enjoys both great legitimacy (due to his position) and popular appeal (for otherwise they wouldn't have been elected). Such leader enjoys many advantages over, say, the CEO of an enforcement agency, in any attempt to secure support for a coup
2. Government soldiers are trained to blindly obey their commanders. That obedience is rooted in emotions in ways that go well beyond the obedience employees feel for their employer. Government soldiers are more likely to betray their principles and follow illegal commands than are private employees of an enforcement agency.
3. Government agents enjoy qualified immunity. As long as the command they obey is not obviously illegal, they are likely to obey it without concern for legal repercussions. Employees of enforcement agencies, by contrast, enjoy no such immunity. If, in the course of obeying their managers, they commit crimes (even unintentionally), they can be found guilty and pay personal price. That would make them much more reluctant to obey apparently-illegal commands.
To summarise, I argue that,
subject to appropriate preconditions, an ancap society should be expected to be at least as stable (and probably more so) than a mature democracy.
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.
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