There is another flaw in the reasoning of your story. If the man were truly sane he would definitely not be secure in the knowledge that he would not be convicted. A sane man would do what his conscience dictated knowing full well that he might be convicted of theft and trespass or even shot for attempting it. He would do what he felt was right in full awareness of the possible consequences of his actions with a willingness to accept them.
It is yet another subtle introduction of delusional 'borderline' thinking that suggests that doing what you think is the greater good will excuse you for committing in the process lesser injuries to your fellow man because you will have popular support. That is also a collectivist point of view. An ethic that is based on the expectation of reward through consensus.
The individualist does not depend on salvation or forgiveness delivered by the goodness and fairness of his fellow man when weighing right and wrong. He does what he feels is right which will only naturally be best for everyone, himself included, as long as he considers himself no more or less important than anyone else. He knows that it is possible that no one else will agree.
The individualist knows his decision is his own and the consequences of his actions are his own to bear whether they are just and balanced or not. The sane man knows that only his own actions are under his control and expects nothing else.
Hope is another matter. We can always hope that others will treat us fairly.
1. Clear reason, in this case yours.
2. A sane man, a very rare being indeed.
3. "We can always hope that others will treat us fairly,"
which hope, if fulfilled, will almost certainly be accidental. Any society dominated by irrationality, and most are, will despise the rational man the moment they truly understand him.
I never expect to be treated "fairly." I am never dissappointed.
Hank
From Hank:
Yes, this is the kind of problem we all run into every day, and we need hundreds of laws to make sure every possible situation such as this is covered, and we might as well cover all the situations that probably will not happen at all, as well.
I did not take that position. If you're attempting to claim that I did, you're being dishonest. If you're attempting to claim that your nightmare fantasy would be the logical culmination of even thinking about hard cases, you and I have nothing to say to one another.
It appears that you didn't consider that, in this and comparable hypothetical cases, the conditions can always be tightened and intensified to leave the protagonist no way out of the hard choice. The point of the problem is that in such a case, adhering strictly to the precept of ethical individualism (in this case, in its property rights manifestation) produces a horrible result. This is the sort of problem the foes of liberty will present you with, and if your only response is the weak one you made above, you won't stand a chance against them.
One of the identifying traits of hard cases is that they are rare, which makes them sources of temptation to bend the law on the grounds that "that will never happen again" -- or, perhaps, never happen in the first place. But I suggest you elevate your sights a bit, Hank; cases just as bizarre as this are now being used to erode Constitutional protections. For example, arguments about computer-generated pornography that depicts juvenile-looking characters in sexual situations are being used to undermine free-speech protections, even though the whole point of the anti-child-porn laws is to prevent real children from being sexually exploited.
To argue against these borderline cases, one must learn not to react reflexively. One must learn to "keep breathing," agree with the proponent's assessment of the situation as he presents it -- without quarreling with his assumptions and conditions, which are his to control, not yours -- and then suggest that, while it does indeed seem necessary for the hypothetical protagonist to violate the curmudgeon's property rights, the likelihood that the curmudgeon's claim against the protagonist would be upheld by a jury is exceedingly slight. The critical thing is to prevent the "hard case" from acquiring precedental power, such that it could be used to undermine property rights in areas well back from the borderline.
Ralph Waldo Emerson put it extremely well in his essay "Compensation": "If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will fail to convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in." Mention a quote like that, harnessing Emerson's authority to your argument, and you might gain a few converts. Refuse to address the matter altogether, and you look intellectually cowardly.
As for "socialism on the sly," that's just epithet-hurling, not serious disputation, and I dismiss it.
From TigersEye:
There is another flaw in the reasoning of your story. If the man were truly sane he would definitely not be secure in the knowledge that he would not be convicted. A sane man would do what his conscience dictated knowing full well that he might be convicted of theft and trespass or even shot for attempting it. He would do what he felt was right in full awareness of the possible consequences of his actions with a willingness to accept them.
Well, since we're discussing hypotheticals here, remember that the conditions are not yours to control. I could make the postulates as tight as I pleased, as I mentioned above. I could pre-indemnify the protagonist against all practical negative consequences of his choice, leaving only the ethical dilemma. But let it pass. Even if we assume the likelihood of the worst possible practical consequences for the protagonist himself, as a moral actor cognizant of his power to affect the outcome of the scenario, he still has to face a choice between adhering to the letter of property rights theory and averting a public slaughter.
It is yet another subtle introduction of delusional 'borderline' thinking that suggests that doing what you think is the greater good will excuse you for committing in the process lesser injuries to your fellow man because you will have popular support. That is also a collectivist point of view. An ethic that is based on the expectation of reward through consensus.
Once again, I did not take that position, and to impute it to me is both intellectually and rhetorically dishonest. A sane protagonist would be secure in his assessment of his probable future; he would not do what he chose to do out of expectation of reward, or even exculpation, but rather from fellow-feeling for the madman's victims.
A recent case from Europe involved a man who committed a homicide to prevent the forcible "female circumcision" (a horrible paraphrase of genital mutilation) of his 12-year-old daughter. Witnesses for the prosecution claimed that the girl had consented to the operation. The father was tried and convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison, even though he had wielded deadly force only to prevent the commission of a felony. He expressed no regret for what he'd done, and said at his sentencing that if the situation were to recur, he'd gladly do it again.
This is my idea of a sane man. He didn't stop to agonize over the "right to life" of someone who was determined to inflict an irreparable harm on a child. He didn't ponder whether his daughter might really have consented to the act, and whether he had a right to override her decision. He acted on his guardianship, his convictions and his best knowledge. An American jury would almost certainly have acquitted him -- without establishing as a precedent that murder is okay under the law.
The point of all this is that one must exhibit appropriate humility in political argument. Ethical individualism and its corollaries are very good things, an entirely proper basis for written law, but they don't cover all conceivable cases (including a few which actually have occurred and will occur again), and we ought to be frank about it. with regard to Friedman's problem as I presented it, we could say: Juries and judicial and prosecutorial discretion are supposed to be counterweights to the law's inability to cover all cases. Their failings arise from allowing them to become precedental, overthrowing the law rather than trusting to the judgment of future juries, judges and prosecutors to handle future hard cases.
The late Don LaVoie liked to say that persuasion is like sex; there has to be some give and take. It isn't war, where the object is to destroy your enemy. This applies with particular force to the promotion of our idea, which, as appealing as it is to us, will inevitably elicit resistance from others to whom it appears ominous or outrightly threatening -- and some of that resistance will take the form of "hard cases."
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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