On game-theoretic and moral aspects of aggression and enslavement, see also pages 261–64, including the endnotes, of Robert Nozick’s final book (2001).

Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World. Harvard University Press.

Errata:

We accidentally omitted this one from the Reference list:

Boydstun, S. 1984. The Moral Value of Liberty. Nomos 2(1):18–22.

We better add the stretch of text I had elected to omit from the end of Part I in the RoR edition above. This subject will resurface near the end of Part III.

Part I (continued)

 

Rights to Liberty for Two in Isolation (continued)

 

We consider now the rights that obtain with respect to benevolent interventions between two people when isolated from wider society. Eric Mack has taken the position that individuals have a right to do anything that does not violate the rights of others. On that supposition, he then could promptly infer that individuals have a right to do truly wrong things, such as deliberately cutting off their own fingers for no good reason, so long as they do not violate the rights of others (Mack 1984, 157). I do not think that Mack’s completely general supposition can be sustained, at least not in the present context.

 

The intervention of A to preempt B bringing physical harm to himself could be morally right. In addition to true preemption, a measure of preventative detention could in some cases be morally justified. At a minimum, there would have to be indicia in the prior acts of B that would portend physical self-destruction to justify the intervention of A, that is, to overcome the moral presumption against intervention. We assume those prior acts of B do not materially affect A. Then, under our formal definition of a right, A has no right that B not harm himself. Furthermore, A has no right against B’s resistance to A’s intervention. To have such a right, the resistance would have to be in support of an act against which A has a right and to which A is responding.

 

On the other side, the only plausible meaning to be given to a right of B to harm himself is that B has a right of resistance to the intervention of A. The resistance to the intervention of A is, by hypothesis, not an act of self-defense; it is the intervention of A that defends B. The acts of B that constitute his resistance cannot be rendered right by the fact of A’s intervention; the aim of B’s resistance is to complete the bringing of harm to himself, and this we have supposed, in the present case, to be wrong. There is in this setting no right of B to harm himself.

 

The rightness of other-defense is justified and bounded by the moral ideal: B’s life must remain his own and A’s life must remain his own. Actions that are preludes to physical self-harm create only a prima facie case for the justness of intervention. When more is learned of a person attempting suicide, for example, it may be found that the attempt occurs in a mood of depression and outside the context of realistic deprivation. Then again it may instead by found that it occurs (either within or outside the context of terminal illness) on account of suffering or decline of personal competences. The project of suicide may be the expression of a critically evaluated rational life plan. In the end, an intervener may be morally required to retreat; to do otherwise would, in some cases, deprive individuals of rational self-mastery and the meaning they may give their lives by ending them.

 

The license for benevolent intervention cannot be extended beyond defense against physical harms where A and B are both adults. It is only physical harm or coercion that can preclude the possibilities for self-realization in adults. Beyond physical self-harms, individuals have an incontestable right to take any action that does not affect others, however truly, objectively wrong such an action may be. That is life self-chosen. Coercive fashioning of other’s lives under the pretext of other-defense will count as a violation of the right to liberty.

 

In affirming the justice of limited other-defense, when two people are isolated from wider society, we have contradicted the proposition that individuals have a right to do anything that does not violate the rights of others. We have contradicted also the principle that an initiation of the use of interpersonal force always means that a right is being violated. We have not, however, contradicted the principle that no one has a right to initiate the use of force against another. Among these contentions, which ones will also obtain when we set A and B in the surroundings of society remains to be seen.

Q&A

When A forcibly intervenes against probable self-inflicted harms of B, the intervention acts of A are otherwise morally wrong acts that are rendered morally right by the (begun or about to be) acts of B. Then why are such interventions by A not to be regarded as by right?

Because, in such cases, A acts as a surrogate for B regarded as the subject of possible harm. It is not surrogates, but victims, who initially have something materially in jeopardy and who thereby could have their rights violated or infringed. A may be right to intervene, but it is not by right in the present setting.