| | Bill: "Yes, and I'm saying that in principle that is what your Objectivist Private Defense Provider is claiming. It assumes a perfect right to outlaw retaliatory force that is at odds with its own principles of justice. If ANYONE within the geographical area covered by its services violates its laws, it assumes the right to arrest and convict that person of a crime."
No, I'm explicitly claiming that an OPDP would NOT have the contractual or moral right to arrest and convict people who are not harming its subscribers. Nor would that make any economic sense -- in fact, it would be an immoral violation of its Objectivist principles -- it would be a sacrifice -- to arrest random non-subscribers for acts that did not harm its subscribers. It costs money to do that, money that would cause the OPDP to raise its dues and thus lose market share to its competitors who were not making such sacrifices.
And, in fact, it is likely that economic forces and moral logic would cause an OPDP to NOT assume the responsibility of arresting and prosecuting its own subscribers if those subscribers violated their oath to adhere to NIOF principles by harming a non-subscriber. The proper agent to arrest and prosecute those subscribers would be a competing OPDP or government or private individuals acting on their own, with the OPDP simply assuming the role of monitoring the situation to ensure that the rights of its subscriber were not violated in the process, that its subscriber received a fair punishment for their infraction.
The reason? Again, it costs money to do that, and the OPDP's contractual obligation would only be to prevent injustices against its own subscribers. To spend any more money than its contract calls for would, once again, be an immoral sacrifice that would cause other subscribers to cancel coverage.
"It is not obligated to do so, if the victim (or others on the victim's behalf) did not pay for that protection, but it assumes a perfect RIGHT to do so, especially if its other subscribers authorized the enforcement on behalf of public safety."
Take a close look at that statist term, "public safety". What does it mean in this context? If it refers to that subset of actions that prevent the initiation of force against the OPDP's subscribers, that is fulfillment of its contractual obligations to protect its subscribers against their rights being violated.
If it refers to any other actions, you are again assuming the OPDP would be violating its own principles and protecting non-subscribers, thus incurring expenses that would be an immoral sacrifice for its subscribers to pay, expenses that would cause its subscribers to cancel and move their coverage to a competing OPDP that more closely adhered to Objectivist principles.
It is profoundly collectivist and unObjectivist to refer to "public safety" in the sense of protecting everyone in a geographic region. Objectivist principles seem to demand that each person be responsible for providing for their own safety (or the safety of those they care about), either directly, or, if it is more economically efficient to do so, by hiring an agency that specializes in performing just that task and thus can be more efficient. Muddling up this individual responsibility and demanding it become a collective responsibility, and thus a sacrifice, is the origin of the mistake in reasoning that led Ayn Rand to think that a minarchist government is the most moral form of government, and to assume that it would not be prone to morphing into greater statism over time. That smuggled-in collectivism is the camel's nose in the tent.
Bill: "The OPDP cannot allow other protection agencies with a different set of laws to operate within the geographical area covered by its services, because it must regard them as the equivalent of criminal gangs."
The first clause in that sentence does not logically follow from the second clause. If a criminal gang is operating anywhere in the world, inside or outside the borders that an OPDP claims it will protect its citizens inside, for example a government that is oppressing its citizens who meekly submit to its rule, it would not be the OPDP's responsibility to attempt to free those citizens from the oppression of their government. The OPDP's contractual obligation would be limited to preventing a government or other criminal gang from harming the OPDP's subscribers, period.
Note that "borders" would have entirely different meanings for a government versus an OPDP. For a government (aka "a large organized criminal gang claiming a monopoly of violence in a geographic area"), a "border" is the outside edge of a geographic region within which it claims to essentially own everyone inside it via fractional slavery. For an OPDP, a "border" is the outside edge of the geographic region within which it guarantees that its subscribers can be protected against NIOF violations. That is, a "border" in this context is essentially an OPDP saying "as much as we would like to guarantee your rights everywhere in the world, if you go into certain areas, we simply don't have the resources or military might to prevent others from violating those rights at this time." Thus, an OPDP might have several "borders" -- a smaller region where they guarantee they can protect their subscriber's rights, and a larger region where if their subscribers get into trouble they will attempt to secure their safety, but can not guarantee they will succeed.
Bill: "It must also strive to be the sole and exclusive provider within that area, because people who are occupying it have a right to know what they are legally accountable for -- what they can and cannot do under the law and what they will be arrested for if they violate the law."
Again, the first clause of that sentence does not logically follow from the second and third clauses.
An OPDP would strive to widely publicize how it expects its subscribers, and only its subscribers, to be treated within the geographic border within which it claims the ability to secure their safety. It would make no such claims for the safety of anyone else who has chosen to not purchase its services. Thus, if some criminal wanted to avoid the wrath of an OPDP, all they would have to do would be to either steer clear of the subscribers of that OPDP, or if they find themselves interacting with them, making sure they observe the OPDP's rules of interaction for just those subscribers.
This in no way obligates an OPDP to strive to gain a monopoly of subscribers in an area, any more than a private security guard service hired by, say, a CEO of a fortune 500 company would feel obligated to become the police force for the entire U.S. Such a security guard service would limit itself to protecting the CEO, and nothing more.
"For example, are late-term abortions allowed under law or will they be prosecuted as a crime? If different defense agencies with different laws are each attempting to enforce their own brand of justice within the same geographical area -- with one agency defending a woman's right to late-term abortions and the other agency prosecuting them as murder -- then women and doctors won't know what procedures can and cannot legally be performed, because there is no single body of law to which they are subject and on which they can rely. Under such circumstances, there will be a jurisdictional conflict and the potential for civil war, unless the two agencies can agree on a uniform legal system. If they do agree, then you will have a monopoly on retaliatory force within a defined geographical area, which is to say, a government."
This seems kind of obvious to me, but I guess I better spell it out in great detail so it might make sense to you, too:
Again, you are thinking of OPDPs in collectivist terms, as if they were a government. Think of it in individualist terms: who would be responsible for protecting the rights of an unborn fetus? Clearly, if the mother is strictly pro-life and wants to keep a fetus, there is no source of conflict here. If she is pro-choice, and theoretically, everyone else in the population is pro-choice (admittedly an absurd situation, but it helps to illustrate the situation here), again, no conflict.
The conflict arises when a mother wants to abort a fetus, and OTHER people see that fetus as a person and want to keep it alive against the mother's wishes.
So, how would that work under competing OPDPs and maybe governments all operating in a geographic region?
If an OPDP was contractually pro-life, again, there would be no conflict between it and its subscribers -- that would be stipulated in the contract up front that a fetus was a human being, and would be automatically enrolled as a subscriber at conception, and it would be protected against having its rights violated. Obviously, no woman in her right mind would enroll in that OPDP if she was pro-choice. If she was enrolled because she was initially pro-life, then became pregnant, then decided she really was pro-choice, she would cancel her coverage with the OPDP and enroll with a pro-choice OPDP.
If an OPDP was contractually maximally pro-choice (i.e., it did not consider a fetus to be a human being until birth, and thus not a subscriber under its protection until then), again, there would be no conflict between it and its female subscribers. It would not act to protect a fetus from being aborted.
Conflict would only arise if a women who was pro-choice and was enrolled for protection with a pro-choice OPDP ran up against a husband or boyfriend or relatives or concerned friends who enrolled the fetus with a pro-life OPDP (or who were subjects of a pro-life government), and who asserted that the fetus was a human being who was enrolled as a subscriber under a pro-life OPDP.
Now, consider the difference between this situation and one where a woman gave birth to a child and then wanted to murder the child. No OPDP would ever defend the woman's actions in that situation, because virtually everyone everywhere considers that an unambiguous initiation of force. We can call that a "murder" without sparking outrage amongst half the population, because, again, everyone agrees. Whereas, if you call an abortion "murder", a sizable chunk of the populace will vehemently disagree with that assertion.
So, to return to the situation described two paragraphs above: each OPDP would have to assess, as a company, whether there was a business case to be made for having a policy of defending assertions by husbands, boyfriends, relatives et. al. that a fetus was a human being and thus a subscriber or not, given the difficulty inherent in the woman having physical custody of the fetus and having extreme differences of opinion, both within and without the Objectivist philosophy, on whether that was an initiation of force.
I suspect that in most places in the U.S., most OPDPs would conclude that calling an abortion a murder and trying to prosecute it as such would involve it in some really expensive defensive measures that simply would not justify the marginal increase of premiums that they would get by taking that bold policy. They would make a rational decision that the marginal costs greatly outweighed the marginal premiums, and decline to write such policies.
In a few places in the U.S., for example, most of LDS-dominated Utah (with the possible exception of the relatively liberal Salt Lake City area), and also in the Mormon-dominated rural areas in the surrounding states such as Arizona and Nevada and southern Idaho, such policies outlawing abortion by an OPDP might make business sense, since one would be hard-pressed to find a devout Mormon who would purchase a policy not defending the right to life of a fetus. So, a pregnant woman in that area dominated by right-to-life OPDPs might find it in her interest to flee the jurisdictional "borders" of the areas of protection claimed by such OPDPs and purchase protection from an OPDP in a Blue area such as Manhatten prior to having the abortion.
Damn, this is really eating up my time responding to your (really good and thoughtful) questions. But, I'm having fun, despite some squawks from TSU (The Spousal Unit) about the time suck involved.
Is any of this making even a bit of sense to you, Bill, or do these explanations still come across to you as crazy and illogical and not all at grounded in Objectivist principles?
(Edited by Jim Henshaw on 3/18, 3:36pm)
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"It is my contention that limited government is a floating abstraction which has never been concretized by anyone; that a limited government must either initiate force or cease being a government; that the very concept of limited government is an unsuccessful attempt to integrate two mutually contradictory elements: statism and voluntarism. Hence, if this can be shown, epistemological clarity and moral consistency demands the rejection of the institution of government totally, resulting in free market anarchism, or a purely voluntary society ... Suppose that I were distraught with the service of a government in an Objectivist society. Suppose that I judged, being as rational as I possibly could, that I could secure the protection of my contracts and the retrieval of stolen goods at a cheaper price and with more efficiency. Suppose I either decide to set up an institution to attain these ends, or patronize one which a friend or a business colleague has established. Now, if he succeeds in setting up the agency, which provides all the services of the Objectivist government, and restricts his more efficient activities to the use of retaliation against aggressors, there are only two alternatives as far as the "government" is concerned: (a) It can use force or the threat of it against the new institution, in order to keep its monopoly status in the given territory, thus initiating the use of threat of physical force against one who has not himself initiated force. Obviously, then, if it should choose this alternative, it would have initiated force. Q.E.D. Or: (b) It can refrain from initiating force, and allow the new institution to carry on its activities without interference. If it did this, then the Objectivist "government" would become a truly marketplace institution, and not a "government" at all. There would be competing agencies of protection, defense and retaliation – in short, free market anarchism."
