[ExI] Be nice to leftists

[Anders Sandberg]

Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> , 15/6/2014 6:11 PM:
On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 12:53 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
 On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Omar Rahman <rahmans at me.com> wrote:
 Um, 'law produced privately'? What kind of law is it if it is private to you? You wouldn't happen to want to actually ENFORCE those laws on others against their wills, would you? I guess then it would be your private force vs the private force of those you declare 'law breakers'. Sounds like the law of the jungle, might makes right etc. 
### Read up on private law, come back when you have something relevant to say.
No, he's right.  Enforcement is a fundamental weakness of relying only on private law.  There exist those who refuse to agree to any laws, and there have since law first existed.  The only way they are kept from taking what they please without recompense is by enforcing laws upon them without their consent.  There is no reason to believe that, in a society where all laws are produced privately, these people would agree to any laws.
Yup. Nozick called them the "John Wayne" types in Anarchy, State and Utopia. In the final step in his derivation of a minarchist state he argued that the violence monopoly/state would be justified in involuntarily protect their rights (and hence also limiting their freedom). I have never been convinced about the morality of this step in his derivation. 
In polycentric private legal systems it might be easier to handle them: they are not protected, and if they misbehave they will be attacked by the various security firms (and law companies, if they are separate). This makes it pretty irrational to try it. I had some analysis in my rpg writeup of an anarchocapitalist legal system: http://www.aleph.se/EclipsePhase/Law%20and%20Order.pdf - see the "Above the law" section. Basically, it drains resources from you at a very high rate, so unless you have more resources than the entire rest of the society you will soon be in trouble. 


Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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