Friday, May 6, 2022

The Intruder Argument

A free society has no need for elaborate jury systems because the arbitrators acting as judges are bound by free market forces. Arbitrators have to hand out judgments that are seen as reasonable by a majority of people or they will run out of business. An arbitrator that sides too heavily with plaintiffs will be shunned by future defendants, and arbitrators that side too heavily on the side with defendants will be shunned by future plaintiffs. For a plaintiff and a defendant to agree on an arbitrator, the arbitrator must be seen as reasonable.

Another aspect of a free society is that it will have few laws. There's no need to agree on anything beyond the golden rule when there are good arbitrators to choose from. Nobody has to lay things out in detailed texts for such professionals to come to reasonable conclusions.

Finally, only societies that values privacy will ever be free. If everyone feels entitled to an opinion on everything, and there's general acceptance for this, we quickly get mob rule.

A free society doesn't allow third party opinions to interfere in other people's business. If we're not directly involved in a conflict, we have no business interfering in it. If we nevertheless insist on interfering, we become legally responsible for that interference. We cannot point to majority opinion, or a written text to defend ourselves. We are always wholly responsible for our actions.

With this in mind, we can look at hypothetical cases to see what would be their likely outcome in a free society.

Let's consider the case of a home intruder. Someone enters our house uninvited, and we end up killing him. The intruder's family decides to sue us for his death.

This may seem like a simple open and shut case where the reasonable arbitrator clears us of our action. However, that would only be the case if we can demonstrate that our action was reasonable. For example, if we were talking about a burglary. However, a kid coming into our house by mistake would be an example of the opposite. It would be very hard to defend our action if that was the case.

Let's say we invite someone into our house. But that person refuses to leave, and we're forced to feed him. Are we allowed to escalate our aggression towards him to the point of murder? The reasonable arbitrator will probably say yes. If all other alternatives are exhausted, murder becomes the ultimate response.

But how would this work if the person invited into our house was a child in need of care? Can we first invite that child, and then subsequently kill him for refusing to leave? Morally speaking, this would be a grave sin. However, a free society makes a distinction between a sin and a prosecutable crime. If the child has no guardians to sue the murderer, there's no way to bring the case to trial, and hence no way to prosecute the murderer.

As reprehensible as the sin may be, there will be no legal action against the murderer because the child has no-one to do this for him. The murderer may be shunned from society, and punished indirectly in this way, but if there's no family with sufficiently close ties to reasonably claim personal damage, there's no-one with any rights to sue for damages. However, if there's as much as one person that can demonstrate sufficient closeness to the child to demand compensation, there's room for a court case.

This brings us to abortion and infanticide in which case the child in question is murdered by its own guardians. A free society will have no way to legally prevent such sins. If the mother and father are in agreement on the matter, no-one can claim damages. However, if either of the child's guardians are in disagreement, a court case can be made. But a free society has many other options to prevent abortions and infanticide. We don't need strict abortion laws in order to prevent abortions.

A free society will have no way to prevent guardians from selling their guardianship to someone else, and since there's a constant demand for adoption, we can assume that most unwilling parents will be able to find alternative guardians. Some of these sales may be exploitative and nasty, but a free market will quickly establish reliable ways to check on the fate of the child after adoption. No-one will sell their guardianship to a sketchy character if there's a well established adoption center available.

But let us for argument sake imagine a case where two mentally disturbed parents insist on torturing their child to death rather than sell their guardianship through an adoption center. How would a free society deal with such a horror?

The answer is easy to imagine. Concerned neighbors will get together and agree to kidnap the child. They will break into the house of the disturbed parents and take the child away from them. This will be a risky venture. They will have to plan it carefully, and they will likely be sued for damages after the fact. However, a successful kidnapping of this kind will not be ruined in court, because no arbitrator will feel obliged to hand the child back to the mentally disturbed parents.

The disturbed parents can argue all they want about property rights and the like. But none of this matters in this type of extremes. All that matters is the golden rule and the cultural norms of society. Held up against this, the concerned neighbors are in their full right to take the child away from its parents, and a reasonable arbitrator will acknowledge this fact.

Porto neighborhood
Porto neighborhood

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