Who says social ostracism doesn’t work?

Posted on April 8th, 2008 by bile Categories and Tags: Uncategorized, CNN, crime, ostracism, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, police, property, theft, TV, Xbox 360

5 Responses to “Who says social ostracism doesn’t work?”

1. bosco Says:
   April 8th, 2008 at 1:41 pm

   I don’t know if I’d call it ostracism.  He certainly wasn’t excluded from people online.  In fact he probably received more attention and communications from people online because of it.  Maybe social antagonism?

2. bile Says:
   April 8th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

   ostracism: Banishment or exclusion from a group; disgrace.

   The disgrace is obvious. The exclusion is from general law abiding society.

3. bosco Says:
   April 8th, 2008 at 2:33 pm

   I can see that.  Maybe also exclusion from people we deem "cool".

   I was thinking about this the other day in terms of this article.  If you take the Rothbardian stance that children are property assuming your not aggressing against them and they are free to run-away you could compel a child to consent to have sex with you in exchange for food and shelter.  Also you could tell them from the time that they are born that the outside world is harsh and running away may result in their death.

   Now personally I think we should try to limit pedophilia through social ostracism.  At the same time I realized that there is already such a strong stigma against pedophiles that people tend towards "vigilante justice".  I think you need to tread carefully between social ostracism and Heinlein-esq pushing "douche-bags" out of airlocks.

4. bile Says:
   April 8th, 2008 at 8:14 pm

   Rothbard doesn’t call children property, period. He says the adult is a trustee.

   We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a “trustee” or guardianship kind. In short, every baby as soon as it is born and is therefore no longer contained within his mother’s body possesses the right of self-ownership by virtue of being a separate entity and a potential adult. It must therefore be illegal and a violation of the child’s rights for a parent to aggress against his person by mutilating, torturing, murdering him, etc. On the other hand, the very concept of “rights” is a “negative” one, demarcating the areas of a person’s action that no man may properly interfere with. No man can therefore have a “right” to compel someone to do a positive act, for in that case the compulsion violates the right of person or property of the individual being coerced. Thus, we may say that a man has a right to his property (i.e., a right not to have his property invaded), but we cannot say that anyone has a “right” to a “living wage,” for that would mean that someone would be coerced into providing him with such a wage, and that would violate the property rights of the people being coerced. As a corollary this means that, in the free society, no man may be saddled with the legal obligation to do anything for another, since that would invade the former’s rights; the only legal obligation one man has to another is to respect the other man’s rights.

        Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.[4] The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.[5] (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)?[6] The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die. (Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian society the existence of a free baby market will bring such “neglect” down to a minimum.)

   As for pushing people out airlocks… that’s an act of aggression. I really wouldn’t call what happened in this story vigilante justice.

5. bosco Says:
   April 9th, 2008 at 9:13 am

   Rothbard dances around the idea that children are property with certain limitations.  Parents are trustees in that they control this property within certain limitations.  Assuming the child can run-away and you are not aggressing against it the child is effectively property.

   As far as pushing people out of airlocks, you are right, that is an act of aggression.  I worry that giving out peoples names, addresses and telephone numbers could possibly encourage acts of aggression.

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