Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Vaniver 04 September 2013 05:02AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 September 2013 07:32:37AM 7 points [-]

Furthermore, to achieve justice -- to deter, to exact retribution, to make whole the victim, or to heal the sick criminal, whichever one or more of these we take to be the goal of justice -- we must almost always respond to force with force. Taken in isolation that response will itself look like an initiation of force. Furthermore, to gather the evidence we need in most cases to achieve sufficient high levels of confidence -- whether balance of the probabilities, clear and convincing evidence, or beyond a reasonable doubt -- we often have to initiate force with third parties -- to compel them to hand over goods, to let us search their property, or to testify. If politics could be deduced this might be called the Central Theorem of Politics -- we can't properly respond to a global initiation of force without local initiations of force.

Nick Szabo

Comment author: Torello 06 September 2013 01:23:53PM 3 points [-]

Is this a similar message to Penn Jillette saying:

"If you don’t pay your taxes and you don’t answer the warrant and you don’t go to court, eventually someone will pull a gun. Eventually someone with a gun will show up. "

or did I miss the boat?

Comment author: Manfred 06 September 2013 06:27:44PM 1 point [-]

Well, it's similar, but for two differences:

1) It uses a different and wider category of examples. Viz. "initiate force [...] to compel them to hand over goods, to let us search their property, or to testify."

2) It makes a consequentialist claim about forcing people to e.g. let us search their property for evidence: "we can't properly respond to a global initiation of force without local initiations of force."

The second difference here is important because it directly contradicts the typical libertarian claim of "if we force people to do things much less than we currently do, that will lead to good consequences." The first difference is rhetorically important because it is a place where people's gut reaction is more likely to endorse the use of force, and people have been less exposed to memes about forcibly searching peoples' property (compared to the ubiquity of people disliking taxes) that would cause them to automatically respond rather than thinking.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 September 2013 01:27:38AM 1 point [-]

The second difference here is important because it directly contradicts the typical libertarian claim of "if we force people to do things much less than we currently do, that will lead to good consequences."

Actually that isn't what Szabo is saying. His point is to contradict the claim of the anarcho-capitalists that "if we never force people to do things, that will lead to good consequences."

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