This state action, the legitimate defense, is a good action.
It is not a necessary evil. It is a good action. One does not need to strike back
the aggression, one just need to prevent the offender to fulfill his will. One who
stops a person from hurting him just putting his hand on her face, while the other
punches the air in vain, is coercing the person. In a good way, if the person
unjustly wants to punch her.
My point is: not all acts of coercion are immoral, on the
contrary they can be very moral, even demand loyalty to values, like discipline
or prudence, from the person who performs them. You very well know William James, who in the paper the moral substitute for war argued for a way of promoting these kind of values aroused in war outside of war.
In this sense, while there are people not willing to
voluntarily cooperate, but offensively to coerce others, the state action, the
defensive action of force, should and will exist.
State is a dimension of the person, her readiness to physically prevent an offensive act.
Also, when you say there are rights previous to the state that the very state violates, I think there is a misconception. Rights are the creation of the state. Right is a guaranteed demand one can make to others. The word guarantee here means there is a third person who guarantees it. The moral sentiment of justice is a moral sentiment, not a right. To be a right means to be physically enforceable. Means coercion.
I don't want to talk about rights, though, I can picture a society where the trade is based on the good will of people; as we say in Brazil, on the wisp of the moustache, on the trust of receiving what was one's promised when there is no good reason not to.
You argue the state is the greater perpetrator of immoralities, through it, yes, plenty of immoralities are committed. But would be otherwise without a state? Man would become virtue without a state? Man would just use force in self-defense, never against his neighbor? I mean, we had an anarchy state of affairs when the roman empire dissolved, the state was not, was it good? Was feudalism good? You will say there was a kind of state in each feud, ok, but would there be no defensive militia in an anarchy society? What would prevent this militia from saying, well, let us start to take away from the ones that produce goods? Then you would call them a state, right? Good. So, your view of the state is it is the structure formed on the basis of man's immorality propension of physically abusing his neighborhood's will. I'm against this state too.
However, if we say state is the extrapolation of the state dimension of man then it is not bad. It is amoral, just an structure to accommodate his state dimension.
When the state is perpetrating immorality, we can say it is being misused. Then it is not the state that is bad, it is people who are acting bad through it.
Let us say people find new land. It can be equally distributed in size, but let us say two want the same piece. Who will decide? I mean, they can both go to the elder and trust him to decide, as the women had Salomon to decide for them who was the baby's mother, you allow me a Bible reference, don't you? But then, if one of them refuses to accept the arbitrage of the elder, or of any other fellow, how it would be? Any one of them who entitled himself to the land, would he be coercively attacking the other or self-defending? You can't say.
When there are no agreed rules upon which to say who owns the land, we can't say who would be acting in an unjust way. On this case; in others, even without forced or agreed rules, we could say it. For example, if one points a gun to your head to take your wallet, he is the offender, you are the defender. But in the case of the land dispute, no one can legitimately claim it.
You can say the person who does no accept any authority to decide the issue is acting unjust, therefore the land should be granted to the one that accepts the authority. But then you would be willing to coerce her. To coerce her to accept an authority she has not agreed upon.
To deny forced coercion is to get to the ultimate data where it can't be decided what is from whom.
At this point, the sole force would be tempted to prevail, rejecting to be used just as an accessory in the aftermath of a value-grounded discretion of an authority, whether agreed upon or not.
So, to have or not to have coercion is not a matter of choice, whether it be a clearly aggressive, a defensive in response to the first, or one no one can say of what kind is, it will happen.
I know you say that to go to an anarchy society man would have to be better, less dependable on state, than he is now. When questioned how it would be without a state, you said that didn't matter, as the state is immoral, it didn't matter, as long as it was not, just as people didn't know how it would be once slavery was over. But slavery was over because somebody would enforce it. Would slavery be over had people said to each other, well, slavery is bad, immoral, let us drop it aside, without any government action coercing its practice? Left to their own discretion, slavery wouldn't be over in Brazil, or in America, cause somebody, even thinking it to be an immoral behavior, would still make use of it. And you couldn't forbid her to.
You're arguing against an immorality, the coercion, but to be coercive, a coercion one initiates, is not all the times immoral. I'll repeat to make it clear: Not all initiated coercion is immoral. If due to an ultimate data, it is amoral, maybe also moral.
So the state does not need to be.
We have to reformulate our notion that the state dimension of man is founded upon his readiness to defend himself from an aggression. This is not his state dimension, let us call it his self-defense dimension. The state dimension is his necessity to have an authority to point what is from whom when you come to an ultimate data. My life is my life, nobody needs to say this to me, even the offender knows it, but the ball the baseball player hit and is hold both by me and by another person, and no one wills to let it go, or there is no agreement to jointly have its property, this is a situation of an ultimate data, to be decided by the discretion of an outside authority, agreed upon or not, or by force only. This is the situation out of which the state amorally appears.
From this it comes a law. An authority will always be, whether it is agreed upon or not.
In the example of the baseball, the two persons could agree they would decide who would take the ball playing the odds, heads or tails. But then they agreed to the authority they both perform together. If they had taken the advice of an elder, he could have told them to decide on heads and tails, with the winner paying ten game tickets to the loser. Then they would have agreed to the authority of this elder.
Had they not agreed to any authority, whether something they would have decided in between or with the assistance of somebody else, the police, seeing they were about to start a mess among the fans, takes them apart and to the chief. He would decide for them who would get the ball. A third person coercively sets the dispute.
The last option is, they don't agree to any authority, there is nobody to come and coercively set who is to take the ball, in this situation, if no one gives up, pure force would make its way.
So authority will always be.
It can be of four kinds: the dispute is resolved between the disputers, by a third person they agree to decide what is from whom, by a third person whose decision they are forced to accept, or by one of them.
Authority will always be, the question is to know how it will be. And by whom.
Ubi societas, ibi jus.
To not have an authority is not to relate. If one does not want any authority, any shared authority, or one agreed upon, or coercively acted over him, he will have to be the authority.
So, aren't you saying anarchism is the very best form of government were men virtuous, not more or less virtuous, or virtue and immoral, but tested virtuous, respecting in each and every circumstance one another's free-wills and willingly to surrogate its autonomy to an outside arbiter when he enters in a relation where a matter will come to dispute?
Bu then it is not anarchism anyway. It is the free will which agrees to have an administration.
Were it the case, well, then this administration would be good. Aren't you saying that immorality comes from the state when it comes from man himself, as virtue comes from him too?
All your argument, Mr. Molyneux, is based on the immorality of violence. But violence will be when the motive of liberty is the self-assertiveness of oneself. Whether out of this self-assertiveness or to preclude it. The way out of it is not not to have a state, it is to have mature people.
