Sunday, July 09, 2006

Can Justice combine with Reality?

The State is an entity of force and legalized violence. It cannot be justified without justifying violence and coercion, and that cannot be done if we admit the self-ownership of every man over his own body (only by denying such self-ownership can a person be logically consistent when justifying the State; no further details about that offered at this point).

So given that a person owns his or hers own body, how are we to accept the presence of the State? And if we don't, does it make sense in reality? Isn't State coercion necessary to keep the peace among individuals and groups of them?

One approach is to say: I don't accept the State as a justifiable entity, but I don't imagine we can live without it.

Conservative and minarchist-libertarian criticism of anarchy on the grounds that it won't "work" or is not "practical" is just confused. Anarchists don't (necessarily) predict anarchy will be achieved - I for one don't think it will. But that does not mean states are justified. (#)
Personally, I think is a short-cut to a peace of mind. If the State can't be justified, but we can't live without it or imagine we can achieve its absence, then there must be a flaw in the argumentation (if libertarianism is so logically consistent and correct, why would it not win in the long run?). But there is no flaw in the argumentation (given acceptance of the individual exclusive ownership of his own body), so the proposal that anarchy won't work is simply wrong.

And when it comes to achieving it, we must not forget that a few hundred years ago everyone was considered a property of kings and queens and everything else was considered unthinkable. How would modern times look like if all hope of improvements were considered impractical and impossible to achieve in the minds of early libertarians philosophers?

Another approach to "tackle" the problem of Justice versus Reality is to accept the argumentation for a no-State society as logically consistent, but deny its consequences and simply accept the State as a necessary practicality. Any injustice can be "argumented" for by using this kind of reasoning. The State could for example hire men to purposely cause car-crashes because that would force people to use seat-belts, which is a very practical thing to do. Violence is then used as a tool to force people to protect itself from it. Un-justifiable State is then used to show the practical necessity of the State. This is a ridicule.

The only consistent policy is to deny the presence of the State and go head-on with those who wish to uphold it. The practicality of this action is immense. We remove dictators and violent men from the streets without hesitations, and don't have any problems with dealing with the resulting relative freedom from violence. The same applies for the violence of State-coercion.

No comments: