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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: The Myth of Robinson Crusoe (minimal morality)
Message-ID: <511@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Jun-85 23:36:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.511
Posted: Thu Jun 27 23:36:51 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Jun-85 03:29:00 EDT
References: <663@whuxl.UUCP> <2380049@acf4.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 27

In article <2380049@acf4.UUCP> mms1646@acf4.UUCP (Michael M. Sykora) writes:

>Actually, what libertarians are talking about is the right of Mr. X and Mr. Z
>to do anything they wish so long as they do not innitiate force or fraud
>against others.

This begs the question so much that I cannot consider it to be anything but
a slogan.  To take a very radical Christian position, for instance:
Consider the view that EVERY action has moral repercussions; that you must
consider, not just its effects on you, but the implications for EVERYONE.
It may be legal for me, as a teacher, to smoke, but is it really moral?
Once you take this sort of a principle as your guide, Mike's principle leads
you inexorably AWAY from the marketplace.  The information needed to make
such decisions simply isn't present there.  You are also therefore
responsible for your influences upon another's criminal behavior, a
responsibility that Mike has explicitly denied in another posting.  I
therefore have to conclude that his position denies anything but immediate
and local considerations of right and wrong (which translate to force and
fraud in Mike's terms).

Now, I think it is impossible to seriously support this theory of local harm.
It isn't possible for one person to see all the effects of what he chooses
to do.  I therefore see no reason to believe that an indivdual must be
assumed to to be the best judge of his own good; moreover, it has never been
indicated who is going to determine that "force or fraud" has occured.

Charley Wingate  umcp-cs!mangoe