Okay, welcome to the eighth in a series of ten lectures on the Steve Berger, Walter Block, Austrian libertarian seminar.
Please let's start with the moment of silence as is our practice.
I said that as the week were on, I would get more radical.
I was being namby-pamby at the beginning, you know, Mr. Nice Guy, as is my usual pursuit, but now I'm taking off the kid gloves.
Before I get to today's subject, which will be very radical and very controversial even within our small group,
I just wanted to say that this week is a very tough week.
I didn't realize how tough it would be. My typical day is prepare for the morning lecture, give the morning lecture, wolf down some lunch, prepare for the afternoon lecture, give the afternoon lecture, go do some exercise, I usually swim, then prepare for the next day's lectures, two of them, and then again and again and again.
It's tough but it's a delight. I wouldn't give it up for the world and I'm very
honored that I was asked to do this. I mean how often does a professor get to
give 10 lectures to volunteers in a week and have it blasted all out to radio land
or TV land or blog land or whatever they call it. It's an honor and a privilege
not only to do it but to interact with the people here. The people out there in
blog land don't appreciate because the questions usually don't come so thick and
Fast During the Formal Sessions. But afterward, I'm attacked viciously by about 10 people. And it's always with very important questions, and many of which I haven't thought of, some of which I say I have to sleep on and come up with some half inept answers the next day. But it's been a great learning experience for me, and it's an honor and a privilege to be interacting with you. Notice I'm trying to get you on my good side. Because now,
No More Mr. Nice Guy
Okay, I have written an article on abortion.
The first article I ever wrote on abortion appeared in Reason Magazine in 1969 or 72 or somewhere in there.
The second article I wrote, co-authored with my friend and colleague from the University of Central Arkansas, Roy Whitehead,
is appears in the Appalachian Journal of Law, Appalachian Journal of Law and it's
called Compromise and the Uncompromisable, a private property rights
approach to resolving the abortion controversy. Before I get into the
specifics, I wanted to talk a little bit about this effort. It was
It was published in volume four, number one, of spring 2005, so it just came out.
I probably wrote it in 1995, I was 10 years old at least, and it probably was rejected by 20 or 30 or maybe 40 journals.
I probably beat Murray Rothbard out in one thing, namely I get more rejections than he gets before I get published.
What happened is in the academic journals, economics, philosophy, political theory, you're only supposed to send an article out to one at a time, and sometimes they'll keep it for three months, six months, a year, and then reject it, so it takes a long time.
Then finally what I did is I hooked up with my friend Roy, with whom I've co-authored a lot of law review articles.
The advantage of law review articles is you can send it out to 300 law reviews all at once, so you don't have to wait quite so long.
But still, I had a horrible experience because it was accepted not once, but twice, and two times the journal that accepted it,
The law review journal that accepted the article reneged.
They said, you know, we've been reconsidering
and in the basis of this, that and the other,
you didn't put the comma right or something,
we're rejecting it.
I said, didn't put the comma right,
you know, I'll change the comma.
No, no, sorry, we can't publish it.
This is hot stuff.
And in the,
let me read the first
Footnote to the thing. The authors of the present article wish to congratulate the editors of the Appalachian Journal of Law for their courage in publishing it.
This article was accepted for publication previously by both the Thomas M. Cooley Law Review and the Manitoba Law Journal in Canada.
In each case, the editors reneged and refused publication despite their initial acceptance.
So that's a strange history of an article. It takes so long and then reneging and stuff, but finally it's here and I'm very proud of it.
I think it's the cat's pajamas. I think it's hot stuff. If any of you want copies of it, email me and I'll give you an email version of it.
You might, you know, not want it after you hear what I have to say, but that's a whole other issue.
Okay, now for the substance. The abortion controversy is a horrible controversy.
The life and death of millions of human beings is at stake.
And philosophically there are two sides, the left is pro-choice, that's what they call themselves, the right is pro-life.
And yet there doesn't seem to be any way to compromise this, there doesn't seem to be any way to deal with this.
The left says what they say, the right says what they say, and never the twain meet.
It seems to me that since the, not the Civil War, but the War of Northern Aggression,
or the war to prevent southern secession, there hasn't been as philosophically a difficult issue as that time.
I mean we've had other wars that have killed more people, but there wasn't any philosophical problem.
Here there is a philosophical problem.
And there are two schools of thought. The left is pro-choice.
It says that you can have an abortion pretty much on demand.
The extreme right, the conservatives say no, no, no,
it's human life, you must preserve it.
I am happy to say that libertarianism offers a compromise.
That's why I call the piece compromising
the seemingly uncompromisable.
It seems that you can't compromise this,
but you can compromise it, as I'll try to show.
And I think that the compromise is not like you add up five and three and divide by two and get four.
It's not a compromise like that, like let's say abort half the kids or something.
That would be a numerical compromise.
This is a philosophical compromise.
This is, to my way of thinking, the essence of libertarianism applied to this very tough, intractable problem.
And it just comes out that it's a compromise.
need not and I didn't think it would necessarily when I started but that's
where the logic of the libertarian position has led me. Libertarian position
to repeat very briefly is of course non-aggression and private property rights
and what you do is you hold on to them like the girl in those horror movies
holds on to the cross where she wants to ward off the vampires, you know, or the
Garlic or whatever it is, you hold, you cleave onto that tightly, no matter what happens, you hold onto that and I think you can come through correctly.
Okay, we start with the first issue, when does life begin? And this, just in and of itself, is a tough problem.
Some people say, well, life begins at birth and therefore what the fetus is, is sort of a bit of protoplasm
And it's no more significant to get rid of the fetus than it would be to get rid of, if I had cancer on my pinky, you know, you cut off the pinky and that's it, or get rid of an appendix.
It's just a bit of protoplasm and it's not a controversial issue.
I reject this for two reasons.
And one, it doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem that the key difference is the time between
you're in the womb and the time that you're out of the womb. It seems to me the key difference
is at one time there's a sperm here and an egg there, and then they get together and
now there's a fertilized egg. That seems to me much more philosophically significant,
because now there's a human being that in the ordinary course of whatever will become
human being, whereas the other seems to me almost like it just a change of
address, you know you move from Auburn to Montgomery and you change the dress, big
deal. One dramatic way of putting this is imagine twins and one comes out five
minutes after the other and now here you have one twin who's crying and the other
twin even sort of see the head peeping out and you know five minutes later
If they're identical twins, you're going to be hard put to tell the difference between them.
And right now, the only difference seems to be the change of address.
One is breathing air and the other is breathing through an umbilical cord.
But it doesn't seem to me to be so different that you can make a life or death distinction between the one twin and the other twin.
Okay, that's one reason.
The other reason is that I am going to come out in favor, in certain circumstances, of the pro-choice view, namely that abortion is justified under certain circumstances.
Therefore, philosophically, it behooves me to take the assumption that is the most damaging to my case.
I don't want to have a straw man argument. I don't want to say, well, it's just a bit of protoplasm, therefore abort it.
I mean, what's the fun there and where's the philosophical challenge there?
So given that I am going to take, under certain circumstances, which I will elucidate soon, the abortion side,
it's much more impressive or it's more required of me to take the more difficult of the two scenarios to make my case.
Because if I can make my case in the easy one, I prove nothing.
If I can make my case in the more difficult one, then maybe I've accomplished something.
Okay, so for those two reasons, I assume that human life starts not at birth, but at the fertilized egg stage.
Just the two-cell stage, and then that's a human being.
Okay, let me put up an equation, if you will.
Abortion equals killing plus evicting.
It's no sense talking about abortion because abortion is a complex activity.
It encompasses two sub-categories, and we might be wanting to say different things about each of them, I will, and therefore, it's of the utmost importance to distinguish between the two sub-categories of which abortion is made.
So we're not going to really be talking about abortion, rather we'll be talking about each of them separately, killing and evicting.
And the theory that I've come along with, or the title for the theory that I've dreamed up is, it could be a libertarian theory of abortion.
The one I've come up with is a theory of eviction, or evictionism.
So now there are three choices. There's the pro-choice, the pro-life, and evictionism.
And my claim is that evictionism is a compromise, and evictionism is correct,
and evictionism of the three is the only one compatible with libertarianism.
So what I say is that the mother of an unwanted fetus has the right to evict but not to kill.
Killing is murder.
You're not supposed to be murdering young babies who are in the hollow ball stage
or in the whatever fetus kind of stage.
You're not supposed to be killing them.
Now, you can evict them because we have rules about private property rights.
And who owns the private property rights in question?
Well, it's the mother's womb. She owns it.
Now, the easy case is when a 13-year-old girl is walking down the street, she gets grabbed, she gets raped,
and all of a sudden she's got something growing in her.
Isn't it obvious that what's growing in her is a trespasser?
And isn't it right, according to libertarian theory, that you have a right to remove trespassers?
Now, there is another side-order condition for libertarianism, and that is you have to do it in the gentlest manner possible.
For example, if someone is trespassing on my lawn, maybe inadvertently, the first thing I do is not to take a bazooka and blow them away.
I mean, libertarians are a bit hard-hearted, but, you know, that's too hard-hearted.
I think the first thing you do when you have a trespasser on your property is say,
Sir, did you know that you're on my land?
And, oh, you didn't know? Well, it is my land, so please leave.
And I think that's a reasonable way to go about it.
And if he says, you know, this or the hell with you,
and, you know, then you push and shove and then you get to the bazooka stage.
But then he's doing a lot more than trespassing.
He's trespassing plus he's resisting your licit use of violence to repel him
So it's sort of an escalation stage. I mean the second stage is in a bazooka you say well
You know if you don't leave I'm going to call the cops and if he goes for your throat when you say that well
Then he's doing a lot more than just trespassing. He's a real serious bad guy
or if somebody is you know stealing your bubblegum and you're a
If you're a shopkeeper and you have a net that you can drop and trap them, you don't shoot them instead, you drop the net.
So we have the principle, I think well established in a whole host of other areas, that when you're dealing with criminals, you have to stop them.
But you don't use the most force possible first, you use the least force.
Now if he's dangerous, if it's Godzilla there, you might not want to argue with him.
Who was it? Walter Williams was talking, you go into a room and there's a tiger sitting on the couch there.
You don't say, well, you know, tiger, you're trespassing, please leave, you know.
You have to take this with some common sense.
But I think we've established that you remove the fetus in the gentlest manner possible.
Now, a hundred years ago, the gentlest manner possible of removing a fetus was to kill it.
That was the only way you could do it.
And I think it's justified to remove it, because it's a trespasser.
A hundred years from now, or five hundred years from now, when we have super-duper medicine, if we don't blow ourselves up first,
I presume it will be possible to remove the fetus at any stage,
put it in a host mother, or a test tube, or a petri dish, or some new invention that they come up with,
without any harm to the mother or to the fetus and under 100 years from now or 500 years from now would be totally unjustified to kill it.
Things get a little bit more complicated with today but things are clear with the partial birth abortion.
Now what's the partial birth abortion? Partial birth abortion is the fetus is just about ready to come out.
It's nine months old or eight and a half months old as a fetus and instead of taking it out and killing it
And once or twice that's happened, somehow it slips out before the abortionist is ready and then they kill it while it's outside and viable?
Oh, come on, that's out and out first degree murder or even worse than first degree murder, it's killing of an innocent.
But suppose it's still, the head is just peeping out and what you do is you drill a hole in the skull and sort of extract its brains while it's inside because, you know, you want to kill it, that's what a partial birth abortion is.
Well, it seems to me that if we adopt evictionism, with the side order condition of the libertarian, most generalist manner possible of evicting, that that would be ruled out right away.
Now, you see, the benefit to the pro-life people is if they keep on with what they're doing, they're losing right now.
These are being slaughtered, and when medical technology kicks in, if they then adopt this, it'll almost be seen as too late, it'll be seen as special pleading.
Whereas if they adopt evictionism now, they can say, well look, you know, we've done it long before medical technology came along to prove it.
Okay, I talked about the rape victim. Let's talk about the case where the cause of the fetus is voluntary sexual intercourse.
Is the fetus still a trespasser? People are likely to say, no, no, no.
It's not a trespasser because the mother invited the fetus in, in effect, by consenting to have sexual intercourse.
But, she changed her mind. For one reason or another, she now doesn't want to feed us.
Look, suppose I invite you into my house, and we have a nice dinner, and now I get tired of you, you don't agree with me, I hate people who disagree with me, and I say, okay, leave.
Well, if you refuse to leave then, you're a trespasser.
Now, this I think is different. The obvious retort to what I just said is, I invite you up in an airplane for a little tour, and now I get tired of your discussion, and now we're at 30 feet, and I say, please leave, and you say, well, how about, you know, letting me out when we land, or give me a parachute or something, and I say, no, no, no, no, this is private property, get out.
I think that this analogy there is that there's an implicit contract.
There's an implicit contract between me who invites you on my airplane and you who comes to my airplane that what I'll do, I mean if there's a crash, there's a crash, you can't help it, but if the airplane is working properly, the only time you get out is when we're back down on the ground.
So there is an implicit contract. I'm a believer in implicit contracts. You don't have to have things that are written.
If you go to a restaurant and order a cup of coffee and you drink it down and then they present you with a bill for a million dollars, no.
There's an implicit... I'm not a price controller. I'm not against charging a million dollars for a cup of coffee.
But you have to tell them beforehand. And if you don't, you can't charge that.
Well, how about $100? Can you charge $100? How about $10 for what you could usually think of as a $2 cup of coffee?
Well, that's a continuum problem and I don't want to get into that.
But certainly $1 million is way too much and even $10,000 is way too much for a cup of coffee.
But I insist that for there to be an implicit contract, there have to be at least two parties.
And in the case of me who invite you on my airplane and you who come to my airplane, there are two parties.
So there can be an implicit contract between us.
But now let's look back at the case of voluntary sexual intercourse.
Are there two parties?
Well, who are the two parties?
It seems that there are two adults, a male and a female.
And there's one fetus that's not yet a fetus because the sperm and the egg are this far apart in the mother's body and they're getting close.
Getting close or the egg is staying there and the sperm is moving along.
Where is the implicit contract? Well, if it's between the mother and the father,
then it would be sort of like this case of purchasing the services of a woman to bear your child.
I think there was a Mary Beth Whitehead case where the couple was infertile,
and they went to Mary Beth Whitehead and said, look, we'll give you 10,000.
Here's the sperm, you know, put it together with your egg and give us this baby.
Then if she aborts or evicts, she's in violation of a contract. Okay, but that's a very statistically insignificant case.
Let's get back to the case that there's a man and a woman, they engage in voluntary sexual intercourse.
Who is the contract between? Well, if they make a contract such that the man pays the woman to have the baby,
then she can't evict it or abort it or anything to it because of the contract violation.
But again that's not the interesting case. Let's suppose now that the man leaves, he's out of the picture, he can't be found.
Can there be a contract between the mother and the fetus such that when the mother voluntarily takes on the fetus she has an implicit contract to keep it for nine months?
And my answer is no, because at the time of sexual intercourse there's only one person, remember we're forgetting about the adult male, there's only one person, the woman.
There is no fetus yet. So while I go along with implicit contracts, I only go so far.
I don't go along with implicit contracts when there's only one person.
There have to be two people, and there aren't two people.
Another objection to my modest proposal here is you throw someone in the water.
Now, ordinarily, if there's someone in the water drowning, do you have an obligation to go and pick them up?
No. Not according to libertarians.
But suppose you throw someone in the water who can't swim.
Then do you have an obligation? I think so, because otherwise you're a murderer.
So, then the question comes, is having a child or is conceiving a child like throwing them in the water, and I think the analogy falls apart.
I think that throwing some in the water is an act of aggression. It's an initiation of violence against their body.
You're picking them up, it's a salt and battery, you're throwing them in the water, they can't swim, you're about to drown them, you should go to jail for that.
The analogy is you should go to jail for having voluntary sexual intercourse, which is highly problematic, you know, there'd be a lot of people in jail if we did that, so we can't allow that.
So I think that that objection fails, and we can't say that I'm wrong because I'm on that ground.
Okay, I want to prove to you that evictionism is really a, what do you call it, compromise.
And I have a table here. The rest of it is my notes, so forget about that.
Just let's look at this table here. And what I'm saying is that it's a compromise because there are three theories now,
People that have theories, there's us libertarians have evictionism, and by the way, as in so many other things, where do I get this stuff from?
I got it from Murray, I got it from reading Murray Rothbard, he wrote three lines on it and I've written many more than three lines about it, but the original idea came from him.
He didn't take my view that life starts at birth, rather that life starts at a fertilized egg, he took the view that life starts at birth,
But apart from that minor difference between he and I, this is really his theory, but articulated and expanded by me.
So, we have three, a three by two matrix, evict, kill, evictionism, pro-life, pro-choice, evictionism says yes, you can evict.
Can you kill? No.
Pro-life says, can you evict? No.
Can you kill? No.
And pro-choice says, can you evict? Yes. And can you kill? Yes.
So you can see that the two other theories, pro-life and pro-choice, each say no-no or yes-yes to evict and kill.
Whereas the third theory, evictionism, truly is a compromise between the two because it agrees with one on one thing,
it agrees with the pro-choice on eviction and it agrees with the pro-life on no-killing.
So it really is a compromised position, not because it's set out to be a compromised position or anything like that,
but because that's the very nature of the thing.
Okay, so what happens if this view is implemented?
If this view is implemented, if eviction is implemented right now,
what happens right now is that one-ninth of babies are saved.
Say, the babies in the last month, okay, because a baby who is now nine months old, if it's evicted in the gentlest manner possible, can live.
But let's suppose that an eight-month-old can't, or many of them can't.
But in ten years, an eight-month-old one will be able to be evicted without harm, if medical science moves on,
and maybe not 10 years, but maybe 20 years, I don't know.
And then in another 10 or 20 years, a 7-month-old one will be able to be saved.
And then in another 10 or 20 years, or 5 years, or whatever the years may be,
eventually, in 50 years, or 100 years, or whatever it is, through a gradual process,
all fetuses will be saved.
There'll be none that will be put to death.
And the whole controversy will end. There'll be no controversy.
Nor will there be any injustice during this period of, what do you call it, during this transition period.
Because take a three-month-old fetus right now who can't be saved.
According to the evictionism theory, the mother has a right to rid herself of it.
And if medical science is not well developed enough to save it, tough on the baby.
It's not a rights violation to evict a fetus in a generalist manner, it's just a horror, because medical technology is not well established yet to do that for a three-month-old.
I think as a general point, it's very important for us libertarians to distinguish ourselves from both our friends on the left and the right.
It's not that we're moderates. We're more extreme than both of them in both directions.
But we have to have a bit of product differentiation.
We can't say, well, you know, we're really a branch of conservatism.
Nor can we say we're a branch of left liberalism. We're unique.
Everyone else is out of step.
The left sort of agrees that, you know, you should have civil liberties but not economic liberties.
The right sort of agrees that you should have economic liberties but not civil liberties.
The first two parties, neither one is really adamant on their particular liberty.
We say you should have both. And everyone says we're inconsistent.
No, everyone else is inconsistent. And to take the third area, you know, those charts,
the Nolan chart that is supposed to rate your... where you're a libertarian, they have economics and they have civil liberty,
but they never have foreign military adventurism. So it really should be a three-dimensional thing, including that.
And there, the left and the right sort of take turns in being bad.
Right now, the right is bad and the left is sort of okay, but it keeps changing around.
Whereas libertarians are pretty consistent about, you know, the George Washington
and John Quincy Adams business of non-entangling alliances and no imperialism.
So we're unique in three ways.
And we're also unique here in the case of abortion.
And I try to tell my Catholic friends, and my friends who are pro-choice,
Why did it get so big? Oh, I see, because of this, right.
That you're losing the war right now, and if you adopt this view, you can win it starting right now.
And not only adopt it because it's philosophically correct, but adopt it to save babies.
You can save one-ninth of babies right now, assuming that the babies are equally distributed among the nine months.
I haven't had much success, but I'm hoping, and this is the first time I got a publication in a scholarly journal.
The last one I said was in Reason Magazine in the 70s.
Maybe this will have some effect.
I put my heart and soul into it and I really am on the side of the pro-life people because my goal is to save life.
Life, I think life is precious. One of those babies will be a Murray Rothbard or a Mozart and, you know, we've got to save all the babies we can.
And I think this is a philosophically coherent and justifiable way to do it.
Okay, that's pretty much what I want to say about abortion. Now I get into stem cell research which is a lot more controversial.
Hard to believe, but there's a compromise here too.
Now, stem cell research is taking a fetus or a fertilized egg and mushing it and killing it and doing stuff with it.
So you might say, well, you know, how can we justify that sort of a thing?
But give me a few minutes.
First of all, there's no compromise on government funding for stem cell research.
That's out of the picture.
I mean, for libertarian, there's no government funding of anything and no government funding of this.
So again, in the analysis of the stem cell situation or the research on babies,
we start again off with the assumption that life begins at the fertilized egg stage.
And that's more important than near birth, which is just a change of life, a change of address.
Now, I want to introduce a distinction, a tripartite distinction between other adults, children and everything else, like cows and cars.
Other adults you can't own. Children you can't own, but you can own the right to bring them up, the right to be their guardian.
And how do you get to own the right to be their guardian? How is it just that Bob Murphy and his wife had that little baby?
Why should they be the guardians? Why not me? Why can't I just grab that little cute kid and, you know, I've been kissing him and all,
Well, according to the libertarian homesteading theory, they're the ones that homesteaded them.
They each took some small amount of time to conceive the baby,
and then the wife took nine months to homestead it, to mix her labor with it,
to give it a homestead. They're the legitimate owners of the baby,
and as long as they act in a way that is not child-abusive, they're the rightful owners.
As long as they act in a way that is not child abusive, they're the rightful owners.
If they starve it, they're murderers.
Suppose, well let me not pick on them, but suppose that there's a couple that has a baby
and now wants to leave it in the back bedroom and not feed it anymore.
They're tired of feeding it. Why should they feed it?
Well, in libertarian theory, they are now stopping their homesteading process,
so they lose rights to keep that baby as theirs, and anyone else who comes and takes that baby is justified.
So if I come and take the Murphy baby, I'm not justified because they are actively homesteading it.
But if somebody is abusing it by neglect or in any other way, and the amount of neglect on babies is amazing,
you know, burning it with cigarettes and, you know, there's just horror stories, but just good old neglect.
If they neglected for more than, you know, you can neglect it for 10 minutes if it doesn't cry,
but if, you know, you neglected past its next feeding, you're a neglectful parent, anyone else can come grab that baby.
I happen to believe that you can own other people through alienation, and I've written on that in the JLS.
It's sort of a side order point, but let me just make the point, even though it's a little peripheral to my main interest.
Suppose my son has a dread disease, and Steve Berger here has long wanted me to be his slave, and he's very rich.
And my son's operation, which will save his life, will cost five million.
And I make a deal with Steve that if he gives me the five million, I'll be his slave.
and I agree to do it because I value my son's life more than my liberty.
He agrees to do it because he values me as a slave more than the five million he has to pay.
So it's a mutually beneficial decision and all is well, as far as libertarianism is concerned, until I first sass him.
When I sass him, he gets out the whip and he starts whipping me.
And now Ken, the policeman, sees this, and I start saying, well, you know, he's initiating violence against me.
And he says, violence, tut-tut, I own you, you're my slave.
What should Ken, the policeman-judge, do?
Well, I say it's a valid contract.
And Ken should ignore this whipping, or help him whip me further, or whatever, because I'm an ornery slave.
But apart from that, you can't own human beings unless a human being voluntarily sells himself into slavery to you
and a baby can't do it because we don't agree that babies can be part of contracts without guardians, okay?
So you can't own a baby, but you can own the right to bring up the baby in that it would be wrong for anyone else to take the baby out of your care
as long as you're bringing up the baby, as long as you're not doing any child abuse.
Okay, another point.
Now, you know libertarians are against positive obligations.
There are no positive obligations.
If you're starving or drowning, I don't owe you anything unless I'm contractually obligated,
in which case it's a negative obligation or it's a contractual obligation.
But apart from that, all libertarian theory says with people vis-a-vis each other
is you keep your mitts off of them, that's it.
You don't have to come to their aid.
Coming to their aid is over and above the call of duty.
It's a virtue, it's a mitzvah, it's good to do this.
Libertarians aren't against it,
but libertarianism is a theory of when you go to jail
or when it's justified to use violence against you,
and it's not if you keep your mitts off.
But how about this baby that I am now neglecting?
Do I have an obligation to tell you about this?
And my claim is that I do, and that it's not an instance of positive obligations, rather, if I don't, I'm guilty of some sort of crime against homesteading,
namely, forestalling or precluding people from owning stuff. And here's where we get into that, what do you call it, the bagel.
Here is area X, here is area Y. If you homestead an area like area Y, you have to allow somebody access to area X.
Maybe bridge under or a tunnel under or bridge over, but if that's not technologically possible, you have to allow them an egress.
Now, someone, one of the vicious questioners said, well, suppose there are two people, each own X and Y and Z, which of them has to let people through to X, and I couldn't answer at the time, but my answer now is, well, you have a barrier right there, and they should be able to get through X, through those two barriers, in other words, the borders between Y and Z should allow them to get into the X area,
So, nature abhors a vacuum, homesteading theory abhors an un-homesteaded piece of land like X,
and I think you have an obligation not only to allow them through, but to even notify them.
Now, originally I thought X would be 100 square miles and everyone would know about it,
but if X were smaller and you didn't know about it, you'd have an obligation to tell people.
I've been accused of informational socialism on this ground, but I plead innocent.
Not only here, but in the case of Murder Park, you have to tell people that it's Murder Park.
You just can't say, oh, by the way, you didn't know it's Murder Park. Boom.
You have to tell them, I don't think that's informational socialism.
I don't think it's a positive obligation.
I think the implicit contract or the logic of homesteading implies that.
Similarly with the baby.
You have to take the baby out of the bedroom and put it where?
Where? In the hospital, in the church steps, there was a case in MASH, the movie MASH, where they had a baby like that.
They took it to the monastery and the people there took care of the baby.
It's an obligation. If you don't do it, you're guilty of murder.
Okay, let us, but wait, suppose that no one wants to take care of the baby.
There was this case in Canada where there was a severely mentally handicapped and physically handicapped child who was in pain.
No, just severely mentally handicapped and physically handicapped, not in pain.
I'll get to the pain in a second.
and the father killed it. It was the Latimer case.
My view or what I take to be the libertarian view is he was guilty of murder
because he didn't offer her to anyone else. By wanting to kill her he showed that he was
incapable or unwilling to bear the responsibility of homesteading her or being her guardian,
which is fine, he doesn't go to jail for that, but by killing her he precluded other people who might have
wanted to take her and keep her alive and healthy and happy. So he was a criminal.
Take the case of Terry Shivo. Terry Shivo was for all intents and purposes a baby.
She was incapable of taking care of herself even though she was a 43 year old woman.
But for all intents and purposes, she was incapable of taking care of herself.
Now, there were allegations that the husband and other people had said that she had said that if she were ever in such a dire circumstance, she should be put to death quickly and painlessly.
But it seems to me that to put someone to death, you need more than just a say-so, especially when the people who were saying so stand to gain by that because the husband had some other woman and they wanted to get rid of her.
I mean, if it's a contract over a pen, okay, I'll say so. But if it's life itself, I want to see a notarized one, not just a signed statement, I want to see a notarized one.
Or I want to see a TV interview saying exactly that. And there wasn't.
So what should have happened in the Terry Shivo case is that when the husband wanted her put to death, he shouldn't have been allowed to put her to death.
He should have been kicked out of the guardianship of her because he no longer wants to guard her.
And then the next person online should be given that option.
And the next person, I assume, and I'm not sure, would be the parents or the siblings,
or the children if she had adult children.
And if none of those wanted, then all those people picketing outside, saying, you know, life for Terry.
Well, some of them should have been given her.
What Murray used to call this was friends of babies.
If there was a Friends of Babies organization, they should be given her.
But suppose nobody in the whole bloody world wanted her.
Or suppose no one in the whole world wanted the Latimer kid.
Then what?
Now we come up with a very difficult case, because according to libertarianism,
a baby who is unwanted and no one wants to take care of him has to die.
And it's just that they died because there were no positive obligations.
But there are ways of dying and then there are ways of dying.
And I ask myself, suppose I were a five-year-old kid
and no one wanted me, how would I like to be treated?
Namely, I'm trying to get at what is child abuse and what is not.
And there are two ways to go.
One is, I get no water and no food and I die an excruciating death a week later.
That's one way.
The other way is I get put to sleep by ether or something or a painless way.
If ever I were to commit suicide and I announce this and I'm on tape,
I want to go the quick and easy way.
I don't want to go out in two weeks starving and dehydrated.
That's a horrible way to die. That's torture.
So, what is child abuse?
It seems to me that child abuse is dying the way Terry died,
of having the feeding tube removed and you just... Ben?
Terry Schiavo wasn't conscious at all.
Okay, well, then take another person who was conscious and suffering.
If ever I'm in that position and I'm conscious, I mean, if you're unconscious, I guess it doesn't matter.
But if you're conscious, then I'd rather go out quickly and cleanly.
Take another case, and here is where I'm coming from a radical perspective.
I now have a five-year-old son, and I can't feed him, and he's going to die because I don't have any food or water for him.
However, there's a rich guy who wants to involve him in a pornographic film where he'll be raped.
What's child abuse now?
It seems to me, again, if I were the five-year-old,
I'd rather be raped.
It only takes 10 minutes or so, half an hour tops,
and then live the rest of my life normally.
Okay, maybe I'll have psychological problems,
but I'll deal with them, rather than being dead.
Now, we're sort of probing the outer reaches
of libertarian theory here,
where there are no good solutions,
where we're in lifeboat land, lifeboat situation land.
So don't think that libertarianism is cruel.
Rather the cruelty emanates from the fact
that we're in dire circumstances
and we have to deal with it
because when you have a lifeboat situation,
it's incumbent upon us to analyze it.
We just can't analyze nice situations
where the sun is shining and everyone's rich.
We also have to apply it to the netherworld of philosophy
where death is the only choice
And the only choice is which way to die.
Well, I say keep the kid alive.
I'm willing to make a concession that if the torture goes on for 70 years
and then life lasts for five minutes, OK.
But that's a continuing problem of how much torture and how much life.
If it's just a matter of 10 minutes of torture
and then a life of, you know, a normal life, maybe psychologically unhappy but, you know, that's why they have therapists
and some of them are pretty good. I think that that would be non-child abuse.
Okay, what's next in the story?
Now, I'm abstracting from all sorts of slippery slopes and killing for money and continuing problems
I'm assuming a God's-eye view where God knows exactly what's happening.
The point I'm making is we've got to get the law right first and then we worry about such peripheral issues as, you know,
people will now kill people, mercy killing when it's not justified.
I mean, that's a legitimate concern and there are cases, I think, in Holland where they're bumping off old people to get their money
and, you know, this is obviously not something I'm favoring.
Okay, so now we get to the compromise of stem cell research, having drawn the picture there.
So here we picture it. Over here there's a lab, and what they do is they get eggs and they get sperm.
And there might be a shortage of eggs, but there's no shortage of sperm, which reminds me of the story.
There was a male and a female actor, as good-looking as Tom Cruise and Britney Spears, not them, but very good-looking actors, a male and a female actor, and they went to some campus and they each read the same script, and the script was, I've got a motel room over there, the female actor would go to young lads on the campus and the male to young ladies and say, I've got a motel room over there, how would you like to spend the next two hours with me doing what kind of work?
comes naturally. And the female got about 97 out of 100 yeses, and the male got about four or five yeses.
The point is that females are a lot more judicious about spreading their eggs around, because they've got so few eggs,
and you can prove this by supply and demand, because when you have so few, they're more precious,
Nails have got plenty of sperm, they're willing to share it, they're generous to a fault.
So, to get back to my story, here you are in a lab, they've got a whole bunch of sperm
and many other eggs they can get and they put them together.
Did they violate any rights yet?
No, it's non-invasive, you know, voluntary sperm and eggs, whatever, donors, fine.
Can they start experimenting on them, killing them?
Experimenting doesn't necessarily mean killing them, but it means poking around with them, which isn't really good for them.
Well, they can, in my view, trying to extrapolate what libertarianism says about that, they can, if and only if, there aren't any people that are willing to take them on and bring them up.
In other words, so here you have the supply side, and the supply side is this lab, and the demand side is friends of babies, that organization, consisting of the rest of the world who are potential adoptive parents of all the sperm and eggs that they put together.
Now, if supply is greater than demand, we've got extra human beings that no one wants to take care of.
On the other hand, if the demand side is greater than the supply side, then there'll be no medical experiments,
because any fetus that the lab puts together, the friends of babies will say, okay, we'll take them, we'll take them.
Now, I used to think that the supply would outstrip the demand because it's easier to put babies together in a lab than it is to bring them up.
And on the web, some genius who I cite in my article that I'm publishing on this subject said,
Well, you don't really have to bring them all up. All you have to do is freeze them and keep them alive in that way.
And who knows in 500 years, maybe this or that, but you just freeze them and you'll keep them alive.
And now, it looks as if the demand side will win, because freezers are cheaper than petri dishes, or the technology and the number of eggs is very limited, even if not the amount of sperm.
So that's the compromise. The compromise is, we don't say whether stem cell research is justified or not.
We leave it to the market. We leave it to whether supply is greater than demand or not.
If demand is greater than supply, there'll be no stem cell research.
If, on the other hand, supply is greater than demand, the additional supply that is not demanded now has two choices.
One, they can die out of thawing, T-H-A-W, you die from being thawed, it doesn't hurt because it's just a fetus.
And the other is you get experimented on, and now I ask, well where is the child abuse?
Suppose I were one of those fertilized eggs, which would I rather be, thawed or experimented on?
And my answer is, thought is a certain death, whereas being experimented on, maybe one out of a million will live.
And since I'm pro-life, I think it's not murder for them to experiment on stem cells or fertilized eggs as long as supply is greater than demand.
So it's a true compromise.
We leave it to supply and demand and see what happens.
As an empirical statement, I think there'll be no stem cell research.
What about the case where
a couple has a baby and the baby has
some horrible disease,
and what they do is they create another baby in order to use the other baby, the
second baby, as a
source of supply of body parts for the first one?
You've heard of cases like that.
What's the libertarian view there?
it should be obvious by now the libertarian view there is sure they can
use the second baby as a source of whatever they want for the first baby if
and only if there's not one person in the world that wants to take that second baby
as long as there's someone else that says, oh, wait a minute, not so fast
let's not be using the second baby as a supply of body parts for the first baby
because I want the second baby
they then have precedence over the parents because the parents are no longer
Homesteading the Second Baby. They're homesteading the first, but they're not homesteading the second baby.
Okay, now I have a whole series of objections to my theory.
And what are the objections?
The first one is that you're putting human beings in a Petri dish, and doesn't this violate libertarian law?
Some of these objections are silly, I think, but I'm going to read them because I want to be exhausted in my treatment of this very important subject.
Well, it doesn't seem to me to violate libertarian code to put a sperm and an egg in a Petri dish or in a test tube or in some way.
It's not a violation of rights. It doesn't constitute an initiation of violence or a violation of property rights.
Remember I said you've got to keep those things in the fore, and if you do, you don't run into problems, or you can negotiate through this dangerous philosophical terrain.
Well, why is it wrong? Why is it not wrong, but why is it a violation of rights to put a sperm and an egg in a petri dish?
I don't see why it is.
The second one has to do with birth control pills.
And my understanding of birth control pills is that there are three kinds.
The first one stops ovulation, no eggs.
Well, that doesn't constitute an initiation of violence against a human being,
a human being defined as a fertilized egg or better.
Second, you make the cervical mucus hostile environment for the sperm.
So when the sperm gets there, it can't impregnate.
That doesn't seem to be a problem.
The third one is you change the endometrium.
The fertilized egg is there, but it has no nutrients because it can't attach itself to the body to get the nutrients.
Now, this seems to me to be a violation of rights.
Because you have a fertilized egg, that's a perfectly good fertilized egg.
And if some friend of baby says,
Aha, we want that egg, give it to us.
On what basis are you denying them?
Because you're not homesteading it.
You're as if putting it in the back bedroom when it's an infant.
In other words, the fertilized egg that's in the womb but not connected to the womb
and can't get nutrients from the womb is in effect like the infant,
the two-year-old who's in the back bedroom who you're starving to death.
No, no, no.
So that one would be illicit, so again we have some sort of compromised position.
The next objection is that you're treating children as property, but I'm not.
I'm only treating as property the right to bring up a child, which is different than the child itself.
Next objection is that I'm being a Nazi, making soap out of Jews is wrong,
Making medicine out of children is equally wrong, that's the quote, but I'm, well I was going to say but I'm not, but I am, but I'm only doing it for people that no one wants to bring up, and it's not my fault, it's your fault, why aren't you bringing them up? You see the argument? So in a sense, Nazism is justified, boy, I shouldn't say things like that because people will take it out of context, but let me say it again more quickly,
If Nazism is justified, if the Nazism is limited to helpless people that no one in the whole world wants to take care of and then you're giving it a quick death rather than a long drawn-out death.
Well, by Nazism you just mean coercion here and I think coercion is justified in those weird lifeboat kind of situations.
I know this doesn't sound right, and maybe I'm wrong and I'm open to criticism, you know, we're all struggling here for the truth,
but I'm trying to apply libertarian theory as best I can, and this is what I'm coming up with.
The objections get better.
Here's the best objection, it comes from Jeff Herbiner, who I admire and respect,
And what he does is he quotes someone who I admire and respect maybe even more, namely Murray Rothbard.
And here's Jeff Herbiner's critique of what I'm saying. He's mainly quoting Murray Rothbard.
It's two pages of single-spaced words, so I'm not going to read the whole Herbiner quote,
but I'll read Herbiner's quotes of Murray Rothbard.
And he says, Murray says, in the Ethics of Liberty, page 99, quote,
So the parental property rights must be limited in time.
That means, you know, once they're 18, they're on their own.
But it also must be limited in kind, for it truly would be grotesque
for a libertarian who believes in the right of self-ownership
to advocate the right of a parent to murder or torture his or her children.
Well, I disagree. I think I've specified a case where it would be right to murder or torture a child and to do so out of non-child abuse, out of love or whatever.
And the cases to repeat myself are, take the torture first, if the torture will save the child's life.
And if the torture takes 10 minutes and the child is 5, so it has 70 year life expectancy, fine.
Well, not fine, but better than not. I don't want my kid dead.
I'll be damned if my kid dies when I have it within my power to save him by letting him be tortured.
Look, if my kid doesn't want a penicillin shot and it'll save his life,
he's getting that penicillin shot whether he likes it or not. He's a kid.
Paternalism is justified for children, not other adults, so torture is justified, and so is murder, so is killing.
If the only choice is a long, slow death or a painless death, and those are the only choices, then I think it's...
Now remember, the long, slow death is you do nothing, so in a sense you're guiltless, you didn't commit the murder,
rather the starvation committed them, committed the murder.
Well, I think it's more consonant with libertarian theory to have a mercy killing in such a case.
Now again, it sounds a little weird, and Murray's got more to say.
But let me introduce a new topic that I'm just concocting.
I'm in the midst of writing about.
It's a thing called negative homesteading.
Ready for your daily allotment of jokes? Remember we're asking why is it that the
chicken crossed the road? Barbara Walters, isn't this interesting that the chicken
crossed the road? In a few minutes we will be listening to the chicken tell, for
the first time, the heartwarming story of how it overcame a serious case of
and Moulting and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.
Not a very good one, but maybe the next one will be better.
John Lennon, why did the chicken cross the road?
Imagine all the chickens crossing roads in peace.
Aristotle, Roderick Long will appreciate this one.
It's the nature of chickens to cross the road.
Maybe he won't appreciate it, I don't know.
Karl Marx, it was a historical inevitability
that the chicken crossed the road.
Saddam Hussein, it was an unprovoked act of rebellion
and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons
of nerve gas on the chicken.
Captain Kirk, why did the chicken cross the road?
To go boldly where no chicken has gone before.
Fox Mulder, you know who Fox Mulder is?
You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross the road before you believe it?
Freud, the fact that you're all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.
Okay, let's get back to the criticism of Jeff Herbiner citing Murray Rothbard against my thesis.
The second quote that Jeff makes from Murray is Murray says in the Ethics of Liberty, page 152,
to sum up the application of our theory of extreme situations, and indeed we are now doing extreme situations,
if a man aggresses against another man's person or property to save his own life,
he is still a criminal aggressor against the property of another,
And the victim is within his right to repel that aggression by force and to prosecute the aggressor after the crime.
Let me introduce this new concept that I've been working on called negative homesteading.
Now you all know what positive homesteading is.
You grab something, you mix your labor with it and you own it.
Fine.
What's negative homesteading?
Negative homesteading, I'm in a bad mood or something because everything I'm talking about today is pretty miserable.
These lifeboat situations are pretty horrible.
Negative homesteading is sometimes called homesteading misery,
and I just concocted this stuff, so I'm open to criticisms as I am,
even for stuff that I haven't concocted.
I regard this as a learning experience.
As I said, as I moved on in the week, I would get more and more radical.
Well, more and more radical means new stuff that I haven't even published yet.
So what's negative homesteading?
Negative homesteading is homesteading misery.
Suppose a lightning bolt hits me, pretty miserable, I'm going to die,
but I have a magic ring and I can ward it off and it'll hit Max a million.
Do I have a right to do that?
He's saying thank you, but I don't think he's fully serious.
Do I have a right to do that?
No, I don't have a right to do that.
There were two innocent people, me and Maximillian.
But I was the first to be hit by the lightning.
I homesteaded the misery.
I own the misery. I can't pass it off on anyone else.
Take the next case.
I'm now a suicide bomber.
I've got my pack of bombs here.
Here's one, here's another, got them in my pocket, ready to blow up the hospital, here are my sticks of dynamite or whatever these guys have got.
Now, if I were just marching toward the hospital and you were the hospital guard, you'd shoot me, now it'd be the end of it.
But, what I do is I grab Carrie Anne and I hold her in front of me as a shield.
And now I'm marching forward, holding her, and she can't resist because I've drugged her.
This will teach you to mess with me.
And she's as tall as I am, and let's say she's as wide as I am, which isn't true, but suppose she were.
Or I get Dan, he's even wider than I am.
I'm marching forward with Dan in front of me as a shield. I'll pick on Dan, instead of you, he's bigger.
You are the guard for the hospital. The only way you can stop me from blowing up the whole thing?
You can run, but the hospital people can't, and you're dedicated to saving them.
The only way you can do it is to shoot me, and then I'll blow up right here when I'm still a hundred yards away.
But if you do, you've got to go right through Dan, because he's in front of me as a shield.
Can you do it? Let me read the Rothbard quote again.
To sum up the application of our theory of extreme situations, if a man aggresses against another person's, another man's person or property,
he is still a criminal aggressor against the property of another, and the victim is within his right to repel that aggression by force and to prosecute the aggressor afterward.
Somewhere I've read in Murray or maybe someone else, that Dan has a guardian angel and the guardian angel is hovering up here with a pistol and just as you, remember here I am marching right behind Dan and you're the hospital guard and you're about to shoot me through Dan and the guardian angel of Dan is assigned to protect Dan's life and what the guardian angel does, Dan is helpless, he's drugged or something,
This is my tool. The guardian angel shoots you, the hospital guard, because right now, Dan has two threats against his life, one me when I get to the hospital, and the other you right now, you're going to shoot him.
And the angel says, well, Dan has two problems, an immediate problem and a future problem. The immediate problem is you, the guard.
The future problem is me, the suicide bomber, but the guardian angel reasons, you know, first let's take care of the most pressing problem,
and then we'll worry about the secondary problem, and the guardian angel shoots the guard.
That, I think, is the libertarian view, as I understand it. I think Murray said it, but I can't find where he said it,
But if he didn't say it, then I'll just make this up as a hypothetical libertarian view, and I disagree with it.
The reason I disagree with it is based on my negative homesteading theory.
My negative homesteading theory is that Dan is the first homesteader of misery.
I grabbed him first. He's toast.
He has to pay, not the guard. The guard is doing his good job by keeping me off of the hospital.
Now, one argument in favor of this is that it's broadly based utilitarian,
because we do live in an era where there are suicide bombers,
and while no suicide bomber has yet grabbed the shield and started marching forward with him toward a hospital,
it's certainly a plausible scenario, and it's incumbent upon us to answer the question,
And it seems that the answer, against which I'm contending, is let the suicide bomber go and blow up the hospital, which is non-utilitarian.
But I only point that out as peripherally because I'm not a utilitarian, I'm a libertarian, and libertarians believe in rights.
And based on this negative homesteading theory, Dan has to keep his misery to himself.
He can't inflict it on anyone else any more than he could if lightning was hitting him and he deflected it to some other innocent person.
I'm claiming that the guard would be justified in shooting me and Dan.
Let's say the bullet goes right through both of us.
I'm saying the guard would be justified in doing it, contrary to what Murray seems to be saying here.
I'd have to read it in the original to make sure Jeff didn't get it out of context, which I doubt, but my understanding of proper libertarian theory based on this new twist of negative homesteading is that the guard would be justified in shooting us both with one bullet, innocent Dan and guilty me. Why? Because Dan has already been captured. He can't deflect his misery onto other people any more than he could if he could deflect
How do we deflect a lightning strike onto some other innocent person?
See, if a lightning hits Dan, and then Dan deflects it on Matt, who's sitting next to him, they're both innocent.
So how do we pick between Dan and Matt?
Well, the way I'm picking is the lightning hit Dan, not Matt.
So Dan has got to keep it to himself.
He can't transfer the misery onto another innocent person, even though Matt is just as innocent.
Dan?
Rather than the misery growing, what if it was just transferred in the sense that, let's say you threatened to kill me unless I picked someone in this room for you to kill.
I wouldn't do the killing myself, but so you would say either pick a person in the room or I'm killing you.
And so I said Adam.
Thanks.
No problem.
There have been cases, and I told you about this Hasidic rabbi friend of mine,
where the Nazis would come to a Jewish town and they'd say,
look, pick the worst Jew you want. We're killing one Jew. You pick him.
The one who prays the least or the worst, whatever.
And according to the Torah, you're not supposed to do that
because you're aiding and abetting and cooperating with evil.
Or A stands here and puts his gun in the back of B,
who for some reason can't turn around and says,
says unless you shoot C over there I'll shoot you and if the proper thing is for B to turn around and try to shoot A but if he can't he cannot shoot him picking shooting you don't cooperate with evil but this is different this is homesteading misery this guy here B he's the homesteader of the misery he can't turn it on C he's got to keep it
He has to turn around and say to me, the bad guy,
under no circumstances am I killing an innocent person, period.
I'm keeping the misery.
Want to kill me? Kill me.
I'm keeping the misery, but I can't use it as a justification to kill someone else.
So I think those cases were all in line.
Let me continue.
I've got another five minutes of this and then I'll call for more questions.
But since Matt has been put to death, your last wish,
Do you want to ask Matt and Adam and then I'll go on?
Yeah, I wanted to ask if we can reverse the situation and say that the hospital is in misery and they are in trouble.
The hospital is in misery, but not first. Dan is the first one to be in misery.
I think.
Yeah, because I got him now.
Yeah, but he is in the same situation. He is threatened by the same...
This is where homesteading comes in. And remember, homesteading, if two people are both homesteading something,
The first one there is the homesteader.
So the negative homesteading is that the first homesteader has to keep the misery.
The hospital is the second one. It's theoretical.
I'm still a hundred yards away and I've got Dan and I'm going to blow him up.
Dan is the first homesteader of the misery. He's got to keep it.
And in the case of the lightning, he's the first guy that the lightning hit, not you.
You're the second guy. So he can't get you.
Adam? It sounds to me like there's no way to take this idea without accepting
collateral damage in war because the person living next door to Saddam Hussein
has homesteaded the misery that he spreads and you know I would be allowed
to send a missile out there and kills the dominant, kills this other guy, well he
was really close homesteading that misery. This is the next objection I was going to
Am I now becoming a, what is it called, pro-war libertarian?
You know, let's, let's, Arandian, you know, Arandian, let's nuke Saddam or something.
And my answer is if Saddam has somebody real close to him, you can.
But not the whole country, you can't have the whole country next to him.
But if Saddam is there, and he's captured someone, and he's holding someone, and he says,
you can't, and let's suppose Saddam is a bad guy, because in actual point of fact, he was our man,
he was our Noriega, I mean, the US has this long history of getting some dictator and supporting him,
and then turning against loyal dictators, but forget about that.
Let's suppose Saddam was a uniquely bad guy, the way some people think.
Well, I think you can take out his castle, and people shouldn't be in that castle.
And if they're captives of him in the castle, too bad, they're the first homesteaders in misery.
And the people might starve?
Well, it has to be a small bomb. It can't be a nuclear bomb, but it can be a bomb that kills more than one person.
Because look, otherwise, any bad guy, any suicide bomber is not going to come unarmed.
And he's going to come with a shield and then, but that's a utilitarian argument.
But the philosophical argument is that he was first grabbed.
He's now in the power of the ultimate bad guy, the suicide bomber.
Let me just continue a little bit more and then I'll call on Maximilian.
Okay, the next quote from Murray is, this is the Ethics of Liberty, page 97.
A guardian then assumes only those rights of the ward that are necessary for him to exercise so that the ward comes into a state of full self-ownership.
By bringing this development to an end and killing the ward fails to qualify as a right that the guardian can assume.
It seems doubtful in fact that he would have had the right to arrest in any way the development of his ward towards self-ownership,
as would happen in the case of indefinitely freezing eggs. My answer is the movie, The Sand Pebbles.
Anyone ever see that movie? Steve McQueen. The apex of the movie is the protege of Steve McQueen has been captured by the bad guys
And the bad guys have got the protege tied up to a pipe, and what they're doing is cutting him.
And they're going to cut him to death.
And what Steve McQueen does, he takes a rifle from a quarter mile away and kills him.
So he saves him from this death by a thousand cuts, a quick death rather than a tortured death.
Is Steve McQueen guilty of murder?
No. He is exercising proper guardianship.
Now, it's true it's not his son, but it was his protege.
And if it was his son, if I was in that position, I'd want my father to shoot me.
I'd rather die a quick death like that than being tortured and being skinned alive.
I mean, what they were going to do to him was torture him to death over
as long a time as they could keep him alive and in horrific pain.
Now, it's a pretty depressing thing.
You know, we're talking about this death or that death, and we're quibbling over types of death,
but still we have to go where libertarian theory leads us.
And libertarian theory leads us to Steve McQueen shooting his son or his protege,
a mercy killing.
Now, yes, yes, mercy killings can be abused,
But again, we want to take the God's eye point of view.
God is looking down and knows exactly what's happening and knows what's in Steve McQueen's heart
and knows that he's trying to save him from torture.
And we stipulate that a tortured death is worse than a quick and clean death.
So I'm led as if, I don't know, by an invisible hand or by my understanding of libertarianism,
down some pretty ugly corridors, but that's where I end up.
Okay, the next guy that comes up with criticisms, a guy named Tom Fleming, who writes for Chronicles,
and I won't even mention his criticisms, because they're all...
I don't know, he starts blaming Mises for me, and he starts blaming Austrian economics for this stuff.
It's just ludicrous.
So, that ends my formal comments. Let me now call on Max Billion, and let me try to defend this, or let's discuss this.
I was wondering if you don't recognize any difference between the case of the lightning and the case of the bird.
I mean, the lightning is not choosing to harm you, it is not a murder if the lightning hits you,
but the guardians can choose if they choose to shoot on you and kill you.
The question is, do I not recognize the difference between the lightning case and the case of the suicide bomber?
The lightning has no motivations, no purpose, it's just the act of nature.
I'm putting words in your mouth, but I'm trying to get the point across.
Whereas the suicide bomber is purposeful and motivated.
No, no, no, no, not the suicide bomber, the guardian.
Oh, the angel, Dan's angel?
The guard.
The guard, the hospital guard.
Yes, there is this analogy, I agree.
But that's what an analogy is. An analogy is a similarity, but not a perfect similarity, otherwise it would be the same thing.
So obviously the lightning is an act of nature or an act of God or whatever, and it's blameless. You don't blame lightning.
And you might blame the God for shooting Dan, who is an innocent person. So obviously I see a difference.
But I also see a similarity, and the similarity is that the first one to be immiserated, the first one to be homestead negatively,
he's the one that's got to keep it to himself, he can't be foisting it off on other people.
And Dan was the first guy to be hit by lightning, he can't give it to Matt.
And Dan was the first guy to be grabbed by me, the suicide bomber, and he can't save his life at the cost of the guard and the hospital inhabitants.
I agree with this point. What I'm saying is that the guard shouldn't shoot on...
The guard shouldn't shoot me and Dan? If the guard doesn't shoot me and Dan, then I come to the hospital with Dan, and now that I'm in the middle of the hospital,
But this is an utilitarian argument.
An utilitarian argument.
They blow up the whole world.
Now, here, he's innocent, so principle says we don't blow him up, but it's not very utilitarian.
Probably the answer to that case is somebody volunteers to kill him.
And we hold a ticker-tape parade for him because he saved the whole earth, and then we execute him for being a murderer.
Because remember, libertarianism doesn't answer the question as to whether somebody should kill Steve, who's now under the threat of the Martians, who are beyond our reach.
It just says, he killed him, should he be put in jail? And the answer is yes, or executed, or whatever punishment that he should be punished.
Nat, and then Dan.
I'm interested in hearing how you would distinguish the Terry Shivo case from the Steve McQueen example.
Because it seems like in the Steve McQueen example, the murderers or torturers are using that person in much the same way
that whatever religious riot or whoever it is, you talk about keeping Terry Shivo alive or using her,
because it doesn't seem that she's enjoying her life as a vegetable.
So, it's not a perfect analogy, but it seems similar to me.
Well, at the time, they didn't really know what her situation was.
There were some people who said she could have recovered, and others say she couldn't.
I mean, if she's a vegetable, she feels no pain, so it really doesn't matter in some sense.
On the other hand, where there's life, there's hope.
Maybe in 10 years they'll invent something to bring her back to life.
But the point is, who should be the guardian of Terry?
Who should be the guardian of any child-like person?
And it seems to me that the guardian of Terry should be the person who is guarding,
who is doing the best for Terry.
And the best for Terry doesn't seem to be her husband, it seemed to be her parents.
Remember the case of the Latimer girl, the father murdered her.
Anyone else would have taken care of her, or anyone else would have done better for her.
So I think the father loses his right, as does the husband of Terry, to be the guardian when you stop guarding.
Remember, children are a unique creature.
You can't own them, but you can own the right to bring them up.
And the only way you can keep the right to bring them up is by bringing them up or by supporting them.
Once you stop supporting a helpless child, you lose your right to be their guardian.
Steven and then Dan.
How do you exercise the forfeiture or abandonment of the guardianship right you have?
How far are you required to extend effort to find another place or potential sustenance in life for the fetus or the newly born baby that you don't want to bring up with the libertarian standard for finding that out?
I don't think there is any libertarian standard. I think that's a continuum problem.
You have to put a... and here we call upon common law.
Common law is you put the baby on the church steps, which means you notify the priest of this.
Well, or put an ad in the newspaper or bring it to the hospital.
Now, what kind of a newspaper? Does it have to be the New York Times or a lot of circulation,
but suppose it's a little ad and no one sees it?
libertarianism doesn't answer that question because it's a
continuum problem you have to make a good faith effort to notify the friends
of babies or the what's that group where you keep orphanage I mean if you notify
one or two orphanages and they both decline how many orphanages do you have
to do 17 93 there's no answer but the idea is you have to make a good faith
effort to notify people who you think are reasonable candidates to take the
Baby. If you do that then you can starve the baby or you can mercy kill the baby.
Dan? Well I had a question that sort of extrapolates from the case of the baby
being abandoned and now we're going to have a torture of someone like that take charge of
the baby. Let's consider the case of a fully adult individual who finds himself, for very
Walter Block is in the continent of Asia, the Eurasian landmass, but that entire landmass is now taken over by Nazis, and perhaps legitimately, they legitimately own all the land there.
And they now say, Walter Block is in the middle of the landmass, so he can't really get to the ocean to swim away to England or someplace like that.
And they told you to either leave or they're going to shoot you.
What can you do? Would it be okay for them to shoot you, since you couldn't, if you tried to leave just by walking out of the original land mass, you would die of starvation, which you said is much worse than a quick and painless death. So that would be okay then for them to shoot you, because that would be a mercy kill.
Well, I suppose if I accept your premise, I'd rather be shot than starved to death, but I'm not sure why they get the right to, how did I get there in the first place?
Well, that's a tough one. I mean, if you fall with a parachute onto the land of bad guys, you're a trespasser.
Okay, if I accept your premise that I have to be either shot or mercy shot or tortured.
Right, but with the child, we already accepted the premise that it's better to die quickly than it is to...
Yeah, well, I'll accept that. I don't much like the idea of being put in that position.
But if I stipulate that I'm in that position, then when you say follows, ineluctably,
well, which would you rather be, tortured to death by starvation and thirst, or put out of your misery quickly?
I'd have to think it.
I'm not sure that I have any objection to your core legal reasoning, but you have an ancillary presupposition in the case of the eviction, and I believe also with Peter Dish, the best case scenario is that it's there until it can be fought and then grown into an organism.
and this is, there's some sort of presupposition of continued technological progress which I think is
exogenous to the argument and I don't think is very Austrian because you're sort of trying to see
around the corner and you're making, the purpose is to get to a sort of absolute rights position
and I buy the fact that within a rights position you can have a sort of subsidiary utilitarian
argument too, but the historicism of the, not historicism, but I think progressivism of the auxiliary argument I don't buy, that seems to be the case.
Could you say again specifically what you don't buy?
The fact that, well, in the case of the eviction, you're saying that this will become an increasingly good thing, right, through history.
In other words, 200 years from now, we'll be able to prolong the baby much longer and I don't think that has place in legal reasoning, because we don't know that, we can't see around.
Well, I don't know that it's legal reasoning. I'm combining legal reasoning with empirical and with predictions, but my prediction is that as medical technology increases exogenously,
More and more babies will be able to be saved
until all of them are saved.
Now, I might be wrong on that.
Let's suppose I'm wrong on that.
I'm willing to stipulate I can be wrong
on my empirical prediction,
but I then resort to the core argument.
That was a utilitarian extraneous argument.
The core argument is, let's say medical technology
never improves past now, and that right now,
one ninth of babies can be saved.
Well, then that's it.
One-ninth of babies are saved.
Or if I were speaking or writing in the year 1700,
and we never thought that medical technology
would be doing anything, then I would be a pro-choicer.
I would say that you have a right to evict
in the gentlest manner possible.
Medical technology is such that the gentlest manner possible
is no different than any other manner, and that would be it.
So then the libertarian position would collapse
on the pro-choice.
In the future, if my prediction is right,
which may or may not be right,
then it becomes pro-life.
Right now, it's sort of a middle.
But the principle is invariant to the historical episode.
Namely, rights are timeless.
It's just as wrong for the caveman
to bop another caveman overhead
as for the spaceman to bop another spaceman over the head.
Libertarianism is a timeless theory.
But still we can talk about medical technology and make reasonable assumptions and say well here let's apply it here, let's apply it here, let's apply it here.
So I'm not really putting much emphasis in that. My main emphasis is in the libertarian theory.
And it's reasonable to suppose different cases.
Adam.
So let's say I accept your premises and I can't raise any objections against them now about the eviction versus the killing.
On the other hand, to say someone's trespassing, don't you have to say that they're willing and able to lead, or that they're able to lead but they can't?
I don't think so.
Like, if you're at my estate and it's a mile radius, and I say, I want you off my property, and let's say you agree, and I say you have one second to get off before I shoot you, and there's no way you can get off in one second.
Judith Jarvis Thompson, a philosopher, has a very famous case where you wake up in bed, and there's an umbilical cord between you and a violin, and you can't get out of it in one second.
So it seems like it has to be judged relative to the capability. And it sounds to me like the child in the womb is a captive. He might like to get out, but he can't. And so you want to evict him, that's fine, but you're not giving him the opportunity to get out based on his capabilities.
Judith Jarvis Thompson, a philosopher, has a very famous case where you wake up in bed and there's an umbilical cord between you and a violinist and you both wake up at the same time and you ask the violinist well how come you to be in my bed and he says well I don't know all I know is I went to sleep in the hospital last night and here I am and we surmise that what happened is a bunch of bad doctors took them off the kidney dialysis machine in the hospital brought them to your house attached them to your kidney
Again, there you are. Now he's helpless. He'll die if you cut the thing.
Do you have to carry him around for nine months? Do you have to carry him around for the rest of your life?
This seems to be the implication of what you're saying. My answer is a compromise.
No, you don't have to carry him around attached to you. Be awkward, what the heck, but minor point.
You don't have to keep him around for the rest of your life. You don't have to keep him around for nine months.
You just can't cut the cord and you can't shoot him.
Namely, you have to notify a hospital.
You have to call the hospital and say,
hey, look, there's this guy.
Can you please take him off me and stick him back
on the kidney dialysis machine,
which will take a half hour of phone calling.
So it's sort of a compromise.
And yet that person is just as helpless as the fetus.
So I don't think you have to keep the fetus for nine months.
but that's an arbitrary time selection on a continuum problem.
Okay, if you will, but it seems to me to be more
in the spirit of ownership to keep them for a half hour
than to keep them for nine months.
In other words, you're so far apart on the continuum
that it starts to make a difference in kind.
There's a difference between notifying
and supporting for nine months.
and the pro-life people
want you to keep that person for nine months.
And that seems to be letting the trespasser
get away with murder.
Well, get away with trespassing.
But only for nine months.
Well, nine months is...
Relative to the capability,
where else would that capability be?
Well, that's one way to look at-
I give Stephen Hawking more time
to get off my property than I give you.
Okay, more time, but you see, even Stephen Hawking,
Okay, so you give the fetus an hour, you give Stephen Hawking a half hour since he's better than the fetus,
and you give me ten minutes since I'm better able-bodied than him, but nine months is a gigantic amount of time.
Matt?
Yeah, I think that you did a very important work on the distinction between addiction and abortion,
And I have the example, let's take the airplane example, in which you will find a person that is in coma.
Can you just, in a gentle way, evict it out of the airplane and throw it away?
Even if you have a radio and somebody on the radio says,
well, okay, you just fly around for another nine months, you don't need to do anything, and we'll take care of it when you land.
Yeah, well, I guess you're making the point I'm making that there's a difference between notice
And I appreciate the difference between a fetus, Stephen Hawking, and an able-bodied person such as myself, on the one hand, and on the other hand, something that is clearly not notice.
It's way more than notice. And even on notice, I'm already treading on thin ice with regards to positive obligations.
There are people on the other side who are saying, what? Give notice? The hell with that. Just, you know, get rid of them because there are no positive obligations.
So I'm a great compromiser here, not because I'm susceptible to compromise, but because that's where I think the theory leads us.
Noah, and then we're out of time. What should we do? Noah.
There's a lot of weight placed on this gentlest manner possible, it seems.
And I'm wondering about costs, particularly. It seems cheapest to carry the baby and have it after the nine months.
And then maybe the next least expensive is to have a violent killing, non-addiction, non-generalism in a possible.
And I'm wondering about the risk to the mother's life. I'm wondering about the actual monetary cost.
And I'm wondering about even pain, even if it's more painful.
I try to cover all this in the article, but I didn't really get into it because I had only so much time.
I would be subjectivist in this as a good Austrian and say what cost is cost to the mother.
And if the mother wants to evict, then that's the cheapest because that's what she prefers to keep it in for nine months,
even though it might not cost much in money, it would cost a lot in time.
And she's in effect announced this.
As for the money, it's the friends of babies that have to pay for everything.
And if there's more risk, then the mother doesn't have to take on more risk.
But now you have to, I mean, if it's this much more risk versus, you know, that much, again, you get to continuing problems.
But the friends of babies have got to pay the whole way.
The mother has no positive obligations to do anything, would be my rough answer.
For the more detailed answer, you'd have to see the piece.
Well, thanks for being such a great audience in the face of a hostile argument.