At 05:22 PM 4/19/03 -0400, david wrote: ...
It is the initiation of force that is wrong. People who try to rob others should have their behavior regulated by being killed by their intended victims.
In order to distinguish when force has been initiated, you have to have some agreed-upon definitions of rights. The whole argument you're in here about smoking has to do with boundaries of rights. Harmon says your cigarette smoke is a form of assault. This may or may not be valid, but it's certainly possible to come up with kinds of fumes that are a violation of the rights of the people forced to endure them (think of mustard gas, or even the smell of raw sewage), so it's not obviously bogus. In practice, this is an area where simple rights arguments don't work all that well, because there are big areas of gray.
Hiring professionals to deal with robbers is a valid response to the robbers' initiation of force. Killing people who use force to regulate individuals who smoke in public is also a legitimate response to the their initiation of force.
How about if whenever I see someone smoking in public, I go stand upwind of them and open my package of Instant Sarin Mix? Which one of us is initiating force? How about if I'm more polite, and merely open my package of Instant Skunk Scent Mix? The issue is where you draw the line, and the problem is that there's no unambiguously right answer. The only way to resolve this peaceably is to have some agreed-upon standards to resolve the gray areas into solid lines. Those agreed-upon standards are sometimes in the form of written laws, sometimes in the form of precedent in case law, and are very often simply the unwritten standards of conduct that most people live by most of the time. And often they need courts of some kind to rule on gray areas that exist even within those rules.
David Neilson
--John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259