Quarantines may be justified

[John Kelsey]

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 at ix.netcom.com
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