| | Michael,
I appreciate your efforts to make clear the concepts of delegated self-defense as they relate to the morality of foreign intervention in post 74. The arguments in that post are well made, honest in their representations of what I said, focused on the ideas and without personal attacks. (Unlike some of the things you've said in other posts, which I'll address, or not, in another reply).
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Talking about the issue of a person who pays taxes to deal with an offense where the taxpayer is NOT the victim, you say, "In other words, If he did not violate MY RIGHTS, why am I forced to pay to punish him for violating SOMEONES RIGHTS, SOMEWHERE?"
(And the stipulation is that we are talking about someone who HAS committed a violation of someone's individual rights.)
And the answer you give is that "...the justice system [serves] a more important and complex role than merely ‘revoking the rights which people have not respected in their victims’" and you go on to list a number of roles: arbitrating disputes, maintaining a monopoly on retaliatory force, retribution for crime, etc.
I explained function of government in different terms. What I said was that government should provide the environment for protection of individual rights within a jurisdiction. That would include structures like the civil and criminal laws, the courts, the cops, the jails and prisons, etc. and functions like you mentioned. The important point here is that all justifiable government functions or roles flow from the rational implementation of individual rights in a jurisdiction (as laws) - no more and no less.
Notice how a tiered or layered system of taxation relates to a tiered or layered system of jurisdiction. I pay towards the city, the county, the state and the federal and the law differentiates in services provided by law, as well the obligations on the citizens, by jurisdictions and this is an element of justice. I am paying for the administration of local laws only for my location. The fellow in Omaha doesn't pay for the costs of maintaining the courts in Los Angeles as well as in his own city.
There is a reason that this has all come about. My rights may exist the minute I am born, and if my mother died and left me the last person on earth, they would still exist, but never come into question because they are only needed when we live in a society. As society grows from tiny groups to larger groups we have naturally followed the practice of dividing and/or joining - people join groups, new groups form, larger groups divide, and layers are added since some things apply to all subsumed groups, and other things only apply within a group. The constant squabbling among people living under their layers of groups, using a principle of parsimony, a sense of what is fair, the presumption of self-interest and the passage of time have evolved the system of jurisdiction.
Jurisdiction is underappreciated. It is much more than just a simple relationship between a geographical boundary and a specific law. And, I've said before that confusions are bound to arise when people fail to make distinctions between law and individual rights. That, in a sense, is what is happening in much of this thread. Individual rights tell us what is right or wrong in an action, and law tells us if there is an obligation for governmental action (and at what group level - local cops, county sheriff, state troopers, FBI, etc.). We know that it is immoral for a person to harm themselves say with an abuse of a drug, but that it is not our obligation to interfere. And that this kind of immoral act is their right to engage in. We recognize that (or would if our laws were more rational in this area) by not having a law that prohibits people from taking drugs. Jurisdiction is about legal obligations on the structure of government and they describe both the geographical location covered and the layer of government that holds the obligation. A person can do any act that is not a immoral and remain moral, any act that is not a violation of individual rights and not be an aggressor, and any act that is not illegal and not be a criminal. A government can only act when a specific laws permit that act. Some laws require that a government act. Individuals carry their rights everywhere they go – but they may wander in and out of numerous jurisdictions.
We see that one nation aggresses against another and we judge the action as wrong. Further, that it is a specific kind of wrong, one that violates individual rights. That is in the realm of morality AND it is in the area of morality that government, by its nature, deals with. In getting from morality to having a government entity to respond, we move to the area of law. Objectivity requires that we be a nation of laws - a call for action that arises out of moral outrage should never be enough to make a government take an action that is outside of, or not provided for by law. A just law will require some government body, at the proper level, to act. But the law must be one that falls inside of the jurisdiction. We don't have jurisdiction in a foreign country (in the absence of binding treaties that include that country). This is fair and just. Otherwise, the citizens of Omaha are paying to provide the umbrella of protection for the entire world, not just their city, their county, their state, and their country. Further, if the umbrella were to include the entire world, then it would right to expect some US government agency to step in everywhere for every violation of a law... but wait, how do we apply the law that governs Omaha (Federal law, civil law, etc.) to Zimbabwe? The only answer, in practical terms, would be that we don't apply it logically (can't) or fairly (not enough resources) and that leaves it at the whims or rationales of those who muster a majority or hold sufficient political power at the time.
But, if the attack is on our country that makes it within our jurisdiction.
Right now, when you look at the international level what you see is mostly anarchy - no jurisdiction. If we imagine that the UN were a rationally constituted body that had been granted a required sovereignty by all of the nations under it, then a conflict like Russia invading Georgia would be seen as in the UN's jurisdiction and it would hold the responsibility for acting.
When someone says, well, let’s apply that to a mugging on the street in Omaha, does that mean that no one should stop the mugging? On the moral side, there is a right being violated, that makes the action wrong and it is the kind of wrong that should invoke an arm of the law. Having established that it is a violation of rights, any individual wanting to could intervene to help the victim. And the local police, criminal courts, etc. should be working to provide their part. If one of the citizens that jumped in to help the victim happened to be a cop from a different city, it would be quite correct to say that he was acting as an individual and NOT as a cop from Council Bluffs. Council Bluffs has no right to intercede out of their jurisdiction. The delegation of self-defense rights has to as exact and as specific as we can make it since it is the use of force. If I say to some person, you are my body guard, that doesn't give them a right to shoot someone that is moving towards me unless they see a weapon (i.e., have reason to believe there is a threat to my life). I can't delegate what I don't have. A thief can't steal good title, and a government cannot claim moral right to take actions it has not been delegated and delegation is always jurisdictional. Any citizen or group of citizens can go to Georgia and fight. This used to be done in years past, even though transportation was much slower - the citizens from Tennessee that went to fight at the Alamo - the people that went to fight against the fascists in Spain.
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Finally, you made these comments near the bottom of post #74: "I don’t believe anyone would prefer the justice system only acts to defend individuals in the very specific moment they are threatened, and stops defending or persecuting criminals once the threat of the range of the moment ends. Yet this is the exact same standard you hold nations to (which are collections of individuals) in regards to other nations, which are collections of individuals as well. If an individual has right to act in the long term rational self defense, so do collections of individuals, and so do formally recognized collections of individuals." I would say "government" rather than "justice system" and I would talk about laws or structures or taxes at any point of intersection between an individual and government and relate that to individual rights. For example, government is constituted to provide the environment of individual rights by using laws and the laws allow for structures like police and courts. Laws rightfully allow a cop to defend and a court to try and a prison to incarcerate a criminal. Because the purpose is to make an environment for ourselves (consistent with individual rights) we don't restrict our attention to only the moment of the crime. We recognize that we can grab up that criminal later in time (we have a statute of limitations to keep the time element from being abused). Notice that from this, more accurate portrayal of the application of self-defense through delegation to a government that you cannot expand it by saying that a collection of individuals have rights. That implies the rights become rights of the collection as a collection. Instead the collection has structures and the structures are the product of laws and can only act by laws and the laws have to have jurisdiction.
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