All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:40
116 Criminals Part 1: Capital Punishment

The argument from morality and state slaughterhouses

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 10 to 10 on Monday the 27th of February.
I hope you're doing well.
Thanks so much for everybody who's getting involved and participating in freedomainradio.com forward slash board.
Very interesting discussions going on.
Very excellent questions.
A brilliant crew, if I do say so myself.
I am really enjoying the commentary.
I think that the caliber of conversations is very high.
I think that the level of respect and good manners.
I show my British side there, where I think that good manners are very important.
And so I invite you one and all to come aboard.
It's a great community and I think that the more we can put up there, I mean, it's for each other, of course.
It's fantastic.
But the more we can put up there, the better.
And because, you know, people who come in will then get lots of answers to questions that might otherwise have not been able to get a hold of.
So, come on board.
I'm also, as we speak, trying to get Christina, who's very interested but needs to check with her own professional organizations about how all this works, is very keen on putting up an advice board or an advice folder.
Because being a libertarian is challenging from a negotiating standpoint, an emotional standpoint, interacting with others.
We all have to live in a world that ain't quite as sane as we are, and that produces a wide variety of exciting interactivity and emotional challenges.
Christina would love to do what she can to help there, so she's chatting about that at the moment, and we'll open that up as soon as she figures out what levels of ridiculous disclaimers she needs for whatever legal reasons.
I mean, I can give advice because I'm not part of any professional association, but Christina is not quite the same level of flexibility, so she's just going to check into that and she will get back to us.
So, I'd like to talk about criminals today, and also, I guess, to do a short stop in the world of the death penalty, because that was a question that came up from a young libertarian who PMed me this weekend, talking about a conversation that he had with his father, who was, you know, real keen on the death penalty, you know, three strikes and you're dead kind of stuff.
And this is not that uncommon among people who are really big into law and order.
It's interesting because sometimes it's co-joined with great skepticism of the government, i.e., well, the government shouldn't do welfare programs, and the government shouldn't do this, and the government shouldn't do that, and the public schools are terrible.
But, you know what would be really great?
It would be to give them the power of life and death.
So, the power of redistribution of income, it's really incompetent, very bad, all too political, and produces exactly the wrong results.
If we give them the Zeus-like power of life and death, then, by heavens, we will be so much better off as a society.
Again, it's just a wrinkle that is sort of part of the emotional fabric of, quote, political thinking in the modern world, and it's worth having a little sort of examination of it, and then we'll talk about crime in general.
Just before I do that, though, I remembered something, which is that for those of you who listened to the podcast so long, and thanks for all the fish which I uploaded last night, you may notice that the last couple paragraphs have been talked about before.
Absolutely, that is the case.
I have rejigged the article based on the request from A website to include more specific details, a little bit less theory.
So I thought that the details about the destruction of the card industry, life in a cardless universe, would be interesting to people.
And the remainder of it remains fairly the same as it was before.
So sorry if you've experienced that.
It's not that I've forgotten what I've posted before.
I just didn't want to just post something on the card industry.
And you never know where these things are going to end up.
So maybe some environmentalist mails it to someone else and without the conclusions that are embedded in the second third of that or the last third of that podcast, that environmentalist is going to say, ah, you see, we need more state controls because the state can get away from you.
So let's talk about the death penalty and then we'll have a I'm not sure that I'm going to get too far along criminality before I get home.
Or get to work, rather.
But let's take a shot.
So the death penalty basically is granting the government the right to put people to death for crimes that they have committed.
And I think that's a very interesting proposition.
Again, I view this as a mathematical proposition, as a logical proposition, and it's well worth having a look at it and saying, well, what are the actual mechanics that occur?
Well, the actual mechanics are as follows.
So, let's just take an absolutely certain case, and we're going to remove all possible ambiguities, of which there are several dozen, and say that Bob has killed a guy and he was caught on videotape and 12 people testified that they saw him do it and he was found with the smoking gun in his hand and he confessed and the DNA tests prove that he is the illegitimate son of Michael Jackson.
And, then, because his murder is incontrovertible, let's just say, I mean, never really the case, but let's just say it is incontrovertible, then the state has the right to execute him as a punishment for this crime.
Well, that's fine.
It's a perfectly valid moral proposition to examine, and let's have a little look.
Now, let's take out silly ideas like the state, and just as we usually do, we'll talk about the argument for morality, and we'll talk about individuals.
So, let's just say that Joe is the guy who represents the totality of the state experience.
I'm not going to divide it into the arresting officer, the jail guard, the prosecutor, the executor, the judge.
I'm just going to say that Joe represents the totality of the state process.
So, what we're really saying is that Bob kills someone, and because Bob kills someone, Joe can kill him.
And that's a very interesting moral proposition.
You certainly can't, based on the argument for morality and, you know, just logic and common sense, you can't just reserve this right for the state.
Because, as we have talked about at length and potentially ad nauseum, You can't just make up a moral rule and say, well, this applies to this guy in this situation, but not this guy in that situation.
I mean, otherwise it's just a bunch of silly opinions and they don't add up to anything.
But you have to come up with a rule or a moral approach that is consistent to all people at all times and in all places.
So there's no such thing as the state can do this.
You're saying Joe, who calls himself the state but could easily call himself a member of the Flying Nun Cabaret, that Joe has the right to kill Bob because Bob has killed someone.
And it's not a question of self-defense.
So, for instance, the moral right to defend oneself against violence, which I know that I've talked about it, like, let's not get hung up about it.
So I mean, I don't want to flood my inbox with people telling me that I'm contradicting myself, because I'm fully aware that I have had a podcast about Forget about self-defense, it's not really that important, but let's resurrect it just for the moment to talk about this particular instance, because I think we can dispose of it towards the end as well.
But let's just say that Bob attacks Fred, and Fred is defending himself, and shoots Bob in the chest.
I mean, he tries to shoot him in the leg to disable him, but it doesn't work, so he shoots him in the chest and kills him.
Well, no one's really going to have any problems with that, because it's self-defense, and there's lots of arguments as to the validity of self-defense.
I'm not going to go into it here, but email me if you have any questions, and I'll point you to the voluminous literature on self-defense on the web, or you can Google it yourself.
But let's just say for the moment that nobody has any real problems with Fred defending himself against Bob's attack.
Now, because Fred has the right to defend himself against Bob's attack, and everybody has the same moral rights, then obviously Joe has the right to defend Fred against an attack.
So, if Fred has the right to shoot Bob because Bob is attacking him, then Joe also has the right to shoot Bob, because Bob is attacking Fred.
I'm just trying to get my mental pawns all in a row.
So, the right of self-defense is not just applicable to the person being attacked, because everybody has the right to defend for others, which is why you get the root of things like security guards, and as we've talked about, DROs, private armies, and all that kind of good stuff.
So, whatever right is available to one is available to all, and therefore you have the moral right to intervene in somebody else being attacked.
Now, you don't have a moral responsibility, a duty, an obligation, an absolute to do it, no more so than you have an absolute moral compulsion or demand To defend yourself.
I mean, if you want to let Bob just come and choke you to death and lie there passively, a la Michael Hutchens, well then, you can do that and nobody's going to really have any problems.
Although they may have a problem prosecuting Bob for doing that, because obviously you weren't fighting back, therefore it wasn't particularly something you didn't want to happen, and so on.
So, that is something that's perfectly valid.
It's not something that is valid only for the state, or only for policemen, or only when they're in uniform, or only between the hours of 9 to 5, or only when there's a full moon, or an eclipse, or anything like that.
It's valid at all times and for all people.
Self-defense.
On behalf of yourself, self-defense on behalf of others, perfectly valid.
Now, the other question then becomes, what about the passage of time?
And also the question of proportional force is interesting.
So let's say that Bob steals Joe's wallet.
And then Joe, the next day, sees Bob and shoots him in the face.
Well, I mean, it's an interesting question.
There's no real absolute answer, because again, remember, morality only has to have a biological degree of accuracy, not the degree of accuracy required for physics, because it's a biological construct, or an aspect or property of biological entities.
So, at what point can you shoot back somebody who's stealing your wallet, or at what point can you shoot back somebody who's attacking you?
Obviously, during the time you can, but what if 30 seconds has elapsed?
What if a minute has elapsed?
What if 5 or 10 or 20 or 2 days or whatever has elapsed?
At some point, we would not say that it's a particularly moral thing to do.
However, on the principle of restitution of property, I think it is valid.
So, for instance, if... I'm just going to get rid of everybody else and talk about me and Bob.
So, if Bob steals my wallet, then I see Bob the next day, I can go to Bob, hold a gun to his neck and say, give me my wallet back.
Because restitution of property is a valid moral principle in my book, and, you know, so I can go and get my wallet back.
And if Bob ain't gonna give me my wallet back, then, you know, can I shoot him?
Can I not?
I don't know.
I mean, it's so rare.
Nobody's ever really gonna do it anyway.
I mean, this Charles Bronson vigilante stuff is all just pure fiction, so I don't mind talking about it from a theoretical standpoint.
But again, basically, we generally have bigger fish to fry.
But, I personally... I don't really have any particular issues with it.
The question of excessive force is one that is very much a grey area.
And so, generally, if you can get the person to back off from you, you should do that.
If you can run away, you should do that.
If you have to be violent towards them, do it in a non-lethal manner.
So, who knows?
And, of course, nobody ever knows the truth of what happens in these situations anyway.
I mean, you could get some guy To take an extreme example, you could get some guy who's really keen on being a murderer.
So what he does is he walks through a slum dressed in a three-piece suit with a clear plastic bag stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills swinging at his side.
And then when he gets attacked, he goes, Oh my heavens!
It's just so wrong!
I'm gonna shoot this guy!
And therefore he does it.
And it all gets very complicated from there, because to what degree is that entrapment?
I mean, who knows?
I mean, again, these things are also very rare that it doesn't really matter.
Most people who want to kill others don't go to that elaborate kind of scenario.
They just join the military.
So, to go back to the question of what degree do third parties have to redress the grievances of individuals, well, it's tricky.
And it's not tricky because of the moral right.
It's tricky because of the proof.
So let's say that Bob steals my wallet and you see this but don't do anything.
But later you see Bob and then you hold the gun to his neck and say, give Steph back his wallet or I'm going to shoot.
Well, if I have the right to do that, then surely you have the right to do that.
The rights are not specific to the person acting or the person being acted upon.
They are common to all people at all times.
Therefore, if I have the right to go and find this guy and shoot him because he's not given my wallet back, then so do you.
So, from that standpoint, it seems like reasonable.
Now, is that the death penalty?
Well, no, of course not.
You obviously are going to have to give the person the right or the possibility of giving your wallet back and so on.
And so all of this stuff's very interesting.
I think it can be pretty alarming to non-libertarians who aren't used to dealing with these kinds of moral topics in a way that is not overcharged with moral terror of violence and civil war and, you know, gang warfare and so on.
So, you know, I think it's interesting to talk about.
Do I think we should talk about it that much outside the movement?
Well, if somebody presses us, sure.
But the idea that the death penalty should be the exclusive right of the state, and that the state can take over that retaliatory measure from somebody else, and that the state can determine whether that right of attack or right of retaliation is valid on behalf of somebody else, and whether it can tax other people,
To pay for this whole process, and whether it is a sole determiner of guilt or innocence in these matters, well, all of that is complete nonsense, because all of that is reserved for the people who represent the state as a whole, and therefore is not common to everybody at all times and in all places, and therefore it's not a moral rule.
It's simply The exercise of power.
Now, as to why the US remains the sole Western country that still has a death penalty, well, I mean, it's co-joined with the religiosity, right?
I mean, with the religiosity, the death penalty becomes both more imperative and less morally troubling for, I mean, just two reasons I'll touch on here.
We could do a whole podcast on this, but There is an eye for an eye.
There is the old biblical God.
There is the idea that God gives civil authorities absolute power, and therefore there's no capacity for the civil authorities to do any wrong.
And so the imperative to kill people in retaliatory, sort of, quote, justice-based measures is very high in a religious society.
And so you can see Saudi Arabia and America have some degrees of commonalities of kind, if not degree of course, Saudi Arabia is much worse, but some commonalities of kind for this kind of thing.
I mean it's interesting because in the Soviet Union one of the first things that Lenin did was to get rid of the death penalty.
So you can see that in a supposedly atheistic, although completely insane and corrupt communist society, they don't have the same kind of moral imperative.
Now of course they do end up killing a whole lot of people, but it's not part of the law in general.
The death penalty was one of the first things abolished by Lenin, In the early 1920s, or the late 19-teens.
So, in America you have a religious streak which is, you know, eye for an eye, Old Testament.
And also, you can't kill someone in the religious framework.
All you can do is destroy their physical body.
You can't kill a human being in the biblical world.
You don't have the power to extinguish a soul.
A soul is a direct product of the omnipotence and Omnipotence and all knowledge and all powerful nature of God and therefore no human being has the capacity to extinguish a soul.
Therefore there is no real capacity to kill the essence of a human being.
You can only destroy the physical shell which releases a soul and then that judgment is up to God, right?
There's that old sick army joke.
It's like, kill them all!
Let God sort it out.
And there's some real truth in that.
For instance, one of the things that morally was defensible, although not morally defensible of course, that was morally defensible in the structure of Christian thought throughout the Crusades was the following sort of scenario.
So you're some crazy Christian knight who trots off to Jerusalem to get back the holy lands from the infidel Muslims.
And you capture a whole bunch of Muslims and you know, or you believe, that if they do not accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they're going to go to hell forever and have an eternity of mind-blowing, unbelievable, horrifying torments and so on and so on and so on.
So, what do you want to do?
Well, you want to convert them, and then kill them, so that they don't have a chance to relapse.
And this happened with depressing regularity during the Crusades, that they would get a field full of Muslims together, men, women, and children sometimes as well, and they would, you know, force them with a knife at their throat to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, and then they would kill them, so they were releasing these souls directly to God, and so on.
So don't think that the Muslims alone have a historical monopoly on this kind of violence.
It is something that is joyfully part of the Christian tradition as well.
And I'm not saying it was common, but I'm saying that morally it was defensible.
And the only question then became, of course, the mortal sin that the person who is killing someone has
uh... bought upon themselves but uh... that sort of question for another time and also that requires that you have pretty solid knowledge of the bible which back in the days of the crusades was not particularly possible because i don't think i think that i think i've got the time frame correct it was fourteen century and so the bible was not available in the vernacular so basically you could just believe anything that the priest told you had to believe anything that the priest told you so the priest would say well they will uh... go to heaven if you kill them after they accept jesus christ
And also, you won't go to hell because you are harvesting souls for God, and that's a good action, and you're taking on the sin, but for the sake of others, which absolves the sin.
And, you know, they can get all this kind of complicated muckety-muck together to justify this kind of killing.
And, of course, the Christians wanted to kill people who believed other things than Christianity.
And later on, after the fragmentation in the post-Reformation period, anybody who believed a slightly different flavor of Christianity They wanted to kill these people, of course, because it was a direct competition to their crazy belief system for there to be other crazy belief systems around.
So, you know, you can read directly in the Bible that if somebody counsels you to believe in other gods, you kill him, kill his family, kill his hamster, kill his offspring, and even, I think, pee in his bushes.
So, Christianity as a sort of sick, crazy cult, which is definitely its origins, it's been sort of beaten back into a kind of normalcy at the moment, But it's only normal if you're kind of repressively insane.
Christianity as a crazy violent cult.
...was very keen on getting rid of other crazy violent cults, and because it was fundamentally irrational, the only way that it could do that was through the threat of violence.
So they wanted these killing machines to go around, these knights to go around slaughtering Muslims, so that Muslims would be frightened into conversion, and say, yes, I believe in Christ even before, and I believed in Christ for five years, and yes, I'll go to the church, all of that.
Because, you know, you can't argue people into religion, you can only bully them, or frighten them, or threaten them, because religion is just so nuts to begin with, that nobody's going to believe it based on argumentation.
So, to get back to the question of self-defense in the state from a relatively small tributary of tangential conversation, the question of the death penalty and of state retribution can simply be resolved by saying, is it a right that's available to everyone, then it's not a right that's common to the state, and then what I can do is, if I see a crime or have heard of a crime occurring, Then I can go around my neighborhood and collect money at gunpoint for me to go and pursue the crime and determine the truth or falsehood.
And if anybody else tries to pursue the crime and determine the truth or falsehood, I can shoot them.
And then I can decide for myself whether or not the crime occurred or did not occur.
I can incarcerate and imprison somebody in my basement.
And then after a certain amount of time has passed and I've taxed everyone to death for the sake of appeals, then I can just shoot them in my basement.
Well, if you're willing to grant that right to everybody, then, well, you've got a kind of moral rule.
But, of course, that moral rule is self-contradictory, because if that right is available to everyone, then it's available to the criminal.
And if the right of determining truth and falsehood is available to everyone, then the criminal is going to have the right of determining truth and falsehood of the crime itself.
Which means that you can't have one person impose their will on the other.
I mean, I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the hang of this kind of stuff.
That there are no such thing as these kinds of rights that can be proactively used to coerce other people who are peaceful.
And the primary coercive methodology that goes on in the state justice system is not the incarceration of criminals, nor is it the determination of truth and falsehood.
But it is rather the attack upon the taxpayer to fund it.
That's something that's very important to understand.
The government is not interested in justice.
The government is interested in your money.
The government is not interested in determining the truth or falsehood of particular moral actions.
But instead it is interested in your tax dollars.
And so what it does is it creates a bloated, inefficient, and underfunded, on the front lines at least, court system.
And it throws lots of people in jail.
It gives lots of people rotating in and out privileges.
It also, when the jails are too full, and when it can no longer profitably make money off criminals, will give this ridiculous concept called house arrest.
And it does all of that, not because it's interested in solving the problems of crime.
stay home, and that's about it.
And so you're grounded.
That's the sort of moral nature of that kind of transaction.
And it does all of that, not because it's interested in solving the problems of crime.
Obviously, it's not, for a variety of reasons I've talked about before, one of the major ones being things like the illegalization of drugs, gambling, and prostitution.
But it is very interested in creating a bloated, wasteful and inefficient court system that it can use to tax you, to leverage money, to get more funding, to get bigger budgets.
And it has absolutely no interest whatsoever in serving you as an individual in this circumstance.
It is really only interested in pillaging you for money.
And that's very clear, because if you look at what people want, if you look at the surveys, what do people want?
Well, they don't care that much about putting people like pot smokers in jail.
I mean, there's not somebody who says, really, that the biggest issue in my neighborhood is somebody smoking pot in the privacy of their own apartment.
Or, you know, basement apartment, perhaps.
To stereotype pot users, which I'm sure is quite unfair, nobody says that's the big thing for me.
What they do say is that the big thing for them is violence that is not avoidable.
I mean, if you look at sort of the surveys and just sort of talk to people and you say, well, you know, is it corporate tax evasion that is your big issue?
Is it the prevalence of drug use somewhere?
Is it this, that, or the other?
Well, no, of course not.
What they're concerned about, like any rational human being, is the prevalence of violence within their own neighborhood.
I mean, there's very proven methodologies for reducing the violence.
Obviously, making nonviolent crimes legal would be a huge first step.
Obviously, focusing efforts on not allowing people, young violent offenders, to simply just be released over and over and over again.
I mean, I think by the time that people are 18 in certain jurisdictions in North America, they've been arrested an average of 18 times before they go to jail.
Well, obviously that's not... And, of course, their criminal record gets completely scrubbed when they turn 18.
In fact, it's shredded, and it's illegal to refer to it even.
So, they're not arrested, they get a whole bunch of funsies, and then their whole history is scrubbed when they get older.
I mean, you could not really conceive of a better way or a more powerful way to ensure that violent youth crime was as great as it conceivably could be.
Up the profits, decrease the punishments, and erase any history of arrests.
Well, you know, way to go!
You've absolutely created a perfect vat of incentives to ensure that the culture of violence is going to multiply and escalate and increase and spread.
So, there's simply no question that the government has no interest in reducing violence that is specific to particular locations, which is the most important thing for people.
It is interested rather in just creating big, complicated, revolving door messes with long-term incarceration of older people who are non-violent, because it's cheaper to incarcerate non-violent people.
I mean, if the only people that you incarcerate, and I'm not saying the state should have this right, If the only people that you incarcerate are sociopathic, brute, violent criminals, it generally tends to be more expensive.
But if you incarcerate non-violent offenders, white-collar criminals, drug users, and so on, it's cheaper because they're more passive, they're less likely to be brutal, and so on.
Well, even that having been said, and we can talk about this another time, as I mentioned before, the state of prisoners in American jails is absolutely off the charts in terms of brutality.
And I'm sure this is not true, not to pick on America, I'm sure this is true for more than just American jails, but the prevalence of rape and brutality, violence, Theft, murder, it's staggering.
I mean, it really is just a living hell on earth that these millions of people in the States and tens of millions throughout the world experience.
I mean, it really is.
It's a modern gulag.
It is absolutely outside the bounds.
It would be completely illegal under the Geneva Convention to place enemy troops, to place prisoners of war in these kinds of situations.
It would be completely illegal under the Geneva Convention.
But domestic citizens are thrown into these unbelievably violent, destructive, and criminal-breeding, of course, traps.
If you get perpetually raped for a year in prison, you are not going to be able to come out and reintegrate into society with any degree of efficacy.
It's just not going to happen.
So you're just guaranteeing that people are going to remain in the criminal system.
They're never going to break free.
And of course, the criminal system has no incentive to reduce the number of criminals any more than the welfare state has any incentive to reduce the number of people dependent, poor, of poor people, people dependent on welfare.
That's just the nature of the beast.
And people respond to incentives, the basic fundamental axiom of economics, whether Austrian or otherwise.
And therefore, we know for sure that these people are not interested in reducing the number of criminals, but are rather interested in slowing down the wheels of justice and making sure that the general population doesn't really have access to justice.
This is sort of very important.
One of the things that occurs with the drug trade, and I'm pillaging this entirely from Harry Brown, so you can dig this all up on his website, But one of the things that's very interesting about criminality within the modern system is that... Let's just talk about drugs.
Well, with drugs, you don't have a complainant.
I mean, it's sort of very important.
If somebody steals my TV, then I'm going to call the cops, if I sort of don't mind wasting some time for no effect.
I'm going to call the cops who are going to say, yeah, you give me that serial number and I'll be right on that.
I'll look for that, you bet.
So if somebody steals my TV, I'm going to call the cops and I'm going to complain, and therefore they are reacting to an event within society that they are informed about.
But if I buy, I don't know, a dime bag of pot from somebody, then he's not going to... I mean, let's just say that it's illegal, right?
So we're not going to exactly appeal to the court system or Small Claims Court if the transaction doesn't go the way we want.
Well, so if I buy this dime bag of pot, I go home and I smoke it, well, who's going to complain?
Well, the drug dealer is not going to complain.
I'm not going to complain.
So there's no complaint that is going on.
And when you make these kinds of things illegal, these voluntary, mutual advantage kinds of interactions, like drugs, gambling and prostitution, Then you turn the state from somebody that takes phone calls to somebody that swarms out en masse to infest its paranoid, delusional, homicidal criminal fantasies into every nook and cranny of society.
So it turns from a switchboard into a private army, or sorry, a public army.
That swarms over the landscape of the general population looking for stuff that it disapproves of.
That's a very important change when you're talking about the nature of criminality within the world.
That's a very important change from reactive to proactive pursuit of criminals.
And this, of course, corrupts the entire state system, right?
Because they profit from the pursuit and manufacture of criminals rather than from what people actually want, which is a reduction of the incentives for crimes and specific and tangible Punishments for those remaining violent crimes that are committed.
That's sort of what people actually ask for.
And of course, that's not what the state ever delivers.
So we'll talk a little bit more about criminals and their relative level of danger.
Of course, this is relative to the state this afternoon.
But I just sort of wanted to get that point across.
If you're talking about the death penalty with people, then say, you know, do you consider this a moral rule?
It's sort of my advice.
If you do consider this a moral rule, yeah, okay.
Well, that's great.
So then you and I can do it.
No, no, no.
Only the state can do it.
Oh, okay, so it's not a moral rule.
It's just you think that this guy should do it, but this guy shouldn't.
So it's just like your opinion, right?
It's just like you like blue or you like fish or whatever.
And you can sort of easily take it from there and get people to understand that if they're going to create a rule called Somebody can kill somebody else for a crime that they never witnessed years later, then you may not exactly be adding to the stability and control of violence that I think we're all sort of interested in in society.
So thanks as always so much for listening.
I hope you're doing well, and I will talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection