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>>All legal concepts are government created fictions. This is often the diverging point between a libertarian outlook on the world, and an authoritarian one.
by syshum 6y ago
>>All legal concepts are government created fictions.
This is often the diverging point between a libertarian outlook on the world, and an authoritarian one.
To the Authoritarian all laws are just social constructs created by governments, thus it is all subjective and there is no objective truth or unethical laws
To libertarians like myself we believe in the Lockean concept of natural rights, where by laws and governments are erected by man to protect those natural rights and any government that goes beyond that goal is Authoritarian and unethical.
To summarize Frédéric Bastiat "The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties;"
Ethical Governments are formed to enforce this law, these natural rights, to provide a common defense force of a persons natural rights.
Ethical Governments are not formed to control and regulate all aspects of society at all levels and on all subjects
- bawolff 6y agoThat doesn't make a lot of sense. If you believe that there is some sort of natural rights that laws should reflect, than you believe that you can have good laws and bad laws. This implies laws are social constructs (that attempt to model some sort of semi-objective moral truth). If laws were not a social construct but objective rules, it would follow that there is no such thing as a bad law as they are the ground moral truth by basically fiat (which i would call the authortarian view)
- syshum 6y agoWhat, I have read your comment multiple time and I can not make any sense from it. I have no idea how you get from me expressing support for the basic idea of natural human rights to "there is no such thing as a bad law". Of course there still could be bad law and object moral truth. Those laws would be immoral and we have all kinds of unethical and immoral laws today on the books. Many protests and riots have been done recently due to many of these immoral laws I have no idea how you got from A to B in your comment
- bawolff 6y agoFor reference here is how i got here: You claimed "To the Authoritarian all laws are just social constructs created by governments, thus it is all subjective" with the implication that libertarians (which you are arguing for) believe the opposite. Thus you are claiming: "laws are not subjective" By which i took to mean (this might have been a slight leap on my part now that i look at it again): laws are not simply someone's decree, and falliable like all human creations, but instead they have some deep truth or objective reality to them. I concluded from this: laws cannot be bad, because that contradicts the idea that they have "truth" and are objective. I don't believe you can judge something objective good or bad. Objective things just "are" they are neither good nor bad. Good and bad are the realm of the subjective.
- syshum 6y agoNo I believe laws SHOULD be based on on some deeper truth, that deeper truth for libertarians is The Philosophy of Liberty also known as the Self Ownership Principle [1] Good, Ethical and Moral law is then derived from this objective principle unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. The law has been used to destroy its own objective. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense. [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9srplWe_QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9srplWe_QQ [2] http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html