I think the analogy from a democratic state redistributing wealth to an individual unilaterally redistributing wealth is tenuous.
Say I steal from my neighbor, and my neighbor decided to lock me up in his basement in retaliation. He even finds a judge and appoints me a lawyer so I have the chance to argue my innocence, but I'm ultimately found guilty. Clearly my right to due process has been violated no matter how fair my neighbor's process was, because he lacks the legitimacy to take unilateral action against me. These same actions undertaken by a legitimate state do not constitute a rights violation.
The other disanalogy is that it's unfair to arbitrarily target specific people for a collective moral burden. Even if it would be just to take $1000 from each well-off person to give to the poor, that doesn't necessarily justify taking $1000 from a single arbitrary well-off person.
"These same actions undertaken by a legitimate state do not constitute a rights violation."
Don't they? Either way the suspect is being detained and confined against their will. Those violations are weighed against the potentially worse alternative of letting thieves run rampant so they may be justified. Crucially that justification isn't available to states alone. It seems to apply to anyone able to offer a fair process in a similar situation.
I think appealing to a weighing of consequences reveals that reasoning about rights just isn’t very productive. I don’t support a policy of sanctioned vigilante charity collectors because I think the consequences of that would be bad. I do support a policy of redistribution via taxation because I think the consequences are good.
Rights are an intermediate heuristic that are helpful for deciding certain policy cases and not helpful for others.
“Suppose you meet a hermit on an island outside the jurisdiction of any government. The hermit has a hut and some tools that he made. It wouldn’t be okay for you to take those things, even though there is no government-made law that applies to this. “
This raises a question about why the hermit's status would change after some government claimed his island as part of heir jurisdjurisdiction. I suppose the answer is found in your book on the problem of political authority.
> To gauge whether letting the poor remain unhoused is bad enough that it justifies violating property rights, imagine that I decide to collect money for my charity to house the poor. I’m not getting enough voluntary contributions, so I demand that you give me $1000. I threaten to kidnap and imprison you if you don’t pay up.
I think the question whether this is justified is the real crux of the problem. Surely it is permissible to at least sometimes violate property rights in pursuit of wealth redistribution: e.g., to steal food to prevent yourself from starvation. It is not clear how to draw the line here. The behavior you described probably isn't permissible, but perhaps it could be ok if done in service of more effective causes, like aid to people in the poorest countries.
I think that many left-wing objectors would also happily bite the bullet, or say that such threats are permissible in principle but are not in real life due to second-order effects. This might mean giving up on property rights altogether.
“Permissible” serves as a weasel word here. That gets around the real question, which is, does it violate property rights but the alternative is worse, or does it not violate property rights? Framed this way, the answer is clear. People can think that a problem is so urgent that it is worth violating property rights, but that doesn’t mean we should redefine property rights in such a vague way that they are just suggestions.
There are strong arguments for allowing exceptions to rules in emergencies. But this doesn’t mean we should repeal the rules. If such emergencies really justify violations of rights, they justify giving compensation of some kind to those whose rights are violated. So starving might justify you in taking some bread, but it would not establish that you owed nothing to the person whose bread you took. This pretty much eliminates the justification of redistribution.
A separate issue: we could look at redistribution as a compact that each of us is willing to contribute conditional,on others also contributing. Then the question Aries why this condition is valid. If I feel I have an obligation to do something, how is this conditional on others also doing it? Either I am supposed to help or I am not.
I think the analogy from a democratic state redistributing wealth to an individual unilaterally redistributing wealth is tenuous.
Say I steal from my neighbor, and my neighbor decided to lock me up in his basement in retaliation. He even finds a judge and appoints me a lawyer so I have the chance to argue my innocence, but I'm ultimately found guilty. Clearly my right to due process has been violated no matter how fair my neighbor's process was, because he lacks the legitimacy to take unilateral action against me. These same actions undertaken by a legitimate state do not constitute a rights violation.
The other disanalogy is that it's unfair to arbitrarily target specific people for a collective moral burden. Even if it would be just to take $1000 from each well-off person to give to the poor, that doesn't necessarily justify taking $1000 from a single arbitrary well-off person.
"These same actions undertaken by a legitimate state do not constitute a rights violation."
Don't they? Either way the suspect is being detained and confined against their will. Those violations are weighed against the potentially worse alternative of letting thieves run rampant so they may be justified. Crucially that justification isn't available to states alone. It seems to apply to anyone able to offer a fair process in a similar situation.
Yeah it isn’t super clear cut.
I think appealing to a weighing of consequences reveals that reasoning about rights just isn’t very productive. I don’t support a policy of sanctioned vigilante charity collectors because I think the consequences of that would be bad. I do support a policy of redistribution via taxation because I think the consequences are good.
Rights are an intermediate heuristic that are helpful for deciding certain policy cases and not helpful for others.
“Suppose you meet a hermit on an island outside the jurisdiction of any government. The hermit has a hut and some tools that he made. It wouldn’t be okay for you to take those things, even though there is no government-made law that applies to this. “
This raises a question about why the hermit's status would change after some government claimed his island as part of heir jurisdjurisdiction. I suppose the answer is found in your book on the problem of political authority.
> To gauge whether letting the poor remain unhoused is bad enough that it justifies violating property rights, imagine that I decide to collect money for my charity to house the poor. I’m not getting enough voluntary contributions, so I demand that you give me $1000. I threaten to kidnap and imprison you if you don’t pay up.
I think the question whether this is justified is the real crux of the problem. Surely it is permissible to at least sometimes violate property rights in pursuit of wealth redistribution: e.g., to steal food to prevent yourself from starvation. It is not clear how to draw the line here. The behavior you described probably isn't permissible, but perhaps it could be ok if done in service of more effective causes, like aid to people in the poorest countries.
I think that many left-wing objectors would also happily bite the bullet, or say that such threats are permissible in principle but are not in real life due to second-order effects. This might mean giving up on property rights altogether.
“Permissible” serves as a weasel word here. That gets around the real question, which is, does it violate property rights but the alternative is worse, or does it not violate property rights? Framed this way, the answer is clear. People can think that a problem is so urgent that it is worth violating property rights, but that doesn’t mean we should redefine property rights in such a vague way that they are just suggestions.
There are strong arguments for allowing exceptions to rules in emergencies. But this doesn’t mean we should repeal the rules. If such emergencies really justify violations of rights, they justify giving compensation of some kind to those whose rights are violated. So starving might justify you in taking some bread, but it would not establish that you owed nothing to the person whose bread you took. This pretty much eliminates the justification of redistribution.
A separate issue: we could look at redistribution as a compact that each of us is willing to contribute conditional,on others also contributing. Then the question Aries why this condition is valid. If I feel I have an obligation to do something, how is this conditional on others also doing it? Either I am supposed to help or I am not.