Topic: Question for the "anarchists" in the crowd. - page 2. (Read 5822 times)

myrkul, you have a horribly infectious disease that will kill all the people around you.

Now I'm guessing that since you've been told, you will not take any action on this. This is because you don't believe me. So now do we need to create a standard for belief? This is what the statist system does: it creates the AMA and the people within it have authority to decide if someone has a serious enough disease that force can be used against them.

However, in a voluntary society, each individual sets the standard by which they go. So when the employer interviews her, they say "Has an insured doctor ever examined you for disease? Did they conclude you were disease free? What is that doctor's name?" There's even more complex things like there could be cooks' insurance companies that will bond a cook for not having infectious disease, and the employer could just ask if they are bonded for it. And then when she is not bonded, they don't hire her. This put it on the employer, not on Mary.

And if an employer wants to take a chance and use her anyway, then they should be allowed, even if it would probably result in their certain death. This is the point of voluntaryism.

But I agree that the end result for her will be that she would be ostracized at some level and she would then only have the option to self sustain as a hermit or voluntarily check herself into a charitable quarantine.

A trespasser is an "ethical subject", somebody capable of taking rational actions, thus somebody with rights, and by extension, somebody that must respect other people's rights and should be deemed responsible if s/he doesn't. A disease is not a responsible, rational being.

Let's put it in another way: imagine you have a restaurant, and without noticing it you serve rotten food to a client. The client gets sick. I consider you to be responsible. You can't blame it on the bacteria that "invaded" the food.


Not that "immediately", of course. Even if something is considered to be a violation of the NAP, there are several justice principles, like proportional punishment, presumption of innocence etc. These principles would render such scenario quite rare. For less dangerous diseases, nobody would bother searching a "guilty" transmitter, because even if you do find it, any applicable punishment would likely not pay for the trouble. And even for serious diseases, you'd need to prove that it was person X specifically that passed it to you.
That's why I don't think that, in a free society, people would manage dangerous transmittable diseases this way. It would likely be something closer to what Robert Murphy describes in the article I linked above: people using their discrimination rights to block sick people from their properties.

Haha, I think it would take a bit more than a business plan to make work and personally get something out of it. But yea, it's an "out-there" concept.

You need to talk to a bank about this. Draw up a business plan. I'm serious.

Yea, and they are mostly unpleasant places. For that reason, most people will put up resistance against being put in a hospital unless undeniably ill. Make hospitals like McDonalds for adults and people will willingly go. Casinos, etc.

Ah, definitely, but as has been pointed out, there are places for those who are infected with contagious diseases and thereby ostracized from society. Those places are called hospitals.

Once again agreed, but if the default response to being infected is to ostracize the person, then the expected result is antisocial behaviour. I am talking about what happens due to the initial diagnosis.

Anti-social behavior should lead to ostracization.

I agree somewhat. It is also on others to create an environment that allows the information to flow as accurately as possible about who may have bad disease X, so that anti-social behaviour by the infected person is not significant point of failure in the system, while not leading to undue ostracization.

Fault definitely applies. Maybe not the first time the disease gets passed on, but once they've been told they're contagious, it's on them to see that it doesn't happen again.

Couldn't this be taken as support for anarchism? The current methods have failed to solve it.

Proof enough that this is not a simple or settled problem.

I don't think the concept of fault applies. The reality of the situation is that it is bad for the infected person to be around others until a solution is found, one way or another this problem will be dealt with. We see how the government dealt with it. It could be done better, but usually such decisions are made under uncertain conditions. Noone knows how infectious the disease is or the route by which it travels, etc. Ideally, symptomless carriers should be rewarded somehow.

A carrier's immune system is not overpowered (that leads to death of the host), it has made peace with the disease. It may not be a conscious act, but neither is digestion. That disease is now part of her body.

How is an immune system giving up or being overpowered in any way like inviting someone in. It's not even a conscious act. If my intruder has me pinned down, it somehow makes him welcome and me liable?

That analogy is not accurate. It would be more like a guest in your house (Mary's immune system had ceased fighting the disease, effectively coming to a truce) used a sniper rifle to kill people in your neighborhood. It's his doing, but if you let him stay, it's your fault if he keeps killing.

I feel that I agree that a disease in you body is your own property since it is an invader. A guy trespassing in my house might kill a guest there, but I don't think that I'm responsible. It would be different if Mary intentionally infected herself to then go on and intentionally infect others, but in this case she didn't even know.


And this would be a situation where he defrauded the women he was with, similar to if Mary was asked if she tested positive for some disease and fraudulently claimed not.

I just don't feel that the presence of the sick should in any way be taken as an immediate violation of the NAP.

A small group of people are currently killing thousands and imprisoning millions so... I'll take my chances with the sociopaths not having a veneer of legitimacy?

Actually, no... he can be (and people have been) prosecuted on murder charges for that. Likewise in a libertarian society, he would be treated as a murderer.

I believe you can argue that she was violating people's rights. You're responsible for your properties. If your dog escapes and hurt the neighbor's son, you're responsible. If your car loses its breaks all of the sudden, while parked, and end up running over some one, you're still responsible, even if you were not driving it. If your factory or nuclear plant leaks pollution and hurt people living nearby, you're responsible. And so on.

Mary was responsible for her body. Her body was the transporting a lethal disease. She could be deemed responsible.

I know a real case of a disgusting man who knew he had AIDS, and still would convince his sexual partners to drop the condom, obviously lying about his health situation. He managed to contaminate multiple women on the course of the years, on purpose. I mean, he wanted to infect the highest number of women possible. I consider this man is an intentional murderer - a serial killer if you will. And yet, there's no law or any recourse his victims could use to punish him.

All that said, I find the scenario presented by Murphy in his article more reasonable than a scenario in which victims would prosecute those who transmitted them the disease. For a start, it's hard to determine who gave you the disease. But yeah, if this second approach start being applied, insurances would probably cover your legal costs if you infect people. In such cases, these insurances would have an interest in isolating you from society once you get a transmittable disease, in order to reduce their expanses. Such quarantine could be foresee in your contract with the insurer, making it no longer coercive. There you have it, another potential solution to the problem. Both solutions may coexist.