Topic: Question for the "anarchists" in the crowd. - page 5. (Read 5889 times)

Some of the most heinous actions in history have been perpetrated by people thinking they were doing good, or even that it was god's will that they do what they did. Intent to do wrong is not necessary to do wrong.

Again, intent is not necessary for you do to harm. If you do harm, you're liable for the damages. You may not have meant for the baseball to go through your neighbor's window, but it happened, and you still owe him a window.

This would make sense if she had not directly caused the harm that she did. She spread disease not only by being a carrier, but by not washing her hands before prepping food. She didn't have to work in food service. In fact, in her first quarantine, cultures of her waste showed that she was "teeming with typhoid salmonella", and she ignored that fact.

No. They would have the ability to use force, but not a monopoly. And that's the key factor.

Once the presence of the typhoid bacteria is proven, continuation of her actions is not a "passive threat to society," it's a direct attack. Regardless of whether she thinks she's doing it or not, she's directly harming anyone she cooks for, because she refused to take simple health precautions.

I think you are right moonshadow, the thing to do is work towards increasing the flow and accuracy of information so that we can have an AnCap society not dependent on the use of force to deal with these outlier situations.

I don't find this position to be acceptable.  Whether or not she had violated the ZAP by the mere act of accepting a food service job is dependent upon her state of mind concerning the accuracy of the doctors' claims that she was a carrier.  Keep in mind that she was the first example in recorded medical history of a completely asymtomatic carrier, and medical science was even less respected at that time than it is today.  How many people whole-heartedly believe that the medical institutions have suppressed the cure for cancer or the risks of vaccines in order to sell drugs and vaccines?  It's not at all unreasonable to believe that Mary believed she was being unfairly persecuted, and perhaps even without cause.  She was neither the only typhoid carrier at the time (once it was known, many were identified, roughly 3% of survivors were asymtomatic carriers) nor the only one to break the terms of their quarantine release, but the only one to spend the rest of her life in quarantine.  She wasn't even the most deadly in that same decade.

And restitution for what, exactly?  She may have caused harm, but again only passively.  A judgement of restitution, even if it were just to impose upon Mary for the events prior to her first encounter with the public health agents, would effectively be a form of slavery.  She literally had no knowledge or control over the harm caused, at least prior to her first arrest.  It's a leap of logic to presume that she intended to cause harm, certainly befor the first incarceration, which lasted for about five years IIRC.  Even showing harm caused was difficult at the time.

You can make the argument that a heroin addict can be held responsible for the harm he causes others while high, or for the crimes he might commit in persuit of his addiction.  But how can you make the argument that the heroin addict should pay restitution to the stupid kid that sees the heroin addict and thinks it can't be that bad, and then gets addicted himself?

In hindsight, there was many things that Mary had done to earn her quarantine.  But that's exactly the problem that I see.  We have the benefit of both that hindsight and the common knowledge gained from those events.  But what if we didn't?  What if New York state was an ancap society in 1907?  How could the actions that were taken have been justified at the time?  (retroactive justifications are always false arguments, if you can't make the claim at the time then you can't make the argument later)  If such actions cannot be justified under an ancap society, and I can't see how they could, what would an ancap society have been able to do to respond to the (general) threat of unaware & passive carriers of infections, and still remain an ancap society?  If a special medical institution had the special power to incarcerate people under the charge of being a passive threat to society, wouldn't that same institution then have the monopoly on force that defines a modern government?

Hmmm.

Well, the first time, Probably she'd be taken aside, given that laundress job, and told not to seek employment in the food industry.  To drive that home, flyers would be circulated to local institutions and wealthy households. Restitution would probably be required.

After the name change and outbreak at the woman's hospital, yeah, forcible quarantine, and a laundress job at the hospital, probably. She may not believe she's contagious, but she's also shown she doesn't care if she is. Not to mention typhoid is spread through unwashed hands... She shouldn't be in food service even if she isn't contagious. Restitution would definitely be taken out of her salary, what's left after her room and board are paid. If she agrees, she might be able to get a bit of extra money by allowing the doctors to try to find out why she's asymptomatic.

As to the ZAP, she's already violated that by taking that second food service job. If someone had killed her, it would probably have been a little overmuch, but within their rights.

This lady could have been a godsend to medical science, too bad the government locked her up rather than someone rewarding her for her genetic luck.


Durr someone could have done that anyway, anarchism has nothing to do with whether that happens.

Since it's anarchy, then someone could have just go ahead and killed her.

But how, then, could it be an ancap society?  If any instutution, medical in nature or otherwise, were to quarintine Mary away against her will (which is exactly what it would have taken, since she didn't accept any fault of her own) then 1) it wouldn't be acting like an ancap institution, certainly not one that believes in the ZAP; and 2) there would certainly be other institutions that would find fault in the medical institution's actions and move against it, functionally resulting in a civil war, the penultimate breakdown of any stable society, thus destroying itself.

To answer your last question, absolutely nothing. Anarchy would simply be governance with new attitudes and standards. Government would be reduced to the notoriety of just another institution.

As a libertarian at heart, I respect the concept that governments cannot actually improve society (http://youtu.be/BNIgztvyU2U).  However, I have issues with the idea that a society without a traditional government (i.e. an institution with a monopoly on the use of force) can effectively manage the very small percentage of people who both have the ability to cause great & widespread harm and also refuse to refrain from doing so.

In the past, I've used the example of Child Protective Services and of criminal courts, but both those examples suffer from a lack of specificity.

So I want to use a different example, and one from history.

How would a (presumedly stable) anarchist society (ancap) have responded to Typhoid Mary without destroying itself via inaction and without violating it's own principles?  For those who need a refresher on her... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_Mary

Now bear in mind, that Mary steadfastly refused to accept that she was contagious, and refused to change her occupation (household cook) to one of less risk to others.  She caused massive amounts of human death and harm, entirely passively, simply by engaging in the type of work for which she was both experienced & trained.  

The state of New York locked Mary away in a hospital that was functionally a prison, yet did not, and could not, charge her with any actual crime.  All of the harm that she caused was of a passive nature, and she (presumedly) did not intend any of it.  She spent more of her natural life in this prison hospital than the average convicted murder does today in the United States.

What would an ancap society have done differently?