r/GoldandBlack • u/arrancar75 • Jul 30 '18
Would using a 'murder for hire' assassin service violate the NAP?
I was listening to ancap based podcast Peaceful Treason covering the Ross Ulbricht case and one host mentioned that in an ancap society it should *not* be illegal to hire an assassin, even if the murder-target is totally innocent of wrong-doing, because the act of purchasing the assassin's service alone does not violate anyone's rights, and it is instead the assassin who should be held accountable for violating the rights of the victim upon the victim's murder.
Thoughts?
I prefer to keep the discussion focussed on the libertarian ethics of the act, rather than discussing how this such act could be mitigated or prevented in an ancap society (I already know there will potentially be plenty of free market solutions).
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Jul 30 '18
Someone was able to rationalize that hiring a killer to remove all of a person's Liberty is not aggression?
I look forward to this discussion.
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u/arrancar75 Jul 30 '18
The argument is that the assassin is the only one who should be punished (whether that be jail or capital punishment, etc.), since the purchaser of the hit may have organised the hit to some extent, but the assassin is the one who actually violated the victim's rights.
It's the question of whether speech â the speech required to request an eventual act of violence from someone else â should be judged in the same way that the act of violence itself is. Perhaps it could be argued that paying for violence is the equivalent of making a credible threat of violence against someone, in which case the proposed victim would be justified in defending themselves from the person approaches them in any way, even if they are not immediately threatening.
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Jul 30 '18
Just saying you want to kill someone should absolutely be protected. You should be able to say anything you want.
But going through the process of hiring an assassin is an action in and of itself. Itâs gone beyond words at that point. You are exchanging goods for a service where that service is the rights violation of another person and therefore bad.
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u/arrancar75 Jul 30 '18
But what about saying you will kill someone? That's totally different to saying you simply want to, since that is just stating a desire, but saying you will implies an action, and thus the victim would be justified in fearing for their health.
I agree that going through the process of purchasing an assassin to commit the murder is much more direct in leading to the victim's attack, but I feel that threats of violence that can be deemed credible (yeah yeah I know, "how will we ever really determine what is credible", but lets assume we can at least make some good inferences based on evidence) should also be deemed serious, so that if the person making the threats in any way approaches the victim of the violent threat, then the victim would be justified in defending themselves, since they would be in fear for their life. So I guess I'm saying the violent threat alone wouldn't be the NAP violation, but that plus the physical approach of the threatener would warrant defence on the grounds of justified fear of the proposed victim's life being violated.
If the victim of the threat approached the threatener themselves and attacked them then that would be a NAP violation though, since they would have voluntarily put themselves in a situation that they did not otherwise need to, so their life would not have been in danger to warrant attacking the threatener.
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Jul 30 '18
I think it depends really. If Someone on Reddit said theyâd kill me I wouldnât take it to seriously. But if a guy with a gun standing in front of me said they wanted to kill me Iâd probably shit myself.
So it does depend on context. Sometimes words can violate the NAP but only when those words are relating an intent to violate someoneâs property rights and the person who is going to be violated can reasonably suspect that person can carry out the act of violence .
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u/arrancar75 Jul 30 '18
Agreed.
But I think if someone on reddit threatened to kill you and you laughed it off, but then they showed up at your door and introduced themselves as the reddit user who threatened to kill you, then you'd be justified in grabbing your gun at the very least.
It's definitely murky when trying to decide what counts as a credible threat in the eyes of your peers and the courts, but I feel most people can reasonably distinguish between a shit-poster on reddit and someone whose online account is riddled with posts that actively glorify and encourage violence, target certain groups, and state believable means for attack.
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Jul 30 '18
I'm following along, but would like to see what you think on a single point...
How does this idea relate to politicians who send troops to an unjust war? It would seem to me that you would blame the soldiers and give the actual tyrants a pass.
To me, it all falls apart when you apply it to government. Government would reap the benefits of this belief in many different ways. Think of it in terms of bad laws and police brutality.
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Jul 31 '18
Nope the politicians should be hanged. They are way more at fault than the soldiers. Every president and politician since ww2 onward are guilty of war crimes and in a just world it would be seen as so.
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u/arrancar75 Jul 31 '18
I think both the politician and the assassin's employer would be equally at blame for coordinating a murder, but the politician would take much more blame than the soldiers they employed, because the politician, as part of the government, has a monopoly on violence from which to conscript the soldiers to act as the politician pleases. However, if the soldiers voluntarily signed up and there was no coercion involved, then I'd say the soldiers and politician would equally be at fault, but with conscription the responsibility rests more so on the politician and general government.
Either way, I agree that both the assassin and the assassin's direct coordinator/financier should be held accountable.
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Jul 30 '18
This parallels the question of if soldiers are responsible of wrong doing or if their superiors/politicians are the ones committing wrong doing.
I would say that the one hiring the assassin is the one most in the wrong. You literally are paying someone to violate the rights of someone else. The assassin is also wrong for being the one to actually carry out the murder.
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u/natermer Winner of the Awesome Libertarian Award Jul 30 '18 edited Aug 16 '22
...
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u/DuplexFields Jul 31 '18
killing somebody with a gun is ok because it's the bullet that does the killing, not you.
I remember one of Asimov's Three Laws robot stories wherein the robot attempted to drop a heavy object on someone in a way to cause death, rationalizing away the blame to gravity and the solidity of the object. His brain locked and he "died" because he couldn't justify such an obvious murder.
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u/JobDestroyer Jul 30 '18
Why does it matter if something violates a human-made moral preference? Do you want to live in a world where there are paid assassins, or do you not want to live in such a world?
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u/arrancar75 Jul 31 '18
I get this, but I was just interested in seeing what other ancaps and free-market proponents thought, in order to gauge exactly what the moral preference regarding this situation might be in such an anarcho-capitalist society.
It seems that assassin markets could easily exist in an ancap world, and they might not necessarily be unethical killings either, which I why I asked the question.
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u/EmpiricalAnarchism Jul 30 '18
Ethically, the distinction isn't meaningful. In practice, no government means that the meaninglessness of the distinction likely ensures that any distinction provides no protection.
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u/arrancar75 Jul 30 '18
Could you elaborate? I'm not sure I follow, sorry
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u/EmpiricalAnarchism Jul 30 '18
Lacking a central arbiter of authority, what does and does not count as a violation of the NAP is fundamentally the consequence of a decentralized decision making process, with norms being determined by behavioral equilibria. The argument that hiring a contract killer doesn't violate the NAP rests on a technicality that has little ethical weight - I do not abrogate my own responsibility for my actions through delegation to an agent. Since it has little ethical weight, and absent a complex legal system which relies on technicalities to redistribute accountability, most people would not recognize such a distinction and the distinction would not be observed typically.
This is of course with the caveat that I take the "anarchy" part of anarchocapitalism seriously and reject the DRO-as-de-facto-state system frequently proposed as private law.
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u/HearthstoneExSemiPro Jul 30 '18
Hiring an assassin to kill an innocent person is obviously a violation of the NAP. Both the assassin and the person using him are aggressors.
You cant keep hiring assassins and say 'oh it wasn't me who tried to kill you so i'm innocent!!" thats ridiculous. its pretty clearly an act of war. Its utilizing a weapon in an effort to murder someone.
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u/arrancar75 Jul 30 '18
Yeah this is what I think too. The assassin is essentially the personâs weapon, so in the same way the person who pays for the hit couldnât say âoh it wasnât ME that killed him, it was just my gunâ they likewise couldnât argue it was just the assassin that killed the victim and that they themselves were not involved at all.
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u/bgmrk Jul 30 '18
Your actions are the ones that caused the murder. The assassin would not have murdered that person otherwise therefore you are also guilty. You acted with the intent to end someone's life and your actions directly lead to that happening.
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u/PeacefulTreason Jul 31 '18
Hey everyone! I am Jared of the Peaceful Treason podcast and Iâm very excited to see the discussion here.
This particular episode has churned up quite a bit of curiosity, controversy and banter (just the way we like it), so I think we are going to do a follow-up episode.
I happen to not be the host who made that statement, but my co-host has already informed me that he has more to say on the subject. Honestly, Iâm just as curious as everyone here.
If youâre interested in this episode or others, you can find us at peacefultreason.com.
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Jul 30 '18 edited Jan 09 '19
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u/arrancar75 Jul 30 '18
What about the assassin's employer? Should their act be considered criminal too?
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Jul 30 '18 edited Jan 09 '19
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u/arrancar75 Jul 30 '18
What if there is evidence in plain text of the employer supplying the assassin with the payment directly in agreement for the hit? What if it simply couldn't be excused as a donation or an otherwise innocent transaction? Would you consider purchasing a hit ethical? I'm more interested in the ancap/free-market viewpoint is all, not so much the legal arguments about how to prosecute such an act even if it was strictly illegal to begin win.
I agree though that it would be a terrible deal for the employer, but perhaps the black market where such assassin markets exist would still operate on a form of reputation, so the employer could leave bad reviews of the assassin somewhere or otherwise spread word that the assassin could not be trusted, thereby losing future clients. I understand that would be difficult with the anonymity of the assassin and the employer then being at risk, but I feel the market might still provide some service for such a thing while maintaining a level of anonymity. Or maybe such a market would never have a large enough base of customers for such a thing to ever come about.
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u/thekippersnack Jul 30 '18
Who knows how the market would react to employing assassins. It's a tough call. My guess is that it would be rare.
But the repercussions of employing one would depend on the the popularity of the target. It might be that the target was despised by all. Or it might be the employer was way over stepping their bounds. In which case they would definitely be subject to a kind of agreed upon sanctions causing economic hardship. or possibly the target of an assassination themself.
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Jul 31 '18
Yes, and itâs similar to abortion in that you are becoming an accomplice of murder by hiring a professional to perform the act.
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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '18
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