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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

Sincere question. Why are you allowed to murder someone in self-defense, but not as a punishment for crimes? What moral code do you rely on that draws the line there? Why is that moral code more correct than one that draws the line between punishment and capricious violence?

FWIW, I'm somewhere between you and OP in my thoughts. Definitely against the death penalty in practice, and somewhat ambivalent in theory. But it's interesting to really think about the axioms we construct our morals and ethics from, and why they're the way they are.

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>>Why are you allowed to murder someone in self-defense, but not as a punishment for crimes?

The principle of Self Ownership, which is the basis of the philosophy of liberty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9srplWe_QQ

It would not be murder to protect your own life from the aggression of others. However any use of violence must be in proportion to the threat to your life. I.e I do not believe you have the right to kill someone for trespassing, but only in those circumstance where there is a reasonable believe your life to be direct and immediate danger.

If capital punishment is murder, then taxation is theft.

Correct

Is paying for services theft?

I dunno, I'm not a libertarian :)

Why don't you rephrase that with the appropriate level of detail and not leaving out important facts: Is not wanting to pay for something that you were given and didn't explicitly request theft? And yes, I'm an anarcho-capitalist and jumping in here.

There are a slew of assumptions that are being made when arguing for a pro-state stance. Eventually, you'll stumble on this thing called the "social contract", and then magically all questions of validity are somehow answered. It's a convenient answer devoid of any first-principles, that many are content with using as a basis to defend the status-quo of the existence of a state.

There's no such thing as no state. For any conflict, whoever wins is the de facto state.

I think you'd get disagreements from both sides of the fence on that definition of a state.

All of the theories of who is a state or not fail as soon as real geopolitics is involved.

Taiwan is not a state in the eyes of the US simply because China wouldn't play nicely if we said otherwise.

Saudi Arabia during its formation in the early 1900s would have been indistinguishable from the ISIS of today.

If your window is broken and I replace your window but take your TV as payment, did I steal your TV?

Maybe you had a different window you wanted, or maybe you did not want to replace it at all.

"Paying for services" implies some kind of voluntary exchange. Government is not voluntary, government is violence, and any "service" provided by government is done so at gun point under the threat of violence and paid for in the same manner.

Yes, yes, you and the guy above are Americans, I get that. Me, I'm from Europe. I guess we see things differently.

Of course, none of us here has a country that would demand such ridiculous things as income taxes from expats, so I see where that may come from.

Great answer. Do you consider lifetime imprisonment to be immoral for the same reason?

That depends, in general yes.

Generally I believe the only persons that should be in "prison" are those that are a clear danger to society Serial Killers for example.

Not for punishment, but for the protection of society.

I think the legal system should be less about punishment, and more about Restitution and Protection.

Self-ownership... Then you could theoretically "cede" that ownership of your own body to someone else like a family-member / spouse (perhaps a will, or have it done prior-to-death). And thus, in that frame of reference murder becomes an extreme form of theft.

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