To avoid this a society should aim for just laws, swift execution of those laws by law enforcement, and speedy trials by courts. If any of those three are failing, other avenues of justice will be sought by those who can afford it and that impacts the poor who can't 'afford' justice.
Words to remember today with the asymmetric application of the law. Eventually vigilante justice becomes the justice for those facing injustice.
But when a government abdicates their side of the deal, what choice to people have? Does such a government really expect people to forego receiving justice at all when their government repeatedly and consistently refuses to provide it? When governments abdicate their duty to provide justice, vigilante justice becomes morally justifiable. This is not a good state of affairs, and is why a government must prioritize being an effective provider of justice. When a government abdicates their side of the bargain, the aftermath is blood on their hands.
The deal is slightly longer: the government gets the right to handle justice, you forgo your right to pursue your personal justice, and you gain the right to not have other peoples' arbitrary sense of justice enforced upon you. And yes, the government bears responsibility for enforcement of personal justice.
If the government abdicates its role, I agree you have the right to enforce your own personal justice. You have not, however, gotten everyone else to sign away their right to not be the target of your vigilante justice.
Put another way, the subject of the "justice" may not feel that the government has abdicated their role and may be content with the way things are going. They have not agreed that the rules have changed, else I strongly suspect they would react differently. If vigilante justice is permissible, responding to vigilante justice with force is also permissible (as is their right to claim what they perceive as "justice").
I also find it a bit spurious to say that the government has abdicated their permission, but the laws are still in effect. If you and the other person have absolved your relationship with the government, the laws no longer apply, and your justification for forcibly removing someone becomes dramatically weaker. You say it's your property and they should leave, they say that was enabled by an unjust socioeconomic system and that reclaiming it was the more just thing to do, and we end up in a very subjective incarnation of justice.
You've conceded that in absence of a government, people have the right to enforce their own personal justice. If the right to pursue justice still exists in absence of a government, then some sort of law must also exist in absence of a government (from what else would you derive a right to seek personal justice?) The laws to which I appeal now do not come from governments, books, or gods; I believe they are encoded in our genes after eons as living as a social species. Social instincts which evolved to facilitate cooperation in groups are the root of all basic laws written down by governments. When somebody is wronged, in violation of these universal laws, they feel it in their bones.
If you don't believe any of that, believe this: when people feel wronged they will seek justice. Either a government can provide them with a safe framework to receive justice, or people will seek it themselves. You'll never succeed in scolding people away from desiring justice. When seeking vigilante justice is routine, that is categorically a failure of government to provide justice.
Natural rights.
>The laws to which I appeal now do not come from governments, books, or gods; I believe they are encoded in our genes after eons as living as a social species.
>If you don't believe any of that, believe this: when people feel wronged they will seek justice. Either a government can provide them with a safe framework to receive justice, or people will seek it themselves. You'll never succeed in scolding people away from desiring justice. When seeking vigilante justice is routine, that is categorically a failure of government to provide justice.
You're trying to justify violating the sanctity of life in response to a violation of the sanctity of property. These are clearly not on the same level, and so you feel the need to defend this utterly unnatural stance. What you want is permission to carry out vigilante justice without the threat of reprisal, but that's not how this works. If you do something as protest that can later be rectified, that is something different; but if you throw off the mediating force of the law to unilaterally take what can't be given back, you have opened yourself to like or greater doom. Nothing can protect you, not even your self-righteousness. Justice doesn't exist in a state of nature, only dead-reckoning and vengeance.
Eviction by force is not the same as murdering someone for squatting. You're conflating the two.
There is no world in which violence is seen as an appropriate tool to force an eviction where people do not die resisting eviction.
'Natural rights' are the entitlements we feel that we have, derived from the rules we feel others must follow according to natural law. 'Natural law' is the rules for social conduct which are baked into our genes. Or, as wikipedia puts it
> Natural rights are those that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government, and so are universal, fundamental and inalienable (they cannot be repealed by human laws, though one can forfeit their enjoyment through one's actions, such as by violating someone else's rights). Natural law is the law of natural rights.
Natural law and natural rights are two sides of the same coin.
Again, when you do so, you must understand that others have no obligation to tolerate it.
In the squatting case, it is just government (and all taxpayers) dumping the problem of homeless people onto a set of unfortunate property owners. It is simply much cheaper for the government (and hence taxpayers) to not address the root causes.
These people want to sound like their just “hard men taking justice into their own hands” but they’re really just a bunch of low-level goons being hired to enforce the existing power structure (property and capital owners at the top and everyone else at the bottom)
It's the same violence, and the same outcome; one just uses neat uniforms.
I also like the rule of law but let's not pretend that these two situations are really that much different.
So yeah, I do believe state sanctioned violence is worse for the majority of people.
Oh and if I try to defend myself from an attacking cop I go to prison for decades.
If you're in the USA, then it's the one of the safest areas in the world. Do you realize the reason you don't deal with lawless people is because of the police? There's a lot of accountability and procedure in policing here. For every bad news story there are millions of daily encounters with some of the worst offenders that you're fortunate to never deal with.
> "So yeah, I do believe state sanctioned violence is worse for the majority of people."
This is beyond ridiculous, especially in the comments of an article describing people being beaten and thrown out of their homes with extrajudicial violence. Is your suggestion that they're better off this way without any protection or oversight and instead left on their own? Do you really think billions of people around the world agree with you?
> "Oh and if I try to defend myself from an attacking cop I go to prison for decades."
An attacking cop means you've started a fight with the police, so the advice is to not do that. But are you implying that you'll do better against some attacking gang instead?
It's seems like you have not experienced any serious danger because you'll change your opinion very quickly in the face of unchecked criminal activity. It's easy to make sweeping statements from your safe and comfortable home but it's highly unlikely you would enjoy, let alone survive, in places with less rule of law.
You can make a guess at that and assume what you want.
> There's a lot of accountability and procedure in policing here. For every bad news story there are millions of daily encounters amongst some of the worst people that you're fortunate to never encounter.
No, there isn't. Cops can do literally anything they want to you with minimal/no repercussions. If I defend myself against an aggressive cop I'm getting a felony and going to prison for decades.
> This is beyond ridiculous, especially in the comments of an article describing people being beaten and thrown out of their homes with extrajudicial violence. Is your suggestion that they're better off this way without any protection or governmental oversight and instead left on their own? Do you really think billions of people around the world agree with you?
Actually - argubly yes. I do believe in no state sanctioned violence. Someone removing me from a place I'm living would think twice if they knew I was armed/had weapons. I could rely on the protection of my network and my community, rather than the protection of some cop that lives two hours away from the area they're supposedly serving and protecting.
> An attacking cop means you've started a fight with the police, so the advice is to not do that. But are you implying that you'll do better against some attacking gang instead?
So let me get this straight, cops don't harass people in your opinion? I really wish that I didn't have the experience with cops that I've had - maybe I could stay ignorant like you about police violence.
> It's seems like you have not experienced any serious danger because you'll change your opinion very quickly in the face of unchecked criminal activity. It's easy to make sweeping statements from your safe and comfortable home but it's highly unlikely you would enjoy, let alone survive, in places with less rule of law.
Again you know nothing about me, where I've been, or how I've lived.
That's not my opinion, and harass is not the same as attack. Unprovoked/unreasoned encounters are incredibly rare as to not be an issue for the vast majority. Have you even looked at the case law and statistics of police encounters? Also felony does not mean prison for decades, and defending yourself in court does not lead to a felony in the first place. Unless you mean defending yourself through violence, but then again that's against the law.
> "Someone removing me from a place I'm living would think twice if they knew I was armed/had weapons."
Really? Do you intend to tell all those people in mentioned in the article to just shoot back next time? How do you imagine that's going to go for them?
The police is not just a single person but part of an entire apparatus that has far more reach and resources than you which is where their ability to combat crime comes from. You're not really a match for motivated criminals, but even if you were, this is clearly not the preferred solution for the majority of the population.
> "You can make a guess at that and assume what you want.... you know nothing about me, where I've been, or how I've lived."
Why use such vague statements then? But since you said so, I'll go ahead and assume (with extremely high confidence) that you have no experience with violence and lawless environments. I have history with both sides of the law and know career criminals with less hostile police interaction than you seem to have. In fact, police are the least of their concerns, similar to anyone who lives in dangerous places, but then again you would know that if you were familiar with such areas.
Police violence is definitely an issue, but this thread is a comparison to not having any state protection at all, and just about everyone in the latter situation would happily switch places with you. But I'm pretty sure you know that, and would never take up such an offer.
There are a lot more people who don't own capital than there are people who do.
This attitude explains, at least in part, why they live in a place with the shoddy rule of law and a deficiency of capital. (The track record of revolutions which violently re-allocate property is terrible, mostly for the people who originally lacked capital, moreso in the last century.)