Though different actual legal regimes in a stateless society would doubtless adopt different rules, the maxim of nonaggression and the prohibitions on violating people’s bodies and on interference with their possessory claims that underlie it provide a clear and intelligible framework for the legal rules it would be reasonable for just institutions in a stateless society to implement. A central role in maintaining justice and preventing aggression should be played by simple tort-law rules precluding attacks on bodies and possessions and requiring compensation for injuries when such attacks occur. Such rules would leave no room for attempts to foster virtue using the force of law or to employ the law to prevent or end nonaggressive injuries—often important, but appropriately addressed by non-forcible means. Just legal rules enforced in a stateless society would not feature the separate category of crime, which is essentially statist. A stateless society could deal effectively not only with direct interpersonal injuries but also with environmentally mediated injuries to Fairness would surely take expected consequences into account when determining what it was and was not reasonable for them to do, and the general tendency of the baseline rules to foster certain kinds of consequences would (I believe) tend to make it reasonable for people to endorse them and to render it unreasonable for people to decline to so. Given the importance of simplicity and reliability, among other values, legal regimes would have every reason to treat the baseline rules as if they were deontological requirements, and ordinary moral actors would have good reason to treat them as generally exceptionless. 6 I’ll refer throughout to those who voluntarily agree to accept the authority of a legal regime as partici
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 22:08:29 +0000
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