/liberty/ - Liberty

No it shouldn't.

yes it should

maybe it shouldn't

I don't know

Would libel/slander count as defrauding the public with misinformation?

>>68509

Yes, it should.

>>68525

misinformation are non threatening words

"misinformation" can be interpreted in different ways too

I'll ruin your life on Yelp nigger

>>68509

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Do you understand the difference between civil law and criminal law? The First Amendment addresses criminal law. Libel is a matter of civil law. Libel isn't "against the law"; somebody brings a tort case for libel on the grounds that you have caused them a harm. Consequently, the First Amendment doesn't have anything to do with libel.

>>68560

>or abridging the freedom of speech

Is hardly very enlightening but it certainly is expansively restrictive. Anything that can be seen as "abridging the freedom of speech" is not allowed. That means anything goes when it comes to speech, irrespective of "harm". I think this whole criminal/civil nonsense is a misdirection. If you're not to say that someone is a nigger under penalty of fine, that is abridging speech. If you're not to say that someone is a nigger, for then they have the legal right to sue you and you will have to pay them the same amount, how is that any different?

>>68509

As Rothbard said himself, no person has the "right" to their own reputation, because a reputation literally consists of the thoughts that other people have about you. Claiming that you can silence your critics because they damage your reputation is like claiming that you have the right to control other people's opinions of you. Even if the things people say are incorrect, making them morally in the wrong, nothing they have done actually violates libertarian ethics and thus passing a law to restrict it is not justifiable.

Yes but I could accept libel/slander laws in an otherwise libertarian society

libel and defamation might count as aggressive action therefore violating NAP

>>68625

They don't. Only physical aggression is recognized, so no.

>>68569

>I think this whole criminal/civil nonsense is a misdirection.

Only if you ignore the part where it says "Congress shall make no law". That puts it squarely in the realm of criminal law, which concerns statutes. Civil law address harm, not violation of statutes. You don't have to have "broken the law" to owe damages in a civil case. Hence, you need not have violated any law made by Congress to be sued for libel. Every subsequent clause of the First Amendment is subordinate to the phrase "Congress shall make no law", meaning that civil law, and thus libel cases, are entirely outside of its purview.

That's far from an insignificant point. That's central to the amendment. It isn't written that way on accident. The civil/criminal distinction is at the core of the Amendment, and to ignore it is to ignore its plain text.

>If you're not to say that someone is a nigger, for then they have the legal right to sue you and you will have to pay them the same amount, how is that any different?

There is a profound philosophical and practical difference between allowing the government the authority to simply prohibit particular forms of speech and allowing people the right to seek damages for harm caused by particular forms of speech. In the former case, the government can prevent the expression of certain ideas entirely, using only its authority as justification. In the latter case, a party must be able to demonstrate before a court that he has been harmed by the speech and that it was untruthful, can only seek damages for those cases he brings before the court, and has no power to entirely restrict the expression of ideas; only to seek damages in cases where those ideas were falsely asserted as fact. You can't sue somebody for libel if they say "I don't like him" or "I don't trust him and here are the reasons why" (provided those reasons are truthful). You can't sue somebody for libel when they express political dissent or distrust of the leadership. You can't sue somebody for libel when they share evidence of shady goings-on with the public. Libel cases are an entirely different animal from government censorship of speech.

>>68626

sound waves are physical arent they?

>>68801

The soundwaves are not hurting you in any way. What you object to is the abstraction in your mind they create. They are not causing you physical harm.

>>68836

soundwaves can break glass

>>68836

Hearing loss is permanent.

>>68908

And if someone makes enough noise to cause hearing loss, they're violating your rights.

>>68580

but in order for contracts to be valid, informations should be as exact as possible.

When you spread false info to destroy a reputation, you are damaging the people who need to use reputation as part of informations to enter a contract with a person.

So, when you say false things to damage reputation, and you know they are false, you are damaging the ability to form an opinion.

Now, we can't pretend that people have the perfect informations about something or someone, because nobody hold the perfect informations. But we can pretend that people do not create informations that are for sure false just to damage informations about someone. I think it could work in reverse, as saying false positive things about something or someone.

>>68925

>>68929

I don't really think I'm convinced by either side of this. I think the problem lies in confining our thinking to all court cases representing aggressions or contract violations, while failing to account for the enormous role that freedom of association plays.

Setting aside for a moment the function of the court as an executor of ethical principle, let us consider its role as a social reputation system. We can't all keep track of who is trustworthy, so we invest our trust in a small number of courts, who we trust to in turn judge the trustworthiness of others. This allows for rational trust of numbers of people far in excess of Dunbar's number. We trust the court to accurately assess your trustworthiness.

Now suppose somebody slanders you. Lets ignore for a moment whether or not it's an aggression. You can still accuse that person of being a liar. Now there's a question of which party is trustworthy. Enter the courts. If one party is willing to take the dispute to a court and the other is not, it reflects poorly on the party that refuses, and people are less likely to trust that person. If the case is taken to court, people are more likely to trust the party that the court judges to be in the right, and the court can provide terms of remedy that would serve to demonstrate the guilty party's willingness to correct their mistakes. If the party does not pay those damages, then others will know that the person in question is a liability to associate with, as they have proven themselves willing to cause problems without making amends. Lack of social support leads to very real material losses. Parties are much less willing to contract with the person in question, making it harder to get insurance, thereby increasing financial risks and expenses.

In this way, a court can judge cases which are possibly not addressed directly by ethics without violating ethical principles. All judgments and consequences are a result of the freedom of association, and no justification need be offered for aggression; defensive, retaliatory, compensatory, or otherwise.

That isn't to say that there is never a case for a court to justify forceful reclamation of property or something like that. It is merely to say that slander and libel need not appeal to definitions of "aggression" to be addressed by courts.

>>68509

No.

Libel and slander infringe on an individual's lockean natural right to possess and use their property. One's reputation is property inasmuch as any other possessed tangible thing in that it is a thing acheived by the application of the individual's labour.

Libel and slander, then, are tantamount to vandalism.

>>69165

>Libel and slander infringe on an individual's lockean natural right to possess and use their property.

How, precisely? What about spreading false information constitutes an interference with my ability to use my property, in and of itself? You might say that it can lead to people interfering with my use of my property as a result of that false information, but it doesn't necessarily, and it would be that interference which would constitute a violation of my rights, making that false information at worst an act of fraud against the persons so convinced, not against me.

>lockean natural right to possess and use their property

All deference to Locke; he was influential but wrong. His formulation of ownership was based on vague, undefined notions like "mixing labor", and essentially amounted to a sort of labor theory of ownership; "I own this because I worked for it". That appeals to our notions of justice and desert, but it lacks any real logical rigor. It's a weak argument. We now have the benefit of much more coherent theories of natural property rights.

>>69173

>We now have the benefit of much more coherent theories of natural property rights

Such as?

>>69175

Well Kinsella, despite his personal flaws, does a decent job of identifying property rights in terms of rivalrousness; that property rights are necessary to avoid conflict over rivalrous goods. I don't remember who his intellectual forbears are, but he does a good job of addressing Lock in an accessible fashion.

Hoppe identifies them as logically necessary normative propositions which can be proven axiomatically.

I take an approach which could be seen as a hybrid of those two from a negative angle. I acknowledge the rivalrousness of goods, and that interfering with the otherwise conflict-free use of these goods constitutes the initiation of a conflict, but rather than justifying property rights as a consequence of the practical need to avoid conflicts, or identifying them as a given set of positive normative claims which can be identified as a consequence of logic, I highlight that the initiation of such conflicts necessarily constitutes the performative assertion of logically irreconcilable normative propositions. Rather than positively asserting some set of property norms, recognize that initiating conflicts over rivalrous goods necessarily constitutes the assertion of normative claims which cannot be justified under any rational formulation of ethics; that is to say, it is unethical.

This has the benefit of being a much easier position to defend logically while having easily recognizable pragmatic consequences. It's a deontological argument which can readily address teleological concerns.

>>69173

>all deference to locke

Admittedly, yes.

>how does spreading false information interfere with the right to use property?

In this case, because of the nature of that property. A reputation is information, the utility of which is caused by the content of that information.

Spreading false information alters the information conveyed by the reputation and thus changes its utility for the one who possesses it. In this way, it infringes on the reputation's owner's right to keep and use his property.

Your question is about like asking "how does breaking someone's window infringe on his right to property?"

>>69184

I was talking about a framework explaining how you come into legitimate possession of something. Those are explanations of why property rights are important.

>>69209

see

>>68580

>>69209

>A reputation is information, the utility of which is caused by the content of that information.

As explained elsewhere, you're going to have a hard time justifying your right to control the information in other people's minds. You don't really have any agency over that, you certainly don't possess it, and I'm not so sure you can accurately describe it as rivalrous. Saying that you "have a reputation" seems only grammatically to describe possession; it doesn't identify something you actually control.

>Your question is about like asking "how does breaking someone's window infringe on his right to property?"

That's demonstrably false. The window is unambiguously rivalrous and under the control of the person who possesses it. Describing a reputation as being "possessed" or "damaged" is poetic, but not philosophically accurate.

>>69215

>I was talking about a framework explaining how you come into legitimate possession of something.

Well the consequence of those theories is that we can identify the process of coming into legitimate possession of a rivalrous good by any method of doing so which does not initiate a conflict. We can address and identify the classically-identified methods using this theory as follows:

Voluntary transfer is an obvious one. If all parties involved in the exchange of property consent to the transfer, then no conflict has resulted and everyone involved has the right of their action.

Original appropriation is justifiable because the original appropriator of a good from its un-owned state, being the first, has no other parties with whom to be in conflict. You can't have a conflict without another party, so the act of originally appropriating un-owned goods is conflict-free and thus justifiable. This is subtly distinct from Locke's approach, which justifies ownership because of some vague idea that "mixing labor" with something makes it yours. Such an approach can't be coherently expressed in rigorous philosophical terms, doesn't explain why doing so makes something yours, and creates all sorts of conflicts when you talk about subsequent actors "mixing their labor'' with the same goods.

Most theorists just mention original appropriation and voluntary transfer, but I also like to mention identity. A human, being composed of their body, has agency over that body in a way which isn't quite described by original appropriation. By virtue of the fact that one is one's body, you have control over that rivalrous good which is logically prior to all other possible claims.

>>68890

>>68908

Technically, all actions contribute to entropy and thus violate the NAP.

>>69261

except the voluntary contract between magical girl and incubator

>>69261

>contribute to entropy

what do you mean?

>>69270

what do you mean?

>>69522

What kyubey is doing is an act of fraud, and thus not covered by the NAP, if someone doesn't know what they are agreeing to, they are not capable of consenting to it.

>>70881

> if someone doesn't know what they are agreeing to, they are not capable of consenting to it.

implying

>>68910

I was just jumping in to remind everyone here to wear hearing protection whenever you go shooting.

If you don't have a gun you are not prepared to protect yourself from harm and thus should not be posting here in my opinion looking at you Poland

>>68910

what rights?

>>68509

The first amendment doesn't protect anything you dingus.

Libel isn't a thing. IT's a state power to increase their reach and destroy your opponents in court over faulty phrases.

That is to say, your "character" is a form of private property in how it's branded and imaged and marketed to others, or even sold. You can rightfully sue if someone is illfully and intentionally harming you character, but libel is a different beast with much more bullshit involved.

>>71297

>You can rightfully sue if someone is illfully and intentionally harming your character,

You're going to legally enforce impressions of you? By what right do you gain ownership of opinion?

>>71298

Your character is a physical manifestation of you that is tied directly to your worth. Harming one's character is a willfull action against another as anything else would be your own fault. I can't help you if you don't understand non-material property.

>>71341

no

your character is you