Conza

I thought I would recommend some of the not so well known but nevertheless  mind-blowing journal articles that should be read by everyone in the movement, especially by those outside it. This is the third in a series of many.

“Causation and Aggression”    by Stephan Kinsella and Patrick Tinsley

Sections:

1. Praxeology and Legal Analysis: Action vs. Behavior
2. Aggression and the Implicit Concept of Causality
3. Complicating the Picture: Causation, Cooperation, And Human Means
4. “Mere” Speech-Acts And Aggression
5. Cause-In-Fact, Proximate Cause, And Action
6. Reinach and Causation

In the context of legal analysis, one important praxeological doctrine is the distinction between action and mere behavior. The difference between action and behavior boils down to intent. Action is an individual’s intentional intervention in the physical world, via certain selected means, with the purpose of attaining a state of affairs that is preferable to the conditions that would prevail in the absence of the action. Mere behavior, by contrast, is a person’s physical  movements that are not undertaken intentionally and that do not manifest any purpose, plan, or design. Mere behavior cannot be aggression; aggression must be deliberate, it must be an action.

Here Stephan Kinsella clears up and clarifies some advanced aspects of libertarianism. Some questions to investigate:

• Why we should concern ourselves with A’s intent? If we objectively determine that A’s actions caused the death of B, what should it matter what A intended to do—or whether A intended to do anything at all?
  

• Consider the following case in which an aggressor employs an innocent human as one of his means. A terrorist builds a letter-bomb and mails it to his intended victim via courier. The courier has no idea that the package he is delivering contains a lethal device. When the addressee dies in an explosion after he opens the package, whom should we hold responsible?

• What about the defense that speech cannot be aggression since it does not actually invade others’ property borders?

• The same question is asked in a variety of situations: did the general kill people, using his troops as means to this end? Did the manager use his employee as a means to attain some end? Did the wife kill her husband by using her lover (or a hired hit-man) as the means to attain this goal? If some one votes in favor of socialism (or speaks out in favor of it), are they a cause of the ensuing acts of aggression by state agents?