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Score One For The Home Team! [says a Martha-hater]

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I agree completely with your first post Betsy, but I must take exception to this.

When men can wield force against other men whenever they want to without being restrained by law, what you have is -- in fact -- anarchy.

That would make the minutemen at Lexington Green anarchists, wouldn't it? The fact that they stood up to the British army made them, (according to the law of the time.), traitors, and rebels. They were criminals in the eyes of their own government.

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That would make the minutemen at Lexington Green anarchists, wouldn't it?  The fact that they stood up to the British army made them, (according to the law of the time.), traitors, and rebels.  They were criminals in the eyes of their own government.

It is fairly common that when men rebel against their slavemasters, the ruling state declares them criminals. The crucial question is whether citizens have a means of changing their government, and the colonists were allowed no means of changing their government. The question you have to ask when proposing violent rebellion is whether the existing government is fundamentally rights-respecting.

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I believe in the rule of law because I believe in the rule of justice--and that means that I believe in the rule of law to the extent that the laws are just. What do you believe in?

Boldface my doing. :D

I totally agree with you.

And the core of what makes laws just can be found in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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I agree completely with your first post Betsy, but I must take exception to this.

That would make the minutemen at Lexington Green anarchists, wouldn't it?  The fact that they stood up to the British army made them, (according to the law of the time.), traitors, and rebels.  They were criminals in the eyes of their own government.

Betsy is merely defining anarchy, which, is, by the way, my definition as well.

Your example of the minutemen? They are not anarchists. Why? Because when the truly oppressed rebel against the oppressors, it is a matter of rebelling on the principles of defending one's right to life.

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"The question you have to ask when proposing violent rebellion is whether the existing government is fundamentally rights-respecting."

And ours clearly is not.

"In a government of laws and not of men, when it is shown that an unjust law has been enforced by agents of the government, the LAW is held responsible and not those sworn to enforce the law."

I don't understand that. Any immoral act committed in the name of a law is the result of the decisions of individuals along a chain of command. First, the legislators who enact the law, then the agents who enforce it. All those people commit an immoral act by playing their part, and I hold them all responsible.

I once began the process of entering the law enforcement field, but changed my mind while I was waiting on the bureaucracy because I realized that I would not be willing to enforce immoral laws, and there are SO many of them I could not do the job at all. I think that was the responsible choice. And if others had the knowledge and integrity to make the same choice, then the legislators would be forced to revamp the legal system, or they'd have no agents, as they shouldn't.

"In a government of laws and not of men, agents and employees of the government must act in accordance with the law and not on their own. "

Doesn't this mean they are not responsible for their choices? I think they should quit their jobs before knowingly committing an immoral act in the name of the law. If I had become a cop, I would never have arrested anyone for having drugs, or written anyone a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt, for example. I wouldn't have lasted long, so that's why I changed my mind. Why is an individual not accountable for choosing to enforce a law he knows is immoral? (If that's what you're saying. Please correct me if I've misunderstood.)

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I agree completely with your first post Betsy, but I must take exception to this.

That would make the minutemen at Lexington Green anarchists, wouldn't it?  The fact that they stood up to the British army made them, (according to the law of the time.), traitors, and rebels.  They were criminals in the eyes of their own government.

You're confusing anarchy and anarchists. I would venture to say that there was a temporary state of anarchy in parts of America when fighting off the British. Although, even that's not true, because most of the towns had their own local governments, and the revolutionaries had provisional governments.

They weren't anarchists, in any case. An anarchist would promote anarchy above a government based on rule of law and rights. The outcome of the situation shows that the "minutemen" were clearly not anarchists, even if in a few cases there might have been anarchy (very very temporarily).

"When men can wield force against other men whenever they want to without being restrained by law, what you have is -- in fact -- anarchy. "

Then an anarchist would be one who wants this to be true, to be able to wield force against other men whenever they want to without being restrained by law. It's clear the American Revolutionaries did not go for that.

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"The question you have to ask when proposing violent rebellion is whether the existing government is fundamentally rights-respecting."

And ours clearly is not.     

I think our government respects rights more than it doesn't and it respects rights more than any other government in the world right now.

Most importantly, there is a peaceful procedure for challenging and changing the system to correct the violations of rights which do exist. As long as we have that, there is no justification for using force to achieve that end.

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"In a government of laws and not of men, agents and employees of the government must act in accordance with the law and not on their own. "

Doesn't this mean they are not responsible for their choices?  I think they should quit their jobs before knowingly committing an immoral act in the name of the law. 

So do I. A person is responsible for choosing his career and should be judged for that.

What I object to is holding an individual responsible for enforcing a bad law when the blame primarily belongs to those responsible for the existence of the unjust law: the legislature which passed the law and the people who elected the legislators. The thing to do isn't to punish the cop charged with enforcing the law but to repeal the bad law.

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"The question you have to ask when proposing violent rebellion is whether the existing government is fundamentally rights-respecting."

And ours clearly is not.     

It's hard to argue with that, since even though the government does use protection of rights the basis for its actions, it does manage to violate rights at every turn. Presumably you don't think that any government is fundamentally rights-respecting, so you'd put all governments in the same boat as North Korea and Nazi Germany. If you believe that, then I presume you think it is also proper for anyone in the US to pick up the gun to overthrow the state (assuming that you don't go the other way and say that North Koreans do not have the right to overthrow the oppressive regime that enslaves them)

....

Doesn't this mean they are not responsible for their choices?  I think they should quit their jobs before knowingly committing an immoral act in the name of the law.  If I had become a cop, I would never have arrested anyone for having drugs, or written anyone a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt, for example.  I wouldn't have lasted long, so that's why I changed my mind.  Why is an individual not accountable for choosing to enforce a law he knows is immoral?

I agree and commend you for your principles. The key is exactly what you said: "knowingly committing an immoral act in the name of the law". Morality is fundamentally about what the actor knows. It is not self-evident that the function of government is strictly to protects individual rights, and very, very many people in government do not understand that. So it should be no surprise that some (more likely, almost all) police believe that is is proper for them to issue tickets to people for not wearing a seatbelt. These people are not knowingly committing an immoral act. Once a person grasps the basic principle of what law is supposed to do, it wold be very diffcult to continue employment enforcing laws, given the nature of the laws that they would be required to enforce.

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I don't understand that.  Any immoral act committed in the name of a law is the result of the decisions of individuals along a chain of command.

As a person studying Objectivism, I'm faced with the same dilemna of which you speak. The problem is that I was a cop first.

I once began the process of entering the law enforcement field, but changed my mind while I was waiting on the bureaucracy because I realized that I would not be willing to enforce immoral laws, and there are SO many of them I could not do the job at all. I think that was the responsible choice. And if others had the knowledge and integrity to make the same choice, then the legislators would be forced to revamp the legal system, or they'd have no agents, as they shouldn't.
Unfortunately as a cop, you have little to nothing to do with enacting most laws. And frequently, you aren't given the choice of picking and choosing which ones to enforce. I don't actively pursue the enforcement of laws that I think are wrong, such as drug laws. However, when faced with a situation that obligates me by my duty to make a drug arrest, I will do it. Hardly anyone I know as a police officer agrees with me that there should not be drug laws. According to most polls and referendums, the majority of the public still wants drug laws. Still, when appropriate, I engage other officers in that conversation to try to sway their opinion.

I am principled person and I'm a cop. If I chose not to be a cop anymore, I would be leaving the job, a very important job that some people must and should choose to do (particularly Objectivists in my opinion), to less principled people (at least as far as drugs and some other laws are concerned). I choose to try and change the system to some degree on the inside. It's nice to think of what would happen IF no one decided to be cop for those reasons, but the facts of reality differ. Therefore, I made my decision to remain principled and be a cop according to those facts of reality. But, I would never seek a job with the DEA for those same reasons.

Doesn't this mean they are not responsible for their choices? I think they should quit their jobs before knowingly committing an immoral act in the name of the law. If I had become a cop, I would never have arrested anyone for having drugs, or written anyone a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt, for example. I wouldn't have lasted long, so that's why I changed my mind. Why is an individual not accountable for choosing to enforce a law he knows is immoral?

How would you hold a police officer responsible for those choices? The reason why individuals (or cops specifically) are not held accountable for choosing to enforce immoral laws is because we don't live in an Objectivist society, and many people don't agree that drug laws (for example) are immoral. You may personally hold disdain for me or other cops as being unprincipled, but in general that's what "the public" wants at this point. And as with other large scale changes, it takes time and people working on the inside and the outside to affect that change.

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But he is obliged to enforce the law. When a person is coerced into an action, they do not bear moral responsibility for that action.

This is wrong; he chose the career hence there is no coercion. There is a difference between putting a gun to someone's head and demanding they kill someone, and that person choosing to join a body which will force them to kill somone. Rand talks about a similar scenario in an interview at http://www.jeffcomp.com/faq/murder.html

Ayn Rand:

Well here you have to take your example literally. If a man is under threat of losing his life, then you cannot speak of his right, or the right of Man C, since the rights have already been violated. All you can say is that the rights of Man B and Man C are still valid, but the violator is Man A, with Man B as merely the tool. Therefore you cannot say that rights do not exist. They do exist, but the violator is the initiator of force, not the transmission belt. However this does not apply to any other kind of misfortune, and it does not apply to a dictatorship, because here you would be speaking metaphorically. For instance, you couldn't claim that the men who served in the Gestapo, or the Russian secret police, they couldn't claim (as some of the Nazis did) that they were merely carrying out orders, and that therefore the horrors they committed are not their fault, but are the fault of the chief Nazis. They were not literally under threat of death. They chose that job. Nobody holds a gun on a secret policeman and orders him to function all the time. You could not have enough secret policemen. Therefore I took your example literally. Actually, such a thing does not happen, because if somebody wants to murder someone, he picks a willing executioner. He cannot go with a gun in the back of Man B, and order him to shoot Man C, because that does not relieve him of the responsibility, nor the guilt, for the crime. Only in that literal sense could one say that Man B is absolved, but not in the metaphorical sense; not if he is a willing official of a dictatorship, and then claims "I had no other way to make a living"" That does not absolve him. His life was not in danger.

The only reason immoral laws can be enforced is because individual police officers choose to enforce them. Without the sanctioning of individual police officers, they could not exist. If you are a police officer then you could certainly argue that from a utilitarian perspective that the good you do when catching genuine criminals outweighs the harm you are causing to innocent people, but this is a decision which only you alone can make. I think there is an argument here, and I would agree with it to _some_ extent. I obviously wouldnt claim that all police officers are immoral and/or should quit their jobs (except for officers working primarilly in injust fields such as Narcotics, about which I would make both claims). However we are now discussing whether immoral actions are 'balanced out' by postive ones, not about whether they are actually immoral.

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In fact, I think the laws that she was convicted of violating are just laws (although very badly written because they can be interpreted in many ways). Insider trading laws are just plain and simple wrong, whereas laws against obstruction of justice are actually decent laws. But federal investigators should not have been investigating insider trading. If you look at Bernstein's op-ed, his criticism is against insider trading laws, not the prosecution for violating the law. And the dismissed charge of fraud based on the fact that she maintained her innocence is certainly a quite valid reason to criticize the prosecution: it is prosecutorial coersion of the worst kind, inventing new and non-existent crimes.
Well this is true, insider trading is a nonsense crime, and from what I know of them, the laws themselves are very ambiguously phrased. They should be overturned, and of course they should be criticized. However this is not the issue here.

Different in what way? As I have pointed out, there is a substantive issue about whether she is actually guilty or at least whether the prosecution met its legal burden. Be that as it may, she has been convicted and the rule of law demands that she do the time. So who exactly is advocating that the law be broken?

A lot of people are loudly condemning the imprisonment as unjust (which it is). However, in cases where people are jailed for the other nonsense crimes which I mentioned, the reaction is often not "this conviction is unjust", but rather "the laws are unjust but the person deserved to go to jail for breaking them". I think a lot of people would have wanted Martha to get off due to the injustice of the laws she supposedly transgressed, but I doubt they would be so supportive of a person who was being prosecuted for selling drugs, or owning child pornography.

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The only reason immoral laws can be enforced is because individual police officers choose to enforce them. Without the sanctioning of individual police officers, they could not exist.

This is wrong.

If one policeman refuses to enforce unjust laws he will be punished and the laws will be enforced by other policemen.

Immoral laws do not exist because the police enforce them. They exist because they are passed by the legislature in accordance with the wishes of the voters. The proper, and the most effective, way to get rid of bad laws is to work to REPEAL them.

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If one policeman refuses to enforce unjust laws he will be punished and the laws will be enforced by other policemen.
Using "if I dont do it then someone else will, so I might as well" as a justification for seemingly immoral behavior may well lead to unfavourable outcomes if applied to other scenarios. In any case, this is true only in the most abstract sense and breaks down in some concrete situations - in some cases the police officer will have the choice whether to let an innocent person go, and it will be unlikely this specific person is caught by anyone else.

Immoral laws do not exist because the police enforce them.  They exist because they are passed by the legislature in accordance with the wishes of the voters.

Enforcement by police officers is a necessary condition for these laws to be upheld. There are other factors at work also, but they could not be upheld if the police did not cooperate.

Let us take a concrete example. A college student goes out to a club one day and takes an illegal recreational drug. He is apprehended by a police officer, who is now faced with a choice - should I let this person go since he is morally innocent, or should I initiate force against him? Assume he chooses the latter and the student is forcibly taken to the police-station, after which he is tried and sentenced in court. This person's life is likely to be ruined. This would not have happened had it not been for the actions that the individual person playing the role of a police officer took when initiating force against him. Without the immoral actions of this individual police officer, our fictional college student's life would not have been prosecuted.

This police officer has ruined a persons life. He may justify his actions by saying "I was just following orders" or "I caught a murderer yesterday so it balances out", but neither of these serve to either erase the effects of his actions, or provide comfort to the college student.

The proper, and the most effective, way to get rid of bad laws is to work to REPEAL them.

I agree, but that is not the issue here.

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But the policeman's job is to uphold the law. As long as we are still an essentially free nation and we have the power to change the laws, then they should be upheld. If we permit policemen to make their own judgements about whether to enforce a law or not, then things become much more arbitrary.

Keep in mind that Objectivists are a small segment of the population, and advocating that policemen decide which laws are just not only takes power away from people to vote and change the laws, but would ensure that something much worse happens. A policeman with leftist tendencies might choose not to arrest the impoverished youth who robs a rich lady on the street, or a Christian policeman might let off a criminal who says he's really sorry and that he'll go to church. The fact that these policemen would be wrong about what was just doesn't change anything. The proper way to decide what laws should exist is not through a single man's choice (witness what happens with activist judges), but through a formal legal process, especially a legislature.

At present, an Objectivist policeman should arrest someone who violates drug laws. Leaving aside the fact that many people involved with selling and distributing drugs are often involved in violent acts as well, the law isn't even arbitrary. You know what the law is regarding drugs. It's not the same as present sexual harassment laws where you can't know until AFTER the fact whether you've committed a crime or not based on the arbitrary feelings of the alleged victim. The proper course of action is to change the mindset of enough people so that the drug laws can be changed, not hope that you have an Objectivist policeman who will let you off.

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A lot of people are loudly condemning the imprisonment as unjust (which it is). However, in cases where people are jailed for the other nonsense crimes which I mentioned, the reaction is often not "this conviction is unjust", but rather "the laws are unjust but the person deserved to go to jail for breaking them". I think a lot of people would have wanted Martha to get off due to the injustice of the laws she supposedly transgressed, but I doubt they would be so supportive of a person who was being prosecuted for selling drugs, or owning child pornography.

That may be true, but a lot of people are not Objectivists. So a lot of people may think Martha should be freed because they love her recipe for lemon cake, using home-grown lemons: that is not a rational basis for supporting or opposing a conviction. I really think that a lot of people do not understand that she was convicted of lying to government investigators, and that she was not convicted of insider trading. She was convicted of faking reality: and if you look at a number of the (earlier) posts here, they focus on a true but contextually irrelevant fact that insider-trading laws are not proper laws. In addition, a lot of people would say "Yes, it's perfectly okay to lie to investigators, as long as you do not lie in court while under oath". The "a lot of people say" argument holds no sway. What I would like to see you provide is evidence that lots of Objectivists believe that her conviction was unjust or wrong, or even that the underlying law (not the insider trading law which she was not even prosecuted for) is wrong or unjust. The 5th amendment to the US Constitution provides the proper means for her to have responded to the investigators: instead, she chose to fake reality. (Or not: it is probable that she lied, but not certain, and the law demands certainty for a conviction. But we'd need a transcript to sort this out - I leave open the possibility that her conviction was unjust).

You bring up "other nonsense crimes", but she was not convicted of a nonsense crime (I have no opinion of the conspiracy charge since I don't know what the specific law is that shw was convicted of in that case, so I'm only speaking of the violation of section 1001). So any comparison between this case and, say, an anti-trust conviction is really not relevant.

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The only reason immoral laws can be enforced is because individual police officers choose to enforce them. Without the sanctioning of individual police officers, they could not exist.

Your analysis is way off the mark. The reason why immoral laws exist is because legislatures exist with a minimally-fettered ability to impose conditions on the lives of citizens, and because judges (esp. Supreme Court justices) have an unfettered power to interpret what those laws say (though in practice, they are not as unconstrained as legislatures are). Police have little to do with enforcing the law; they essentially bring the facts to the attention of the prosecutor, who makes a decision whether to pursue the matter.

The primary responsibility for bad laws lies with the staff members hired by the legislators, who construct these laws which their employers (the legislator) then argues for. For some sick reason, sponsoring bills is seen as a good act, not the evil act that it almost always is. The only reason immoral laws can be enforced is that they are created in the first place, and the only reason why that is possible is because there is no constitutional requirement that laws be explicitly justfied with respect to the proper function of government.

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This police officer has ruined a persons life. He may justify his actions by saying "I was just following orders" or "I caught a murderer yesterday so it balances out", but neither of these serve to either erase the effects of his actions, or provide comfort to the college student.

It was the student who ruined his own life, by choosing to take drugs. Even if drugs were legal (which I think they should be), the student's life would be ruined from the moment he decided to ingest the drugs. So, although the government is clearly in violation of his rights, I don't think he deserves any pity.

People who choose fighting crime as their carreer shouldn't be condemned for enforcing unjust laws while under threat of retribution from the government if they refuse to. The responsibility for such injustices lies with the true initiators of force: the criminals who make the police necessary, and the legislators who pass unjust laws. The cop, in this case, is like a pilot bombing Saddam's palaces while trying to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties: he is acting to minimize the damage done after force has already been initiated.

On the other hand, people who choose the enforcement of unjust laws as their carreer...

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