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A question about violence and the initiation of force.

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rasconia

I think the fundamental problem here is that you are operating on a different definition of "freedom" from that used by everyone else in the thread.

Of course it is true that you can _always_ think what you want. That's not what is meant by freedom. Freedom is the ability to act on your own judgement without interference by other people.

If I decide I want to build a house on my property, and take action to do so, but someone walks up to me and threatens to kill me unless I stop, my freedom has been curtailed because a person is telling me he will take my life if I proceed. It's not worth my life to continue working on a house I won't be able to live in because this guy killed me while working on it so I stop. My ability to follow my judgement (that the best thing to do with my property is to use it to build a house) is thwarted by the threat of force. I am not free, and I am not free because someone is using force on me to compel me to behave a certain way. I am *not* still free simply because I could still choose to drive one more nail and get shot for it, versus not.

That man, in interfering with your exercise of your judgement, is violating your rights and denying your freedom (the two are nearly if not totally synonymous).

All that having been said, I specified that only people could deny you your freedom. It is not a denial of freedom if a flood or earthquake wipes out your work on your house. Only people can violate your rights, the natural world and even wild animals cannot. (Another way to phrase this is that only people are moral agents.)

Also, it is not a denial of freedom if you find you cannot build the house because you do not have the property, capital and/or materials to do so. If you find yourself having to steal to finish the house, you are the one violating someone else's freedom. Trade must be consensual; you do not have a right to do business with someone against their will, just as they do not have a right to force you to stop building.

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No, "doing whatever we can to survive" is not the only option that remains: You could instead choose to not do whatever you can to survive. People occasionally do choose to kill themselves, after all.

You dropped context:

"The value of our life, however, remains, and so morally, when rational action is no longer possible, then doing whatever we can to survive and to get us BACK to being able to live as rational beings is what remains."

The conjunction is important. *IF* we are compelled to choose between doing something we would regret for the rest of our lives, or dying, then choosing to die is a perfectly valid choice.

Trying to survive (rather than trying to get yourself killed) obviously would be the rational choice, since you value your life. However, this means that rational action is still possible.

You have a gun to your head.

You have been given a choice.

Kill a baby and go free, or die.

You have no other alternatives.

If you kill the baby, could you live with yourself? I don't know - perhaps you could - I could not, and I would choose to die in that instance, because if I killed the baby to save myself, my own self loathing would leave me incapable of rational living henceforth.

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