However, by your very inaction when someone’s rights are threatened and you are the sole entity capable of protecting their rights, you are acting against the principle of protecting individual rights and the victim _will_ suffer. That is very clearly threatening the victim with force.
It clearly is not an initiation of force if you do not not sacrifice yourself for the sake of a victim. Your remaining silent is neither an act of force nor is it a threat of such an act. By the reasoning that you give, your failure to give money to a person in need (especially in an emergency situation) is just as much a “threat of force” because the victim will suffer if you do not give something up. Your argument based on being the “sole entity capable of protecting their rights” also runs aground, if you claim that this is somehow rationally relevant (and not just an appeal to emotion). If “sole protector” is really the relevant principle, then just in case there is more than one source of evidence, you should not be compelled to testify. There is no principle (in Objectivism, though there is such a principle in altruism) that you should be compelled to protect the rights of the victim.
Would I be correct in assuming that you reject the 5th Amendment right to protection against self-incrimination – that you think that a person should be forced to testify against himself? That is implicit in your argument, and I want to see if you really want to apply this principle of the absolute right of the victim over the lives of others seriously.
The results of your actions (with respect to the subpoena) determine whether or not justice and the victim’s rights are upheld. Note that it is the criminal that put you in this position–not the court.
It’s clear that the accused – if he did indeed commit the act – bears the responsibility for the rights violations inflicted on you. But the results of your action do not “determine” whether the victim’s rights are upheld: at most they have some bearing on that outcome, depending on what the facts are.
This is absolutely not a “greater common good” principle. It is not requiring you to give up your property to help the poor or any other value that only enters the picture in the context of a society with laws. It is required for the protection of the very rights a proper government is established to defend. It is not “greater common good”–it is directly supporting (and required by) your “good” of being able to live in a society of men.
This is a greater common good argument, masking behind a proper function of government argument. It is compulsory altruism: you are being forced to destroy value. The economic questions of property and the poor have nothing to do with it. The power of the subpoena very clearly says that your own rational interest must be sacrificed for the sake of the public interest, both the interest of the victim (who may be dead and therefore in fact has no remaining interest) and more importantly the collective interest of society. You can throw in “in order for government to be able to function” all you want, but that does not change the fact that the subpoena is only justified in terms of the interest of others, not yourself.
Your whim (not to go to court) cannot and should not come above the objective requirements of enforcing the law. If we have objective laws, we must have objective enforcement of the laws or the former are meaningless. The two are corollaries–to have one without the other is an enormous fraud.
A corollary of that position if the government requires you to give up your property or even your life in order for it to function, then it is right if they force you to do so. In short, you support taxation and the draft. If you find that you do not support taxation or the draft, then you should reexamine your argument, because that is where your “anything for the sake of keeping government going” argument goes.
The power of the subpoena is virtually absolute (the 5th amendment being the exception – and perhaps in your version of subpoena power the 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination would be in the toilet). This power is exercised with no protection against the resulting destructoin of values. Your testimony may well have a direct inculpatory or exculpatory consequence w.r.t. the accused, and may have significant consequences in terms of your own rational interests, ranging from damage to personal relationships, loss of property, loss of job, even loss of life. Indeed you can rightly say “Poor Smith, his wife left him and he lost his job all because of his coerced testimony at the Jones trial. But fortunately, we know that Smith’s right were really violated by Jones, so that makes it okay”.
On moral grounds, the witness should testify if it results in no destruction of his values, because destruction of value is irrational; the state should never compel a person to act irrationally.
