Enforcing Rights in a Stateless Society
In response to my comments about bargaining power, quasibill plausibly suggests that “If contract enforcement is left to moral sanction, bargaining power would seem to be a perfectly acceptable consideration,” even from the standpoint of libertarians committed to the non-aggression principle. To put the point more sharply, if “moral sanction” were all that was at issue, and such libertarians still objected to talk about bargaining power, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that their objection wasn’t really rooted in concerns about aggression. The conversation we’ve been having makes it a natural next step to consider the more general issue of the range of formal or quasi-formal options short of the use of force that might be available in a stateless society to safeguard a range of morally significant interests. (As I suggest in my recent post on rights , I think many of these interests ought to be talked about as rights, but I don’t think anything directly related to my current ...