- This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 1 year ago by
.
-
Posts
-
At the bottom of page 319 of OPAR Peikoff notes that, when speaking of the vice of initiating physical force against another, “physical” does not necessarily mean violent. Agreed. He also notes that it does not have to be “direct” and cites fraud as an example of an indirect use of force. I can understand how a threat to use force would be “indirect” but do not understand how fraud is indirect force. Would he also say other “white collar crimes” such as libel, identity theft and embezzlement are examples of “indirect force”?
Fraud is indirect physical force because the defrauder forcibly holds on to some value of yours and/or withholds some value owed to you. Embezzlement is a straightforward example of fraud and of indirect physical force. The embezzler physically takes wealth that doesn’t belong to him, withholding it from its rightful owner.
In his Advanced Seminars on Objectivism, Peikoff answers a question about libel (just after the 1-hour mark in lecture 14 on Government). He says that for libel to be a rights violation, it has to demonstrably deprive a person of property (like if someone libels Rand and then book sales immediately drop). I’ve heard some Objectivists make another argument: Libel deprives a person of his property in the form of the reputation he has earned. This, though, seems like a very hard case to make, because you cannot objectively prove that others have lowered their opinions of a person on account of someone’s libel—and if those people lower their opinions on the basis of non-objective charges, then what is their opinion actually worth?
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.