Reader Doug Barrett from Edmonton, Canada, suggests that the 9 cases in Nozick’s Tale of the Slave can be expanded upon:
10. They read ‘the Tale of the Slave’ and they are now aware that you feel you are a slave. “We’re sorry you feel that way.” they say. “If you want to, you can go somewhere else and live in a way that you think isn’t slave-ish. Or you can stay with us, and play by our rules, and if you do you are welcome to try to persuade us that you have a better way to live.”
I [Doug Barrett] think once this offer is made, one cannot really claim to be a slave. And continuing further still…
11. You persuade them. “Hey, this living as free individuals is great!” they all say. “By the way, some of us didn’t like being called a 10,000-headed monster. Some of us want to beat you up for that insult.” And they beat you up.
12. They are about to beat you up. “No, no, no.” you say. “I have the right as a free person to insult you, but you, as free people, don’t have the right to beat me up. I may be more eloquent than you, and you may be more numerous and brawnier than I, but in a society of free people it is my skills, not yours, that are valued.”
“Huh?” they say (for they are not as eloquent as you).
“My friends, I wasn’t preaching anarchy back there in points 10 and 11. In a free society there is still a police force that protects against injustices. From now on, injustice is defined as the use of physical force for the purpose of coersion or vengance.”
“But we want to beat you up! Who serves on this police force that prevents us from doing what we want?”
“Why, virtualy the whole community! In a truly free society nearly everyone recognizes the value of freedom and rises up to prevent or punish unjust violence, as I defined it above, when it occurs.”
“Virtualy the whole community?!” they wail.”But that’s us! And we *want* to beat you up! Why would we stop ourselves from doing what we wanted?”
“Because you appreciate freedom so. Or you will, eventually. It is difficult for you, who have lived so long as slaves, to make the transition; to deliberately restrain yourselves rather than have some master do it. In a pre-existing and continuous free society you would learn from childhood that recourse to violence is wrong.”
“But wait a minute! Isn’t recourse to violence a part of the human repretoire of behaviour?” say some of the more eloquent ones.
“Yeah!” say the rest.
“Certainly,” you agree, “the use of violence has been a part of societies throughout history and prehistory. And violence is not totally off the menu in a free society. We’re still going to kill animals for food and sport, if we like. Parents can still physically discipline children. (If the parents want to, that is. The parents are free individuals.) And there will still be the need to defend our borders from foreign nations of slaves. We can’t just have outsiders coming in here and living any way they’d like. And there may be the occaisional local deviant who uses violence unjustly and will need to be restrained or punished. But amongst ourselves, amongst correctly-behaving free adults of this society, everyone will believe passionately that we shall not use violence against one another.”
“But we can hardly restrain ourselves from beating you up right now! How are we going to develop that level of discipline you describe?”
“That is up to you. You are free. You might hire people to train you, or hire people to remind of how important freedom is, or make it a religious thing, or you might just leave it up to each individual. Just as long as most of you end up beleiving more or less the same thing; that freedom is good and violence (as proscribed above) is bad.”
“But the old master didn’t like us fighting either. He’d whup us if he caught us at it, and we learned to avoid a whupping you don’t brawl even when another slave taunts you. Now we’re free, but we behave the same way.”
“Right, morons!”
“Doh!” they say.