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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Rand and Ghate's view that government is necessary for ob... — Carmelics
    Home/Rights & Liberty
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Rand and Ghate's view that government is necessary for objective law is contradicted by historical evidence of the Law Merchant.

    Rights & LibertySocial Contract
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Lon Fuller's 'inner morality of law' requires generality, consistency, and publicness—criteria the Law Merchant satisfied without state apparatus.
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    • 2.Fuller argued in 'The Morality of Law' (1964) that legal systems emerge from reciprocal expectations, not sovereign command, validating non-state legal orders.
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    • 3.The Law Merchant's voluntary arbitration and reputation-based enforcement produced stable, predictable rules meeting Fuller's criteria for genuine law.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Bruce Benson's 'The Enterprise of Law' (1990) documents that the Law Merchant achieved objectivity through iterated merchant interactions producing convergent norms.
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    • 2.Hayek's spontaneous order theory holds that decentralized rule-emergence can produce more consistent and universal norms than centralized legislative design.
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    • 3.If objectivity in law requires universalizability and consistency rather than state sanction, decentralized systems can satisfy that standard on their own terms.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Starting in the 11th century, merchants from various countries created the Law Merchant to protect foreign merchants not covered by local laws.
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    • 2.The Law Merchant was uniform throughout Europe and enforced by merchant-created courts in European cities.
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    • 3.The Law Merchant was developed and enforced without the involvement of any European government.
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    Rights & LibertySocial Contract

    Related

    Bruce Benson's 'The Enterprise of Law' (1990) documents that the Law Merchant ac...Fuller argued in 'The Morality of Law' (1964) that legal systems emerge from rec...Hayek's spontaneous order theory holds that decentralized rule-emergence can pro...If objectivity in law requires universalizability and consistency rather than st...
    +6 moreShow less
    Lon Fuller's 'inner morality of law' requires generality, consistency, and publi...Starting in the 11th century, merchants from various countries created the Law M...The Law Merchant was developed and enforced without the involvement of any Europ...The Law Merchant was uniform throughout Europe and enforced by merchant-created ...The Law Merchant's voluntary arbitration and reputation-based enforcement produc...The existence of the Law Merchant demonstrates that a peaceful society without g...

    Similar

    Rand and Ghate hold that individuals without a government cannot produ...78%Without a government, there are no objectively defined laws.76%The law is not coherently designed to serve a unified social purpose, ...74%The existence of the Law Merchant demonstrates that a peaceful society...74%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: ayn-rand
    View source passageHide passage
    Onkar Ghate (2019) and Harry Binswanger (2019) both defend this view. Ghate uses two scenarios involving individuals in a state of nature. Suppose you are by yourself on a desert island, and you domesticate a pig. Then someone from a neighboring tribe steals it. Do you have a right to retaliate by stealing some of his property, or stealing from his relatives? Again, suppose Robinson Crusoe and Friday are strangers sharing an island, and Crusoe invents a superior spear. Does Friday have a right t
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit