Voluntary Slavery

Our thought experiment taken place in a newly established settlement, Freetown, the inhabitants of which decide to live under libertarian principles. They leave nearly all areas of the economy to the free market, including the justice system. In their private justice system, one can give consent for the judge and jury to confiscate life, liberty and property in the event of a crime. The benefit of this consent to the citizen is that they gain the protection of the law. We will leave out issues of how law is established and maintained in a free justice system. Regardless of the solutions for these issues, it remains that at some point one must consent to an authority that can confiscate life, liberty or property in order to benefit from the protection of the law, which is the issue that our thought experiment is concerned with. Let us consider what happens when a person goes to court as the defendant, and they stand accused of theft. The evidence is produced, ably explained and meticulously examined. The defence and the prosecution are each given their chance to state their case, and they do, with the help of highly capable lawyers. The jury spend days deliberating before finding the defendant guilty. The judge then returns a sentence of 5 years in prison. An inevitable problem of any justice system is that it sometimes gets the verdict wrong. In this case, they got the verdict wrong and the defendant was in fact innocent. Despite his/her pleas, the defendant is forced to serve his/her sentence. It is important to note that when he gave consent to submit to the authority of the justice system, he was aware that sometimes mistakes are made, as are all members of the public. My argument is that this form of justice system amounts to voluntary slavery, and that one is being inconsistent by simultaneously supporting free justice and not supporting the ability of one to consent to voluntary slavery. When one consents to slavery, one accepts that they might have their possessions confiscated at any time, and that they could also lose life, liberty and property, all without any good reason, and that the person deprived lacks any ability to resist. The same is true when one consents to the justice system. In both systems that you consent to, you are throwing yourself, your life, liberty and property at the whim of someone else's preferences, or at the whim of a group of people. If they so choose they can preserve your possessions, life and liberty, even enhance them, but if they so choose they can also destroy it all. Yes, the probability of loss might be different in each scenario, but since when have libertarians ever sought to control peoples choices based on probabilities? The principle in both systems is exactly the same. Of course, if you accept my argument thus far, you must also accept that as free justice is morally equivalent to voluntary slavery, as is mandatory justice the moral equivalent of mandatory slavery. The libertarian reading this might now be very worried. They might fear that if it is true that justice in a free society amounts to voluntary slavery, then the whole libertarian ideal of a free society will collapse, as we will all have to submit to moral slavery in order to have any justice system. Either then, the libertarian must abandon attempts to establish any justice system at all, mandatory or voluntary, or they must accept slavery. I suggest they choose the latter. One can actually submit to slavery of one form or another with no moral problem at all. I find the whole concept of the voluntary slave to be a contradiction in terms. If one agrees to behave in the fashion of a slave in one way or another, then they are merely fulfilling a contractual obligation, an obligation with the same moral value of any other contract. Freedom is partly defined by the ability to make free contracts of any nature with anyone. Freedom is preserve through contracts being upheld. Therefore, if one makes a contractual agreement to behave as a slave, then that person would actually be upholding freedom by acting as a slave. Also, a person who chooses to act as a slave has made a choice, for which they must be held responsible, in exactly the same way one is held responsible for the payment of a bill. A person who has the choice of a course of action, and who is held responsible for their course of action is a free person living in a free society. A person who has their choices restricted, yet who is held responsible for those choices is not free and is living in tyranny. In this way, a person who chooses to live as a slave is more free than a person living under an system that does not permit him to live as a slave, however counter-intuitive this might seem.