@salima,
salima;80445 wrote:in your theoretical government, shouldnt there be something in place to 'oppress' those minorities who have the intent or potential to harm others?
Thanks for the interest Salima, the question you raise is a very difficult one, but I'll try my best to answer.
Government should never act to prevent a crime. A shocking statement perhaps? Well, to my mind, using the law and the force of the police to prevent a crime means using the law and force of the police to punish an individual who has yet to commit a crime: i.e. who has not commited a crime. There is no such thing as potential crime. Justice can only be reactive. What someone might call preventative justice, i.e. preventing rather than later righting a wrong, is not justice at all. It is in theory tyrannical and in practice leads to what we all would plainly recognize as tyranny. The only exception would be a conspiracy to commit a crime. Of course, that involves charging the accused with conspiracy to commit X, not with X. The person has to tried and found guilty. The burden of proof, as always, is on the prosecution. In other words, this exception is not justification for stopping people on the street because some official decides they look suspicious and are a potential threat.
As for the man waving grenades in the shopping mall. Another shocking response no doubt...let him. From a legal-philosphical perspective, it is no more justifiable to arrest him for potential murder than to arrest an outspoken critic of government for potential treason. but BrightNoon, if we press the button to instantly create your ideal society, wouldn't the malls be full of grenade weilding nutjobs next week? Perhaps, but that's no more likely than if we maintain the current system. Why? My guess is that people who intend to waive grenades around in publoic places are going to do that regardless of whether that action is legal or illegal. Sure, if we declared tommorow that it was legal to carry grenades in public, there would be a number of people who took advantage of that new liberty to have some fun, people who otherwise would not walk around with grenades. However, are these the people we need to worry about, the people who would actually use grenades? I think not. The people who intend to commit such crimes are not going to be disuaded from doing so by the law. As with so many issues, a ban on some potentially dangerous activity only influences the choices of law-abiding citizens who would not abuse that liberty anyways, while having no effect on the ill-intended criminals. For example, have regulations or outright bans on publicly carrying firearms dissuaded crminals from carrying firearms? No, but it has dissuaded honest citizens from doing so, thus leaving them more vulnerable to the criminals.
I think a broader question needs to be asked. What is the purpose of justice, what is its proper application? In my mind, the reason we have given government the authority to use force against citizens is only so that the government has a monopoly of force, i.e. so that it can effectively prohibit inter-citizen violence. We have not granted government this power so that it can be used against us for whatever purpose the majority deems fit: e.g. interning japanese-americans, enforcing war-time sedition acts, etc. In other words, the purpose of justice, the raison d'etre for the government monopoly of legitimate force, is to maintain the internal peace upon which civil society rests, nothing more. This means that the role of justice was to settle, not deter, private justice, vigilantism, vendetta, etc. If something is deterred, great, but that is ancillary. The primary goal is to prevent the disolution of civil society in the wake of private violence by asserting, through actual force or threat of force, the superior violent capacity of the state, and then mediating between all parties concerned to the satisfaction of them and to the society as a whole that the solution is equitable and objectively arrived upon.
