Whether Criminals Can Be Ostracized without the Executive Branch?
That they can is the suggestion of Stefan Molyneux, a righteous libertarian crusader. I disagree with him for three reasons:
1) It depends crucially on high technology. The information on a criminal’s misdeeds or on his “credit rating” needs to be disseminated widely throughout the world. Even if this is possible now, it was not always so. So, the ability to banish a person from polite society is contingent on there existing a tightly connected network of individual history- and profile-keeping companies, no restrictions and easy access to background checks, etc. Perhaps elements of this global system exist already, and perhaps the state prevents some of them from arising, but, again, that Stefan’s idea is implementable is not true a priori.
2) Lowering the credit score of a murderer or a deal breaker or any kind of criminal may not be sufficient punishment. Now I suppose that a credit score can be negative, and hell or -infinity is the limit, so to speak. But still, even a -1,000,000 rating on a serial killer does not seem like a tough enough penalty. Also, in daily life doing a background check is often impossible. You don’t get investigated when you go to a restaurant or a grocery store. Technology might be able to solve this problem in a purely anarchist society; e.g., a store might require a thumbprint as a condition of entering its property. The print will be instantly checked, and if the credit rating is lower than some store-set amount, entrance will be denied. Still, it’s hard to speculate: e.g., a serial killer may be a scrupulous in paying his debts.
Stefan also needs to come up with some idea of how one’s social rating can be repaired.
3) Suppose that I have in my hand a judicial verdict against my opponent ordering him to pay me restitution or levying some sort of punishment. If he refuses to surrender, and I can’t force him to, then I derive no benefit from my actions of notifying the credit agency to lower his trustworthiness index or whatever; doing so is a public good. Now it’s true that people seem to enjoy rating their business partners — witness, for example, eBay. But it is unclear if people will do something similar if the costs of rating negatively those who aggressed against them exceed a few mouse clicks.
It seems to me, therefore, that my insight that the executive branch, unlike judicial services, cannot be privatized is of genuine value.
Update. There is a fourth simple yet powerful reason why ostracizing criminals from society is a very imperfect solution. If a person cannot even get food at a supermarket or a fast food place because of his low social rating, then he is permanently branded an outcast and will have to resort to further crime to survive. And the more he goes awry, the more his rating decreases, creating a vicious circle. At least in prison he gets food at regular times. O’Henry’s short story The Cop and the Anthem illustrates the problems involved. So, at the very least, some ways of allowing a criminal to find a way back into the general public’s graces must exist. We can say more. While deterrence seems served by this system, given that rehabilitation is also one of the four theories of punishment, it, too, must be given some authority. And it is association with good folks that rehabilitates, so ostracism will need to be qualified.
Alternatively, there may arise a network of businesses catering to the underworld, e.g., highly secured markets. In this case we may see a whole legal but still underground economy which may have the effect of efficiently linking criminals together with dire consequences for the rest of societry. Then ostracism will fail even to deter.