You’re asking, then, whether I would trade off the satisfaction of having other tribe-members help me punish the one who hurt me, against the probability of being hurt? In the specific circumstances you have set up, I absolutely would. The reason is that, if there’s no punishment for murder, there is presumably likewise no punishment for retaliation in kind. So I don’t need my tribe to enact any punishment, I can do it myself, gaining even more satisfaction. This really seems like the best of both worlds: You get to take personal vengeance on anyone who wrongs you, with no dilution through ‘official’ coalitions; while the probability of actually being wronged goes down.
Yes of course, you are free to do it yourself, but it is assumed on the large scale that that even including retaliations (which are crimes), crime rates would go down. And in a society with no punishments would it be rational to do that? (Given that the friends or relatives of that guy could come after you for coming after him for coming after you and so on..?
It’s hard to reason about your hypothetical, because it seems to directly contradict actual experience. But it seems fairly straightforward to reason about what I, personally, would do: I want the chance of crimes against me minimised, so I accept the no-laws state as the best way of getting that. But if I nonetheless am among the unlucky ones, then I want revenge, so I get revenge. By hypothesis, the chance that the other guy’s friends will successfully punish me has got to be small, because we’ve established that crime is very low in this hypothetical universe.
You know this doesn’t have to be relegated to “thought experiment”. It’s pretty much the story of a large part of human history:
There were no state-enforced laws, per se, but you didn’t kill people, because then their family/clan/tribe would kill you. Of course then your family would do the same, and well..you can see how this might be a never-ending downward spiral. A more sophisticated way would be to pay a weregild . (I killed your brother. Sorry. Here’s some goats.)
If you are interested in seeing how this actually worked out, early Icelandic society is a pretty good microcosm. If you want to make learning it fun, read a saga. (Here’s Njal’s Saga )
You’re asking, then, whether I would trade off the satisfaction of having other tribe-members help me punish the one who hurt me, against the probability of being hurt? In the specific circumstances you have set up, I absolutely would. The reason is that, if there’s no punishment for murder, there is presumably likewise no punishment for retaliation in kind. So I don’t need my tribe to enact any punishment, I can do it myself, gaining even more satisfaction. This really seems like the best of both worlds: You get to take personal vengeance on anyone who wrongs you, with no dilution through ‘official’ coalitions; while the probability of actually being wronged goes down.
Yes of course, you are free to do it yourself, but it is assumed on the large scale that that even including retaliations (which are crimes), crime rates would go down. And in a society with no punishments would it be rational to do that? (Given that the friends or relatives of that guy could come after you for coming after him for coming after you and so on..?
It’s hard to reason about your hypothetical, because it seems to directly contradict actual experience. But it seems fairly straightforward to reason about what I, personally, would do: I want the chance of crimes against me minimised, so I accept the no-laws state as the best way of getting that. But if I nonetheless am among the unlucky ones, then I want revenge, so I get revenge. By hypothesis, the chance that the other guy’s friends will successfully punish me has got to be small, because we’ve established that crime is very low in this hypothetical universe.
You know this doesn’t have to be relegated to “thought experiment”. It’s pretty much the story of a large part of human history:
There were no state-enforced laws, per se, but you didn’t kill people, because then their family/clan/tribe would kill you. Of course then your family would do the same, and well..you can see how this might be a never-ending downward spiral. A more sophisticated way would be to pay a weregild . (I killed your brother. Sorry. Here’s some goats.)
If you are interested in seeing how this actually worked out, early Icelandic society is a pretty good microcosm. If you want to make learning it fun, read a saga. (Here’s Njal’s Saga )
second learning about early Icelandic society, it has some fascinating legal and economic structures.