A person who derives quasi-sexual gratification from inflicting enormous pain upon helpless female victims has evil intentions, assuming we consider each human being to have certain natural rights. However, ‘natural rights’ are fiendishly difficult to derive from reason without swallowing unproven assumptions. John Locke had it simple: God made Adam, He gave Adam sovereignty over the world and all its contents. He said that Man shouldn’t kill another man. End of story. If He exists and if belief in His Judeo-Christian form were universal, we could literally announce that the sociopath pervert was evil because God said so. We could also say that property rights exist as a natural right because ‘Vox Dei’.
I regret that this sort of argument is not sustainable for all humans at this time. To announce that the depraved person is irrational, is both practically pointless (he wouldn’t care) and not based on reason at all. The only basis for condemning a criminal other than natural rights is utility – which is close to arguing for a ‘public good’. As I reject the notion of public goods, I can hardly claim that a public good justifies condemnation of someone’s gratification of their admittedly unpleasant (to me) hobby. After all if twelve monsters agree to inflict pain on one victim in secret (so the rest of the public is unaware of the act), it can’t be condemned by utilitarian principles: at some point the aggregate pleasure outweighs the aggregate pain.
It’s no good recoiling in horror at the activities of sadistic monsters (an emotional response), striking out at them, and then trying to justify the action by reason, when the rationale is unsubstantiated. I happen to think that Rand’s account of the identification of objective morality is as good as it gets from a libertarian natural rights point of view. N.B. Brian, who despises Randians, tries to derive morality from utilitarian principles. What he comes up with is decency, not rules for discovering ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Without a theory of natural rights I think libertarians are kidding themselves on the subject of ‘crime’, ‘deviancy’ and ‘justice’.
