In terms of morality, I tend to agree with you. However, anyone can sue anyone else and the arbitrator decides. To say that neither Merry nor the current arbitrator would be sued on it implies a remarkable unanimous view among members of a particular AnCap society.
As I was asking your buddy, what is your cause of action? What theory of justice would give you standing? What idiot of an arbitrator would take such a case and what defendant would agree to such an arbitrator? And what Belter would honor such a judgment?
So, imagine this. You have what you think is a serious issue against another person. But he thinks you're wrong so he doesn't need to take it to arbitration. So he doesn't need to. If some arbitrator agrees to handle the case, the other guy doesn't need to accept that arbitrator -- in fact any arbitrator who agrees to handle the case is automatically disqualified for agreeing to take it.
It looks to me like you need a grand consensus about law to get that result. Otherwise what keeps somebody who's popular from pulling that if you (who are not so popular) try to sue him for something that is really important? "That silly Sandy Sandfort, what a ridiculous idea for a lawsuit! He has no basis for suing over something so stupid! No arbitrator would take it and if one did that would prove he was a bad arbitrator that I should not accept. Let's have another round, boys." And you can tell your story and he tells his story, and his story gets believed, and there is no arbitration to even try to find out who's lying.
Well, but what happens if you try to find an arbitrator who will take the case and you can't find one? I guess that's a clue. "Stop right there. You're saying that jamesD did
that? I don't believe it. You'd never get a jury to believe it. You'd better just forget the whole thing." If you can't find an arbitrator then that's an important clue. If you find one then of course the other guy won't want to use the guy you picked, so your guy and his guy agree on somebody -- somebody who probably hasn't heard any of the details yet, and so there's reasonable doubt what he'll decide.
Unless there isn't much doubt, in which case your arbitrator really ought to try to talk you out of it. "I can see your point but I doubt many others can. You just don't quite fit into the society yet and you don't understand how things work here. You can't sue JamesD. He literally gets away with murder. Be happy you're still alive and just walk away."
Try a rather different example. You are in your ship heading directly toward Ceres at rather high relative velocity, and you throw out some junk you don't need. Later you decelerate and dock. Your fast-moving junk damages a docked ship and some machinery on the surface of Ceres etc. It's clear where it came from. Does anybody have a case against you? I would say yes. You are endangering people and their property. They have a right to expect you not to drop junk on them, when there was a reasonable chance it would hurt somebody. On the other hand, suppose you were in an orbit where you had no reason to think it would hurt anybody and 15 years later it did. In that case I'd say your liability is much less.
Why? That's silly. Damage is damage and if it arose out of your negligence, elapsed time has nothing to do with it, nor does your intent. Negligence is negligence.
So if the debris that B&E's mass driver shot out in more-or-less random directions while they were rescuing themselves hits somebody in 15 years, then they're liable? I don't think you have thought this out.
I am not going to address your increasingly bizarre hypotheticals. In every case, they have been asked and answered.
I don't see that they've been asked and answered, and you have no obligation to answer.
My argument from morality (not law) is that I should treat other people as both individuals who have moral responsibility for their own actions, and as unguided missiles. When people are heading for some stupid clusterfrack and there's something reasonably simple I can do to help them avoid it, then I should do so. Unless I personally benefit from the clusterfrack, or it looks safer for me to mind my own business.
Harris was responsible for ordering someone else to commit murder, and Young was responsible for carrying it out. You don't say that Harris was not responsible just because Young was also responsible and should have disobeyed.
If I have reason to think that somebody will make a bad moral choice, or they are not really capable of making the choice, and I carelessly send them off to do it at random, am I less negligent than if they were big rocks that I negligently launched at high-v? Especially when I am their arbitrator?
I don't suggest that I be held legally responsible for that, except in particularly clear-cut cases. But is it a bad moral stand?
My father was a dentist. He did very good work and kept his prices relatively low, and he built a thriving practice. Once he organized a meeting of all the dentists in a seven-county area, not through the ADA but just a social meeting. They discussed fixing prices and made some progress, but he said there was one dentist he needed to have there who just didn't show up. The man like him had a great reputation and kept his prices low, and they really wanted him to participate.
Thus defeating your own "guild" concern. Perfect!
Why defeating? They did collectively raise their prices. He raised his less. They'd have preferred it to be unanimous among the good dentists, but he was only one man and he was already working as hard as he wanted to.