If you were a profit maximizer, you would not care what I got, and co-operation would be much easier
to accomplish.

Without the courts and without a state to enforce the rulings of the courts, it might be argued that any and all disputes can escalate to violent conflict and are more likely to do so.

I think most people would argue that without an enforcer of last resort (i.e., the State, or a Leviathan, if you will)
we would be forced to act as relative-gains maximizers even in otherwise benign interactions.

(5) Robert Bidinotto: No Final Arbiter of Disputes

One common objection — this is one you find, for example, in Robert Bidinotto, who's a Randian who's written a number of articles against anarchy (he and I have had sort of a running debate online about this) — his principal objection to anarchy is that under anarchy, there's no final arbiter in disputes. Under government, some final arbiter at some point comes along and resolves the dispute one way or the other. Well, under anarchy, since there's no one agency that has the right to settle things once and for all, there's no final arbiter, and so disputes, in some sense, never end, they never get resolved, they always remain open-ended.

So what's the answer to that? Well, I think that there's an ambiguity to the concept here of a final arbiter. By "final arbiter," you could mean the final arbiter in what I call the Platonic sense. That is to say, someone or something or some institution that somehow absolutely guarantees that the dispute is resolved forever; that absolutely guarantees the resolution. Or, instead, by "final arbiter" you could simply mean some person or process or institution or something-or-other that more or less reliably guarantees most of the time that these problems get resolved.

Now, it is true, that in the Platonic sense of an absolute guarantee of a final arbiter — in that sense, anarchy does not provide one. But neither does any other system. Take a minarchist constitutional republic of the sort that Bidinotto favors. Is there a final arbiter under that system, in the sense of something that absolutely guarantees ending the process of dispute forever? Well, I sue you, or I've been sued, or I am accused of something, whatever — I'm in some kind of court case. I lose. I appeal it. I appeal it to the Supreme Court. They go against me. I lobby the Congress to change the laws to favor me. They don't do it. So then I try to get a movement for a Constitutional Amendment going. That fails, so I try and get people together to vote in new people in Congress who will vote for it. In some sense it can go on forever. The dispute isn't over.

But, as a matter of fact, most of the time most legal disputes eventually end. Someone finds it too costly to continue fighting. Likewise, under anarchy — of course there's no guarantee that the conflict won't go on forever. There are very few guarantees of that iron-clad sort. But that's no reason not to expect it to work.