By the wryly rabble rouser, R. Brownell
Why the Non Aggression Principle is Stupid: a further analysis of Matt Zwolinski’s argument
1. Parents don’t have the right to starve their children
Maybe Murray Rothbard had a higher opinion than I have of the moral aptitude of children, but I think I speak for many people when I say kids aren’t born into this world as saints nor do they have the survival capability to handle life alone. This is an obvious point, but sadly, many libertarians tend to see children and other human beings in a materialistic view instead of treating them as human beings. In his highly controversial piece “Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non Aggression Principe”, Matt Zwolinski gave laid out reasons for rejecting the stupid and cumbersome principle (NAP) which has led libertarians of all strains to develop cult like behavior. The last point he made, which I feel should be number one, dealt with the NAP’s neglect of the positive rights of children:
“It’s one thing to say that aggression against others is wrong. It’s quite another to say that it’s the only thing that’s wrong – or the only wrong that is properly subject to prevention or rectification by force. But taken to its consistent extreme, as Murray Rothbard took it, the NAP implies that there is nothing wrong with allowing your three year-old son to starve to death, so long as you do not forcibly prevent him from obtaining food on his own. Or, at least, it implies that it would be wrong for others to, say, trespass on your property in order to give the child you’re deliberately starving a piece of bread. This, I think, is a fairly devastating reductio of the view that positive duties may never be coercively enforced…”
2. Death to litter bugs?
In the age of social justice, trigger warnings, and the “devastating” effects of hurt feelings on the more sensitive likes of our Western civilization (meanwhile ISIS is crucifying children, but we need to make sure a boy who dresses up as a girl can get changed in the girls locker room of his school, right?), it seems that aggression knows no bounds. However, many libertarians fail to come to a conclusion on where the infringement of life, liberty, and property ends. Zwolinski manages to point out the fallacy of the common understanding of aggression under the NAP:
“…Rothbard himself recognized that industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited. But Rothbard did not draw the full implications of his principle. Not just industrial pollution, but personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one’s fireplace, smoking, etc., runs afoul of NAP. The NAP implies that all of these activities must be prohibited, no matter how beneficial they may be in other respects, and no matter how essential they are to daily life in the modern industrialized world.”
3. Hurt feelings are aggression
But wait! There’s more! The NAP train keeps on rolling! Even hurting someone’s feelings can be regarded as aggression, so where’s the line?
“…borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the whole world by lightly scratching your finger? Or, to take a perhaps more plausible example, suppose that by imposing a very, very small tax on billionaires, I could provide life-saving vaccination for tens of thousands of desperately poor children? Even if we grant that taxation is aggression, and that aggression is generally wrong, is it really so obvious that the relatively minor aggression involved in these examples is wrong, given the tremendous benefit it produces?”
4. Keep aiming that gun at me, I’m still gonna stand here
Libertarians need to understand that we do not live in a vacuum, there is a majority of the world that does not acknowledge the NAP, therefore we must have a political and individual philosophy that conforms to reality:
“…to borrow an example from David Friedman, what if I merely run the risk of shooting you by putting one bullet in a six-shot revolver, spinning the cylinder, aiming it at your head, and squeezing the trigger? What if it is not one bullet but five? Of course, almost everything we do imposes some risk of harm on innocent persons. We run this risk when we drive on the highway (what if we suffer a heart attack, or become distracted), or when we fly airplanes over populated areas. Most of us think that some of these risks are justifiable, while others are not, and that the difference between them has something to do with the size and likelihood of the risked harm, the importance of the risky activity, and the availability and cost of less risky activities. But considerations like this carry zero weight in the NAP’s absolute prohibition on aggression. That principle seems compatible with only two possible rules: either all risks are permissible (because they are not really aggression until they actually result in a harm), or none are (because they are). And neither of these seems sensible.”
The threat of violence is not always cut and dry, so where does the line get drawn? If someone is pointing a gun at you, must you wait to defend yourself?
5. Keep printing money Fed!
Inflation is aggression, right? Or is it? Libertarians fail to clamp down on this issue as there would be no prohibition on fraud:
“…according to NAP, the only legitimate use of force is to prevent or punish the initiatory use of physical violence by others. And fraud is not physical violence. If I tell you that the painting you want to buy is a genuine Renoir, and it’s not, I have not physically aggressed against you. But if you buy it, find out it’s a fake, and then send the police (or your protective agency) over to my house to get your money back, then you are aggressing against me. So not only does a prohibition on fraud not follow from the NAP, it is not even compatible with it, since the use of force to prohibit fraud itself constitutes the initiation of physical violence.”
6. Despotic definition of property rights
Jefferson and Locke would be rolling in their graves if libertarians took the NAP as an absolute principle:
“Even if the NAP is correct, it cannot serve as a fundamental principle of libertarian ethics, because its meaning and normative force are entirely parasitic on an underlying theory of property. Suppose A is walking across an empty field, when B jumps out of the bushes and clubs A on the head. It certainly looks like B is aggressing against A in this case. But on the libertarian view, whether this is so depends entirely on the relevant property rights – specifically, who owns the field. If it’s B’s field, and A was crossing it without B’s consent, then A was the one who was actually aggressing against B. Thus, “aggression,” on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all. It means ‘violation of property rights.’ “