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June 30, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:48
2417 Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle - Rebutted!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, analyzes an article criticizing the Non Aggression Principle.

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Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Mullen.
I hope you're doing well.
Get ready for a rant.
This is Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle by Matt Zwolinski.
Many libertarians believe that the whole of their political philosophy can be summed up in a single, simple principle.
This principle, the non-aggression principle or the non-aggression axiom hereafter, N-A-P, I will be introducing you to another principle called Y-A-D in a moment, holds that aggression against the personal property of others is always wrong.
Where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.
From this principle, many libertarians believe the rest of libertarianism can be deduced as a matter of mere logic.
What is the proper libertarian stance on minimum wage laws?
Aggression and therefore wrong.
What about anti-discrimination laws?
Aggression and therefore wrong.
Public schools, same answer.
Public roads, same answer.
The libertarian armed with the NAP has little need for the close study of history, sociology or empirical economics.
With a little logic and a lot of faith in this basic axiom of morality, virtually any political problem can be neatly solved from the armchair.
On its face, the NAP's prohibition of aggression falls nicely in line with common sense.
After all, who doesn't think it's wrong to seal someone else's property or club some innocent person over the head or to force others to labor for one's own private benefit?
And if it's wrong for us to do these things as individuals, why would it be any less wrong for us to do it as a group, as a club, a gang, or a state?
But the NAP's plausibility is superficial.
It is of course common sense to think that aggression is a bad thing, but it is far from common sense to think that its badness is absolute, such that the wrongness of aggression always trumps any other possible consideration of justice or political morality.
There is a vast difference between a strong but defensible presumption against the justice of aggression and an absolute universal prohibition.
As Brian Kaplan has said, if you can't think of counterexamples to the latter, you're not trying hard enough, but I'm here to help.
In the remainder of this essay, I want to present six reasons why libertarians should reject the NAP. None of them are original to me.
Each is logically independent of the others.
Taken together, I think they make a fairly overwhelming case.
One, prohibits all pollution.
As I noted in my last post, 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 the 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 our daily life in the modern industrialized world.
And this is deeply implausible.
We'll get to this.
Okay.
Prohibits harm, small harms for large benefits.
The NAP prohibits all pollution because its prohibition on aggression is absolute.
No amount of aggression, no matter how small, is morally permissible.
And no amount of offsetting benefits can change this fact.
But suppose, to borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the world by lightly scratching your finger.
Or to take perhaps a more plausible example, suppose that by imposing a very small tax on billionaires I could provide life-saving vaccinations 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?
Okay, now we'll have to do these at a time.
Okay, so in terms of prohibiting all pollution, if I lock you in a garage with a car running, then clearly, like, you can't get out, then clearly the gas is produced by the car's engine is harmful to you, and this is attempted murder for sure.
If I drive past you on the street, I'm not doing any particular harm to you.
And most people say, and I think rationally so, They say that if no pollution were allowed, then my life expectancy would be about that of the pre-Roman Empire.
In other words, the average life expectancy would be in the early 20s or late teens.
If no pollution were allowed, I would not have any access to medicine or hospitals or electricity or any of these things, and therefore I'm going to accept a small potential harm in the form of pollution for the sake of a very large population.
A benefit in terms of modern industrial civilization.
So I don't see how it is a violation of the non-aggression principle for there to be pollution.
We all willingly accept, most of us at least, willingly accept a small amount of pollution because it is vastly preferable to the state of nature dying from tooth decay at the age of 12 that we would face in the absence of an industrial civilization.
So, and not to mention, for instance, the fact that in terms of what is beneficial to life, pollution is far more beneficial to life than, say, having to grow all of your food by hand, which leaves you subject to the vagaries of weather and so on.
And, you know, 10 to 15 percent sometimes in certain decades of the European population in the Middle Ages would simply starve to death.
And so I think we will take the net positive of An industrial civilization with enough food and healthcare and antibiotics and medicines and all this kind of stuff relative to the small negative risk of general pollution.
And of course, if you don't want the pollution, then you can move away from civilization.
There's tons of places in the world where, I mean, Canada, like 90% of the borders, 90% of the population is in 10 degrees of the U.S. border.
Massive amounts attract, which are virtually pollution-free.
You have to give up industrial civilization to go and live pollution-free, but that's kind of the deal.
So I don't see how that is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
We all willingly choose that and happily choose that because it is such a net benefit to us all.
Prohibit small harms for large benefits.
So let's take this example.
By imposing a very, very small tax on billionaires, I could provide life-saving vaccinations for tens of thousands of desperately poor children.
So we're talking about a democracy here, we would assume.
And in a democracy, if you impose a small tax on billionaires to help children, we assume that the general population is going to approve of that.
Otherwise, as a Politician, you wouldn't have gotten into power, or you would have gotten into power by lying, or you'd be voted out of power the next opportunity because people would be so horrified.
In other words, the vast majority of people, or sorry, A democratic, right, 50% plus one, people are clearly in favor of this, and if the majority of people are in favor of this, you don't need a state to achieve it.
If the majority of people are in favor of a tiny tax to pay for life-saving vaccinations, then in a democracy, that will be achieved through the democratic process.
Therefore, you don't need a state to do it because people will do that voluntarily.
So there is no need for this ridiculous stuff.
So three, all or nothing attitude toward risk.
The NEP clearly implies that it's wrong for me to shoot you in the head.
But 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?
I don't really understand this.
Threatening someone with death produces physiological responses and a traumatic experience of the moment, even if you don't actually kill someone.
That's why threatening someone is bad for their cortisol production.
It's bad for their PTSD. It's really just bad for them all around.
So if you simply threaten someone with death, then you have brought about physiological responses that are actually dangerous and bad and damaging to their health.
So you don't actually have to have a bullet to come into someone, right?
I mean, if I release a tiger in a school children's playground and it turns out that the tiger is pretty domesticated, has never really attacked anyone, the children are still going to be, you know, screaming, shaking, having bad dreams for days.
I've clearly harmed them.
Even though there's not been any direct harm, so I don't understand what that means.
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 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 harm, or none are because they are, and neither of these seem sensible.
So if I understand this correctly, if I'm flying a plane and my engines fail and I crash, then so people who live...
But everybody who buys a house who lives under areas where planes fly knows that risk ahead of time and is voluntarily accepting that risk when they buy their particular piece of property.
You buy a piece of property near the airport, you know that occasionally frozen refugees are going to fall on your lawn.
So, if you know ahead of time and accept the risk, I don't see what the problem is.
And if you don't want that risk, then don't buy a house where there are planes around.
Billions of places in the world you could buy a house with no planes overhead.
Sorry, if you don't want the risk of anything to do with roads, then become a self-sufficient farmer and don't ever use the roads.
Again, that's all perfectly permissible.
But the moment you order something that's It's going to be delivered to you on the road, so you accept the risks of road travel, whether it's for yourself or for others.
Four, no prohibition of fraud.
Libertarians usually say that violence may legitimately be used to present either force or fraud, but according to the NAP, the only legitimate use of force is to prevent or punish the initiatory use of physical violence by others.
Well, it's not the non-violence principle, it's the non-aggression principle.
And fraud is not physical violence.
But 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 non-aggression principle, it is not even compatible with it, since use of force to prohibit fraud itself constitutes the initiation of physical violence.
It's theft, of course, right?
I mean, libertarian society is going to be founded upon contracts, and to violate a contract is to steal, right?
I mean, it's the basic argument that if you and I enter into a contract wherein you send me $500, I'm going to send you an iPad, and I don't send you an iPad, I've just stolen your $500, of course, right?
As surely as if I had shoplifted it from you.
And the recovery of stolen property is valid under, I mean, all common law, all sensible moral doctrines, and so on.
I mean, you don't have to use violence.
In fact, there's many, many better ways than using violence to get your property back, right?
So if you violate someone's contract in a free society, then all your other contracts will be suspended until you make restitution.
In other words, you won't be able to get electricity, you won't be able to get water, you won't be able to drive on the highways, you won't be able to get gas until you, right?
So if you say, well, I'm going to break contracts, then everyone else is going to break their contracts with you until you make restitution.
None of that involves the use of violence.
It's just I'm no longer going to provide services, and that was buried in my contract when I Made it with you until you restore the $500 to the guy you stole from.
Now, if I tell you something's a genuine Renoir and it's not, you're not physically aggressed?
Sure, of course not.
But, I mean, the vast majority of theft in this world is not physical aggression.
The vast majority of theft is deception, fraud, nationalism, all this kind of stuff.
And so you have taken someone's property if you sell them a rotten piece of goods, a piece of goods that's fraudulent.
5.
Parasitic on a theory of property.
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 is B's field and A was crossing it without B's consent, then A was the only 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.
But if this is true, then the NAP's focus on aggression and violence is at best superfluous and at worst misleading.
It is the enforcement of property rights, not the prohibition of aggression, that is fundamental to libertarianism.
Okay.
Well, when he says one idea is parasitic on another, what he means is dependent, but it's kind of a weasel word to make it sound negative and so on.
So I said that I was going to introduce you to another acronym, the YAD principle.
So if you club someone on the head who happens to be walking across your field, it is my absolute certainty that in any just system, you would be convicted of assault or murder.
And you say, well, he was on my property.
Say, well, okay, yeah, sure, we understand that.
But having a field is designed to make sure that other people don't build a house on that field, that they don't build a shed on that field, that they don't...
You know, regularly use it for batting practice or whatever it is.
So it's not designed really because somebody puts a toe on the edge of your property.
This is not really designed for somebody walked across your property and it wasn't marked and they didn't know and they got lost or whatever it was, right?
And so the YID response is, let's say, You club some guy on the head, you give him a concussion, and he takes you to court and you say, hey man, he was on my property.
And the jury or the judge or whoever is adjudicating the case will say, I'm sure that's true, but still, you're a dick for clubbing him on the head.
That's the YAD. You are a dick for clubbing him on the head, right?
Like if somebody's standing on a piece of your property and you shoot them in the toe because the toe is across your property line.
Okay, their toe was trespassing on your property, but you're a dick for shooting them in the toe.
And the YID property is really, really important.
Okay, so, let me stop my rant, and then we'll get to the end of the article.
So, ethics is not physics, right?
So, this is the history of ethical philosophy, and it's completely maddening.
The history of ethical philosophy follows this Socratic paradigm.
The Socratic paradigm is, you define X as justice, and then you can find the opposite of X, which everyone thinks is justice, and therefore X can't be justice, and so on.
That's not the end of the world.
It's a fine place to start when it comes to thinking about things, but it's total bullshit in terms of detail.
So everyone's got a hard-on for, you know, the meaty man dick called physics and mathematics and logic and all these things that exist in these abstract realms.
And everybody wants to get the biological sciences To the level of physics.
But guess what?
Sorry.
Anything to do with biology cannot reach the level of physics.
So this is my impression of somebody in a biology class who's a libertarian or, you know, somebody who's interested in ethical theories.
So in the biology class, the teacher says, you know, horses are mammals, right?
They cycle their young.
They give birth to live young.
They have one head and so on.
And someone in the back says, excuse me, Professor, isn't it true, because I once read somewhere that a horse was born with two heads, and therefore you can't really say that all horses have only one head.
Professor says, yeah, well, I suppose, you know, mutations and stuff like that, it certainly is possible that horses can be born with two heads.
With two heads.
It's very rare.
Once every 100 years, but yes, it certainly is possible that horses can be born with two heads.
So, to continue.
Professor, I have another question for you.
I also read once that a horse is born with five legs, but you keep referring to them as quadrupeds.
So isn't it true that horses can be born with five legs and therefore you can't really say, but we still know they're horses, right?
You can't really say that they're born with four legs when sometimes they're born with five legs.
Like, well, I guess, yeah, I guess a horse could be born with five legs.
But, you know, a vast majority of horses are built with four legs, and so that's the definition.
But then, shouldn't there be asterisks?
Like, horses are born with four legs, except on rare occasions when they've gone for five years.
Horses have one head, except on rare occasions when...
And I can think of thousands of pages of footnotes, because everything could be possible, right?
Five...
5,000 pages of footnotes of what a horse could be other than the standard definition.
Like you say that horses are born, they give birth to live young, but isn't it true that a lot of horses sometimes they give birth to foals that are dead?
They're stillborn and therefore we really can't say that a horse is a mammal and a mammal always gives birth to live young because a lot of times mammals give birth to young that aren't live.
And isn't it true also that a horse who gives birth to a baby who then dies in childbirth can't suckle her young and therefore you can't say that horses suckle their young on their nipples because if they die...
What if the horses mama horses built are born with the genetic mutation that says she has no nipples then she can't actually suckle her young because she has no nipples?
But still we say that she's a horse, so it seems to me that your definition of the horse is at best incomplete and at worst superfluous and incoherent.
I can only do that voice for so long before I want to punch myself in the throat, which I'm sure would be a violation of non-aggression principle at some point.
So you see, I mean, in the realm of biology, you have this definition of a horse, but every now and then some freaky-ass horse is born that violates that definition, and it's still a horse, right?
Human beings generally have skin pigmentation, but occasionally you will get an albino and so on.
So, you know, human beings are not born with two heads.
We say human beings don't have two heads, but of course you get Siamese twins and so on.
So in the realm of everything to do with biology is mutations and randomness and evolution and so on.
And also, you know, cross-pollination species, some species can breed together and so on.
And you end up with, you know, mules and stuff like that.
So the idea that you've just got these definitions, it's fine for physics.
Yeah, of course.
You propose a universal law of physics, somebody finds an exception, your universal law is in trouble.
But it seems to me that the discipline of biology manages to survive things like mutation, crossbreeding, blurred definitions between species and so on.
You know, it's enjoyable to play around with those edges of the definitions and so on.
Still, we know what a mammal and a reptile is, and we know what a bird is, and we know what dinosaurs were, and this is not terrible.
And the science marches on, right?
Because if every time you proposed a definition in biology, everybody immediately began to think of all the possible exceptions and avoidances and exemptions and mutations and all that, You'd end up with a definition literally with thousands of pages of footnotes and exceptions, and by the time you'd finished all those footnotes and exceptions, you'd just want to go and jump into a shark tank and have a less painful end.
So, biology manages to have all these definitions, and it doesn't get stalled or stopped in the way that ethics do by creating some freaky-ass scenarios which void the definition, or seem to void the definition.
And so, this is really, really important.
If I'm found in a room with some guy who's died of asphyxiation, right?
Then I probably strangled him, right?
Or probably deprived him of oxygen.
I put a bag over his head or something and then took it away.
Deprived him of oxygen in some way.
Now, is it theoretically possible that the random motion of the air molecules all went to...
The ceiling just around where this guy was.
And then he ran around and they all just happened, all happened to go.
So all of the air just happened to, in its random Brownian motion, move away from, and he asphyxiated in a room full of air just because, is that, is that possible?
Well, good luck with that in court, right?
This is another principle.
You're a dick and good luck with that in court.
Yes, it's possible.
Of course it's possible.
But, but, It's never going to fly in court.
I mean, it's so wildly improbable that we take the reasonable outcome, which is that I deprived him of oxygen or he deprived himself of oxygen, but it was not just the accidental movement, right?
So if I'm a surgeon and some guy comes in, he's all the symptoms of a heart attack, right?
And I, you know, do like I don't know what the hell surgeons do.
They crack his chest or something like that.
And it turns out that he wasn't having a heart attack.
What was happening was space aliens were trying to beam his heart out of his chest.
And then the moment I opened up his chest, they were able to beam his heart out of his chest and therefore my actions caused him to die.
Their heart-beaming chest ray couldn't penetrate the ribcage or whatever.
Is that possible?
Yes, it's theoretically technically possible, but you don't get sued for wrongful death in that situation because it's so wildly improbable and you have to go with the preponderance and the majority and all this kind of stuff, right?
So you're a dick is one of the things and good luck with that in court is another, right?
The example that sometimes is given is a guy in a desert.
He's wandering around the desert.
He's going to die.
All he's got is a gun.
And then he comes across a guy with a vending cart in the middle of the desert.
This is the shit you have to make up.
I'm not making it up.
You come across a guy, the guy who's dying of thirst, comes across a guy with a vending cart where it says, you know, bottles of water, one million dollars each.
And then the theory is you say, oh, so what you'd say is, if you don't have the million dollars on you or you don't have a million dollars at all, then you'd say, what?
Oh, okay, so...
You're just going to die.
You're not going to use your gun to steal a glass of water from this unarmed guy, a bottle of water, and then not die.
And of course everyone's going to go and take the water.
Absolutely.
I would.
You would.
Of course we would, right?
Aha!
You see, the need trumps property rights and therefore welfare state.
Well, this is all nonsense, right?
Because imagine, so let's say I sign a contract that says I will pay you a million dollars for this bottle of water.
And then we go marching back to civilization and he tries to enforce this and I go to court and I say, this guy was basically going to let me die if I didn't give him a million dollars.
And people will say, well, okay, maybe that's in principle with the letter.
It was his property.
You voluntarily signed a contract and so on.
But guess what?
They would say to the water bottle vendor, you're a dick.
You're a total dick.
Can you believe it?
Extorting someone for a million dollars for a 50-cent bottle of water, basically with the threat of death hanging over them.
What a dick you are.
And they would simply not enforce the contract because it would be under...
A coercion.
Now, I guess the coercion caused being dead or dying or whatever, which was not initiated by the water cart vendor, but he's completely exploiting a situation that he did in an event where he can price gouge to the nth degree.
Nobody would enforce that contract.
In fact, people would say, if you're the kind of guy who's going to try and sell a bottle of water to a dying man for a million dollars, You're such a dick.
I don't want to have anything to do with you.
I never want to deal with you again.
You really not have any compassion.
You have no humanity.
And this would be a huge...
Now, he'd be all over the papers.
His picture would be all over the internet because, you know, you can write about stories.
And he would be revealed as a total dick that nobody would want to have anything to do with in the future.
And so, you know, this is important stuff to understand.
There is the letter of the law, and that's important.
I've got a whole book on ethics, which is free.
at freedomradio.com called Universally Preferable Behaviour, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, which you should look at and you should read.
It's a really great theory of ethics.
Can you invent situations, right?
Like the old flagpole thing.
Guy's hanging from a flagpole.
He tripped and fell off a roof.
He's hanging from a flagpole.
Three stories up, he has to kick in a window and go through somebody's apartment rather than fall and leave a morally perfect property rights respecting stain on the sidewalk below.
Of course he's going to kick in the window.
Of course he's going to go through somebody's property.
He's probably going to violate their property rights so that he doesn't die.
And I can guarantee you in a free society or in any remotely rational society, if I owned that apartment and I sued that guy for property damage, people would say, you're a dick!
But the guy was going to die.
Would you rather the guy die than just kick in your window, which I'm sure he'll offer to replace and repair or whatever it is?
And everybody would say, you know what?
I'm going to kick in 20 bucks to repair your window and clean your carpets and all that kind of stuff because I'm glad the guy's alive and you're a total dick.
For bringing charges against him, and otherwise, through no fault of his own, he would have plunged to his death.
Like, you're just a dick!
And good luck with that in court, if you want to enforce that.
So, we don't have...
Like, there's no independent physics.
There's no book you're going to look things up.
I mean, I think that there's ways of working with ethics philosophically that are very rigorous and very analytical and very logical and so on.
But fundamentally, proposing a rule and then racking your brain to find literally one in a thousand years' exceptions is really overlooking The reality of the challenges we face ahead.
Look, let's work on getting people to understand that taxation is theft.
Let's get people to work to understand that the law is an opinion with a gun and that democracy is a suggestion box for slaves.
Let's just work to get people to understand the basic realities of the immoralities that they're facing that are consuming them and eating their children alive and so on.
We're in the middle of a goddamn plague here.
Bodies are coming in by the cartload.
It's bring out your dead time, except they're not quite dead.
And we are the doctors who can heal people of the plague, but it's a lot of work.
And with the bodies piling in, and we haven't slept in days, and we're saving lives left, right, and center, some guy comes in and says, well, what if somebody really wants the plague?
They have an insurance policy, and they really want the plague, so I don't know if we can actually...
Cure people.
Oh, because they may want the plague, and therefore it might not be a bad thing for them, and we're taking that choice out of their hands, so maybe we need to interview everyone for an hour or two and make sure that they don't actually want to die at the plague before we save them, and it's unconscious.
This is somebody who just wants people to die.
I mean, they're just so screwed up in their head.
That they're coming up with these absurd and outlandish scenarios to stall the healing of people dying of plague when the bodies are piling up in all of the rooms around the healing room.
And so this kind of person is in the way.
This kind of person is like, we've got a huge amount of work to do.
We've got a huge amount of evils to end in the world.
All of the evils that don't end, all of the people who remain deluded and blinded by sophistry, by lies, by propaganda, They need the basic tools of reason and evidence.
They need to wake up.
They need to apply the non-aggression principle in their own lives, which fundamentally means not hitting their children or protecting children from being hit or aggressed against.
There's so much to do.
90% of parents are still hitting their children.
We all recognize that punching children is not a good thing.
Spanking children, which is the intent to cause fear and pain to adjust behavior, It's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
I'll put a link to an article I wrote about that below.
Huge amounts of work to do.
Let's at least get people to stop, you know, hitting their babies, let's say.
The majority of moms think it's fine to hit babies one to three years old.
But we've got a huge amount of work to do, and this idea that a guy in the desert 10,000 years from now and a guy hanging from a flagpole, which never ever happens, that this is what we've got to focus on is It's engaging in abstract, useless bullshit debates while the bodies pile up around us.
This is criminal, fundamentally.
It's not criminal like you'll go to jail, but it's a criminal abrogation of moral responsibility if you have the capacity to reason in ethics, and you have the capacity to identify the truth in ethics, and you have the capacity to change people's minds about ethics when we live in such an ethical, nihilistic, moral hellhole, right, with a million Iraqis dead as a result of the state.
With hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people entrapped in the prison industrial complex, hundreds of millions of children in North America, trapped in the propaganda mills of government schools and so on.
We have a huge amount of work to do, and if you sit there whacking off in a goddamn corner about once-in-a-thousand-year scenarios, while humanity falls into a primordial blood-soaked ooze of statism, that's criminal.
But let's continue.
Here's number six.
What about the children?
Three question marks!
Wow, that must be an important question then.
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 way 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 is, I think, a fairly devastating reductio of the view that positive duties may never be coercively enforced.
That it was Rothbard himself who presented this reductio without apparently realizing the absurdity in which he had walked rather boggles the mind.
I don't know what it is with libertarians and children.
I mean, it's completely bizarre what goes on with libertarians and kids.
I mean, some guy was arguing it's better to sell your child into I mean, what the hell is it with libertarians and children?
It's not that complicated.
When you have a child and you keep a child, you have created a contract.
You have created a contract.
It may be implicit.
Implicit contracts are fine.
I don't have to get you to sign a contract which says don't shoplift and pay me for what you want if you walk into my store.
Implicit contracts are perfectly fine.
You have the right to trespass on my property, call the store.
I don't have to get you to sign a contract When you order in a restaurant that you're going to pay later for what you consume now.
Implicit contracts are everywhere, all the time, no problem whatsoever.
When you have a baby and you take that baby home, you have created an implicit contract.
And you have created an implicit contract which says, I am now going to take care of this baby.
You don't have to sign anything.
You don't have to say anything to anyone.
That's implied, right?
And if you then starve that baby to death, you've killed that baby.
You are a murderer.
It's like if you have a bed and breakfast and then somebody comes in and they rent a room and then you haven't signed a contract which says I will unlock the door in the morning or I will let you out in the morning.
You haven't signed the contract.
But if you lock them in your room and they die of thirst in two days, you've murdered that person.
All I did was turn a lock on my property in my house.
Right?
I didn't sign any contract.
I mean, this is insane.
What the fuck is wrong with you people?
Of course, it's murder to starve a three-year-old to death because you have created that three-year-old.
That three-year-old is a biological prisoner within your house.
That can't be changed.
They are dependent.
They are helpless.
They can't cook their own food and so on, right?
And they can't go out and get their own food.
So they are a prisoner.
It's just as if you'd locked someone in your basement.
Lock someone in your basement?
Okay.
Let's say somebody is drunk.
Comes into the wrong house.
You leave your door unlocked.
It's fine.
It's legal.
They go into your house.
And they trip down the stairs, fall into the basement.
You lock the door.
And then you hear them rummaging around, thumping, crying for help the next morning.
But you don't unlock the door.
But you haven't aggressed against them.
They've trespassed on your property.
But you're a dick if you lock the door and let them die of thirst in two days.
You're a murderer.
Right?
I mean, you understand that because you have the capacity to release them and you're not.
And the result of you not releasing them is they die.
Yeah, they've trespassed.
They made a mistake.
They were drunk.
They went, whatever, right?
Oh, my God.
It's not even that complicated.
It doesn't have to be, you know, it doesn't have to be the definition of a horse with 5,000 pages of footnotes.
That's obsessive-compulsive.
That is looking for a standard of perfection that is only possible within theories, particularly scientific and mathematical and rational theories.
But It's not that complicated to understand that if you take a child home and then starve that child, you are a murderer.
Because by taking that child home, the implicit assumption is that you're going to take care of that child.
If you take that child home and starve that child to death, then you have broken the implicit contract of taking the child home from the hospital or wherever it's being born.
I don't know why this is so complicated.
All right.
There's more to be said about each of these, of course.
He says, Yeah, I mean, if you don't want pollution, then go live in the woods.
But pollution is something that you implicitly accept taking part of all the benefits of an industrial civilization.
You can't have an industrial civilization without some effects of pollution.
And if you think that by going to live in the woods you're going to deal with the problem of pollution, you sadly mistake it.
Because you're going to trip and you're going to get a cut and you're going to get an infection and you're going to get gangrene and you're going to die.
See, pollution isn't just man-made.
In fact, the pollution that human beings make is to shield us against the pollution of nature, which is why lifespans continue to increase, although pollution continues to increase, industrial pollution and so on.
It's because we always want man-made pollution to protect us from The pollution of nature.
Or things in nature which harm us as human beings.
You know, things like tooth decay, infections, cold, extreme heat, and so on, right?
Those things kill you in a state of nature.
Trust me, I've lived in the woods for a year and a half.
I know what I'm talking about.
And that's with some pretty modern amenities.
You want to be as close to pollution as humanly possible.
Because the alternative is to take nature's pollution, which comes in the form of things like bears.
Things in nature which are harmful to your life.
Bears and infections and And, you know, the fact that you may not have access to medicine if you get some horrible disease and so on.
So, yeah, we voluntarily accept pollution by being in a civilized industrial area of the planet, and we do so for very obvious and rational reasons, which is massively beneficial.
Now, people who want to live in a city and don't want pollution don't understand the implicit contract of living in civilization, which is to...
To live in the middle of a city, right next to a hospital, to take your groceries by car, to go to a hospital and get all these kinds of, whatever, radiation treatments you need and so on, and then to say, I don't want any pollution in my air, is to be fundamentally and functionally retarded.
It means you don't understand the fact that the food gets delivered to you because of pollution, the fact that the hospital exists because of pollution, the fact that you get radiation treatments because of pollution.
So to say, I want all the benefits of pollution, but I don't want any pollution whatsoever is insane.
It just means you're retarded.
You don't understand the contract of living in a place where there's pollution, which is you get a little bit of airborne pollution and so on, but you know what you don't get is...
You know, cholera in your goddamn water!
You know, I mean, cleaning up water, it takes a lot of pollution.
And if you don't want, you know, moose shit and mosquito larva and, you know, human urine, In your water, it means that there's going to be some pollution because you need energy and filters to clean the water.
So if you want clean water, you take a little bit of air pollution.
If you don't want the air pollution, you get filthy water, which will kill you in three days.
It's really not that hard to figure out this pollution thing, but anyway, all right.
So he ends up by saying, libertarians are ingenious folk, and I have no doubt, given sufficient time, they can think up a host of ways to tweak, tinker, and contextualize the NAP in a way that makes some progress in dealing with the problems I've raised in this essay.
But there comes a point where adding another layer of epicycles to one's theory seems no longer to be the best way to proceed.
This is a reference to the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, where they tried to figure out the retrograde motion of Mars by putting more circles in circles, because they thought that it had to be a perfect circle because of God, right?
And eventually, by putting the sun in the center of the solar system, the Copernican Revolution solved that problem by making ellipsis.
And you could then explain very easily the retrograde motion of Mars where it seems to go back and then forward again, simply by putting the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and so on, outwards from the center of the solar system.
There comes a point where what you need is not another refinement to the definition of aggression, but a radical paradigm shift in which we put aside the idea that non-aggression is the sole, immovable center of the moral universe.
Libertarianism needs its own Copernican Revolution.
So, I mean, I don't know.
It's fine.
I mean, it's fine.
Nitpick.
You know, nitpick.
You know, I've done over a thousand videos, and in one of them, because I'm taking chemotherapy at the moment, I get this terrible taste in my mouth, and pop is one of the few things that takes it away.
So, you know, in one video, I have a sip of Diet Pepsi, I think it is, and everyone's like, oh, my God, stay away from Diet Pepsi.
It'll kill you.
It's like, yeah, well.
Libertarians can be old lady scolds at times and nitpickers extraordinaire.
I mean, I don't mind testing theories.
I mean, you can't just say the NAP is the center of our moral universe and therefore libertarianism.
I mean, you just plant your flag somewhere and say this is where we start.
It's arbitrary.
There's no reason why the non-aggression principle should be superior to the aggression principle.
I mean, fundamentally, but what is required from theories is logical consistency first and foremost.
Logical consistency is the first test and then empirical evidence comes after that.
That's the way science works, right?
You draw it out on blueprints and then you build it, right?
That's the way engineering works, sorry.
And the way science works is you come up with a theory You come up with the general theory of relativity and then you find out whether the light bends around the gravity wells when there's an eclipse and you find out whether time does change when you go faster and so on.
You get atomic clocks on airplanes or whatever.
So you come up with a logically consistent theory first and then after that you test it against the evidence and so on.
Now the evidence is always going to be contradictory.
Evidence is always going to be contradictory, particularly in things like parenting.
Parenting is really annoying for empirical evidence because so many people lie about how they were raised.
So many people lie or don't remember.
There was a study done where girls who were raped as children, and this was not subjective reporting.
They were actually in hospital.
They were raped.
There were rape kits done.
There was prosecutions and so on.
And this is when they were sort of 10, 11, 12 years old.
They were raped.
God help them.
And this was all verified and so on, and 20, 25 years later, researchers went back and interviewed them, and 40% of them had no memory of this whatsoever.
This was empirically verified.
40% of the women in their 30s had no memory, or at least claimed to have no memory.
I don't know if they put them on polygraphs or not, but they, to all intents and purposes, had no empirically verifiable memory of what was empirically verified for them when they were 10, 11, and 12 years old.
So when you're talking about history, personal history, childhood and so on, it's really, really challenging because empiricism is, you know, we raised him perfectly, gently and wonderfully and he turned out to be a sociopath.
It's like, well, you claim that, but that's exactly what parents who were Abusive would say.
So, you know, it's kind of a really, really tough to take any kind of, you know, I know a guy, he was raised perfectly well and he turned into a criminal.
It's the therefore spanking.
You know, I mean, how the hell do you know he was raised perfectly well?
Did you have some drone following him 24-7?
You reviewed all the footage of his first 18 years?
You know exactly.
What happened?
Of course you don't.
Do you know what happened when he was in the gestation?
Do you know what happened to his mother's stress hormones?
Do you know what epigenetics switched on genes of violence because of stress for the mother?
People who say stuff like that, it's really annoying.
Then you say, well, how do you know or there's no way to prove it?
Oh, so basically you put forward a theory and anyone who tells you anything against it is dismissed as lying.
But the reality is that human memory and motivations for telling the truth about pathologies in childhood is so suspect that it's really, really tough.
All you can do is follow the science and then dismiss most of what people say.
This is just a reality of dealing with childhood, which is one of the reasons why empiricism when it comes to childhood is something we should be very skeptical about and we should really only look at I've done a whole essay on this.
I'll put it in the low bar here.
You can check it out.
But...
What we want is rational consistency in our ethical theories, not just, well, the non-aggression principle, that's the center of our moral...
Why?
Why?
Why is the non-aggression principle better than, you know, the no-aardvark principle, or, you know, whatever it is, right?
But no matter what your theory is, the enactment of it is always going to be subject to two problems, in the same way that you may have a theory about what a horse is, and then horses are going to be born with two heads and four legs, or five legs, sorry, And no hair.
And albinos.
And they're going to give birth to stillborn babies and therefore not conform to the mammals, give birth to live young.
So you have a definition and then you can always find or make up something which appears to challenge that definition in a tiny minority.
But who cares about that?
I mean, what we need to deal with right now is the fact that taxation is eating the young.
The fact that people are being thrown into the rape rooms of prisons.
The prison population in federal prisons has gone up almost 800% over the last decade or so.
7% or 8% of them are in there for violent crimes, and most of those violent crimes are associated with the drug war anyway.
And more men are getting raped than women in the United States because of the hundreds of thousands of rapes in prison populations.
So, I mean, this is stuff we've got to deal with.
This is, I mean, the social contract of, you know, maybe pollution in a hundred.
I mean, who cares about that stuff?
We've got so many bodies piling up that to not work as hard as we can, to rescue people as quickly as we can, is fundamentally criminal.
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