Free Thoughts Blog

This next piece in my series on arguments for libertarianism looks at virtue ethics. Which presents something of a problem. Most of the ways to justify a libertarian state begin with a moral philosophy and then extend it to politics. This was the case with the last three installments on Robert Nozick. Nozick takes the idea of basic rights already familiar to most of us and asks what sort of state they allow. Similarly, consequentialist libertarianism–where I’ll likely turn next–draws on another familiar moral philosophy: what’s right is whatever produces the best results.

But unless you’ve studied moral philosophy, it’s unlikely you’ve even heard of virtue ethics. And, unless you’ve studied virtue ethics, it’s unlikely you have much of a sense of what it’s all about. This is in large part because virtue ethics looks almost nothing like other schools in its basic approach to addressing moral issues.

Which all means I probably can’t assume the kind of background knowledge I did with Nozick or I will with consequentialism. And that means first writing a post introducing virtue ethics, before moving on to what it’s all got to do with libertarianism. Before undertaking that task, however, it’s important to be clear about something. Just as “consequentialism” isn’t a single, agreed upon moral theory but rather a name for a category of theories often in disagreement, virtue ethics is a school of thought, with multiple, often conflicting forms. In what follows, I do my best to stick to the areas of agreement and paint with broad strokes, avoiding the niggling–and for now, unnecessary–details.[1]

Let’s start with the biggest difference between virtue ethics and other schools of moral philosophy. Typically, the key question of morality is “What’s the right action?” For consequentialists, the answer is whichever choice produces the best results. They’ll differ on what “results” means, though typically they’ll say it has to do with “the most happiness” or “the least pain.”

Deontologists hold that the right action is whichever conforms to proper rules or duties. While the content of those duties varies among deontologists, most libertarians align them with natural rights. Thus the morally right action is the one that doesn’t violate another person’s rights. Any action violating rights constitutes a moral wrong.

Libertarians will recognize this divide. On the consequentialist side, you have people like Ludwig von Mises and David Friedman, who argue that free markets just work better than the alternatives. On the deontological side, we find Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick, grounding their libertarianism in fundamental human rights. Writes Nozick, “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).”

Virtue ethicists think they’re all starting with the wrong question. Rather than “What is the right action?,” we should ask “What is a good (i.e., virtuous) person?”

A good person is a person living a good life by the standards we share because of our common humanity. In other words, what’s a good life for humans is not the same as a good life for cats or a good life for tulips. We have a nature, and that nature defines the contours of the good life, just as our nature defines the contours of good nutrition.

But does this mean there’s really only one sort of good life? That we can’t reasonably disagree about what makes a life good? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that two lives, both equally good, may look rather different in their details. A good life lived by an urban business woman isn’t much like a good life lived by a member of the Amish. And clearly we don’t want to say that only the Amish live good lives or only cosmopolitan city dwellers do.

But at the same time, enormous commonalities exist between good lives of any sort. To have a good life is to be loving and be loved. It is to pursue–and one hopes, achieve–meaningful accomplishments. It is to be fair and honest and kind. No one really believes otherwise. Would any of us defend as “good” a life without love, without accomplishments? One filled with dishonesty and animosity? A life of violence and insecurity? Certainly not.

It is that sort of good life, defined in broad universals, that virtue ethics is all about. It’s the sort of life we’re talking about when we say, “He’s a good man.” We all know what that means.

The ancient greek philosopher Aristotle, whose writings inspire and inform most modern virtue ethical thinking, called this good life one of “eudaimonia.” While often translated as happiness, the term more precisely means something like “human flourishing.” Eudaimonia isn’t found in a moment but rather in a lifetime. Only at the end of our lives can we be sure we’ve achieved it, as it takes into account the life as a whole. Eudaimonia is the well-lived life. Thus we can be on the path to it even at those times when we are immediately unhappy, as those temporary bouts of displeasure can have effects that enrich and improve our lives as a whole.

Our purpose as humans is to find eudaimonia. (And this isn’t just a purpose, but a strong desire. Who, after all, wants to lead a bad life?) The way we assure our lives will be good is to possess virtues and to make choices in accord with them. In order to achieve eudaimonia–to live well–we need access to goods and we need to possess virtue.

Goods are things like food, shelter, clothing, books, health, education, and so on. Without them, we won’t have the resources necessary to let us cultivate virtue. Clearly this is one of the points by which virtue ethics can lead to libertarianism. For free markets represent the best way humanity’s found for delivering goods. Thus if goods are necessary for virtuousness, which is necessary for eudaimonia, then a system of markets will be preferable to one without.

Next, we need virtues of character. These we’re all familiar with: compassion, courage, hope, integrity, honesty, benevolence, and so on. They can be thought of as both skills and dispositions. We have to fully understand the content of the virtue, which is why virtue ethics places such emphasis on moral education. We must also be disposed to act in accord with the virtue. I may understand benevolence, but unless I’m inclined to act in accord with it, I’m not myself benevolent.

Finally, we need the virtue of practical wisdom. This is the skill of understanding what virtues apply to a situation and how to act in such a way as to manifest them. Practical wisdom is the trait of being morally wise. Without it, I may act out of a sense of benevolence, but my actions could do harm to those I intend to help, and so I won’t truly be benevolent. Thus practical wisdom is a necessary component of–or prerequisite to–all the virtues.

Thus a virtuous person is one who has learned about and fully internalized all of the virtues. They have become a key part of who he is, such that his actions are always motivated by them. And he has the practical wisdom necessary to ensure that his motivations and his actions are in line.

Really being virtuous means we don’t try to behave morality, because if we have to try–if our urges tell us to do something else–then we haven’t properly internalized the virtues. Instead, we aim to be virtuous people and, when we are, one of the results will be morally right action. Here again we see an important connection between virtue ethics and libertarianism. Virtue is a character trait, not a command. It is something we must achieve ourselves (though certainly with help from others), not something that can be forced upon us by the state. The state may provide part of the framework that enables us to achieve virtuousness, but it cannot (and so should not try to) make us virtuous.

Taking morally right actions isn’t why one cultivates virtue, of course. Rather one cultivates virtue because being virtuous is just what it means to achieve eudaimonia. The virtuous life is the good life.

With all this in mind, we can finally answer the question of moral action. To act well when faced with a moral dilemma is to do whatever a virtuous person would characteristically do in a similar situation. A fully virtuous person possesses all the virtues, as well as the practical wisdom to act well. We say “act well” instead of “right action” because virtue ethics acknowledges that not all dilemmas have a right answer. Two virtuous people, in the same circumstances, could take different actions, while both acting in accord with the virtues.

Notice that this formulation is not a recipe for acting morally but, rather, a means to evaluate the morality of an action. If presented with a moral dilemma, we shouldn’t ask, “What would a virtuous person do in this situation.” Rather, we should act in accord with what our own virtue tell us to do. Thus a person lacking virtue will not be able to behave virtuously–though he can still stumble upon the right moral action by accident.

In one sense, this means virtue ethics isn’t as clear a path to right moral action as the alternatives. You can’t just apply a rule and get a result. Rather, virtue ethics says, “Let us start by enabling people to develop kindness, honesty, prudence, caring, and so on. Then we we can trust those virtuous people to act well.” In fact, the acting well will simply be whatever choices those virtuous people make.

It’s possible to argue that much of the wisdom of consequentialism and deontology can find a place within a virtue ethical framework. A virtuous person will care about the consequences of his actions and he will act in ways that respect the autonomy of others. We cannot achieve eudaimonia by actively and consistently doing harm, nor can we achieve it by treating our fellow humans as means instead of ends.[2]

And all of this has profound implications for the state, a topic I’ll turn to next time.

Matt Zwolinski tells us that “Many libertarians believe that the whole of their political philosophy can be summed up in a single, simple principle … the ‘non-aggression principle’ or ‘non-aggression axiom’ (hereafter ‘NAP’) ….” And this is what he intends to refute. Despite having criticized some interpretations of the non-aggression principle myself, I should here like to defend one version of it. For I see no inherent confusion in using the NAP as a shorthand reference to how people ought to behave and what is necessary and sufficient for interpersonal liberty fully to exist. However, in the event of a clash of liberties (e.g., I need to have a fire but you would suffer from my smoke) we need to resort to the MAP: minimization of aggression principle. And it seems reasonable to interpret the MAP as an attempt to apply the NAP as far as possible. Therefore, I view the MAP as practically implied by the NAP rather than as a separate and additional principle. This should become clearer as we proceed.

Zwolinski continues that the NAP “holds that aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong….” Except that, as we have seen, very often two parties cannot help impinging on the liberties of each other (for instance, whether pollution is allowed or prohibited: one side or the other side must suffer an interference/constraint/cost). And in such cases “aggression” may not seem to be exactly the right word, though it will do. And what is inevitable is not obviously “wrong”.

Zwolinski writes that “aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.” I had rather say, somewhat less imprecisely, “aggression” is proactively interfering with another’s person or property (when these are not themselves the result of any proactive interference). Is it true that “From this principle, many libertarians believe, the rest of libertarianism can be deduced as a matter of mere logic”? Most libertarians appear to have supplementary or additional principles. However, my own view is that only a pre-propertarian conception of libertarian liberty can fully allow that “the rest of libertarianism can be deduced as a matter of mere logic.” But that is, indeed, a single principle and one that I wish to explain and defend.

As an implicit criticism, Zwolinski observes that “The libertarian armed with the NAP has little need for the close study of history, sociology, or empirical economics.” That is surely a great virtue in a practical principle for everyone. Moreover, this appears to overlook that, because study is bound to be finite, no study can support a universal theory such as the NAP—although it can test it and possibly refute it. He continues that “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.” And such simplicity is clearly highly desirable. Strictly speaking, no faith is required or possible: we do not choose what to believe. However, any—necessarily conjectural—solutions can be derived. And they are then ready for criticism and testing.

What is the philosophical significance of the fact that “On its face, the NAP’s prohibition of aggression falls nicely in line with common sense”? Common sense is a fallacious criterion of truth or morality. So it is similarly irrelevant to say that “it is far from common sense to think that its badness is absolute.” But it is relevant to present “any other possible consideration of justice or political morality” as a criticism of the NAP conjecture. It might seem that “There is a vast difference between a strong but defeasible presumption against the justice of aggression, and an absolute, universal prohibition.” But in practice our, necessarily conjectural, theories are always open to potentially refuting criticism no matter how “absolute” we might think them to be. Zwolinski approves of Brian Caplan’s view that “if you can’t think of counterexamples to the latter, you’re not trying hard enough.” But counterexamples that are merely logical possibilities and unlikely scenarios are beside the point. Real systematic refutations of the practical morality of the NAP/MAP do not appear to exist, as far as I can tell.

We then move on to the “six reasons why libertarians should reject the NAP.” And we ought to note immediately that to refute one, dubious, interpretation of the NAP is not to refute every interpretation of it.

1. Prohibits All Pollution

Zwolinski asserts that “industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited” moreover, even “personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one’s fireplace, smoking, etc., runs afoul of NAP.” As I have explained, prohibiting pollution (for instance, coercively preventing someone from lighting his fire for needed warmth and cooking) also violates the absolute NAP. Hence the MAP comes into play.

2. Prohibits Small Harms for Large Benefits

Zwolinski asks us to “suppose, to borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the whole world by lightly scratching your finger?” And here I would reply that the NAP is about the real world rather than about every logically possible world and thought experiment. He goes on to “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.” This is slightly less implausible but it is still not realistic. We don’t need to tax anyone to develop new vaccines. And the institution of any taxation would disrupt productivity immediately and then do cumulative damage as the economy has its growth slowed. Moreover, that growth would probably have included new advances in vaccines sooner or later. Zwolinski concludes by asking “is it really so obvious that the relatively minor aggression involved in these examples is wrong, given the tremendous benefit it produces?” And the obvious answer appears to be that implausible assumptions do not refute a practical principle.

3. All-or-Nothing Attitude toward Risk

Zwolinski asks, “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?” And the answer is that it is an aggressive act to take such a serious risk at someone else’s expense. In monetary terms, the degree of the aggression is something like the amount of money that the victim would have to be paid to accept such a risk (I don’t mean to imply that everything can be reduced to money, of course). Without such an agreement, you are using someone else’s property—his head—without his permission for your dangerous game. Imposed risks are aggressions; actual damage is not necessary. Otherwise, by analogy, you may as well say that coercing someone to do something at gunpoint only becomes an aggression if you actually shoot them when they fail to comply.

Zwolinski then observes that “almost everything we do imposes some risk of harm on innocent persons” and that “Most of us think that some of these risks are justifiable, while others are not” but our reasonable explanations “carry zero weight in the NAP’s absolute prohibition on aggression.” And, again, this overlooks that there is aggression whether such risks are allowed or coercively prohibited. But there is no insuperable problem with applying the MAP, as long as we have a reasonable account of what policy best deals with the clash in an unbiased way (it need not be perfect or admit of cardinal accounting).

4. No Prohibition of Fraud

Zwolinski asserts that “Libertarians usually say that violence may legitimately be used to prevent either force or fraud.” Do libertarians “usually” use the word “violence”? “Coercion” seems more likely and more appropriate. He continues that “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.” This is easily answered. A fraud is an aggression because it violates the property rights that the relevant agreement establishes. All this talk about “violence” is merely confused.

5. Parasitic on a Theory of Property

We are told that “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.” In fact, it need not be “parasitic on an underlying theory of property.” It is true that some NAP advocates argue along the following lines: “aggression” is the violation of legitimate property, and legitimate property is only established using assumptions that libertarians independently argue to be legitimate (self-ownership, labor-mingling ownership, etc.). That is because they don’t have an abstract theory of liberty from which to derive property. However, if we say that libertarian ‘liberty’ is ‘the absence of aggression’, then we can interpret this in a pre-propertarian way. Property comes into existence in a libertarian manner when that property does not aggress on (i.e., proactively constrain or interfere with) other people. For instance, I make and claim this spear, hut, rabbit stew, at no cost or loss to you: you are not worse off as a result. And if there is some vestigial cost or loss to others (for instance, you cannot now use the very same natural resources that I did), then we again resort to the MAP. I hope the gist of this view is clear enough (I have written at length in other places to deal with myriad details, but some readers become lost in their own inaccurate paraphrases of the details without first showing that they have grasped the basic problem or the basic idea of the solution). In this way, respecting liberty—as the absence of aggression—can indeed be the “fundamental principle of libertarian ethics.”

By way of illustration, Zwolinski asks us to “Suppose A is walking across an empty field, when B jumps out of the bushes and clubs A on the head … 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.” It seems worth noting that a disproportionately large retaliation itself becomes a new act of aggression. I won’t give a theory of proportionality here, but it is derivable from the NAP/MAP.

Thus we can readily agree with Zwolinski that “‘aggression,’ on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all.” And we can even agree that “It means ‘violation of property rights’”—as a rule of thumb. But property rights themselves can be derived from whatever control of resources does not aggress, i.e., proactively constrain or interfere with others (or, in the event of a clash, what minimizes such constraints or interferences). Hence, it is false to say that “It is the enforcement of property rights, not the prohibition of aggression, that is fundamental to libertarianism.” As we have now seen, it is liberty itself—interpreted as the absence of interpersonal aggression—that is “fundamental to libertarianism.” That conclusion should not be completely astounding.

6. What About the Children???

Zwolinski then tells us “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.” An analogy might help to answer this point. A child will not swim in the pool without a lifeguard. You volunteer to be the lifeguard, and as a consequence he gets into the pool. Then to allow the child to drown flouts the claim to your protection that you have previously given him: it is thereby an aggression against the child (positive actions are not always necessary to aggress against the claims we cede to people). In a relevantly similar way, a parent has assumed a duty of care for the vulnerable person that he has brought into existence. Negligently to allow one’s own child to starve to death is to flout that duty and thereby commit an aggression against that child. Therefore, one has a libertarian obligation either to feed him or to discharge the parental duty by finding someone who is willing to take it on. (I have some reservations about this position, but I won’t discuss them here.)

Consequently, it is incorrect to say that the NAP “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.” As the starving child is having his given claims aggressed against, anyone has a right to come to his aid in his defense. Any duties that we create by our behavior, including but not limited to explicit contracts, may be coercively enforced if that is what is necessary to minimize any overall aggression.

Zwolinski then sums up his position with a few observations. He first notes that “There’s more to be said about each of these, of course. Libertarians haven’t written much about the issue of pollution.” Is that correct? For what it’s worth, when I typed “pollution” into cato.org I saw “465 results.” Then he observes that libertarians “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 have raised in this essay.” And, indeed, the Rothbardians have already done this with their interpretation of the NAP. But Zwolinski concludes that “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.” However, this overlooks a third possibility: one can have a paradigm shift within the interpretation of what constitutes “non-aggression” (or ‘liberty’). And this is what I claim to provide.

Zwolinski’s concluding sentence is that “Libertarianism needs its own Copernican Revolution.” The analogy is more apposite than he realizes (although, of course, Aristarchus of Samos long antedated Copernicus). For the “Copernican Revolution” that we can have here is to stop trying to theorize “non-aggression” (or liberty) ultimately in terms of legitimate property and do the reverse: to theorize legitimate property ultimately in terms of non-aggression (or liberty). And with this approach all six given reasons to reject the non-aggression principle can be comprehensively refuted.

Yet I fear that this ‘revolution’ is seen as ‘heretical’ by some libertarians—where it has been noticed at all—and this is compounded by my ‘incomprehensible’ rejection of all supposed justifications in favor of the critical-rationalist epistemology that I apply (see my earlier reply on this matter). And so I should just like to emphasize that this position is not a criticism of libertarianism or any kind of compromise with non-libertarian principles. Rather, it is intended to clarify and unify much currently diverse libertarian theory behind a single principle of liberty itself. With that aim, at least, real libertarians ought to have some sympathy.

The socialist calculation debate is an important episode in the history of economic thought in part because it revealed some of the previously underappreciated things that markets accomplish. It did so by supposing the existence of a socialist planning agency that would have to do all of those things instead - a thing that many socialists of course wanted, but that supporters of the free market have also found very useful to examine. It turned out that the planning agency would face a large number of previously unanticipated problems. Many of them now appear insoluble.

Not that we haven’t tried. On the contrary, lots of work has been done here. That work illuminates what markets actually accomplish (not always what we thought they did!), what economic science can know about them (not as much as we’d like!), and what institutions, if any, might ever be able to improve on them.[1] There are many facets to the socialist calculation debate, and in what follows I’ll talk about only some of the more relevant ones.

One problem in talking about this fascinating episode in the history of economic thought is that each of its lines of argument is often conflated with the others, and, at times, an author raising objections to the prospect of socialist calculation will veer from one problem to another with little in the way of transition. I’ve tried hard to sort out the threads as I see them, but it’s very possible that someone more well-read in Austrian economics will come along and disagree.[2]

Anyway, let’s begin looking at objections.

I. The Math Is Too Hard.

This is by far the weakest objection to the prospect of socialist calculation. It’s also one that I still seem to find in all kinds of places, and still offered as if it mattered. It doesn’t, and it’s not a terribly important objection anymore, but it’s necessary to go through it to get to the interesting stuff.

By the early 20th century, economists had shown that in theory, a centrally directed socialist allocation of resources could match that of a market economy that was in a Walrasian general equilibrium.

What’s a Walrasian general equilibrium? The economist Léon Walras had earlier shown mathematically that, under certain not obviously problematic assumptions it was possible for the markets in many different goods to clear simultaneously – that is, a multi-good market could theoretically adjust all of its prices so that supply and demand were in balance for all goods at the same time. Producers could theoretically make the exact amounts needed to fill consumer demand, and consumers who were willing to pay the market price could always get what they wanted. Most importantly, Walras showed that nothing about the simultaneous existence of many different goods in his model would get the way of the process, and the existence money wouldn’t either.[3]

General equilibrium has obvious appeal, and yet real-world economies never seem to reach it. Walras himself emphasized that markets only approximated his theoretical equilibrium through a process he called tâtonnement–literally, “groping.” And they were therefore not terribly efficient when compared to the mathematical ideal. Which I think is true.

Scientific socialists, in part inspired by Enrico Barone, proposed to do better.[4] Solving the right system of equations would in theory give planners the optimal allocations of all capital and consumption goods, allowing them to reach Walrasian equilibrium directly, even as markets could only grope about in the dark.

In the early twentieth century, theoretical economists – even folks like Lionel Robbins and F.A. Hayek – conceded that all of the above was true. But, they said in part, the math was just too hard. It’ll take forever to solve all those equations.[5]

But forever is a very long time, and today we have computers that can most certainly crack problems like this one. Even, as some have claimed, for an economy with millions of goods.

In 1993, Allin Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott examined the calculations needed to very closely approximate market-clearing prices for all goods in the Soviet economy circa 1983. For this economy of around 10 million goods, and using only a commercially available supercomputer of mid–1980s vintage, they determined that market-clearing prices, denominated in hours of unskilled labor, could be roughly arrived at in just 17 minutes.

That’s a pretty impressive result. So impressive, in fact, that one gets the feeling that something else must almost certainly be going on here.

And indeed, something else is going on here, but what it is will have to wait for the next post in the series.

In his post on pollution and the non-aggression principle, Matt Zwolinski begins by telling us that “Libertarians generally believe that aggression against innocent persons is morally wrong, and that the only just use of violence is to prevent aggression by others.” Somewhat less imprecisely, we might say that the only just use of coercion (using force and the threat of force against people) is to prevent or redress aggression.

He then says, “In this respect, at least, the liberal egalitarian philosopher John Rawls was on precisely the same page as his libertarian colleague, Robert Nozick” and quotes Rawls on “freedom” purportedly to that effect. However, Rawls has an understanding of “freedom” that is inherently political and which sanctions much that libertarians would rightly see as itself involving aggression. Consequently, Rawls and Nozick are certainly not “on precisely the same page”.

We are soon asked, “Suppose I aggress against you not by beating you over the head with a club, but by blowing tobacco smoke into your face? The smoke-blowing, just like the clubbing, is a physical invasion of your body. And it is a harmful invasion.” And here we should note that the physical harm itself is irrelevant to liberty. What matters is that the victim disvalues the invasion for whatever reason. If an aggression were to improve the victim’s health, then it would still flout his liberty.

After such considerations, Zwolinski concludes that “The consistent application of Rothbard’s absolutist principle of non-aggression thus seems to require a prohibition on all forms of non-consensual pollution.” And in its absolutist form I agree. However, this overlooks something crucially important: it cuts both ways. The enforcement of the prohibition would itself aggress against the people whose activities would produce the pollution (e.g., having fires for needed warmth and cooking). So such prohibitions cannot be allowed either. We have reached not one but two unacceptable conclusions and, more to the point, they amount to an inconsistency in the “absolutist” version of the theory. Hence that form of the theory is a priori refuted. (I know that Rothbardians try to introduce various points to solve such problems, but they look ad hoc and invalid to me.)

There are two main problems with the absolutist theory that lead to this result. First, while liberty itself can be interpreted as the absence of aggression, the libertarian policy must be to minimize aggression when there is such a clash as that described. Thus some sort of compromise is required, maybe with some damages being paid in one or the other direction. Second, “aggression” understood in terms of violating property rights is only a rule of thumb. “Aggression” can be more abstractly and accurately theorized as proactively imposing costs (such as both pollution and pollution prohibitions) on other people. This pre-propertarian theory is required for consistently solving such property problems, paradoxes, and inconsistencies whenever they occur.

This alternative approach should become clearer and more cogent as I reply to Zwolinski’s final essay, in which he attempts to refute the “non-aggression principle” beyond any salvation.

Just to clear up any misconceptions, I think the minimum wage is an unjust and inhumane public policy. It is morally wrong. I also believe—I hope less controversially—that rape is a serious moral wrong. And no, George, I didn’t need to study history, sociology, or empirical economics to come to that conclusion.

I suppose George Smith thinks he has snared me in some sort of philosophical trap by forcing me to admit this. After all, in my original essay on the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), I criticized devotees of the NAP for the casually a priori approach they often take to issues like the legitimacy of public roads, public schools, and the minimum wage. But—A-ha!—if I don’t think that careful empirical study is necessary to determine the injustice of rape and child molestation, then how can I simultaneously hold that it is necessary in order to determine the injustice of the minimum wage? Gotcha!

Well, maybe it doesn’t sound quite so much like a gotcha when I put it that way. Is it really so absurd to believe that the immorality of rape is considerably easier to discern than the immorality of the minimum wage? That the latter might require a more careful study of a wider array of empirical evidence than the former? I suppose it doesn’t seem that way to me. Some acts wear their immorality on their sleeve—it is part of “what is seen,” to borrow Bastiat’s famous distinction. With others, and perhaps the minimum wage is one of them, most of the wrongness derives from facts that are “unseen,” and require a bit of careful digging to unearth. Is there really an inconsistency here?

Of course, if you think as I do that coercion is bad, then you’ll think that minimum wage laws are prima facie objectionable even before engaging in this digging. But notice that even in the case of rape, we wouldn’t want to end our analysis here. Rape is coercive, yes. And it involves a violation of one’s property in one’s body. But if this is all we understood about rape, then we wouldn’t have come anywhere close to understanding the full weight or significance of its injustice. We wouldn’t understand the devastating psychological effect that rape can have on a woman. We wouldn’t understand that women are often blamed for their own rape, or the ways our entrenched institutions protect rapists while shaming and silencing their victims. We wouldn’t understand, in other words, why a lot of people think rape is an especially serious injustice, or one that calls for more attention and more action to effectively combat.

Rape is aggressive and a violation of property rights, just like stealing someone’s car radio or imposing a minimum wage law on them. But rape is not just like a minimum wage law. And that is because aggression and property rights are, by themselves, not the only categories relevant to moral or juridical evaluation.

This is a rather obvious point, as far as moral philosophy goes. But it does seem to pose a challenge to those who believe that all the thorny questions of justice can be resolved by the application of a neat and tidy principle like the NAP. If not all aggression is on a par—if some, like rape, is very seriously wrong, while some, like shining a flashlight at your house, is not wrong at all—then why should we believe that the non-aggressiveness or aggressiveness of conduct is anything like a sufficient indicator of its justice or injustice? And why should we believe that aggression (no matter how small) must never be permitted in order to produce any kind of social or individual benefit (no matter how large)?

Smith raises a number of other points in his essay, most of which I won’t be able to address here. Which is just as well, I suppose, since he hasn’t yet managed to develop many of those points himself. He stresses (contra Rothbard) that the NAP is about “force,” not “violence,” but doesn’t bother to explain what he takes the difference between those two concepts to be. He asserts that the NAP is about justice, not about moral permissibility, but again he leaves the difference almost entirely unexplained. Since these distinctions appear to play an important role in Smith’s argument, I assume that he will explain them at some point in his series. But until he does, there is little I can do to respond to them.

Smith concludes his essay by accusing me, somewhat uncharitably, of having engaged in a “hit-and-run” against the NAP. I’m not sure what he was expecting from a 1,200 word blog post. Apparently, criticizing the NAP on a number of grounds isn’t enough—I should have developed and articulated my own alternative theory of libertarianism too. Well, I’m happy to do that, and to discuss in more detail the various topics I raised in my initial post. There is certainly more to say about each of them. So I must object to Smith’s characterization. It’s only a hit-and-run if you hit and then run. And I’m not going anywhere.

There has been much buzz lately in libertarian Internet circles concerning the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), a favorite ethical maxim adopted by many libertarians in defense of anarcho-capitalism. This increased attention to the NAP is due in large part to Matt Zwolinski’s excellent article articulating many of its counterintuitive implications. Zwolinski recommends that instead of radically editing the principle as stated – that is, instead of adding epicycles to our original understanding of the orbital paths of celestial bodies – libertarians ought to undergo a “Copernican Revolution” by developing a new ethical system to justify our preferred socio-political order. Like any good controversy, there has been much response, most notably by Jason Kuznicki in his equally-excellent essay “Non-Aggression and Billiards.” In this essay I examine Kuznicki’s defense of the NAP, not necessarily as an absolute and inviolable axiom, but at the very least as a strong though rebuttable presumption.

We are all taught that certain things are true when in actuality they are false. We are taught, for instance, that there are three inviolable laws of motion governing all moving bodies in our universe, when in reality things work a bit differently when we start dealing with very small particles. We are also fed exaltations concerning the immutable axioms of Euclidean geometry when such an axiomatic system remains contingent upon a series of assumptions that may or may not hold true. Even so, these kind-of-true-but-strictly-speaking-false principles of physics and mathematics are very useful to us: they can allow us to understand how billiard balls interact with one another, or perhaps they help us find out how much manure we need to help fertilize a 16 foot by 24 foot field.  The NAP, so Kuznicki argues, is of similar value: it gives us a good starting point to help determine when actions are morally right and morally wrong, though some refinement, or “engineering,” might be required for more advanced situations.

But many times Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry are insufficient. Surely the rocket scientist and quantum cryptologist need to go beyond high school mathematics and physics classes in order to do their jobs properly. This, of course, does not change the fact that most people need only an elementary understanding of physics and mathematics to get through their day-to-day lives. But in comparing the NAP to something like Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry, we need to see if the analogy carries over to this corollary: do practical agents, trying to navigate through life, require only the NAP to help guide most of their decisions, or do they need a more robust version of the NAP – or perhaps a new moral system altogether – in order to navigate life’s imbroglios? As practical agents, are we high school students or rocket scientists? 

I contend that we are rocket scientists. We are rockets scientists not because life is that hard a thing to navigate through (though it certainly has its harsh contentions), but rather because the high school math many libertarians want us to adopt – the NAP – is so insufficient as a moral theory that it cannot stand up to the basic experiences we all, as practical agents, face. For example, most of us, it seems reasonable to suggest, will end up having and raising kids. Will the NAP (Newtonian physics) tell us how to raise them right? As Zwolinski points out, it will not only not tell us how to raise our kids correctly, it will, in actuality, approbate actions that any sane person would think constitutes morally impermissible methods of child rearing. Thus, quantum mechanics is required. Many of us also frequently engage in behavior that yields some sort of environmental pollution. Will the NAP (Euclidean geometry) gives us the right answer as to what we ought to do? Again, no. It will tell us that we cannot, as Zwolinski once again points out, drive an automobile or light a campfire, conclusions that are surely absurd. Thus, non-Euclidean geometry is required. Several people are confronted every day with the chance to commit some kind of fraud to make a quick buck or reap some benefit. Will the NAP tell these individuals how they ought to act? As Zwolinski shows, it will not. Our high school physics and mathematics has failed; we need a more sophisticated theory.

Since the adoption of the NAP results in rocket scientists trying to make their way with Newtonian mechanics, we need to beef up the NAP, rendering it capable of handling the sorts of problems we as rocket-scientist-like practical agents face. In editing the NAP, there seems to me to be two paths we can take. First, we can radically alter or add to our definition of “aggression,” in hopes of reproaching the sorts of actions our original NAP failed to delimit as off-limits. Kuznicki offers an attempt at doing this in hopes of rendering fraud impermissible; namely, he advocates we classify as morally impermissible actions that are “impediments to reflective self-rule” to go along with our ban on brute physical aggression. This may work, but it is certainly not enough. What do we add to physical aggression and impediments to self-rule if we are to outlaw a parent starving their child? What do we add to allow for reasonable amounts but not too much pollution? Moreover, we also run the risk of our amendments yielding results we find unacceptable. Would my neighbor playing loud heavy metal music several hours throughout the day impede my ability to reflectively self-rule? Maybe, if it sufficiently hindered my concentration. Yet most libertarians would find it acceptable to do something on one’s property as benign as playing loud music. So now we need to further edit what is meant by “reflective self-rule” to account for this result. Epicycles upon epicycles.

The second way we can strengthen the NAP proceeds as follows: we can keep our original understanding of what constitutes aggression, but then add a list of exemptions we consider to be legitimate instances of when the NAP may be transgressed. We then get something like this: it is morally obligatory to follow the dictates of the NAP except in cases x­₁, x_2­, x₃,…, x_n, in which case it is morally permissible (or perhaps obligatory) to disobey the dictates of the NAP_­. The problem, though, remains that variable n can be a high – indeed very high – number, to the point at which listing all exemptions becomes difficult, if not impossible. In fact, there is probably a case to be made that, given the tremendously narrow scope of the NAP and the ingenious ability of philosophers to dream up counterfactuals, the list of exemptions might be un-codifiable, presenting a problem for this approach to amending the NAP. Instead, it might be argued that rather than listing each and every exemption to the principle, we might simply develop a secondary rule determining when some situation constitutes a legitimate instance of when the NAP may be permissibly violated. But this project also seems rather hopeless, for any rule that concretely adjudicates exemptions from non-exemptions will have to contain excruciating detail – perhaps an un-enumerable amount of detail (we could not, for example, simply say that situation s constitutes an instance permitting exemption from the dictates of the NAP just in case situation s yields a severe reduction in an agent’s autonomy, because it is not clear what constitutes a “severe reduction in an agent’s autonomy”). Once again, epicycles upon epicycles.

It is not the case that every ethical system yielding implausible implications through counterfactual analysis must be abandoned for another ethical system. It might be that an ethical theory is polished to the point that it can be revised to such a miniscule extent that it remains worth holding on to – after all, one or two epicycles does not grossly detract from the elegance of an otherwise perfectly elliptical orbital path. But there comes a point when the amount of revision borders on the absurd – after we have drawn the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth epicycle. At this point, it makes sense to start anew in hopes of developing a better theory that does not require such extensive revision, allowing for maintained elegance. I think the NAP is in this latter category. As such, it is high time we, as libertarians, do as Zwolinski bids by undergoing our own Copernican Revolution in search of a better moral and political philosophy.