So, just to make it clear, if I have more guns, I can take your property?
I know you think you’re scoring a point, but you’re just talking past me. What do you mean “can”? Do you mean “can I physically take your property”? Well, if your gun is big enough, then sure, though at that point is isn’t “property” because you haven’t honored our property contract. If you mean “can” as in some sort of “will God think that’s a sin” type of thing, then I reject the utility of the question: again, if you’ve got a gun big enough to take my “property”, then what does it matter if it’s “just” or “right”? I’m not going to stop you by pointing it out to you.
In short, I feel your description of hte NAP and property gives me the possiblility to never negotiate with anyone.
The NAP and property have nothing to do with your “possibility to never negotiate with anyone”: that exists no matter what. If you don’t want to negotiate, you simply won’t, and no number of philsophers or libertarians is going to make you. Negotiation is a bilateral process, so by definition, you only participate if you choose to participate.
It is in my self-interest to shoot first, and I ask if I can have it later.
Non-sequitur alert: how do you come to that conclusion? T answer that question one way or another is a complex economic calculation that takes into account all of the consequences of each possible decision.
You can speak for “most people?”
You are clearly missing my derivation. I’m not “speaking for them”, I’m positing a hypothesis: that the vast majority of pairwise relationships between people have qualities such that each of them would benefit from a mutual non-aggression pact that is more or less equal to the NAP. Note the things I am not doing:
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I am not using that as a justification for “forcing” the NAP on them. No, I am not claiming that I can better know others’ subjective values than they do; I am making a predictive statement, an empirical estimate.
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I am not saying that all people will magically just sign mutual nonaggression pacts, or that if they do, that they intend to honor it. I assume there will always be defectors. It just doesn’t follow that the majority of non-defectors should abandon their mutually beneficial contracts just because some of their contracts get violated. That is what the “state” is: people who are perfectly civil, who would deal with each other without coercion or force if they were dealing with them directly, instead deal with them via coercion and force because they deal with them through the state. I would never walk over to my neighbor and beat him to take money from him to pay for my daughter’s school; but I do the equivalent via the state.
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I am not justifying the state; I am arguing that rather than try to “prove” that “freedom” is the best morality, or that libertarianism is the best political system, so that the only way people will participate is if they buy your morality or become political philosophers, we can get the equivalent of the NAP by showing people that they easily benefit from explicitly signing non-aggression pacts with people that they weren’t going to aggress against anyway (in most cases), or at least that it would cost them more to aggress against than not to. It won’t be universal, but there’s a lot better chance of selling that simple calculation than there is of everyone becoming a scholar on libertarianism.
But we have to be realistic: we have to sell it in terms of self-interest, not in terms of morality or philosophy. A system that only works if every part understands the whole system design and who and how it works is doomed to failure before it starts. The system has to work even when the vast majority of its parts/participants don’t understand the whole system and why or how it works, because it is just unrealistic to expect 7 billion people to all “get it”. We’re fighting a losing battle as libertarians: we strive to have everyone “get it”, and then blammo, the world will change. They aren’t going to “get it”. If you’re going to sell it - and clearly, we need to sell something, because the whole idea is to have a voluntary society which means everyone else has to volunteer to parrticipate - we need to sell something really easy and basic. The NAP as a principle or concept is a lovely thing and it sucks me in, but 20 years of doing this has shown me clearly that it doesn’t suck that many people in. It’s competing against too many other memes for too little mind-real-estate. it’s competing again “feminism” and “socialism” and “equality” and “wage gaps” and “class warfare” and “religions”, all of which are trying to occupy the small mind real-estate of “most important issue”. We just can’t sell libertarianism or the NAP as “the most important issue”, because it will never occupy the top stop in a very large fraction of minds.
But there is lots and lots of mind real-estate for “this is in my self-interest”, and it’s not a zero sum piece of mind real estate, a new meme that “this is in my self interest” does not kick out old ones. I wouldn’t even tell people about the NAP or libertarianism (or our philosophical definitions and derivations of property). They don’t need to understand it to essentially be honoring it. They just have to say “hey, I really don’t want to attack Joe anyway, and it is worth far more to me to know that Joe isn’t going to attack me, so I’ll sign a non-aggression pact with him.” Induct, and blammo, you’ve got a huge number of mutual non-aggression pacts that together have more or less the effect of the NAP, in the sense that even if we explicitly had a NAP that many people signed, the result would be that between most pairs of people, there would be no aggression, and then there would be exceptions. The good people here and in other libertarian/AnCap places have spent a lot of time thinking about how a world that is filled mostly with non-aggressing pairs of relationships but that has a few pairs could still work pretty well. In effect, you get the same thing, but you get it in a much more sellable and thus feasible way. In one derivation, there is the NAP, a single contract, and everyone signs it because they understand that the NAP will lead to a better society, but even though everyone signs it, some people still aggress against some other people sometimes and we have to have to deal with it; in the other, people sign pairwise contracts (in reality, they don’t need to sign them with very many other people, because most people they will never interact with) because they can easily see those contracrts as being in their self-interest, but some people still agress against some other people and we have to deal with it. It’s the same effect; but it’s a much lower barrier to get there.