Formulation of Non Aggression Principle

[gotlucky]

Sorry, I didn’t see that you responded to my post in a response to others. So you can ignore my previous statement about waiting for a response.

@Eran

gotlucky,

The reason the conventional formulation of NAP is circular is that “aggression” only makes sense by reference to “legitimate property”, yet legitimacy of property titles is itself conditional on compliance with NAP.

Consider a statist who argues that government (as representative of the citizen body) is the legitimate owner of its entire territory. Since the entire territory of the country is the legitimate property of the democratic government (goes the explanation), no government law violates NAP (in the same way that landlord charging rent or setting rules of conduct on his territory doesn’t). Since government action doesn’t violate NAP, its ownership is legitimate.

Thus nothing in the NAP helps distinguish between the libertarian and the statist position (thus justified).

This is not quite true. The libertarian concept of just property is derived from the NAP. The NAP is a form of the golden rule, the ethic of reciprocity. Homesteading and estoppel are derived from this concept of reciprocity, though they do not find their origins in libertarianism. Through concepts of homesteading and estoppel, we get the libertarian idea of just property.

The point of the NAP is that it is the foundation of libertarianism, and all libertarian concepts can be derived from it. There are plenty of libertarians who do not care to derive these other principles and just accept them as separate axioms. But this need not be the case. Certainly, if you encounter a libertarian who just accepts homesteading as an axiom, then the NAP will seem circular. But other libertarians, such as Rothbard (or myself!), do not just accept homesteading as a separate axiom. To us, all libertarian concepts must be derived from the NAP or they are not libertarian.