Irrational principle of non-violence?

Economics Political Theory
1

I have been troubled of late by a question of ethics. It is the case where one might be acquitted of murder because they were under duress.

In a situation where survival needs are immediate and scarce, might violence be a rational option? If I am in a lifeboat on the ocean for an unknown period of time with one other person, who has water, and I don’t, is not the rational action for me to try to take the water, by force if necessary? The non-aggression principle would seem to forbid my attack, but if such action is rational, is not then the non-aggression principle irrational?

2

In what sense is the word ‘rational’ being used here? The economist’s and the ethicist’s definitions differ, and cannot simply be conflated.

3

Personally, I think the right of survival trumps the right to property, so long as the person stealing to survive was not a criminal before the situation arose.

4

I’m confused by your question, frankly. Methinks rationality must be the same across disciplines, or we can have no real rational basis for ethics at all. If rationality is defined differently by context, it has no real meaning.

5

Many words mean different things in different fields of study. For instance, the world “liberal” means different things in political philosophy, international relations, and economics. To answer your question in this case I think the first person to claim the water would be the rightful owner and if the non-agression principle is your highest ethical principle than you should not kill and steal the water. If, on the other hand, preservation of your life is your highest ethical principle it would be consistent for you to take the water by any means.

6

rational selfish action can often contradict rational moral action, because the selfish action is necessarily inward looking and doesnt consider other people, it is morally suspect… to steal someone elses meal cause you dont want to feel momentary hunger and cant wait an hour to get to a fridge sounds like a crime to me, yet your example is different only by degree of extreme.

just because someone might choose to something due to their self interest does not make the action that they adopt right/moral.

e.g. if the water in your story ins mine, then i am merely acting in self defence taking it from the other person. If the water in fact belongs to that other person, i would be committing an immmoral and criminal act to use violence against him. a principled person may well decline to act in a criminal way even if this risks their saftey. e.g. in nazi occupied europe, if you knew where jews were hiding, or helped allied resistance you were at mortal risk from Nazi government and Nazi doctrined europeans, yet you would be in the moral right to risk your safety by being moral and protecting innoents by putting yourself at risk.. this scenario you describe is of a similar nature,.

7

I couldn’t agree until first someone proved that survival is a “right.” No living creature in the history of the universe has ever survived, in the end, so it seems rather dubious to postulate survival as a right. A right not to be murdered, now–that’s defensible.

–Len.

8

Obligatory poke at Rand: you’re right, it has no meaning. [:P]

But then again, no word has absolute meaning in the Platonic sense. Words are fuzzy at best; ambiguous at worst. We could play the game of asking why a “large rat” is so much smaller than a “small elephant,” etc., but lets not and say we did.

In this context, “rational” can mean “sensible,” or it can mean “not crazy,” or it can mean “mathematically rigorous.” Randians use it as a meaningless affirmation of whatever they think at the time–i.e., “rational,” for a Randian, really means, “plausibly rationalized.” Consider Ayn’s own “rational” argument why no woman should ever be president, for example.

In Economics, a man is “rational” when he chooses the strategy that maximizes his utility. In ethics, one is “rational” when one adheres to “the good” at all costs. In your original question, you’re assuming the Randian ethic that preserving one’s life is “the good,” and therefore a man is irrational when he fails to place his own life above any other consideration. To a plumb-line libertarian, one’s self-interest is important, but it is only the second-greatest commandment. The greatest commandment is, “Thou shalt not initiate aggression.” This is causing you some cognitive dissonance, because your gut agrees with non-aggression and with self-interest, but in case of a tie your gut prefers self-interest. The best of us are liable to sin in a survival situation.

–Len.

9

As others have already said, rational economic man is simply he who puts certain means in use for the attainment of certain ends, which will improve the situation for him from his point of view. Rationality in moral terms usually means moral consistency, following the good &c.

10

No one has been able to take it with them, either, if you take my meaning. I fail to see why someone getting something first entitles them to survive while I die. Especially if I possess the force to take the means of life from them. The case where life and death hangs in the balance like this is extremely rare, especially in modernized countries. I guess what I’m going for here is a rational justification for the non-aggression principle. Why is it held that it is ALWAYS better not to aggress? What if one person has hoarded all the means of survival, and refused to give them up for any price. While an argument can be made that one shouldn’t have allowed that, such is past. I would assert that a person cannot be held guilty for any act truly necessary for their own survival. Even in the case of survival versus survival, prior possession does not seem to me to determine absolute right. I am justified in trying to take what you have, and you are justified in trying to defend yourself.

Please do give me a reasoned argument for the non-aggression principle.

11

Are any rights provable? I can’t defend survival as a right, but in my opinion, people have the right to secure the bare minimum necessary to continue living, and if legitimate means fail to attain these ends, then they are justified in using illegitimate means.

If a fox kills a rabbit to feed his family, was he justified in doing so?

12

Here is one direct (deontological) proof of the NAP. Hoppe has further elaborated it. I no longer subscribe to this justification for libertarianism, but it is perfectly possible to prove rights and argumentatively prove the NAP. Moral nihilism is pointless nonsense, much like its analogues elsewhere in philosophy.

In other threads, Geoffrey Plauche has recommended den Uyl, Rasmussen, Veatch and his own dissertation papers as a good starting point for arguments for natural rights, so I would in like fashion recommend them.

13

Not rigorously.

I’d point out that you’re now the proud owner of a contradictory ethics: if people have the right to secure “the bare minimum necessary,” and people also have the right to their own persons and property, then those two rights will flatly contradict each other.

Libertarian ethics apply to human-human relations only. Not anima-aminal, animal-human, human-deity or deity-deity relations. In short, “justification” is a meaningless concept with respect to foxes and rabbits.

–Len.

14

Well it’s rational if your goal is survival. Rationality means the action you take will likely allow you to achieve your goal. Depending on your goal, acting morally may or may not be rationnal. If your goal is to become a famous murdered then obviously acting morally is irrational. Now, ethics can also enlighten you on what goals you should have but that’s a different story.

In the boat, I’d probably take the water, and that would be immoral. I shouldn’t do it, and if the guy tried to kill me to prevent me from doing it, it’d be in his right, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it.

15

Yes, but I never proposed a “right to take it with you.” I only proposed a “right not to be robbed.” You’re arguing that, if you need my stuff badly enough, you have a “right to rob.” Your “right to rob” directly opposes my “right not to be robbed,” and embroils you in all sorts of difficulties and contradictions. For starters, does my “right not to be robbed” empower me to resist your robbery with lethal force? I.e., am I justified in killing you for doing what you claim to be justified in doing? And what if you and another starving man find me simultaneously? Are you obligated to split the proceeds when you’re done killing and robbing me? Or are you then justified in robbing each other, since both are starving?

And the thorniest question of all, of course, is: who decides? If you don’t rob me, and you’re starving, you’ll die–eventually. You won’t die instantly. There’s still time to find someone else and rob him, or persuade someone to give you charity, etc. So who defines the point at which you’re officially in a “life or death” situation? If you’re allowed to decide, you’ll err on the side of robbing me prematurely; for example, when you’re actually days away from death. If I’m allowed to decide, I’ll err the other way. Since there’s no objective standard, we’re stuck duking it out. If we pick a third-party arbiter to avoid conflict, we’ve reinvented government: as the official arbiter of life-and-death disputes, he is de facto empowered to declare which disputes are life-and-death. From this, as Hoppe argues, dictatorial power follows inevitably.

Nonaggression is an objective, unambiguous standard which is incapable of contradicting itself.

Welcome to the Hobbesian war of all against all. By the progression I sketched above, the end result is that you’re always justified in trying to take what I have, and I’m always justified in trying to stop you.

I prefer a simple minimalist argument: the aggressor bears the burden of proving himself justified in acting. No justification is possible, for the simple reason that any justification must ultimately boil down to a circular argument. Hence, initiation of aggression is impermissible. If I am not aggressing, I don’t need to justify my actions: being nonaggressive, they by definition nobody is in a position to complain. QED.

The argument isn’t rigorous, but it’s solid. The key is forcing the burden of proof consistently on the shoulders of the aggressor. That’s why culture is so packed with mechanisms to shield aggressors from the burden of proof. When I’m arrested for doing something secretly in my basement that hurts nobody, the state relies on the fact that symbols of authority confer an assumption of legitimacy. If I could ask the officers why they were doing this, and force them to answer, they’d be completely stumped. Which is precisely why they wouldn’t attempt to answer at all. They’d simply reach for the tasers.

Other arguments are also available. Hoppe’s argument that non-aggression minimizes conflict is a good one. Note that your suggestion tends to maximize conflict. Mises’s argument, based on Ricardo, that non-aggression maximizes everyone’s prosperity, is also good. Above I argued that non-aggression is self-consistent, while your suggestion is not. That, too, is a good argument.

–Len.

16

The rational course of action depends entirely on what the consequences of attempting to steal the water will be. If the victim fights back and you are killed in the fighting, then clearly it was highly irrational for you to attempt to steal the water.

The same reasoning also applies to the person with the water. If refusing to give you water means that your only recourse is to attack him, then he endangers his life by having water, which is obviously the opposite purpose of having water in the first place. It is rational for him to share water with you.

17

Conversely, the non-aggression principle is highly rational since human beings do not innately respond well to force. Moreover, force often begets force. It also is a civilised principle, since few people in their everyday lives get what they want via compulsion or coercion. Healthy people would acquire things via voluntary action, behaviour and interaction.

18

Aggression can be logically justified. For example, if I’m trapped on a raft and the other person with me is hoarding a large quantity of water, refusing all offers, I have two choices (1) die of thirst or (2) agression - overpower the other person and/or steal the water through stealth and drink the water I want. If I estimate that I’m strong enough or sneaky enough, then #2 has a good chance of success and would be considered a reasonable choice by most people. Aggression carries with it social stigma, innate shame (for those with a conscience) and a risk of retaliation and legal penalties, making it usually a poor choice; but in the situation proposed it’s the superior choice. I think this example shows how the principle of non-agression is not a good choice in all cases.

19

I think the point is, that in situations without the securities and traditions (trade, for instance) of civilization available, sometimes the correct way to act is in an uncivilized manner.

20

To which I reply, “And…?” You offer those two choices as if #2 is self-evidently justified. But that means you’re simply saying, “Aggression is justified because it’s obviously justified,” which is a circular argument. And I can assure you, there’s absolutely no way for you to escape circularity here. You’ll keep finding novel ways, to say, “But I’ll DIE!” and I’ll keep replying calmly, “So what?”

That’s basically an appeal to evolution. None of us have one single ancestor who failed to survive, at least long enough to reproduce. We’ve got survivor genes, and most people will obey their survival instincts, morality be damned. On the other hand, cooperation has survival value as well. The net effect is that we’re evolved to cooperate most of the time, and to cheat when we’re desperate or confident we can get away with it.

You keep not definining “good.” Or rather, you’re operationally defining “good” such that self-preservation is the highest good. So it’s no surprise that you’re concluding that non-aggression isn’t always “good.” I define “good” as non-aggression. I’d rather (in principle, anyway–I got selfish genes too) die than aggress. I’d certainly rather see you die than aggress. I’d rather see America fall. I’d rather see mankind become extinct. I’d rather see the universe itself perish. Literally, “Justice though the heavens fall.”

Our disagreement is not resolvable. You’ve picked survival as the greatest good. For you that’s an axiom, and it can’t be proven or disproven. It’s possible that you can be persuaded to change your views, but apart from your own conscious choice there’s no way to decide between your view and mine.

Here’s a stab at it anyway. In principle, you must believe that all mankind should perish before you: if you’ll kill and eat one human in order to survive, then presumably you’d kill and eat two; by induction, you’d rather that billions died if necessary to secure your own survival. But I suspect right now you’re bristling, and indeed hoping I’ll drop the N word so you can invoke Godwin’s law on me. If so, why? If your survival is more important than any other consideration, why be bashful about it? I suggest that perhaps you don’t believe your survival trumps every other consideration, after all. And if that’s the case, it ceases to be so astonishing that I might suggest that non-aggression is more important than any individual’s survival.

–Len.