Spot on! You are one of the few people who get it. You realize that boundaries are vague and prone to subjective interpretation. I know two other people who have the same stance. They are Roderick Long and myself.
Imagine a fight between two people. You will hear “well, he is ‘initiated’ the fight, so I can ‘defend’ myself however I want.” Often, however, the so-called ‘initiator’ is not the "initiator. The ‘initiator’ is actually ‘defending’ himself from a prior perceived ‘assault’. That’s why fights occur.
Each fighter believes that their own adversary is the ‘initiator’ of the fight. Both fighters believe that they are defending themselves against a perceived ‘initiator’.
Yeah, a lot of people conflate personhood with property. They redefine their terms to so the terms fit their conception of their own ideology.
I become extremely angry when I read the news about violence. Imagine reading the news and you read “Jones attacked Smith.” As you know, people will automatically assume that “Jones” is the ‘initiator’ and “Smith” is the ‘victim’. Most of the time, however, things are not that complex. Both people are guilty to a certain extent. Smith may have provoked Jones before, and Jones thought Smith ‘violated’ his boundaries. Therefore, Jones felt justified to retialate against Smith. However, the news often accuse Jones as an ‘attacker’ and Smith as a ‘victim’ when both are guilty to some extent. I hate the black-and-white assumption that there is a “good guy” and there is a “bad guy”. Things are not that simple. How about “both may be guilty” to some extent?
People also rationalize their vengeance all the time. Often times, they will rationalize their desires by interpreting the law in some way so their vengeance will look “legal.” The “rule of law” is indeed a myth.
Most people won’t understand this, unless you give out many specific examples of my pionts and specific examples of violence.
By the way, Brainpolice, please log in into your new YouTube account, ‘AntiFringeElements’. I have sent you a private message about the fringeelements incident.
Perhaps you’d like to support your bare assertion? Or have you done so elsewhere already?
If someone comes along and keys my car, did they initiate force against me? Not literally, as I wasn’t the one keyed. But it seems rather self-evident to me that the whole concept of private property could be likened to considering external objects and space to be parts of people, in a metaphorical sense. Otherwise, concepts like property damage/destruction and trespassing would be meaningless, wouldn’t they? Or is that your point here?
“Arbitrary and too literalist” compared to what, exactly? It appears you’re using a different definition of “aggression” from most other libertarians.
What part are you calling a “bare assertion”? That all non-pacifist political philosophies, including libertarianism, rationalize physical violence? Or my premise (which Gene Callahan apparently has a similar notion to) that there is simply no such thing as a neutralized concept of non-aggression (and therefore the portrayal of libertarianism as uniquely situated with respect to the question of aggression is wrong)?
The former is supported by a basic survey of political philosophies and is kind of true by definition in the sense that only pacifism rejects physical violence consistently, and the latter can be unveiled by continually asking an advocate of libertarianism for reasons and pointing out their reliance on specific concepts and values in order to frame their understanding of “non-aggression”. One is likely to find paradoxes of circularity (such as the relationship between property rights and the NAP) in which one’s alleged “axioms” end up relying on other things (and hence can’t really be axioms) while one simultaneously wishes to pass those other things off as derived from the alleged “axiom”.
It’s more that I (and Callahan apparently) make a distinction between physical aggression and property-related infringements. To say that someone has “initiated aggression” against you by standing on a patch of grass that you own or not agreeing to some rule you want to impose on them is simply ridiculous. To then proceed to rationalize actually using physical force against another person in the name of non-aggression makes things appear even more absurd.
In effect, by rigid propertarian definitions, civil disobedence is the initiation of force while the use of physical violence in reaction to it is defense or justified retaliation; but these definitions don’t come from any abstract principle of non-aggression itself, they rather stem from a whole slew of values and concepts that give a context to the use of such a notion of non-aggression. For Gene, it’s simply a matter of intellectual honesty about what one advocates. For me, it helps form a case against propertarianism.
Arbitrary because it just begs the question of property norms, and too literalist in the way that it treats relations to physical objects as essentially having equal status to personhood. My whole point is that most libertarian’s definition of aggression is determined by factors that have nothing to do any essence of non-aggression. Libertarianism has no neutral grasp of non-aggression in and of itself, as there is simply no such thing. People’s concepts and values are interrelated; hence there is no notion of “non-aggression” that is in a vacuum.
The decision to consider whatever violence supports a neo-lockean property framework as non-aggression and whatever violence (and apparently non-violence) is simply arbitrary in that it is relative to a particular concept-value scheme. Change such a value scheme, and you still have some “non-aggression” notion, but the boundaries have been redefined. Most libertarians just define the boundaries in a certain way and then act as if they have access to non-aggression in some neutral way, as if it’s the essential distinguishing feature of their political philosophy.
The truth is that libertarian philosophy (and its inherent fragmentation into competiting interpretations) has no such neutrality about aggression. It functions within the limits of value heirarchies and discriminations, just like all other political philosophies. Indeed, the fragmentation that exists within libertarianism is itself a testament to the incompatible concept-value heirarchies that people bring to the table when they enter into the world of libertarian politics, and it fuels the contention that libertarianism can’t be presented as a coherant whole via reduction to the NAP.
What people seem to forget is that it’s not “Force” thats the problem but the “initiation of force” that begins to cause problems. There is nothing wrong with defense, and while I consider myself a pacifist I would be the first person to advocate for defense of property and self.
People who are trying to defend against a utopian concept of a force-free society have fallen victim to a strawman. That or they mis-understood the NAP, and related libertarian principles to begin with.
Force = OK
Initiation of Force = Bad mmkay
On the flip side, it is a bit if a mischaracterization to say that libertarianism is based on force, as if force was the centerblock. That line of reasoning follows more akin to statism in general. Libertarianism is more easily described as a system based on social cooperation, as opposed to force alone. Force, defense of property, is just one ingredient.
I’m not argueing under the assumption that libertarianism either claims to involve no force or physical violence or that any good political philosophy must meet such a criteria. I’m argueing against the claim that libertarianism actually objectively distinguishes the initiation of force from other kinds of force, as well as the claim that it is uniquely consistently concerned with non-aggression. How the line between the initiation of force and the non-initiation of force is drawn depends on some kind of favoritism to certain values and how one ideologically relates to the different parties in a given conflict of interest.
If you take away a given libertarian’s underlying assumptions about property, rights, ethics, and various institutions, they are left with no way to disambiguate the question of force. Although it’s impossible, this would be a genuinely neutral view of force that by its very nature could not make any normative distinctions. On the other hand, the moment you make normative distinctions, you can’t claim to have a neutral view nor can you claim that your concept of aggression/non-aggression is pure or detached from idiosyncratic considerations. The first step comes in admitting it’s an interpretation.
“Arbitrary and too literalist” compared to what, exactly? It appears you’re using a different definition of “aggression” from most other libertarians.
That is the problem, it is too difficult to talk about something like aggression in a vacuum of non practiced law. These are not stagnant magical concepts, they are a product of the practiced art of law/legal theory.
The best you can really do, I think is try to get very crystal clear legal practice terminology (e.g. freedom is freedom not a right as a right is a right, etc), not predicted laws and how they will be enforced. After that the next best thing is to promote custom law, markets, and defederalization and show the disadvantages of statutory law.
Sorry, I realized I wasn’t sufficiently clear there. By “bare assertion”, I meant your premise that “there is simply no such thing as a neutralized concept of non-aggression”.
Okay, this (the latter) still sounds like a bare assertion to me. Can you please support it? If that means asking me questions following the Socratic Method, you’re welcome to do so.
If you’re implying that I (for one) don’t make such a distinction, you’re attacking a straw man. Of course I distinguish between infringement of person and infringement of property. Whether it’s ridiculous to say that trespass is aggression (I take “initiated aggression” to be a pleonasm) depends on how one defines “aggression”. Again, I note that you’re apparently using a different definition for “aggression” from that of most libertarians. Neither definition is right or wrong, of course – they’re merely different from each other.
How are you defining “civil disobedience”? For example, if factory workers organize a “sit-in” strike, would that constitute “civil disobedience” to you? In that situation, I’d argue that the factory workers are trespassing and thus the aggressors. If they try to stay by force, then I’d consider force to be justified in removing them.
Perhaps you’d like to elucidate what you see as “intellectual dishonesty” when it comes to “propertarianism”.
All norms are question-begging, really. No norm can ever be proven objectively correct. One always runs into the is-ought problem when trying to do so.
What do you consider to be the “essence” of non-aggression? Why do you consider “neutrality” (however you’re defining it) to be desired? Isn’t the desire for “neutrality” itself a norm?
Now this makes more sense. Of course, if one changes what he means by “aggression”, then “non-aggression” similarly changes. For example, were one to subscribe to a view of “cosmic justice”, then his definition of “aggression” would be very different from that of a libertarian. Depending on which kind of “cosmic justice” he subscribes to, the very act of staying alive for some people would constitute “aggression” against one or more other people (or even things).
Perhaps you’re right that libertarians today focus too much on what they call “non-aggression” and too little on their other values – such as life, liberty, and (yes) property. I certainly don’t advocate taking the view that what I call “non-aggression” is somehow neutral and that what others call “non-aggression” is necessarily biased on some way(s).
Part of the issue is that the NAP, strictly speaking, only states that “aggression” is morally wrong. It doesn’t provide a definition for “aggression”, however. I’m not surprised that, even among libertarians, different definitions are used for it.
Obviously the details are left up to the market. What exactly is wrong with that?
Point being? If you take away half the English dictionary, the other half also becomes incoherent. Ideologies are built in this way, I don’t see anything wrong with this.
You of all people should know that there is no such thing as a non-bias. Does anyone claim to have a neutral view? If thats the case you should be disputing that, not where the line is drawn between the initiation of force, and force. Every action is built apon a structure of preferences, favoritism if you want. So I am not sure what you hoped to gain by raising this point.
Do you deny that Libertarianism makes an extra effort, whether right or wrong, in keeping it’s conceptions regarding force and the initiation thereof more uniform when compared to a counter statist ideology? IMHO Libertarianism has, and continues to make more of an effort to keep these things into consideration. The entire economic calculation problem for example is an argument which shows the economic effects of force on the market.
Again whether it’s right or wrong is irrelevant. The point is that Libertarianism has made, and continues to make, an attempt to remain consistent in this regard. That is all that is needed really. I believe that libertarianism has done a good job of pointing out the inconsistencies of other ideologies, while making an effort to keep it’s own consistent.
Sure if we decide to be pedantic, and critique the hell out of every mundane detail, i’m sure we could find several specific vague cases where the answer is not so cut and dry. The actions of these cases however should be left up to the market. There is nothing wrong with the fact that we may come across these situations.
I am not sure what you hope to gain by employing this level of pedanticism. To many of us the difference between the initiation of force, and defensive force is fairly obvious in most situations. It’s also obvious how the initiation of force causes various market anomalies as described by the calculation argument. Ignoring the market effects of initiated force, as opposed to social cooperation, is just naive.
In those situations where it becomes obscure as to whom is the initiator is and who is the victim, well it’s a useless mental exercise for us to try and decide the outcome of what should happen. The market will regulate which directions such cases should go. If regulated poorly in the eyes of consumers, arbitration will move to a more just socially accepted firm.
So all in all I don’t really see what your argument against libertarianism hopes to achieve.