If we abolished all states tomorrow, we would not have a free market. We would just have a market. There would still be aggression and coercion.
This is probably obvious, but I need to stress it: the only way to eliminate aggression and coercion is for people to voluntarily agree to not use them. By definition, if you use aggression and coercion to stop aggression and coercion, you have not elimated them. So no matter what, you will only eliminate (and really, “minimize”) aggression and coercion by agreement. You may think that you can come up with the most rock-solid, “objective” derivation of rights ever and every single political philosopher may agree with you (and consider how unlikely that is), but even then, it will still only have the power of how much every single person on this planet agrees with you. You need to start from a framework that the key to moving things forward is finding a way to get people to voluntarily agree to things from which markets, property etc will form.
Property rights would be determined by the market. But that is not to say that they would be consistent or fair. Force would determine property rights as much as anything else.
If a million people claim that I can’t walk on “your land”, who are they to say that I can’t? Ultimately someone will have to use force to stop me. That will be aggression (from my perspective) and will invalidate the “free” market.
Without objective rights, you cannot determine what is aggression and what is not.
I think that statement is incorrect. You are assuming that the only way for a dispute about possible “aggression” to be settled is to refer to a universal definition or set of rules. In fact, though, all that is logically needed is to refer to the set of definitions/rules that the parties in the dispute have previously agreed to. You don’t need universal or objective rights; you need pairwise rights. You and I may settle a dispute about what is aggression much differently than Joe and Bob, who are parties to a different contract defining their rules of interaction. The difference is huge: the chances of getting everyone to agree on or adopt some universal/ojbective set of “rights” is infinitessimal; the chances of getting most people to have agreements in place with most other people with whom they interact that define their “rights” when interactive with each other is much higher, as illustrated by history in which that is what actually happened: most people do not aggress against their neighbors and their “stuff” because it is in their self-interest to not do so since that will generally come with a similar agreement in the opposite direction. “Property” long predates any explicit philosophical definition; philosophers just named it and abstracted it, but they didn’t invent or define it.
The reason that the modern state has become prevalent - and in the process reduced the existence and effectiveness of “property” and “non-aggression” - is I think an intellectual one: because one’s actions through the state are extremely indirect and implicit, most people do not realize that their participation in and advocacy for the state is actually a violation of the implicit agreements they traditionally formed. I’d never go steal from my neighbor directly to pay for my daughter’s education, but my stealing through the state from the same person for the same reason doesn’t “feel” like stealing because it is so indirect. I didn’t actually steal from them, I instead participated in a very roundabout process whose end-result was the same: someone stole from them on my behalf and gave me the proceeds. The “state” is a great obfuscator, a social construct that makes it very difficult for one to understand cause and effect, and because the simple agreements/contracts that people naturally form that emergently create “property” and “nonagression” rely on being able to easily see and discern cause and effect, the “state” has caused a breakdown in those agreements.
Basically, in any social construct, there are only two choices: things exist bilaterally, that is, by contract/agreement, or they exist unilaterally, by force. You seem to want a third option: that they exist by brilliant philosophical construction. You keep missing the fact that ultimately, that is just a subset of the first: a group of people may agree on a philosophical construct and so base their contract/agreement on that. What you seem to want to do is imbue that philosophical construct with the magical power to be unanimous, so that it takes on the character of an agreement signed by everyone.
I’m claiming that that is pragmatically impossible. Too many years of discussing things with too many people has convinced me that no such (nearly) universal philosophy can exist: people start from too many differing sets of assumptions for them to ever converge on the same conclusions, and many of these people understand perfectly the assumptions that you will be starting with and still think that theirs are more important or more intelletcually valid etc. “Objective” always starts with a set of assumptions that cannot be “objectively” proven (this is where Rand’s objectivism breaks down for me… she’s not avoiding assumptions, she’s just pushing the issue of “what are my assumptions” to another level. That doesn’t make those assumptions any less subject to disagreement, or any more universal. It’s all well and good to derive your “morality” from some set of assumptions through a rigorous process, but the result is only as good as those assumptions, and that’s difficult if not impossible to either measure or agree on. The arrogance of Objectivists in not realizing that there is no reason to think that their assumptions).
The best I think we can hope for is a network of agreements from which concepts like “property” and “non-aggression principle” emerge, and to try to encourage that web of agreements to form. I have created some constructions in that direction, though it’s hardly the last word.
I just think you keep confusing yourself by trying to elevate your own opinions/constructions to a level “above” everyone else’s. You say
If a million people claim that I can’t walk on “your land”, who are they to say that I can’t? Ultimately someone will have to use force to stop me. That will be aggression (from my perspective) and will invalidate the “free” market.
What I’m trying to argue is that while having everyone essentially “agree” on one contract or definition (e.g. whatever definition of “objective rights” that you’ve come up with) is one way to have society operate with institutions like “property” and “NAP”, it is not necessary. It would be better, I agree, but you can get something almost as good as an emergent property of many (essentially) pairwise contracts, and the latter is much more likely.
I’ve watched and participated in the “libertarian” movement for over 25 years, and I have seen it spin and spin searching for that one “correct” definition of everything. At some point, if you keep trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, that’s insane behavior. I think it’s time to stop trying to find the one “correct” libertarianism and instead concentrate on the almost universal commonalities between the various schools.