I’m having an ongoing discussion with my father; I’m a voluntarist but he seems to be drifting from that position and trying to apply the NAP in an extreme way which is annoying me.
He seems to really fixate on The Native Americans saying that they were the only ones who ever lived at peace with the earth and took only what they needed. I tried to break his theory down to the smallest level so that I could better understand his argument.
What I asked was, what constitutes aggression for him? I was told that even making a shovel by chopping down a tree and mining the earth for metal was considered violating the Non aggression principle against the Earth/Nature/whathaveyou because the Earth and all the animals are just as important as any human (and have all the same rights) if not moreso because atleast animals don’t destroy the earth like humans.
When I try to explain that by his standards then it would be immoral for me to live in anything but a naturally formed cave; he retorts that such a thing is untrue and I could just as easily use wood that died from natural causes. (Can’t be purposely chopped down.)
He’s starting to say that the concept of property is meaningless because thats “something written on a piece of paper.” And “you can only own what you can hold with force by yourself.” (Meaning that by his standards I can’t own something like land if I’m not constantly there to keep people from stealing it.)
I’m at a crossroads here and I could really use some outside opinions on the best way to approach this argument because I really just want to help him see the error in his thinking.
The NAP has nothing to do with animals or plants or dirt. Is this something that your father truly believes? Does he have plans to abandon you and go live off in the woods somewhere? Or is he trying to make a point? Can you explain the situation a little bit more?
Try to find the line, beyond which NAP no longer applies. E.g., is killing viruses ok? If not, every human must shutdown his immune system. And I’m affraid it’s pretty difficult to consume anything (even dead matter) without killing some bacteria in the process. Heck, even the act of dying will be aggression against microflora and microfauna of the human’s body.
Well first of all, you don’t need to help him see the error in his thinking; there’s the possibility that continuing to press the issue with him will only make him more resolute in his opinion, not because it’s right but because you pursue it so fervently. Some mistakes in thought will correct themselves if left alone.
That said, if he’s disillusioned about what the concept of property is, ask him if he owns his body or not.
Thus we have the myth of the Native Americans. A lot of people generally know nothing of Native Americans, or their many many tribes, fall back on them being peaceful and friendly and devout protectors and worshippers of the earth. They lived in accordance with nature like many other Old World people, by doing so went through the motions of life and death. Destroy his argument by asking him to cite which tribes exactly and their various ritualistic practices, which he will not.
Besides that I generally don’t apply the NAP to nature. I have some grievances on modern culture’s disregard for nature, but that’s a cultural issue, not a political one.
Your dad misunderstood what NAP means, which isn’t surprising since it uses a special definition of aggression. It is not gramatically, syntactically, or theoretically unusual to construct a sentence such as “they acted agressively towards the tree,” or “he chopped down the tree with great aggression.”
(Added for clarity): so when you say Non-Aggression Principle, you’re using the word aggression in an ideologically constructed sense. So it is only axiomatic in as much as the language surrounding it is axiomatic.
I’d ask him to explain how the earth is a moral agent. Is the earth and all the non-human animals just as important as any human because… he says so? That is, is he putting that notion forth as an assumption? If so, then you can simply reject that assumption outright since, as an assumption, it can’t be proven or disproven.
It is not gramatically, syntactically, or theoretically unusual to construct a sentence such as “they acted agressively towards the tree,” or “he chopped down the tree with great aggression.”
I think that’s a great point to make - many people take two definitions of the same word and equate them to create odd fallacies.
The NAP is a fine principle. And I admire your father’s attempt at consistency. He seems to have simply humbled himself to the point of being equal with trees, which compares to Jainism.
There is a lot of sliperyness practiced with the NAP, espicially with land. For instance when the conditions of homestead, taking non-scarce land, become a justification for the aggression of unilaterally holding scarce land.
A series of thought experments can prove the aggression. They are found in this larger essay.
I assert that:
Freedom is a social concept. It only has meaning in the presence of multiple people, and it only concerns actions done by people to others.
Absolute freedom is being free from any interference/harm.
Interference can be judged via the scientific method of control and experiment.
That method with objective isolation of the moral actors provides an objective definition of ‘interference’.
If there are objective means for ‘proper isolation of the moral actors’, then there is an objective definition of absolute freedom.
Using a thought experiment and the scientific method, the notion of created property is found consistent with protecting freedom, and makes no claims on others freedom. The experiment follows:
6a) The first experiment reveals how property in creations does not violate freedom.
Owen, creates a tool, from non-scarce materials. Carl wants to borrow it, but Owen prevents Carl’s access. Is Owen’s prevention (the crux of property) costing Carl any liberty? In the control case Carl exists without Owen or his claim. Carl has no access to the tool because Owen never existed to create it. In the experiment there is Owen’s assertion of exclusion. But there is no difference between experiment and control. Carl has the same options in both trials. Thus Owen and his assertion does not harm Carl.
6b) The second experiment reveals how property protects freedom.
Owen makes the tool, but in the control case without the notion of property Carl helps himself. In the experiment with Owen’s ownership respected even with Carl and his want, Owen still has access and proceeds without interference. Owen’s property claim protects his freedom.
Before moving on to 7) Natural property, I’d like to point out that property flows from the concept of freedom. The logical progression of ideas is from the specific and narrow to the derivable implications. Property is a social concept. And so it starts out quite complex. Having property in yourself, if you are alone in the universe doesn’t mean anything. The concept of property goes beyond the social context, it also asserts a behavior on others, namely that they refrain from causing harm through interference in the access to the ‘owned’ item. So property as a concept has to rely on the notions of others, and notions of the harm they can do. Its not a logical starting point to start with when defining freedom. Especially when compared with the definition of freedom as “free from human caused harm”.
So lets look at what Murray Rothbard says, “the libertarian defines the concept of ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’. . .[as a] condition in which a person’s ownership rights in his body and his legitimate material property rights are not invaded, are not aggre against. . . . Freedom and unrestricted property rights go hand in hand.” Yikes! that has a lot of attached qualifiers. But they don’t really serve any purpose. So boil that down, and its “Freedom is respected property.” And then what is property? That’s the whole trick of this odd starting point. To tie the whole thing down to an irrelevant event that being “first use”. And use is further defined as the impossibly vague “mixing of labor”. Property a social concept, and a claim on freedom, somehow derives from an event (homestead) that has nothing to do with either.
Why first use? Why not second? Just how much mixing is needed for the perpetual claim? Something more then Indians, and less then what the first white guy did? Why doesn’t the bum wiping and mixing labor with windshields get a piece. Does labor only mix the first time? Why? If I fence off a continent, do I really get the whole thing? Is planting a flag enough? Just what is the principle that determines enough labor is mixed? What if it was a really heavy flag? The air is currently unowned, can I just homestead the earths atmosphere, because I mix labor with it? Why not? Air and labor don’t mix?
Is there a state ministry of first use? Who funds that? Homestead logic starts out irrelevant and just gets worse. That’s why the objectiveness of the scientific method and its delineation of harm is so important. Its possible to secretly entrench a privileged claim on all the worlds freedom simply by asserting the relevance of an irrelevant event. All the claims establishing privilege at some point have to assert an irrelevancy. It can be white skin, royal lineage, ‘first use’, etc… But the purpose of all the irrelevant interjections is to escape the cost for cost principle of a voluntary trade in rights, and replace it with the privileged claim.
Systems of privilege will also lack symmetry. The golden rule, the vial of ignorance, and Locke’s proviso all imply a symmetry of rights. To get symmetry, any subjective assertions must be asserted in a symmetric way. Meaning that all must have equal subjective say in the end. The finding of harm can not be done by the harmer, as that would be a non symmetric, and possibly privileged assertion. But if the harmed is free to determine harm then all are free to determine harm as they chose. This then meets the requirement of symmetry, for subjective assertions in a symmetric fashion.
This may without the scientific method in conjunction allow “the harmed” to claim harm when others fail to behave as desired resources. But with the scientific method the “harmer” is removed in the control case, as is any potential service as a resource. The supposed harm of the ‘harmer’ to act as a resource will compare equally to his absence, showing no difference. And thus no harm. For example the intransigent slave who gives his master nothing, is not harming the master by his disobedience, because when removing the slave the master still gets nothing.
Homestead violates symmetry because given the choice between owner/firster and renter I would take owner. Homestead triggers all those criteria for a privileged system. Unnecessary complexity, irrelevant interjection, and violation of symmetry. One can also show that hypothetically possible worlds that are consistent with homestead also result in classic tyranny.
Using a thought experiments and the scientific method, the notion of found property is shown conditionally inconsistent with protecting freedom, as its enforcement makes violent claims on others freedom. The experiments follow:
7a) The first experiment reveals how property in natural resource (land) conditionally violates freedom.
Owen, holds land of superior and scarce quality. Carl wants to borrow it, but Owen prevents Carl’s access. Is Owen costing Carl any liberty? In the control case Carl exists without Owen or his claim. Carl has access to the to land because it exists independent of Owen. In the experiment case there is Owen’s assertion of exclusion. The difference between control and experiment is that Carl losses access. Thus Owen and his assertion does harm Carl.
This does not prove that natural property is ‘wrong’, only that it comes at a cost to absolute freedom. (I haven’t qualified “freedom” with “absolute”, yet. But since I will later apply another qualifier “equal” later, for another meaning and consequent implications, I’ll introduce it now.) Absolute freedom is the only kind yet defined.
7b) The second experiment reveals how property in natural resource (land) is conditionally consistent with absolute freedom.
Owen, holds land of non-scarce quality. Carl wants to borrow it, but Owen prevents Carl’s access. Is Owen costing Carl any liberty? In the control case Carl exists without Owen or his claim. Carl has access to the to land because it exists independent of Owen. In the experiment case there is Owen’s assertion of exclusion, but since the land is of non-scarce quality Carl merely needs to chose the alternate available land. There is no effective difference between experiment and control. Carl has the same options in both trials. Thus Owen and his assertion does not harm Carl. People familiar to Locke’s proviso may recognize this. “while enough and as good remains for others.” This is exactly the case, but what people fail to recognize is that the “while” does not refer to any single time but to all time. The twin experiments of 7a and 7b bear this out. They each find a inconsistency or consistency with absolute freedom and natural property, but nowhere is time a condition. The cases and the proviso refer to all times.
7b is not going to be necessary to make any georgist point. Georgist respect for natural property is actually going to come from the property rights demanded by 6. But I added it here to help people understand where they have gone wrong on the homestead assumption. Which is they falsely extend the non-violent conditions at the time of original homestead to justify aggression across all times. What starts out as purely defensive force, will under conditions of scarcity turn into initiated force against absolute freedom.
7c) I just made the assertion of “force of aggression”, so I should back that up with logic. Proving “force of aggression” requires only one more experiment.
The conditions are the same as the experiment case of 7a, IE Owen, exists, and claims scarce land. But the test is on aggression. So in the control case Owen claims the land, but does not enforce his claim. And in the experiment Owen also claims the land and sticks a gun in Carl’s face. In the control case Owen, who has been reading along with us, sees that from 7a, Owens assertion is an abridgment of his own absolute freedom, and so comes up with two answers. Either he demands absolute freedom and ignores the contradictory claim as confiscatory, or he thinks up some other solution which will abridge his absolute freedom. But in the experiment case he losses that choice due to Owens gun in the face. He simply has his absolute freedom denied. Absent this other notion of conditional freedom call it ‘social’ freedom, the denial of Carl’s absolute freedom is caused by the one changing factor, initiated force. One can get distracted talking about the effects on Owen all day, but the difference on Carl’s absolute freedom comes solely from Owens violently enforced claim.
7c Shows that ‘homestead’ property as it is being practiced, is a regime based on violence against absolute freedom. However, Carl sees that his assertion to the scarce land also infringes Owen’s absolute freedom. And Carl being a thoughtful guy sees the contradiction and knows from this two things.
Absolute freedom for all is impossible.
Absolute freedom can not be the only guide to property and justice.
I saw the title of this thread and thought it must have been about Walter Block. (Zing!)
Stop using the term “non-aggression principle” and just explain your position. The problem with introducing principles and axioms in a casual argument about morality is that its just begging your opponent to find extreme cases. I would say something like:
“I don’t think its okay to steal, murder, or assault another person unless in self defense. These are actions that have been considered immoral by nearly all standards and were prohibited by social conventions well before they became written laws. Property, like this moral position, is older than the written laws and rules that define its modern boundaries. It is the building block of civilization and is a necessary condition of a flourishing society. I think that a reasonable property ethic of ‘to each his own’ which prohibits murder, theft, and assault is not only morally superior to others, but when applied to the political sphere, can be used to establish a political and legal system which results in a society with an incredibly high standard of living.”
I was about to use that word, but I had some doubts, looked it up in the dictionary, and found a definition not in line with what I expected, so I wrote it out. But thanks!
“I don’t think its okay to steal, murder, or assault another person unless in self defense. These are actions that have been considered immoral by nearly all standards and were prohibited by social conventions well before they became written laws. Property, like this moral position, is older than the written laws and rules that define its modern boundaries. It is the building block of civilization and is a necessary condition of a flourishing society. I think that a reasonable property ethic of ‘to each his own’ which prohibits murder, theft, and assault is not only morally superior to others, but when applied to the political sphere, can be used to establish a political and legal system which results in a society with an incredibly high standard of living.”
Do you mean isolation of each individual moral actor from every other? If so, then how can this provide an objective definition “interference” when such requires multiple moral actors?
What are these non-scarce materials?
What makes “first use” irrelevant?
Without getting into what “mixing labor” means, it’s presumed that a person who mixes his labor with something that no one has previously mixed labor with becomes the owner (i.e. legitimate controller) of that thing. So in your example of the bum cleaning the windshield, he doesn’t get a piece of it because he wasn’t the one who created it, nor did he purchase it from the one who did.
What makes the event necessarily irrelevant?
Anarcho-capitalists - at least those who follow the Austrian school of economics - don’t subscribe the cost for cost principle. That principle presupposes some sort of objective value, and value is actually subjective.
There’s an asymmetry with you being considered the legitimate controller of your body, as it requires that no one else is considered as such.
Suppose that I’ve determined that you’re harming me by your existence. Can you prove that I’m not being harmed so?
By that definition of “harm”, not only is all private property harmful, but all possession is harmful - because, when removing all people but one, the one person left gets everything that everyone else had.
Where is there land of a non-scarce quality?
The physical location may exist independent of Owen, but are you assuming here that Owen hasn’t done anything to the land? He hasn’t farmed it, built anything on it, etc.?
How much is “enough”? What is “good”?
On these points, alone, I fail to see how you’ve proven that homesteading can constitute aggression.
I tried asking him which indian cultures he had studied to reach his conclusions that they all live at peace with the earth in the fashion that he describes and was predictably met with a “they all lived like that, stop trying to split hairs”. No success, so I dropped that and moved on to debunking his belief in the Chief Seattle speech. I told him that the speech was actually written by a screenwriter in the 1970s named Ted Perry. I think I may have gotten through to him about that, but I’m going to have to show him more evidence in time.
Moving away from the discussion about native americans, we turned to some wierd quasi discussion of property rights.
He defined his terms by claimig that everything had a lifeforce that was equal to everything else. (The potted plant on the desk is just as valuable as the life of a newborn.) He said that of course I had beeen trained from a young age to value human life over everything else. That in “his world”, chopping down trees and digging up minerals constituted raping the lifeforce of the earth and was a crime. I retorted that by such standards society would still be small, nomadic, and very low tech. His remark was that “your way of thinking would lead to the destruction of the entire planet.” So I tried to explain that ownership and private property would actually lead to a much more efficient preservation of land and resources with incentives to preserve the future value of the land. He disregarded this as another set of ideas “written on paper”. And, “How can you own land when your’e only here temporarily and the Earth is here forever”?
In the end he said that even though he would think my actions of mining the earth and chopping trees would be immoral, he would never act against me physically because he respected me as a person. Apparently, I would have to eventually be judged for my crimes against the planet by “the creator”.
I guess as long as he respects my property and won’t aggress against me for those “crimes”, everything is alright.
A resource is scarce when its supply is short of exclusive demads. Unwanted land is not scarce. If you want unscarce land go to antartica. Air is a resource. It is not currently scarce.
So one of the conditions of mixing labor is that no one else has mixed labor first. This answers the question of first use. But not really why. Can you answer that second question. What about the third question, is there something in the principle that guides how much is taken by how much labor? I see you are reluctant to discuss mixing labor, it seems more of a metaphore. Labor doesn’t ‘mix’. Without resort to mystic metaphores I can see that labor changes the form of nature, nothing more.
“What makes the event necesarily irrelevent?” Have you a better defense of homestead then a common defense of God. “Prove he doesn’t exist.”. I thought the whole idea of property was to assert a relevent condition. And now you say this is the standing assumption. Is there any defense with more substence?
“Anarcho-capitalists - at least those who follow the Austrian school of economics - don’t subscribe the cost for cost principle. That principle presupposes some sort of objective value, and value is actually subjective.”
tut tut Now just where did I say anything like that? Your mind appears to be snapped so tight it is reading defenses and chimeras into the discussion. I am at a loss to find a more generous reason for that non-sequitor. If you want to continue being a statist, I am not going to stop or convince you otherwise. I only come to share some perfectly sound tautologies and expose some really unclear thinking that parades as anti-statist.
“There’s an asymmetry with you being considered the legitimate controller of your body, as it requires that no one else is considered as such.”
incorrect. The symmetry is preserved because no single unsymetric source prevails. To prove asymetry is easy, one must show how from any of supposed points of symetry there is actually a difference. If a assume that all control their own body this is symetric from the POV of all bodies. The symmetry you propose is beyond that necesary in the context already established, and thus irrelevent.
“By that definition of “harm”, not only is all private property harmful, but all possession is harmful - because, when removing all people but one, the one person left gets everything that everyone else had.”
Close but not quite, you have ejected a few qualifiers. Only exclusion from scarce resources is harm. Also exclusoin from created form is not harm. Both of those points where explicity called out, making your response insouciant.
“How much is “enough”? What is “good”?”
I quote Locke. If you want to know what he ment you should read Locke. I believe he is the source of the metaphore on “mixed labor”, so using that and jettisoning the conditions he is attaching is at some level dishonest.
“On these points, alone, I fail to see how you’ve proven that homesteading can constitute aggression.”
The points are numbered. The logic is supposed to flow. If the arguement fails then you should be able to point to the fallacious step and explain the fallecy. Offering an opinion is not adding substence for logical debate.
Really? So if I turn away a Jehovah’s Witness from my porch, I’m “harming” him? To avoid “harm,” we need to force all homeowners to let in everyone who knocks at the door?
“I think that’s a great point to make - many people take two definitions of the same word and equate them to create odd fallacies.”
Well it’s not really a fallacy without the ideological definition behind it. It’s the problem of language. It’s not really possible to apply laws to language like you can numbers since definitions are never stable. And if it is, who exactly is equivocating isn’t really a reasonable question to ask. Neither person is using the word in a way that doesn’t make sense.
OP, my guess is that your dad’s point is, unless he just straight up misunderstood you, that the baseline requirement for understanding NAP requires speaking on ideological terms, and ultimately a control of language that no society has ever established. There’s always a proliferation of meaning happening between the spaces of language, and this is a good thing for creative and philosophical advancement. The universality of property runs into problems outside of its vacuum.