Turning the NAP into a physical reality

One of the problems that I see with moral theories such as the NAP is that regardless of their merits or construction, they have absolutely no bearing whatsoever to physical reality except insofar as people are willing to respect such rules. Rights are ultimately formed by agreement between men and backed up by might.

However, given that many here believe that following the NAP is “right” and that following the NAP also leads to a more prosperous and harmonious people (not something I necessarily disagree with), the question is how do we change the set of rights that people agree that other people have in order to move human society closer to the ideal?

Right now the only real option is reforming or disbanding human-led government and replacing it by another power structure; the preferred one here being anarcho-capitalism where power is distributed amongst many actors and none enjoy territorial monopoly except under property that they directly and legitimately control.

That’s fine, but property and all other such things are human inventions, and as such, they only exist if humans are willing to respect them. If someone violates the NAP, there is no physical law that’s going to prevent them from doing so. In many cases, people ideologically support these violations thus lending a significant amount of power to those who would aggress against others. That’s how we end up with events like WW2, which as much as you can blame on governments, would never have happened had these governments not had the consent of the people. Hitler, Hirohito, etc… could not have done it by themselves.

So ultimately we have to concede that a system like anarcho-capitalism may lead to less aggression overall, and we can simultaneously assert that it is the most logical system for the ends which we value such as liberty and prosperity and we may be correct in doing so, but it doesn’t necessary follow that there actually will be less aggression. For some reason or another, people derive either monetary or psychic profit from breaking the NAP both individually and collectively as part of large groups.

The question is, which gives more profit: Cooperation or aggression? Right now the increase of wealth and division of labour means that cooperation usually leads to better results (withness the end of slavery in recent times) but the profitability of aggression is never zero, otherwise nobody would ever aggress.

What if we could change that? What if there was a way of physically enforcing the NAP (let’s leave aside the fact that nobody agrees exactly on the threshold where an action starts to take on shades of coercion)? One way of doing this could be via a world-encompassing AI with the sole task of preventing people from violating the NAP. You could otherwise do whatever you wanted in life, but if you tried to kill someone, a force would stop the bullet from striking and entering the other person’s body. If you tried to steal from someone, a force would prevent you from doing so. For more ambiguous areas such as whether you have the valid right to homestead an area or not, a court could arbitrate on the decision, but once the outcome was made the AI would force you to obey it. If the court ruled that you were illegally squatting on someone else’s land, it would physically prevent you from re-entering that land.

Instead of other humans having to enforce the NAP against you and the problems that come from that since humans seek power for their own ends, a god-like entity would do it. This AI would do nothing else and would have no personality so it would not seek power for itself; its only purpose would be to enforce the NAP and turn it into a physical reality.

Leave aside the question of whether such an AI is possible or not; assume that technology permits it. Would you endorse this reality? If so, then why do you prefer this reality (which is a de-facto minarchy)? If not, then why not and why do you believe that human-led enterprises would do a better job at preventing violations of the NAP?

Not true. Rights may be respected based on agreement, but they’re called “natural rights” for a reason.

So…what, exactly?

That’s a pretty absolute statement. There are some crazy fucks out there.

They made a movie about this. It was called Minority Report. Didn’t go very well in that story.

Off hand, if there really were some way that aggression could truly be prevented from being inflicted, with 100% accuracy, I suppose I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But I don’t see how that’s feasible. Even supposing something like that isn’t outside the realm of science, any technology that powerful would never be able to be maintained without abuse. And if you ask me, it’s almost like wishing your grandfather died so you could get some inheritence and buy a car. It’s a wish. Just wish for the damn car.

“For more ambiguous areas such as whether you have the valid right to homestead an area or not, a court could arbitrate on the decision,”

An easy way to get away from this ambiguity is to have the AI eliminate violence against any person’s body. It’s a stronger statement than the NAP, and it requires that things like property be enforced nonviolently, that is, without force, but it is also a lot less susceptible to slippery slopes that lead from “good” violence to bad violence/force.

“Would you endorse this reality? If so, then why do you prefer this reality (which is a de-facto minarchy)?”

I would endorse it under the conditions you create, and for the reason you give.

However: I reject the premises. Such an AI would have been programmed by humans, so would be subject to all the failures, confusion, and misuse that any other system created by humans is. In short: you really couldn’t trust it.

I agree with Ultima: any appeal to something “natural” or existing apart from man’s creation is an appeal to mysticism. It requires some mystical godlike “giver” of rights.

The only “rights” are things that people have contractually agreed to give each other. It’s a much cleaner way of thinking about things, and much less subject to the kinds of abuses like “I have a right to health care” (at the expense of stealing from someone else, apparently). It also makes everything an economic problem, rather than a (generally intractable) philosophy problem: it is simply a question of what people are economically willing to trade.

The NAP in this setting is simple: it is an agreement amongst signers to not use force against the other signers, for the benefit of knowing that the others have agreed to the same. This is a much simpler thing to evaluate: for most people, this is an easy trade to make, since most people aren’t particularly interested in initiating force/violence and have much more to gain from knowing that they are safe from the other signers. The exceptions are generally the very desperate (hence we see a reason for helping such people out: they are more likely to adhere to the NAP because it’s more likely to be a net win for them); the thugs (fuck them, we’ll just have to deal with them with force), and the really insane/stupid (who again we’d have to find a way to deal with, but we already have to deal with them).

The contract approach is a much more tenable approach than some mystical handwaving at “natural rights”.

No, it doesn’t. All it requires is a belief…a belief that human beings have inalienable rights. Whether they come from the human’s nature as an individual, or a flying spaghetti monster in the sky, it makes no difference.

I personally don’t care what makes things “cleaner”. Your objection on the grounds of “subject to abuses like ‘I have a right to health care’” is easily refuted with the realization that no one has a right to stuff. Saying otherwise is engaging in a contradiction fallacy…that everyone has a right to enslave others (i.e. force them to provide you a good or service)…but obviously it’s logically impossible for everyone to have such a right.

On the contrary, it is this frightening notion of a person’s rights coming from the collective, that leads to abuses…and ironically leads to the most “unclean” outcomes. Just ask George Bernard Shaw. (Although he of course would argue his way of dealing with members of society was the “cleaner” method.)

I suppose you would follow through on your assertion and have no problem initiating force on those that do not sign your non-agression contract? After all, you don’t have an agreement with them, now, do you? I don’t care if someone agrees to not use force or not. I’m not going to use force on them until they do. Because their rights do not come from my say so. They exist before me, and anyone else. They are inalienable.

You think this sort of “rights come from the collective” argument is more “tenable”…but it is much more severely flawed than a lot of other ideas I’ve heard.

NAP in general is good approximation of what I would like to achieve, but IMO it is not achievable absolute. First of all meaning of term ‘agression’ is subjective and nuanced. That will lead to conflicts between people. Both sides will believe that they have ‘moral’ right to retaliate because in their minds they will believe they were agressed against. Who is wrong or right here? Obejctively it is impossible to determine and thats why in my opinion only mutually voluntary solution is acceptable because it must necessarily in some way be beneficial to both. What if that person will not agree to any of your proposed solutions though, because he/she does not share your fundamental beliefs? If you want to end this conflict with such uncooperative person you either agress (use force to remove this person or take back your property, or whatever) or give up and give incentive to be harassed by this person in the future. Agression is unavoidable even in ancapistan, I believe it is system that will minimize occurence of it though due to free market incentive system.

Am I getting it right that the purpose of this discussion begins with the idea that the NAP was a solution to end all violence? It never was.

I’m only really interested in which rights are respected. At the end of the day that’s all that matters. Debating which rights we should respect and the source of those rights is not a debate I’m interested in getting into. I’m taking it as a given that most people here support the NAP under most circumstances*.*

But, we will come to the day where such technology is possible so we’ll have to deal with it sooner or later. Imagine the changes from 1900 to 2000. I think 2000 to 2100 is going to involve a significantly greater amount of change, and the power of man to use technology for good, or evil, is going to increase drastically.

The problem with the NAP is that depending on your viewpoint you can justify nearly anything under it. All you need to do is say you were acting in “self-defense”. I think most people including the vast majority of non-libertarians already agree with the NAP; they don’t support murder or theft. They do, however, believe in self-defence and taking what’s rightfully theirs, and this is where no two people on this earth agree on the boundaries.

This is interesting because one problem with the NAP is that who’s to say what constitutes agression and self-defence? Many of the worst tyrants in history have thought that they were acting in self-defence.

However, how do you get away from violence entirely? I’m not sure it’s possible. What do you do with a squatter who absolutely refuses to leave your home? At some point you need to use physical force to evict them or prevent them from entering.

I agree that we need to be highly skeptical of any system that had been programmed by humans, but an AI is more than just a system – it also acts of its own accord. It can act similar to humans and be as dangerous as an all-powerful human, or it can act very differently from them.

These guys have put a lot of thought into how to design a “friendly AI”: http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html .They have also put some thought into what such an AI should do, and one of their ideas (as far as I understand it) is to take what people would preferred to have done had they had perfect knowledge of the future. This is one idea and I’m not sure that it’s better or worse than an escalating arms race between many different actors; it’s simply one possibility.

Let me get this straight. You’re only interested in which rights are respected. You’re not interested in which rights we should respect…and yet your fundamental question was “how do we change the set of rights that people agree that other people have…”?

I really think you should take a minute and figure out what you’re after because it really doesn’t seem that even you know.

Then why are you asking about a hypothetical omnipresent A.I. god that can prevent violence? Why is your question not about how boundaries are set, or why people have different boundaries about what’s “rightfully theirs”? I really think you’re confused.

To make matters worse, we can also disagree on what constitutes voluntary and what doesn’t. If a person sells themselves into slavery to live was it voluntary? When does an action become involuntary? What if said slave later tries to escape? Depending on your viewpoint strict adherence to the NAP can lead to some unpleasant and abhorrent outcomes. We live in reality however and in reality people will only adhere to the NAP if it benefits them. If it doesn’t then they won’t.

In general I believe that adherence to the NAP is good for people in general, but I’m not under any illusions that if only everyone respected whichever author’s vision of morality then we would all live in a utopian paradise. Self-interest can lead to vibrant market economies but it can also lead to ugly outcomes. Power imbalances are dangerous, and although some people think in black and white and think that anything a large bureaucratic organization does is good if its name = corporation and bad if its name = government, what really matters is where power lies. Only when power is distributed can people hope to have their rights respected.

Increasing technology has the potential to place more power in the hands of the state or more power in the hands of the people. If you had something like an AI that enforced NAP but did nothing else that would actually place more power in the hands of the people because they would have freedom from others who tried to place their boot on their neck, even though the monopoly of violence actually rests with a single actor, the AI. Of course this is fraught with problems like who defines what aggression is and what if the AI malfunctions or has a backdoor, so for the same reason we wouldn’t want world government maybe we don’t want a singleton AI, either. Nonetheless the technology and the power will come whether we like it or not so we will have to deal with a world where this is possible.

Yes, I’m only interested in which rights are respected. I don’t care why you believe in the NAP or what your justification for it is. What’s up for discussion is how do you actually get these rights, and under which scenario are you more likely to have these rights? Obviously you are less likely to be aggressed against if others also believe in the NAP, and even less likely if the NAP could not actually be broken by other people.

Sorry, double post.

I’m going to repeat what you said again:

  1. “I’m only really interested in which rights are respected.”
  2. “I’m not really interested in which rights we should respect.” (paraphrase)
  3. “how do we change the set of rights that people agree that other people have…”?

Do you still not see the complete absense of logic in that line of statements?

  1. I’m interested in which rights we can obtain in practice.

  2. I’m not interested in discussing what those rights should be or where they come from because there are 1000 threads about that. In this thread you can assume that we prefer the NAP as under libertarian theory and I don’t care if you think they are natural rights or not.

  3. If you want others to respect libertarian NAP and they don’t believe in it, you are less likely to have those rights in practice.

I’m not sure why you’re getting stuck on this. Do you disagree that your rights in practice only exist to the extent that they are respected by others? If so then there’s not really anything further to discuss.

Obviously if you are at all concerned with how to change the set of rights people agree that others have, then you ARE interested in “which rights we should respect.” I really don’t get how you don’t see this.

“I don’t care what rights anyone thinks should be respected. Now, how do I influnce what rights people think should be respected?”

How in the world is “belief” not “mysticism”? That’s precisely the definition.

The problem with “belief” is that there is no way to compare “beliefs”. I come at my approach because I tried your approach, and it doesn’t work. As soon as you explain your “belief” that “humans have inalienable rights” (and btw, I don’t believe that, even though we are both “libertarians” here), they simply assert their belief that supports statism (plug in many examples here, e.g. “I believe in equality”, “I believe in social justice”, “I believe that we all owe something to each other/the planet/my god”, etc).

To have anything approaching a libertarian/AnCap/free world, the bulk of the population has to “be onboard” in some fashion. Will you give me that? Then what I’m saying is that the attempt to get everyone to “believe” the same thing is doomed: beliefs, because they are assumed and not derived, are numerous and impossible to measure against each other. Just look at how many religious “belief” systems there are: you will never get a majority of humans to “believe” anything.

This is why I cast it as an economic problem. It is much more likely that you will get a majority of people to make a trade that is in most of their individual self-interest.

The rights you dont care about about are a part of the rights of NAP. So how could you go correctly go about determining which rights “we” should grant, if you dismiss reviewing a portion of them?

I apologize if I haven’t been making sense. I only mean that I don’t want to talk about that in this thread, not that I don’t personally care about it at all.

Well we have other threads for that. What I want to focus on in this thread is the idea of these rights being enforced physically, and for that I’m just taking libertarian NAP as a given. I just don’t want to get bogged down in discussions on whether these are “natural rights” or whatnot cause it doesn’t matter for the scenario and it’s easy to get derailed.