 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm your host, Terence West. Defending the Non-Aggression Principle I reply to Matt Zolensky, Part 5, by George H. Smith. Most of this final part of my series is a general commentary on the Non-Aggression Principle, NAP, rather than a response to specific points raised by Matt Zolensky in six reasons to reject the Non-Aggression Principle. At the end, I briefly consider the problem of pollution. According to Zolensky, the Non-Aggression Principle, NAP, quote, holds that aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in the terms of the use or threat of physical violence. As I noted in Part 1 of this series, the NAP usually is, and should be, expressed in terms of physical force, not violence. A possible distinction between these two terms may be illustrated as follows. Suppose a large man physically blocks the doorway of an old lady's house and will not allow her to enter. We might say that this is not literally a violent act, since the man never comes into contact with the lady. And even if we agree that this act should be reasonably interpreted as intent or threat to use violence, should she attempt to enter her own house, it is the blocking of the entrance by physical means that qualifies as the violation of her property rights. Thus, in this, as in many other cases, it seems more appropriate to speak of physical force rather than violence, per se. Given that Murray Rothbard often framed the NAP in terms of violence, Zolensky cannot be faltered for following his lead. But it should be kept in mind that many, and perhaps most, libertarians follow and ran in framing their fundamental political principles as the non-initiation of physical force, often abbreviated in IOF, rather than speaking of violence. As Rand wrote in Man's Rights, to violate man's rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment or to expropriate his values. Basically, there's only one way to do it, by the use of physical force. Similarly, in The Nature of Government, we find this formulation. Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or compel him to act against his own judgment. In Part 3, I discussed how Rothbard applied the NAP to the issue of fraud. That, Rand applied in her NIOF principle in essentially the same manner, as well as the other problems, such as breach of contract, is clearly indicated in this passage from The Nature of Government. A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force. It consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods, or services of another, then refusing to pay for them, and thus keeping them by force, by mere physical possession, not by right, i.e. keeping them without the consent of the owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force. It consists of obtaining material values without their owner's consent under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force. It consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by threat of force, violence, or injury. Although Rothbard's usage may be confusing at times, three things should be noted. First, his use of, quote, violence is consistent with a legalistic meaning, according to which violence is regarded as the unjust or unlawful use of physical force. The entry on violence in Black's law dictionary reads, in part, force, physical force, force unlawfully exercised, the abuse of force, that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Second, that Rothbard intended his non-aggression principle to be identical with prohibiting the initiation of physical force may be seen in the fact that he sometimes used the latter phrasing, as we see in his article, law, property rights, and air pollution, in which he depicts the basic axiom of libertarianism as no initiation of force against person or property. Third, throughout the history of classical liberalism, we sometimes see the terms force and violence used more or less interchangeably. For example, in the Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek wrote that the threat of force or violence is the most important form of coercion. At times, Rothbard used neither violence nor force when formulating the fundamental libertarian principle. In man, economy, and state, for instance, he focused on the libertarian prohibition of invasive action, which he defined as follows. Invasive action may be defined as any action, violence, theft, fraud, taking away another person's freedom or property without his consent. While conceding that Rothbard formulated the N. A. P. in various and sometimes imprecise ways, I think it's clear what he meant. Another potential source of confusion is Rothbard's use of axiom in regard to the N. A. P. Since Rothbard attempted to provide a moral justification for the N. A. P. especially in the ethics of liberty by, quote, axiom, he obviously did not mean a fundamental moral principle, much less a self-evident moral principle. Rather, he used axiom to signify the fundamental political principle of a free society. Whether this was a judicious use of axiom is something I will leave for readers to decide. As with many earlier libertarian thinkers, regardless of the terms they used, both Rothbard and Rand attempted to justify a theory of rights, and they then used that foundation to distinguish between voluntary and coercive interaction. As Rothbard wrote in Power and Market, liberty is defined as freedom to control what one owns without molestation by others. This notion of freedom was squarely in the Lockean tradition, as I discussed in an earlier essay. Rothbard, who was well-versed in the history of libertarian ideas, often used property in the older classical sense to mean moral jurisdiction over something. It was with this meaning in mind that James Madison spoke of property in one's time, and an earlier Lockean, William Willaston, spoke of property in one's happiness. This is what Rothbard meant when, following the lead of 19th century libertarian Herbert, he defended self-ownership as the fundamental human right. Rand, in contrast, preferred to speak of the right of life instead of self-ownership, while reserving the word property to denote external goods. Nevertheless, she occasionally reverted to the classical meaning of property, according to which to own X or to have property in X means to have sovereign jurisdiction over X, i.e. the right to use and dispose of X as one sees fit. In what is capitalism, Rand put it this way, is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work, and its products, or is he the property of the tribe, the state, the society, the collective, that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe his course of life, control his work, and expropriate his products. Despite the linguistic differences between Rothbard and Rand, both emphasized consents as a fundamental condition of justice and human relationships. As Rothbard put it in the Ethics of Liberty, after explaining the nature of the free society, the society of the peaceful cooperation and the voluntary interpersonal relations, there is however another and contrasting type of interpersonal relation, the use of aggressive violence by one man against another. What such aggressive violence means is that one man evades the property of another without the victim's consent. The invasion may be against a man's property in his person, as in the case of bodily assault and or against his property in tangible goods, as in robbery or trespass. In either case, the aggressor imposes his will over the natural property of another. He deprives the other man of his freedom of action and the full exercise of his natural self-ownership. Disagreements over how certain key words should be used are nothing new. We find similar discussions throughout the history of classical liberalism. An interesting and useful analysis appears in an unpublished manuscript by Jeremy Bentham. He lived 1748 to 1832. After dividing coercive laws into two broad categories, commands and prohibitions, Bentham continued. In either of the two cases of command and prohibition, the person whose act is that in question may be said on account of such act to be coerced or to be under coercion. In the case of command, he may be said to be constrained, to be under constraint. In the case of prohibition, he may be said to be restrained, under restraint. When a person is neither constrained nor restrained with respect to an act, neither constrained to do it nor restrained from doing it, he is said with respect to the act to be free, to be at liberty. Bentham concluded, liberty then is neither more nor less than the absence of coercion. This is the genuine, original, and proper sense of the word. The idea of it is an idea purely negative. Quoted in Douglas G. Long's Bentham on Liberty, University of Toronto Press, pages 73 and 74, F. A. Hayek, among other classical liberals, agreed that to be precise, we should probably define liberty as the absence of restraint and constraint. So, long as it's understood that these terms refer to the action of human beings rather than a natural phenomenon, we now arrive, at long last, to the only point by Zwolinski that I have not yet considered, pollution. Zwolinski writes, as I noted in my last post, Rothbard himself recognized that industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited. But Rothbard did not draw the full implications of his principle. Not just industrial pollution, but personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one's fireplace, smoking, etc., runs a foul of NAP. The NAP applies that all of these activities must be prohibited, no matter how beneficial they may be in other respects and no matter how essential they are to our daily life in the modern industrialized world. And this is deeply implausible. In an earlier article, Libertarianism and Pollution, Zwolinski explores in greater detail the possible implications of the NAP for pollution. Any sites in passing Rothbard's most complete treatment of the issue, law, property, rights, and air pollution, which was originally published in the Cato Journal, Spring 1982. At the risk of ending this series with a whimper rather than a bang, I'm afraid I have little to say about pollution and the problems it creates for the NAP. For one thing, I have not given this issue much thought over the years. For another, I think Rothbard deals quite well with the problem in his article in the Cato Journal, though I might take issue with a few minor points. I will concede that Zwolinski is justified in raising the problem of pollution. Of his six objections to the NAP, this is the only one that's credible in my view. But I see no justification for rejecting a string of interpretation of the NAP on the basis of one difficulty. All general theories, including those in hard sciences, confront unresolved problems and unanswered questions. Libertarian theory is no exception. But to call for radical paradigm shifts because of such problems as Zwolinski does with the NAP cannot be justified unless the dominant paradigm, to use Thomas Kahn's expression, experiences drastic failures in a number of areas and unless a more satisfactory paradigm is offered in its place. Should Zwolinski ever decide to explain his own paradigm, then we may examine its strengths and weaknesses and thereby compare it to a strict interpretation of the NAP. But no such comparative analysis is possible in a theoretical vacuum. Merely to claim that there are exceptions to the NAP does not come close to telling us what we need to know. Unless we accept Zwolinski and his fellow bleeding hearts as the final arbiters in this matter, we will need clearly defined criteria by which we can identify legitimate exceptions to the NAP and distinguish them from purported exceptions that cannot be justified. Again, it will not do for Zwolinski or anyone else to proclaim that X is an exception to the NAP unless he also explains and justifies the criteria we should use to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate exceptions. Meanwhile, until his groundwork has been laid and justified, I will continue to view pollution as merely one among numerous problems in libertarian theory that requires additional work. This has been Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org. I'm Terence West. Thanks for listening.