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For those who love to argue the extremes against the NAP
Posted on: September 5, 2017 at 13:41:22 CT
90Tiger STL
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this is a great read.
https://mises.org/library/defense-non-aggression
A couple of passages about "starving your children" and polution, which come up a lot here:
Letting your infant starve v. intervening on the parents' property:
Zwolinski suggests that, according to Rothbard, it would be wrong to trespass on someone’s property to feed a three-year old child whom someone was starving to death. The person starving the child isn’t aggressing against him, but trespass is aggression.
That is nonsense. To starve someone who cannot leave is to murder him. You don’t have to touch somebody to kill him: there isn’t a special libertarian concept of murder, different from the ordinary one. Neither is it the case that you are free to violate people’s rights, so long as you do so on your property. Rothbardian libertarianism is not the doctrine that each person is an absolute despot over his own property.
POLLUTION
Zwolinski finds another flaw in the NAP. If, as Rothbard thought, industrial pollution violates the NAP, then must we not prohibit the slightest bit of smoke blown onto someone’s property, if the owner objects? Further, he asks in an earlier post, what if someone objects to a few photons of light beamed at him: should so trivial a matter be treated as harm? The NAP, taken strictly, threatens to derail nearly all human activities. If Rothbard replies to this that pollution below a certain level does not count as harm, why does he get to decide the limits of harm?
I don’t think Rothbard made the absurd claim that the limits of harm were for him to decide. Rather, he recognized that setting the limits of harm is matter of convention, settled by the understanding that prevails in a society. Zwolinski here falls into a mistake that many libertarians make. They deny a role to convention in delimiting the boundaries for the application of a concept: unless “nature” settles the matter, use of a concept is an all-or-nothing affair. Zwolinski‘s objection about risk fails for the same reason. Why must a supporter of the NAP hold that either all risks of harm must be prohibited or none? Once more, that dread word “convention” must not be uttered. Or is it rather that he thinks that Rothbard rejects it? Let us leave Zwolinski to sort out his own confusions on this question.
https://mises.org/library/defense-non-aggression
A couple of passages about "starving your children" and polution, which come up a lot here:
Letting your infant starve v. intervening on the parents' property:
Zwolinski suggests that, according to Rothbard, it would be wrong to trespass on someone’s property to feed a three-year old child whom someone was starving to death. The person starving the child isn’t aggressing against him, but trespass is aggression.
That is nonsense. To starve someone who cannot leave is to murder him. You don’t have to touch somebody to kill him: there isn’t a special libertarian concept of murder, different from the ordinary one. Neither is it the case that you are free to violate people’s rights, so long as you do so on your property. Rothbardian libertarianism is not the doctrine that each person is an absolute despot over his own property.
POLLUTION
Zwolinski finds another flaw in the NAP. If, as Rothbard thought, industrial pollution violates the NAP, then must we not prohibit the slightest bit of smoke blown onto someone’s property, if the owner objects? Further, he asks in an earlier post, what if someone objects to a few photons of light beamed at him: should so trivial a matter be treated as harm? The NAP, taken strictly, threatens to derail nearly all human activities. If Rothbard replies to this that pollution below a certain level does not count as harm, why does he get to decide the limits of harm?
I don’t think Rothbard made the absurd claim that the limits of harm were for him to decide. Rather, he recognized that setting the limits of harm is matter of convention, settled by the understanding that prevails in a society. Zwolinski here falls into a mistake that many libertarians make. They deny a role to convention in delimiting the boundaries for the application of a concept: unless “nature” settles the matter, use of a concept is an all-or-nothing affair. Zwolinski‘s objection about risk fails for the same reason. Why must a supporter of the NAP hold that either all risks of harm must be prohibited or none? Once more, that dread word “convention” must not be uttered. Or is it rather that he thinks that Rothbard rejects it? Let us leave Zwolinski to sort out his own confusions on this question.
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For those who love to argue the extremes against the NAP - 90Tiger MU - 9/5 13:41:22
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