Is NAP a Sufficient Foundation For Ethics And Politics?

For us to have a proper theoretical foundation for the discussions about the ongoing contentious issues in the liberty community, we must start with the first core issue : Whether NAP is a sufficient foundation for ethics and politics.

This short study note looks into the evolution of NAP, and ends with my conclusion.

What Are Ethics And Politics?

Then there is ethics, or morality (I’ll use the two terms as being synonymous)—the branch of philosophy concerned to define a code of values to guide human choices and actions.

And then there is politics—the application of ethics to social questions; the branch of philosophy that defines the proper nature of society and, particularly, the proper function of government.

– Leonard Peikoff, 1972/2023, “Founders of Western Philosophy”

Evolution Of NAP

Rothbard

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.

If no man may aggress against another; if, in short, everyone has the absolute right to be “free” from aggression, then this at once implies that the libertarian stands foursquare for what are generally known as “civil liberties”: …

– Murray Rothbard, 1973/1978/1985, “For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto”, “Chapter 2: Property and Exchange”.

It is Rothbard who coined the term “nonagression principle” first in his short pamphlet released on 1973.

It is unclear when the abbreviation “NAP,” noticing the spelling and word-choice changes, first appeared.

Now the man who seizes another’s property is living in basic contradiction to his own nature as a man. For we have seen that man can only live and prosper by his own production and exchange of products. The aggressor, on the other hand, is not a producer at all but a predator; he lives parasitically off the labor and product of others.

…

Thus, parasitism cannot be a universal ethic, and, in fact, the growth of parasitism attacks and diminishes the production by which both host and parasite survive. Coercive exploitation or parasitism injure the processes of production for everyone in the society. Any way that it may be considered, parasitic predation and robbery violate not only the nature of the victim whose self and product are violated, but also the nature of the aggressor himself, who abandons the natural way of production - of using his mind to transform nature and exchange with other producers - for the way of parasitic expropriation of the work and product of others.

– Murry Rothbard, 1982, “The Ethics of Liberty”, “Part II: A Theory of Liberty; 8.Interpersonal Relations: Ownership and Aggression”

In Rothbard’s more refined scholarly work, the emphasis is on the natural law origin of the ethical principle of nonaggression.

The syllogism is:

• Ethics must be universal. (See the Moral universalizability section below.)
• It is part of man’s nature that man can only live and prosper by his own production and exchange of products. (It is part of the natural rights premise, explained in the other section of the same book.)
• Aggressor lives parasitically off the labor and product of others. (By definition.)
• Therefore, aggression is not ethical.

HHH

Yet Rothbard is not content with having developed a full-fledged economic defense of a pure market system. Culminating in 1982 with his second magnum opus, The Ethics of Liberty, he proceeds to provide us with a comprehensive system of ethics to complement and complete the task of justifying laissez faire.

…

Agreeing with Rothbard on the possibility of a rational ethic and, more specifically, on the fact that only a libertarian ethic can indeed be morally justified, I propose a different, non-natural-rights approach to establishing these two related claims. It has been a common quarrel with the natural rights position, even on the part of sympathetic readers, that the concept of human nature is far “too diffuse and varied to provide a determinate set of contents of natural law.”13

– Hans-Hermann Hoppe, 1993, “The Economics and Ethics of Private Property”

HHH further echos Rothbard’s desire for a rational basis for ethics. However, HHH constructed a new path of rationality called “argumentation ethics,” whose syllogism deserves a separate discussion.

Walter Block

The non-aggression axiom is the lynchpin of the philosophy of libertarianism. It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another. That is, in the free society, one has the right to manufacture, buy or sell any good or service at any mutually agreeable terms. Thus, there would be no victimless crime prohibitions, price controls, government regulation of the economy, etc.

– Walter Block, 2003, “The Non-Aggression Axiom of Libertarianism”.

Walter Block also used the word “non-aggression axiomm,” under the context of “legality” in a mini article of his.

Stephan Kinsella

In Stephan Kinsella, 2011, “The relation between the non-aggression principle and property rights: a response to Division by Zer0”, a lot issues related to NAP are clarified or refined.

Axiom or principle?

Many libertarians focus on the non-aggression principle as the essence of our political philosophy. Ayn Rand formulated a version of it in Atlas Shrugged: “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate — do you hear me? No man may start — the use of physical force against others.”2 Some, such as Rothbard, have even called it the non-aggression “axiom”

…

Rand’s “axioms” resemble Misesian/Kantian “apriori” concepts the denial of which leads to self-contradiction. For this reason alone, it’s better to refer to the non-aggression principle instead of the non-aggression axiom.

Being a legal practitioner, Kinsella cares about the precision of words. He considers the choice of word “axiom” wrong and NAP is a better term.

Is property rights, as a legal concept, more fundamental than NAP?

Another reason is that it’s not clear that “non-aggression” is really the most fundamental libertarian principle. In fact, I think it’s not. I think the libertarian conception of property rights is more fundamental than aggression. If I use force to take an apple from your hand, is it aggression? Is it trespass? Well, that depends on who owns the apple. If it is my apple, and you have just stolen it from me, then it is not trespass. If it is your apple, then it is trespass, or aggression. Classifying an action as aggression or not requires knowing who owns what.

Additionally, Kinsella does not consider NAP the most fundamental libertarian principle. Instead, the libertarian conception of property rights is more fundamental. In the example he gave in the article, he thinks that the distinction could help to justify aggression better.

From other context, we can also learn that Kinsella generally follows HHH’s argumentation ethics as the correct rational basis for ethics of property rights.

Check Premises

Morality and law

The Hart–Fuller debate is an exchange between the American law professor Lon L. Fuller and his English counterpart H. L. A. Hart, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1958 on morality and law, which demonstrated the divide between the positivist and natural law philosophy. Hart took the positivist view in arguing that morality and law were separate. Fuller’s reply argued for morality as the source of law’s binding power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart%E2%80%93Fuller_debate

Rothbards wrote:

In fact, the legal principles of any society can be established in three alternate ways: (a) by following the traditional custom of the tribe or community; (b) by obeying the arbitrary, ad hoc will of those who rule the State apparatus; or (c) by the use of man’s reason in discovering the natural law-in short, by slavish conformity to custom, by arbitrary whim, or by use of man’s reason. These are essentially the only possible ways for establishing positive law.

“The Ethics of Liberty”, “3. Natural Law versus Positive Law”.

Rothbard defined “natural rights” as an individualistic replacement of the “natural law” theory:

This “classical” natural-law theory placed the locus of the good and of virtuous action in the State, with individuals strictly subordinated to State action. … From the Lockean emphasis on the individual as the unit of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts, stemmed his conception of natural law in politics as establishing the natural rights of each individual. … It is this tradition of natural-rights libertarianism upon which the present volume attempts to build.

Later on, HHH instrumented his own “argumentation ethics” that aims to replace “natural rights” and completely unroot itself from the “natural law” tradition.

But what about the objectivists?

In general, objective means “either a fact independent of anyone’s consciousness, or is based in and determined by such facts of reality.” An objective person is committed to grasping all relevant data and integrating it consistently, i.e., by “the method of deliberate, disciplined adherence to reality by the use of logic.”

Objective law is also to be contrasted with two other prominent legal theories, Natural Law and Positivism. Natural Law is a form of intrinsicism, holding that law is found “ready-made” and “distinguished by its independent possession of certain qualities that we can simply spot or recognize as the source of its claim to our obedience.”

Positivism, by contrast, is a form of subjectivism, holding that law is “the unconstrained, amoral invention of a particular group of men.”

Tara Smith, “Objective Law” link: https://www.atlassociety.org/session/tara-smith-objective-law

The exact distinction of how objective law differs in it way of obtaining through reason from natural law tradition seems rather nuanced and requires a deeper degree of understanding of the area, which I will skip from this research.

Moral universalizability

The general concept or principle of moral universalizability is that moral principles, maxims, norms, facts, predicates, rules, etc., are universally true; that is, if they are true as applied to some particular case (an action, person, etc.) then they are true of all other cases of this sort. Some philosophers, like Immanuel Kant, Richard Hare, and Alan Gewirth, have argued that moral universalizability is the foundation of all moral facts. Others have argued that moral universalizability is a necessary, but not a sufficient, test of morality. A few philosophers have also argued that morality is not constrained by universalizability at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_universalizability

My View: NAP Cannot Be The Foundation For Ethics and Politics

After the research, I found myself in agreement with Kinsella on his assessment that NAP is not more fundamental than the ethics of property rights. This should also mean that NAP cannot be a sufficient foundation for Ethics.

I hold my view that to address property rights conflict effectively, one must focus on the issues of property rights, with aggression being only one aspect of the conflict. An especially interesting topic is self-defense, which sometimes can be seen as “aggression”, either due to the sloppy usage of languages, or preemptive nature in case of responding to intimidation. In fact, intimidation is considered a form of physical aggression by Rothbard:

Defensive violence, therefore, must be confined to resisting invasive acts against person or property. But such invasion may include two corollaries to actual physical aggression: intimidation, or a direct threat of physical violence; and fraud, which involves the appropriation of someone else’s property without his consent, and is therefore “implicit theft.”

– Murry Rothbard, 1982, “The Ethics of Liberty”, “Part II: A Theory of Liberty; 12.Self-Defense”

In future research, we should further look into two separate problems:

• What is the definition of the libertarian concept of private property rights, and is it alone the sufficient foundation for ethics?
  • A sub-quest is to look into the ethical foundation of objectivism, which reasons from a metaphysical level on the question of “what a man’s life is.”
• What about politics? Ethics, or morality, is “the branch of philosophy concerned to define a code of values to guide human choices and actions.” Meanwhile, politics is “the application of ethics to social questions; the branch of philosophy that defines the proper nature of society and, particularly, the proper function of government.” (Peikoff, “Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume.”)