Tag: NAP

On occasion, a good-hearted person decides that the NAP applies to animals. What they usually mean by this is not that animals can be expected to accept it, of course, since almost no one is that divorced from reality.

What they mean is that if person A is harming an animal, then person B is entitled to use “defensive” force against person A, just as would be the case if person A were harming another human.

Obviously this cannot be true, because if it were, it would mean that anyone who interacts with any animal without the animal’s consent is guilty of a crime, as he would be if the animal were a human being.

This leads immediately to the conclusions that pet owners are slaveholders, meat-eaters are (at least) accessories to murder, and many other obviously ridiculous conclusions.

Again, of course it is not true that anyone who follows the NAP is a “good person”, or is entitled to have others deal with him voluntarily. If most people think that meat-eating is a terrible evil, then those people would be free in anarchy to shun meat eaters. But they would still not be free to use violence against them, as that would be a NAP violation.

But if you don’t accept the consequentialist reasoning above, then you should also consider that “argumentation ethics”, which logically proves the validity of the NAP, applies only to beings capable of reasoning. If a dolphin (for example) turns out to be able to discuss and agree to the NAP, then that dolphin would also be entitled to claim its protections.

So far, though, we have only us.

As we have seen, anarchy is any society in which everyone is expected to follow the NAP or be subject to the usual social sanctions for violating it.

This means that the path to anarchy is whatever actions make it less socially acceptable for anyone, including State actors, to violate the NAP. Once we have made that socially unacceptable for anyone, we will have arrived at anarchy.

Definition of Anarchy

Any society in which everyone is expected to follow the NAP, or be subject to the usual social disapproval, is an anarchy.

Proof

State actors must violate the NAP in the course of their duties, as otherwise they would be unable to force compliance.

The reason that it is possible to find people to do this is that the vast majority of people believe that it is right or at least acceptable to violate the NAP if one is acting in the name of a State.

This is necessarily true because the only difference between the behavior of a criminal and that of a State actor is this different expectation on the part of the general public: that while it is not acceptable for a criminal to violate the NAP, it is acceptable for a State actor to do so.

So if there were no exception to the rule of following the NAP made for State actors, there would be no State.

Q. E. D.

Note regarding NAP violations

Note that of course this does not mean that there would be no NAP violations in anarchy; of course it is likely that there would be, because some people are criminals. The sole (but immensely important) difference is that no sanction would be given to these violations, so they would be far more expensive to those committing them.

The Non-Aggression Principle is the fundamental requirement for being a libertarian. If you accept it as valid, then you are a libertarian. If you don’t, you aren’t a libertarian.

But what is it exactly? Nothing more (and nothing less) than the agreement that you will not use violence against other people other than defensively (to protect yourself, your possessions, or another innocent person). This means that all people have the right under the NAP not to have aggressive violence used against them, even if they themselves do not accept the NAP.

The NAP is not pacifist. You can use (an appropriate level of) violence against other people to defend a value. E.g., self-defense is not a NAP violation, but holding someone up with a gun to get their wallet, or for that matter shooting them just because they annoy you, is a NAP violation.

Having said that, there seems to be some confusion about what the NAP does and doesn’t imply.

1. What it does imply: That people who follow it will never be in a position to have defensive violence used against them, because they themselves do not employ aggressive violence. Thus, any violence used against them must be aggressive rather than defensive, and therefore will by definition be prohibited by the NAP.

2. What it doesn’t imply: that people who follow it are behaving in a moral way, i.e., that that their actions are morally right or socially acceptable. That is, a person can follow the NAP but still be a jerk. In that case, others still can’t use violence against that person without violating the NAP, but those others can shame, boycott, or use any other non-violent means to teach that person a lesson.

3. Also please note that actual violence or a credible threat of actual violence against a person or people is required to violate the NAP. Mean words or even very nasty actions like doxxing someone, don’t violate the NAP, although they are still bad actions.