Loony Libertarians and the Nonsensical NAP

The stultification of Britain continues apace. The “libertarians” have arrived in force. A number of Conservative MPs and ministers now openly endorse this crackpot political philosophy. I remember a time when Daniel Hannan MEP was the only one and everyone used to make fun of him. Those were the days.

As someone who spent far too much of his youth on the internet arguing with Americans, I am already deeply familiar with libertarianism. But I suspect that most Brits have, hitherto, not encountered it. The long and short of it is that “libertarianism” is a right-wing movement which hates the government and hates paying taxes and which campaigns to abolish public commons, public ownership and democratic structures, so that private capital can bequeath to us all the utopian world it has been striving for against the machinations of government bureaucrats. They think everything in modern, organised society is communist and what is communist is bad and must be destroyed.

The term “libertarian”, ironically, was first used in Europe, to describe various 19th Century communists and, later, left-wing figures like George Orwell who opposed censorship and dictatorship. This is an entirely separate, right-wing, movement, which began in the USA during the 1970s, as many of the hippies in California started to get jobs and make fat piles of cash, trading bongs for bonds and Hendrix for Hayek.

In practical terms, there’s not that much more to know about it. But there is a philosophy, of sorts, undergirding libertarianism and, if you ever have the misfortune of talking to one of these kooks, you can be sure you’ll be hearing about it (at length)! Each libertarian carries, in his silky smooth brain, a mind-palace constructed with autodidactic (universities are communist! Books are communist!) fervour from a wingnut grabbag of abstract principles which they read on some internet forum and decided were the smartest thing they’d ever heard (not having ever studied anything intellectual, which would be communist).

The most sacred of these principles, to a libertarian, is the rather banal-sounding “Non-Aggression Principle” or NAP. The basic idea is that it is morally unacceptable to aggress upon another or their property and that the state uses force legitimately if and only if it acts to punish violations of this rule (for most libertarians, the state should not act preemptively to prevent NAP violations) or enforce legal contracts.

Murray Rothbard is a revered figure among libertarians. It was he who formulated the classic NAP, where “no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else”. In Rothbard’s view: if one takes the NAP, together with the right to own property, one can logically derive “the entire property rights structure of the market economy”. It is Rothbard’s account - the libertarian gold standard - I will be primarily concerned with.

Before going further, it is worth noting the deductive logical structure of libertarianism, where a complex account of society can be derived from a simple moral homily or two. Von Mises, another libertarian allstar, called this “praxeology”: the idea that we should not investigate the economy scientifically, but that we should take as given a series of core axioms and deduce economic reality from these. Rothbard is not terribly interested in empirically investigating the market economy to infer the forces which move it; he holds that it all flows logically from a couple of basic moral truths.

This is, of course, fundamentalist thinking and it is no accident that libertarianism comes from the good old USA. In many ways, libertarianism can best be understood as a form of liberal fundamentalism. Americans, steeped in Christian fundamentalism, who found their faith in Western liberal capitalism waning, employed the very same trick they use to maintain their faith in God, to keep themselves on the righteous path of capital.

Fundamentalist thinking like this also appeals to another important Western demographic: the lazy pseudointellectual. It’s wonderful to think that you needn’t study or learn history, economics or politics: you can just use your high-IQ brain to deduce the complex truths of society from a couple of moral principles. This is why so many extremely-online neckbeards are libertarians. They can sit online, endlessly “debating” how one ought to employ these basic principles, honing their talking points and feeling smug each time they rattle them off at their confused and unsuspecting victims. At no point do they have to get out of their gamer chairs and actually challenge themselves to read a book or expand their understanding of the world.

So it behoves me, I suppose, to detail the incoherence of the NAP in a consumable online format.

The philosophical work of establishing a “Non-aggression Principle” is necessarily going to stand or fall on the definition of “aggression”. Rothbard’s definition is concise: “the initiation or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else”. At first glance, this doesn’t seem a terribly controversial way to define aggression.

A number of terms here, however, immediately jump out at me: “initiation”, “physical” and “property”. That’s probably because I am familiar with libertarian politics and know precisely why they are there, but besides that: it seems intuitive that the definition could be made even more parsimonious by the removal of one or more of these terms. I don’t imagine anyone would really object to the idea that Rothbard is describing a form of aggression, but is he describing all forms of aggression? Is this a philosophically parsimonious definition? Rothbard is going to need one, since he is attempting to establish a philosophical principle. So I’m going to help him out a bit.

A simpler definition of aggression might run: “the initiation of force, by one actor upon another”. The concepts of physical violence and property have been removed and replaced. The necessary components of aggression seem, to me, to be:

1. The initiation. In this respect, Rothbard is correct. Aggressive acts are distinguished from more general acts of force (or violence) by their place in a chain of events. The most important aspect of an aggressive act is that it occurs prior to some other forceful or violence act in that chain.

2. The use of force. Rothbard chooses to talk in terms of violence, but I prefer to use the more parsimonious terminology of “force”. Both terms will require their own definition, but “force” is tidier. “Violence” is a stronger term with a certain moral quality to it and we are not concerned with whether an act rises to that level when trying to discern if it is aggressive. It is sufficient that it be forceful.

3. The actor. Aggression requires a conscious actor. Does a tectonic plate aggress upon another? One might say so in a poetic sense, but this would be an example of anthropomorphism, where the plate is being ascribed human qualities to create an aesthetic effect.

I see no reason one could not define “aggression” in the more parsimonious manner I have just detailed. Concepts of “physical violence” and “property” are philosophically superfluous. Their inclusion in Rothbard’s definition is a political choice. They are there because they are necessary to support some other, consequent argument.

So it is important to understand that we are working with an explicitly political definition of a term. “Aggression” as Rothbard uses it is not a purely philosophical term. It has added political context. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing this. In fact, it is common in political thought.

The reason it is important and, in this case, a problem, is that the libertarians are explicitly trying to offer some sort of deontological account which does not presuppose their political conclusions. That is why it is called the Non-Aggression Principle. Part of their task is to derive political conclusions from abstract philosophical truths. Notions of property, in particular, cannot be presupposed.

If a leftist were to define some term more broadly and with added political context, to account for some empirical factor, this wouldn’t be an intellectual problem for them. They take it as given that all political thought has a social and historical context.

But for the libertarians there is an undergirding claim: that they are deriving their normative political conclusions from abstract philosophical principles which are prior to everything else - a set of “first principles”. However, we immediately see that the principle - the NAP - is being adjusted to allow for the conclusions.

Rothbard’s NAP relies on added political context from further down the logic tree. It is therefore not a principle.

This is a case of begging the question (an informal fallacy in philosophy; a type of circular reasoning in which the truth of the conclusion is assumed in the premises). Rothbard has assumed that his premise - that physical violence and property are necessary components of aggression - is true, because libertarian political conclusions demand that it be so.

If you try to solve this issue by removing that political context and, for example, using my more abstract definition of “aggression”, then a lot of libertarian political conclusions no longer follow. Property, for example, is no longer sacrosanct - and they can’t have that!

Alternatively, you could try to solve the issue by giving Rothbard’s qualifiers of physical violence and property their own philosophical justification. But this would require the establishment of some other prior principle, considerably weakening the primacy of the NAP and requiring a massive adjustment of the libertarian account.

However, this is probably the most sensible move the libertarians could make in response is to shift the NAP: shift it to a second-order proposition. This would allow for a prior account of a) the importance of property rights and b) the physical violence.

Many libertarians have made just such a move (Narveson et. al.) and do not rely on the NAP to draw their conclusions. However, 99% of libertarians still love to bang on about their beloved NAP and believe it to be an infallible rudder for all moral political action.

I think I have shown, at the very least, that it is confused and incoherent as an idea. It’s also highly unoriginal: just a tortured, vapid version of more classic arguments around the legitimacy of political violence. It is as if the NAPers have taken a received notion of nonviolence they have picked up passively from being raised in a liberal society, taken a received notion of property which they have picked up from being raised in a capitalist society, then fretfully attempted to join the two, without things ever really rising to the level of philosophy.