This is the first of what will be a series of posts criticizing libertarian ideology as not up to the claims its advocates claim for it. Perhaps some will even seek to enter into dialogue on this or other issues to come.
Nonaggression?
Libertarians talk endlessly about the “nonaggression principle,” the view that all acts of aggression against peaceful people is wrong. They say this as if it is something that sets them aside from the rest of us who supposedly to a greater or lesser degree have no problem with aggressing against peaceful people.
But this is hooey. The real issue is determining what constitutes aggression. No normal person supports aggression against peaceful people, but many normal people will disagree among themselves as to what constitutes aggression. Except for libertarians, I know of no one who draws the line between aggression and non aggression at the point where physical force or its threat enters in.
Aggressive sound
Let us take a concrete and not at all fanciful example. I play my music late at night. I live in an apartment with thin walls. My neighbor is a light sleeper whom I do not like. I keep him up and enjoy doing so. Am I aggressing against him?
What if I do not play my music loud to annoy him, but regard him as too sensitive and so interfering with my enjoyment of my property?
Libertarians define aggression as crossing boundaries without permission. My music crosses his boundaries and invades his hearing. Am I aggressing against my disliked neighbor? Is my neighbor too sensitive? Or not? Most places have noise ordinances to take care of this problem, but of course that is an act of government and so from a strong libertarian position is itself aggression. My music can cross his boundaries but I cannot be told to turn it down or suffer legal consequences without being ‘aggressed’ against.
Let us say the libertarian says well, that is aggression. Then how much music constitutes aggression? Is it a matter of decibels or of length or of both? Does the time of day matter or whether it is a week day or a week end? Who decides and on what grounds?
Aggressive light
Let us say I have a house and again do not like my neighbor. I shine bright lights on my property outside his bedroom window late at night. Am I aggressing with photons, which are certainly more physical than sound waves. Let us say a libertarian grants that is aggression, a crossing of his boundaries by my photons. Then at what point do unwanted photons crossing from my property to yours constitute aggression? If our dislike is mutual, just seeing me constitutes photons going from me onto his property. But most people including all normal ones would find that is not aggression.
If photons do not constitute aggression, why? After all, they definitely cross boundaries and can cause suffering when they do. They even can lower property values, especially if I paint obscene images on my fence facing your yard, or simply make my property look garish from the street.
The point is pretty clear: aggression exists on a continuum and different people will decide at different points where it should be stopped. But virtually everyone will say at some point it crosses the line from acceptable behavior to aggression. Most all of us will say that line arrives before physical force or its threat is employed.
Sexual aggression on the job
A boss tells an employee that she must provide him sexual favors if she is to keep her job. Libertarians generally say she can quit, so the boss might be a cad, but he is not committing aggression that should be punished by the law. But what if unemployment is high and quitting will cost her a letter of recommendation? What if she is a single mom who supports two kids? What if one is sick and she needs to pay medical bills? What if she needs to provide not only sex, but kinds of sex she finds particularly distasteful such as bondage, even though in some formal sense no aggression took place because the boss never threatened her with physical violence?
Civilized countries realize that aggression takes many forms beyond the physical.
Just where to draw the line is a judgment call.
Civilized countries attempt to provide fair means by which a community can draw the line.
Libertarians use the ‘nonaggression principle’ as a sound bite to claim the moral high ground and put those who disagree with them at a rhetorical disadvantage. But in fact they often defend actions many of us would regard as aggression.
No long ago I had a discussion on this issue with a friend who considers himself a liberal. Since we are both economists, the argument led to a discussion on “externalities”. My friend has a bar that stays open till very late and we started to discuss about noise regulation. I told him that when noise was loud enough to prevent people from sleeping that was an agression towards this people and therefore it was reasonable to ban it. He was against such banning and he argued strongly against calling that an agression. As you mention he considered that the term “agression” should be restricted to physical violence. My reply was that noise is physical (if it is strong enough I could blow his ears). I also argued that, in any case, you do not need to cause a direct physical efect on the body to be agressive. Since I like dogs and have dogs I used the followed example: ¿Wouldn’t he consider it an agression if, in order to fight his noise, every day before he oppened his bar I took my own dogs and all my friends’ dogs to defecate around the entry of his bar. Further more, wouldn’t a certain form of violence be involved in my behaviour. Surely that would have a very negative effect of his business. As you may expect, being economists, the argument immediately derived towards externalities, private property and public goods. For him the problem was that the street is “a common” and the way to solve these kind of problems is through the privatization of the commmons. Curiously, the tendency of the economist’s liberal discurse is often to go to the extreme of reducing all interactions to exchange and to try to solve all the problems derived from other kinds of interactions through the elimitation of “free” (public) goods.
Moving on to the broader issue, in my opinion the discussion should envolve not only the question of what we call agression but also of what we call violence and the recognition of the violence that can be supported through the existence of a real threat of physical violence. I am thinking for instance in famines. Let us say the “Chinese great famine” under Mao. People where starving while siting in front of the places where grain was being stored. For me that is quite violent. We could say the same thing about severe pollution and people who have to suffer it because they are unable to do anything about it. The point is that the whole set of institutional arragements under which we live are capable of causing a great deal of damage without necesarily giving a single blow.
Hi Luis-
Your friend is pretty ignorant about the commons, but then he’s a libertarian. The standard critique of ‘the commons’ by people like that is a critique of unowned/unmanaged land. The commons have a long history of being well managed in many societies around the world. And often manged better than through ‘private property.’ Perhaps this ideologue would benefit from reading Elinor Ostrom’s work as well as that of those influenced by her?
I hope he doesn’t teach students as he is too ignorant about the subject to do so competently.
And you are on target about violence.
Market fudamentalism amongst some economists is quite strong. I have discussed with some of my collegues about “the commons” and they do know Orstrom’s work. However, their argument is that hers and related work has to do with backward societies and that in advanced ones a market solution is much better. One them went to the extreme of arguing that if all walk-ways, streets and roads were privatized they would be better managed and much cleaner. Taking Coase’s arguments beyond its limits these people argue that all problems related with “externalities” can be eliminated if private property rights are defined clearly enough and if the technology that is required to protect the property in question is available. I have even heard the argument that the only problem with privatizing the air we breath is a technological one and that such problem will be solved sooner or later.
I am afraid that there is people who whish to be able to solve all their problems and satisfy absolutelly all their physical, psychological and emotional needs through market transactions and they really believe that it is possible. I remember that I was quite shocked when I read the news about the 17 year old chinese kid who sold his kidney to get an ipad and an iphone, however I discovered that there was quite a number of people who saw no problem in it: he was a free person making use of his body. No one forced him and he was “old enough” to know what he was doing. In fact, people who hold these views think that this market solution is much better than having to relay on organ donations. I have heard similar arguments with respect to child adoption. Namely, that a couple who wants a baby and cannot procreate should be able to buy the baby from a couple that can have one and would be willing to have the baby and sell it. The argument is that it is inefficient to restric the solution of this problem to the posibility of adoption or to some sort of altruistic gesture by those that can procreate. However, in my opinion the step between this and trafic with humans is between very small and non-existent.
At a certain point, it becomes impossible to attempt to refute market fundamentalists on the basis of the consistency of their arguments. There is a point when we reach bottom rock, which has to do with differences in personal values. It is a bit like arguing about human sacrifices with a 400 a.d Moche indian.
Hi Luis-
I think we can critique them at a deeper level, but it requires a rarely encountered intellectual honesty on their part for a market fundamentalist to grasp the point. But the issue is not faith, it is intellectual integrity.
As a former market fundamentalist myself, many decades ago, I found my way out based on a moral repugnance as to the practical implications of the doctrine. Anyone who is not a sociopath like Ayn Rand will be troubled by some of the implications of market fundamentalist thought, and eventually might reject it on moral grounds alone. As I did. But many ‘individualists’ are deficient in empathetic awareness. However there is another approach.
For the honest among them there that approach is to show how the most fundamental concepts used by libertarians and other market fundamentalists are incoherent, and that the people advocating this position in the most literal sense do not know what they are talking about.
I published a substantial demolition of libertarianism based on this approach. You can find it in Georgia Kelly (ed.) Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/uncivil-liberties-georgia-kelly/1114584370?ean=9780988613003
It examines concepts like coercion, property rights, and the individual, concepts fundamental to ;libertarian ideology. It demonstrates that libertarian understanding of them is incoherent in their own terms.
The book is not pricey and you might want to take a look at it.
Sadly, libertarianism and market fundamentalism today is more a secular religion like Marxism was than a rational understanding of the social world. It’s adherents have trapped themselves within an intellectual mobius strip that prevents any outside stance to criticize their conclusions. Even this kind of critique often has no impact because they lack the integrity to fearlessly follow the implications of the words they use