Check out Matt Z’s latest essay at libertarianism.org. It’s part of his ongoing attempt to ask the hard questions and challenge the orthodoxy of the non-aggression principle.
Here’s an excerpt:
Of course, if you think as I do that coercion is bad, then you’ll think that minimum wage laws are prima facie objectionable even before engaging in this digging. But notice that even in the case of rape, we wouldn’t want to end our analysis here. Rape is coercive, yes. And it involves a violation of one’s property in one’s body. But if this is all we understood about rape, then we wouldn’t have come anywhere close to understanding the full weight or significance of its injustice. We wouldn’t understand the devastating psychological effect that rape can have on a woman. We wouldn’t understand that women are often blamed for their own rape, or the ways our entrenched institutions protect rapists while shaming and silencing their victims. We wouldn’t understand, in other words, why a lot of people think rape is an especially serious injustice, or one that calls for more attention and more action to effectively combat.
Rape is aggressive and a violation of property rights, just like stealing someone’s car radio or imposing a minimum wage law on them. But rape is not just like a minimum wage law. And that is because aggression and property rights are, by themselves, not the only categories relevant to moral or juridical evaluation.
This is a rather obvious point, as far as moral philosophy goes. But it does seem to pose a challenge to those who believe that all the thorny questions of justice can be resolved by the application of a neat and tidy principle like the NAP. If not all aggression is on a par—if some, like rape, is very seriously wrong, while some, like shining a flashlight at your house, is not wrong at all—then why should we believe that the non-aggressiveness or aggressiveness of conduct is anything like a sufficient indicator of its justice or injustice? And why should we believe that aggression (no matter how small) must never be permitted in order to produce any kind of social or individual benefit (no matter how large)?
UPDATE: “Ideology can make obvious facts unobvious to some people.” -Matt Z via Twitter
Image via libertarianism.org
