Anarcho-Capitalism: A Branden ‘Blast from the Past’

[George H. Smith]

As it turns out, the world is not quite as simple as the one example you present. Breach of contract issues are often in dispute—and reasonably so.

When the jeweler withholds your physical property, he is, in effect, stealing something that belongs to you. So you could say that forcibly taking the ring from him is retaliatory force. But how does that apply when someone claims that he did fulfill the terms of a contract, and the other party disagrees? For instance, a contractor builds a structure to contractual specifications, but completes the project one day after the contractual deadline. A judge or arbitrator enters the picture, and has to decide upon an equitable settlement. If one party disagrees with that settlement, force must be initiated to enact that settlement.

And, to repeat, the whole notion of "indirect force" totally subverts the non-initiation of physical force principle as anything remotely resembling an objective guide to the definition of rights.

While I have been attempting to defend Rand's NIOF principle, Dennis tells me that things are not this "simple." This, of course, is the standard refrain of Rand's critics. How many times have we heard that the real world as not a simple as Rand represented it to be? To this Rand said, in effect, that is precisely because the world is so complex that we require the guidance of fundamental, clearly defined principles.

Dennis is exceedingly fond of what I call "argument from examples." He reminds me of the guy mentioned in BB's Efficient Thinking course. Barbara explained why one industry should not be nationalized, after which the guy conceded the point but then asked why some other industry should not be nationalized.

Rather than wander aimilessly from one hypothetical example to another -- But what about this case? Okay, but what about that case? Okay, but I have another case! -- our time would be better spent in disentangling different issues and then applying our fundamental principles to the relevant problem.

Dennis now wants to know how the NIOF principle would apply to "someone [who] claims that he did fulfill the terms of a contract, and the other party disagrees?"

There are two distinct issues here: first, the problem of resolution; second the problem of restitution.

If two parties in a contract dispute disagree about the damages that may be due to one party, but if they have previously agreed to submit such disputes to arbitration, then that arbiter decides who owes what to whom. This is the process of resolution.

After the resolution has been determined, the same reasoning I applied to earlier cases applies here as well. If the arbiter decides that X owes Y (say) $1000 in damages for breach of contract, then (assuming no appeal is permitted) X is now holding $1000 that legally belongs to Y. In other words, the arbiter (by the prior agreement of both parties) has legally transferred the title -- the legal claim of ownership -- of $1000 from X to Y. And if X, who is now holding $1000 that belongs to Y, does not give Y his money voluntarily, then he is holding Y's money by force, i.e., without the consent of Y.

This analysis simply follows the analysis of the "indirect use of force" found in the passage from Rand that I quoted earlier today. I have little hope that this will satisfy Dennis, however, for he has a potentially infinite number of hypotheticals from which to draw in his eagerness to demonstrate the legitimacy of initiated force. ? But what if the contracting have not agreed to arbitration? Or...or...what if...what if....?

Ghs

[anthony]

Rand also stated (many times) that "Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force."

If this is what Rand said, she was clearly in error. Fraud, embezzlement, etc. are all violations of others' rights but do not imply the use of physical force.

Yeah, and stealing a car isn't using force if it's unlocked and the keys are in it and you just walk up to it and take it without having to punch the owner in the face? The term "physical force" equals "punch someone in the face"? And therefore the only right that we have is to not be punched in the face? J

So, if the actor does something he does something with physical force, a redundancy. And it's an initiation if he's first. So I type a slander and put it on the Internet--that's violation of a right? I speak to someone and get him to give me money for a good or service I do not deliver--that's a violation of a right? Now if I murder someone that's a violation of a right, but how do we apply what was only in my head to determine if it's murder in the first or second degree? --Brant help me, I'm drowning!

Rand also stated (many times) that "Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force."

If this is what Rand said, she was clearly in error. Fraud, embezzlement, etc. are all violations of others' rights but do not imply the use of physical force.

Yeah, and stealing a car isn't using force if it's unlocked and the keys are in it and you just walk up to it and take it without having to punch the owner in the face? The term "physical force" equals "punch someone in the face"? And therefore the only right that we have is to not be punched in the face? J

So, if the actor does something he does something with physical force, a redundancy. And it's an initiation if he's first. So I type a slander and put it on the Internet--that's violation of a right? I speak to someone and get him to give me money for a good or service I do not deliver--that's a violation of a right? Now if I murder someone that's a violation of a right, but how do we apply what was only in my head to determine if it's murder in the first or second degree? --Brant help me, I'm drowning!

Rope coming!

Writing about unilaterally breaking a contract in VoS, she said it is an "indirect use of physical force."

She explains fraud and theft by the same term, and as "mere physical possession...not by right."

Therefore we can broaden "physical force" to include the indirect use, and what is not "by right."

"Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force

that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing

his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment." [p.108]

[rhartford]

From Wikipedia:

“Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor) is the English equivalent of the Latin lex parsimoniae --- the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.”

Considering some quotes from previous posts:

“keeping [values] by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner.”

“[fraud] consists of obtaining material values without their owner's consent”

“holding $1000 that belongs to Y, does not give Y his money voluntarily, then he is holding Y's money by force, i.e., without the consent of Y.”

Isn’t the “simplest explanation” for a political standard the prohibiting of the violation of an owner’s consent, rather than adding the assumption that the violation is “indirect use of force” and therefore allowing the violation to be included as a referent of the NIOF principle?

[George H. Smith]

From Wikipedia: “Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor) is the English equivalent of the Latin lex parsimoniae --- the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.” Considering some quotes from previous posts: “keeping [values] by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner.” “[fraud] consists of obtaining material values without their owner's consent” “holding $1000 that belongs to Y, does not give Y his money voluntarily, then he is holding Y's money by force, i.e., without the consent of Y.” Isn’t the “simplest explanation” for a political standard the prohibiting of the violation of an owner’s consent, rather than adding the assumption that the violation is “indirect use of force” and therefore allowing the violation to be included as a referent of the NIOF principle?

The references to the NIOF principle and to the indirect use of force are not assumptions that are somehow added on to a theoretical scheme. Rather they are an integral part of the theory itself. You could not even justify property rights in the first place without them. Rand clearly understood this.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I want to explain, if only summarily, why I think Rand's stress on the NIOF principle as the foundation of her political theory is so important.

Going back to the 17th century -- in John Locke, for example -- we often find individualist philosophers who mention "force and fraud" as two things that a government should prohibit. Now, by "force," these philosophers typically meant the initiation of force, as evidenced by equivalent terms, such as "aggression," that they sometimes used.

Few of these philosophers went much further than this, however, partly because they assumed their readers would know what was meant, but also because they wished to avoid pressing the point so far as to become vulnerable to the most common criticism of their adversaries, namely, that Lockean individualists were in fact promoting "anarchy," in substance if not in name.

The 19th century libertarian Auberon Herbert probably came closest to anticipating an explicit formulation of the NIOF principle, and he certainly did not shy away from the logical consequences. For example, like Rand, Herbert opposed compulsory taxation and called for voluntary financing of government instead. (Rand said that "the imposition of taxes does represent an initiation of force," and since she believed that a proper government should never initiate force, she explored possible alternatives, one of which is based on an insurance model -- a possibility that was explored by some early American anarchists, such as Francis Tandy.)

What Rand did, better than any previous political philosopher, was to explicitly isolate the NIOF principle as the foundation of rights theory in general. She argued that the use of reason is essential to man's survival and happiness, and that the initiation of force, in its various manifestations, prevents us from using our reason. And she clearly understood that our rights to external property are the moral means by which we implement our choices, and that without such property rights, no other rights are possible.

Again, Rand was not the first philosopher to put forward such ideas. In the 19th century, the radical individualist Thomas Hodgskin maintained that external property should be viewed, morally speaking, as extensions of one's body. And Rand's approach was at least implicit in the common phrase "property in," which was used throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Locke spoke of "property in one's person" (and he was not the first to do so), while many advocates of religious freedom, such as James Madison, spoke of "property in one's conscience." Madison even used the term "property in one's time" in his argument against Sabbatarian laws (i.e., laws that restricted activities on Sundays).

According to this approach, to have "property in" something (or "propriety in" something) is to have legitimate moral jurisdiction over something. It is to have a moral claim of ownership -- hence the term "self-ownership" that became popular among 19th century libertarians. Property rights are the conceptual method by which we distinguish mine from thine.

To this analysis, we need to add the meaning of "coercion," or "force," that was explored in considerable detail by Jeremy Bentham and other individualists. Coercion was commonly divided into "constraint" and "restraint." To constrain a person is to compel him to act in a manner that he would not otherwise have chosen. To restrain a person, in contrast, is to use force to prevent a person from acting as he would like.

Rand's comments about actions that qualify as the "indirect use of force" qualify (for the most part) as examples of restraint. To be free to act means to be free to dispose of one's own property (one's own body, labor, and the fruits of one's labor) as one sees fit. Thus if you are in physical possession of something that is my property, and if you take and/or keep this property in your possession without my consent, then you are exercising that form of coercion known as restraint. You are restraining me from exercising control over that which properly belongs to me.

There is absolutely nothing artificial or contrived about this method of analysis. In my experience, those who claim the contrary typically know very little about the history of individualist thought and, moreover, have given relatively little thought or serious consideration to relevant and complex philosophical problems.

I don't think Rand was especially familiar with the history of individualist thought, but she had a remarkable ability to understand the problems and arrive at reasonable solutions in a fairly systematic manner. I once attended a lecture by John Hospers in which he made the same observation. He said that Rand "reinvented a number of wheels," but that she did so in an admirable fashion that displayed a remarkable mind.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy...civilization is the process of setting man free from men." [AR]

I'm glad you used that quote...

Seriously, do you read anything else except my last lines? Cos, that's all you respond to.

I thought it self-explanatory; man free from men, means the individual from the collective,

'self-hood' from coerced social duty,

self-authority, from the counterfeit 'authority' of unknown masses -

releasing you to pursue mutual values with other individuals of your choice. ...

Tony,

There's actually a wider context to that quote. It is from Roark's speech in The Fountainhead. Here it is a little more filled out.

It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken and is running amuck.

When Rand said "civilization" here, she was using it in two different meanings. (I have found Rand doing this elsewhere.)

The first, "... one civilization fell after another," can roughly be given this meaning: a large form of government or culture that lasted long enough to form an historical identity. She called civilization in this meaning an "age" in this very quote (i.e., "Now, in our age..."). This use of civilization refers to a specific historical group of people, thus it can be plural. (Like this statement, "The following civilizations, in other words, the Roman civilization, the Egyptian civilization, the Aztec civilization, etc.")

The second, "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence..." is basically a standard. The opposite of civilization in this meaning is a savage tribe or brutal dictatorship. Freedom and lack of violence are implicit in this meaning.

In other words, this standard is like a scale of measurement. At one end there is pure civilization (so to speak) which is the ideal. At the other there is a society (or group of people) totally oppressed by violence and intimidation. And there are all forms of gradations between them. Then you judge the society you live in according to that standard. You locate your civilization on the civilization scale (to use both meanings in the same sentence).

Since this use of civilization is part of an abstract way of evaluating, one end of a form of measurement, there can be no plural.

Think about it. If Rand did not use these two meanings as I said, how can we explain the logical inconsistency of "... one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy..."?

Isn't a civilization's (a specific society's) journey into decline a form of its progress through history? If so, how does that result in progress toward more privacy? Obviously it doesn't, but you can only make that logical error if you stick with one meaning and exclude the other.

(There's also a double meaning of "progress" that can be used here, but let's keep it simple. Ah, hell... Let's do it... For the record, one meaning is going through time like history goes through the ages, i.e., progressing through the ages, and the other is moving along a standard from worse to better. i.e, progressing from savage to civilized. Rand used this last meaning in "civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy," but that meaning doesn't make sense for the meaning of civilization in her phrase "... one civilization fell after another.")

A while back I was going to write an article on Rand's habit of using the same word with two different meanings within the same work or context and give some examples. This was not one of them, but now I can add it to my notes. I still have an intention of doing that article one day, but it is not high on my priority list right now.

I think Rand did this because she had a dose of poet in her. Poets do this stuff all the time. It enhances rhetorical impact and makes people stop and think.

Unfortunately, when you get in a discussion where "gotcha" is used a lot, it makes for great confusion. So I often find her use of this form of emphasis irritating and catch myself wishing she had used a different technique. Why? Because I have wasted too many hours of my life saying, "That is not what Rand meant" to people who have an agenda (or don't have a clue).

God knows I don't mind disagreeing with Rand. I do enough of my own (especially about the scope of some of her ideas). But getting her meaning right (or at least trying to get her meaning right) has to be one the table as a prerequisite if a person is serious about the ideas and not just about his or her own posture in some imaginary contest.

I'm not ragging you and you don't fit the bill of a gotcha person. (Like I've said several times, you are one of the good guys.) I am merely using your discussion as a prompt for a tangent. But I think this is an important tangent in general for correctly understanding Rand's ideas.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

I think Tony and I were both using it in the "standard" sense.

[rhartford]

I have done minimal reading in the history of individualist thought, so I very much appreciate the knowledge and insight that George brings to this site. I want to focus on one paragraph from his post.

. . .

To this analysis [of the foundation of political theory], we need to add the meaning of "coercion," or "force," that was explored in considerable detail by Jeremy Bentham and other individualists. Coercion was commonly divided into "constraint" and "restraint." To constrain a person is to compel him to act in a manner that he would not otherwise have chosen. To restrain a person, in contrast, is to use force to prevent a person from acting as he would like.

. . .

Suppose person A has a rocking chair. Someone, person B, wants to take it from A and A wants to stop B from taking it. Suspend moral judgment for a moment. Each “have chosen” “to act in a manner” that they “would like.” Only one can have their chosen action take place. The other will be subject to constraint or restraint as described above. Before adding ethical considerations, the situation is symmetrical.

Of course, the solution is that the owner (be it A or B) of the rocking chair (the owner’s property) should be free to act and the other should be restrained. But, ownership and property are social concepts prior to political theory. When a value is created, the creator – not anyone else in the social context – is the owner and the value the owner has created is the owner’s property.

In political theory, the decision to protect the owner/property relationship, and prohibit transfer of property without the owner’s consent, determines whether A’s “chosen action” is protected and B’s restrained, or vice versa. The essence of justification of protection of the owner/property relation is the nature of value creation and its role in supporting a man’s survival and happiness. The essence of implementing protection of the owner/property relation is to protect the owner’s consent. In my view, focusing on protection of consent may lead to more fruitful advances in political theory than focusing on prohibiting the use of force to violate consent, the NIOF principle.

[Brant Gaede]

I have done minimal reading in the history of individualist thought, so I very much appreciate the knowledge and insight that George brings to this site. I want to focus on one paragraph from his post.

. . .

To this analysis [of the foundation of political theory], we need to add the meaning of "coercion," or "force," that was explored in considerable detail by Jeremy Bentham and other individualists. Coercion was commonly divided into "constraint" and "restraint." To constrain a person is to compel him to act in a manner that he would not otherwise have chosen. To restrain a person, in contrast, is to use force to prevent a person from acting as he would like.

. . .

Suppose person A has a rocking chair. Someone, person B, wants to take it from A and A wants to stop B from taking it. Suspend moral judgment for a moment. Each “have chosen” “to act in a manner” that they “would like.” Only one can have their chosen action take place. The other will be subject to constraint or restraint as described above. Before adding ethical considerations, the situation is symmetrical.

Of course, the solution is that the owner (be it A or B) of the rocking chair (the owner’s property) should be free to act and the other should be restrained. But, ownership and property are social concepts prior to political theory. When a value is created, the creator – not anyone else in the social context – is the owner and the value the owner has created is the owner’s property.

In political theory, the decision to protect the owner/property relationship, and prohibit transfer of property without the owner’s consent, determines whether A’s “chosen action” is protected and B’s restrained, or vice versa. The essence of justification of protection of the owner/property relation is the nature of value creation and its role in supporting a man’s survival and happiness. The essence of implementing protection of the owner/property relation is to protect the owner’s consent. In my view, focusing on protection of consent may lead to more fruitful advances in political theory than focusing on prohibiting the use of force to violate consent, the NIOF principle.

If you protect consent you define consent and you may define the owner out of consent--for his own good. This eventually maximizes state power over the individual by muddying the theorectical waters of freedom and individualism. Yes, the advances will be more fruitful, but do we want to eat that fruit? There is also what seems to be a heavy streak of utilitarianism supporting your politics that tends to cut out Randian ethics. That's not too clear either.

NIOF is not an ethical primary, but there are a lot of ethics in there. It's politically right to do what you want to do as long as it is not IOF, which is politically wrong. There is a reason natural human rights are negative, not positive. Positive is in the giving, and that could mean most anything. I don't want to be on the receiving end without serious vetting.

--Brant

[anthony]

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy...civilization is the process of setting man free from men." [AR]

I'm glad you used that quote...

Seriously, do you read anything else except my last lines? Cos, that's all you respond to. I thought it self-explanatory; man free from men, means the individual from the collective, 'self-hood' from coerced social duty, self-authority, from the counterfeit 'authority' of unknown masses - releasing you to pursue mutual values with other individuals of your choice. ...

Tony, There's actually a wider context to that quote. It is from Roark's speech in The Fountainhead. Here it is a little more filled out.

It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken and is running amuck.

When Rand said "civilization" here, she was using it in two different meanings. (I have found Rand doing this elsewhere.) The first, "... one civilization fell after another," can roughly be given this meaning: a large form of government or culture that lasted long enough to form an historical identity. She called civilization in this meaning an "age" in this very quote (i.e., "Now, in our age..."). This use of civilization refers to a specific historical group of people, thus it can be plural. (Like this statement, "The following civilizations, in other words, the Roman civilization, the Egyptian civilization, the Aztec civilization, etc.") The second, "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence..." is basically a standard. The opposite of civilization in this meaning is a savage tribe or brutal dictatorship. Freedom and lack of violence are implicit in this meaning. In other words, this standard is like a scale of measurement. At one end there is pure civilization (so to speak) which is the ideal. At the other there is a society (or group of people) totally oppressed by violence and intimidation. And there are all forms of gradations between them. Then you judge the society you live in according to that standard. You locate your civilization on the civilization scale (to use both meanings in the same sentence). Since this use of civilization is part of an abstract way of evaluating, one end of a form of measurement, there can be no plural. Think about it. If Rand did not use these two meanings as I said, how can we explain the logical inconsistency of "... one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy..."? Isn't a civilization's (a specific society's) journey into decline a form of its progress through history? If so, how does that result in progress toward more privacy? Obviously it doesn't, but you can only make that logical error if you stick with one meaning and exclude the other. (There's also a double meaning of "progress" that can be used here, but let's keep it simple. Ah, hell... Let's do it... For the record, one meaning is going through time like history goes through the ages, i.e., progressing through the ages, and the other is moving along a standard from worse to better. i.e, progressing from savage to civilized. Rand used this last meaning in "civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy," but that meaning doesn't make sense for the meaning of civilization in her phrase "... one civilization fell after another.") A while back I was going to write an article on Rand's habit of using the same word with two different meanings within the same work or context and give some examples. This was not one of them, but now I can add it to my notes. I still have an intention of doing that article one day, but it is not high on my priority list right now. I think Rand did this because she had a dose of poet in her. Poets do this stuff all the time. It enhances rhetorical impact ...Michael

Michael,

Definitely her technique! 'Poetry' in her intellectual prose...and didacticism in her 'poetry'. (Well, certainly in AS) It's always fascinated me.

Style-wise, powerful combinations, that unfortunately could have a negative impact on young writers searching out their own voice.

I've thought about this a lot. (You have also referred to it in the past.)

For that quote, sure, Rand utilized 'civilisation' two ways - one as the moral ideal,

the other as the generic noun.

I don't have a problem with that, though I agree that one has to allow her some leeway in her meanings - apply the context, and refer to previous writings - to 'know what she meant'. I think it has become second nature for experienced O'ists, as you know yourself.

Which would horrify her (I'd guess) given her finely meticulous choice of word and crafting of sentence construct.

I think, for instance in this case, "Privacy" is key here. Given the context of collectivism, it's apparent what she meant:

("Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.")

Or, fleshed out: A moral civilization is the result of the progress from the public (collectivism) to the private (individualism.)

(And all that it entails: replacing dutiful responsibility towards others, with self-responsibility by all men; diminishing the power of the many over the one; etc.)

Tony

[Dennis Hardin]

Those of us who do not possess your Ayn Rand Decoder Ring did not realize that she did not wish to be taken literally, that she was oversimplifying this issue. We did not realize that Rand was speaking loosely or perhaps metaphorically. We did not realize that when Rand said, as she did over and over again, that "force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use," what she really meant to say was: "force may be use only in retaliation (with many exceptions) and only against those who initiate its use (with many exceptions)."

Thanks for clearing this up and for resolving the anarchist/minarchist debate, at long last. Until your explanation, the simple-minded on both sides of the controversy thought that Rand meant what she said, so the controversy revolved around the issue of whether or not a limited government must initiate force.

You're welcome.

Every minarchist I have debated over the years -- such as NB, BB, John Hospers, Tibor Machan, and William Thomas (even Phil Coates) -- insisted that a proper government is not permitted to initiate force, so they have attempted to rebut the anarchist claim that a limited government must initiate force. We now understand, thanks to your decoder ring, that their concerns were unwarranted. You are the first minarchist (that I know of) to point out that Rand was simplifying matters a great deal, and that when she said that legitimate force may be used only against those who initiate its use, she really meant "sometimes," not "only."

Thus have you cut through the Gordian Knot by saying, in effect: A proper limited government must and will initiate force in a number of areas, so what's the big deal?

[Rand]stated that the basic way to violate individual rights was through the initiation of physical force. She cited many, many exceptions to that principle. Libel and slander laws and reckless endangerment are just two examples.

Rand also stated (many times) that "Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force." "Only" does not mean "basic." It means "exclusively" or "solely." Rand used the word "basic" in the following context: "The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others."

"Basic," in this context, means "fundamental" or "foundational." The fundamental political principle of the O'ist ethics, she said, is: "no man may initate the use of physical force against others."

The only exceptions to the NIOF principle that Rand ever acknowledged were emergency situations. She did not regard the "exceptions" you mention as exceptions at all. She never so much as hinted at any such thing.

Ghs

In thinking about this issue further, it occurs to me that Rand did not consider such issues as defamation of character, reckless endangerment or intellectual property to be exceptions to the noninitiation of force principle. Rather, her position was that, once these issues were objectively established as consistent with rights—i.e., as conditions of existence required for proper human survival—violations of them would constitute the initiation of force.

I have been approaching the issue of the initiation of physical force from the existential perspective of who first engages in a literal act of physically compelling one individual to do something—because that is the approach used by the anarchist. The anarchist says: you cannot physically stop me from starting an agency whose purpose if to use force strictly in retaliation. On a purely existential level, the monopoly government is engaging in the first act of the initiation of physical force by stopping that agency from doing what it purports to do.

Similarly, in the case of fraud, the government is the first party engaging in a literal act of the initiation of physical force. Prior to arresting the defrauder, no physical coercion has been exercised.

The same is true with respect to contract law. When there is disagreement about the settlement, the first act of physical force is when the settlement is enforced by the police. In the other cases of indirect force I cited--stalking, gang intimidation and bomb threats--the first act of literal physical coercion is taken by the police.

When Rand used the term “initiation of physical force,” however, she was not speaking in strictly existential terms. This is why she did not regard the initiation of physical force as a fundamental, as you claim. In her view, it is necessary to define what is or is not a right before you can correctly ascertain who is initiating the force.

You put the cart before the horse. You claim that whenever force is used, rights are violated. She says that you do not know who is initiating force until the nature of rights has been proven and defined.

In "The Nature of Government," Rand spends several paragraphs explaining what rights are before she says the following:

To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force.”

CUI, p. 289

You simply say: Individual rights means that no man may initiate physical force against another. You skip the part about clearly formulating what individual rights are, which—as I have repeated several times before--is the more fundamental issue.

David Kelley explains the issue this way:

Many libertarians, indeed, regard a principal banning coercion as a kind of axiom from which all principles assigning rights can be derived. In effect, the fundamental right is the right not to be coerced, and specific rights can be established by identifying specific forms of coercion. Property rights in particular are to be established by identifying certain actions involving physical objects as acts of coercion

The problem with this approach is that it works only if we can identify a given act as coercive prior to and independently of any premises about the rights of individuals affected by the act– otherwise we would not be able to derive those rights from a ban on coercion. It is clear that it cannot be done in regard to the right of property. In this case, what the libertarian must show is that prior to any recognition or acceptance of property rights, we can identify certain uses of a physical object by ‘A’ as acts of coercion against ‘B’. But how are we to do this? If we already know that ‘B’ owns the object, then ‘A’ s’ taking the object or using it without ‘B’s’ permission may be regarded as coercive: it prevents ‘B’ from acting in ways that fall within his de jure freedom. If we do not know whether ‘B’ owns the object, however, then we cannot tell merely by inspecting ‘A’s’ action whether it is coercive. If I walk across a piece of land, or fence it off and plant it, there is simply no way to tell whether I have engaged in coercion without knowing whether the land belongs to someone else.

David Kelley, "Life, Liberty and Property"

Human Rights, Paul, Miller, Paul, p. 111

My Ayn Rand Decoder Ring simply amounts to placing her view of force in the context of the rest of her philosophy. Here is how Chris Sciabarra explains Rand's view of rights:

The notion of rights has had a long intellectual history, emerging from the natural law prescriptions of antiquity and reaching its apex in Lockean political philosophy.

Rand’s approach, however, differs from the rights doctrines of classical liberalism because it is self-consciously derived from a broader theory of ethics. Whereas some libertarian thinkers, such as Rothbard, begin their defense of rights with an axiom of nonaggression, Rands theory is the culmination of a full-bodied system of thought Rand approached her philosophical totality from a variety of vantage points. Since a social existence is necessary for the flourishing of the individual, Rand's defense of rights is her consideration of this totality from the perspective of social relations. Everything she wrote about being, knowing, ethics, life, survival, reason and the integrated nature of human beings is internal to her concept of individual rights.

In later years, Rand expanded on her earlier formulations and integrated these into the corpus of her fully developed philosophy. She argued that the concept of rights provides a moral bridge between individual ethics and social relations. It "preserves and protects individual morality in a social context," and is "the means of subordinating society to moral law." Just as life provides the standard of morality, so, too, the right to life provides the basis for all other rights. For Rand, "the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self generated action – which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life."

Chris Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical

p. 274-275

Rand held that it is appropriate to undertake the existential act of the initiation of physical force against those who were engaged in the violation of rights. Technically, she did not consider this the initiation of force, however. She put the libertarian anarchist in the exact same position as the con artist, the extortionist, the stalker, the street gang or the terrorist calling in bomb threats, because there is no such thing as a "right" to set yourself up as an independent agency imposing your view of “legitimate” force outside the exclusive province of government.

The oversimplication I spoke of consisted of Rand’s use of the phrase noninitation of force without always making it absolutely clear that clarification of the nature of rights must precede any understanding of what that phrase means.

She said, in some cases, “The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.”

In other cases, she said, “Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force.”

To avoid the anarchist’s confusion, she should always have put the issue of the initiation of the use of force in the context of objectively defined rights.

[Dennis Hardin]

When the jeweler withholds your physical property, he is, in effect, stealing something that belongs to you. So you could say that forcibly taking the ring from him is retaliatory force. But how does that apply when someone claims that he did fulfill the terms of a contract, and the other party disagrees? For instance, a contractor builds a structure to contractual specifications, but completes the project one day after the contractual deadline. A judge or arbitrator enters the picture, and has to decide upon an equitable settlement. If one party disagrees with that settlement, force must be initiated to enact that settlement.

And, to repeat, the whole notion of "indirect force" totally subverts the non-initiation of physical force principle as anything remotely resembling an objective guide to the definition of rights.

Your problem is with Rand, not with me. As Rand wrote in "The Nature of Government":

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner's consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

It is perfectly fine if you disagree with Rand's analysis. If you think that her analysis of the "indirect use of force" totally subverts her NIOF principle, then we can discuss this problem. But you have no business posing as a defender of Rand while directly contradicting what she said.

Ghs

I'm not contradicting what she said at all. To repeat what I said above: the whole notion of "indirect force" totally subverts the non-initiation of physical force principle as anything remotely resembling an objective guide to the definition of rights.

As my prior post makes clear, Rand did not consider the non-initiation of force principle as an objective guide to the definition of rights. A full clarification of the nature of rights must precede any rational understanding of what the "non-initiation of force" means.

As to the question of "unilateral breach of contract," do you seriously want to argue that any and all instances of breach of contract are as clearcut as the one situation she describes? If one party withholds payment, then of course she is correct. But there are numerous instances where the party being accused of a "unilateral breach" contends he has fulfilled the terms of the contract, and a judge must resolve the dispute. How is the settlement to be enacted without the force of government standing behind the judge's decision? I'm quite sure Ayn Rand was well aware of such disputed settlements.

As I recall, Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden were directly involved in a disputed settlement over his rights to the articles he had written for The Objectivist.

[Dennis Hardin]

Abortion is a good example of how fuzzy your thinking is. A fetus is part of a woman's body, and a woman, as a self-owner, has a right to do with her body whatever she likes. An abortion is not "technically" initiating force. You can initiate force only against another independent moral agent. If you hit youself in the head, you are not initiating force against yourself, technically or in any other way.

This is one instance of why I said that your examples go all over the map and are poorly thought out.

Ghs

So, tell me, George. At what point does the fetus become an "independent moral agent"? Is it okay for the woman to bash the baby's head in moments before bringing it to full term? It's her body. She can do what she wants while it's still part of her body, right? She can use a coat hanger to pulverize the little parasite to her heart's content. Right? That's not "initiating force." As long as the baby is inside her--or even partly inside her--it doesn't have any rights.

Since your thinking is obviously so vastly superior to mine, please use your "basic political principle" to clarify when the fetus can no longer be slaughtered by the mother. You've dispensed with all of my nonobjective, muddled thinking about the conditions of a moral existence. NIOF is all you need. Right?

I would be happy to clarify your muddled thinking on this matter.

The fetus acquires independent rights at the moment when it becomes an independent being, i.e., at the moment of birth. Until that moment, it is part of the woman's body and falls within the jurisdiction of her self-ownership. A woman cannot lose her right to self-ownership merely in virtue of becoming pregant. Pregnancy is not an aggressive act.

You ask: "Is it okay for the woman to bash the baby's head in moments before bringing it to full term?" No, this is not "okay" in a moral sense. On the contrary, I would condemn this as a morally reprehensible act (in most situations). But the woman's action, though highly immoral, would not be unjust.

Ghs

So the baby, moments before delivery, is not yet an "independent moral agent," and can be rightfully killed by the mother. You think that would be "immoral," but "just."

I suppose that's the sort of brilliant, subtle reasoning one would expect from someone who takes the NIOF principle as his starting point in the definition of rights. Thanks for allowing us to bear witness to your genius. From my "muddled" perspective, this is insane.

FYI, not that I think you will give a rip, Ayn Rand questioned the legitimacy of abortion after the first trimester.

"Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a 'right to life.' A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable.Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Letter, A Last Survey--Part I ,Vol. IV, No. 2 November-December 1975

But then, Rand held that rights were an extension of morality, not a license to kill.

[Dennis Hardin]

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot argue that intellectual property rights are invalid, and then argue that stealing intellectual property—i.e., stealing something that is not physical—is an initiation of force. If you oppose intellectual property rights, then from your perspective, Rand is sanctioning the initiation of force. It is only from the perspective of someone who agrees with the notion of intellectual property that protecting such rights constitutes retaliatory force.

Rather, I would say that in making a good-faith effort to delineate the particulars of her NIOF principle, Rand made a mistake in regard to IP. The result of this error, if enforced, would result in the initiation of force, in my judgment, but this is an unintended consequence of Rand's position. In no way did she sanction (i.e., approve of, support, or encourage) the initiation of force per se.

Ghs

Rand clearly recognized that intellectual property would involve the initiation of physical force on an existential level. And that is simply one more piece of evidence to show that she did not regard the NIOF principle as representing any sort of guide to the definition of rights.

The delineation of rights must come first, philosophically, before we can assess what constitutes the initiation of force.

[Dennis Hardin]

I want to explain, if only summarily, why I think Rand's stress on the NIOF principle as the foundation of her political theory is so important.

What Rand did, better than any previous political philosopher, was to explicitly isolate the NIOF principle as the foundation of rights theory in general. She argued that the use of reason is essential to man's survival and happiness, and that the initiation of force, in its various manifestations, prevents us from using our reason. And she clearly understood that our rights to external property are the moral means by which we implement our choices, and that without such property rights, no other rights are possible.

The NIOF principle is not the fundation of her political theory. Her derivation and explication of rights provides that foundation. And it is only after rights have been clarified and defined that the NIOF principle can even be properly understood or applied.

Again, Rand was not the first philosopher to put forward such ideas. In the 19th century, the radical individualist Thomas Hodgskin maintained that external property should be viewed, morally speaking, as extensions of one's body. And Rand's approach was at least implicit in the common phrase "property in," which was used throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Locke spoke of "property in one's person" (and he was not the first to do so), while many advocates of religious freedom, such as James Madison, spoke of "property in one's conscience." Madison even used the term "property in one's time" in his argument against Sabbatarian laws (i.e., laws that restricted activities on Sundays).

According to this approach, to have "property in" something (or "propriety in" something) is to have legitimate moral jurisdiction over something. It is to have a moral claim of ownership -- hence the term "self-ownership" that became popular among 19th century libertarians. Property rights are the conceptual method by which we distinguish mine from thine.

Objectivism rejects the entire notion of "self-ownership" as the basis of the right to life. The acceptance of this idea is one more example of the failure to appreciate the underlying philosophical basis of rights.

Q: Is there a difference between saying that someone is the owner of his own life and saying that someone has a right to his own life?

Peikoff: Ownership is a concept which implies a relationship between you and an external object. There's the owner and the external object you possess. How can you own yourself? Who is the owner that is doing the owning of the owner? This is nonsensical. There is someone over and above me who is me that's owning my body and soul. Ownership is a concept that only applies to external property. You own physical objects that you can use and dispose of. You don't own your own freedom.

This whole idea came into being many generations ago from very bad, frightened conservatives who thought that the safest way to defend individualism was to make it all a matter of property rights. Therefore, individual rights are just a form of property rights. You just own yourself. This was in the day when property rights were considered sacrosanct but life and liberty were thought of as vague abstractions. This is a completely wrong inversion because it makes property the primary instead of the derivative.

Podcast

In this case, I think Peikoff is totally accurate his analysis.

To this analysis, we need to add the meaning of "coercion," or "force," that was explored in considerable detail by Jeremy Bentham and other individualists. Coercion was commonly divided into "constraint" and "restraint." To constrain a person is to compel him to act in a manner that he would not otherwise have chosen. To restrain a person, in contrast, is to use force to prevent a person from acting as he would like.

Rand's comments about actions that qualify as the "indirect use of force" qualify (for the most part) as examples of restraint. To be free to act means to be free to dispose of one's own property (one's own body, labor, and the fruits of one's labor) as one sees fit. Thus if you are in physical possession of something that is my property, and if you take and/or keep this property in your possession without my consent, then you are exercising that form of coercion known as restraint. You are restraining me from exercising control over that which properly belongs to me.

There is absolutely nothing artificial or contrived about this method of analysis. In my experience, those who claim the contrary typically know very little about the history of individualist thought and, moreover, have given relatively little thought or serious consideration to relevant and complex philosophical problems.

I don't think Rand was especially familiar with the history of individualist thought, but she had a remarkable ability to understand the problems and arrive at reasonable solutions in a fairly systematic manner. I once attended a lecture by John Hospers in which he made the same observation. He said that Rand "reinvented a number of wheels," but that she did so in an admirable fashion that displayed a remarkable mind.

Ghs

This strikes me as a very strained analysis, to say the least.

To begin with, it’s a false dichotomy. When you compel someone to act in a way they would not have chosen (i.e., “constraint”), you are also restraining that person from doing those things they normally would have done (“restraint”).

To compel someone to act differently is also to stop someone from acting normally. For instance, fraud, breach of contract and extortion—Rand’s basic examples of “indirect force” in The Nature of Government--are all forms of stealing. Both constraint and restraint apply to acts of stealing. First, you compel someone to do something they would not otherwise have done by choice—you obtain a material good they would not have otherwise given you. At the same time, you prevent them from having that good and using it. The difference is, in the case of both fraud and breach of contract, deception and/or false pretenses are being used. In the case of extortion, a threat of force is being used.

The same is true of other examples of indirect force---e.g., stalking, gang intimidation and bomb threats. You compel the victims to act otherwise than they would have chosen and you prevent them from pursuing their values in the way they normally would have done.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dennis,

It occurs to me that using NIOF as an axiom instead of one principle among others within a hierarchy of concepts is the ultimate in mind-body dichotomy.

In the axiom version, the mind is removed from social relations at the foundation and the body reigns supreme. In other words, you can only use force against a body--and it doesn't matter at that level (at the principle level) whether that body has a mind or not.

I understand NIOF more in terms of bullying human beings than just initiating force--which means I reject it as an axiom. (Sometimes you have to initiate force against a person to save his or her life so I exclude that from rights violations, but this stuff has been discussed and nit-picked ad nauseum). Bullying means exercising power over others to extract advantages and values from them that they would not freely give, in trade or otherwise. (Stupid extraction is when the bully doesn't even gain value from the value he takes away from the victim. He just takes and/or destroys.)

I include cult manipulations as part of this basis (bullying). Much of cult stuff is not physical so it's complicated. But I definitely see a rights violation in leading a person by baby-steps down a mind control funnel--even if it is masked as making each baby-step to appear as informed consent. This is another issue than NIOF as an axiom. but I mention it here because, although it does not involve force, it definitely involves victims. (Where's the force in love-bombing, for instance? But that will make a person accept and do all kinds of crazy stuff he would not do otherwise. I could go on and on...)

In another way of looking at this, I accept the urge to exercise power as a normal inherent part of human nature (the underbelly part deriving from our animal brains) and the NIOF principle as one form of channeling that urge in a positive direction in social relations. Existentially (or metaphysically), the urge to power is more fundamental than NIOF because it is part of man's identity, whereas NIOF is not. People are prone to acting on power when their conceptual brains are not engaged. They only act on NIOF if they resist that urge, and they will only do that if their conceptual faculty steps in to take control at the moment.

You do not need NIOF in order to turn your rational faculty on, this happens automatically many times during the day, albeit you need freedom in order to act on your reason to the full.

Unfortunately, our capacity to keep our rational faculty turned on and fully aware throughout the day is limited. So inherently we live a lot of time in other mental states and on autopilot. And in those states, we are vulnerable to doing bad things based on an urge to power if it surges up. Choosing NIOF as an important principle and internalizing it is one good way for your awareness to kick in and slam the brakes on in those cases, but that is a far cry from using it as an axiom.

I believe one of the good things in our court system is that it acknowledges this by taking intent into account when examining a crime. I don't see how intent enters if NIOF is used as an axiom. The mind has been excluded at the foundation.

I'm doing a project right now on Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. To riff off of that, our court system uses a "think and commit crime" standard in defining punishments, with thought transmuted into action getting the heaviest penalties and action without thought (or with little thought) getting the lightest.

I'm fully on board with that precisely because it reflects human nature as part of the mix in rights violations.

(The courts can be and are unfair, too, but that is another discussion--one that does not deal with the point of including the mind, not just the body, in axioms about human beings.)

Michael

[Xray]

There are many, many things in a free society that would be highly immoral but not unjust, and which should not therefore fall within the province of coercive laws. If, while driving along a country road, you happen across a little girl, hit by a car, who has been badly injured, you should not be legally obligated to help her. In fact, if you are sadistic enough, you could even stand over her and taunt her as she dies, take pictures with your cell phone and then post the pictures on the Internet, and then leave her in the middle of the road as you found her, perhaps to be run over again by another car.

I can concoct other scenarios that are even more morally reprehensible, if you wish, but which should not fall within the province of law. Living in a free society can be a real bitch.

Which raises the question whether living in such a "free" anarchistic society would be desirable. For isn't there something missing in this model of an anarchistic society where e. g. the pinching of a pencil can be sued (via a privately hired agency) because property rights of the pencil owner have been violated, but a person watching an accident victim bleed to death (instead of calling an ambulance) cannot be sued because the watcher did not initiate force and not violate any property rights?

Does the protection of property rights count more than an individual's right to have his/her life protected?

[Brant Gaede]

I think these posts-counter posts between George and Dennis are extremely important and basically address what I have always considered wrong with libertarianism--the severing of politics from the rest of philosophy, especially ethics. The ethics that are in politics are not integrated with the ethics that are not and cannot be considered basic even though the NIOF principle is extremely important. NIOF works, sort of, in cases of gross and obvious criminality--rape, kidnapping, murder, etc.--but is no substitute for general philosophical investigation and reasoning or a complete politics of governance. I so far don't see even George with all his knowledge and brain power over-coming this essential libertarian problem of using "anarchy" as its philosophical default.

The Objectivist has another problem, however, which is Objectivism's cultural intolerance to true individualism which constitutes a philosophical blackade of its own to people who might be willing to approach its ideas from a political orientation--libertarians--or a cultural orientation--conservatives.

--Brant

[Xray]

"Existentially (or metaphysically), the urge to power is more fundamental than NIOF because it is part of man's identity, whereas NIOF is not.

Imo NIOF as a formulated political principle is a product of humanity's cultural evolution toward less violence.

As for NIOF not being part of man's identity - NIOF is certainly different from the urge to power driven by the need for survival, but since survival in groups also requires a certain harmonious reciprocity (just think of the many mutual grooming activities by higher developed mammals living in groups), the NIOF principle can also be reconciled with another part of man's nature. The more peaceful part.

We operate on NIOF countless times in everyday life, without necessarily having to be consciously aware of the NIOF significance of e. g. gestures like openly extending our hand to the other peson as a greeting gesture. Open hand = you can see that I carry no weapon; I don't want to initiate force, but am approaching you in a peaceful way.

[Brant Gaede]

"Existentially (or metaphysically), the urge to power is more fundamental than NIOF because it is part of man's identity, whereas NIOF is not.

Imo NIOF as a formulated political principle is a product of humanity's cultural evolution toward less violence.

As for NIOF not being part of man's identity - NIOF is certainly different from the urge to power driven by the need for survival, but since survival in groups also requires a certain harmonious reciprocity (just think of the many mutual grooming activities by higher developed mammals living in groups), the NIOF principle can also be reconciled with another part of man's nature. The more peaceful part.

We operate on NIOF countless times in everyday life, without necessarily having to be consciously aware of the NIOF significance of e. g. gestures like openly extending our hand to the other peson as a greeting gesture. Open hand = you can see that I carry no weapon; I don't want to initiate force, but am approaching you in a peaceful way.

Which is a typical female trick to get what a woman wants from a man who only has a gun he cannot use to protect himself without viiolating the NIOF principle.

--Brant

I don't know how to stop them

[George H. Smith]

In thinking about this issue further, it occurs to me that Rand did not consider such issues as defamation of character, reckless endangerment or intellectual property to be exceptions to the noninitiation of force principle. Rather, her position was that, once these issues were objectively established as consistent with rights—i.e., as conditions of existence required for proper human survival—violations of them would constitute the initiation of force. I have been approaching the issue of the initiation of physical force from the existential perspective of who first engages in a literal act of physically compelling one individual to do something—because that is the approach used by the anarchist. The anarchist says: you cannot physically stop me from starting an agency whose purpose if to use force strictly in retaliation. On a purely existential level, the monopoly government is engaging in the first act of the initiation of physical force by stopping that agency from doing what it purports to do. Similarly, in the case of fraud, the government is the first party engaging in a literal act of the initiation of physical force. Prior to arresting the defrauder, no physical coercion has been exercised. The same is true with respect to contract law. When there is disagreement about the settlement, the first act of physical force is when the settlement is enforced by the police. In the other cases of indirect force I cited--stalking, gang intimidation and bomb threats--the first act of literal physical coercion is taken by the police. When Rand used the term “initiation of physical force,” however, she was not speaking in strictly existential terms. This is why she did not regard the initiation of physical force as a fundamental, as you claim. In her view, it is necessary to define what is or is not a right before you can correctly ascertain who is initiating the force. You put the cart before the horse. You claim that whenever force is used, rights are violated. She says that you do not know who is initiating force until the nature of rights has been proven and defined. In "The Nature of Government," Rand spends several paragraphs explaining what rights are before she says the following: To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force.” CUI, p. 289 You simply say: Individual rights means that no man may initiate physical force against another. You skip the part about clearly formulating what individual rights are, which—as I have repeated several times before--is the more fundamental issue. David Kelley explains the issue this way:

Many libertarians, indeed, regard a principal banning coercion as a kind of axiom from which all principles assigning rights can be derived. In effect, the fundamental right is the right not to be coerced, and specific rights can be established by identifying specific forms of coercion. Property rights in particular are to be established by identifying certain actions involving physical objects as acts of coercion The problem with this approach is that it works only if we can identify a given act as coercive prior to and independently of any premises about the rights of individuals affected by the act– otherwise we would not be able to derive those rights from a ban on coercion. It is clear that it cannot be done in regard to the right of property. In this case, what the libertarian must show is that prior to any recognition or acceptance of property rights, we can identify certain uses of a physical object by ‘A’ as acts of coercion against ‘B’. But how are we to do this? If we already know that ‘B’ owns the object, then ‘A’ s’ taking the object or using it without ‘B’s’ permission may be regarded as coercive: it prevents ‘B’ from acting in ways that fall within his de jure freedom. If we do not know whether ‘B’ owns the object, however, then we cannot tell merely by inspecting ‘A’s’ action whether it is coercive. If I walk across a piece of land, or fence it off and plant it, there is simply no way to tell whether I have engaged in coercion without knowing whether the land belongs to someone else. David Kelley, "Life, Liberty and Property" Human Rights, Paul, Miller, Paul, p. 111

My Ayn Rand Decoder Ring simply amounts to placing her view of force in the context of the rest of her philosophy. Here is how Chris Sciabarra explains Rand's view of rights:

The notion of rights has had a long intellectual history, emerging from the natural law prescriptions of antiquity and reaching its apex in Lockean political philosophy. Rand’s approach, however, differs from the rights doctrines of classical liberalism because it is self-consciously derived from a broader theory of ethics. Whereas some libertarian thinkers, such as Rothbard, begin their defense of rights with an axiom of nonaggression, Rands theory is the culmination of a full-bodied system of thought Rand approached her philosophical totality from a variety of vantage points. Since a social existence is necessary for the flourishing of the individual, Rand's defense of rights is her consideration of this totality from the perspective of social relations. Everything she wrote about being, knowing, ethics, life, survival, reason and the integrated nature of human beings is internal to her concept of individual rights. In later years, Rand expanded on her earlier formulations and integrated these into the corpus of her fully developed philosophy. She argued that the concept of rights provides a moral bridge between individual ethics and social relations. It "preserves and protects individual morality in a social context," and is "the means of subordinating society to moral law." Just as life provides the standard of morality, so, too, the right to life provides the basis for all other rights. For Rand, "the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self generated action – which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life." Chris Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical p. 274-275

I don't have substantial disagreements with any of this (though you have oversimplified the problem). I have never claimed that the NIOF principle is a moral primary. But once the NIOF principle has been derived and justified by moral reasoning, it becomes, for Rand, the foundation of political theory and the necessary presupposition of a free society.

Just because the NIOF is not a moral primary does not mean that you can posit all kinds of exceptions, willy-nilly, on the social and political level. Rand was very clear about this. She also insisted that a proper government is strictly limited to those powers that have been delegated to it by individuals. All rights, she said (like Lockeans before her), are individual rights. A government cannot possess special rights over and above the rights of individuals.

Thus if you wish to argue that a government has the right to initiate force, you must first show that individuals have the right to initiate force against other individuals. I eagerly await your explanation of how Rand defended and approved of this right. Perhaps you will find what you need in another dimension.

Rand held that it is appropriate to undertake the existential act of the initiation of physical force against those who were engaged in the violation of rights. Technically, she did not consider this the initiation of force, however.

This is gobbledygook. All acts of force, whether initiatory or retaliatory, are "existential," i.e., they are acts that, once undertaken, actually exist. To say that a given act is existentially the initiation of force but "technically" not the initiation of force is a needless and self-contradictory distinction. Rand said nothing like this. You are merely venturing out farther on thin ice in an effort to defend an interpretation that had no basis to begin with.

Acts of force do not come with labels that enable us to differentiate between initiatory force and retaliatory force. We distinguish between the two by identifying the relevant rights involved -- and this is a primary philosophical function of a theory of rights.

A man enters a house, picks up a television, and leaves with it. Has this person initiated force against any one? Well, we don't know yet because we don't have sufficient information. Is this the guy's own house? Is it his television? If not, does he have the consent of the owner? Etc., etc.. Only after we have this information about the relevant rights can we determine whether force was involved in this act.

She put the libertarian anarchist in the exact same position as the con artist, the extortionist, the stalker, the street gang or the terrorist calling in bomb threats, because there is no such thing as a "right" to set yourself up as an independent agency imposing your view of “legitimate” force outside the exclusive province of government. The oversimplication I spoke of consisted of Rand’s use of the phrase noninitation of force without always making it absolutely clear that clarification of the nature of rights must precede any understanding of what that phrase means. She said, in some cases, “The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.” In other cases, she said, “Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force.” To avoid the anarchist’s confusion, she should always have put the issue of the initiation of the use of force in the context of objectively defined rights.

You can repeat this catechism as often as you like. But until you explain how a government acquires a legitimate monopoly on force that permits it to use force against other agencies that are doing the same thing that it does, you are pissing in the wind.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

You can repeat this catechism as often as you like. But until you explain how a government acquires a legitimate monopoly on force that permits it to use force against other agencies that are doing the same thing that it does, you are pissing in the wind.

What government acquires is what is put on it and what government de-aquires is what is taken from it. But what it is can never be "legitimate;" only just there.

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

Are there ethics in politics? If everyone was ethical, and didn't worry how anyone else chose to live, and did whatever they could to defend themselves from injustice... isn't that enough?

This is what I don't get... If people can't be trusted to be moral, and we must have laws, then who makes the laws? If it's that some people are good and some people are bad, and good people must make the laws and bad people must be kept out of politics, then how do we separate good people from bad people?

Laws, ideally, separate good people from bad people, but how are they separated before the making of laws? I think it's just a wish to unburden good people, but it's impossible. Good people will always have to deal with bad people, but they should be empowered to do so. Not by law, but by social attitudes. This giving up your right to protect yourself stuff... it's more popular to reproach someone who stands up for themselves because of this attitude, like, "Why couldn't you just obey like the rest of us?"

[anthony]

It is highly rewarding to gain the benefit of intellects being driven to max revolutions.

(Can't help picturing a naval scenario of battleships launching broadsides

with 20" guns.)

#341 from MSK is a thoughtfully original one, from my pov.

Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes!

Tony (Awaiting the salvo from USS George H Smith.)

[George H. Smith]

Abortion is a good example of how fuzzy your thinking is. A fetus is part of a woman's body, and a woman, as a self-owner, has a right to do with her body whatever she likes. An abortion is not "technically" initiating force. You can initiate force only against another independent moral agent. If you hit youself in the head, you are not initiating force against yourself, technically or in any other way.

This is one instance of why I said that your examples go all over the map and are poorly thought out.

Ghs

So, tell me, George. At what point does the fetus become an "independent moral agent"? Is it okay for the woman to bash the baby's head in moments before bringing it to full term? It's her body. She can do what she wants while it's still part of her body, right? She can use a coat hanger to pulverize the little parasite to her heart's content. Right? That's not "initiating force." As long as the baby is inside her--or even partly inside her--it doesn't have any rights.

Since your thinking is obviously so vastly superior to mine, please use your "basic political principle" to clarify when the fetus can no longer be slaughtered by the mother. You've dispensed with all of my nonobjective, muddled thinking about the conditions of a moral existence. NIOF is all you need. Right?

I would be happy to clarify your muddled thinking on this matter.

The fetus acquires independent rights at the moment when it becomes an independent being, i.e., at the moment of birth. Until that moment, it is part of the woman's body and falls within the jurisdiction of her self-ownership. A woman cannot lose her right to self-ownership merely in virtue of becoming pregant. Pregnancy is not an aggressive act.

You ask: "Is it okay for the woman to bash the baby's head in moments before bringing it to full term?" No, this is not "okay" in a moral sense. On the contrary, I would condemn this as a morally reprehensible act (in most situations). But the woman's action, though highly immoral, would not be unjust.

Ghs

So the baby, moments before delivery, is not yet an "independent moral agent," and can be rightfully killed by the mother. You think that would be "immoral," but "just."

I suppose that's the sort of brilliant, subtle reasoning one would expect from someone who takes the NIOF principle as his starting point in the definition of rights. Thanks for allowing us to bear witness to your genius. From my "muddled" perspective, this is insane.

FYI, not that I think you will give a rip, Ayn Rand questioned the legitimacy of abortion after the first trimester.

"Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a 'right to life.' A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable.Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Letter, A Last Survey--Part I ,Vol. IV, No. 2 November-December 1975

But then, Rand held that rights were an extension of morality, not a license to kill.

I never said we should take the "NIOF principle as [the] starting point in the definition of rights." On the contrary, I agree with Rand: After we justify the NIOF principle by employing a theory of individual rights, we should then apply the NIOF principle consistently in a social/political context.

Like Rand but unlike you, I am not willing to pick certain actions -- i.e., non-rights-violating actions that I don't approve of morally -- and say, in effect: Well, gee, that guy is not violating anyone's rights, but I don't personally approve of what he is doing. I think I will therefore initiate force against him and justify my violence against an innocent person by a vague appeal to exceptions to the NIOF principle. Consistency in matters of principle? How absurd!

You accused me defending a "license to kill" -- and as usual you quote Rand, as a Christian would quote the Bible, to buttress your point. Do you actually have an argument somewhere? Or, better yet, do you actually have a theory of rights that deals with the problem of when a fetus acquires a right to life and when the mother loses some of her rights, to that extent? Or would you like to throw another hissy fit?

I assume you eat meat. What?! Do you defend a license to kill helpless and innocent animals? Would you say that animials don't have any rights? What?! So is it okay with you if people torture dogs and cats, subjecting them and other animals to prolonged and intense pain for no purpose other than to give pleasure to their sadistic tormenters? You savage! Pack up your license to kill and your license to torture and begone from civilized society! We all know that if something is highly immoral it should also be illegal. Rights are an extension of morality, after all, not a license to kill and torture.

Ghs