D-Day and the Non-Aggression Principle

 

A foundational idea within libertarian thought is the non-aggression principle (NAP). I should not use physical violence against people who have not physically attacked me and have shown no evidence of plotting to do so. People who do not follow my religion or ideology and even commit blasphemy against it are not engaging in violence. As such, as hurtful as I may find their words, I must tolerate these people and cannot attempt to injure them. Libertarians go further with this doctrine and reject the legality of any law that lacks a clear victim of physical violence. For example, you have the right to shoot heroin and sleep with hookers. Such actions may be bad for your physical health as well as your family and the larger society. That being said, since these actions do not initiate physical violence, they should be legal. By contrast, all government action is, by definition, violent as it carries the implied mafia-style threat of either obeying or men with guns will do you extreme bodily harm. As such, any attempt by the government to go after people who have not initiated acts of violence themselves (people other than the likes of thieves, murderers, and invading foreign armies) is inherently illegitimate.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of this concept is Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable which is premised on the notion that it is better to be a prostitute or a drug dealer than a politician or a policeman. The fact that people are willing to break the law and risk prison in order to use your services demonstrates that people honestly want what you are selling. By contrast, as a public school teacher, I have no reason to assume that my students actually want to be in school. By agreeing to teach, I am, arguably, implicated in a conspiracy to deprive children of their liberty for hours every day in order to justify robbing the public to pay me a salary as I waste my student’s time. At best, I should allow students to play on their phones all day in order to better demonstrate that public schools are useless and should be abolished in order that kids should be allowed to make better use of their time by selling drugs and sex on a street corner.     

I would like to consider a limitation to the NAP. The NAP is premised on a world of individuals. What happens when we have to consider people as groups with narratives of initiated violence and victimhood? Imagine a German soldier sitting in a bunker, minding his own business, on the coast of Normandy, D-Day morning. Our German soldier has personally never initiated violence against anyone. Through no fault of his own, the only job he can find consists of putting on a uniform, carrying a gun, and sitting in this bunker. As this does not violate the NAP, our soldier agreed to do it.

Now our soldier finds that people he has never met are firing shells in his general direction, heedless of the fact that he might get hurt. Our soldier charges the Allied soldiers storming the beach waving a philosophy book and shouting: your actions violate the NAP and are, therefore, unethical. You are initiating violence against someone, mainly me, who has never harmed you. I was not part of the 1940 invasion of France, so it is not my fault that France is under German occupation. Furthermore, you are damaging beachfront property that does not belong to you. As none of you own property on this beachfront, you have no standing to argue that I have less of a right to be walking on this beach than you do. You need to sail back across the English Channel and leave me in peace to do my government job as inefficiently as possible. This will hasten the collapse of Nazi Germany, allowing me to finally do something useful like drug dealing or prostitution.    

Clearly, the German soldier’s position is absurd though I am increasingly frightened to suspect that many members of the Mises Caucus would be willing to agree that it is immoral for Allied soldiers to shoot him. Even though he has personally never harmed anyone, he is part of the larger system of Nazi Germany that has initiated violence against millions of people even as the vast majority of people in the system have not personally harmed anyone. Are we going to claim that the concentration camp guard who never shot anyone is innocent? What about Nazi propagandists like Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher?

Once we admit that our German soldier is guilty by virtue of our narrative that he is part of this larger system called Nazi Germany, it is hardly obvious where to draw the line. Imagine if a group of Englishmen were to charge the beaches of Normandy and open fire on the local French residents to retaliate against the Norman invasion of England in 1066, an injustice that the modern residents of Normandy have presumably benefited from in some way. Do students have the right to plant bombs in their teachers' cars in order to defend themselves against "educational violence?” On a serious note, critical race theory activists believe that you can be guilty of "structural violence" by virtue of being white and not actively working to overthrow the American political and economic systems, institutions tainted by racism.

Clearly, narratives are necessary in order to make sense of the world. That being said, once we allow for narrative thinking, we have to recognize how easy it is for anyone to game the system and argue that they are the victim of some historical injustice and that they have the moral right to do bad things to someone by virtue of the fact that the person can be connected as a beneficiary to that injustice.