Walter Block has posted a piece of correspondence he recently received on the topic of saving the world, libertarianism, and making fools of ourselves. It’s a topic we’ve addressed before — a few times, actually — but it continues to have legs. The question, in brief, is: would you steal a penny from someone to save the world?
Obviously, the heart of the question is this: how seriously do you take the non-aggression principle? Are you so committed to it that you would never engage in even the smallest violation of it under any circumstances, or do you accept that there are some situations in which the NAP isn’t the only consideration? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it remains popular among internet libertarians to claim the former.
It’s easy to see how people continue to make this mistake. The non-aggression principle, after all, is the cornerstone of libertarianism; if we’re to be libertarians, shouldn’t we support it to the maximum degree? This is foolishness, however. We should, instead, support the non-aggression principle to the appropriate degree, and, as should be readily apparent, if support of the NAP requires the death or immiseration of all mankind, it’s probably not appropriate. After all, as I’ve said before, man was not made for the NAP, but the NAP for man.
I rather like this particular illustration, because it really drives right to the heart of the issue. On the one hand, we have “saving the world,” an evocative (though relatively meaningless) bromide designed to make us think that, okay, this is about as important a goal as one can imagine. On the other hand is “stealing a penny,” which is a proxy for the most meaningless, insignificant violation of the NAP there is. If you were to steal a penny from me, I honestly would not notice the loss. I have scads of the things. I, like many merchants, keep a dish on my front counter with arbitrary pennies in it for the convenience of people whose purchases involve odd change totals. What on earth is a penny compared to the entire world? Even setting aside the question of whether or not a penny has value in a destroyed world, we can all see that this is an almost meaningless violation of the NAP, yet there remain people who would claim to put the world to the torch before accepting it.
There is a very good reason why so many young libertarians struggle with this concept. It’s very easy to fall into a mindset of what one could call “hyper holism;” libertarianism, as libertarians understand it, is good. The non-aggression principle, as the foundation of libertarianism, is therefore also good. Therefore, the thinking would go, actions pursuant to the non-aggression principle are ipso facto also good. Consider what Dr. Block’s correspondent says: he "absolutely understand[s] the ethics behind it." Ethics? Ethics underlying a decision to destroy the entire world, and all mankind with it? There is, in fact, a fundamental concept in ethics that says that, if your ethical system is incompatible with human survival and human flourishing, it is not a viable ethical system.
The truth of the matter is that we need to look a bit deeper than this. It’s not enough to say “the NAP is good, so I guess the world is doomed.” What kind of crazy philosophy is that? That’s exactly the caricature of libertarianism that leftists try to flog us with! Why on Earth would we go for that? Fortunately, nothing about libertarianism compels us to do so. We can steal the penny and save the world just fine. All libertarianism compels us to do is recognize that this comes at a cost: namely, we are guilty of the crime of stealing a penny, and can (and should!) be tried and punished accordingly.
This is where the system reaches reaches its actual conclusion: not at the crazy point where we consign the entire world to the flames to stand on some misunderstood principle, but at the point where we accept the consequences of our actions. What form those consequences take, of course, is not a question of theory; could be we apologize, could be we make restitution, could be we end up pleading our case in front of a judge. Or it could be that, since our crime was absolutely minuscule, nobody would even care enough, and we get away, as they say, scot-free.
This is what Dr. Block is talking about when he discusses "libertarian punishment theory." It is nothing more or less than the price of violating the non-aggression principle. Since, contra our detractors, we aren’t fantasizing about a world of perfect libertarians all behaving perfectly and no bad things ever happening, we can’t stop our analysis at “don’t violate the NAP.” We need to know what happens when somebody does. This is punishment theory.
The other tine of the fork, as it were, is that young libertarians often mistake what libertarianism actually is; they take it to be some type of universal moral philosophy. It is nothing of the sort. It is purely a political philosophy, which is to say: a philosophy of the ordering and structuring of society. Though we often speak colloquially in terms of “right” and “wrong,” which seems to add a moral dimension to libertarian philosophy, all it in fact tells us is whether or not a given act is legal. It is entirely possible for something to be legal according to libertarian philosophy — i.e., not in violation of the non-aggression principle — while simultaneously being immoral; prostitution comes immediately to mind. It is similarly possible to construct a situation in which the only moral choice is in violation of libertarian law, such as in the case of our stealing-a-penny-to-save-the-world gedankenexperiment. This is no contradiction in libertarianism; rather, it merely shows that some things are beyond the scope of political philosophy.
In brief: stealing a penny to save the world is a violation of the non-aggression principle and thus illegal under libertarian law, yes. That does not — emphatically does not — mean it shouldn’t be done, however. It means merely that there is a cost for doing so that must be borne, and that will not be socialized; the violator must face the consequences of his actions — which, in this case, would be exceedingly mild, as the crime in question was just shy of being meaningless.