This way of thinking about the relationship between political ethics and general ethics doesn’t follow strictly, of course perhaps there are moral principles that are concerned exclusively with the use of force and don’t depend on more general principles. On this view, natural law political ethics wouldn’t be seen as free-standing rather, natural law convictions about proper limits on the use of force would flow from natural law ethics more generally. That didn’t mean that all moral stances compatible with a commitment to non-aggression were equally good.īy rooting his position in the natural law tradition, Rothbard plausibly implied that political ethics was a subset of natural law ethics more broadly construed. As long as rejecting aggression was accepted as a ground-rule, people could get along satisfactorily even if their views on other moral questions differed. At the same time, he seems plausibly to have believed, it’s most important to get clear on the moral limits of violence. Rothbard emphasized in The Ethics of Liberty that the natural law theory he offered there was a theory of politics, that is, as he put it, of “the just use of force.” He did not intend to propose a general theory of ethics, and he stressed that serious moral questions extended well beyond questions about when force was appropriate. (For convenience, we can call these the person-aspect and the property-aspect of the NAP.) Leonard Read (who did not, perhaps, take it quite seriously enough) famously summed up this principle by observing that it was compatible with “anything that’s peaceful.” In this post, I want to ask whether an important expositions of the natural law tradition in which Rothbard and Rand were both rooted can ground something like the NAP. As commonly read in libertarian circles, the principle precludes the initiation of force against someone else’s property as well as her person.
The strand of libertarian thinking anchored in the work of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand gives pride of place, as far as political ethics are concerned, to the non-aggression principle (NAP), which holds that no one may initiate force against another person.
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