Marketable Aggression

I'm making a rambling and (I hope) constructive critique of market anarchism. Right now it's two little videos where I argue that free markets depend on "religious" presumptions of individual freedom. On my last entry, a youtube user left a comment asking how I think people in a market anarchist society would be able to respond to violent invasion if "we exclude the possibility of selective market-based violation of individual autonomy". I responded that I do believe that some violent retaliation can be legitimate (and thus shouldn't be called a "violation"), but that that retaliation must be proportional and discriminate, and that non-discriminate or non-proportional retaliation is illegitimate regardless of the market demand for it. I thought it was a fairly tight response. But maybe it was too focused.

I didn't have to concentrate on proportionality. I could have just mentioned what a lot of people today think should count as crimes. Most people I know think pedophiles should be thrown behind bars - even the non-violent pedophiles. Most people I know think the producers, sellers, and users of heavy drugs should be thrown in prison. Most people I know think the practice of keeping more than one spouse at a time is an affront to the natural order of things, and that it is within the "public interest" to legally forbid such abominations.

The policies mentioned above are all violent actions that many people would willingly demand in order to get what they believe would be a more secure environment. And all these marketable uses of violence are initiations of violence, which should go against any libertarian's code.

Then there's other kinds of marketable violence. Most people I know think it's okay to force kids to go to school - that is, to confine a non-aggressing child in a particular place regardless of his or her saying "no". Most people I know think it's okay to give kids shots against their will. Most people I know aren't disturbed in the least bit by infant genitle mutilation. Most people I know think spanking is as good and right as little league baseball.

It's easy to imagine that, if we were to get competition in governance today, our legal systems would not be libertarian (it might be better in some regards than the statist system we have now, but it wouldn't be libertarian). A market "anarchist" society without widely-shared and firmly-held beliefs about the sovereignty of the individual, and without widely-shared and firmly-held condemnations of encroachment onto the individual, would be little more than a bundle of all the worst things about democracy tightly wrapped together with all the worst things about capitalism. The political rules of a society are deeply intertwined with the prevailing sentiments of it. If we wish to ever see a world where we are free to choose otherwise, then the freedom to choose has to be something like a dogma.

Traffic Laws in a Free Society

Last week I made the mistake of admitting to someone at my workplace that I'm an anarchist.

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked.
"Sure," I said.
"Do you drive?"
"Yes."
"How do you put up with it?"
"Put up with what?"
"Stop signs. Traffic lights. Police pulling people over..."

She was one of the many who think that rejecting inherent political authority means rejecting law and order, as if there can be no such thing as law without government. But I condemn government, not because I condemn law, but because I find government to be completely incompatible with the one law that matters most - individual sovereignty.

"I have no problem with rules," I responded. "I just think people should be allowed to choose which rules to follow."

The one law (or maybe I should say one of the few laws) which isn't up for choice, but which is rightfully thrust onto everyone without their consent, is the obligation to leave others to enjoy themselves. Every other law, and every other governing body, and every other person or group of persons that wishes to exercise control over a man or his things, requires his consent, and has no authority over him without his consent.

Government laws prohibiting the manufacture, possession, use, or distribution of certain drugs are illegitimate, since they prohibit an act which harms no one and they lack the consent of the subjects. They imply that government has the right to control the bodies of its subjects.

The libertarian maxim on criminal law is "No victim, no crime." If no one is limiting another's liberty through a violent act against their body or property, or through a threat of violence against their body or property, then no one's liberty was violated, no one was victimized, and no one has a right to react forcefully.

Some libertarians have taken their rejection of victimless crimes so far that they reject laws against drunk driving. Since a crime is only committed when there is a victim, they argue, driving with an alcohol content above a specified amount should not be considered a crime. If a drunk driver drives recklessly and crashes into someone else's car and other people have to be rushed to the hospital, then the drunk driver can be prosecuted for endangering other people's lives, injuring other people, and damaging other people's property. But he should not, according to these libertarians, be prosecuted for the content of his blood. What matters is whether his actions deny someone else's sovereignty over themselves. If no one is injured, deprived, or threatened by his actions, then there is no victim, and whether he has a noticeable amount of alcohol in his body is irrelevant.

I originally wanted to respond to this line of reasoning by assaying whether drunk (or some other kind of reckless) driving poses such a threat to others that it can be treated like pulling a gun on someone. I guess I'll say very quickly that if the fear instilled by drunk drivers is so great that people actually refrain from setting foot or wheel on public roads, then yes, drunk and other reckless driving on public roads could and should be treated like any other threat that denies other people's liberty and against which people may forcefully react. But this argument only pertains to public roads, and it doesn't account for the rich diversity that would be able to exist in a free society.

Every good libertarian and classical liberal knows that we should be allowed to have private roads (and some libertarians believe that a system of private roads would be more efficient than what we have). We don't violate anyone's liberty by paving a strip of our own property and driving on it. Every good libertarian and classical liberal also knows that we should be allowed to do just about whatever we want on our own roads. If you want to ghost ride in your own driveway, parking lot, or road, that's your choice.

People already engage in activities that threaten their own lives and the lives of others, and only the most parternalist among us would call for those activities to be banned. If you want to race your own very light and very fast car on a race track, go ahead. You don't violate anyone's rights by driving that fast on that race track. So long as everyone else on the track knows that people are driving dangerously fast, and so long as the race track owners allow you to drive that fast, no one's rights are violated. If you are to be free, you should be free to take onto yourself whatever risk is necessary to pursue your own happiness. The courts are starting to disagree, but deep down inside we all know that if you want to drive like an idiot with other consenting idiots, that's your choice.

If there can be race tracks where drivers waive each other's liability and drive in a way that endangers themselves and each other without legal consequence, why shouldn't we be allowed to have private roads where drivers and passengers can do the same? From a property rights perspective, there seems to be a clear case for legally allowing private road owners to permit drunk driving on their roads.

This isn't to say, though, that all road owners have the obligation to allow drunk driving on their roads. Far be it. Road owners have the moral right to exclude drunk drivers, just as pub owners have the right to kick out belligerent drunks. To say that anyone has a moral and enforceable obligation to provide services to someone they don't want to serve is to condone slavery. And to say that anyone can be forced to allow others access to their property is to say that their property isn't really theirs to begin with. And so, from a property rights perspective, road owners have the right to keep drunk drivers and other reckless drivers off their road.

Over the past three years that I've been reading libertarian legal theory, I've noticed some anonymous fringe elements condemning police outright, and denying any right of police to pull people over or arrest anyone. Those attitudes might be libertarian in spirit, but they aren't libertarian in theory. Individual sovereignty implies that people be allowed to use proportionate and discriminate force to address threats (i.e., defensive violence is permissible), and if we should be free to hire chefs to cook for us and bus drivers to drive for us, we should also be free to hire police to protect us. And, since individual sovereignty implies each property owner's right to determine the conditions of use (that is, the rules) on his or her property, road owners have the right to employ police to pull over reckless or suspicious drivers.

Suppose I had my own house, and suppose also that I threw a party in it. One of my male guests makes some unpleasant comments about the human female, and out of consideration of my female guests I pull the guy to the side and explain to him that he can't be saying things like that at my party. If he continues, or if he goes ahead and gropes someone, I have the right to physically take hold of him and throw him out of my house. In fact, I don't have to wait for him to offend my guests, or do something that everyone acknowledges as offensive. If he so much as puts on a Che Guevara shirt, I have the right to throw him out, and to say otherwise is to say that the house I bought really doesn't belong to me. Now, I don't have the right to beat him for it, or lock him in the basement (unless he gets violent and that's the only safe place for him). I'm only entitled to use so much force as is necessary to stay sovereign over myself and what is mine, or to maintain other people's sovereignty over themselves and what is theirs.

The same goes for roads. Road owners have the right to come up with their own rules for their own roads, and they have the right to enforce those rules. Their police have the right to pull over people who don't follow those rules, to fine people who break those rules, and to drive home people who they think shouldn't be driving. Now, they wouldn't have the right to imprison people indefinitely or without cause (that's kidnapping). But they do have the right to remove from the road those drivers who break the road owner's rules, and that means they should have the right to pull people over, and chase down and set up road blocks for those who don't pull over. If I have the right to pull a guy to the side in my party, or throw him out of my house, then highway patrol should have the right to pull over people who break the road owners' rules.

Hopefully, those rules won't get too ridiculous. There's a chance that they would. Someone might strictly enforce a no bumper stickers rule, or cite people for having chrome that's too shiny. We can trust, though, that competition in roads and road security would render the most relevant and least intrusive policies, since road owners whose rules are absolutely uncalled for wouldn't see a whole lot of business and would be allowed to fail.

Now to qualify what was just said about private roads and private traffic laws. In the video I linked in the above paragraph, Walter Block suggested someone try implementing the death penalty for drunk driving. The audience laughed, and probably most of them thought he was joking. I'm quite sure he wasn't. Block thinks it's theoretically possible to voluntarily and peacefully alienate your right to live. He could and probably would argue that a driver signs away his right to live when he drives drunk on a road that is clearly marked with signs saying "Drunk drivers will be shot." Without writing a book about it, let me say that a driver doesn't alienate his right to live by driving on a road any more than a guest alienates his right to live by stepping foot in someone else's house. If he opens fire on police, or aims a gun at another driver, that's a different story. (I say more about retaliatory force in my entry on abortion.)

At any rate, even if a road owner were to have drunk drivers executed, I doubt that rule would take off. Rather than encourage drivers to not drive drunk, it would encourage drunk drivers to not get caught. Chases on those roads would be much more violent than on the other roads, and that would increase the cost of keeping that road. Also, people would want to use other roads if they know they could possibly be executed for driving funny or tired. Roads with that rule wouldn't see much business. And, if executions are so controversial, the road owners run the risk of getting boycotted.

Before closing, I'd like to underline that though road owners in a free society would be free to write and enforce their own traffic laws, they would not be free to perform disproportionate or nondiscriminate acts of violence on drivers or passengers. If it is a free society, then individual sovereignty would be the rule of law, and any act that punishes the wrong person, or punishes someone too much, would be considered illegal, and other people would have the legally-recognized right to prevent it.

Also, I should mention that private roads doesn't mean no public roads. Roderick Long has two essays, here and here, where he argues that public space is not only permitted by libertarian principles, but is also desirable, and would likely appear in a free society. Land does not need to be government-owned to be owned by and freely available to the general public. The question of who to write the traffic rules, what traffic rules to write, and how to enforce traffic rules on public roads in a free society is a question worth asking, and unfortunately a complete answer to it won't fit here. The very short answer is common law and mediation.

If you are bothered by the complexity and otherness of a system like this, just ask yourself these three questions. Should people be allowed to drive drunk on their own roads? Should people be allowed to drive drunk on roads designated for drunk driving? Should people be allowed to drive on roads where drunk driving is prohibited? If you answer "Yes" to the first, then I don't see why you shouldn't also answer "Yes" to the second. And who in their right mind wouldn't answer "Yes" to the third? If you answer "Yes" to all three of those questions (and I don't know any red-blooded American who wouldn't), then you basically want a system like the one I call for.

Dress Standards on Public Transportation, and other things

You're sitting on a public bus, and your stop is about half an hour away. The bus is gradually getting more crowded, and newcomers are standing in the aisle holding on to hand rails. A man gets on and stands right in front of you. He acts completely normally - he says "Excuse me" and "Thank you", he awkwardly smiles the way you're supposed to on a crowded city bus, etc. - but there's one thing that makes him look more than a little unusual, and which makes other people feel very uncomfortable. He's completely naked.

This is a city bus - it's supposed to be for everybody who either can't or doesn't want to ride in a car or ride a bike. And we know that, in freer societies like ours, we're supposed to be free to do with ourselves as we please. Is it okay to kick him off the bus, or to not allow him on the bus in the first place? In some cases, yes. But wouldn't that violate his sovereignty over himself? I don't think so.

You should be free to walk around your own bedroom and bathroom naked. If your curtains are drawn, you should be free to walk around your entire house completely naked. If your neighbors permit, you should be free to walk around their house completely naked. If the owner of a restaurant permits, you should be perfectly free to sit at a table and enjoy a meal completely naked. You do not, however, have the right to present yourself unclothed on the property of anyone who doesn't consent to your nudity. You have sovereignty over yourself and what is yours; you do not have sovereignty over other people and their property.

We see the signs in restaurants that say "No shoes, no shirt, no service", and we never think twice about whether excluding someone who isn't properly clothed according to that sign violates those people's rights. Restaurant owners want to maintain a certain atmosphere that caters to a particular segment of the population (those who don't want to be offended by the presence of shirtless people), and to run their business the way they want to run it (which they have a right to) they have to make clear certain rules about how they want their property used. When a shirtless man walks in, no one violates his rights by refusing to take his order. If he really wants to have a shirtless restaurant experience, he could go to a restaurant that caters to people who don't mind the presence of shirtless patrons.

So, if a naked man gets on a bus where nudity is forbidden by the owner, the driver has every right to keep him from getting on. The only problem with applying this line of reasoning to city buses is that city buses belong to "the city" and not anyone in particular. But that isn't a problem with this line of reasoning. That's a problem with the oxymoronic idea of "public" ownership. Things that are publicly owned are supposedly owned and run by everybody for everybody. But we know that "public" services are funded by one segment of society (not everybody), distributed by another segment of society (again, not everybody) for the benefit of a very select segment of society (again, not everybody).

But I think I can address the problem of dress standards on public transportation without opining that tax subsidies for public transportation violate individuals' property rights, or that the most efficient mass transit is private mass transit.

As I wrote above, the restaurant managers want to cater to a certain crowd, and to do that they have to have certain rules that express the dining preferences of that crowd. "No shoes, no shirt, no service" is a condition of use that expresses these preferences. If you want to be served, you have to be wearing shoes and a shirt.

In order to cater to a target ridership, the owners of public transportation services (whether they be public officials or private entrepreneurs) should be free to lay down conditions of use that express the riding preferences of that crowd. If a significant portion of the target ridership happen to be very socially conservative (as many working-class people are), then they might want to and should be free to take that social conservatism into account.

When I was taking summer classes at Cal, I drove to Fremont and took BART to downtown Berkeley. One day (I forgot whether it was the morning or afternoon) a woman and her 2-year-old daughter got on and sat right across from me. The girl was making a lot of noise, the mom was speaking to her in some Central or Eastern European language, and suddenly the girl was quiet. I looked up from my book, and saw that this woman was nursing her daughter (who was old enough to talk) on this train. They didn't hide it with a towel or anything.

Now, I didn't mind at all. If you want to nurse your kid right in front of me, you have my blessing. But you might not have the blessing of the other people on the bus or train. Luckily for her no one reacted with horror, and I doubt anyone would in the Bay Area. Even if people did dislike it, it would have to be a chronic "problem" and the number of people offended by it would have to be sufficiently large for any drop in business to be noticed.

If there are enough people who are offended by it, and if there are enough women who insist on nursing or pumping in transit, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating nursing cars or walled-off nursing sections in cars. Likewise, if there are enough people who are offended by nudity, and if there are enough people who insist on traveling nude, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating clothing-optional cars and buses. So long as people get on the proper car or bus, no one would be made a captive audience to the offending exposure.

Many urban areas in the U.S. are seeing a sharp increase in the number of conservative Muslim immigrants. Some of these women find it more appropriate to not be in any situation where their bodies are pressed against the bodies of men they aren't married to, and they would be very reluctant to get on a crowded car or bus. As of now, there aren't enough of them to make an impact, and women who prefer to not be touched by strange men just somehow make do. If transportation services in the U.S. want to cater to these women in the future, when the number of them might be drastically higher than it is now, they might want to consider designating women-and-children-only cars and buses, or women-and-children-only sections of cars and buses.

Before you spout off screaming "Segregation!", let me point out that we already have restrooms segregated by sex. Most women prefer to have a restroom experience that is free of men, and in response to this overall preference shopping malls, restaurants, train stations, and office buildings provide restrooms reserved only for women. No normal person would say that the women are discriminated against for having restrooms reserved specifically for them, or that men are discriminated against for not being allowed to use restrooms that women use.

And don't worry about this being some kind of special priviledge. It's just that in the near future there's going to be a large number of people who want a particular kind of service, just as there are large numbers of people today who want particular kinds of service, and if you can make a buck providing that kind of service then why not? So long as no one's assaulted, defrauded, burgled, or in some other way deprived of their sovereignty over themselves, the provision of special services is completely legitimate.

Another possible objection to women-only cars and buses can come from people who are bothered by social heterogeneity. If a society is to be stable, they say, then it must run on values that are shared by everyone, and allowing separate cars for women out of consideration for conservative muslim immigrants allows pockets of recent immigrants to exist as third-world peoples in an otherwise modern America. Now, whatever America's values are, social homogeneity shouldn't be one of them. We should be a people who tolerate experimentation - not just in technology, but also in ways of relating to each other. The fact that some people wear more clothes than you do, or separate themselves from the opposite gender more than you do, should be no political concern of yours. We pride ourselves in our freedom to live by the values we choose, and we even like to pretend that our nation was founded on that freedom. If other people value the segregation of sexes, then let them live according to that value. They don't violate your liberty by getting on their own train cars.

Did you ever wonder why there are a million different kinds of churches in America? It's because here we're relatively free to live according to the values we choose, so long as we allow others the same freedom. One of the main rules in "doing church" in America has been: If you don't like our rules, start your own church. And so for the past couple hundred years people have associated according to their shared ideas of what's right. We don't have an established church. No one's forced to go to any particular kind of church. We don't force everyone to adhere to the same church polity, listen to the same religious music, or keep the same dress code. If that's the freedom we're allowed in religion, why shouldn't we be allowed it in mass transit?

My radical proposal is this: allow people to choose their own rules. If they don't want naked guys on their buses, let them keep naked guys from getting on. If they want to be naked on the bus, let them have buses where they can be naked. If women want to go topless, they can get on the naked buses too. If women don't want to be touched by men they don't know, let them have women-only buses. This isn't an issue of what's appropriate in public. It's an issue of what preferences people have. And if this is to be a free country, entrepreneurs should be allowed to cater to different people's preferences.

Individualism

In matters of politics and social morality, I consider myself a "purified individualist". Now, by individualist, I don't mean long bangs and skinny jeans and music with unpredictable tempo changes and disorienting time signatures. I don't mean intentionally acting in ways that other people find distasteful. I don't mean crossdressing for the sake of insulting someone's sense of gender-appropriateness. Though some of you might think of me when you hear of things like that, that's not what I mean when I say my political ideology is Individualism.

By "Individualism", I mean that radical idea that you don't own other people, that you have no right to do anything to them that they don't want done, take anything from them that they don't want to give, or threaten to do any of those things, so long as they're not intruding into someone else's matters. Think of it this way: Every man is his own king, with absolute sovereignty over his own life (and every woman is her own queen, etc.). Sure, it means that if a guy wants to wear a dress just so he could insult other peoples' sense of gender-appropriateness, then you have to let him do it (unless of course, he's violating someone's property rights while he's at it). But that's all that it means. It doesn't mean that you have to act so different that other people say "omg, you're such an individual."

In his essay on Henry David Thoreau, Randall Conrad wrote "Despite his deep-rooted individualism, Thoreau was readily moved to activism against injustice." Randall's use of the word "individualism" doesn't match the way I use it. Randall uses it as if it means isolationism. Now there is a type of foreign policy called "isolationism", which people like me are accused of advocating, but isolationism isn't what's implied by individualism. Isolationism means you have to keep to yourself, and have minimal interaction with others (or stay in your own country, and have minimal interaction with foreigners); Individualism means you have no right to initiate force against another. According to Individualism, you have every right to intervene to stop injustice. You just don't have the right to force other people to help you do it. You could encourage others to help you, but threatening force against nonparticipants isn't the correct way to do it.

Sure, fight your wars of liberation. But

1. Don't kill civilians (that's murder);
2. Don't force other people to pay for it (that's robbery); and
3. Don't force other people to fight your wars for you (that's slavery).

So when you tell me that so-n-so's an individualist like me, you better not be talking about his predisposition to disagree with people, or about some weird diet he's trying (unless it's out of consideration for human or animal rights).

On a less serious note, my second nephew "arrived" yesterday. It wasn't as if he wasn't already here, though. When my sister visited last month it was kinda hard to ignore the fact that there was a baby inside her. And since it was inside her, where else could it have been but right here? Oh well. Since little Jordan was born yesterday, people will celebrate the beginning of his life on August 25th. I, however, will celebrate the beginning of my life in the month that it really began - November.

When I say I espouse "purified individualism", I mean that I believe individual rights don't depend on how drastically you can affect the world around you. They don't depend on what you've contributed, how strong you are, how smart you are, how many people you know, or any of that. They don't depend on your physical or mental capacities or state of development. If you have rights as an individual, then your rights don't depend on how others value you. They don't depend on your race, mother tongue, species, or age. You have them whether you're an adult human, a fetus, or an animal... I constantly strive to purge from my ethical framework all forms of anti-individualism, from utilitarianism to is-ought-ism. That's why I say "purified individualism".

All right then, a few words on Abortion

Though my own convictions about abortion have been the driving force in my ideological development, I've avoided writing a word about it. My pro-life stance might be too visceral for me to write anything fair. But now is a good time to start practicing. The Saturday before last, Wendy McElroy posted a list of supposedly problematic implications of the pro-life position. These implications might already have been addressed by pro-lifers, but I thought I should throw in my 2 cents, since I have a somewhat unique moral groundwork, and what someone else says in favor of the pro-life position might not represent my own convictions. (Before going into this I should say that everything McElroy has written about particular American anarchists or about the anarchist movement in general makes an enchanted read and is warmly recommended by me.) Now, on the A-question.

Implication #1: If the fetus is accorded individual rights, then the aborting woman and anyone who assists her are murderers and must be subject to whatever penalty society metes out for that crime, up to and including capital punishment. The punishment should be applied to past abortions as there is no statute of limitations on murder. If anti-abortionists shy away from this conclusion, then they do not really consider abortion to be murder.

Someone could call something murder without demanding or excusing the death penalty for it. I do. If I were a retributivist, or a "let's make an example of her"-ist, I would say that the offending woman alienated her right to live by killing her child. But I am neither of those. Retribution is arbitrary violence, and the very idea of non-defensive punishment is questionable. Now, it would be just for a defense agency to force a murderer to make some kind of ammends. But that can't involve execution. If we wish to justify retaliation on the grounds of proportional defense, then killing a killer is just only when the killer is in the act, or very obviously about to commit it (and when the act would obviously be lethal). If the murderer isn't in the act of killing anyone, and if she isn't obviously about to kill anyone, then lethal force against her is unnecessary to save anyone's life, and is disproportionate (aka, unjust). So no, according individual rights to the fetus does not imply condemning aborters to death.

Implication #2: if a woman cannot 'kill' her fetus because it is a separate human being, then she also cannot injure it. If she does, she should be prosecuted in the same manner as if she assaulted an innocent bystander. If she ingests harmful substances, then the law should view the act as though she had strapped down a child and force-fed a toxin to it. Thus, the pregnant woman is vulnerable to criminal prosecution based on her diet, her lifestyle choices, etc.

Yes, and I agree. A pregnant woman is liable for anything she maliciously or negligently does that injures the fetus, just as a woman who recently gave birth should be liable for anything she maliciously or negligently does that injures the newborn. I don't see anything radical about this. I should say, though, that pregnant mothers shouldn't be prosecuted for smoking weed. Weed only makes babies lazy and stupid, and God forbid that any parent be prosecuted for raising their child in an unaccredited Baptist school.

Implication #3: if a woman wishes to abort, or to take actions that will harm the fetus -- eg. smoking crack -- then she should be imprisoned or otherwise forcibly restrained from inflicting death and/or injury on the innocent "child". Constant monitoring would be required -- presumably by the state; the woman would be a slave to her fetus. Anti-abortionists must explain how -- short of totalitarianism -- they intend to protect fetuses in peril.

Every good libertarian rejects the idea of "victimless crimes" and opposes all "protective" and "defensive" measures that violate individual sovereignty. A woman should not be punished for a crime that she hasn't yet committed, and any preemptive action against her on behalf of the fetus can only be just if her intent to abort is blatant and explicit. It would be very difficult to get a blatant and explicit sign of her intent to abort -- if she tells anyone, she would only tell her closest friends, and if one of her friends rats on her, she could brush it off as being part of her bad pregnant temper (and everyone else she told might dutifully agree). In a free society, the official policy would be to give all evidence the interpretation that is most charitable to the suspect or the potential offender. And so, "she looked unfortunate enough to want an abortion" just isn't going to cut it. McElroy's target here might not be pro-life libertarianism, but pro-life neo-conservatism. A pro-life libertarian, if he or she truly is libertarian, would oppose all actions that violate individual sovereignty, including wire-tapping, thumbing through other peoples' medical records, and false imprisonment.

Implication #3 can almost as easily be used to say adult humans shouldn't be given rights. McElroy supposes here that since the right would only be enforced in our present system through the unjust use of force, then the right shouldn't be accorded. Taking the implication further, someone can argue that we shouldn't accord human adults the right to live, since doing that would justify imprisoning anyone who intended to kill an innocent adult, and that would involve the intrusive machinery of the present police state, as well as traditional violations of individual sovereignty like compulsory jury duty (which is slavery), mandatory testimony (which also is slavery), and criminal action on behalf of "The People" (which is fraud). Should we go on to say that human adults can't have the right to live, since that "supposed" right is only enforced through acts that violate individual sovereignty?

McElroy's implications presuppose a system of criminal justice like the one we are presently subjected to. But in a free society there would be ways to protect the innocent without resorting to criminal "justice". Rather than spend so much time, effort, and money on finding out and hunting down killers, putting on an exquisite show that we call a "trial", then sustaining the convict for years on end behind bars, and doing all sorts of other things meant to get back at a criminal, we would find it much more costworthy to merely minimize the incentives to initiate force. The incentive to kill a pre-born baby is obvious. But would that incentive still be there, or be as powerful, if instead of being condemned to a life of motherhood a woman were offered free pre- and post-natal care and more than enough money to stay in school in return for the custody of her child? A free market in the stewardship of children might do wonders to reduce the number of abortions.

Implication #4: anti-abortionists are effectively defining pro-choice libertarians out of the movement. If anti-abortionists are correct, then pro-choice libertarians are morally sanctioning and/or legally encouraging the deliberate mass murder of defenseless children. If there is any line that cannot be crossed without losing all claim to the word "libertarian", then surely the advocacy of mass murder is that line.

Well, I would have used more clinical words to say it, but yes and no. The word "libertarian" has already been defiled by people on the left who advocate government mandated healthcare and compulsory "education" and by people on the right who advocate preemptive wars and mass deportations. I like to use the word to describe all those who hold the sovereignty of every individual as a universal moral principle to which all laws should adhere. If they rigorously examine all policies and uses of violence that cross their mind, and condemn all those that they consider violations of someone's sovereignty, then they're libertarian in my book. That can include minarchists and even communists, so long as they believe in the right to secede. It definitely includes pro-choice thinkers like Murray Rothbard and Wendy McElroy. These two have contributed so much to the way I think about freedom and morality, that it would be ideological identity theft for me to take from them a word they and their followers have used for the past half century to describe the way they think about force. True, I think they can be more consistent, but if I were to reserve the word "libertarian" for only those who are consistent in the way I want them to be, then I would be the only libertarian I know. The vast majority of libertarians eat meat, and I consider that an initiation of force against non-aggressors. It would be much better for me to use an entirely different word to describe my purified individualism -- how about "Puritarianism"?

Implication #5: anti-abortionists are destroying the concept of natural rights itself which claims that every human being properly has jurisdiction over his or her own body. It is only because each human being is a self-owner that it is improper to initiate force against another. But if the fetus has the right to live off the pregnant woman's body functions -- to share the food she eats, the blood her heart pumps -- then this is tantamount to saying that one human being can properly own the body functions of another. It is tantamount to saying that one human being can properly enslave another.

If we wish to talk about individual rights, then we have to think of these rights as not depending on one's race, color, creed, social or economic status, mental or physical capacities, state of development, or on the sentiments or convenience of others. And if we want to think of rights that way, then we have to consider them inhered at the moment of conception. According rights at any moment later than conception is to let violent ageism, ableism and other kinds of anti-individualism creep in through the back door.

I concede, though, that all our inherent rights are negative, not positive. You have a right to live; but you don't have the right to force other people to house, feed, and protect you. By being present in a woman's body without her permission, an unwanted fetus is a trespasser in another's body, making it an enslaver, a leech, and a rapist. But enslavers, leeches, and rapists don't necessarily forfeit their right to live by enslaving, leeching, and raping. Their right to live is suspended when they are in the act of enslaving, leeching, or raping with the use of or a blatant and explicit threat of lethal force. If the invasion of individual sovereignty is not accompanied by lethal force or by a blatant and express threat of it, then there is no right to use lethal force to address it.

Let's consider the shopkeeper and the shoplifter. Most of us would say that a shopkeeper can rightfully use some force to stop a kid who is infringing on the shopkeeper's individual sovereignty by stealing candy from the store. But most of us would gawk if the shopkeeper pulled out his gun and shot the kid dead in the doorway. There's an issue of proportionality. The kid was only stealing -- he didn't have a knife or a gun, and he wasn't posing any threat to the shopkeeper's or any one else's life. If the kid did have a gun, then the story changes. If he aims it at the shopkeeper's head and threatens to shoot him if he doesn't hand over all the money in the cash drawer, then lethal force here is legitimate. The necessary criterion for using lethal force has been met -- the kid threatened the shopkeeper's life. Killing the kid would therefore be legitimate. But without this criterion being met -- without the criminal using or blatantly and expressly threatening to use lethal force, retaliating with lethal force is disproportionate and thus unjust.

It's a similar case with abortion. Even though an unwanted fetus is an enslaver, a leech, and a rapist, killing it is a disproportionate form of defense and thus unjust, unless carrying it to term would most likely kill the mother. This doesn't mean we have a right to enslave women. It just means that women shouldn't use lethal force against children who don't threaten or use it.

Implication #6: anti-abortionists are destroying the idea of a "natural harmony of rights" between human beings. If rights are based on being human, then everyone has the same ones to the same degree. The self-ownership of one person in no way violates the self-ownership of another; my freedom of religion in no way violates yours. Consider if human nature were different, however. If I had a biological need to eat human flesh in order to live, then the structure of universal rights would make no sense. One man's life would require another man's death. This would be Hobbes' "war of all against all" and to demand the non-initiation of force would be to condemn mankind to extinction. Similarly the anti-abortionists posit a fetus whose right to self-ownership is in direct opposition to the self-ownership of the pregnant woman. They posit a biological disharmony of interests. Although such disharmonies can occur in nature -- e.g., Siamese twins -- these occurences are extremely rare and are not commonplace, like pregnancy. If they were not rare, then the idea of natural rights or "harmony of interest" would have no application to human nature.

First I must say very quickly that rights are not based on being human; they are based on having the present or potential capacity to enjoy life. To arbitrarily pick one particular species as the only body of rights-possessing beings, to the exclusion of all other species, does not capture the norms we wish to express when we say "individual sovereignty" or "self-ownership".

Now, to address the biological disharmony of interests. We already understand that there is a social disharmony of interests. The interests of parasites conflict with the interests of producers. The members of one class live off the labor of the others, without their consent. Members of the exploited class have the right to use some force to extract repayment from the parasites (but good luck figuring out who's a parasite and who's not), or at least to stop the parasitism. But, as I said a few paragraphs ago, they only have the right to kill those parasites who are killing or are blatantly and expressly threatening to kill someone. We don't describe this as a conflict of rights or a conflict of self-ownership; we only describe it as a violation of rights which justifies a particular degree of violence.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but I don't see how the biological disharmony of interests should be treated any differently. The unwanted fetus is violating a particular degree of the mother's sovereignty over herself. She may justly retaliate. She may "evict" the "trespasser", if she could remove the fetus without killing it. But unless her life is blatantly threatened by the pregnancy, she has no right to use lethal force against the child. An unwanted pregnancy isn't a conflict of rights or a conflict of self-ownership; it's just another one of those cases where someone's sovereignty is violated, and where the severity of their retaliation cannot justly exceed the severity of the violation.

Implication #7: anti-abortionists are claiming, "The fetus is an individual with rights" and, so, the onus of proof logically rests on the one who asserts a claim rather than upon those who see no evidence for the assertion.

Talking about moral proof is a funny thing to do, because no one can prove that anyone has rights, just as no one can prove that God exists. We can, however, make assertions about what traits render an adult human being rights-possessive, and can show that those traits are shared by children, pre-born children, and non-human animals. As I said a few paragraphs up, this trait is the present or potential capacity to enjoy life. To demand anything more sophisticated than that is to be violently snobbish. It's to say "you're not smart enough, strong enough, old enough, sociable enough, or well-enough connected to be left to enjoy your life." And that drips with Manifest Destiny.

Implication #8: if a pregnancy threatens a woman's life, anti-abortionists must legally require the woman to remain pregnant even if it means her death. Otherwise they do not take their own argument seriously. If the fetus is a separate individual with full rights, then the ill woman has no more right to kill it to save her life than a woman who needs a liver has the right to kill another person to secure a 'donor' organ. You cannot kill an innocent bystander just because your health requires it.

I can be fully "pro-life" and still insist that a woman has the right to abort when the pregnancy blatantly and imminently threatens her life. In the case of an ectopic pregnancy, the fetus affects the mother's situation in such a way that she would most likely die if she does not remove the fetus. Since a threat of lethal violence is made, a lethal retaliation is legitimate. (Now, if the mother is able to have the fetus removed without killing it, then she would have the obligation to remove it that way, if she chooses to remove it at all. This raises a lot of points that need to be addressed, but if I go into them here I'd be writing a book rather than "a few words".) The fetus is in the same position as an armed robber pointing a gun, and so can be treated in the same way. The difference between the fetus and the innocent bystander is that here the fetus is in a position to kill, while the innocent bystander isn't.

Now, some pro-lifers say that because the child never consciously chose to kill the mother, it is innocent even when the mother's life is threatened by the pregnancy. But conscious choice isn't what matters. Imagine a Manchurian Candidate with his gun pointed at an official and his finger on the trigger. Who would say that the absence of the assassin's conscious choice precludes the guards' right to shoot him? The conditions affecting the victims are the same as if the assassin aims his gun out of his own free will. Now what about a drunk? Should people be legally forbidden from killing him if he aims his gun at them when he's stupefied? Of course not. The fact that he wasn't in his right mind when he threatened someone else's life doesn't mean the victim has no right to lethal defense. When it comes to imminent threats, it's immaterial whether the offender consciously chose to kill, or just happened to be in a position of killing.

More than a few times I've heard a remark like this: "But all pregnancies pose some threat to a woman, so how could you say that only some women in some situations have a right to choose? If you allow a woman the discretion to choose an abortion when her life is threatened, then you're allowing her the discretion to decide when the threat against her life is serious enough to merit a lethal reaction, and you're basically conceding women's absolute right to choose." True, there is a good bit of subjectivity that should be admitted. But allowing a woman to choose in the case that her life is threatened isn't the same as leaving the term "life-threatening" completely up to the woman to define. There are cases where an offender can objectively be shown to pose no immanent threat to the victim's life. The kid running out the door with stolen candy is one such case. I'm no obstetrician, but I'm sure there can be innumerable cases where the tolls on a woman's body are nowhere near serious enough to constitute a threat against her life.

Implication #9: pregnancies that result from rape must also be brought to term. Anti-abortionists who make exceptions for e.g. a 12-year-old who becomes pregnant after being raped are saying that it is alright to kill an innocent baby under the 'proper' circumstances... which denies their entire argument, of course.

Yes, and I fully agree. Individual rights don't depend on age, ability, the convenience of others, or on how auspiciously one was conceived. Again, I don't know what's so radical about this.