DOES SPANKING VIOLATE THE NON-AGGRESSION PRINCIPLE?

June 11, 2023

Guest contributors: freedomain

A long-lost article...

Libertarianism centers around the nonaggression principle and a respect for property rights, which are derived from the axiom of self-ownership. The nonaggression principle states that it is immoral to initiate the use of force, although proportional and just responses to the initiation of force are acceptable, in the form of self-defense.

Libertarians condemn social institutions which violate the nonaggression principle and property rights. Taxation, national debts, fiat currency, unjust invasions, and the persecution and incarceration of nonviolent citizens through drug laws – all these have been roundly and soundly criticized by libertarians through the decades.

The one thing that all these institutions have in common is that we, as individuals, can do next to nothing to oppose them. Even as a collective movement, not only has libertarianism been unable to shrink the unjust power of the State, but it’s hard to see how the movement has even slowed the rate of its growth.

Libertarianism is fundamentally a moral philosophy with political implications – however, some libertarians have a habit of focusing on the political implications, which cannot be changed by any individual, and avoiding the personal implications of the moral philosophy, which can be put into practice by everyone.

For instance, while countless books have been written analyzing economics from a libertarian or Austrian perspective, very few have been written about how to apply Libertarian morality to parenting. Ayn Rand touched on parenting in a throwaway scene at Galt’s Gulch in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ and Murray Rothbard reaffirmed the right of adult children to leave abusive parents in ‘Kids Lib,’ but I do not know of any major work by a Libertarian or Objectivist focusing on parenting. Nathaniel Branden has touched on the subject in a few articles, but does not mention any particular discipline techniques.

Very few libertarians become bank robbers or Federal Reserve Chairmen (but I repeat myself). By far the most common aggression Libertarians will ever personally use or experience is the disciplining of children. This is a moral question central to our lives as parents, yet it has to my knowledge never been addressed in Libertarian literature.

So – in terms of practical morality, the most essential question for libertarians to discuss is: does spanking violate the nonaggression principle?

The nonaggression principle basically states that it is immoral to initiate the use of aggressive force against another human being. Clearly, spanking is the initiation of force, in that it is not used in self defense, but rather as a form of discipline or punishment for children.

Spanking is hitting a child with the goal of deterring behavior. In order to be effective, spanking must inflict sufficient pain to alter behavior, and so mild swats to a padded bottom cannot be considered spanking. Spanking must result in sufficient physical and emotional pain for the child to fear it as a punishment.

Since spanking is the initiation of force, and cannot be excused under the category of immediate self defense, it would seem to be a violation of the nonaggression principle, and thus immoral – however, there are times when the initiation of force can be considered moral, or at least not immoral, and these have to do with the defense of another person’s well-being.

For instance, if a blind man is walking into a busy street, it can’t be considered evil to stop him from getting creamed by a bus, even if we have to tackle and bruise him to do so. In the same way, if you require an emergency tracheotomy, and cannot give your consent, is not quite the same as being stabbed if a handy surgeon takes a knife to your throat.

Certain actions would seem to be morally appropriate even though they violate the nonaggression principle, just as other actions could be morally appropriate even if they violate property rights, such as the example of a man hanging from a flagpole who kicks in a window and climbs into someone’s apartment rather than fall to his death. Not many of us would argue that the hanging man should respect the apartment dweller’s property rights and fall to create a morally perfect stain on the sidewalk below.

Thus the initiation of force does not violate the nonaggression principle if the following conditions are met:

It is an unforeseeable crisis
The initiation of force is the only possible remedy
The ‘victim’ would almost certainly give his consent in the moment if it were possible
The victim gives his consent after the fact

The reason for these standards is fairly simple – morality is universal, and thus is independent of time, and so it is irrelevant whether an aggressive action is approved of before or after the event. Everyone who perpetrates aggressive actions is in a sense gambling on the reaction of the victim, because if the victim likes the aggression, the perpetrator will not face any legal retaliation for his actions.

There are of course situations that can arise where the person initiating aggression ends up misjudging the intentions of another person – if I pull back a drunk staggering towards a cliff edge, he may thank me, or he may be enraged at my prevention of his suicide attempt. Reasonable standards of anticipation should be the rule here. If the vast majority of people would prefer to be pulled back from a cliff edge, it is reasonable to pull someone back – if the man really wants to commit suicide, then he should approach the cliff edge when no one else is around, otherwise his actions could be easily construed as a twisted cry for help.

So, if an aggressive action does not fulfill the four standards outlined above, then it is almost certainly a violation of the nonaggression principle, and therefore immoral.

Let’s look at these one by one, to figure out where spanking lands on the moral spectrum.

An Unforeseeable Crisis

Many parents who spank claim that it is a reasonable reaction to an imminent crisis, such as a child reaching for a pot of boiling water on the stove.

This is not a valid argument, for several reasons.

First, it is the responsibility of the parents to ensure a safe environment for their children, therefore it seems hard to justify hitting a child for the negligence of the parents. Basic childproofing requires that only the back burners be used on the stove, and that the handle be pointed toward the wall, rather than toward the kitchen. In the same way, cupboards, drawers, stairs, electrical outlets and so on should all be protected through child safety devices.

It is hard to imagine any dangerous action a child could take that could never have been anticipated or prevented by the parent, either through patient coaching or childproofing.

Also, any parent who is close enough to a child to hit him for reaching for a pot of boiling water is also close enough to pick up or move the child away in a nonviolent mannerway, which immediately eliminates the danger.

The initiation of force is the only possible remedy

As mentioned above, if a child is in imminent danger, and the parent is close enough to hit, then the parent is close enough to pursue nonviolent remedies to the situation. Furthermore, dangerous situations that are the result of my negligence do not excuse me from the results. If I don’t repair my failing brakes, and this causes me to crash my car into your house, I cannot blame the brakes.

The initiation of force can only be excused in an emergency if it is the only possible remedy – if I’m choking on a fishbone, and the Heimlich maneuver does not work, and the only chance I have for survival is an emergency tracheotomy, so be it. If I have a mild cough at my dinner table, and someone stabs me in the throat, that’s just plain assault.

Since the initiation of force is not the only possible remedy when a child is in a dangerous situation, it does not fulfill this requirement for moral justification.

The ‘victim’ would almost certainly give his consent in the moment if it were possible

Well, first of all, it is possible for the child to give his consent to being spanked, since there is no immediate time pressure for action. A child can certainly express his or her wishes, assuming an appropriate age – but of course spanking is only considered effective if it is thoroughly against the child’s wishes. Therefore spanking also fails this test.

The victim gives his consent after the fact

This one is very tricky, since many children who were spanked grow up into adults who claim that spanking was very effective in eliciting and maintaining good behavior. “My parents spanked me, and I turned out fine!” “My parents spanked me because I was a disobedient child with no discipline, and I became very well behaved and disciplined as a result, and so I am very happy that they did spank me.” “I deserved spanking because I was disobedient.”

This certainly could be considered the victim giving his consent after the fact, but there are some important caveats or restrictions on this.

First of all, it assumes that spanking is not abusive, in that it is only the perspective of the victim that determines the morality of the situation, which is not a valid principle. Many citizens are fine with paying taxes; this does not make taxation moral. There are countless examples of women who had been verbally and/or physically abused by their husbands who stay, and even claim to love their husbands – this does not mean that physical and verbal abuse suddenly become morally acceptable. The Stockholm Syndrome is a well-known psychological phenomenon in which the victim of violence and abuse emotionally bonds with the abusers, and may even fight to defend them from justice.

Secondly, aggression which impairs judgment cannot easily be excused by the victim. To take an extreme example, if a man is forced to submit to a frontal lobotomy, and afterwards, claims to have no moral problem with the operation, we cannot take his word at face value, since his cognitive abilities have been enormously harmed by the procedure he was subjected to.

Also, propaganda dilutes clarity of thought – that is its real purpose of course. A 20-year-old man who was raised in Russia in the 1950s would likely profess great affection for communism and Joseph Stalin, but his perspective was not arrived at through a process of independent, sovereign and free inquiry. Amish children cannot grow up with independent and critical thinking about the Amish religion, and so we must rationally apply an extra layer or two of skepticism to their adult pronouncements about the forms of thought that they were indoctrinated with as children.

Children raised in heavily religious households would also very likely have been subjected to heavy propaganda about physical punishment due to the general conception of the Biblical commandment that to spare the rod is to spoil the child.

Furthermore, since spanking has been scientifically linked to lower IQs, it is mildly analogous to the frontal lobotomy example, in that it can impair cognitive abilities to the point where any judgments about spanking that come from the victims of spanking are at the very least suspect.

Spanking also creates many emotional and social problems, from depression to anxiety to self-destructive rebelliousness to increased aggression towards other children, a decreased capacity to form positive and healthy relationships, and so on.

Thus, since we know that spanking can create irrational bonds with the perpetrators, lowers intelligence, impairs social development, reduces the possibility of positive and healthy relationships, and increases risks of mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, it is certainly more difficult to get objective approvals from the victims many years after being spanked. Rather than rely on self-reporting, we must defer to the objective science on the effects of spanking.

This problem is only compounded by the fact that, at least in my experience, very few people who claim to approve of spanking after-the-fact have any knowledge about the negative effects it has likely had on their intellectual, emotional and social development.

I will be much more prone to forgive someone for stealing a cardboard box of mine if I do not know that my wife was using it to store $20,000 worth of our gold. In other words, if I’m not fully apprised of the negative effects of an aggressive action, it is not possible for me to provide an objective judgment of that action.

Thus, the standards of acceptance for spanking would have to be, at a minimum:

A reasonably detailed knowledge of the objective effects of spanking on the development of children.
A reasonable amount of time in professional therapy to ensure that any irrational attachments have been addressed.
A philosophical understanding of the basic fact that personal approval does not equal moral justification.

Common Spanking Defenses

“Kids Can’t/Won’t Listen to Reason”

How do you know your kids won’t listen to reason? If you spank your kids because they won’t listen to reason, you’re not exactly finding out if they can listen to reason in that moment, are you? The science is not in your favor here, since babies can process mathematical odds at 9 months, show empathy at 14 months, and perform basic moral reasoning at 18 months.

This position would have at least some credibility if spanking was preceded by years of failed reasoning attempts – but if the spanking comes first, it becomes a classic self-fulfilling prophesy. Since spanking tends to lower IQ and provoke defiance and evasion, it sure looks like it’s “needed” because kids don’t listen to reason – but that’s like saying I need to spank my kids because they don’t speak Mandarin, when I have never exposed them to Mandarin.

Also, if you believe that your kids can’t listen to reason, are you sure that you as a parent are being perfectly rational? Are you telling them that flags must be saluted and war is heroic and public schools are great and that they have to kiss Aunt Millie even though she smells? Does your behaviour match your commandments? Do you tell your kids that they have to do the right thing even if they don’t feel like it in the moment, and then sit and watch football all Sunday instead of playing with them?

Do you hit them because they hit others? Do you take away their toys and then tell them to respect other people’s property? Do you tell them to respect their mother, while treating their mother disrespectfully?

Remember that children are born as total foreigners to the world you take for granted. They have never heard of America or Europe or Jesus or Krishna or war or prison or history or culture. They are born empirical and striving mightily and endlessly for rationality – delusional is the culture that dares to say that any children who oppose or question cultural norms are by definition “irrational.” That would require something other than culture – it would require a truly rational and philosophical world, and that is something we are still generations away from.

It is very hard to be truly rational in this world. It means rejecting an enormous number of beliefs held by others. It requires great courage, and a deep commitment to reason and evidence at all costs. So – can you look in the mirror and state with absolute certainty that you have to spank your kids because they are irrational, while you are 100% rational?

Also, why is it only children who must be spanked for being irrational? Have you ever been pulled over unfairly by a cop? Harassed by a border guard? Received bad service from an unapologetic waiter or valet? What about your own parents, as they age? Are they becoming any less clear-headed? What about that kinda-sorta racist woman at the office? Isn’t she being irrational? Or that dude next door who won’t support Ron Paul, even though he supports so many of his positions?

So – we can spank those who don’t listen to reason? Well OK, so just let that cop or coworker or neighbour have it! What? No? You’re not rushing out to do that? Why not? You have the moral right on your side!

Irrationality and injustice surround us – and irrational adults have infinitely less justification for their foolishness and inconsistencies than children whose brains are still so very young. So – why pick on kids?

“Kids Brains are Immature”

You say that children must be spanked because their brains are physically immature? All right – if physical mental limitations require spanking, does that mean we must spank elderly people with dementia? What about mentally handicapped adults?

You get that that would be morally repugnant, right? Surely those with physical limitations need more tender care, not more aggression.

“It’s the Only Way Kids Will Listen”

Many parents use the word “listen” when what they really mean is “obey.” What if your kids are listening to you, but just disagree with you? What if they have legitimate criticisms of your values and/or behaviour? Is that all right?

“It Teaches Children ‘Respect'”

Again, the word “respect” is used, when “obedience” is usually the goal. Respect, of course, must be granted before it can be requested. If you treat your children with respect, you can reasonably ask for mutual regard – if you spank them, frightening them into compliance with your size and strength, you are only compelling them into obedience against their will and judgment; you are not treating them with respect.

The goal of parenting is to create self-sufficient virtues in children. Applying external pressure and punishments tends to teach them fear-based compliance rather than the internalization of moral standards.

If spanking worked, then its use should quickly curtail. 40% of high school students are still being spanked by their parents, which is proof against the idea that spanking allows children to internalize values. Spanking causes compliance and resentment, obedience and resistance, which is why its use tends to increase over time – or at least not decrease.

Conclusion

According to the standards outlined in this essay, spanking is a clear violation of the non-aggression principle, and thus an immoral action.

This is not to say that all parents who spank are immoral. Morality requires knowledge; if all parents who spank are immoral, then all libertarians were immoral before they discovered libertarianism. Most people need exposure to the argument that taxation is theft before they can reasonably be held morally responsible for understanding the violent basis of the state. It is only within the last few decades that serious moral and scientific objections to spanking have spread within society, and patience and persistence is the key to convincing others of this essential and actionable moral reality.

That having been said, however, now that you have read this essay, you need to refute these arguments and disprove the science, or stop spanking. If you lacked knowledge and clarity before, you deserve sympathy. If you cannot refute these arguments, and continue to spank, you have no excuse anymore.

Join the Freedomain Community

To read more articles like this, sign up and join my community today

Stefan Molyneux@freedomain

January 24, 2026

THE GREATEST ESSAY IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Humanity evolves through accumulated wisdom from endless trial and error. This wisdom has been transmitted through fiction – stories, superstitions, commandments, and ancestor-worship – which has created the considerable problem that these fictions can be easily intercepted and replaced by other lies.

Children absorb their moral and cultural wisdom from parents, priests and teachers. When governments take over education, foreign thoughts easily transmit themselves to the young, displacing parents and priests. In a fast-changing world, parents represent the past, and are easily displaced by propaganda.

Government education thus facilitates cultural takeovers – a soft invasion that displaces existing thought-patterns and destroys all prior values.

The strength of intergenerational cultural transmission of values only exists when authority is exercised by elders. When that authority transfers to the State, children adapt to the new leaders, scorning their parents in the process.

This is an evolutionary adaptation that resulted from the constant brutal takeovers of human history and prehistory. If your tribe was conquered, you had to adapt to the values of your new masters or risk genetic death through murder or ostracism.

When a new overlord – who represents the future – inflicts his values on the young, they scorn their parents and cleave to the new ruler in order to survive.

Government instruction of the young is thus the portal through which alien ideas conquer the young as if a violent overthrow had occurred – which in fact it did, since government education is funded through force.

This is the weakness of the cultural transmission of values – by using ‘authority’ instead of philosophy – reason and evidence – new authorities can easily displace the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years.

It is a common observation that a culture’s success breeds its own destruction. Cultures that follow more objective reason tend to prosper – this prosperity breeds resentment and greed in the hearts of less-successful people and cultures, who then swarm into the wealthier lands and use the State to drain them dry of their resources.

Everything that has been painfully learned and transmitted over a thousand generations can be scattered to the winds in a mere generation or two.

This happens less in the realms of reason and mathematics, for obvious reasons. Two and two make four throughout all time, in all places, regardless of propaganda. The Pythagorean theorem is as true now as it was thousands of years ago – Aristotle’s three laws of logic remain absolute and incontrovertible to all but the most deranged.

Science – absent the corrupting influence of government funding – remains true and absolute across time and space. Biological absolutes can only be opposed by those about to commit suicide.

Authority based on lies hates the clarity and objectivity – and curiosity – of rational philosophy. Bowing to the authority of reason means abandoning the lies that prop up the powerful – but refusing to bow to reason means you end up bowing to foreigners who take over your society via the centralized indoctrination of the young.

Why is this inevitable?

Because it is an addiction.

Political power is the most powerful – and dangerous – addiction. The drug addict only destroys his own life, and harms those close to him. The addiction to political power harms hundreds of millions of people – but the political junkies don’t care, they have dehumanized their fellow citizens – in order to rule over others, you must first view them as mere useful livestock instead of sovereign minds like your own.

Just as drug addicts would rather destroy lives than stop using – political addicts would rather be slaves in their own sick system than free in a rational, moral world.

If we cannot find a way to transmit morals without lies or assumptions, we will never break the self-destructive cycle of civilization – success breeds unequal wealth, which breeds resentment and greed, which breeds stealing from the successful through political power, which collapses the society.

If we cannot anchor morals in reason and evidence, we can never build a successful civilization that does not engineer its own demise. Everything good that mankind builds will forever be dismantled using the same tools that were used to build it.

Since the fall of religion in the West – inevitable given the wild successes of the free market and modern science and medicine, which came out of skepticism, reason and the Enlightenment – we have applied critical reasoning to every sphere except morality. We have spun spaceships out of the solar system, plumbed the depths of the atom and cast our minds back to the very nanoseconds after our universe came into being – but we cannot yet clearly state why murder, rape, theft and assault are wrong.

We can say that they are “wrong” because they feel bad, or are harmful to social cohesion, or because God commands it, or because they are against the law – but that does not help us understand what morality is, or how it is proven.

Saying that rape is wrong because it feels bad to the victim does not answer why rape is wrong. Clearly it feels ‘good’ to the rapist – otherwise rape would not exist.

Saying it harms social happiness or cohesion is a category error, since ‘society’ does not exist empirically. Individuals act in their own perceived self-interest. From an evolutionary perspective, ‘rape’ is common. The amoral genes of an ugly man that no woman wants are rewarded for rape, since it gives them at least some chance to survive.

Saying that rape is wrong because God commands it does not answer the question – it is an appeal to an unreasoning authority that cannot be directly questioned.

Saying that rape is wrong because it is illegal is begging the question. Many evil things throughout history have been legal, and many good things – such as free speech and absolute private property – are currently criminalized.

Saying that rape is wrong because it makes the victim unhappy is not a moral argument – it is a strange argument from hedonism, in that the ‘morality’ of an action is measured only by pleasure and pain. We often inflict significant misery on people in order to heal or educate them. We punish children – often harshly. The ‘hedonism’ argument is also used to justify sacrificing free speech on the altar of self-proclaimed ‘offense’ and ‘upset.’

So…

Why is rape wrong?

Why are murder, theft and assault immoral?

A central tenet of modernity has been the confirmation of personal experience through universal laws that end up utterly blowing our minds.

The theory of gravity affirms our immediate experience of weight and balance and throwing and catching – and also that we are standing on a giant spinning ball rocketing around a star that is itself rocketing around a galaxy. We feel still; we are in fact in blinding motion. The sun and the moon appear to be the same size – they are in fact vastly different. It looks like the stars go round the Earth, but they don’t…

Science confirms our most immediate experiences, while blowing our minds about the universe as a whole.

If you expand your local observations – “everything I drop falls” – to the universal – “everything in the universe falls” – you radically rewrite your entire world-view.

If you take the speed of light as constant, your perception of time and space change forever – and you also unlock the power of the atom, for better and for worse.

If you take the principles of selective breeding and animal husbandry and apply them to life for the last four billion years, you get the theory of evolution, and your world-view is forever changed – for the better, but the transition is dizzying.

If we take our most common moral instincts – that rape, theft, assault and murder are wrong – and truly universalize them, our world-view also changes forever – better, more accurate, more moral – but also deeply disturbing, disorienting and dizzying.

But we cannot universalize what we cannot prove – this would just be the attempt to turn personal preferences into universal rules: “I like blue, therefore blue is universally preferable.”

No, we must first prove morality – only then can we universalize it.

To prove morality, we must first accept that anything that is impossible cannot also be true.

It cannot be true that a man can walk north and south at the same time.

It cannot be true that a ball can fall up and down at the same time.

It cannot be true that gases both expand and contract when heated.

It cannot be true that water both boils and freezes at the same temperature.

It cannot be true that 2 plus 2 equals both 4 and 5.

If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then it cannot be true that Socrates is immortal.

If you say that impossible things can be true, then you are saying that you have a standard of truth that includes both truth and the opposite of truth, which is itself impossible.

The impossible is the opposite of the possible – if you say that both the possible and the impossible can be true, then you are saying that your standard for truth has two opposite standards, which cannot be valid. This would be like saying that the proof of a scientific theory is conformity with reason and evidence, and also the opposite of conformity with reason and evidence, or that profit in a company equals both making money, and losing money.

All morality is universally preferable behaviour, in that it categorizes behaviour that should ideally be chosen or avoided by all people, at all times. We do not say that rape is evil only on Wednesdays, or 1° north of the equator, or only by tall people. Rape is always and forever wrong – we understand this instinctively, though it is a challenge to prove it rationally.

Remember, that which is impossible can never be true.

If we put forward the proposition that “rape is universally preferable behaviour,” can that ever be true?

If it is impossible, it can never be true.

If we logically analyse the proposition that “rape is universally preferable behaviour,” we quickly find that it is impossible.

The statement demands that everyone prefers rape – to rape and be raped at all times, and under all circumstances.

Aside from the logistical challenges of both raping and being raped at the same time, the entire proposition immediately contradicts itself. Since it is self-contradictory, it is impossible, and if it is impossible, it can neither be true nor valid.

If “rape is universally preferable behaviour,” then everyone must want to rape and be raped at all times.

However, rape is by definition violently unwanted sexual behaviour.

In other words, it is only “rape” because it is decidedly not preferred.

Since the category “rape” only exists because one person wants it, while the other person – his or her victim – desperately does not want it, rape cannot be universally preferable.

No behaviour that only exists because one person wants it, and the other person does not, can ever be in the category of “universally preferable.”

Therefore, it is impossible that rape is universally preferable behaviour.

What about the opposite? Not raping?

Can “not raping” logically ever be “universally preferable behaviour”?

In other words, are there innate self-contradictions in the statement “not raping is universally preferable behaviour”?

No.

Everyone on the planet can simultaneously “not rape” without logical self-contradiction. Two neighbours can both be gardening at the same time – which is “not raping” – without self-contradiction. All of humanity can operate under the “don’t rape” rule without any logical contradictions whatsoever.

Therefore, when we say that “rape is wrong,” we mean this in a dual sense – rape is morally wrong, and it is morally wrong because any attempt to make rape “moral” – i.e. universally preferable behaviour – creates immediate self-contradictions, and therefore is impossible, and therefore cannot be correct or valid.

It is both morally and logically wrong.

What about assault?

Well, assault occurs when one person violently attacks another person who does not want the attack to occur. (This does not apply to sports such as boxing or wrestling where aggressive attacks are agreed to beforehand.)

This follows the same asymmetry as rape.

Assault can never be universally preferable behaviour, because if it were, everyone must want to assault and be assaulted at all times and under all circumstances.

However, if you want to be assaulted, then it is not assault.

Boom.

What about theft?

Well, theft is the unwanted transfer of property.

To say that theft is universally preferable behaviour is to argue that everyone must want to steal and be stolen from at all times, and under all circumstances.

However, if you want to be stolen from, it is not theft – the category completely disappears when it is universalized.

If I want you to take my property, you are not stealing from me.

If I put a couch by the side of the road with a sign saying “TAKE ME,” I cannot call you a thief for taking the couch.

Theft cannot be universally preferable behaviour because again, it is asymmetrical, in that it is wanted by one party – the thief – but desperately not wanted by the other party – the person stolen from.

If a category only exists because one person wants it, but the other person doesn’t, it cannot fall under the category of “universally preferable behaviour.”

The same goes for murder.

Murder is the unwanted killing of another.

If someone wants to be killed, this would fall under the category of euthanasia, which is different from murder, which is decidedly unwanted.

In this way, rape, theft, assault and murder can never be universally preferable behaviours.

The nonaggression principle and a respect for property rights fully conform to rational morality, in that they can be universalized with perfect consistency.

There is no contradiction in the proposal that everyone should respect persons and property at all times. To not initiate the use of force, and to not steal, are both perfectly logically consistent.

Of course, morality exists because people want to do evil – we do not live in heaven, at least not yet.

“Universally preferable behaviour” is a method of evaluating moral propositions which entirely accepts that some people want to do evil.

The reason why it is so essential is because the greatest evils in the world are done not by violent or greedy individuals, but rather by false moral systems such as fascism, communism, socialism and so on.

In the 20th century alone, governments murdered 250 million of their own citizens – outside of war, just slaughtering them in the streets, in gulags and concentration camps.

Individual murderers can at worst kill only a few dozen people in their lifetime, and such serial killers are extraordinarily rare.

Compare this to the toll of war.

A thief may steal your car, but it takes a government to have you born into millions of dollars of intergenerational debt and unfunded liabilities.

Now, remember when I told you that when we universalize your individual experience, we end up with great and dizzying truths?

Get ready.

What is theft?

The unwanted transfer of property, usually through the threat of force.

What is the national debt?

The unwanted transfer of property, through the threat of force.

Individuals in governments have run up incomprehensible debts to be paid by the next generations – the ultimate example of “taxation without representation.”

The concept of “government” is a moral theory, just like “slavery” and “theocracy” and “honour killings.”

The theory is that some individuals must initiate the use of force, while other individuals are banned from initiating the use of force.

Those within the “government” are defined by their moral and legal rights to initiate the use of force, while those outside the “government” are defined by moral and legal bans on initiating the use of force.

This is an entirely contradictory moral theory.

If initiating the use of force is wrong, then it is wrong for everyone, since morality is universally preferable behaviour.

If all men are mortal, we cannot say that Socrates is both a man and immortal.

If initiating force is universally wrong, we cannot say that it is wrong for some people, but right for others.

“Government” is a moral theory that is entirely self-contradictory – and that which is self-contradictory is impossible – as we accepted earlier – and thus cannot be valid.

If a biologist creates a category called “mammal” which is defined by being “warm-blooded,” is it valid to include cold-blooded creatures in that category?

Of course not.

If a physicist proposes a rule that all matter has the property of gravity, can he also say that obsidian has the property of antigravity?

Of course not.

If all matter has gravity, and obsidian is composed of matter, then obsidian must have gravity.

If we say that morality applies to all humans, can we create a separate category of humans for which the opposite of morality applies?

Of course not.

I mean, we can do whatever we want, but it’s neither true nor moral.

If we look at something like counterfeiting, we understand that counterfeiting is the creation of pretend currency based on no underlying value or limitation.

Counterfeiting is illegal for private citizens, but legal – and indeed encouraged – for those protected by the government.

Thus, by the moral theory of “government,” that which is evil for one person, is virtuous for another.

No.

False.

That which is self-contradictory cannot stand.

People who live by ignoring obvious self-contradictions are generally called insane.

They cannot succeed for long in this life.

Societies that live by ignoring obvious self-contradictions are also insane, although we generally call them degenerate, decadent, declining and corrupt.

Such societies cannot succeed for long in this world.

The only real power – the essence of political power – is to create opposite moral categories for power-mongers.

What is evil for you is good for them.

It is disorienting to take our personal morals and truly universalize them.

So what?

Do you think we have reached the perfect end of our moral journey as a species?

Is there nothing left to improve upon when it comes to virtue?

Every evil person creates opposite standards for themselves – the thief says that he can steal, but others should not, because he doesn’t like to be stolen from!

Politicians say that they must use violence, but citizens must not.

Nothing that is self-contradictory can last for long.

You think we have finished our moral journey?

Of course not.

Shake off your stupor, wake up to the corruption all around and within you.

Like “government,” slavery was a universal morally-justified ethic for almost all of human history.

Until it wasn’t.

Read full Article