https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwrsKGzcZLM

Stefan Molyneux has released a long video responding to the critique of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) I published at Libertarianism.org earlier this year.

The first few minutes, in which my own words are read aloud in Stefan’s dulcet tongue, are excellent, and I highly recommend them.

After that, sadly, things start to go downhill.

For instance, in response to my claim that the NAP seems to entail the impermissibility of all non-consensual pollution, Stefan responds by saying:

1. If we prohibited all pollution, people’s average life expectancy would be reduced to that late teens or early twenties (because we’d have to give up all the benefits that pollution-producing industrial activity generates),
2. So therefore we all willingly accept pollution,
3. And if you don’t like it, you can move to some uninhabited part of Canada,
4. So therefore the NAP doesn’t prohibit pollution.

It’s a bit hard to know where to begin with all of this. Something in the county (I won’t say “neighborhood”) of (1) seems basically right to me, and to be an important part of the explanation for why some pollution is morally permissible. But, of course, I’m not a NAPper. And it’s hard for me to see how this kind of aggregative reasoning could justify pollution from the perspective of the NAP. Consider, for instance,

1. There is some pollution that creates more harm than it does good. Grant that we’d all be living in the stone age if nobody polluted at all. How does that do anything to justify the pollution of some particular firm, the loss of which would do nothing whatsoever to retard the progress of industrial society?
2. There are some people who bear a disproportionate share of the burden of pollution. If you live next to a polluting firm and get lung cancer as a result, is that supposed to be made OK by the fact that “society in general” is made better off by “pollution in general”? For a consequentialist, maybe. But for a defender of the NAP?

Regarding (2), just because Stefan Molyneux has decided that the benefits of pollution are worth the cost doesn’t mean that the rest of us have “consented” to it. One would think that libertarians, of all people, would be a bit more careful in attributing consent to people who never actually gave it, merely on the basis of what we think would be good for them.

Regarding (3), I mean, really? “If you don’t like it, then leave”? If I’m smoking in my own home, and you’re my guest, I can say this to you. Because I own my home, and part of what comes along with that property right is a right to determine who uses my property, and whether smoking is allowed on it. But what right do polluters have to make such a demand of their victims? Why shouldn’t the polluters be the ones required to leave?

That gets us up to about the 5 minute mark in the video. Perhaps the rest of the arguments are better. I didn’t watch the whole thing, so I’m not sure. Feel free to watch it yourselves though, and to bring up any points you think are worth addressing in the comments thread.