[SolarCross]

it's very clear why there are no ancaps here. it's a waste of time to talk to people that are allergic to logic.

That is not the most gracious way to concede defeat.

[RedPillAger]

That is not the most gracious way to concede defeat.

i concede nothing, except that the people here will do anything to stray from the truth.

[Saeko]

it's very clear why there are no ancaps here. it's a waste of time to talk to people that are allergic to logic.

Wow, really? You actually haven't even tried to defend any of your beliefs when pressed, and now it's everyone else who is allergic to logic.

[RedPillAger]

Wow, really? You actually haven't even tried to defend any of your beliefs when pressed, and now it's everyone else who is allergic to logic.

what's to defend? you folks think it's ok to initiate force on others to get what you want, but you do not accept someone else doing the same to you. you contradict yourselves. people following the NAP, like myself, do not.

i haven't heard a serious challenge to that position, unless you count the liar that said they wouldn't mind if they were killed or raped. i've only seen people throw out logical fallacies, make wholly semantic arguments, call the NAP names without explanation, or avoid any point i make.

[Drlee]

I haven't heard a serious challenge to that position,

Here are some:

It is childish. It establishes itself on one, unalterable moral absolute. It fails very easily. Not only does it defy logic, it defies human behavior established for millennia. One of the most fundamental problems with the NAP is that it defines aggression in a manner that is unsupportable. The NAP is held by you and others, as I mentioned, as a moral absolute. So applying the NAP one could not drill for oil because that pollutes and the pollution would be aggression against others. One could not drive a car because it pollutes. One could not have a water heater in his house because it pollutes. It fails because strict adherence to it rules out even insignificant acts of aggression when they serve the common good. One could not tax each American even a single penny because taxation is aggression against property. Even if that taxation was used to purchase the cure for cancer. Of course there could be no penny because producing it requires aggression against the people who own the roads surrounding the copper mine should they object to the mine. In other words, it is just childish silliness. The NAP legitimizes sexism and racism provided they do not affect property. So under the NAP may I play my music loud enough for you to hear it if you object. If I am driving down the road listening to music and you stop at a light with me, must I turn down my music because you object and that makes my music aggression?

Moral absolutes are just stupid.

Then there is this. We order our society the way we want to. Your personal peccadillos are not of much concern to us. The sun and stars do not revolve around you. As humans we know that we are expendable. You are too. I really don't care what you think about the NAP I (and virtually everyone I know) rejects it out of hand. So what are you going to do about it sport? Welcome to life in the food-chain.

[SolarCross]

what's to defend? you folks think it's ok to initiate force on others to get what you want, but you do not accept someone else doing the same to you. you contradict yourselves. people following the NAP, like myself, do not.

i haven't heard a serious challenge to that position, unless you count the liar that said they wouldn't mind if they were killed or raped. i've only seen people throw out logical fallacies, make wholly semantic arguments, call the NAP names without explanation, or avoid any point i make.

Apparently some self-described libertarians themselves have some problems with the NAP: Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle.

A summary of the six points (some of which Dr Lee has already mentioned):

1. Prohibits All Pollution – As I noted in my last post, Rothbard himself recognized that industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited. But Rothbard did not draw the full implications of his principle. Not just industrial pollution, but personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one’s fireplace, smoking, etc., runs afoul of NAP. The NAP implies that all of these activities must be prohibited, no matter how beneficial they may be in other respects, and no matter how essential they are to daily life in the modern industrialized world. And this is deeply implausible.

2. Prohibits Small Harms for Large Benefits – The NAP prohibits all pollution because its prohibition on aggression is absolute. No amount of aggression, no matter how small, is morally permissible. And no amount of offsetting benefits can change this fact. But suppose, to borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the whole world by lightly scratching your finger? Or, to take a perhaps more plausible example, suppose that by imposing a very, very small tax on billionaires, I could provide life-saving vaccination for tens of thousands of desperately poor children? Even if we grant that taxation is aggression, and that aggression is generally wrong, is it really so obvious that the relatively minor aggression involved in these examples is wrong, given the tremendous benefit it produces?

3. All-or-Nothing Attitude Toward Risk – The NAP clearly implies that it’s wrong for me to shoot you in the head. But, to borrow an example from David Friedman, what if I merely run the risk of shooting you by putting one bullet in a six-shot revolver, spinning the cylinder, aiming it at your head, and squeezing the trigger? What if it is not one bullet but five? Of course, almost everything we do imposes some risk of harm on innocent persons. We run this risk when we drive on the highway (what if we suffer a heart attack, or become distracted), or when we fly airplanes over populated areas. Most of us think that some of these risks are justifiable, while others are not, and that the difference between them has something to do with the size and likelihood of the risked harm, the importance of the risky activity, and the availability and cost of less risky activities. But considerations like this carry zero weight in the NAP’s absolute prohibition on aggression. That principle seems compatible with only two possible rules: either all risks are permissible (because they are not really aggression until they actually result in a harm), or none are (because they are). And neither of these seems sensible.

4. No Prohibition of Fraud – Libertarians usually say that violence may legitimately be used to prevent either force or fraud. But according to NAP, the only legitimate use of force is to prevent or punish the initiatory use of physical violence by others. And fraud is not physical violence. If I tell you that the painting you want to buy is a genuine Renoir, and it’s not, I have not physically aggressed against you. But if you buy it, find out it’s a fake, and then send the police (or your protective agency) over to my house to get your money back, then you are aggressing against me. So not only does a prohibition on fraud not follow from the NAP, it is not even compatible with it, since the use of force to prohibit fraud itself constitutes the initiation of physical violence.

5. Parasitic on a Theory of Property – Even if the NAP is correct, it cannot serve as a fundamental principle of libertarian ethics, because its meaning and normative force are entirely parasitic on an underlying theory of property. Suppose A is walking across an empty field, when B jumps out of the bushes and clubs A on the head. It certainly looks like B is aggressing against A in this case. But on the libertarian view, whether this is so depends entirely on the relevant property rights – specifically, who owns the field. If it’s B’s field, and A was crossing it without B’s consent, then A was the one who was actually aggressing against B. Thus, “aggression,” on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all. It means “violation of property rights.” But if this is true, then the NAP’s focus on “aggression” and “violence” is at best superfluous, and at worst misleading. It is the enforcement of property rights, not the prohibition of aggression, that is fundamental to libertarianism.

6. What About the Children??? – It’s one thing to say that aggression against others is wrong. It’s quite another to say that it’s the only thing that’s wrong – or the only wrong that is properly subject to prevention or rectification by force. But taken to its consistent extreme, as Murray Rothbard took it, the NAP implies that there is nothing wrong with allowing your three year-old son to starve to death, so long as you do not forcibly prevent him from obtaining food on his own. Or, at least, it implies that it would be wrong for others to, say, trespass on your property in order to give the child you’re deliberately starving a piece of bread. This, I think, is a fairly devastating reductio of the view that positive duties may never be coercively enforced. That it was Rothbard himself who presented the reductio, without, apparently, realizing the absurdity into which he had walked, rather boggles the mind.

[Nunt]

It does not matter whether a lot of people think something is right in a discussion of whether something is right. You are correct about that, but it does matter in a discussion about what we are going to do next.

Taxation is as legitimate as gov't and property rights.

If you wish to argue that they are morally wrong, you have to claim that taxes are the same as theft because both of them are not done with your consent. My reply is that you have consented through the social contract, and you would then reply that this social contract is not legitimate because you did not consent to it either.

I think modern property rights are morally wrong, because I have not consented to them. Your reply could be that I have consented through the social contract, and I would then reply that this social contract is not legitimate because I did not consent to it either.

So, if taxes are theft, then modern property rights are also immoral.

Can you explain further how you get to: "if you believe that taxation is wrong, then you must also believe that property rights are wrong"? I don't understand the logical necessity of that. I admit that many things are wrong with today's property rights and changes are necessary. But just because government enforces property rights, does not automatically make it wrong in my opinion. Taxation is not evil because government does it, government is evil because (among other things) it uses taxation.

I will agree with you that there is not social contract about property rights as long as you do not consent to it. Would you also not agree with the idea that if someone were to say to you: "well as long as you do not abandon all property and go live in Antartica, you tacitly consent to with the moral legitimacy of property rights", then that person would make a faulty circular reasoning?

[Nunt]

Here are some:

It is childish.

As a response to a challange to underpin your case logically, you start with namecalling?

It establishes itself on one, unalterable moral absolute.

Its a basic guideline for people to live. Its fairly flexible. Anyway, you yourself do not hold any moral absolutes? For example, would you not say it is a moral absolute that I shouldn't go out in the street shooting people?

Not only does it defy logic, it defies human behavior established for millennia.

Maybe human behavior these past millenia has been wrong?

One of the most fundamental problems with the NAP is that it defines aggression in a manner that is unsupportable. The NAP is held by you and others, as I mentioned, as a moral absolute. So applying the NAP one could not drill for oil because that pollutes and the pollution would be aggression against others. One could not drive a car because it pollutes. One could not have a water heater in his house because it pollutes. It fails because strict adherence to it rules out even insignificant acts of aggression when they serve the common good. One could not tax each American even a single penny because taxation is aggression against property. Even if that taxation was used to purchase the cure for cancer. Of course there could be no penny because producing it requires aggression against the people who own the roads surrounding the copper mine should they object to the mine. In other words, it is just childish silliness. The NAP legitimizes sexism and racism provided they do not affect property. So under the NAP may I play my music loud enough for you to hear it if you object. If I am driving down the road listening to music and you stop at a light with me, must I turn down my music because you object and that makes my music aggression?

You just don't understand the NAP. It is a flexible moral tool to evaluate whether an action constitutes agression. Libertarians don't believe people are robots (no matter how much you want to repeat this). Social interaction isn't black and white but it is shades of gray. An ideal libertarian society would have judges interpret the NAP for every specific situation, not computers. The issues you raise are borderline cases: is this agression or not? People will have to decide.

The idea that aggression is wrong is pretty absolute, but the exact definition and interpretation of aggression is not. The difference between libertarian law and government law is the following:
Government law: the law is valid if it has followed the right procedures, for example: approved by parliament.
Libertarian law: the law is valid if it respects the NAP.

The interpretation of aggression is of course very important. A society that claims to follow the NAP but interprets aggression in the wrong way is not libertarian. But in the context of human interaction I don't see a way out of this. There is no god handing out absolute judgement. People will always have to judge, it will always be subjective.

Moral absolutes are just stupid.

Then there is this. We order our society the way we want to. Your personal peccadillos are not of much concern to us. The sun and stars do not revolve around you. As humans we know that we are expendable. You are too. I really don't care what you think about the NAP I (and virtually everyone I know) rejects it out of hand. So what are you going to do about it sport? Welcome to life in the food-chain.

That fact that you care to reply, must mean that you care. You make the effort of ranting a some paragraphs and then end disdainly by: "i don't care". Well, if you don't care, why do you open the libertarian subforum?

[velvet]

In even a nominal democracy the government can be compelled to change without violence.

In a democracy the government doesn't represent the will of all the people. There's winners and losers. The winner's will/opinions (in the form of rights, duties, regulations, prohibitions, etc.) are imposed on the losers through government's monopoly on force. Black American have their rights because after the widespread pro-Black sentiment generated during the civil rights movement embedded itself within the government the people who wanted to violate these rights found themselves in-face of government force.

It's still right by conquest. It's just using a more 'sophisticated' mechanism than the pure barbarism used in past times.

However I do think that rights (duties, regulations, prohibitions, etc.) can exist outside the paradigm of force and violence. You mentioned morals though I'm going to replace that with the term social coercion. Within our societies we generate social codes, practices, etc. which are backed through the threat of censure, ostracisation, and other forms of social coercion, and while the prevalence of this is diminishing the basis of their upholding is based on still provides a valid alternative to that of force.

So, if taxes are theft, then modern property rights are also immoral.

The experiences I've had with an-caps has led me to believe that the (moral basis for the) existence of property rights has nothing to do with contractualism and more to do with natural rights or utilitarianism.

[Nunt]

Apparently some self-described libertarians themselves have some problems with the NAP: Six Reasons Libertarians Should Reject the Non-Aggression Principle.

A summary of the six points (some of which Dr Lee has already mentioned):

1. Prohibits All Pollution – As I noted in my last post, Rothbard himself recognized that industrial pollution violates the NAP and must therefore be prohibited. But Rothbard did not draw the full implications of his principle. Not just industrial pollution, but personal pollution produced by driving, burning wood in one’s fireplace, smoking, etc., runs afoul of NAP. The NAP implies that all of these activities must be prohibited, no matter how beneficial they may be in other respects, and no matter how essential they are to daily life in the modern industrialized world. And this is deeply implausible.

2. Prohibits Small Harms for Large Benefits – The NAP prohibits all pollution because its prohibition on aggression is absolute. No amount of aggression, no matter how small, is morally permissible. And no amount of offsetting benefits can change this fact. But suppose, to borrow a thought from Hume, that I could prevent the destruction of the whole world by lightly scratching your finger? Or, to take a perhaps more plausible example, suppose that by imposing a very, very small tax on billionaires, I could provide life-saving vaccination for tens of thousands of desperately poor children? Even if we grant that taxation is aggression, and that aggression is generally wrong, is it really so obvious that the relatively minor aggression involved in these examples is wrong, given the tremendous benefit it produces?

3. All-or-Nothing Attitude Toward Risk – The NAP clearly implies that it’s wrong for me to shoot you in the head. But, to borrow an example from David Friedman, what if I merely run the risk of shooting you by putting one bullet in a six-shot revolver, spinning the cylinder, aiming it at your head, and squeezing the trigger? What if it is not one bullet but five? Of course, almost everything we do imposes some risk of harm on innocent persons. We run this risk when we drive on the highway (what if we suffer a heart attack, or become distracted), or when we fly airplanes over populated areas. Most of us think that some of these risks are justifiable, while others are not, and that the difference between them has something to do with the size and likelihood of the risked harm, the importance of the risky activity, and the availability and cost of less risky activities. But considerations like this carry zero weight in the NAP’s absolute prohibition on aggression. That principle seems compatible with only two possible rules: either all risks are permissible (because they are not really aggression until they actually result in a harm), or none are (because they are). And neither of these seems sensible.

4. No Prohibition of Fraud – Libertarians usually say that violence may legitimately be used to prevent either force or fraud. But according to NAP, the only legitimate use of force is to prevent or punish the initiatory use of physical violence by others. And fraud is not physical violence. If I tell you that the painting you want to buy is a genuine Renoir, and it’s not, I have not physically aggressed against you. But if you buy it, find out it’s a fake, and then send the police (or your protective agency) over to my house to get your money back, then you are aggressing against me. So not only does a prohibition on fraud not follow from the NAP, it is not even compatible with it, since the use of force to prohibit fraud itself constitutes the initiation of physical violence.

5. Parasitic on a Theory of Property – Even if the NAP is correct, it cannot serve as a fundamental principle of libertarian ethics, because its meaning and normative force are entirely parasitic on an underlying theory of property. Suppose A is walking across an empty field, when B jumps out of the bushes and clubs A on the head. It certainly looks like B is aggressing against A in this case. But on the libertarian view, whether this is so depends entirely on the relevant property rights – specifically, who owns the field. If it’s B’s field, and A was crossing it without B’s consent, then A was the one who was actually aggressing against B. Thus, “aggression,” on the libertarian view, doesn’t really mean physical violence at all. It means “violation of property rights.” But if this is true, then the NAP’s focus on “aggression” and “violence” is at best superfluous, and at worst misleading. It is the enforcement of property rights, not the prohibition of aggression, that is fundamental to libertarianism.

6. What About the Children??? – It’s one thing to say that aggression against others is wrong. It’s quite another to say that it’s the only thing that’s wrong – or the only wrong that is properly subject to prevention or rectification by force. But taken to its consistent extreme, as Murray Rothbard took it, the NAP implies that there is nothing wrong with allowing your three year-old son to starve to death, so long as you do not forcibly prevent him from obtaining food on his own. Or, at least, it implies that it would be wrong for others to, say, trespass on your property in order to give the child you’re deliberately starving a piece of bread. This, I think, is a fairly devastating reductio of the view that positive duties may never be coercively enforced. That it was Rothbard himself who presented the reductio, without, apparently, realizing the absurdity into which he had walked, rather boggles the mind.

Interesting article. I think I can respond to most of these points.

1. As I have explained to Dr Lee I don't view aggression as black and white. I think there should be universal agreement that aggression is wrong, but it is difficult to determine what aggression is. Living in a community means that you will always experience negative effects from other people's action. Somewhere we need to draw a line between the negative effects that can be considered aggression and the negative effects that are expected of living in a society. So if anyone is claiming that the NAP can be used to guide all human interactions using pure logic, I would disagree with them. The NAP is part of a broader moral theory and thus needs to be (partly) interpreted by subjective humans.

2. I would say that it remains wrong to hurt someone in order to further your own goals. Even if you perceive the benefit to be very large. If you can really save the world by scratsching a finger, then I'm sure you would be able to convince that person to cooperate voluntarly. If you know how to develop a vaccine, then you can try to get alternative funds. Are you saying that the only source of funding would be a small tax on billionaires. If the way to achieves your goals involves hurting someone else, then find another way.

3. Same answer as 1: just because your activity has a probability to harm someone else (in fact every activity has a small probability to hurt someone else) does not automatically make it aggression.

4. I would classify fraud as not allowed by the NAP. Fraud is just an indirect form of theft. Non-aggression applies to the person and to his property. Not touching someone but taking away all his food is as much aggression as shooting someone.

5. Not a very good example: defensive force is only allowed in proportion to the aggression. But yes, I agree that respect for property rights is an important part of the NAP.

6. This is a bit more difficult to answer. I suppose we start by saying there exists a parent-child contract. Anyone who wants to be parent has a certain amount of obligations and rights towards the child. Now according to the NAP we can't force people into contracts. But we can say that anyone who parents a child implicitly accepts the contract. So if you act like you are the parent of this child, you can't stop feeding the child. If you want to get out of this contract then you can find someone who is willing to take over the contract. Also according to the NAP it would be no problem to rescue a child from someone's property if it is not well treated. The owners right not to have any trespassers is trumped by the childs right to leave the property and if the child cannot get out on his own, someone is allowed to come get him.

7. I'm going to add another point because the author of the article put such a big emphasis on trespassing. In the libertarianism that I envision trespassing is seldom going to be crime. In order to violate someone's property one needs to cause damage or needs to hinder the owner of enjoying his property. If we look at how libertarians view how land can come into possession it boils down to homesteading: if you use a piece of land for an activity, then you should be able to continue using that land for that activity. So we won't see mansions with big plots of land around it exclusively owned by one person. Because then the landowner would have to argue how his previously established activities are harmed by a trespasser. So in many cases trespassing will be okay as I don't see many people having total exclusive property rights. I view property rights more as use rights than as ownership rights that we know today.

[SolarCross]

It's still right by conquest. It's just using a more 'sophisticated' mechanism than the pure barbarism used in past times.

I glad someone didn't need to be held by the hand to understand that Right by Conquest is not necessarily a blood-soaked affair. Indeed Right by Conquest is probably more usually Conquest by Default, the potential combatants weigh up their chances and the one with the lesser chance backs off. It becomes ritualised combat. Democracy is a form of it but the origins go back to the jungle. When a young male lion wants to challenge a older harem keeping male for his females they usually just roar at each other until one of them backs down rather than go toe to toe in a bloodly conflict that will result in potentially lethal injuries even to the winner. Vassalage came about in the same way, two lords would muster their hosts and the stronger makes the offer "look I can fight you and I will win and you will lose but we will both get hammered in the process, why not just agree that I won and you can call me boss and pay tribute and we all live to see another day". Modern democracy was born out the bloodbath of the French Revolution, that's people power, heaving shrieking mobs murdering the entire old regime and each other. Eventually people just realised we can ritualise this and so civilise this "people power" thing so no one gets hurt, let's just see who can get the larger army of little black crosses on pieces of paper and then call that person boss until we do it again.

Conquest by Default is still Conquest, still Might is Right. It isn't "good", it isn't "bad", it is just how it is.

[Drlee]

1. As I have explained to Dr Lee I don't view aggression as black and white. I think there should be universal agreement that aggression is wrong, but it is difficult to determine what aggression is.

You are back-pedaling so fast you might run yourself down.

You do realize that in response to my post and Tax's post you have gone from absolute to "the voters decide" don't you?

And therein lies the tale. Rothbard was as absolute as he could be. He passed into the ridiculous often.

Libertarianism/ANCAP makes the fundamental mistake that government is an artificial construct that interferes with natural behavior when in its most liberal forms it is a natural construct that supports natural human behavior.

I would say that it remains wrong to hurt someone in order to further your own goals. Even if you perceive the benefit to be very large. If you can really save the world by scratsching a finger, then I'm sure you would be able to convince that person to cooperate voluntarly. If you know how to develop a vaccine, then you can try to get alternative funds. Are you saying that the only source of funding would be a small tax on billionaires. If the way to achieves your goals involves hurting someone else, then find another way.

Why bother? You have so fixated on property that you have imbued a stone with human rights. If you consider first the primacy of humans and subordinate property to that you will arrive where most of human history as arrived; that some form of democracy is the most natural and protective of the rights of the vast majority of people. History shows that this works pretty well because although people are inherently selfish (ANCAPS prime among them) in groups they can be trusted to behave so that the vast majority benefits. And that is what social groups are for.

We are at a crossroads in the US and have to decide whether we are going to allow the protection of power, wealth and its acquisition for less than one in one hundred of our compatriots to subject the rest of us to want, disease and powerlessness. I hope we get it right. You are on the wrong side of that issue. You should get your nose out of a book and see what is going on around you. That is real life 101.

[Truth To Power]

what's to defend?

Above all, you need to defend the use of force to prevent others from exercising their liberty to use natural resources that have (invalidly) been claimed as property.

you folks think it's ok to initiate force on others to get what you want, but you do not accept someone else doing the same to you. you contradict yourselves.

As they say in Japan, "It's mirror time!"

people following the NAP, like myself, do not.

Wrong. If you claim property in land, as all ancaps do, you claim a right to initiate violence against others in the name of "non-aggression." As all are naturally at liberty to use all land, there is no way land can be appropriated as property in the first place but by aggression.

It is the need to reconcile the natural liberty of all to use land with the property right of the producer of fixed improvements that originally and inescapably gives rise to the need for government. People cannot secure those rights for themselves, and societies that do secure them will reliably out-compete societies that do not. Ancaps try to finesse this bedrock contradiction in their philosophy by telling silly fairy tales about solitary homesteaders, fairy tales that do not describe the actual origin of any actual land title.

i haven't heard a serious challenge to that position, unless you count the liar that said they wouldn't mind if they were killed or raped. i've only seen people throw out logical fallacies, make wholly semantic arguments, call the NAP names without explanation, or avoid any point i make.

No. You have seen the facts about "property" in land, and you have been unable to answer them. That will not be changing.

[RedPillAger]

Above all, you need to defend the use of force to prevent others from exercising their liberty to use natural resources that have (invalidly) been claimed as property.

use of force is not prohibited by the NAP, only the initiation of force. it is perfectly within the guidelines of the NAP to defend one's self and his property. by the way, you assumed i'm an ANCAP myself. you're mistaken.

[RedPillAger]

So what are you going to do about it sport? Welcome to life in the food-chain.

i expect i'll defend myself

If you claim property in land, as all ancaps do, you claim a right to initiate violence against others in the name of "non-aggression." As all are naturally at liberty to use all land, there is no way land can be appropriated as property in the first place but by aggression.

it's true, before all land was claimed by humanity, that some land was initially made property through aggression; and some after, including today. but, that no longer has to be the case. i can pay for land in a mutually consensual transaction without initiating force on anyone.

[Saeko]

what's to defend? you folks think it's ok to initiate force on others to get what you want, but you do not accept someone else doing the same to you. you contradict yourselves. people following the NAP, like myself, do not.

i haven't heard a serious challenge to that position, unless you count the liar that said they wouldn't mind if they were killed or raped. i've only seen people throw out logical fallacies, make wholly semantic arguments, call the NAP names without explanation, or avoid any point i make.

I've already pointed out to you that there is, in fact, no logical contradiction in being particularistic. You never responded.

[RedPillAger]

I've already pointed out to you that there is, in fact, no logical contradiction in being particularistic. You never responded.

particularism is still collectivist. therefore, it at some point will violate individual liberty. if you disagree, please elaborate on what you mean by particularistic so i can be more clear.

[Saeko]

particularism is still collectivist. therefore, it at some point will violate individual liberty. if you disagree, please elaborate on what you mean by particularistic so i can be more clear.

Particularism is the opposite of universalism. Whereas universalism applies the same rules to everybody, particularism applies different rules to different people.

[Truth To Power]

it is perfectly within the guidelines of the NAP to defend one's self and his property.

But some "property" -- specifically land titles and IP monopolies -- is nothing but institutionalized initiation of force.

If you claim property in land, as all ancaps do, you claim a right to initiate violence against others in the name of "non-aggression." As all are naturally at liberty to use all land, there is no way land can be appropriated as property in the first place but by aggression.

it's true, before all land was claimed by humanity, that some land was initially made property through aggression;

No land was ever initially made property through anything but aggression.

and some after, including today. but, that no longer has to be the case.

In that case, you are assuming that we are born without rights to liberty, because our liberty to use land has already been removed by force and made into the property of landowners.

i can pay for land in a mutually consensual transaction without initiating force on anyone.

It may be "mutually" consensual between you and the seller, but it's not entirely consensual, because as soon as you forcibly exclude others from the land they would otherwise be at liberty to access and use, you initiate force against them. I didn't consent to the forcible removal of my right to liberty so that you could be a parasite, demanding that I pay you for the advantages government, the community and nature provide, sorry.

[RedPillAger]

Particularism is the opposite of universalism. Whereas universalism applies the same rules to everybody, particularism applies different rules to different people.

it's all about consent. if you can view your particularism at its finest granularity, where the individual is self-governed, it would not violate the NAP. you can even have voluntary association in groups. however, any third party "applying rules" to anyone or any group is a violation of the NAP if it's done without consent.