1. Please note that ‘obligation’ is not the only standard at play. Companies exist in a social and economic context. (I have previous comments on this topic that can be easily found.)
2. The ‘if you want a company to be run differently, start your own’ argument is tiresome and weak. There are (and should be) many mechanisms to influence corporate behavior.
3. Even the pre-Trump Republican Party has long taken flack from libertarians who essentially argue that one core principle should guide their political philosophy.
3B. Personally, I have not found a strong philosophical grounding to claim that political philosophies should be reducible to one core thought from which everything neatly derives. (That would be nice, wouldn’t it?) In my experience, figuring out public policy decisions is fundamentally more complex than that due to the interplay of conflicting values and moralities.
> libertarians who essentially argue that one core principle should guide their political philosophy.
this isn't really true of libertarianism even. the word "aggression" from the NAP does a lot of heavy lifting and is subject to a lot of different interpretations.
yes, "threatening" and even "forceful" are subject to interpretation.
suppose you see me walking around town with a rifle. is that threatening? maybe not if you're comfortable with open carry, but what if I do it on the sidewalk in front of your house?
is it a violation of NAP to not wear a mask during a pandemic? what if I've already tested positive for covid and am refusing to quarantine? or what if I know that I have a detectable viral load for HIV and have sex without informing my partner?
another interesting example: if you accept the claim that racist speech is an implicit threat of violence, you can use NAP to justify deplatforming.
you can make NAP imply almost any position you want, depending on how you interpret it. only a very specific and narrow interpretation implies the typical positions held by (US) libertarians.
There is a range of libertarian thought, but all share one principle: liberty.
The ‘non-aggression principle’, in my experience of libertarianism at least, is not as central / common across libertarian writings.
Wikipedia:
> Libertarianism (from French: libertaire, "libertarian"; from Latin: libertas, "freedom") is a political philosophy and movement that upholds liberty as a core principle.[1] Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association.[2] Libertarianism shares a skepticism of authority and state power, but libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling for the restriction or dissolution of coercive social institutions. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish various forms of libertarianism.[3][4] This is done to distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines.[5]
doesn't that wikipedia quote kinda make my point in a different way though? if the concept "liberty" is central rather than the NAP, isn't it just as subjective? the pursuit of freedom from coercion at the point of a gun vs freedom from coercion by economic necessity lead one toward very different conclusions.
to be clear, I certainly don't intend to shit on libertarianism. I'm far from an expert on the philosophy, and I do feel libertarians make a lot of valuable contributions to political discussions. I wouldn't want to live in a world where a libertarian got every single thing on their wishlist, though.
My #3 point, in case it wasn’t clear, is this: any particular form of libertarianism, in comparison with many other political philosophies (such as as the platform of progressives in/near the Democratic Party, has considerably fewer principles that must be traded off. Libertarianism is widely regarded as ‘intellectually simpler’.
My #3B point emphasizes this question: ‘Is simplicity best? Or simply the easiest?’ (to quote a song)
In my view, the respectability of private mortalities is not strongly correlated with the simplicity of their core principles. (For background on what I mean by public and private moralities, see writings by Robert Kane, such as ‘Through the Moral Maze’)
2. The ‘if you want a company to be run differently, start your own’ argument is tiresome and weak. There are (and should be) many mechanisms to influence corporate behavior.
3. Even the pre-Trump Republican Party has long taken flack from libertarians who essentially argue that one core principle should guide their political philosophy.
3B. Personally, I have not found a strong philosophical grounding to claim that political philosophies should be reducible to one core thought from which everything neatly derives. (That would be nice, wouldn’t it?) In my experience, figuring out public policy decisions is fundamentally more complex than that due to the interplay of conflicting values and moralities.