Is Universal Possible?
A couple weeks ago, I went to a forum at Cato called Are Liberty and Equality Compatible?. (Cato, meh. Free lunch, score!) The short story is that James P. Sterba was trying to find a way to squeeze a liberal philosophy into a libertarian mold. What he came up with was this:
1. Libertarians believe in negative liberty. Nobody should be aggressed against/interfered with.
2. If the rich should have the liberty to enjoy their excess without being interfered with, then the poor should have the liberty to take what they need from the rich without being interfered with.
And presto chango, a positive liberty becomes a negative liberty.
Clearly, nobody at Cato was buying this, not even the leftists in the room. But if anyone had been buying it, Sterba would then have tried to convince them that what we are really talking about is a conflict between different equal liberty principles.
The rebuttal was from Jan Narveson. I’m not going to go into the whole back and forth. You can watch it on Cato’s site if you are interested. I just want to talk about one of the core elements of Narveson’s (common) argument. He believes that we need to look for principles that all people can agree to, based on their rational self interest. And he thinks the non-aggression principle is the bees knees.
But can everyone really agree to that principle?
In the context of our argument of rich v. poor, non-aggression only goes so far. At some point, non-aggression no longer serves the rational self interest of the poor. Non-aggression against United Fruit Company was an absurd prospect for a land-starved Guatemalan. Sterba could have made a stronger case that a certain amount of equality (or at least basic needs being met) is a prerequisite to widespread adoption of the non-aggression principle.
More importantly for this discussion, define aggression. There are some people who think it is aggression to break a bank window (even though the only consequence is a few hundred dollars from the bank’s coffers). But some of those same people don’t think it is aggression to pay off corrupt officials in order to buy huge swaths of productive farmland in Africa and then ship the products to Dubai while the Africans in that country starve.
And there are people who think the exact opposite.
Of course, the six hundred pound elephant in the room during that discussion was property. One of the reasons we can’t agree on a definition of aggression is that we can’t agree on who gets to use what resources. Land is one of the most contentious issues in the world, as is what lies below it. Those conflicts are not going away any time soon. Maybe never.
I like principles. I spend a lot of time trying to root out what principles people are operating from. But I’m not sure we are going to get very far if the plan is to convince 7 billion people to define aggression the same way and agree not to do it. And while I pick on the core libertarian principle here, I could write this post about universal human rights and come up with an equally skeptical conclusion about universality.
Universal may not be possible. And if it is true that universal is not possible, then what?






