> A parent making decisions that affect his children is implicitly asking himself whether doing something one child wants to do and the other doesn't will increase the former's happiness more than it decreases the latter’s.
I don’t think this is what I do, ought to do, or can do as a parent. Instead I try to think about how different actions are likely to affect the relationships between the members of my family, how to most sustainably distribute burdens, and what long-run capacities for the family system as a whole might be created or destroyed.
Right. One reason small groups tend to be more egalitarian is that the relationship values and risks tend to be perceived to be around the same magnitude. Nevertheless, talk to a estate planning lawyer for a bit and you'll see that it's not too uncommon for parents to give different amounts to children based on lots of factors, but this also implies differential, not equal, weight on the happiness and utilities of those children. Indeed, the kid who is poorer because of some vice is often given less ("because he'll just piss it away"), which also contradicts at least the short term, static analysis behind diminishing marginal utility arguments for redistribution.
In general it's a fool's errand to try and make coherent sense in some tidy ethical axiomatic system of all these irreconcilable context-based intuitions.
Excellent article! Regarding the NAP and the flagpole, perhaps we can rephrase the NAP so that it doesn't say you "should" let go of the flagpole, but rather that, if you don't let go, then you are liable to compensate the owner for any damages (to be determined how quantified).
You often say that even libertarians don’t believe in the NAP, using the flagpole situation as an example. I think that this is incorrect and most (Rothbardian) libertarians do believe in the NAP. Here is my answer to the flagpole-type situation: Most people will simply suspend their moral beliefs in an extreme situation. That doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in the NAP. If I was in a flagpole situation I would definitely save my life, but I would also acknowledge that I violated someone’s property and try to compensate him afterwards.
I agree. I think it is also worth noting that the owner of the flag pole who demands the trespasser let go should (and would) be held in contempt by everyone else. Presumably also himself. Someone who values other human life so little is clearly vile.
Given that, it seems an unlikely problem (even assuming it happens) as it seems much more likely that there is a rather cheap negotiated compensation that could be reached.
"Someone who values other human life so little is clearly vile"—I think this is right, and I want to say (do you?) that it is wrong to value human life /so/ cheaply, and therefore that the owner of the flagpole is morally required to let you use it to save your life (if not help you), perhaps even an enforceable one. I like to call myself a libertarian, but, let me say, if I saw that the owner was about to try to prise your fingers off his flagpole, making you fall to your death, I would without hesitation try to force him to stop, and feel perfectly justified in doing so. I think what this reveals is the importance of respect for persons, that this is primarily shown by not aggressing against others (thus the NAP), but also to a more limited extent by being prepared to help them when it comes at only a small to yourself (thus the flagpole). The flag pole owner doesn't have to risk his life to save yours, but he could at least let you use the pole.
This gets into the super finicky area of that line between moral propriety and justice enforceable by others. To avoid writing another dissertation, let me extend the story a bit.
Say your upstairs neighbor falls, grabs your flagpole, etc. as in the base case. In general we expect people to help each other if it is at negligible cost to themselves. (Not saying that we should, but rather that we do.) As you say, prying his fingers off is going to make everyone hate you, and for good reason. We can all sympathize with the person who had the accident and falls, and would like others to help us if we do, and likely would help others ourselves. Likes sailors picking up marooned sailors on the high seas, it is just what you do.
Now, say your upstairs neighbor falling and catching your flagpole becomes a near daily event. Turns out he has taken to climbing the outside of the building (or whatever dumb ass thing) and he keeps needing to use your flagpole. At some point you are clearly entitled to say "no" without drawing moral approbation from others. The situation has gone from exigency over which the neighbor had no reasonable control, to simply taking advantage. It would be hard to point to where exactly that happened, but it definitely does.
Even if you don't pry his fingers off the 10th time today he "needs" to be saved, it isn't obvious that anyone would think less of you if you decide "You know what, I am sick of that guy falling on my pole... I am just going to remove it."
The key seems to be judging the motivation and behavior of the neighbor, not just the pole owner. If it was an unavoidable accident, we tend say "you should help and charge for it later if it is a problem." If it is reasonably avoidable (often repeated is a good proxy for avoidable) then we tend to say "no, that's on him." I don't think you can judge the hypothetical case without judging the full scenario and the behaviors of each actor involved and get to what actual people would respond with.
>In general we expect people [in one-off cases] to help each other if it is at negligible cost to themselves. (Not saying that we should, but rather that we do.)
I'm happy to say that we should—note the "should", but also note the "we", which will be relevant in a moment.
>Now, say your upstairs neighbor falling and catching your flagpole becomes a near daily event. ...
Good example. I say that you should save someone's life if the cost to you is negligible. On day 1, letting the neighbor save himself using the flagpole costs you very little—"e" say—so you should allow him on day 1. Ditto for day 2, and so on to day N. In the end, the cost to you will be N x e, which will not be negligible, if N is large enough. And that's a problem for me.
>The key seems to be judging the motivation and behavior of the neighbor, not just the pole owner.
OK, I guess, if the neighbor's constant falling is due to his recklessness, then your obligation to help him is lesser, perhaps even zero. That's an easy case. But suppose not. Or suppose that it is a different person each day has the bad luck to fall off the roof through no fault of their own. On my principle, each should be allowed to use the flagpole, even though after N days the cost to you will be the same, ie much more than negligible. This is a harder case.
I have to say, though, it seems rather bad luck on your part that these people keep falling off the roof just over your flagpole. This is costing you an awful lot. So it seems that you are another innocent victim of this situation, and others should help you deal with it. For there is no reason why /you/ are specially obligated to incur costs to help these falling people. As I noted, we are /all/ obliged to do what we can. So, yes, you are obliged to let this rain of people use your flagpole to save their own lives, but everyone else (those people themselves, or others if they can't afford it) is required to compensate you for the cost of doing so. This is very close to your answer ...
>If it was an unavoidable accident, we tend say "you should help and charge for it later if it is a problem."
Except I think that third parties might have to pick up some of the tab, if the beneficiaries themselves can't pay the full cost of their rescue, as is often the case in the real world.
“Except I think that third parties might have to pick up some of the tab, if the beneficiaries themselves can't pay the full cost of their rescue, as is often the case in the real world.”
This is where the question of agency on both sides comes into play, and the reason I brought up repeat occurrences. Exploitative behavior often comes in the form of “I am a victim of circumstances! You must aid me!” repeated over and over. It is exactly the moral sentiment that we ought to help other humans if random bad luck befalls them that the exploit targets, which is why there needs to be a limiting principle to allow one to cut off the exploitation. Demanding third parties cover the costs of helping of the “victims” of circumstance is how you get welfare states everyone hates. To avoid that one has to look closet at the behaviors of the actors involved and make specific judgements, not general. There will not be a one sized fits all situations answer.
David, you say that "we routinely do make [interpersonal comparisons]" and give these examples:
"Utilitarianism and Redistribution"
"a parent making decisions that affect his children;"
"deciding which friend to give a gift to;"
"signal[ing] my feelings, including preferences, in facial expressions, [etc.]"
What on earth do any of these examples have to do with interpersonal comparison as used by utilitarianism? If these are valid, then ordering a pizza expresses "interpersonal comparison."
Interpersonal comparison in utilitarianism is the studied pretense of quantifying subjective preferences so that the entire society's goods can be redistributed to reach some "optimum" – whether "average," or "total," or "just," or "goldilocks," according to some arbitrary scheme.
Your examples are just one-off statements of "I like that," fluttering on the capricious evanescence of whimsy – utterly useless for either quantifying any preference or even for setting ordinal rankings at the scale that utilitarianism demands.
My examples show individuals making interpersonal utility comparisons in order to decide what to do. If interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible they shouldn't be able to do that.
You are imagining that the only thing utilitarianism is relevant to is running the world and since I don't know enough to do that I don't know enough to run my own life.
It IS possible to make "interpersonal comparisons" for you or those you know closely. But why not just say "I've got a good idea how to maximize income for me or those I know well"? Why put a tuxedo on such a plain and familiar notion? That is an idiosyncratic usage that requires a constant rectification of terms.
It is only in the context of utilitarianism that "interpersonal comparison" has meaningful currency – albeit in its pretense that some kind of non-market calculus can sort out all the personal "satisfactions" of an entire society.
It might be a safer or more likely true critique to say that while one can fairly well estimate the interpersonal utility of various outcome when one really knows the subjects well, the ability to do so drops off rapidly with the knowledge of the subjects. So I can pretty well judge e.g. what restaurant will optimize the happiness of my kids today, but probably can't do the same with 30 of my coworkers, and certainly not with the assortment of the commenters on this post.
Even granting this, this usage is highly idiosyncratic. This usage is just colloquial or familiar, having nothing to do with its meaning for utilitarianism. To say "interpersonal comparison" for this familiar usage is like wearing a tuxedo to a sports bar -- it's just pretentious obscurantism.
In its proper usage within utilitarianism, "interpersonal comparison" is impossible. Utilitarianism pretends to measure these subjective "satisfactions," which are so will-o-the-wisp as to defy objective measure, and pretends to do so for an entire society.
I don't think the usage is idiosyncratic here, at least from the economist perspective. Interpersonal comparison is taking two people or more people's relative utility change from an outcome, comparing it, and saying if the net has gone up or down. Whether one is estimating it (which is what we can do) or trying to very specifically measure it (which is highly questionable and probably impossible) is secondary. By analogy, I can tell you which of my daughters is taller without knowing exactly how tall they are, even if I can't get them to stand in the same place at the same time together for direct comparison; I just get a stick and roughly mark each one's height. Doesn't work great if they are really close in height, but generally I can get a decent idea of relative magnitude.
Now, I agree you can't meaningfully measure across the society, in fact that is exactly what I said. But at the small scale one can, if only roughly.
Perhaps you would clarify exactly what usage you have in mind? It is possible we are using different definitions of the term.
You know, I am trying to be polite to you. You are making that awfully difficult, and coming across as one of those insufferable college philosophy students who has read a little Nietzsche and now thinks he is the Ubermensch, while even his friends who agree with him in broad strokes think he would benefit from a good beating behind the woodshed. You may want to back away from that particular abyss.
I'll admit I'm most likely the least educated person here but I'm trying to follow this as THuley seems to be saying what I keep thinking in that utilitarianism is tomfoolery if you believe in measuring net utility at the individual level.
I.e. You can't profess to believe in utilitarianism when the entirety of your measure , "interpersonal comparison", is "a single grain of my increase in utility is of infinite value therefore anything I do it utilitarian because subjectively any negative utility to anyone else is less than infinity". It seems to be the BMI equivalent which is great and useful when talking about society but worthless at the individual or five blokes in a bar level.
In that's the case I'm partial to TH here on this one because it's a variant of utilitarianism that I utter despise in the same way I hate Gospel of Wealth adherents and neo-puritan libertarian FOOLs.
I don’t understand your criticism. Can you give an example of something that would count as an ICU by your definition? The examples given by DF seem like ICUs to me. What is it about them that disqualifies them?
I just told you that. Assuming that by "ICU" you mean "interpersonal comparisons in utilitarianism," Mr. Friedman's examples cover only comparisons among familiars, such as family members, and even in that case he uses the term "interpersonal comparison" in an idiosyncratic way, useless for utilitarianism which MUST HAVE a way of quantifying subjective satisfactions over an entire citizenry. But no example can be given for utilitarianism's pretense of making such comparisons at scale because the feat is impossible. If you want to take DF's argument from authority, fine, knock yourself out; but there is no argument to be made from reason.
Utilitarianism claims that individuals should act to maximize total (or average) utility. I have just given examples of individuals doing so — estimating the effect if an action they could take on the people it affects. That does not require them to know the utility of everyone in the world.
You: "That does not require them to know the utility of everyone in the world."
Me: Not "everyone in the world" – just everyone in the society in which utilitarianism is supposed to operate. Your examples are useless for that purpose.
My actions have little effect on most people in my society.
Suppose we were talking, not about utilitarianism and how I should act, but about how I can maximize my income. I can't possibly know enough to calculate all effects on my income for the rest of my life of a decision I make today. But I can still make choices based on my best estimate of the effects of each choice.
Your argument is equivalent to saying that I can't possibly act on the objective of maximizing my income — or my life expectancy or the number of children I have or any possible objective I might seek — because I can't know enough to do it perfectly.
Now I see! David, I was perplexed by your readiness to die on the hill of utilitarianism, but now I understand!
You have clamped down on utilitarianism like a bulldog on his last bone because... BECAUSE...
** IT IS THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR NOTION OF LIBERTARIANISM **
I asked myself: "Why is this very smart guy so perversely set on defending this thing? Why, lord, why?"
Because without it, you are left with a deontological defense of libertarianism, which is at least as Swiss-cheesed with problems, and further, which is a step in the direction of those Billy Sunday Bible thumpers!
My friend Walter Block removed the mote from my eyes, here:
It IS possible to make "interpersonal comparisons" for you or those you know closely. But why not just say "I've got a good idea how to maximize income for me or those I know well"? Why put a tuxedo on such a plain and familiar notion? That is an idiosyncratic usage that requires a constant rectification of terms.
It is only in the context of utilitarianism that "interpersonal comparison" has meaningful currency – albeit in its pretense that some kind of non-market calculus can sort out all the personal "satisfactions" of an entire society.
"... see my posts here on climate. In another few months I expect to have them assembled into a short book."
Can't wait! I've read all your posts on climate [I think], but a book, especially a short one, is good to recommend to friends and acquaintances, and on the internet.
It IS possible to make "interpersonal comparisons" for you or those you know closely. But why not just say "I've got a good idea how to maximize income for me or those I know well"? Why put a tuxedo on such a plain and familiar notion? That is an idiosyncratic usage that requires a constant rectification of terms.
It is only in the context of utilitarianism that "interpersonal comparison" has meaningful currency – albeit in its pretense that some kind of non-market calculus can sort out all the personal "satisfactions" of an entire society.
I always thought the most powerful argument against redistribution (which is rarely mentioned, but which seems to me to be incontrovertible) is that it is not costless. Thus since wealth compounds, in the long run everyone (including the poor) will be worse off in a society in which redistribution is carried out.
But since wealth compounds and humanity gets richer over time, that might mean that the benefit of redistribution to the poor of today is avoiding starvation while the cost of that redistribution to the poor of the future is that they can only afford five diamond-studded space ships per household instead of ten, so I don't think that that is a slam-dunk argument.
So. Ironically the compounding argument fails because of the impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility, even though we can say with certainty that redistribution today will make everyone in the future worse off (and eventually by orders of magnitude). But that seems to be where we are.
A very good example of the virtue of holding up arguments to criticism.
Rawls seemed to acknowledge as much and tried to argue for some kind of optimal balance, but then a bunch of people replied that if you started going that route and under lots of scenarios with different rates of growth and discounts for future utility and then the solution for the optimum tends to drop to zero. I suppose the analysis which says the optimal corporate or capital gains taxes are zero follow a similar argument. Archimedes said given a long enough lever he could move the world. Compound interest is like that, given a long enough time horizon it eventually swamps everything and overcomes all other considerations, like water carving a canyon out of the rock.
In the comments to your previous post (Utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, Population, and Pigs), you asked why people keep interpreting utilitarian arguments that one ought to do something as arguments for the state forcing people to do it. As I commented briefly there, we have institutions for redistributing resources from rich to poor of both types: governments that forcibly redistribute using taxation and other government powers, and private charities funded by voluntary contributions.
Suppose I am convinced by the utilitarian arguments for redistribution from rich to poor, but I do not believe that private charities funded by voluntary contributions do enough of it. If I am in a position to determine or influence the use of government power to do more of such redistribution, are the utilitarian arguments sufficient justification for me to do it?
If you are a utilitarian it might be, but you would want to think about the effects of what you are doing on what other people will be able to do with that government power. I sketched some of the downside risks in the post.
I think there’s an even stronger reason not to promote bad arguments: someone might believe them. If I argue:
X1
Xi implies Yi
Therefore Y1
I have not only endorsed the conclusion Y1, but also the two premises. Since at least one of them is false, if believed this will lead to others drawing other false conclusions, in addition to Y1.
The most straightforward case is factual soundness: when I argue based on a false descriptive claim, which the listener believes. A related case is one where at least one premise is a normative commitment like your NAP example, that the listener might be falsely led to believe the arguer will reliably uphold.
Finally, if you endorse an invalid inference, you risk being thought stupid, or dishonest, and undesirably adjusting the listener’s judgment about the rates of stupidity and dishonesty among people who seem like you.
I have a somewhat different argument against the NAP: it cannot be a fundamental principle, because by itself it is devoid of meaning. It requires and assumes agreement on what is the proper set of rights, for without this, aggression cannot be distinguished from legitimate defense. And what exactly constitutes the proper set of rights is typically the issue over which people fight.
Examples: Karl Marx believed the proletarian was oppressed by the aggression of the bourgeois capitalist, and was justified in violent revolution, expropriating the expropriator. Adolph Hitler believed the Aryan people were oppressed by Jewish capitalists and communists, and Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by them, and so were justified in violent responses. In the Middle East, Israelis believe they justly own the land constituting Israel, and conversely Palestinians believe it is justly theirs. All of these could be (or could have been) convinced of the NAP, and it would not change their behavior. The NAP itself is empty and useless.
Regarding rights, Mises made a similar point, that while perhaps property could be said to have originated in Lockeian homesteading, by now nearly everything that exists comes from sources that had changed hands through plunder many times over, and that we should now simply protect existing property rights for utilitarian reasons, i.e. that's the best route to a peaceful and prosperous society.
Finally, regarding marginal utility and interpersonal comparisons of utility - if someone argues that taking a marginal dollar taken from a rich man and giving it to a poor man does good and makes society better, as a moral principle, that's one thing. What I strongly object to is when someone claims that positive economics shows this (because of diminishing marginal utility or something) and then demands I accept it as an objective truth. I object, because positive economics shows no such thing and it's not an objective truth, but someone's evaluation based on an unprovable and untestable moral principle.
Government CANNOT be a moral agent, period, end of story. It may take goods produced by others and incidentally effect some beneficial outcome (e.g., imposing taxes to feed the needy), but that act CANNOT be termed "moral."
This is so because government giving lacks the will and intention necessary for a moral act. Simple example: A boy scout walking an old lady across the street is a moral act; doing so at gunpoint is not. Even should government be funded by voluntary contributions, its giving cannot be moral because those contributions are stripped of will and intention when they go into a general fund. Your cheerfully given $1000 may go to school lunches for the needy, or it may go to Stacey Abrams' climate hustle. But OK, you say, let me earmark my $1000 to go JUST for lunches for the needy. But in that case, why waste your gift on a bureaucratic middleman when you can give it directly yourself, and thereby perform a moral act in the only sense by which "moral" has meaning?
I did not say anything about government being a moral agent. Rather, I said someone might invoke a moral principle in arguing for a government policy. I also did not endorse the particular moral principle in question; I simply pointed out it is not derived from or supported by objective, positive economics.
I took a different approach, back in my salad days when all the NAP and self-ownership blather just made me think no one had any consistent views of them. Whether I would come to the same conclusion now, I do not know, and I'm not going to try to even guess.
I came up with self-control instead of self-ownership: the right, and duty, to control self, which "naturally" includes property you made or traded for, because otherwise stealing your property made you their slave retroactively; they took control of your past self who made that property.
Property ownership is not about what you possess but about what you control. If you homestead virgin land, or buy land from someone else, your fence, gates, doors, etc are how you signal your control of the land, house, cows, crops, iron ore, etc. Let your fences go to rot, don't repair them after a storm, and you have little recourse when others give up waiting for you to repair them and claim your land, cattle, etc because you have abandoned your control of them.
The flagpole problem is solved by saying redress is about self-control disputes, not the NAP. Your violation of his right to control that flagpole is more than outweighed by his refusal to let you control your life.
I don't claim my self-control is the best way to solve these problems, or even a good way. I only claim it helped me to understand why I instinctively treat some things as more moral than others.
To some extent, I agree with you about the NAP. I regard the self-ownership principle as the fundamental principle of liberty, since it's opposed to slavery, which is the ownership of one person by another, and tyranny, which presupposes that a tyrant owns his subjects, as did Louis XIV. I regard the NAP as a principle of justice whose violation is unjust. However, its violation is a sufficient condition but not a necessary condition of injustice. There are unjust acts that don't seem to involve aggression, which is usually understood to mean the initiation of force or the threat of force against another person. An example is trespassing. So, I think we need another principle that states the necessary and sufficient conditions of committing an injustice. For instance: No person can justly violate the rights to life, liberty, or property of another person. I regard libertarianism as not merely the advocacy of liberty (a common definition), but as the advocacy of liberty and justice for all. I believe a free and just society needs a relatively small number of rules that are simple and easy to understand. I don't think consequentialism can substitute for those rules because, say, utilitarianism allows for too much disagreement about what would maximize utility in the long run. But, as you point out, there are circumstances in which violations of libertarian principles are defensible and excusable. I don't say “justifiable” because in such a context, that implies such violations can be shown to be just. I don't regard liberty and justice as the highest possible values. For instance, I believe life is a higher value because in the absence of life, no values would be possible. And it's wrong to sacrifice a higher value for the sake of a lower value. In a common law court, certain rights violations could be defended and excused.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, especially the idea that self-ownership is a fundamental principle—though I want to derive rights to life, liberty and property from that. I also agree that consequentialism is not a good basis for liberatarian policy—not only because it is unclear what the social good is, or even whether such a thing even exists, but because the very idea that right action is determined by what serves some larger good is not in the spirit of libertarianism.
Still, there is ownership and there is ownership. Do I "own" my home? Yes, even though my rights to it are not absolute. Similarly, I might own myself even though my rights to myself are not absolute. DF is right, no-one really believes the NAP when interpreted absolutely, as the flagpole example shows. So why not say that your holding onto the flag pole is, not only "excusable", but also justifiable, and that the owner is not justified in refusing and even less justified in trying to prise our fingers off? He has no right to do so. Sure, that means that his rights to the flagpole are not absolute, but we do not misspeak to say that he still /owns/ it. This "violation" is indeed just, though I do wonder whether this is merely a verbal disagreement
I agree that the rights to life, liberty, and property are derivable from self-ownership. That's because self-ownership is the right (just claim) to one's own life from which other rights are derived. I have argued for that elsewhere. That's one way to show that liberty and justice are mutually consistent. Furthermore, I doubt that the NAP can be derived from self-ownership. One reason is that it doesn't mention rights.
Like most words in our language, “justifiable” is ambiguous. Indeed, one definition is “defensible,” which I implied that a violation of a right can be. But to call such rights violations “justifiable” allows ambiguity to be exploited by opponents of liberty. I prefer precision to ambiguity. In this context, I understand “justifiable” to mean “able to be shown to be just.” I regard a violation of a right to be an injustice, and it's self-contradictory to say that an injustice can be shown to be just.
Thinking about it, I agree that the NAP (= it is always wrong to initiate force) cannot be derived from self-ownership, but that is because any reasonable concept of ownership must already presume it. Suppose, as a first approximation, that a person owns something X when they are the only one with right to use it as they please—that is, (a) they may use X as they please without consent from others; (b) others may not use X at all without their consent.
But this can't be right. I am thinking of using my fist on your face for punching practice. Clause (b) implies I may not do that, if you own your body, but clause (a) implies otherwise, if I own my body. Contradiction! The obvious fix is to modify the first clause to say (a') they may use X as they please without consent from others, /unless that involves aggressing against others/. Some libertarians will be happy to leave it at that.
But, in my view, this is still not right. A variation of the flagpole case—I am poisoned and desperately need to get to the antidote, but (quite innocently) you are in the way, and I need to push you out of the way to get to it. Clause (b) implies that I may not do that, if you own your own body, and clause (a') is no help to me in this case, since pushing you out of the way is an act of aggression. I'm inclined to fix the problem by modifying the second clause to say (b') others may not use X at all without their consent, /unless doing so would save their life at little cost to the owner/.
This means that self-ownership implies a version of the NAP. For if each of us owns ourselves, then this implies, given (b'), that we may not aggress against others, unless doing so would save our lives at little cost to them. The exception doesn't apply very often, in my view, and so this is practically equivalent to the usual absolute version of the NAP.
That trespassing conundrum was one of the problems I had with the NAP and self-ownership, and why I came up with self-control. Cutting across a concrete driveway on a corner lot does no damage, but it sure violates ... something, and in my system, it violates your control of your property. Fences can be climbed without damage; all a fence really does is mark the property boundary more obviously.
> A parent making decisions that affect his children is implicitly asking himself whether doing something one child wants to do and the other doesn't will increase the former's happiness more than it decreases the latter’s.
I don’t think this is what I do, ought to do, or can do as a parent. Instead I try to think about how different actions are likely to affect the relationships between the members of my family, how to most sustainably distribute burdens, and what long-run capacities for the family system as a whole might be created or destroyed.
Right. One reason small groups tend to be more egalitarian is that the relationship values and risks tend to be perceived to be around the same magnitude. Nevertheless, talk to a estate planning lawyer for a bit and you'll see that it's not too uncommon for parents to give different amounts to children based on lots of factors, but this also implies differential, not equal, weight on the happiness and utilities of those children. Indeed, the kid who is poorer because of some vice is often given less ("because he'll just piss it away"), which also contradicts at least the short term, static analysis behind diminishing marginal utility arguments for redistribution.
In general it's a fool's errand to try and make coherent sense in some tidy ethical axiomatic system of all these irreconcilable context-based intuitions.
Looking forward to reading your climate book!
Excellent article! Regarding the NAP and the flagpole, perhaps we can rephrase the NAP so that it doesn't say you "should" let go of the flagpole, but rather that, if you don't let go, then you are liable to compensate the owner for any damages (to be determined how quantified).
You often say that even libertarians don’t believe in the NAP, using the flagpole situation as an example. I think that this is incorrect and most (Rothbardian) libertarians do believe in the NAP. Here is my answer to the flagpole-type situation: Most people will simply suspend their moral beliefs in an extreme situation. That doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in the NAP. If I was in a flagpole situation I would definitely save my life, but I would also acknowledge that I violated someone’s property and try to compensate him afterwards.
I agree. I think it is also worth noting that the owner of the flag pole who demands the trespasser let go should (and would) be held in contempt by everyone else. Presumably also himself. Someone who values other human life so little is clearly vile.
Given that, it seems an unlikely problem (even assuming it happens) as it seems much more likely that there is a rather cheap negotiated compensation that could be reached.
"Someone who values other human life so little is clearly vile"—I think this is right, and I want to say (do you?) that it is wrong to value human life /so/ cheaply, and therefore that the owner of the flagpole is morally required to let you use it to save your life (if not help you), perhaps even an enforceable one. I like to call myself a libertarian, but, let me say, if I saw that the owner was about to try to prise your fingers off his flagpole, making you fall to your death, I would without hesitation try to force him to stop, and feel perfectly justified in doing so. I think what this reveals is the importance of respect for persons, that this is primarily shown by not aggressing against others (thus the NAP), but also to a more limited extent by being prepared to help them when it comes at only a small to yourself (thus the flagpole). The flag pole owner doesn't have to risk his life to save yours, but he could at least let you use the pole.
This gets into the super finicky area of that line between moral propriety and justice enforceable by others. To avoid writing another dissertation, let me extend the story a bit.
Say your upstairs neighbor falls, grabs your flagpole, etc. as in the base case. In general we expect people to help each other if it is at negligible cost to themselves. (Not saying that we should, but rather that we do.) As you say, prying his fingers off is going to make everyone hate you, and for good reason. We can all sympathize with the person who had the accident and falls, and would like others to help us if we do, and likely would help others ourselves. Likes sailors picking up marooned sailors on the high seas, it is just what you do.
Now, say your upstairs neighbor falling and catching your flagpole becomes a near daily event. Turns out he has taken to climbing the outside of the building (or whatever dumb ass thing) and he keeps needing to use your flagpole. At some point you are clearly entitled to say "no" without drawing moral approbation from others. The situation has gone from exigency over which the neighbor had no reasonable control, to simply taking advantage. It would be hard to point to where exactly that happened, but it definitely does.
Even if you don't pry his fingers off the 10th time today he "needs" to be saved, it isn't obvious that anyone would think less of you if you decide "You know what, I am sick of that guy falling on my pole... I am just going to remove it."
The key seems to be judging the motivation and behavior of the neighbor, not just the pole owner. If it was an unavoidable accident, we tend say "you should help and charge for it later if it is a problem." If it is reasonably avoidable (often repeated is a good proxy for avoidable) then we tend to say "no, that's on him." I don't think you can judge the hypothetical case without judging the full scenario and the behaviors of each actor involved and get to what actual people would respond with.
>In general we expect people [in one-off cases] to help each other if it is at negligible cost to themselves. (Not saying that we should, but rather that we do.)
I'm happy to say that we should—note the "should", but also note the "we", which will be relevant in a moment.
>Now, say your upstairs neighbor falling and catching your flagpole becomes a near daily event. ...
Good example. I say that you should save someone's life if the cost to you is negligible. On day 1, letting the neighbor save himself using the flagpole costs you very little—"e" say—so you should allow him on day 1. Ditto for day 2, and so on to day N. In the end, the cost to you will be N x e, which will not be negligible, if N is large enough. And that's a problem for me.
>The key seems to be judging the motivation and behavior of the neighbor, not just the pole owner.
OK, I guess, if the neighbor's constant falling is due to his recklessness, then your obligation to help him is lesser, perhaps even zero. That's an easy case. But suppose not. Or suppose that it is a different person each day has the bad luck to fall off the roof through no fault of their own. On my principle, each should be allowed to use the flagpole, even though after N days the cost to you will be the same, ie much more than negligible. This is a harder case.
I have to say, though, it seems rather bad luck on your part that these people keep falling off the roof just over your flagpole. This is costing you an awful lot. So it seems that you are another innocent victim of this situation, and others should help you deal with it. For there is no reason why /you/ are specially obligated to incur costs to help these falling people. As I noted, we are /all/ obliged to do what we can. So, yes, you are obliged to let this rain of people use your flagpole to save their own lives, but everyone else (those people themselves, or others if they can't afford it) is required to compensate you for the cost of doing so. This is very close to your answer ...
>If it was an unavoidable accident, we tend say "you should help and charge for it later if it is a problem."
Except I think that third parties might have to pick up some of the tab, if the beneficiaries themselves can't pay the full cost of their rescue, as is often the case in the real world.
“Except I think that third parties might have to pick up some of the tab, if the beneficiaries themselves can't pay the full cost of their rescue, as is often the case in the real world.”
This is where the question of agency on both sides comes into play, and the reason I brought up repeat occurrences. Exploitative behavior often comes in the form of “I am a victim of circumstances! You must aid me!” repeated over and over. It is exactly the moral sentiment that we ought to help other humans if random bad luck befalls them that the exploit targets, which is why there needs to be a limiting principle to allow one to cut off the exploitation. Demanding third parties cover the costs of helping of the “victims” of circumstance is how you get welfare states everyone hates. To avoid that one has to look closet at the behaviors of the actors involved and make specific judgements, not general. There will not be a one sized fits all situations answer.
David, you say that "we routinely do make [interpersonal comparisons]" and give these examples:
"Utilitarianism and Redistribution"
"a parent making decisions that affect his children;"
"deciding which friend to give a gift to;"
"signal[ing] my feelings, including preferences, in facial expressions, [etc.]"
What on earth do any of these examples have to do with interpersonal comparison as used by utilitarianism? If these are valid, then ordering a pizza expresses "interpersonal comparison."
Interpersonal comparison in utilitarianism is the studied pretense of quantifying subjective preferences so that the entire society's goods can be redistributed to reach some "optimum" – whether "average," or "total," or "just," or "goldilocks," according to some arbitrary scheme.
Your examples are just one-off statements of "I like that," fluttering on the capricious evanescence of whimsy – utterly useless for either quantifying any preference or even for setting ordinal rankings at the scale that utilitarianism demands.
My examples show individuals making interpersonal utility comparisons in order to decide what to do. If interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible they shouldn't be able to do that.
David, I find your examples idiosyncratic: They are useless for the at scale comparisons necessary for utilitarianism.
You are imagining that the only thing utilitarianism is relevant to is running the world and since I don't know enough to do that I don't know enough to run my own life.
That is the very opposite of what I say.
It IS possible to make "interpersonal comparisons" for you or those you know closely. But why not just say "I've got a good idea how to maximize income for me or those I know well"? Why put a tuxedo on such a plain and familiar notion? That is an idiosyncratic usage that requires a constant rectification of terms.
It is only in the context of utilitarianism that "interpersonal comparison" has meaningful currency – albeit in its pretense that some kind of non-market calculus can sort out all the personal "satisfactions" of an entire society.
It might be a safer or more likely true critique to say that while one can fairly well estimate the interpersonal utility of various outcome when one really knows the subjects well, the ability to do so drops off rapidly with the knowledge of the subjects. So I can pretty well judge e.g. what restaurant will optimize the happiness of my kids today, but probably can't do the same with 30 of my coworkers, and certainly not with the assortment of the commenters on this post.
Even granting this, this usage is highly idiosyncratic. This usage is just colloquial or familiar, having nothing to do with its meaning for utilitarianism. To say "interpersonal comparison" for this familiar usage is like wearing a tuxedo to a sports bar -- it's just pretentious obscurantism.
In its proper usage within utilitarianism, "interpersonal comparison" is impossible. Utilitarianism pretends to measure these subjective "satisfactions," which are so will-o-the-wisp as to defy objective measure, and pretends to do so for an entire society.
I don't think the usage is idiosyncratic here, at least from the economist perspective. Interpersonal comparison is taking two people or more people's relative utility change from an outcome, comparing it, and saying if the net has gone up or down. Whether one is estimating it (which is what we can do) or trying to very specifically measure it (which is highly questionable and probably impossible) is secondary. By analogy, I can tell you which of my daughters is taller without knowing exactly how tall they are, even if I can't get them to stand in the same place at the same time together for direct comparison; I just get a stick and roughly mark each one's height. Doesn't work great if they are really close in height, but generally I can get a decent idea of relative magnitude.
Now, I agree you can't meaningfully measure across the society, in fact that is exactly what I said. But at the small scale one can, if only roughly.
Perhaps you would clarify exactly what usage you have in mind? It is possible we are using different definitions of the term.
On ne dit pas la messe deux fois pour les muettes!
Google is failing me on this French idiom and it's not in my personal lexicon either unlike let's say "Nostalgie de la boue"; what am I missing?
"One doesn't say mass a second time for the mutes!"
Peter, all gentlemen must know French and German, so get busy!
You know, I am trying to be polite to you. You are making that awfully difficult, and coming across as one of those insufferable college philosophy students who has read a little Nietzsche and now thinks he is the Ubermensch, while even his friends who agree with him in broad strokes think he would benefit from a good beating behind the woodshed. You may want to back away from that particular abyss.
I'll admit I'm most likely the least educated person here but I'm trying to follow this as THuley seems to be saying what I keep thinking in that utilitarianism is tomfoolery if you believe in measuring net utility at the individual level.
I.e. You can't profess to believe in utilitarianism when the entirety of your measure , "interpersonal comparison", is "a single grain of my increase in utility is of infinite value therefore anything I do it utilitarian because subjectively any negative utility to anyone else is less than infinity". It seems to be the BMI equivalent which is great and useful when talking about society but worthless at the individual or five blokes in a bar level.
In that's the case I'm partial to TH here on this one because it's a variant of utilitarianism that I utter despise in the same way I hate Gospel of Wealth adherents and neo-puritan libertarian FOOLs.
I don’t understand your criticism. Can you give an example of something that would count as an ICU by your definition? The examples given by DF seem like ICUs to me. What is it about them that disqualifies them?
I just told you that. Assuming that by "ICU" you mean "interpersonal comparisons in utilitarianism," Mr. Friedman's examples cover only comparisons among familiars, such as family members, and even in that case he uses the term "interpersonal comparison" in an idiosyncratic way, useless for utilitarianism which MUST HAVE a way of quantifying subjective satisfactions over an entire citizenry. But no example can be given for utilitarianism's pretense of making such comparisons at scale because the feat is impossible. If you want to take DF's argument from authority, fine, knock yourself out; but there is no argument to be made from reason.
Utilitarianism claims that individuals should act to maximize total (or average) utility. I have just given examples of individuals doing so — estimating the effect if an action they could take on the people it affects. That does not require them to know the utility of everyone in the world.
You: "That does not require them to know the utility of everyone in the world."
Me: Not "everyone in the world" – just everyone in the society in which utilitarianism is supposed to operate. Your examples are useless for that purpose.
My actions have little effect on most people in my society.
Suppose we were talking, not about utilitarianism and how I should act, but about how I can maximize my income. I can't possibly know enough to calculate all effects on my income for the rest of my life of a decision I make today. But I can still make choices based on my best estimate of the effects of each choice.
Your argument is equivalent to saying that I can't possibly act on the objective of maximizing my income — or my life expectancy or the number of children I have or any possible objective I might seek — because I can't know enough to do it perfectly.
Ah ha! Oh ho ho ho ho!
Now I see! David, I was perplexed by your readiness to die on the hill of utilitarianism, but now I understand!
You have clamped down on utilitarianism like a bulldog on his last bone because... BECAUSE...
** IT IS THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR NOTION OF LIBERTARIANISM **
I asked myself: "Why is this very smart guy so perversely set on defending this thing? Why, lord, why?"
Because without it, you are left with a deontological defense of libertarianism, which is at least as Swiss-cheesed with problems, and further, which is a step in the direction of those Billy Sunday Bible thumpers!
My friend Walter Block removed the mote from my eyes, here:
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/libpa3&div=71
Ah ha ha ha! Ah -gasp- ooo-hoo-hoo Haw haw -gulp- ha ha ha ha!
I'm clawing the carpet laughing! Ah ha ha! I can't stand up!
That is the very opposite of what I say.
It IS possible to make "interpersonal comparisons" for you or those you know closely. But why not just say "I've got a good idea how to maximize income for me or those I know well"? Why put a tuxedo on such a plain and familiar notion? That is an idiosyncratic usage that requires a constant rectification of terms.
It is only in the context of utilitarianism that "interpersonal comparison" has meaningful currency – albeit in its pretense that some kind of non-market calculus can sort out all the personal "satisfactions" of an entire society.
"... see my posts here on climate. In another few months I expect to have them assembled into a short book."
Can't wait! I've read all your posts on climate [I think], but a book, especially a short one, is good to recommend to friends and acquaintances, and on the internet.
That is the very opposite of what I say.
It IS possible to make "interpersonal comparisons" for you or those you know closely. But why not just say "I've got a good idea how to maximize income for me or those I know well"? Why put a tuxedo on such a plain and familiar notion? That is an idiosyncratic usage that requires a constant rectification of terms.
It is only in the context of utilitarianism that "interpersonal comparison" has meaningful currency – albeit in its pretense that some kind of non-market calculus can sort out all the personal "satisfactions" of an entire society.
I always thought the most powerful argument against redistribution (which is rarely mentioned, but which seems to me to be incontrovertible) is that it is not costless. Thus since wealth compounds, in the long run everyone (including the poor) will be worse off in a society in which redistribution is carried out.
But since wealth compounds and humanity gets richer over time, that might mean that the benefit of redistribution to the poor of today is avoiding starvation while the cost of that redistribution to the poor of the future is that they can only afford five diamond-studded space ships per household instead of ten, so I don't think that that is a slam-dunk argument.
That’s an excellent point. I wonder if there is an answer to it. I shall ponder.
So. Ironically the compounding argument fails because of the impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility, even though we can say with certainty that redistribution today will make everyone in the future worse off (and eventually by orders of magnitude). But that seems to be where we are.
A very good example of the virtue of holding up arguments to criticism.
Rawls seemed to acknowledge as much and tried to argue for some kind of optimal balance, but then a bunch of people replied that if you started going that route and under lots of scenarios with different rates of growth and discounts for future utility and then the solution for the optimum tends to drop to zero. I suppose the analysis which says the optimal corporate or capital gains taxes are zero follow a similar argument. Archimedes said given a long enough lever he could move the world. Compound interest is like that, given a long enough time horizon it eventually swamps everything and overcomes all other considerations, like water carving a canyon out of the rock.
In the comments to your previous post (Utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, Population, and Pigs), you asked why people keep interpreting utilitarian arguments that one ought to do something as arguments for the state forcing people to do it. As I commented briefly there, we have institutions for redistributing resources from rich to poor of both types: governments that forcibly redistribute using taxation and other government powers, and private charities funded by voluntary contributions.
Suppose I am convinced by the utilitarian arguments for redistribution from rich to poor, but I do not believe that private charities funded by voluntary contributions do enough of it. If I am in a position to determine or influence the use of government power to do more of such redistribution, are the utilitarian arguments sufficient justification for me to do it?
If you are a utilitarian it might be, but you would want to think about the effects of what you are doing on what other people will be able to do with that government power. I sketched some of the downside risks in the post.
I think there’s an even stronger reason not to promote bad arguments: someone might believe them. If I argue:
X1
Xi implies Yi
Therefore Y1
I have not only endorsed the conclusion Y1, but also the two premises. Since at least one of them is false, if believed this will lead to others drawing other false conclusions, in addition to Y1.
The most straightforward case is factual soundness: when I argue based on a false descriptive claim, which the listener believes. A related case is one where at least one premise is a normative commitment like your NAP example, that the listener might be falsely led to believe the arguer will reliably uphold.
Finally, if you endorse an invalid inference, you risk being thought stupid, or dishonest, and undesirably adjusting the listener’s judgment about the rates of stupidity and dishonesty among people who seem like you.
I made a related argument here: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/
Useful points.
I have a somewhat different argument against the NAP: it cannot be a fundamental principle, because by itself it is devoid of meaning. It requires and assumes agreement on what is the proper set of rights, for without this, aggression cannot be distinguished from legitimate defense. And what exactly constitutes the proper set of rights is typically the issue over which people fight.
Examples: Karl Marx believed the proletarian was oppressed by the aggression of the bourgeois capitalist, and was justified in violent revolution, expropriating the expropriator. Adolph Hitler believed the Aryan people were oppressed by Jewish capitalists and communists, and Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by them, and so were justified in violent responses. In the Middle East, Israelis believe they justly own the land constituting Israel, and conversely Palestinians believe it is justly theirs. All of these could be (or could have been) convinced of the NAP, and it would not change their behavior. The NAP itself is empty and useless.
Regarding rights, Mises made a similar point, that while perhaps property could be said to have originated in Lockeian homesteading, by now nearly everything that exists comes from sources that had changed hands through plunder many times over, and that we should now simply protect existing property rights for utilitarian reasons, i.e. that's the best route to a peaceful and prosperous society.
Finally, regarding marginal utility and interpersonal comparisons of utility - if someone argues that taking a marginal dollar taken from a rich man and giving it to a poor man does good and makes society better, as a moral principle, that's one thing. What I strongly object to is when someone claims that positive economics shows this (because of diminishing marginal utility or something) and then demands I accept it as an objective truth. I object, because positive economics shows no such thing and it's not an objective truth, but someone's evaluation based on an unprovable and untestable moral principle.
Government CANNOT be a moral agent, period, end of story. It may take goods produced by others and incidentally effect some beneficial outcome (e.g., imposing taxes to feed the needy), but that act CANNOT be termed "moral."
This is so because government giving lacks the will and intention necessary for a moral act. Simple example: A boy scout walking an old lady across the street is a moral act; doing so at gunpoint is not. Even should government be funded by voluntary contributions, its giving cannot be moral because those contributions are stripped of will and intention when they go into a general fund. Your cheerfully given $1000 may go to school lunches for the needy, or it may go to Stacey Abrams' climate hustle. But OK, you say, let me earmark my $1000 to go JUST for lunches for the needy. But in that case, why waste your gift on a bureaucratic middleman when you can give it directly yourself, and thereby perform a moral act in the only sense by which "moral" has meaning?
I did not say anything about government being a moral agent. Rather, I said someone might invoke a moral principle in arguing for a government policy. I also did not endorse the particular moral principle in question; I simply pointed out it is not derived from or supported by objective, positive economics.
Your point is well taken.
Thanks!
I took a different approach, back in my salad days when all the NAP and self-ownership blather just made me think no one had any consistent views of them. Whether I would come to the same conclusion now, I do not know, and I'm not going to try to even guess.
I came up with self-control instead of self-ownership: the right, and duty, to control self, which "naturally" includes property you made or traded for, because otherwise stealing your property made you their slave retroactively; they took control of your past self who made that property.
Property ownership is not about what you possess but about what you control. If you homestead virgin land, or buy land from someone else, your fence, gates, doors, etc are how you signal your control of the land, house, cows, crops, iron ore, etc. Let your fences go to rot, don't repair them after a storm, and you have little recourse when others give up waiting for you to repair them and claim your land, cattle, etc because you have abandoned your control of them.
The flagpole problem is solved by saying redress is about self-control disputes, not the NAP. Your violation of his right to control that flagpole is more than outweighed by his refusal to let you control your life.
I don't claim my self-control is the best way to solve these problems, or even a good way. I only claim it helped me to understand why I instinctively treat some things as more moral than others.
To some extent, I agree with you about the NAP. I regard the self-ownership principle as the fundamental principle of liberty, since it's opposed to slavery, which is the ownership of one person by another, and tyranny, which presupposes that a tyrant owns his subjects, as did Louis XIV. I regard the NAP as a principle of justice whose violation is unjust. However, its violation is a sufficient condition but not a necessary condition of injustice. There are unjust acts that don't seem to involve aggression, which is usually understood to mean the initiation of force or the threat of force against another person. An example is trespassing. So, I think we need another principle that states the necessary and sufficient conditions of committing an injustice. For instance: No person can justly violate the rights to life, liberty, or property of another person. I regard libertarianism as not merely the advocacy of liberty (a common definition), but as the advocacy of liberty and justice for all. I believe a free and just society needs a relatively small number of rules that are simple and easy to understand. I don't think consequentialism can substitute for those rules because, say, utilitarianism allows for too much disagreement about what would maximize utility in the long run. But, as you point out, there are circumstances in which violations of libertarian principles are defensible and excusable. I don't say “justifiable” because in such a context, that implies such violations can be shown to be just. I don't regard liberty and justice as the highest possible values. For instance, I believe life is a higher value because in the absence of life, no values would be possible. And it's wrong to sacrifice a higher value for the sake of a lower value. In a common law court, certain rights violations could be defended and excused.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, especially the idea that self-ownership is a fundamental principle—though I want to derive rights to life, liberty and property from that. I also agree that consequentialism is not a good basis for liberatarian policy—not only because it is unclear what the social good is, or even whether such a thing even exists, but because the very idea that right action is determined by what serves some larger good is not in the spirit of libertarianism.
Still, there is ownership and there is ownership. Do I "own" my home? Yes, even though my rights to it are not absolute. Similarly, I might own myself even though my rights to myself are not absolute. DF is right, no-one really believes the NAP when interpreted absolutely, as the flagpole example shows. So why not say that your holding onto the flag pole is, not only "excusable", but also justifiable, and that the owner is not justified in refusing and even less justified in trying to prise our fingers off? He has no right to do so. Sure, that means that his rights to the flagpole are not absolute, but we do not misspeak to say that he still /owns/ it. This "violation" is indeed just, though I do wonder whether this is merely a verbal disagreement
I agree that the rights to life, liberty, and property are derivable from self-ownership. That's because self-ownership is the right (just claim) to one's own life from which other rights are derived. I have argued for that elsewhere. That's one way to show that liberty and justice are mutually consistent. Furthermore, I doubt that the NAP can be derived from self-ownership. One reason is that it doesn't mention rights.
Like most words in our language, “justifiable” is ambiguous. Indeed, one definition is “defensible,” which I implied that a violation of a right can be. But to call such rights violations “justifiable” allows ambiguity to be exploited by opponents of liberty. I prefer precision to ambiguity. In this context, I understand “justifiable” to mean “able to be shown to be just.” I regard a violation of a right to be an injustice, and it's self-contradictory to say that an injustice can be shown to be just.
Thinking about it, I agree that the NAP (= it is always wrong to initiate force) cannot be derived from self-ownership, but that is because any reasonable concept of ownership must already presume it. Suppose, as a first approximation, that a person owns something X when they are the only one with right to use it as they please—that is, (a) they may use X as they please without consent from others; (b) others may not use X at all without their consent.
But this can't be right. I am thinking of using my fist on your face for punching practice. Clause (b) implies I may not do that, if you own your body, but clause (a) implies otherwise, if I own my body. Contradiction! The obvious fix is to modify the first clause to say (a') they may use X as they please without consent from others, /unless that involves aggressing against others/. Some libertarians will be happy to leave it at that.
But, in my view, this is still not right. A variation of the flagpole case—I am poisoned and desperately need to get to the antidote, but (quite innocently) you are in the way, and I need to push you out of the way to get to it. Clause (b) implies that I may not do that, if you own your own body, and clause (a') is no help to me in this case, since pushing you out of the way is an act of aggression. I'm inclined to fix the problem by modifying the second clause to say (b') others may not use X at all without their consent, /unless doing so would save their life at little cost to the owner/.
This means that self-ownership implies a version of the NAP. For if each of us owns ourselves, then this implies, given (b'), that we may not aggress against others, unless doing so would save our lives at little cost to them. The exception doesn't apply very often, in my view, and so this is practically equivalent to the usual absolute version of the NAP.
That trespassing conundrum was one of the problems I had with the NAP and self-ownership, and why I came up with self-control. Cutting across a concrete driveway on a corner lot does no damage, but it sure violates ... something, and in my system, it violates your control of your property. Fences can be climbed without damage; all a fence really does is mark the property boundary more obviously.