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I don't know. That's the $64,000 question. It depends on how one defines aggression and how one attributes responsibility for aggression under circumstances forcing property rights into conflict.

Cool, let's do that. I wouldn't have started this thread if I had definitive answers to the trolley problem and its ilk. But I will argue against your assertion of moral immunity for victims' actions impacting innocents. B is responsible for his actions. Because B very much has a choice. The choice is either to keep his arm down, weapon holstered, and be killed by A or to engage his arm, draw his weapon, and kill an innocent 3rd party. Yes, being killed by A is a really crappy option for B. I sympathize for B's pain. But B has no basis upon which to claim a moral right to kill another innocent person. Even if B is being victimized. B's end is legitimate: self-preservation against aggression. But his means, employing violence against another innocent, cannot be justified by that end. B's right of employing violence in self-defence applies only with respect to violence toward the aggressor and no other. Only the aggressor has renounced his regard for the principle of property rights and non-aggression by virtue of his aggressive act. To argue others may be killed by B is to imply that the lives of innocents can be sacrified against their will as a means to defend one's own life. Such a claim violates the fundamental meaning of property rights and self-ownership which recognizes that exclusive control over one's own property and body is not subject to violation by others for any reason. No matter how much it may benefit them. Including saving their lives. Yet defense of his own property rights are the very basis upon which B claims moral sanction to kill. Thus such a claim is self-contradictory. B cannot morally kill innocents. He must not will his hand to grasp his gun and point it at an innocent. He must not will his finger to pull the trigger. Murray Rothbard captures this nicely:

I also hew to principle in ethics. Which is one reason why I'm not ready to accept the principle you are advocating. Namely that aggression against a victim immunizes the victim from moral responsibility for harm to other innocents he causes via his response to the aggression. According to this principle, must one not condone throwing a bomb into a crowd of innocents harboring an aggressor about to attack? And must one not condone its modern day real world equivalent, dropping a bomb onto a building full of innocents harboring a murderous terrorist? Thanks so much for posting this link. I love how Block grasps the fundamental nature of the issue and tackles it head on. I find Block's notion of negative homesteading, i.e. you can't pass on your aggression problem to other innocents, to be more consistent with the NAP as I interpret it.

Apologies if I misinterpreted your comment. No, I'm not concerned with wartime ethics per se. I only have mentiened several wartime examples because drafting people is the quintessential, commonplace, real-world example of the ethical dilemma I'm trying to resolve, namely: This is what is being discussed. This is what I seek clarity around. The trolley problem is an exemplar of this dilemma in the form of an industrial accident. Firing a gun through an innocent to thrwart an aggressor is an exemplar of this dilemma in the form of self-defence. The self-driving car software algorithm is an exemplar of this dilemma in the form of consumer product design.

It's cool, I get your point You say the $50 fine for refusing to join the military is in its violation of property a death threat and so a draftee threatened with a $50 fine is rendered innoccent of any wrongdoing in his subsequent dropping of bombs killing thousands of innocents. I respect the clarity and consistency of your agument. I am not convinced of its overall soundness.

Not intentionally. I am trying to avoid the tedium of repeatedly saying "Individuals asserting themselves to be agents of government, to the extent they are responsible for actions involved in the initiation of aggression." I'd love to omit examples involving government altogether to avoid such distracting complications but the most vivid and common real world examples of uses of force involve, of course, governments.

So you and Josh F argue choice must be free of any coercion whatsoever to carry any moral weight. I find this principle problematic. It implies Vietnam draftees are blameless for killings committed because they were coerced under threat of imprisonment for several years. What if it were just imprisonment for several months? Or just imprisonment for several days? Or a fine of $50? Is proportionality to play a role or does any bona-fide act of coercion render a victim blameless for any of his associated uses of violence? Although it would be cleaner, I'm trying to avoid simple hypothecial examples to avoid incessant accusations of bringing up unrealistic ethical dilemmas. So for another real world example, Nazi concentration camp prison guards gassing Jews are blameless for their actions because they were just conscrpted soldiers following orders under pain of imprisonment themselves had they disobeyed? Ditto the senior Nazi officers who would have been strung up with piano wire had they disobeyed Hitler? Or to get back to my previous examples that were not addressed, a man defending himself against an aggressor can blamelessly employ violence to do so even if it kills innocents? For example, shoot through an innocent if its the only way to stop an aggressor? Or throw a bomb into a crowd of innocents containing an aggressor? Such a man is blameless because the aggressor has removed this man's freedom of choice?

I find discussing philosophy and ethics and their application in the world to be valuable. Those who don't need not chime in here, can pursue other highly worthy discussion topics like the tactics of fighting child abuse and tactics of opposing war. However, I have found just such philosophical issues, including the ethical application of the NAP in non-trivial cases, to arise repeatedly when I engage friends and family in discussions about worthy topics like the immorality of war. For example, I've had people make the following argument to me defending war, "Evil doers have attacked us. We are victims of aggression. In self-delfense, we must take them out. If innocents are damaged along the way, that's a shame, but our right to defend ourselves supercedes their rights because our choice on the matter was removed by the aggressors." That argument to me sounds very much like the one advocated by others on here asserting that victims of aggression are rendered ethically blameless for their own associated actions employing violence harming innocents. Maybe I'm the only one who finds principled application of the NAP not always clear cut.

Josh F, thanks for your considered thoughts. Of course it is plain that employing violence to remove any freedom of choice from a victim makes the aggressor responsible for all resulting violence. But you, yagami, and others seem to argue that such aggression renders the victim completely blameless for his subsequent decisions and actions. Because morality is binary and requires complete freedom of choice. Yet another real world example of the moral dilemma we are considering, one that was faced by thousands of men in the 60's, is the draft. The government threatens a man with imprisonment for several years if he doesn't go to Vietnam and drop bombs on villages full of innocent people. Clearly the government is the primary aggressor both against the man and the Vietamese. Yet I struggle with the suggestion that the drafted man is immune from moral blame for his actions just because he is following orders under pain of punishment. Although himself a victim, he does have choices. They may be unpleasant, but they are choices. It seems one could argue the opposite of what you are arguing. One could argue that aggression threatened against a man does not excuse him from responsibility for his decisions contributing to subsequent harm to innocents.

@dsayers Sorry if I failed to respond to some good points you made. A lot of good points here to respond to and I don’t want to be that guy who posts too much. My goodness, I would never suggest war and defensive force are interchangeable. I merely retracted my previous citation of war as presenting many property rights dilemmas because war has all sorts of confounding underlying moral issues of the sort you mention. My point was and is that NAP conflicts are not rare in the world. Using a simple home invasion defensive force scenario highlights the point I’m trying to make a lot more clearly. And I would never suggest individual home defense and government bomb dropping are comparable. I see now my use of government in the example is distracting from the issue I’m really trying to focus on. Allow me to replace it with an individual throwing a bomb. Most here would deem an individual shooting a gun to repel a home invader to be a case of a victim acting in self-defense. Even if firing that gun poses some small danger to nearby innocents. Most here would deem an individual throwing a bomb into a crowd of innocents harboring a charging aggressor to be a case of a victim initiating his own aggression against the innocents. I.e. to be moral, one must suffer an attack from an aggressor effectively employing human shields. I can think of a range of circumstances between these two extremes posing progressive degrees of risk to innocents. I humbly ask where the line is. Or if it is a matter of principle, then what principle must be employed to separate self-defense from aggression in the case of victims/innocents presented with choices impacting aggression-in-progress. I mention many against few in reference to cases where 1 might die vs 5, or 100, or 1,000 where the natural rights of each individual is violated in equal nature and degree. Is consequentialist calculation permitted in this case? The trolley problem is such an example. Another example might be an innocent standing in front of a terrorist about to detonate a bomb that would kill 5 innocents around him including the one blocking the shot. Would shooting through the heart of the innocent to kill the terrorist constitute murder by the shooter? The unethical nature of unchosen positive obligations is well understood. I concur with you. But there is a distinction to be made between obligation and action. Yes, morality applies to choices of behaviors, but choosing inaction is just such a choice of behavior. In some cases action may be required, in other cases inaction may be required in order to respect one’s negative obligations under the NAP. For example, if an employee of the trolley company representing the trolley owner is manning a rail switch and has the option to throw that switch to send a runaway trolley to the side to avert deaths, under the NAP he has the moral obligation to take action to throw the switch. By contrast if throwing the switch would send the trolley into a crowd rather than safely away from it, under the NAP he has the moral obligation to not throw the switch, i.e. to take no action.

My bad for mentioning war which injects distracting issues. Replace with "use of defensive force." Any use of defensive force carries some risk to innocents. Firing a shot at a charging home invader carries risk that bullet will go through the wall and kill an innocent. Or what if an innocent is in the same room. Or at various degrees of proximity to the aggressor. Or standing in front of the aggressor. Etc. Stef has argued responsibilities for injuries to innocents resulting from use of defensive force accrue to the initial aggressor who set the chain of events in motion. However, this is exactly what governments claim when they bomb buildings full of innocents to kill one bad guy. Blaming the victim/bystander for his actions is problematic. Immunizing the victim/bystander from his actions is problematic. The victim/bystander always has some degree of choice as to how much damage to tolerate versus how much damage to transfer. What are the moral choices according to the NAP when the circumstances pit self against other, many against few, action against inaction. To summarize the core issue: How should responsibility for aggression be justly attributed when a victim or bystander is thrust into a position to employ or redirect force to reduce overall harm to himself or others via taking action resulting in harm to persons otherwise spared via his inaction. Maybe because this subject is important. As champions of the NAP, we should all be endeavoring to become experts in its nuances, proper interpretation, and correct application. Especially in complicated cases. What topic could be more central to our beliefs.

For those insisting the trolley problem is an absurd dilemma that has no relevance to real life, here is a current real-world instance - one that human drivers are de facto making moral choices around every day. http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-robot-car-of-tomorrow-might-just-be-programmed-to-hit-you

As I indicated in my original post citing FDR2165 "The Ethics of Idiocy," I heard no answer to the trolley problem offered therein. Or at least, I don’t consider slapping on a pejorative label of “lifeboat problem” and refusing to consider a question to constitute an intellectually satisfactory response. I understand some artificial philosophical scenarios out there are so contrived as to be tedious to delve into given they won’t yield much real-world insight. The trolley problem is not one. Tough dilemmas around property loss, actions, and responsibility arise every day in the real world in ways great and small. Construction of hypothetical scenarios is a legitimate method to crystallize and emphasize the essential nature of categories of real-world conflicts, providing thinkers a framework for discussion. If a framework lacks essential information present in real-world cases, identifying what type of information is needed and how it is used answers the question. The answer to the trolley problem should not impact anyone’s views of anarchism or the legitimacy of anarchism. Injecting state force into the trolley problem has no bearing on what constitutes right and wrong - what constitutes proper interpretation of the NAP and proper respect for property rights. It’s great that FDR spends the bulk of its energies tackling the most immediate social ethical problems like child abuse and most egregious widespread political injustices like war. However, I hope FDR can afford a little bandwidth to delve into how to handle various tough situations of property rights conflicts. This is a non-trivial area of philosophical inquiry since aggressors always claim to be using force in self-defense and since having ready suggestions for good standards determining how property rights will be recognized, i.e. force will be employed, is vitally important when attempting to convince others of the viability and order of a free society. Remember the state justifies its monopoly on force and all the widespread horrors that follow from that based on the premise that simple individual property rights recognition and ordinary day-to-day conflicts can't be justly resolved through free market methods. When we noodle over free market trolley problem solutions, we undermine that premise. Moreover, every thinking man not just parroting others’ views ought to be constantly challenging his own beliefs, diving into and resolving what-if scenarios and apparent contradictions with gusto, so as to forge and refine his own ever-more rigorous understanding. The foundations of one’s beliefs can never be too well-examined, too well thought-through in their potential implications. Not to mention the fringe benefits of such efforts in preparing one to respond to statist challenges. For example, Stefan’s previous delving into the issue of the man hanging from a flagpole breaking a window to save himself showed that one can choose to violate the NAP on utilitarian grounds so long as one pays the consequences. This was enormously enlightening and indeed suggests one possible valid response to the trolley problem, in fact the response that Walter Block has offered to it. I would appreciate Stefan doing his own earnest analysis of the trolley problem and its derivatives, as I have found libertarians who firmly believe in non-aggression and property rights can come to starkly contrasting views around how to respond to the trolley problem and associated issues of attributing responsibly for aggression. See this fascinating discussion: http://archive.freecapitalists.org/forums/t/2137.aspx

Inspired by David Edmonds's book, "Would You Kill the Fat Man," I have been researching the possible libertarian ethical response to variants of the trolley problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). In FDR2165 Stefan says the trolley problem is so unlikely to happen as presented literally that he dismisses the questions raised as farcical, a waste of time, and refuses to comment. I find this response disappointing. As a conceptual thinker, Stefan should understand such arbitrary, imaginary scenarios are constructed not because they might unfold literally, but to distsill and focus attention on the essence of a crucial philosophical issue - an issue that can and does occur in real life every day in various incarnations. Taking the trolley problem for example, it is easy imagine an industrial accident of any kind, say in a steel plant, a building construction site, or an oil drilling platform. It is easy to imagine a manager posed with the dilemma of throwing a switch that would route lethal damage away from a group of workers but at the expense of killing another otherwise uninvolved worker. Wartime is full of such ethical dilemmas. One could easily imagine a terrorist about to blow up a bomb killing hundreds of innocents in the sights of a shooter but placed behind one individual innocent who must be killed in order to kill the terrorist. Etc. I won't get into the issues in this post, but have expended much brainpower trying to figure out the libertarian position without reaching a definitive conclusion. I invite Stefan to take this up.

RuralRon, you are right. I have equal admiration for Stefan's formidable intellectual capabilities. And I doubt he will weigh-in on our concerns here. I feel frustrated that Stefan spends so much time and energy on his radio program wading through the Jerry Springer-eque quandaries of random callers-in. I wish Stefan would step back to let all those good people work through the particulars of their personal problems over time, in private, sitting down with a good therapist whose career and skillset is dedicated to emotional counseling. Philosophy and psychology may be related disciplines, but they are distinct. I wish Stefan would just spend his time exploring weighty philosophical topics like this one. Philosophy is where his talents are truly great and he can change the world. All the detailed questions surrounding what real freedom would actually look like are vital and crying out to be better understood not just by forward thinkers like you and me but also by the public at large.