Non aggression principle and bullying

[Anders Hansson]

Hi

 

This might be one of the very classic questions that fairly new libertarians annoy the veteran libertarians with, but here it goes :-).

 

I really like the non aggression principle but also understand that it isn't exactly as simple as it could seem at first. What about if you were constantly bullied by your class mates in school but not physically. Let's say they constantly call you fat and stupid. You have to be in school and cannot escape. If you tell on them, you become the problem for the teachers. Maybe you don't have such a fast mouth so you can just argue and joke back to make them stop. One day you had enough and punch one of the bullies in the face. You just broke the non aggression principle.

 

In a way you could say that psychological bullying is an aggression but maybe that is a slippery slope. What if someone thinks that criticizing his/her religion equals bullying.

 

I havn't yet figured it out. What do you think?

 

Best regards

 

Anders

[ProfessionalTeabagger]

It's quite a good question. I think that ultimately moral responsibility falls on the school / government / authority. The abused person is being forced into the same space as the bully. The bully is using the fact you can't escape to psychologically hurt them. Under those circumstances I think there's a case that the bully has initiated force. They causing as much pain as if they punched you. 

So if the abused is wrong in retaliating with violence then they are still less wrong than the abuser. 

[Anders Hansson]

I guess it could come down to tolerance. If you pick on someone because of his/her looks, preferences och personal decisions, it's bullying/aggression. If you on the other hand criticize someone's moral, logic or hehaviour towards others it's ok. That would be my instinctive division between what is ok to criticize/pick on or not.

[Mister Mister]

You're looking at this outside of the context.  Imagine a co-worker or customer constantly verbally bullied you at work.  They would be fired or kicked out, OR you would quit.  Children in school are already in a coercive situation, like inmates in prison.  The fact that there is dysfunction in this environment is perfectly natural.

 

I would add that, to address your larger point of situations in which it is difficult to apply the NAP -- YES there are grey areas in the NAP, like parenting, abortion, date-rape, pollution, or some property or contract disputes.  This neither invalidates the NAP nor justifies the State, any more than grey areas in biology invalidate evolution or justify Creationism.  You need the free market and common law to constantly negotiate these grey areas.

[Matthew Ed Moran]

I agree that the context essentially makes it so that all acts are in a sense defensive, since there is a coercive authority above all. But any person who would use force to protect himself would not be more at fault than someone who initiated the force. Also consider that bullying is an increased risk for children, who are helpless in the situation. The bullying is an implicit threat, and responding to the threat with reasonable reciprocity is definitely valid. 

 

I can't see justice ever being taken against a bullying child in a free society without the parents first being held accountable. However, in situations such as lifeboat scenarios where the expectations of the situation are exceptional from every day circumstances, courts would obviously take into account the context of the situation when deciding restitution. 

 

I would go even farther and say that gray areas have nothing to do with the validity of a theory. The theory itself is judged as either valid or invalid. It would be like saying there are gray areas in the scientific method, because sometimes correlation does not imply any causation (sorry if that's a bad example). Reality is complex, and in reality there are gray areas because there is always unknown and potentially useful information. There are also usually alternate ways of reasoning, so sometimes a more coherent formulation of the theory for a particular type of circumstance would be justified (like particle physics compared to object physics). For instance, biology includes gray areas, but the methodology of biology is pretty consistent; and if it must be expanded over time as new discoveries are made, it is not to invalidate any of the core principles of biology, but to reaffirm them.

[vahleeb]

Hi

 

This might be one of the very classic questions that fairly new libertarians annoy the veteran libertarians with, but here it goes :-).

 

I really like the non aggression principle but also understand that it isn't exactly as simple as it could seem at first. What about if you were constantly bullied by your class mates in school but not physically. Let's say they constantly call you fat and stupid. You have to be in school and cannot escape. If you tell on them, you become the problem for the teachers. Maybe you don't have such a fast mouth so you can just argue and joke back to make them stop. One day you had enough and punch one of the bullies in the face. You just broke the non aggression principle.

 

In a way you could say that psychological bullying is an aggression but maybe that is a slippery slope. What if someone thinks that criticizing his/her religion equals bullying.

 

I havn't yet figured it out. What do you think?

 

Best regards

 

Anders

Hi Anders,

 

I think that the reason why you and most people have these kinds of problems with the NAP is because it is formulated in such emotionally charged terms. Aggression is something that is very personal to many people and they have completely charged the term with their own personal meaning and their own personal emotion.

 

A more correct statement would be Non-Intiation of Force.

Bullying is the initiation of force, therefore any answer to that is warranted.

 

We usually say that you can walk away from verbal abuse, but the only reason why we say that should be the preferred behaviour is because there are very small costs usually associated with that. This is why we accept that it's ok to stop bullying by yourself if you are in someone else's prison and the guardians refuse to step in, because the cost of walking away is too great. However, if the reason why we choose walking away is something that has a connection to costs, then we're no longer choosing on the principle of non-initiation of force, but on the principle of least personal cost.

 

Now the problem becomes: "at what point does retaliatory force become excessive?" and we can debate that if you want. But still, no break of the non-initiation of force happens on the side of the person that is responding to bullying.

[Anders Hansson]

Thanks everyone for the interesting thoughts. I will think about it some more and perhaps come up with a follow up question.

[jphelps]

I think you have to make a distinction between kids play and adults when talking about 'bullying' and the non aggression principal. I was bullied a little in school and it made me think about how to defend myself. The far greater harm would be if the Teachers and adults lock down the school experience and prevent kids from interacting.

 

Is sarcasm and irony, any kind of humor bullying? We need to have a better definition of the word. It really annoys me when there are these loosely defined words  that come up and mean different things to different people.