disease, rights, libertarianism from Jeffrey Tucker (repost)

Posted on: July 14, 2020 at 13:28:01 CT

I was going to write an article on this but it's not worth it, so I'll just post this concerning an odd little intellectual puzzle that has been popping up variously in the libertarian Twittersphere in the last few weeks.

It concerns the so-called NAP (the Non-Aggression Principle, for those unconversant in libertarian-specific neologistic acronyms) and the spreading of disease.

The idea is that to give a person a disease (a cold, flu, AIDS, whatever, oh what about cancer from lighting someone's cig or pouring an alcoholic a drink?) amounts to aggression and so therefore the victim has an actionable claim against the aggressor on libertarian grounds. (Eavesdroppers from the non-libertarian world are already rolling their eyes and can stop reading.)

I've seen this cockamamie logic invoked in defense of the shutdown -- because of course one logical/historical/scientific error in libertarianism can lead people who think they like liberty into strangely supporting the totalitarian state, for whatever reason.
So what of it? What of this claim?

First, it is very difficult to discern intent in this case. The law always and everywhere makes a distinction between intended and unintended harm. How are you going to figure this out?

Second, it's hard to know what diseases should be covered under this thinking: maybe if I make you a cupcake you should later be able to sue me for your diabetes?

Third, contact tracing in viral transmission is extremely difficult: the movie Contagion is just a movie. Even with AIDS, epidemiologists had a very hard time doing this; they found it essentially impossible. In the case of something like Coronavirus, it's actually impossible to do this without unleashing a literal hell in which everyone turns against everyone else.

Fourth, there is truly no historical record at all in any free society in which contact tracing and disease liability ever became the norm, and that is for a reason: it's hard to imagine a more socially divisive undertaking that is so fraught with false positives. It's truly vicious and ghastly.

Fifth, free societies have always dealt with this problem within the realm of manners and civic decency. Cover your mouth when you cough and sneeze. Carry a hanky. Wash your hands. Say it don't spray it. I asked for the news not the weather. I wanted a conversation, not irrigation. And so on. When I was a kid, very young, I blamed an enemy for giving me a cold. My father chewed me out and said that this was a wicked way to think and that it is far worse to spread rumors than it is to spread a cold. He shut me down hard and instructed me never to think this way again. My father was the paragon of what it is like to think like a free man. I believe his attitude is better than the one that, in recent years, has come to replace it: I would be in perfect health but for some weird invader who made me sick (and who is it, dammit?!).

I will conclude this with the following. This silly exercise (I apologize for wasting your time) is precisely what is wrong with seat-of-the-pants rationalism that seeks to reinvent the whole idea of freedom and the free society, and all its legal implications, without the slightest knowledge of or concern for broader implications, history, human experience, science, and so on. It's exhausting to deal with such people as this but, as they said in The Godfather, these are the people we have chosen.