People come to the table with property, which is just another name for bundles of rights. Rights may be transferred from one to another through a consensual exchange. To exercise the rights of another without their consent is a violation of their rights
whether through force (not even seeking consent for an exchange) or fraud (not fulfilling the agreed upon terms of the exchange). It is ok to retaliate with force against those who have deprived you of some of your rights without your consent.

Aggression or Coercion are mainly just mean sounding evocative terms and not primary to the theory. The key terms are rights and consent. Caplan objects to Rothbard's attempt to justify rights based on “naturalness”, (an objection I share), and instead substitutes an intuitionist justification (which I do not share).

Do you have another category of violating someone's rights that libertarians would not be able to stuff into either force or fraud? I doubt it. I think the theory is fairly tidy on this score. The problems for the theory lie in mainly in the initial distribution of rights and the allowed means of defending your rights.

The lover withholding affection is not considered coercive (i.e., violating your rights) because his affection is presumed to be his property to to give or withhold at this discretion. This is not to say that you wouldn't prefer to have his love, or wouldn't feel worse off without it, or wouldn't knuckle under to all sorts of things you otherwise would not when under threat of having that love withheld.

But it is to say that he does not violate your rights by withholding his affection. You are offered an exchange – his love in exchange for the concessions he is asking for. Take it or leave it, but don't whine about being coerced.

For the grownups in the crowd, we find such “exchanges” distasteful because they are usually a category of “consensual frauds” – the “lover” manifestly doesn't have any love to offer (fraud), but the person desperate to hold on to him prefers the lie rather than facing the truth. “Lie to me, I'll believe.” Neither party to the “exchange” seems particularly admirable.

2) The less consensus there is about a law then the more likely you will find that it cannot be understood within the “who started the fight” model. Think about how controversial discrimination laws are. “Fighting words” are often excused as the reason for fighting when people believe that the emotions are so strong as to cause physical reactions (e.g. adrenaline rushes) outside the fighter's control–but even then we still teach children “sticks and stones…”

By the way, I would agree that application of these intuitive judgments to complex hypothetical situations becomes is very challenging–for an example, think about how in politics (which is an early phase of the lawmaking process) it is better to have simple answers for “issues” rather than consistent principles that get negatively tagged as “ideology”.

3) Gil and Ben, you both seem to fall back on the assumption of the independent existence of “property”–your conclusions about coercion or aggression appear to depend on who you feel is the rightful owner of the property. But do you actually have answers to the questions of what characteristics property has that other stuff does not, how things becomes property, how people become owners, how ownership rights can be transferred and how to analyze these rights when looking at coercion or aggression? I sincerely do not expect you to do this since it's a problem that's long vexed libertarian philosophers–in fact, my long search for theses answers to questions about property is what led me to finally conclude that property can only be explained as a result of the application of the non-aggression principle rather something that can really be understood independently of it.

I'm not sure I understand the final question. Both sneaky theft, and deceptive fraud coerce the victim because they deny him voluntary control of his property. That, and not physical force, determines relevant coercion (IMHO).

I think the confusion comes from the fact that we're trying to justify the legitimate use of “force” and it's tempting to say it should only be in response to the initiation of physical force. But, I think coercion as I've described it (denying voluntary control of property) is a better description of an act that justifies retaliatory force.

My goals are to persuade that the principle “don't start fights” is one that keeps you from getting into fewer fights on an individual level, is one that human beings do in fact apply intuitively rather than deductively, is one that can be understood to include both “force and fraud” and is one that makes it possible to distinguish “aggression” from mere “coercion”.

Thought experiment:

1. Gil has possession of some stuff, and the facts are such that if Chris were to try to take it by force then we would agree Chris would be the one starting a fight.

2A. Gil tells Chris, “you can have the stuff–I don't need it anymore”.

2B. Gil tells Chris, “you can have this stuff if you win the game of cards”. Gil loses an honest game of cards.

2C. Gil tells Chris, “you can have this stuff if you win the game of cards”. Gil loses a game of cards where Chris secretly cheated to win

2D. Gil tells Chris “you can't have this stuff.

In each case…

3. Gil puts the stuff on the table and leaves the room.

4. Chris takes the stuff from the table. (He neither threatens nor uses force as he takes possession of the stuff–remember that Gil isn't even in the room at the moment.)

5. At some time later, Gil and Chris have fight about possession of the stuff.

6. A jury is asked to answer the question of, “Who in fact do you honestly believe started the fight?” The answer to this question then determines whether the transfer of possession should be treated as “valid” or “invalid”.

—

And this is indeed where we disagree. You indicate that questions of ownership and property, i.e. whether a transfer is valid or not, should be answered first, before the answer to the question of who started a fight can be deductively answered. You believe that people cannot make judgments about aggression without answers to these other property/ownership questions to explain their judgments. “You have to explain why the person trying to get his property back isn't the one who's starting the fight.”

I feel free to disagree with you because I don't actually claim that there is an objective answer to the question of who started a fight. I merely observe that people have shown that they in fact can and will make these judgments in a more intuitive manner than you claim they must. We both know what the juries would answer universally in the cases above–and we both know that that, again almost universally, they would disregard any philosophical arguments against their intuitive answers.

Think about how many theories of “property” really get tied up in knots even defining what property is and how stuff even is transformed into property? Think about how many people use “property” and “ownership” as words that has nearly magical powers to compel human behavior. I believe that complicated social conventions and theories using concepts like “ownership”, “property” and the “validity of transfers” are just complex mechanisms that depend more on hypothetical “who would have started the fight” types analysis to prevent fights from starting in the first place. It makes sense that these concepts start to become incoherent when they are forced into the role of first principles themselves.

My semantic claim that follows all this is that the “force and fraud” is a necessary word pairing because many people don't understand how fraud does involve force–just after the fact rather than before the fact. And notice how the alliteration makes it easy to remember.

By the way, how would you distinguish the sneaky theft from the deceptive fraud where no force is actually used in the transfer of possession? In neither case is more force used than the other in the transfer of possession.

I think emotional blackmail is a lot harder to reliably identify than other crimes. In some sense that's an accident of our current technological situation. Clearly emotional blackmail can be very harmful, sometimes more debilitating than cutting off someone's finger.

Philosophically there's little basis for distinction between physical and emotional harm, in part because the brain is a physical object. I think as we start to understand the human machine better, so that we can reliably identify emotional harm, we will make more instances of emotional harm illegal, and that sounds right to me.

The 'fraud as aggression' aways puzzled me too. I already used this argument against other libertarians, none of them was convinced.

I would even say that not all forms of theft are agression. I also have a problem with confusing agression against someone with 'agression' against someone's property.

If I stole or damage your car when you are outside, am I using force against you? It's very strange to use these words on this way.

Would you be in favor of compensating for sentimental value if it could be proven through, say, brain scans or something?

Anyway, I didn't take the classical libertarian line about what does and does not count as a violation of the nonagression principle to be so deeply based in contingent facts about verifiability.

I don't think this is an adequate explanation. You have to explain why the person trying to get his property back isn't the one who's starting the fight. Why is a transfer enabled by deception invalid, while one enabled by good luck in a card game not?

To understand how “fraud” violates the non-aggression principle, keep your eye on the ball (i.e. “aggression” not “coercion”).

1. The non-aggression principle says: Don't start fights. (There are many practical and philosophical reasons for this rule. One easy to understand reason is that if you were to say “do start fights” then you would have no complaints were I to take you at your word and repeatedly punch you in the face until you changed your mind… not that I'd do such a thing of course, but it shows how illogical it would be to support an “Aggression Principle”.)

2. If someone else is threatening to start a fight, you can call the police/courts to take action rather than actually waiting for the other person to follow through on the threat. In other words you don't have to wait until the fight actually starts to defend yourself, either individually or through the police/courts, against someone threatening you. (In the courts, an impartial jury is entrusted to fairly and reasonably decide factual questions of “who actually started it or threatened to start it. The police then enforce the decision.)

3. “Fraud” is a short-hand label for situation where someone else is threatening to start a fight if you try to take back stuff obtained from you via deception. You don't actually have to try to take your stuff back and then get into a fight when the facts make it clear what the other person is threatening to do. (Again, a jury gets to decide who would really be starting the fight.)

The problem actually stems from the concept of “property” Many, if not most, libertarians see “property” as a fundamental fact which drives the analysis of the non-aggression principle. For example with “fraud” they would say: “Because I own the property, taking it by deception is wrong.” Some even define aggression itself as the violation of property rights assumed to exist in your own body. But these people are putting the cart before the horse.

In fact, “property” is merely a short-hand label to be applied to “stuff that you would be judged to have started a fight over were we to get into a fight about who gets to control the use of that stuff.” “Property”, properly understood in the context of the non-aggression principle, is a conclusion which depends upon the analysis of who would be violating that principle if there were to be conflict. In the case of “fraud”, the violation of the non-aggression principle occurs not in the deception but in the implied threat of to keep the stuff obtained through that deception. The deception itself is not the aggression.

It may not be threat of force by some Rothbardian definition, but there are very definitely cases where it effectively is a threat of force. If what's being threatened to be revealed is something that is a violation of societal norms likely to be punished by angry mob, then it really is the threat of force. But that's a problem for women in Iran, not well-off straight white men in America.

If you accept that you have legitimate dominion over your person and property, then it should be clear why somone who violates your voluntary control over your property is coercing you in a way that someone who threatens to withhold their affection isn't.

It's not about making you feel bad. It's about damaging you by violating your voluntary control over what is legitimately yours. Someone else's affection doesn't qualify. Your person and property do.

I think I agree that any kind of blackmail (where the threatened action would be moral to do absent demands) is not coercion and shouldn't be illegal.

Having skimmed the summary, it doesn't seem right to me but I suppose it deserves a sympathetic reading, which I don't feel like giving it right now. The main problems, I would say, are that (a) I don't think I'm willing to categorically accept the axiom of non-aggression even applied to individuals, (b) the chapter lacks a critique of social contract theory, the usual justification of the reservation of violence (mostly) to the state, and (c) it relies apparently on the rather questionable notion of natural rights. I like the idea of natural rights, but I don't think everyone thinks they are the same, which is a serious problem.