Self-Defense & Violence Prevention Blog

I quote an excerpt from chapter 12 of The Ethics of Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard:

If every man has the absolute right to his justly-held property it then follows that he has the right to keep that property — to defend it by violence against violent invasion.

Absolute pacifists who also assert their belief in property rights — such as Mr. Robert LeFevre — are caught in an inescapable inner contradiction: for if a man owns property and yet is denied the right to defend it against attack, then it is clear that a very important aspect of that ownership is being denied to him. To say that someone has the absolute right to a certain property but lacks the right to defend it against attack or invasion is also to say that he does not have total right to that property.

Furthermore, if every man has the right to defend his person and property against attack, then he must also have the right to hire or accept the aid of other people to do such defending: he may employ or accept defenders just as he may employ or accept the volunteer services of gardeners on his lawn.

How extensive is a man’s right of self-defense of person and property? The basic answer must be: up to the point at which he begins to infringe on the property rights of someone else. For, in that case, his “defense” would in itself constitute a criminal invasion of the just property of some other man, which the latter could properly defend himself against.

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I agree with the above philosophy regarding self-defense, but I believe one can argue against the property of objects beside the self.

In other words, some may argue that a person cannot justly own non-bodily property, because natural resources, such as land, water, wood, metal, etcetera, belong to all people equally. Nonetheless, few would argue that a person does not own his or her own body. So, regardless of how one feels about non-bodily property, we can all agree on giving every person the right to defend his body and employ the help of others in that defense.

Since a person owns himself, he has every right to do what he wants with his body insofar as he does not offensively harm another person. If another person offensively harms the first person or attempts to offensively harm the first person, then the first person has the right to defend himself even if it entails the use of non-offensively defensive violence.

I cannot see how anyone can disagree with such rights to the defense of one’s own person. Yet, we see people get denied that right to self-defense all the time.

What do you think?