According to the non-aggression principle one should never interfere with the person or legitimate property of another without their permission, unless they have initiated aggression against one first. The non-aggression principle is sometimes taken to be a master argument for libertarian views against the redistribution of money or property- e.g., left wing proposals to redistribute money from the rich to the poor. I won’t argue either for or against the principle of nonaggression, as there are far more pressing ethical issues. Instead I’ll be contending that the non-aggression principle tells us nothing, at least directly, about the topic of redistribution.

In the definition of the non-aggression principle I insisted that the non-aggression principle applies to legitimate property. I’m not trying to smuggle anything especially controversial in here, by insisting on the term legitimate I’m simply insisting that you actually have to rightfully own the thing in question, it’s not enough to simply proclaim that one owns it. A moment’s reflection will show that this stipulation is necessary, if one owned everything one proclaimed one owned then many things would have multiple inconsistent ownership claims.

Consider the case of Bob. Bob passionately claims that he owns the Atlantic ocean, he actually seems to believe this, and insists that no one should cross the Atlantic without his permission. When asked to justify this, he responds by saying that crossing his ocean without his permission is aggression, and everyone should accept an ethical norm against aggression. When confronted with this argument, there is no need to say anything for or against the non-aggression principle, one simply has to say that the Atlantic Ocean is not actually Bob’s, therefore no aggression against Bob has occured.



This is where the champion of the non-aggression principle as a basis for libertarianism hits a problem. the supporter of redistributive taxation typically does not accept that the goods and monies to be redistributed are, in fact, the legitimate property of those they are being taken from. They hold, on the basis of a differing theory of distributive justice than that held by the libertarian, that they are the rightful property of someone else.

The libertarian will respond by insisting that, yes, the prior owner is the legitimate owner of the goods or monies in question, but notice that the argument has now strayed beyond the issue of non-aggression into a debate about who owns what. Our point is simple then, non-aggression tells us nothing about redistribution unless we assume that redistribution is a process of removing something from its rightful owner and giving it to someone else but this is part of what is under dispute in debates about distributive justice. The debate is really about who is the rightful owner of what, and unless one can win this debate, one might as well be Bob insisting that he owns the Atlantic. Just as there is no aggression against Bob implicit in sailing across the Atlantic ocean and ‘breaching’ his sovereignty over that ocean, so perhaps there is no aggression in ‘taking’ money off Beezos to pay for redistribution, if the recipients of that redistribution are already the rightful owners of that money.

Put simply, taking your stuff is not aggression unless it actually does rightfully belong to you, and the whole project of the advocate for redistribution is to try and prove that, in some cases, it doesn’t.

In fact if the supporter of redistribution is correct about who rightfully owns what, then in the non-aggression principle would imply that action resisting redistribution is impermissible, as it would be a form of aggression.

Now of course the libertarian has responses to the advocate for redistribution. They can critique the arguments in favour of redistribution and propound their own theories of who owns what that do not allow much of a role for redistribution, for example, as Nozick does in Anarchy State and Utopia. However such arguments are not primarily appeals to non-aggression, rather they are total theories of who owns what. Nonaggression simply doesn’t cut at the difference between the libertarian and the redistributivist.