Let’s call this the Core Libertarian Insight about the welfare state.

Core Libertarian Insight (CLI): Coercive redistribution of wealth by the state is generally wrong.

Libertarians often defend the Core Libertarian Insight by appealing to two other claims:

No Positive Duties (NPD): People don’t have any positive moral duties to provide aid to others in need.

Non‐​Aggression Principle (NAP): The initiation of physical force is always morally impermissible.

If NPDs is true, then there’s no justification for taking from Peter in order to pay Paul, even if Peter is wealthy and Paul is desperately poor. But even if NPD is false, and we do have positive obligations to others, the NAP entails that it is morally impermissible to use force to compel that aid.

I think that both NPD and NAP are false. But I think that CLI is true. How can these claims be reconciled?

Start with the NAP. I’ve argued before that the NAP is a good principle, but a bad rule. In other words, there is a very strong moral presumption against the permissibility of initiating force against another human being. But it is a presumption that can be overcome if the use of force is necessary to prevent something much worse from happening. You can’t punch your neighbor to take his money or his horse, but you can punch him if, for some reason, that’s the only way of saving a thousand other people from being killed.

As for NPD, I’m convinced by Peter Singer’s Drowning Toddler example that we do have a moral obligation to help others in certain emergency situations where we are able to provide aid at relatively little risk or cost. I even think that such obligations are, at least in some cases, enforceable obligations. Suppose you and I are standing at the edge of a shallow pond, watching a toddler drown. If I am physically unable to perform the rescue myself, and you are simply unwilling to do it on your own, I think I would be justified in threatening you with physical force in order to compel you to perform the rescue yourself. Yes, force is morally bad. But in this case, the alternative is morally much, much worse.

How, then, can I agree with CLI? If we have enforceable obligations to rescue drowning toddlers, couldn’t we argue that the welfare state is justified as a way of compelling the rescue of those persons (including children) who are “drowning” in poverty?

I don’t think so. And though it’s a bit removed from the main argument of his book, I think Michael Huemer makes a pretty compelling case for CLI in chapter 7 of The Problem of Political Authority .

Consider a variation of the Drowning Toddler case, which Huemer labels the “Incompetent Bystander” case: