The Agency Protection Principle

Beyond the Non-Aggression Principle

Libertarian ethics traditionally centers around the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), which states that initiating physical aggression against another's person or property is inherently illegitimate. While compelling in its simplicity, the NAP struggles with ambiguity and circularity, particularly regarding what precisely counts as "aggression," and implicitly assumes a foundational legitimacy of property rights.

This article proposes a refined, minimal ethical rule that addresses these shortcomings by explicitly grounding coercion's legitimacy in the protection and restoration of voluntary agency:

Coercion is justified if, and only if, it prevents or remedies violations of voluntary agency.

Limitations of the NAP

While the NAP effectively limits overt physical aggression, it suffers from significant limitations:

1. Ambiguous Definition of Aggression:
   What precisely constitutes aggression is often subjective or culturally influenced. Is fraud aggression? What about manipulation, blackmail, or psychological coercion?

2. Implicit Circularity:
   Defining coercion as justified solely in response to aggression leads to circular reasoning. Aggression is whatever we define as illegitimate coercion, creating a feedback loop with no clear foundation.

3. Dependence on Rights:
   The NAP implicitly presupposes the legitimacy of property rights, which themselves require justification. Without an independent ethical foundation for rights, the principle risks arbitrariness.

Agency as a Fundamental Principle

Agency—the capacity to make voluntary decisions—is a foundational ethical value because it directly correlates with autonomy and flourishing. Harm, fundamentally, can be clearly defined as any reduction in an individual's voluntary agency.

This explicit grounding resolves many of the NAP's weaknesses:

• Objective Definition:
  Agency violations are measurable, identifiable, and objective. Physical harm, psychological manipulation, fraud, and coercion all have a common feature—they reduce the victim's capacity for voluntary action.

• Explicitly Protective and Remedial:
  The principle explicitly authorizes coercive action not just defensively after harm, but proactively to prevent violations of agency. This clearly legitimizes interventions in cases like kidnapping threats, fraud, or imminent psychological coercion.

• Independent of Property Norms:
  Rather than presupposing controversial rights claims, the agency-based principle directly addresses the underlying value at stake. Ownership, consent, and rights become ethical precisely when they respect and protect voluntary agency.

Practical Ethical Clarity

Under this formulation, coercive interventions become justified only to preserve or restore voluntary agency:

• Fraud and deception are ethically wrong because they violate voluntary agency through misinformation.

• Physical coercion and threats clearly reduce or eliminate voluntary agency, thereby justifying defensive or remedial coercion.

• Contracts and agreements become ethically binding only if entered into voluntarily and genuinely, free from coercion or deception.

Conclusion: An Ethical Upgrade

Grounding ethics explicitly in voluntary agency offers a more coherent, philosophically rigorous, and practically actionable ethical rule than the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle. By emphasizing voluntary agency directly, we not only maintain libertarianism's best moral intuitions but also greatly strengthen its conceptual clarity and ethical applicability.