The Non-Aggression Principle is ethically sound

This leaves me space enough to reciprocate my opponent's kind words and perhaps clear up what seem to be misunderstandings about my argument thus far. I have not enjoyed a debate so much since I argued about infinite regress, and can count on one hand the times I have been so interested in a debate as to check its progress on my phone at regular intervals. For this I thank Mr. Madara and hope to spar with him, be it on the subject of Libertarianism or otherwise, in the future.1. Subjects vs. ObjectsMy argument against self-ownership does not stem from a reduction of the concept of legal object to inanimate objects. The reason self-ownership is self-contradictory is that the active subject and the object purport to be one and the same. Slavery is not illogical but immoral (the justification for this has been mentioned and may be mentioned again), self ownership is not merely immoral but illogical. For a right to exist those three distinct elements need must be present. If they are not, we are laboring in the realm of the absurd simply for the sake of maintaining our ideological mirage of rationality. As to the contention that I have attempted to "[shift] the focus of [my] argument from actual slavery to debt bondage", I must disagree. The matter of debt bondage or indentured servitude is an evolution of the institution of slavery, but is much more generous to the slaves than what we are discussing. In the case in which one offers one's work to pay off debts we could have no qualms. Work is an act of the will, not the will itself; or in other words, work is what a person does and not the person itself. We may accept that someone be entitled to our work as they would be when we sign a labor contract; while personal autonomy is not compromised by a claim to ownership. What we cannot accept is one person owning another, which is a necessary corollary to self-ownership once we realize that ownership implies the right to use, gift and sale of what is owned. Thus, these objections are not so much refuted as misunderstood.2. Rights and RelationshipsThe language of rights is eminently juridical, and none can exist outside of human relationship. This is not a bare assertion, but an accepted fact of legal theory since the days of the early Romans. Ubi societas, ibi ius. I had mentioned this legal maxim before. It is usually used to show that law is necessary for any society (even if it is unwritten) but can also be taken to show that, as rights and obligations flow from relationships, they cannot be taken to have their own existence. Rights are contingent upon the existence of society and are not a prelude to it. The entire point of rights is to regulate interactions between people, to posit their autonomous existence is to make a totem of them.3. Personal Autonomy vs. Self-OwnershipMr. Madara accuses me of making a semantic case after giving us a textbook perfect case of a case built upon wordplay. He says that personal autonomy assumes self ownership by it use of pronouns, and then goes on to entirely miss the point of my previous rebuttal. Now, I am not sure whether my opponent owns or is owned by his mother, but as for me I will continue to look for the basis of personal autonomy elsewhere. One need not go further to accept personal autonomy than to recognize the nature of free will. Human beings are autonomous, not because they are granted a property right to their persons any more than slaves lost their autonomy in any sense other than the legal recognition of this autonomy and their physical shackles. A prisoner in the gulags or any other prison may be obliged by outside forces to conform his will to another's, but he cannot be said to lose his free will. Personal autonomy, therefore, is a simple corollary to the very nature of free will, and not a function of ownership. This said we cannot but take Con's case for the identity of personal autonomy and self-ownership as unsupported and unsupportable.4. Circular ReasoningOne can hardly accuse one's opponent of making a semantics-based case and then argue that ownership does not imply property in the case of personal ownership. Ownership by definition is a property right. Con has no way of getting around this. The fact that my opponent insists on embroiling himself in disquisitions about what he considers meta-ethical truths cannot distract us from this fact. Either self-ownership means a property right over oneself, or it means nothing at all. If it means nothing at all we have nothing to argue about and this entire debate has been a house of cards built on the foundation of a misunderstanding of the concept of personal autonomy; if it is a property right then it is a case of circular logic which cannot be affirmed apart from wilful ideological blindness. ~ An Alternative ~My positive case, mostly there to stave off accusations of Nihilism, is not a case of taking the traditional moral view and building a case on them. Rather it is a case of taking the idea which founds the traditional moral view and reaffirming it. It is not that the idea of human dignity is based on a distaste for slavery, but that our distaste for slavery has grown organically (albeit slowly) from these pre-existing notions. What I can in no way accept is that the idea of dignity becomes any more doubtful after one puts it in quotation marks than the idea of self-ownership as a meta-ethical concept would. In order to affirm or reject either principle one must examine and not simply type it ironically. In my previous rounds I have affirmed the idea of human dignity by saying it stems from our faculty of reason and capacity for free will and rejected the non-aggression principle due to the inherent contradictions in self-property and the despicable actions its logic forces it to regard as moral. Mr. Madara neither gives solid reasons to affirm his theory nor does any more to reject the alternative than object to the fact that it affirms our ethical intuitions. This, by the way, is not the same as basing itself on ethical intuitions. As I have already noted, and my opponent has failed to address, my own case affirms a principle and follows it to its consequences rather than affirming consequences and following them to a principle. The arguments from the thankfully hypothetical case of the diabetic man (hypothetical indeed, but not without its parallels in real life) cannot be said to only favor my position due to ethical intuitionalism because none is present. As to Mr. Madara's statement that I "ignore" the argument from ethical incentives and the potential condemnation of acts of omission I must say I can hardly be said to ignore what I dedicated two separate sections to answer. We must therefore take these to be dropped arguments. =========================CONCLUSION=========================Pro has not given a satisfactory answer to a single argument, other than a reaffirmation of his position. He has simply refused to address (or even recognize the existence of) arguments against his position. His entire case is based on the conflation of self-ownership and personal autonomy, the only argument in favor of the equivalence that has been given is the bare assertion that this is a necessary meta-ethical truth and the bizarre claim that in accepting personal autonomy I am automatically affirming his case. He has ignored the argument for personal autonomy as a necessary corollary to the existence of free will and has sidestepped both the alternative moral framework and the arguments for the inferiority of the non-aggression principle in, as he put it, "upholding moral values". As things stand I see no way to rationally justify affirming the resolution. My thanks again to Mr. Madara.