The Non-Aggression Principle is ethically sound

Thanks, Mr.Travieso. Based on your formidable debate record, I have no doubt that you will provide a very strong opposition in this debate. I will be using this round to provide a brief constructive case for the Non-Aggression Principle.... the obvious place to start would be with a justification for the existence of natural rights: One of the fundamental axioms of any ethical system is that every human being has ownership over his or her own person/self. This is simply a meta-ethical truth that must be assumed for the sake of continuing with any sort of ethical discourse; to deny that humans have personal autonomy is to deny that there is anything morally significant about humans in relation to the rest of the amoral universe, which basically removes the need for morality to exist at all. In other words, the only way to rationally deny that humans possess personal autonomy is to take up a nihilistic framework, which is disallowed by the nature of this debate. I challenge my opponent to try coherently negating this premise; until he successfully does so, we can (and must) safely assume that self-ownership is an intrinsic property of human beings. On the basis of this self-ownership, we can justify all the major natural rights advocated by the NAP: the right to life, the right to personal liberty, and the right to privately own property. It is not at all difficult to see why self-ownership justifies the rights to life and personal liberty. Life is the most essential component of the "self" without it, the entire concept of the "self" becomes meaningless; thus, by owning myself, I own my life and have the right to keep it. Personal liberty is necessitated just by the definition of "ownership"-- if I "own" myself, I am rightfully allowed to do whatever I want to do as my own person (i.e. basic first amendment freedoms, "pursuit of happiness", etc). The right to private property is also derived from self-ownership-- since I am the ultimate source and sole producer of my own labor, I necessarily own that labor, and by extension, the results of that labor; ergo, humans have the natural right to the private ownership of property which they have earned (includes raw materials obtained directly from labor, currency, material goods bought with currency, etc). Therefore, the inherent self-ownership possessed by all human beings does, indeed, justify natural rights existing as intrinsic human characteristics. Since all humans are similarly autonomous, we are morally obligated to acknowledge and respect the natural rights of everyone else, just as we acknowledge and respect our own natural rights. And that is exactly what the Non-Aggression Principle is: an ethical principle allowing us to fully exercise our natural rights (i.e. do whatever we want), with the only limit being that we cannot infringe on others' natural rights (because that is the *only* limit on our rights that has any rational basis for existing). In conclusion, the Non-Aggression Principle has been shown to be fully substantiated and therefore ethically sound. The onus is now upon Con to try discovering flaws with the NAP so as to render it ethically unsound. However, as of now, the resolution is affirmed.