The NAP is about minimizing conflict. Criminals prove it is not
a utopian principle.
As social animals this principle grapples with the question what
is the best course of action possible to minimize conflict as individuals
inevitably encounter each other. As rational animals individual(s)
have recognized (and thus can be recognized) boundaries or natural
rights to accord with the NAP.
These natural rights are life, liberty, and property. These rights are
conflated moral values, meaning, these moral values are also rights distinct
from numerous other moral values that are not rights. Of course nihilist
prefer to stick with them being simply values. These moral values (life,
liberty, and property) are natural rights as they are arguably universal in
human nature and lawful. Recognition of these natural rights minimizes
conflict in principle, the non-aggression principle. Understanding rights,
I have of yet to see how 'pursuit of happiness' is a right other than the
rights of life, liberty, and property are of the pursuit of happiness.
Pursuit of happiness as defined by Thomas Jefferson, Francis Hutcheson,
John Locke, and Aristotle, to name a few, is understood better in the more
original Greek concept called eudaimonia, which means flourishing (happiness).
Arete, excellence, is a component of flourishing. The logical positivists:
utilitarians
(there have been numerous applications of logical positivism), have since the
1800's warped happiness, amongst many other events, to be some kind of
strictly emotive or biological pleasure. If those mental glasses are on when
happiness in this context is to be understood, then taking them off will get
to the original concept in which pursuit of happiness came about in accord
with the natural law of human nature. Pursuit of happiness is an intellectual
pattern, though its acts are conceivably other patterns.
Other ways to conceptualize pursuit (effort/action) of happiness:
pursuit of excellence
pursuit of flourishing
pursuit of quality
moral values (as I defined above)
And as I stated above, all rights reduce to pursuit of happiness, but
everything
encompassed by pursuit of happiness is not a right. For instance, flourishing
happens as the virtue courage is enacted by an individual. That is a
flourishing, an
act of excellence, but courage is not a right.
Without liberty, flourishing, in other words, quality degenerates. Thus
said, when
the initiation of physical coercion is happening flourishing and quality is
perpetually
lacking.
This is a long post as is, so, I will leave this here for now with one more
addition.
The NAP is about minimizing conflict.
Nick
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