It is not true that libertarianism makes it impractical to build roads, but it is true that there are some funny consequences when people try to apply the core doctrines (of self-ownership and nonaggression) to situations involving moving vehicles. The most famous case is certainly the helicopter joke. Some right-wing, conservative-leaning libertarians like to joke about how Pinochet threw communists off helicopters, which is indeed something Pinochet did, in the so-called “Caravan of Death”. Without question, libertarianism is not so radical as to believe that it is always right to kill communists. There are some communists who think it is always right to kill opponents of communism, but no major libertarian has the mirror image of this opinion. There is a reason why helicopter killings, specifically, became a meme: it’s a reference to a joke about property rights.
The joke about property rights is this: If I’m taking you, consensually, on a ride in my helicopter, it is also true that I remain owner of the helicopter and, as the owner of my property, can freely evict trespassers from it. So suppose that I change my mind about giving you a ride and cancel the contract. You then become a trespasser on my helicopter, and I can evict you, such as by pushing you off of it. Pushing you does no direct damage to your body, which, of course, remains your body via self-ownership, and is generally unharmed by being pushed. This was a minimal, least-harm intervention to quickly evict you, and it does not aggress against anything you legitimately own; you own your body, not anything surrounding it. It is no concern of mine what the ground will do to you once you’re out.
This stuff is funny, but it seems clear that no libertarian judiciary would let me off the hook for pushing you out of my helicopter. There are many things it might do instead, but here’s what it would do in my personal libertarian utopia: If the agreement for the helicopter ride was informal, then they might decide that, as a general unspoken part of such informal ride-agreements, I agreed to reimburse any damage to your body that happened due to me negligently letting you fall off of it, payable either to you if you survive, or to those named in your will if you don’t, or to your relatives if there is no such will, etc. I would then be punished by being saddled with a big debt to pay for the entire estimated value of your life, which is, basically, what would be done to any murderer; the gap between the treatment of my conduct and the treatment of murder is thus closed. If I had asked you to sign a written formal contract explicitly waiving such damages, I wouldn’t have this problem, but then you’d be a fool to sign it. So much, then, for the helicopter joke. This post was actually about something else.
I was talking to Tetraspace about politics, and I thought of a moral dilemma that I’m calling the “enslaved pilot”, which I think is interesting because of the contrast between very starkly rights-based moral theories such as libertarianism, and other more eclectic theories. In the hypothetical, an airline company has somehow enslaved a man and made him work as a pilot, so that he has to work the flights they tell him to work, or else they beat him up, or abuse him horribly in other ways. As soon as he lands somewhere, there are keepers who chain him and prevent him from running away. He hates this life, so he has the idea of jumping off and parachuting mid-flight to escape slavery—this way, the airline people can’t catch him. However, this sends a plane full of passengers probably flying to their deaths. Supposing that such an enslaved pilot hypothetically did exist and did act in this way, it is then interesting to think of how different moral and legal theories would evaluate the pilot’s conduct.
Obviously, consequentialists think the pilot did something bad because of the many people’s deaths, although it is unclear what they should think about his culpability as compared with the airline company’s, which is never a very clear notion in their theories. The proportionality clause in the traditional doctrine of double-effect also seems to decide that the pilot’s own action is bad, although it’s unclear if the action is murder or some lesser form of homicide. But I believe that a libertarian or, more generally, a starkly rights-based moral/legal theory would say at minimum, in favor of the pilot, that what he did, even if wrong, is not murder, and shouldn’t be punished as such; although in most places it is likely that the law disagrees.
I do not think the two sources I linked are the only possible interpretation of libertarianism – indeed, my ideal libertarian utopia itself differs from it in some respects – but I do take other interpretations less seriously (as libertarian) the more they differ from the general broad outlook in these sources. Some libertarians who agree with my interpretation of libertarianism might disagree with my judgment of what it says about this case: they might say that the pilot does commit murder, because he violates the nonaggression axiom by effectively turning the plane into a high-powered projectile aimed at the innocent, nonaggressing passengers. I believe that he does not do this, because as an enslaved captive in the airplane, he has no more obligation to maintain it than anyone else does. As to what my personal libertarian utopia would do, of course, it all depends on what sorts of financial penalty are included in the contract between passengers and airline, which, in this case, is probably formal and written and explicit. At any rate, the enslaved pilot is a case of sharp disagreement between libertarianism and moral/legal theories which are more eclectic, and less starkly rights-based.
As an aside, the case is also an illustration of how it becomes simply less economical to own slaves, as opposed to hiring voluntary workers, the more a society is rich and has to manage high-value capital goods. By using an enslaved pilot, the airline company is risking a plane crash, and all connected liabilities, in a way that they wouldn’t risk if they had instead hired a free man.
