jhendon5I’m curious about this statement in your post: “Walter Block, to use one example, seems to think that the NAP is a legal principle which has nothing whatever to do with moral theory. It is simply a legal justification for force.” How can the NAP be used to justify force? Can you provide a link or some other reference to Block’s argument to this effect?
And you write “And since the conflation of the moral and the legal in its institutional form is called “the nanny state”, I have a hard time seeing how the NAP can be both.”
It doesn’t seem to me that the conflation of the moral and the legal in institutional form is necessarily the nanny state. Isn’t the U.S. Constitution a conflation of the moral and the legal which, by attempting to enumerate government’s legitimate powers , would largely negate government’s inclination to become a nanny state?