Voluntariness is a nice applause light, but calling it an “axiom” I am not sure if that even makes sense logically.
If I desire to steal your property, but you threaten to shoot me, so I give up… does it make sense to say that I voluntarily decided to not steal your property? Because if you extend the definition of “voluntary” to include things done under threat of death, then if I threaten to shoot you unless you give me your property, and you don’t want to die so you give it to me, then under the extended definition you also gave me your property “voluntarily”.
As far as I know, the usual definition is “do not initiate violence”, and even that has a lot of gray area around what “initiate” and “violence” mean exactly. If I create negative externalities (for example my factory polutes the air), at which moment does it become a violence? Are smokers violently attacking other people by their smoke? Sick people by breathing? Is it violence to violate someone’s intellectual right? (Some libertarians say “obviously yes”, others say “obviously no”.) Is lying a violence? Is libel? Without exact definition of violence you also can’t have an exact definition of initiation, because if one party does something that is maybe-violence-maybe-not-violence, and the other party responds by clear violence, which one of them was the “initiator” of violence?
tl;dr—most libertarians way overestimate the axiomatizability of libertarianism
Voluntariness is a nice applause light, but calling it an “axiom” I am not sure if that even makes sense logically.
If I desire to steal your property, but you threaten to shoot me, so I give up… does it make sense to say that I voluntarily decided to not steal your property? Because if you extend the definition of “voluntary” to include things done under threat of death, then if I threaten to shoot you unless you give me your property, and you don’t want to die so you give it to me, then under the extended definition you also gave me your property “voluntarily”.
As far as I know, the usual definition is “do not initiate violence”, and even that has a lot of gray area around what “initiate” and “violence” mean exactly. If I create negative externalities (for example my factory polutes the air), at which moment does it become a violence? Are smokers violently attacking other people by their smoke? Sick people by breathing? Is it violence to violate someone’s intellectual right? (Some libertarians say “obviously yes”, others say “obviously no”.) Is lying a violence? Is libel? Without exact definition of violence you also can’t have an exact definition of initiation, because if one party does something that is maybe-violence-maybe-not-violence, and the other party responds by clear violence, which one of them was the “initiator” of violence?
tl;dr—most libertarians way overestimate the axiomatizability of libertarianism