Shields Still Own Themselves

Shields Still Own Themselves

Patrick Smith^*

October 27, 2026

Property and Freedom Journal

Walter Block recently published “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Human Shields” in The Independent Review, the latest in a series of articles by him on this topic.¹ I have been a fan of Walter for many years. I’ve even called him my spirit animal at times. I’ve always admired and aspired to his fortitude to say what he believes and stick by what he thinks is libertarian principle, no matter how unpopular. I have hosted him on Anarchast more than once. I produced the audiobook of his Defending the Undefendable II.² If I have a bias here, it runs toward him. I care about the man, and I have put my own work and personal endorsement behind him.

I already said in public that I was too charitable after our 2024 conversation, and that I was reversing that defense.³ This essay, commenting on his 2025 “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Human Shields” paper, is the argument underneath that reversal. It is about the theory. I am not here to re-litigate anyone’s institute today.⁴

Morality First

He opens his article by treating libertarianism as a legal rule. The non-aggression principle, or NAP, he asserts, “specifies that it shall be illegal to threaten or initiate violence against innocent people.”⁵

I hold that our philosophy begins earlier, and more foundationally: Libertarianism is a moral theory. What is legal, for it to be valid, must be downstream from, a subset of, and constrained by what is moral. A legal incantation requiring a murdered hostage reagent for it to “work” has already destroyed the thing it was cast to protect.

He also lists two “very strong expectations”: that following the NAP will leave people happier and more prosperous, and that a libertarian society will be stable. Absolutely. Peaceful cooperative people tend to get richer, and a society full of people that believe in self-ownership will probably have a decent shot at holding together. Those are bonus effects. They are not the justifications for the moral principles, and those principles do not expire if the bonuses fail to materialize.

Sometimes being a principled person costs you. That is an inextricable part of what principles are—you defer other goals, other benefits, you defer gratification, sometimes even including the gratification of staying alive, because you have placed something higher than yourself. It is your principle, your prime directive. If your prime directive is non-aggression, then you are a libertarian. People constantly want their cake and their principles too. But the whole point of having them is the purposeful sacrifice in service to the higher value. Claiming the value without eating the cost is the definition of a charlatan. If your highest thing is non-aggression when it’s convenient and safe, then non-aggression is not your highest thing—convenience and safety are, and you’re no longer a libertarian.

The Quiet Part Aloud

The Martian example is supposed to show that the NAP and human welfare can come apart:

The people on the fourth planet are all-powerful. They hate libertarianism. … So they declare that unless someone kills innocent person Joe, they will blow up the entire earth, and all creatures on it will die. Harry Hero then steps up and kills—murders—Joe. … Then, the rest of us, attempting to save what last vestiges we still have of libertarianism, convict Harry of murder and are about to execute him.

Then comes another message from the Martians: “Harm one hair on Harry’s head and guess what? Yes, we’ll blow up your entire planet.” So, again there is a gigantic bifurcation between libertarianism, which requires that Harry be punished, and human welfare, for, if you carry out the just sentence against him, we all perish.⁶

In typical Blockian style, he doesn’t try to hide or shy away from the harsh implications of his arguments. He writes:

I am arguing that in that scenario, we should indeed commit aggression. Thus I am indeed agreeing that libertarianism is inadequate in such cases. … I do not at all think that in this scenario, we should let humanity be destroyed.⁷

He admits it is aggression. He admits libertarianism cannot justify it. He is not willing to let the principle win. Harry is a villain to anyone who holds the NAP. He broke the main rule and gets named a hero for it here.

I will channel my bullet-biting spirit animal since he will not. Murdering Joe is, in fact, murder. If the universe somehow manages to rig itself such that the only options are murder or planetary death, maybe the universe is just a nasty place, but so be it. Our prime directive does not become ephemeral when the thought experiment gets dark. These are the costs of being principled. It is absolutely imperative that you choose the correct ones to hold because you are staking your life on it.

The A B C’s

Consider this passage from Block regarding human shields (I will use his lettering convention throughout this paper to avoid confusion):

A wants to kill C. In order to facilitate this evil intention of his, A first grabs up B, a totally innocent person, and then uses him, B, as a shield to hide behind, while he, A, launches his totally unjustified attack on C. We posit that C is a libertarian. … [W]e posit, arguendo, that the only way C can defend himself against A’s unwarranted attack is to shoot both him, A, and his shield, B. Thus, to ward off A’s initiatory violence, C, … would also have to kill B, an entirely innocent person, and this he cannot do, given his misinterpretation of the nonaggression principle, which, he mistakenly thinks, bans all killing of innocents. The error, here, is that B is no longer an innocent. To be sure, he lacks all mens rea. He is innocent in that regard. He might be drugged. Or he might be a one-year-old baby. But he is no longer innocent in that he is now being used as a shield.⁸

Note that Walter here has just described the actual NAP, called it a mistake, and then set about such a fit of laundering that even tiny babies lost their innocence. Allow me to unwind these knots.

We are normative individualists. We own (are responsible and culpable for) our own actions and are culpable for what we do. Your moral status does not and cannot change because someone else did something bad—much less because they did something bad to you. If you have not initiated force you are innocent.

Walter, however, reveals in a mere footnote that he departs from this core libertarian position. For him, human shields—totally innocent people—are liable for actions they did not perform and for threats they did not originate. He writes:

Human shields are causally contributing to a threat to your rights, and it is permissible to use defensive force against anyone who causally contributes to a threat to your rights (whether or not they originated the threat).⁹

This is a complete inversion. “Causally contributing” is not the libertarian test, initiation of force is.¹⁰ B being grabbed and stood in front of a gun is not B initiating force! Anyone whose body makes C’s personal selection of self-defense method harder now gets to die in C’s personal self-defense militia that they never joined. The baby is now a war slave, a wall contributes, and Joe contributes to the Martians’ ultimatum by existing. It’s a rights-stealing wand you can just go around bopping inconvenient people with while calling it self-defense.

And what a tell the villain-baby is! When the paradigm case of quintessential innocence in philosophy discussions becomes the bad guy, alarm bells should be going off.

He quotes Rothbard, from War, Peace, and the State (1963):¹¹

Jones [C] finds that he or his property is being invaded, aggressed against, by Smith [A]. It is legitimate for Jones [C], as we have seen, to repel this invasion by defensive violence of his own. But now we come to a more knotty question: is it within the right of Jones [C] to commit violence against innocent third parties [B] as a corollary to his legitimate defense against Smith [A]? To the libertarian, the answer must be clearly, no. Remember that the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute: it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or starving, or is doing it to save one’s relatives, or is defending oneself against a third man’s attack. We may understand and sympathize with the motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, [C] aggresses against [B] because [A] is threatening, or aggressing against, [C]. We may understand [A]’s “higher” culpability in this whole procedure; but we must still label this aggression as a criminal act which [B] has the right to repel by violence.

To be more concrete, if Jones [C] finds that his property is being stolen by Smith [A], he has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but he has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people [B] or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd [B]. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith [A] is.¹²

Although some have noted some shifts in Rothbard’s positions and emphases in later writings, e.g. on immigration and culture matters, he never recanted that passage. To the contrary, he reaffirmed it in 1984, and again in 1988. He never came around to saying it was acceptable to machine gun the crowd Smith [A] was standing in. Walter’s complaint seems to be that Rothbard actually meant what he wrote. As Rothbard wrote:

Take for example the question of the shopping center guard. A criminal [A] takes someone as a hostage [B], uses him or her as a shield, and brandishes a gun, threatening the rest of the public. Does a guard [C], employed by the shopping center, have the right to plug the hostage [B] (assuming, of course, that he has no clear shot at the kidnapper [A]?) The confusion comes from forgetting the rights of the innocent hostage [B]. The question should be countered by another: namely, assume another bodyguard, hired by the hostage [B] for defense. Assume, once again, that the hostage [B]’s bodyguard has no clear shot at the kidnapper [A]. The bodyguard looks around and sees the shopping center guard [C] take aim and be about to shoot the hostage [B]. The bodyguard, pledged above all to defend the person and property of the hostage [B], has only one justifiable course of action: to shoot the shopping center guard [C], who constitutes the most direct and immediate threat to the person and life of the hostage [B]. By putting the case in terms of someone employed by the shopping center, the framers of the question have silently pushed the rights and defense of the hostage [B] out of public view.¹³

Block’s argument is flawed because it is contradictory.¹⁴ Consider the following reconstruction in premise-conclusion form revealing the explicit contradiction:

The Contradiction in Block’s Argument

P1) Libertarians hold that B and C own themselves and have the right to defend themselves and their property.

P2) Libertarians hold that the only way to lose one’s right to self-defense is to initiate force against another.

C1) B owns himself and may defend himself. C owns himself and may defend himself. This much is uncontestable for all libertarians. (P1-P2)

P3) Walter’s addendum: A uses B as a shield. By Walter’s own stipulation, C can stop A only by shooting A and B. Walter’s claim is that B is then “no longer an innocent,” so C may shoot B as defense.

C2) Therefore, at the same time: C may shoot B, and B may defend himself against C’s shot. (C1–P3)

C2 is clearly a contradiction, because “C may shoot B” and “B may defend himself against C” cannot both be true. We cannot say of B that he has the right to defend himself from C’s attack and simultaneously say that C has the right to attack him. Affirming the latter is equivalent to denying the former. Those two cannot coexist.

The only fix for this logic for Walter would be to say that B is stripped of his self-ownership, consent, and right to self-defense by virtue of being attacked, captured, or even merely hid behind by A. The aggressor must be handed the right to erase his victim’s liberty. Inserting that as a premise before P3, that B can be attacked out of his right to live, is the only out to prevent the fatal contradiction.

Make no mistake, however, that is exactly the ripcord Walter pulled—the premise is his footnote 7—the contribution without initiation inversion we already refused. He never actually wrote that B lost his self-ownership. He just wrote that B may be killed, and that he may not defend himself by shooting at the man killing him (his human missile bit—B thrown instead of held). For all intents and purposes that is self-ownership, consent, and the right of self-defense stripped—all by virtue of A’s attack against him.

A’s need of a shield to make his crime easier does not and cannot reclassify B’s moral existence. Likewise, C’s need of an easier method of defense does not and cannot reclassify B’s moral existence. Persons are separate (Nozick). B is not material in C’s survival math. B is neither a chattel slave to A’s violent acts nor to C’s attempt at socialized welfare-defense.

Furthermore, if we replace force initiation with mere “causal contribution”, we can provide an internal critique by simply running the argument the other way. There are many more ways to provide causal contributions than just non-consensual defensive utility extraction. What about C’s gall to do whatever he did that made A hunt him? Or what about C brazenly walking around with a gun making A want to grab up a shield for his attack? C disconsenting to those effects on A is as irrelevant as B’s disconsent to be made a shield. A extracted both the non-consensual justification for the attack and the need of B as a shield from C in just as causal a way.

By Walter’s own negative homesteading rule, the misery was in fact C’s first, so C may not pass it to B. B merely needs to shoot the no longer innocent causal contributor C in self-defense to immediately resolve the attack-in-progress against him—the attack that wouldnt even exist if not for C’s involvement. Walter arbitrarily decides to see things from C’s perspective with B as the obstacle, instead of B’s perspective with C as the reason A needed a shield in the first place—C’s gun, C’s angering A, or any other way we could imagine C causally contributing. He has not derived why this use, by A, and not the other. Why only that one form of causal contribution?

It’s because it’s a conclusion in search of a justification. He will not let the party he is rooting for lose. C facing the shield, humanity from the Martian attack, Jones-Israel. Looking back, you can see just how far behind us the libertarian prime directive was left. This “causal contribution” standard is insufficient even from inside his own arguments and must be jettisoned.

“Die or Murder” is a false fork

Suppose that Smith [A] is hiding in a building among hundreds of other people [B] and is firing rockets at Jones [C]. Must the latter [C] stand blithely by and allow the former [A] to wreak havoc on him, on his property, on his loved ones, while the former [A] shelters in the building? Not a bit of it, in my interpretation of libertarianism. Jones [C] is now entitled to respond to the barrage of military hardware tossed at him by Smith [A] by repaying this “favor” in kind. But what about the fact that there are hundreds of innocent people [B] in that building, according to Rothbard? In my view, they are no longer innocent.¹⁵

It’s fine to purposefully craft a philosophical scenario to test a given principle, and I loathe people that try to fight the terms of those tests instead of participating. That’s not what he’s doing here. He’s asking a question: Must C stand blithely by and allow A to wreak havoc on him? The implication he’s trying to get the reader to fall into is that by saying no, he’s also authorizing the mass-B-killing. The libertarian answer to his question is far from limited to those two options.

C may take any action on the planet and in all of reality that he can dream up, that does not manufacture a new innocent victim. I suppose he could choose blithely standing around if he wanted, as no libertarian would say he has an onus to defend himself, but the field of options is as wide open as the situation allows. Leave. Barricade. Interpose his own property. Shoot the part of A that is actually exposed without hitting B. Follow A home. Wait. Build a better tool. Hire people. Sign defense contracts before anyone is hiding behind babies. Real life is almost never “kill the hostage or die in the next second”.

His A-B-C case is different. He stipulates that it is kill or die, and we don’t fight the terms here. So, granted. The stipulation still does not invert morality. Sometimes life is exceedingly unfair. Will you go down as a principled man who did what was right in the face of severe adversity and deadly threat, or as the guy who bought his continued existence with someone else’s body? The prime directive is non-aggression. I would rather die a hero than live as the villain—evil on the backs of the innocent. We stand for non-aggression, not for whatever atrocities it takes to survive.

“Libertarianism is not a suicide pact” is doing a lot of work for people who want a permission they cannot derive. It is entirely possible, if you take liberty seriously, that it ends in your death. We do not write a non-death principle.

Culpability, Neither Pie Nor Pile

Some people make the mistake of thinking of culpability as a pie that must be sliced up amongst all co-conspirators in a given criminal situation. The front man gets 20%, the getaway driver 5% unless he ran over an innocent along the way, in which case he might get 25%, and we continue on until the slices add up to 100%. If they just add math to something, it somehow makes more sense.

Other people make a sort of equal and opposite mistake. They take every bad thing, every damage, every hurt, every wrong, and roll the whole thing up to a heap at the feet of someone at the top of some transgression hierarchy they’ve constructed.

For libertarians, culpability is much simpler. We all own the effects of our own actions, and our individual ledgers accrue accordingly. Two people can both be 100% on the hook for a single crime, and two people can be on separate hooks for their individual crimes carried out throughout a crime spree. If C shoots B in a (definitionally botched) self-defense attempt against A, the ledgers are straightforward: C is culpable for one murder (B), and A is too, plus the rest of the litany: assault (B), battery (B), abduction (B), reckless endangerment (B), and attempted murder (C).

The reply we hear is: “C’s not responsible. He’s under duress, under direct coercion from A. Whatever C does is A’s problem.” Threat, duress, and coercion do vitiate one’s capacity to consent, but they do not detach your brain from your nervous system, or rewire it to be remote controlled by an attacker. C never agreed to this situation, or to any option he’s left with in it—he does not consent. He still chooses from a list of options, and that choice is under his control. That control may be limited and his choice constrained and impinged by A, but he is still wired in, with agency—and that agency comes with responsibility and culpability.

Negative Obligation Word Games

Walter, formidable thinker he is, sees the positive-obligation problem coming and tries to outrun it:

But does this claim run afoul of yet another libertarian maxim, that there are no positive obligations? No. There is a negative obligation not to be turned into a shield. If you somehow find yourself in that predicament, you are obligated to try to stop Smith [A]. But suppose you are a one-year-old baby, stuck in that building [B], and cannot possibly prevent Smith [A] from firing at Jones [C]. Then, in the analysis I am putting forth, you, the toddler [B], are a victim of the negative homesteading not of Jones [C], but of Smith [A]. That sounds preposterous at the outset. After all, it is Jones [C] who is firing machine gun bullets into the building, not Smith [A]. But who is ultimately responsible for this carnage against people who can no longer be considered “innocent”? It is Smith [A], not Jones [C].¹⁵

Just from precisely where does C derive the authority to enslave B into C’s self-defense on pain of death? Block’s footnote 9 tells us:

This is similar to the negative obligation of the parents to feed their child if they do not bring him to an orphanage, hospital, police or fire station, or the like.¹⁶

This is not similar. B took nothing in—no voluntary act from which an obligation is acquired. A just assaulted him. The libertarian way to handle this ex ante is contract: mutual defense, advance consent to what happens if someone uses you as a prop, insurance, agencies that hunt A when he is not fused to a child. Without those, and without B’s consent, you have no source for the right to make a means out of B.

There are both tight and loose usages of “positive” and “negative” obligations, and it is easy to motte-and-bailey between them when it suits us. Tight is the rigorous one that carries weight with libertarian rights theory: a negative duty means to refrain only. Don’t hit. Don’t take. Don’t confine. Enforcement is “stop doing that.” No labor, no performance. Loose dissolves into word games you can play both ways while still sounding like the core libertarian negative obligations maxim. Anything you can phrase as “don’t fail to Φ” gets smuggled in as a clear already-vetted conclusion for libertarians not paying attention. Same facts, opposite-sounding duties.

Let’s illustrate with the good ole doughnut homesteading problem (shelving Kinsella et al’s objections and that whole debate for today). Does the encircling owner have a negative obligation not to use his land and fence in a way that traps the man in the hole, or a positive obligation to modify one’s fence and property sufficiently to provide an easement for the ringed-in man? Same fence. Taken loosely you can see how the polarity doesn’t really matter here—we’re saying the same thing two different ways. Word games.

But that is not how we use the terms in libertarian rights theory. The tight usage is narrow and clear. Negative is an obligation to refrain from certain actions toward you or your property. It imposes only duties of non-interference. The right not to be killed, not to have your stuff taken, not to be confined. Enforcement is simply “stop doing that”. Positive is a claim that others must perform certain actions or supply certain goods/services for you. A right to free healthcare, a right to a certain income, a right to be fed. Enforcement requires extracting labor or resources from others. One is a side-constraint on action; the other is a claim on other people’s positive efforts. These generate different practical and moral structures whose differences are not mere wordplay. The libertarian tight usage: you may not imprison someone on your land. You do not have to build him a road, plow it, or staff it.

Walter needs the tight reputation and the loose result. Motte: “a negative obligation not to be turned into a shield.” Bailey, next sentence: you are “obligated to try to stop Smith.” That is perform. C’s reductio sounds like this: “I have a right to have everyone around me resist aggressors sufficiently such that they don’t make the way I would prefer to defend myself any less convenient.” A one-year-old cannot refrain his way out of A’s arms. Using the “negative” word does not match the accurate libertarian usage, nor does it make B the aggressor.

Block is aware of the fatal flaw in his position but attempts to slide past it by simply redefining innocence by brute force:

A one-year-old baby who is used as a shield is certainly innocent, in that he lacks mens rea. […] [I]t is justified for the victim […] to kill this perpetrator in self-defense, and by stipulation the baby, too, must die. But this leads to a philosophical anomaly: It is now justified to kill innocent people. That sounds like a logical contradiction on the order of the square circle. Thus, I am tempted to say that even though this child lacks mens rea, he is still not innocent. His innocence has been taken away from him by his father, who uses him as a shield.¹⁷

Calling out a square circle does not square it. He has to take the baby’s innocence to justify shooting it.

You all must resist sufficiently, and if you do not or cannot, your attacker gets to reclassify your moral status by doing a crime to you. Rapists would be delighted to hear that libertarianism will delete your consent and self-ownership if you don’t or can’t fight back hard enough.

Misery Is Neither Scarce Nor Rivalrous

The toddler quote piles the deaths on Smith (A). His other use of “negative homesteading” is a hot-potato of who dies:

According to negative homesteading theory (Block 2019), [B] was the first to have the misery visited upon him, and he may not properly slough it off onto anyone else, such as [C].¹⁸

In another paper he names the trick. Same theory, lights on:

It is called homesteading misery, or negative homesteading. Like its positive counterpart, positive homesteading, the negative variety claims that the first person to encounter an item in nature and mix his labor with it, becomes the owner of it. […] [N]egative homesteading involves the ownership, or, perhaps, retention would be a better word, of something that is strictly negative. […] For positive homesteading the motto might well be, “first in time, first in right”. In the present case this translates into “first in time, first in wrong” (or bad, or misery).¹⁹

He quotes Rothbard on the innocent shield in that same paper, then takes the opposite position:

Let us now come to the case of the innocent shield, which is the most relevant to the problem of war and the State. [C], an original victim, is being threatened with assault by criminal [A]. Let’s say that [A] is threatening [C] with a rifle, and he hides behind innocent shield [B], who for some reason cannot get out of the way. Does [C] have the right to shoot in self-defense? No, for this makes [C] the criminal aggressor against [B], a fact dramatically revealed by asking the key question: Does [B] have the right to shoot [C] in self-defense? Absolutely. [B] is causing no harm, and he has the perfect right to defend himself. Shooting the innocent shield is murder, and [B] has the right to defend himself with force, and he or his heirs have the right to retaliate. Again, our regrets, our “that’s the human condition,” or “tough cookies” comments, must be directed to the criminal [C] and not to [B].²⁰

“Misery” is not a valid form of property. It is neither scarce nor rivalrous. You cannot homestead it, nor own it, and you are not responsible if someone gets a little of it on them through no act of your own. (This is an example of the perils of overreliance on metaphors. See, e.g., Kinsella’s criticism of another overextended metaphorical argument of Block’s, his “forestalling” argument based on his notion that libertarianism “abhors” unowned property.)²¹ Furthermore, one cannot accidentally, much less non-consensually, come to own something; homesteading is always an intentional action, after all. So even if “First-to-suffer” was a property title, you cannot be conscripted into owning it. Yet furthermore, even if you could be forced into owning something, ownership includes the right to destroy or abandon it at will, so one would just immediately jettison this silly claim to misery-ownership. To deny the abandonment you’d have to also perform yet more alchemy to transmute the emotional state of everyone around you into property as well so as to bar the misery-owner from dumping his feels-trash on anyone’s lawn. Yet further furthermore, even if we accepted all of this, including “first in time, first in wrong”, why on earth would the first in wrong be the first victim and not the first aggressor? A created the misery, let A eat it. Precisely zero layers in this cake function.

When you start toying with the most vital and foundational ideas humans have ever conceived of, and that almost everything is grounded in, property and consent, any inversion becomes possible—up becomes down, inside out, a literal baby the villain. No. These concepts have set meanings. Feelings are not property and experience is not something you own and exchange on the market. He needed B to stop counting as innocent for his entire project to breathe, so he invented a whole new junk science of conveyance.

Shields, Weapons, and Toy Cases

Our requirement has never been that C must take A’s punches, bullets, or missiles. Blocking, donning armor, constructing a wall—that is C owning and defending C. If A actually turns B into a projectile, and A slams B into C’s wall wrecking B, the force is A’s. Block is trying to get you to agree to attacking an incoming missile-person so he can carry that back for a cup and ball sleight over to the captive-shield.

What C may not do is put a new force into B just because he wants to make his defense easier: shoot him, break him, use him up. The injuries may look the same from the outside in scenarios specifically crafted to purpose, but the acts are not the same. One is C remaining C. The other is C treating B as the thing to destroy.

If the only way C lives is destroying B, we are back in the stipulated toy, and we as libertarians have already bit that principled bullet like the heroes we are.

While I want to stay focused on generic theory here, we all know what these toy scenarios are going to be used for once leaving this steel motte, so it must be said at least once. People living near a launcher are not at all a B. They are merely in the vicinity. “We’re sorry your new neighbor is a terrorist, so you don’t own yourself anymore” is the A–B–C case with the screws loosened until it falls apart. Lastly, treating Smith-Hamas and Jones-Israel like individuals in a Just War Theory analysis is rote collectivism that libertarians reject outright. Individuals were attacked, and the individuals responsible may be erased for it. Collective-spook-Israel does not get free license to attack all members of collective-spook-Gaza about it.

Well-Worn Continuum Carpets

Once B is “no longer innocent,” a referee asks the obvious: may you kill any number of such people to save one? May you nuke a city because one criminal is hiding in it?

Walter shrugs. Continuum problem. No definitive number from libertarian theory, nor from any other. Then statutory rape: we know five is too young and twenty-five is not, and there is no age you can deduce to the month, therefore… Hamas placing rockets next to civilians in a Gazan hospital is a “paradigm case,” and nuking London to get twelve terrorists is too far, and how many hypnotists does it take to hold two million people, and anyway how innocent are Gazan adults, really.

We can, have, and must do better than wearing another hole through the continuum carpet every time we hit difficult problems. Age of consent is a question about capacity to consent. You name the qualities or capacities a person must have for their consent to be meaningful, and then you evaluate the person to see if they possess them. Do they meet the criteria or not?

“May you murder these babies so it is easier to shoot the man holding them?” has an answer. You name the qualities required to shoot someone, for a libertarian it is aggression, and then you evaluate the persons. Zero babies are aggressing, so you may murder precisely zero of them. It already came from Rothbard in the passage Walter quoted. It comes again every time a critic refuses to let an attacker further extinguish their victims’ self-ownership. It’s not a continuum and he does not lack an answer. He lacks an answer he likes.

If and only if the miscreants “fully control” their shields, he writes, “the forces of law and order may with impunity, without offending libertarian theory in the slightest, slaughter these innocent people, who have no mens rea for any criminality.” His desired conclusions got him here, and our theory had nothing to do with it.

Block Thinks Libertarian Society is Untenable

Walter’s terms: If police cannot shoot A while he has two newborns taped to him, crime will pay, California shoplifting will look quaint, and libertarianism will not be stable.

Well. See… We already live under that rule. Cops are not supposed to put a round through the infant to bag the man, and it turns out we didn’t get a baby-shield crime wave and society has yet to unravel about it.

He sees the follow-home reply coming. Police can wait until A puts the babies down. Then he says A can always grab them again, crime will pay, you cannot arrest on the spot.

Well. See… We already live under that rule too. Cops already follow and wait for an opening in hostage situations. Still no baby-shield crime waves. Crime, still not paying. Society, still a thing. They can’t sleep fused to infants forever. Cops surround and wait. Other people will hunt them. Technology will outflank them. No tyrant stays perfectly armored once enough people decide they’re done. These stipulations that any successful stop “will spell the demise” of the babies are fine for thought experiments—but the real world already doesn’t work that way. This is a fairy tale trying to get you to sign on to a morality that says: if you will not murder hostages, your society isn’t strong enough to survive. Turns out it will do just fine, and likely far better when out from under the state.

I simply do not have enough credulity within my body to believe that the great Walter Block thinks not shooting at a guy with two babies is the undefendable thing that finally dismantles the philosophy he spent decades arguing for.

We never guaranteed that a libertarian order would be immortal, or that nobody would ever use peaceful means to hollow out its institutions. We said it would be worth it, and more resilient than the alternatives, because it is moral and it refuses to become the thing it is fighting. When you’re at the point of shooting “criminal” babies you may have a society, but it’s not a libertarian one.

In Print

In May 2024 I had this conversation with him on Anarchast. I put Rothbard on the table: every step toward stopping Hamas that does not kill a single innocent. He disagreed. Then he used a puppet named Adam Smith with a knife behind it and came at me. Shoot Adam or die. Libertarianism is not a suicide pact. Justified to kill innocents sometimes. Negative homesteading, no longer innocent, Jones-Israel, the continuum carpet—these were his points refined in print. This is my refusal.

He flags that this is a utilitarian argument while he claims to be a deontologist, and answers that he may have his cake and eat it too, like vanilla and chocolate. That is his argument in a nutshell—he wants non-aggression and his life both as the prime directive.

I still respect and love the guy, and I hope we have many more conversations. His mountain of good work is so large that it’s hard to appreciate it properly. He is too good at this for kid gloves, though. Your self-ownership does not expire because someone attacked you in a way that is inconvenient to someone else’s defense. If that puts them at a disadvantage, it is unfortunate. That can be the price when liberty is the principle.

Endnotes

^*Patrick Smith (substack; [email protected]) is host of @Anarchast and President of VoluntaryVirtue.org. See the accompanying blog post “Patrick Smith, Shields Still Own Themselves,” PFS Blog (Oct. 23, 2026), for related information.

1. Walter E. Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Human Shields,” The Independent Review, v. 30, n. 2 (Fall 2025): 329–337. See also idem, “Human shields, missiles, negative homesteading and libertarianism,” Ekonomia—Wroclaw Economic Review 25, no. 1 (2019): 9–22, p. 9; idem, “The human body shield,” J. Libertarian Stud. 22, no. 1 (2011): 625–30; both discussed in Stephan Kinsella, “A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre,” in Walter Block – Anarcho-Capitalist Austro-Libertarian, Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds. (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, 2025), in the section “Homesteading Misery and Human Shields and Missiles,” pp. 367–368. See also idem, “The Liberty Magazine Polls: 1988, 1999, and 2008: Flagpoles, Parental Obligations, Private Nukes,” StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 18, 2026). [↩]
2. Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable II: Freedom in All Realms (Terra Libertas, 2013; audiobook). [↩]
3. Patrick Smith, “I Was Wrong on Walter Block,” Anarchast (5 May 2025). See also Stephan Kinsella, “Van De Haar and Besada on Hayek, Mises, Rothbard on Zionism,” StephanKinsella.com (March 8, 2026) (criticizing Block for writing a “classical liberal” defense of Israel when he is a libertarian anarchist, not a classical liberal); idem, “Ammous vs. Block on Israel,” StephanKinsella.com (Jan. 29, 2024); idem, “Block on Israel, Self-Defense, Pacifism,” StephanKinsella.com (April 24, 2025). [↩]
4. For more on these topics, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “An Open Letter to Walter E. Block,” HansHoppe.com (Jan. 31, 2024); idem, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?”, Property and Freedom Journal (March 25, 2026); idem, “Mises Institute: Quo Vadis?: Postscript,” Property and Freedom Journal (April 17, 2026); Stephan Kinsella, “My Years with the Mises Institute,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 2, 2026); idem, “Van De Haar and Besada on Hayek, Mises, Rothbard on Zionism.” [↩]
5. Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Human Shields,” p. 329. [↩]
6. Ibid., p. 330. [↩]
7. Ibid., p. 330 n.4. [↩]
8. Ibid., p. 331. [↩]
9. Ibid., p. 331 n.7. [↩]
10. For related discussion of these matters, see Stephan Kinsella, “Causation and Aggression,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023); idem, “Property Rights as Limits on Actions, Individuals are Responsible for Actions, not ‘for Their Property’; Property rights are not obligations or responsibilities,” StephanKinsella.com (May 25, 2026); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Property, Causality, and Liability,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 87-95, p. 90, emphases added (also in The Great Fiction) (“People can be held liable only for their actions, whether intentional or negligent.” [↩]
11. Murray N. Rothbard, “War, Peace, and the State,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 2d ed. (2000), originally published as “War, Peace, and the State,” The Standard (April 1963): 2-5, 15-16; version 2. [↩]
12. Rothbard, “War, Peace, and the State,” pp. 116–117. In this quote, I have added letters in [brackets] to match Walter’s usage, to avoid confusion in discussing these hypothetical examples. [↩]
13. Murray N. Rothbard, “What’s Wrong with the Liberty Poll; or, How I Became a Libertarian,” Liberty 1, no. 6 (July 1988): 52–53, p. 55. [↩]
14. As Kinsella argues:

    The point at which punishment needs to be justified is when we attempt to inflict punishment upon a person who opposes it. … I want to justify punishment in just this situation by showing that an aggressor is estopped from objecting to punishment. Under the principle of dialogical estoppel, … a person is estopped from making certain claims during discourse if these claims are inconsistent and contradictory. To say that a person is estopped from making certain claims means that the claims cannot possibly be right because they are contradictory. It is to recognize that his assertion is simply wrong because it is contradictory. … Contradictions are certainly the archetype of propositions that cannot be true. … [A murderer] cannot consistently claim that murder is wrong, for it contradicts his view that murder is not wrong, evidenced by or made manifest in his previous act of murder.

    Kinsella, “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society, pp. 75, 76, 81, and, in general, Parts III.B (“Dialogical Estoppel”) and III.C (“Punishing Aggressive Behavior”); see also idem, “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (concisely restating the arguments in idem, “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights“). [↩]

15. Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Human Shields,” p. 332. [↩] [↩]
16. Ibid., p. 332 n.9. [↩]
17. Ibid., p. 333 n.14. [↩]
18. Ibid., p. 333. [↩]
19. Block, “Human shields, missiles, negative homesteading and libertarianism,” p. 13. [↩]
20. Murray N. Rothbard, “Eric Mack and the Anarchist Case for War,” The Libertarian Forum 18, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1984): 3-7, p. 6, reprinted in Murray N. Rothbard, ed., The Complete Libertarian Forum: 1969–1984 (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2012). See also similar comments by Rothbard in idem, “Reason Watch,” Libertarian Review 6, no. 4 (August 1977): 10–13; published as “Libertarians Must Never Warm to the Warfare State” at LewRockwell.com and “Libertarians Must Never Warm to the Warfare State” at Mises.org. [↩]
21. See Kinsella, “A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre,” the section “Libertarianism ‘Abhors’ Unowned Resources: Forestalling, Blockian Donuts, and the Blockian Proviso”; see also idem, “On the Danger of Metaphors in Scientific Discourse,” StephanKinsella.com (June 12, 2011). [↩]