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LP makes an interesting claim in the politics chapter: If men interacted “at random, without establishing a social system, the question of rights would be premature.” Basically, he’s saying, if a group of humans on an island somehow choose to live in a hypothetical state of complete anarchy, the concept of rights wouldn’t apply, i.e. there would be no principle to tell one man he cannot rob from or kill another.
This seems absurd to me on several levels:
1. Such a state could not exist. Humans are conceptual beings capable of communication—they would immediately start creating social systems as soon as they interacted. Even if two of those men say “we won’t kill each other, we’ll work together” to each other, or group together into a gang for mutual protection, hey presto, you have a nascent social system. This is played out in Lord of the Flies and other similar stories. “Men interacting without a social system” is like Ununpentium—it’s unstable and can only exist for a fraction of a second before collapsing into a more stable configuration.
2. Even if such a situation could persist, the idea that that would mean men have no rights seems to say it’s carte blanche what anyone wants to do to anyone else. Rights only apply in a social context—when two or more people interact—because you can’t violate your own rights logically. But as soon as two people do interact, whether there is a formalized social system in place or not, rights apply, because one man is capable of restricting the other’s ability to live by his rational judgment. LP’s statement (and hypothetical example) only seem possible to me if the men in the example are pre-rational/pre-conceptual.
I also was puzzled by that sentence. The only thing I could think of was that he was saying that if the interaction among men was “random” (perhaps meaning only very occasionally and of limited significance as in passing each other at a distance in the woods) it would never occur to them to address how they should interact with each other ie the issue of rights. It is not that rights would not exist but rather that it would not need to be addressed in such a primitive state. It is only when their interactions became significant enough to impact their lives that it would occur them to establish rules about how they should act ie a social system. Make any sense?
I basically agree with Steve’s interpretation (by the way, I’d written a long response to this question a week or more ago and apparently never hit “submit,” uggh).
I think Peikoff could have been clearer, but I take him to be saying that men in what’s traditionally called a “state of nature” will not yet have grasped the concept of rights or the various ways in which they apply. It’s not that rights wouldn’t apply but that people don’t yet know what rights are, so they aren’t in a position to know how they apply.
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