Comments Elsewhere

Ghertner: This is true. However, assuming the drug had worked as advertized and turned the entire population into peace-loving non-aggressors, on what grounds could people object that they had had their rights violated?

If you’re talking about the effects of Pax in the movie, it wasn’t advertized as something that would just stop people from committing rights-violations against each other. It was supposed to have pretty radical effects on people’s personalities and dispositions. (And in fact it did; just not the effects that the central planners expected.) But people have a right to have any personalities and dispositions that they want, and coercively controlling the minds of a whole population through drugs involves a massive and systematic regime of aggression against lots and lots of innocent people.

If you’re talking about some other hypothetical drug that somehow stopped people from ever violating anyone else’s rights, and had no other effects at all, then you might have some case for claiming that it wouldn’t be aggressive, in and of itself, to make people take it. Fine, but on the other hand, most of the people you force it on wouldn’t ever violate anyone’s rights in any serious way, so there is a question of proportionality. If the amount of illegitimate force being defended against through forcibly administering the drug is at or near 0, then the amount of force that you could legitimately use in forcing the person to take it is also at or near 0. Meaning that you effectively have no right to force most people to take it anyway.