Libertarian Dilemmas

[Tiberius]

What if your neighbor owns a nuclear bomb. Presently it's not harming anyone. But it does have a giant red button that if pushed would ignite the bomb destroying everything nearby. The neighbor promises never to push it but perhaps the neighbor might hit the bottom accidentally. Would it be wrong under libertarianism to forcefully take away the bomb because it poses a risk?

I'd say most Libertarians would object to people owning such a weapon. The difference between guns and these kind of bombs is that you can aim a gun, and it's allowed in a Libertarian society as a way of defending yourself. You can't aim a nuke in the same way. However you use it, you're going to harm people who weren't violating your rights, either by the original blast, or by the fallout.

What if somebody does not like seeing your house? They think your house is ugly and they don't like to think about it. Them seeing your house puts a thought in their mind that they don't like. Are you violating their right to self? Something of yours is affecting their body (specifically their brain) in a way they don't like.

Quite simply, no. Nothing in Libertarianism is about protecting people from thing they "don't like". Freedom of expression means you can express yourself in any way you want, as long as you aren't harming other people by doing it. You aren't forcing someone to look at your house after all.

If your 8 year kid does not like living with you (perhaps he doesn't like the cereal you buy), would it be violating his right to self to deny him leaving the house? If not, why so?

The concept of guardianship is understood in Libertarianism. Children have some rights, but whilst they are dependent on their parents (which an 8 year old would be) they have to abide by the parents' rules. If the parent was legitimately harming their child, then they are violating the child's rights, but simply buying breakfast cereal the child doesn't like is not going to be considered harm.

How does something become one's property? Say you have a future space explorer arriving at an uninhabited planet? Is the whole planet automatically his? Is it just the part he stepped on? If he settled on the planet and then somebody else settled on it on the other side of the planet, are they violating his property?

I don't think there are any Libertarian "laws" concerning this kind of thing, mainly because Libertarianism only really came about when land on Earth was all "claimed", and the possibility of legitimately claiming extra-terrestrial territory isn't really possible at this point in time.

However I think it would likely work by how much the claimant could actually manage. If he lands, and immediately hires people to guard the planet, or allows people to rent land all over the planet, then he could legitimately say he was managing the entire thing. The likelihood of this happening to one person are quite remote though, due to the fact that usually it takes hundreds, if not thousands of people to pull off one manned space mission. No private person has ever fully funded a mission to another planet, and I doubt they will in the foreseeable future.

And say that this planet has non intelligent life (imagine earth without humans), is he taking property away from the animals? Do animals not have a right to property? Why not?

Libertarian laws (as with most human laws) don't apply to animals because animals are usually designated as lesser species due to their largely inferior intellectual capability.

If you think about it, it works the same way with us. If an advanced species invades the Earth, we're hardly going to cite them for violating our laws.

And can we legitimately own animals? We just scooped them up from the wild and put them in zoos. We bulldoze their rain forests. Why aren't these violations of the two principles of libertarianism?

Again, because animals don't have the same rights as humans. If an animal had the ability to express it's own rights, we may accept them. For now, as rights are a human concept, they are applied by humans the way humans see fit. Some animals have rights because we have the ability to empathize with them. There is a movement to make murder laws apply to chimps and gorillas, which is something I would support.

In the case of pets, for the most part, even though the pets are "owned", they have better lives than they would in the wild. Partly because of the absence of predators, but also (in the case of domesticated pets) because over time, some pets have become so reliant on human owners that without them, they would be unable to survive for too long in the wild.