Block, “Does Trespassing Require Human Action? Rejoinder to Kinsella and Armoutidis an Evictionism”

Walter Block sent me a draft article “Does Trespassing Require Human Action? Rejoinder to Kinsella and Armoutidis an Evictionism,” MEST Journal (forthcoming 2025) and “invited” me to respond, whatever that means (I guess it means: “please change your priorities to suit my goals and spend your time writing this the article I want you to write instead of whatever article you were planning on writing”), presumably in aid of his stated goal of publishing 1000 peer reviewed or law review articles. ¹ I assume he counts “MEST Journal,” whatever that is, as peer reviewed even though it seems unlikely it is actually refereed (he has four articles in 2025 alone in that journal). ² I know from personal experience editing Libertarian Papers for ten years and from other publishing and peer reviewing experience how difficult and time-consuming it is. There is no way MEST Journal publishes this many papers and actually has them peer reviewed. But no matter.

Walter for some reason chose to respond to my informal blogpost from over two years ago, Abortion Correspondence with Doris Gordon, Libertarians For Life (1996) (June 14, 2023), and ignored more recent KOL443 | Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach (PFS 2024) (Sept. 22, 2024) (and Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Libertarian Solution (Grok).).

No time to reply to or comment in detail on Walter’s article but I probably already provided my reasons as to why I disagree with his approach, but in short they are (many already pointed out in Abortion Correspondence with Doris Gordon, Libertarians For Life (1996)):

• He provides no argument for why humans have rights from conception.
• I disagree with his view that you cannot have obligations to children since they were not alive yet when your actions gave rise to the obligation
  • I gave examples of how you can be liable to someone for actions you performed before they are born
  • These obligations do not stem from contract, exactly, but from action
  • Walter seems to be basing his views on a theory of contract not consistent with Rothbard’s title-transfer theory of contract, which he elsewhere claims to support ³
• “Left unanswered are questions such as: suppose the mother could have the abort the child with a normal noninvasive procedure that kills the fetus, or she could remove the fetus by C-section without killing it, but she would have to undergo anesthesia and serious surgery. Can she only evict the fetus via C-section, or may she use the less invasive procedure that ends up incidentally killing the baby?” ⁴
• “One aside: in my recent debate with Walter about voluntary slavery (KOL442), Walter says that if a couple pays a surrogate to have their baby, then they can force her not to abort since she has partially sold her body to them; I suppose a husband could do the same with his wife. So only in the case of women voluntary enslaving themselves can abortion be prohibited. Make of this what you will.” ⁵

If I find time to reply further I will, but I am now preparing for my talk and the upcoming PFS meeting next week in Bodrum, Turkey. ⁶

***

A few quick comments:

My two critics, Kinsella (2023) and Armoutidis (2024), reject the notion that the fetus can be a trespasser and thus a violator of the private property rights of his mother.

Not quite right. I do not believe I have discussed in detail the issue of a pregnancy by rape, but only in cases where the conception was the result of voluntary action by the mother.

Walter also writes:

The implication, here, is that since the fetus lacks “…intelligence, conscience, self-awareness, or other characteristics such as reciprocity, language, discourse, reason, social nature or social setting,” he8 also lacks rights. But this argument is far too good. It proves far too much. For example, the comatose person is without reason. The sleeping person has no language. The last thing on the mind of the two-week-old baby is reciprocity; rather, for him, it is me, me, me. The person running a marathon in the last few miles is so winded, he cannot engage in any discourse; he can barely breathe. Given that this logically implies that these folk have no rights, it would not be murder to put a bullet in their heads. This conclusion is obviously highly problematic.

Walter here provides no positive argument for rights. Nothing to show that rights come from being human; this would imply non-human sapients, such as other evolve terrestrial animals, AI, or extra-terrestrials, cannot have rights. To argue that zygotes have rights you need to do more than show that that they are humans and simply assume that humans have rights because they are humans.

1. Numerous personal emails; Stephan Kinsella, “A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre” (May 9, 2024): text at n.3. [↩]
2. E.g., from Vol 13, No 1 (2025): REJOINDER TO RECTENWALD ON SUPPOSED ISRAELI WAR CRIMES and REJOINDER TO RECTENWALD ON SUPPOSED ISRAELI WAR CRIMES; from Vol 13, No 2 (2025): REJOINDER TO JOFFE ON THE COMPATIBILITY OF LIBERTARIANISM AND ZIONISM and REJOINDER TO ORWELLIAN LIBERTARIANISM: GORDON AND NJOYA’S TOPSY-TURVY WORLD OF TWILIGHT ZONE LIBERTARIANISM. [↩]
3. Stephan Kinsella, “The Title-Transfer Theory of Contract,” Papinian Press Working Paper #1 (Sep. 7, 2024). [↩]
4.  KOL443 | Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach (PFS 2024). [↩]
5.  KOL443 | Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach (PFS 2024). [↩]
6. PFS 2025 Annual Meeting—Announced; Speakers and Topics. [↩]