I think the main difference between us is that I approach ethics differently. Whether or not an act is "non-aggressive" or "does not violate property" does not determine whether that action is ethically right or wrong. I adhere to a mixture of natural law theory, preference utilitarianism, and consequentialism. Basically, I think that something is morally wrong if it increases overall suffering, and right if it minimizes or decreases suffering. Whether or not it is "theft," "aggressive," or anything else is irrelevant. If a man has no food and can't find work, and he, therefore, steals some food to feed his starving kids, then I don't think his theft was morally or ethcially wrong. (Also, I don't distinguish between moral standards and ethical standards. I regard such a distinction as useless and fictitious.)
If you want to know more about my approach to ethics, see my series on Ethics.
The problem with that style of analytics @ekklesiagora is it doesn't identify root causes. The problems you see on the surface are symptoms of a separate cause, which often has an underlying cause beneath it. The root cause of suffering that can be controlled is aggression. All other causes of suffering are tied to chance, personal decisions, etc. and can be mitigated via voluntary action or via exercising one's own liberty.
The other problem that I see is you have conflated morality with ethics, and you have admitted as much. The distinction does exist. It is hardly useless, and definitely not fictitious.
Ethics is external and objective, while morality is internal and subjective. Or, to put it as my friend @twok would:
This is why something can be immoral to an individual and yet ethical in the eyes of society, and something can be unethical to society, and yet moral to an individual. What you described is a case of something being unethical (theft) and yet moral to you(feeding starving children). To the person you stole from, it may be neither moral or ethical, or it may be the same view as you, but it doesn't change the fact you would be violating the ethical standard by stealing.
In order for any ethical standard to work with consistency, it must be an objective concept. It cannot be subjective to individual interpretation. To use the libertarian NAP, the principle implies that aggression (the initiation of using force upon another, without consent) causes the most harm, ergo to reduce harm to everyone, aggression must not be permissible. By objectively removing the permissibly of aggression, you objectively reduce the harm done to others.
The mathematical failings of all "subjective ethics" arguments
By conflating morality, your own internal subjective code of conduct, with ethics (an external & objective code of conduct), you are able to claim all immoral acts (to you) are inherently unethical. This makes your subjective interpretation the only one that can be applied, at least for you. Besides this being semantically false (as all individuals have a separate subjective interpretation of reality), the interpretation you have has a 1:7billion chance of aligning with any single individual, specifically.
To make a single, subjectively derived ethical standard apply willingly across all individuals, in all societies, would be a computational explosion problem. Lets look at some combinatorial mathematics to find out why:
There are 7 billion people who could say yes, or no, to any ethical standard you propose. That's 2^7,000,000,000 possible combinations that need consideration here. Even if we could process a trillion combinations per second (for reference, we can do now maybe a third of that now with the absolute top end processors from last year), a calculation of 2^100 would take 40 billion years to list all the potential combinations out. From there you would need to analyse why the no's were given, and then reprocess the results with the new model to fit their needs, presuming one fix is required.
40 billion years is about 3 times the time we estimate the universe has existed so far, and that is just to work out all the possible binary combinations across 100 cases, just to see what could exist. We are dealing with 7 billion binary combinations, here. Do you honestly think a single solution, which is not innately and infinitely flexible (like anarchy), will objectively work when you are multiplying the combination factor by by 70 million? The maths make it so unfeasible that even if you turned all the matter in the universe into a computer, and used the lifespan of the universe itself to calculate the problem, it would be nowhere near determining a result.
These combinatorial failures are why any centralised or single implementation solution is doomed to be problematic for someone in society. Only with anarchy is it possible to have a multitude of implementation strategies that prevent aggression and harm in society, without having any single entity controlling the system in play. These failures are also why the concepts of intersectionality & social justice impossible to implement, as there are far more than 100 possible combinations of groupings for people within society that could have meaning.
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You said: “To use the libertarian NAP, the principle implies that aggression (the initiation of using force upon another, without consent) causes the most harm, ergo to reduce harm to everyone, aggression must not be permissible.”
I reject that assertion. Sometimes suffering caused by natural causes (e.g. starvation) can be reduced by “aggression” (e.g. stealing food); in which case a rigid application of NAP would lead to an overall increase in suffering.
You said: “By conflating morality, your own internal subjective code of conduct, with ethics (an external & objective code of conduct), you are able to claim all immoral acts (to you) are inherently unethical. This makes your subjective interpretation the only one that can be applied, at least for you.”
The distinction between ethics and morality that you make is semantics. But, I believe my writings on ethics, which I linked before, explain sufficiently why such a distinction is unnecessary. Morality, our personal principles for distinguishing right from wrong, is inherent in human nature, and since they are inherent in human nature they are shared by all humans. Ethics, the theory of right conduct, is rooted in natural law, and consequently the line between morality and ethics is blurred. I am willing to make the distinction, but it is a distinction without a difference within the framework of my theory of ethics. Also, you seem to be blurring the line between ethics and politics.
You said: “To make a single, subjectively derived ethical standard apply willingly across all individuals, in all societies, would be a computational explosion problem…. Do you honestly think a single solution, which is not innately and infinitely flexible (like anarchy), will objectively work when you are multiplying the combination factor by by 70 million?”
I don't suppose to make a single standard apply. Each community would be allowed to set rules as they see fit. Furthermore, you ought to stop to consider the possibility that anarchism will not maximize human wellbeing. Suppose that anarchism leads to chaos, doesn't establish security and stability like it is supposed to, and suppose that there is some flaw in anarchism (which you are unaware of), which guarantees that anarchism always leads to instability and lack of security in persons and property for the majority of the populace. If that is the case, then a flawed singular solution, though imperfect, would actually be relatively better than anarchism in practice.
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So you think impact of natural causes for harm outweigh the aggressive ones? I say "Justify this belief."
You are making a claim that aggression is somehow less impactful to societal wellbeing than natural issues. Crimes with actual victims, war, terrorism, restrictions on trading, the massive amounts of corporate defrauding of entire nations - these are all things that happen because of aggression. They have a far more debilitating effects on societies than the risks of starvation do today.
Your solution is focusing on issues that are less damaging to society, ones that actively cause less harm and can be mitigated privately with ease. To fix these things, you are proposing a state is necessary, and that state is guaranteed to commit aggression at some point to enforce its subjective value judgements on everyone.
In other words, I know your solution won't work because it doesn't care about what causes the most harm to society, and it doesn't actually have a principle to judge those actions from. It is purely subjective, and purely subjective systems do not work to improve things. Every single "Marxist socialist" state has proved this, and every mixed economy shows that it is horrifically inefficient compared with privately designed solutions.
As for your "anarchy could descend into chaos!" argument, sure its possible, but the probability of such an occurrence is far less likely than a state causing actual chaos through war and economic manipulations. This is again because of the mathematical factors I mentioned earlier, something which you seem to have completely ignored.
Regarding Ethics and Morality, you may consider it to be a "semantic distinction" but it is critical. A subjective morality cannot be objectively applied to society and be expected to work well for anyone save the one who created that standard. You must have an objective metric to measure against for ethics to work. Consent is this measure for a vast majority of people, so consent should be considered that which is ethical, and any other subjective value judgement can be considered morality based.
In addition, the means by which ethics are generated are not rooted in any specific philosophy, particularly not natural law. To make this claim is a misunderstanding of how ethics work. The fact you are not distinguishing between subjective moral judgements and ethical principles is why I am saying you are attempting to apply an ethical standard that cannot function.
If each community can decide its laws, and not have them overruled by some other authoritarian group, then its effectively a voluntary anarchistic solution in any case. The democratic confederalism you described, however, does not appear to be this. It appears to be yet another rehashing of the great american experiment, which has now shown no matter how small the government you start with, it eventually will attempt to become an empire.
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