This reminds me of a political philosophy course I had in college. There were a large number of libertarian-minded students in the class, and there was a lot o

This reminds me of a political philosophy course I had in college. There were a large number of libertarian-minded students in the class, and there was a lot of vigorous debate and discussion about the proper basis of law, the role of the state, etc. In one informal discussion session, the instructor introduced his concept of "libertarian socialism", intended to design a political system that maximized individual liberty with constraints designed to mitigate the iniquities that might arise in a system of absolute, inviolate property rights. The example that he used to justify his constraints on property rights was this: What if X owned and lived happily on his private plot of land, but his enemy, Y, decided to buy up all of the land surrounding X in a 360-degree circle, and then build an impenetrable stone wall, completely sealing X within? X would not be able to leave his own land without violating Mr. Y's property rights, and Y could not be stopped from building a wall on his own land. Y would have effectively imprisoned X, and possibly indirectly cause X's death. Since this is clearly an undesirable result, we are justified in adopting a system of law that allows Y's wall-construction project to be preempted. Most of the libertarian-minded students began attacking this model by construing Y's wall-building as a violation of X's natural rights, and started constructing a list of explicit abstract rights that could be asserted by X to prevent Y from sealing him behind a stone wall a la Edgar Allen Poe. But in retrospect, it looks like everyone, the instructor and the students alike, was making the same mistake: in attempting to universalize their model, they take on the challenge of having to accommodate every imaginable contingency. Perhaps it's not merely the tendency to focus on the worst case at the expense of the general case that causes these problems, but also the tendency we have to think things through in an abstract, categorical way, and rationalize universal solutions instead of defining the particular scope of our solutions from the outset.