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RE: Answer to a Common Critique of the Non-Aggression Principle.
Self-Ownership or Self-rule can be extended to groups.
Something humans naturally do, their called hierarchies.
Aside from that I had a question, does the NAP apply to those who reject it?
There is nothing wrong with organising in groups if that is done on a voluntary basis. We organise in families, people that have similar interests and so on. No violence required. Hierarchies are also fine so-long as the ones at the bottom can simply quit. Most people will not want to care about everything themselves and follow the lead of others they trust.
The NAP applies to everyone. With the people that reject the NAP the question is really about self-defence. You may react to violence, but not initiate it. The NAP is opposed to the offensive use of violence only. And anyone that takes the NAP seriously will obviously argue against using violence against people that reject the NAP, such political statists.
Self-ownership as defined by the voluntaryist philosophy is defined based on biological and metaphysical reality. I cannot speak for you more directly than you can, or move your arms for you directly, as you can. You are the highest, most direct executor of your body and mind’s actions. Thus, this self-ownership can never extend to groups/collectives. As Mises said, “Only the individual thinks. Only the individual acts.”
Any individual rejecting the NAP may do so ethically only if this individual does not act on said rejection in violence. One may reject that others should not be stolen from, murdered, raped, or otherwise violated, but those that believe they should not are still self owners who have not consented to such abuses, regardless of the rejector’s predilections and feelings. In rejecting this, though, one also rejects one’s own natural law right not to be violated.
In order for a minimally violent community/society anywhere to be created, this respect for self-ownership objectively must be the grundnorm, otherwise, arbitrary, non-reality-based ideas such as “divine right” inevitably potentiate and create violent conflict.