The Live and Let Live Philosophy: A Brief Introduction

by Marc J. Victor

We live in turbulent, polarized times. Despite unprecedented comfort and prosperity, thoughtful people across the political spectrum feel exhausted by constant conflict, anger, and extreme polarization and hyper-partisanship. Political arguments strain families, friendships, and workplaces. Yet most reasonable people, whether progressive, liberal, conservative, libertarian, or anywhere in between, share the same core desires: safety and security, freedom to make our own choices, opportunities for our children, and a society that is fair, prosperous, and peaceful.

The problem is not our shared aspirations, it is the flawed method we use to achieve our goals. We must refrain from forcibly imposing our moral views and lifestyle preferences onto everyone else through government power and coercion. History shows this approach breeds resentment, waste, and escalating conflict. It is time for a fundamentally different approach. How the Live and Let Live Philosophy (“3LP”) provides a practical framework for resolving conflicts peacefully is explained below.

What Does “Live and Let Live” Mean?

The familiar phrase “Live and Let Live” resonates across nations, cultures, and political lines because it captures a simple, fair intuition with two equally essential parts of the phrase.

Live

As a competent adult, you are the rightful owner of your life. This means you must be in charge of your body, your peacefully acquired property and money, and your time. You have the right to make your own decisions, take your own risks, hold your own values, and peacefully pursue happiness however you define it. No one else has a superior claim to direct your life. While it is always wise to carefully consider the thoughtful counsel of others, you are the “iron-fisted dictator” of your own life. This is what it truly means to live your life.

Let Live

If “Live” means you are in charge of your life, then to “Let Live” means to extend the same equal and reciprocal right to every other competent adult. Allow them to peacefully control their own bodies, property, money, and time, even when you strongly disagree with their peaceful choices because you find them immoral, unhealthy, unwise, or not in their best interest. This is the price we must pay if we are ever to achieve and maintain a free and peaceful society. Are you willing to pay this price if others also agree to allow you to peacefully live as you choose?

Aggressing against another person or their peacefully acquired property violates the “Let Live” part of the phrase. Aggressing means initiating nonconsensual physical force, fraud, coercion, substantial threats of force, breaching valid contracts, or similar acts that violate another competent adult’s right to control their own life and property. The Live and Let Live Philosophy (“3LP”) holds that all such aggressing should always be illegal. In complex situations, the 3LP provides a mechanism to resolve predictable reasonable disputes without resorting to force or coercion, fostering societal harmony.

The Critical Distinction Between Legal Rules and Moral Rules

Distinguishing between legal and moral rules is indispensable to understanding the Live and Let Live Philosophy (“3LP”). This distinction is the key that makes the 3LP work. Legal rules are the mandatory minimum standard of conduct, explaining and publicizing how humans must not act. Legal rules must be followed even by people who do not agree or are entirely ignorant about what the law says.

The violation of a legal rule carries formal consequences such as incarceration, fines, restitution, or monetary damages. Because of these formal consequences, we must be extraordinarily careful about what rules are imported into the law. Only aggressing - acts that violate another competent adult’s right to peacefully control their own body, property, money, or time - should be unlawful. When this legal rule is enforced, no person’s rights are violated because no person or group has a right to aggress against another. Every victim crime equates to aggressing against another person or their property.

Moral rules describe how we should live and treat each other. They are not mandatory and are properly enforced through persuasion, reputation, and voluntary association or disassociation. Despite centuries of good-faith debate, reasonable people maintain sincere disagreements about many aspects of morality. That disagreement is manageable only when we keep our personal moral views outside the law. After all, we are each free to choose who we freely associate with.

When we instead import our personal moral views into the law, we necessarily employ government force to impose them on others who disagree. As a result, we necessarily aggress against others when those moral rules are enforced via the law and thereby guarantee perpetual political warfare. The 3LP offers an escape. We must outlaw all instances of aggressing and keep morality voluntary. This approach allows competent adults to live peacefully according to their own values, even when moral disagreements persist. A good way to think about this distinction is that humans should enforce the law with due process, while enforcement of morality should be left to God, Nature, the Universe, or Karma.

The Legal Principle: Don’t Aggress!

The first of the two principles comprising the Live and Let Live Philosophy (“3LP”) is the Legal Principle (“LP”), which mandates that all aggressing is legally prohibited. The corollary is that all voluntary interactions between consenting and competent adults are lawful. All people should always have the absolute lawful right to resist all aggressing from whatever source. The law properly recognizes this concept as either self-defense or defense of others. This right to resist all aggressing is absolute. As such, there are no exceptions to the LP. No exceptions to the LP are needed for us to realize the civilized, free, peaceful, prosperous, charitable, fair, and just society and world all reasonable people desire.

The LP applies with the same force to all people, groups, corporations, and governments. All groups, corporations, and governments are created entirely by individuals. Because no individual has a right to aggress, even acting collectively, individuals cannot delegate any such right to aggress to any group, corporation, or government. Governments cannot, therefore, legitimately claim powers that individuals do not possess and cannot delegate. As a result, each organization must be held to the same peaceful standard. The rule is simple: if it would be wrong for you to do it directly to your neighbor, it remains wrong when done by the government or any other group, organization, or corporation.

Applying the LP consistently and fairly is the only way to build a society and world rooted in freedom and peace. We cannot aggress our way to a free and peaceful society or world. When the law’s only job is to prevent and punish aggressing and otherwise leave competent adults free to live as they choose, we maximize personal liberty while protecting everyone’s fundamental rights to live however they peacefully desire.

The Moral Principle: Be an Excellent Human

Strictly applying the LP secures freedom. But freedom by itself does not automatically result in peace. For genuine peace, we must inspire a culture in which enough people actively strive to be excellent humans voluntarily. The second of the two principles comprising the Live and Let Live Philosophy (“3LP”) is the Moral Principle (“MP”), which encourages everyone to voluntarily strive to be an excellent human.

Unlike the Legal Principle (“LP”), the MP is not law; it is an enthusiastic suggestion. Every person remains legally free to entirely ignore the MP so long as they do not violate the LP by aggressing. As with free speech, we properly defend the legal rights of others to say offensive things with which we entirely disagree. The same is true for peaceful conduct. We must be prepared to defend the legal rights of others to violate the MP peacefully. Competent adults must have a protected legal right to peacefully live in ways we strongly disagree with. But if we truly desire peace, we should voluntarily strive to live by higher standards and encourage others to do the same.

Being an excellent human includes the aspirational values of cultivating high character (practical wisdom, moral courage, justice in how we treat others, balance, integrity, honesty, empathy, fairness); win/win thinking; open-mindedness; genuine tolerance of peaceful differences (with zero tolerance for aggressing); voluntary kindness and civility; a commitment to truth and rational inquiry; building high levels of trust; and consistent self-improvement. Each of these voluntary aspirational values is entirely within your control.

The MP encourages everyone to adopt these aspirational values voluntarily through persuasion and example, but never through the force of law. The MP’s ultimate goals are to optimize human happiness and well-being while minimizing suffering. Because aggressing against others is never compatible with acting as an excellent human, we can conclude that if everyone voluntarily followed the MP, there would be no need for the LP. However, because we know in advance that not everyone will aspire to be an excellent human, the LP is necessary to set out our mandatory minimum legal standard of conduct that all humans have a legal right to insist upon. The legal right to resist all acts of aggression is our most fundamental right.

Reasonable Disagreements

Even reasonable people who fully embrace the Live and Let Live Philosophy (“3LP”) and its derivative Legal Principle (“LP”) will sometimes disagree in good faith about how the LP applies to complex situations. We can therefore anticipate reasonable disagreements about how the LP applies and effectively resolve them in advance.

Because no universal, one-size-fits-all answer exists for how the LP applies in every complex situation, the 3LP seeks only a reasonable LP interpretation in all cases. When people equally committed in good faith to the 3LP still sincerely disagree about the LP’s application after civilized discussion, we can conclude that more than one reasonable LP interpretation exists. In those circumstances, the local community, whether a city, town, or smaller community, should select which reasonable LP interpretation becomes local law through whatever peaceful process it prefers, such as a fair vote, court decision, arbitration, mediation, or other voluntary agreement.

This local approach respects the need for clear rules that define the boundaries of aggressing, while recognizing that different communities will reasonably disagree about complex edge cases. It prevents any single LP interpretation from being imposed nationally and instead allows local communities to serve as experimental laboratories that test which reasonable LP interpretations produce the best results over time. People remain free to lobby for their preferred legal rules or to pressure communities that adopt legal rules they dislike by voting with their money or their feet. Competent adults can also voluntarily contract around these local LP interpretations by consenting to specific acts, just as participants do in most sporting events.

Applying the 3LP to Real-World Issues

The 3LP provides a simple, consistent framework to analyze any issue:

Step 1. Check if someone is aggressing to determine if the Legal Principle (“LP”) is being violated. Ascertain if any person, group, corporation, or government is initiating nonconsensual physical force, engaging in fraud or coercion, endangering others, breaching a valid contract, or otherwise aggressing against another person or their property. If yes, the conduct should be illegal and terminated immediately. This conclusion ends the 3LP analysis. If reasonable minds disagree, the local community should adopt whichever reasonable LP construction they prefer. If no aggressing is occurring, move to Step 2.

Step 2. Because no person, group, corporation, or government is violating the LP, the conduct should be legal. Competent adults should have the legal right to make their own peaceful choices, even if what they choose to do is immoral, unhealthy, unwise, or not in their best interest.

Step 3. Check for excellence to determine whether the Moral Principle (“MP”) is violated. Ask whether the legal conduct aligns with being an excellent human. If yes, the conduct should likely be encouraged. If no, feel free to encourage excellence and/or peacefully discourage the conduct via persuasion, boycotts, or disassociation, but defend the legal right of others to peacefully engage in the less-than-excellent conduct even if you conclude it is immoral, unhealthy, unwise, or not in their best interest.

This three-step analysis resolves most political issues reasonably, consistently, and justly, while promoting freedom, peace, and our highest level of prosperity. As previously stated, think of the 3LP as requiring humans to fairly enforce the LP while trusting God, Nature, the Universe, or Karma to enforce the MP. This is how we Live and Let Live together!

Join The Live and Let Live Movement

The 3LP is not partisan or ideological. It is not left versus right. It is a practical peace philosophy for reasonable people of goodwill who are tired of endless conflict and ready to try a better way, one that respects everyone’s freedom while encouraging personal excellence and voluntary cooperation. We seek to move past the divisive tribalism that is tearing our species apart and instead celebrate our differences while inspiring each other to bring out the best high-character versions of ourselves. Let’s live our best lives together and work to leave the world better than we found it in the short but wonderful time we remain alive.

This short article offers only a brief introduction to the 3LP. If these ideas resonate, I warmly invite you to visit our website and join the Live and Let Live Global Peace Movement at www.LiveandLetLive.org. You can learn more about the 3LP by reading or listening to The Live and Let Live Philosophy - The Abridged Version for a much fuller yet accessible explanation.

For a complete analysis and explanation of the 3LP, including a detailed application to more than twenty-five specific political issues such as gambling, prostitution, LGBT issues, drugs, free speech, racism, religion, firearms, taxes, wealth inequality, immigration, healthcare, abortion, and many others, along with responses to common objections and thoughts on implementation and transition, please read or listen to the full comprehensive book, The Live and Let Live Philosophy: Two Principles for Freedom, Peace, and Prosperity.

Both the comprehensive book and the abridged version are available at www.LiveandLetLive.org. There you can also connect with others in the Live and Let Live Community, apply to become an officially recognized ambassador, and explore the Live and Let Live Engine, an open-source online encyclopedia examining these ideas and their application across a wide range of issues. Visit the site to join the community, apply as an ambassador, and contribute to the Engine.

Our foolish insistence on attempting to force our moral preferences and preferred way of life onto one another through political power has failed miserably. That approach has resulted in endless and growing conflict. We now also face extraordinary global challenges. Because of our rapidly increasing technology, smaller groups of people have the increased ability to inflict greater amounts of harm to larger numbers of people worldwide. The time to act is now. The reasonable people of the world must urgently come together to champion a practical plan to achieve freedom, peace, and prosperity.

A better path exists, one built on respecting each person’s ownership of their own life while inspiring excellence in how we treat one another. Thank you for investing some time to learn about the 3LP and our plans to help improve the world by promoting freedom, peace, and our highest level of prosperity. Let’s celebrate and enjoy our common humanity together rather than fight over our trivial differences. Join us and be part of the solution.

Live and Let Live