The Alien Ultimatum - Why Parasitic Ethics Cannot Answer Their Own Hypotheticals

The Asymmetry: What Each Framework Actually Tests

Ancaps get asked: "Aliens will destroy Earth unless you steal a penny. Will you violate the NAP?"

The question tests: Will you violate consent at all?

Ancap answer: No. Not preference. Logical necessity from axioms (self-ownership, property rights, NAP).

But here's the fatal mistake when "flipping" this hypothetical:

Asking statists to stop violating consent for 24 hours isn't a mirror test. Their entire framework operates on consent violation. Taxation, central planning, redistribution - all built on coercion.

The real mirror asks: How MUCH consent violation is justified?

The Actual Statist Test: Quantifying the Acceptable Horror

"Aliens will cure all disease and end scarcity IF you sacrifice 1 million starving children. Do you do it?"

This is the functional equivalent because:

Ancaps test minimal consent violation (one penny of theft)
Statists must test degree of consent violation (since they already coerce)

Now watch what happens:

If They Say Yes

They admit willingness to mass murder for consequences. But then why pretend to care about human welfare? Just say you worship power and outcomes, not people.

If They Say No

Why not? Their policies already sacrifice people:

Taxation kills via poverty and resource misallocation
Prohibition kills via black markets and untreated addiction
Inflation destroys savings and causes starvation in poorer nations
Central planning creates famines (Holodomor, Great Leap Forward, etc.)

What's the objective threshold? 1 million dead is too much, but the millions already dying from statist policy are acceptable? On what basis?

If They Can't Answer

They expose that parasitic ethics have no objective decision procedure. They rely on:

Democracy → Majority whim (51% could vote yes or no arbitrarily)
Utilitarianism → Arbitrary utility calculus (who decides 1M deaths < curing all disease?)
Marxist theory → Vanguard whim (Party could rationalize either answer)
Technocracy → Expert whim (experts will disagree on risk assessment)

No matter which mechanism they pick, it reduces to whim-worship. There's no axiomatic foundation to derive a guaranteed answer.

What This Reveals: Parasitic Ethics Cannot Function

This isn't just about hypotheticals. It exposes the core incoherence:

Statist ethics claim to be consequentialist but cannot justify which consequences matter or when.

They already accept mass death from their policies (taxation, central planning, prohibition). So what's the principled difference between:

The millions dying from state intervention NOW
The 1 million they'd sacrifice for alien utopia

There is none. They just pretend current deaths don't count because those are "necessary" or "complicated."

But by what standard? Who decides? The majority? Experts? The Party?

Every answer reduces to arbitrary power. Whoever controls the mechanism controls the threshold for acceptable violence.

Why the Ancap Answer Is Guaranteed (And Theirs Isn't)

Ancap ethics: Derived from axioms (self-ownership, property, NAP). Cannot be denied without performative contradiction. The answer to "will you violate consent?" is always No - not because we calculated outcomes, but because the question demands logical impossibility.

Statist ethics: No axioms. Only competing claims about "the good" with no objective grounding. The answer to "how much violation is acceptable?" depends entirely on who has power at the moment of decision.

One is logic. The other is politics.

The Real Test

Forget aliens. The hypothetical already exists in reality:

Your government policies kill people through poverty, prohibition, inflation, and war. How many deaths justify your desired outcomes?

Statists can't answer because they have no objective threshold. They just gesture at "democracy" or "expert consensus" - mechanisms that are themselves arbitrary and contested.

Meanwhile, ancaps have a clear answer: Zero aggression is justified. Not because we worship suffering, but because consent violation is logically incoherent as an ethical foundation.

So next time someone asks if you'd steal a penny to save Earth, flip it:

"You already steal billions and sacrifice millions. What's YOUR objective limit? Or do you just do whatever feels right?"

They won't have an answer. Because parasitic ethics cannot answer their own hypotheticals.