This is entry number five in my series attempting to answer Bob Murphy's "Tough Questions for Libertarians". See #458128 for details on the series.

If someone has fallen out of the apartment building you live in, and they're precariously hanging just outside your window, should it be legal to not allow them into your apartment when they'll likely die otherwise?

This is a pretty well known thought experiment from Walter Block. It's a direct follow up to the previous post: #470381. Since that post dealt with the hot topic of abortion, I decided to disentangle these two questions, rather than treat them as different versions of the same thorny issue.

Here's the clip from Bob's show: https://fountain.fm/clip/iwIgUx2cWhPhXjPvTvKi.

Yes.

This question highlights the nature of libertarianism as a legal theory, rather than a general theory of morality. Should you let the person in? Probably. Do you have a legal obligation to? No.

There's an important addendum to this answer, though. I'm sure many people will read this and think "So desperate people should just die in Ancapistan?"

In light of that, I think it's important to play out what would happen if this person broke into the apartment, but otherwise passed through it peacefully. Now a trespass has been committed and possibly some property damage. The legal consequences would just be to pay for any damages caused to the apartment owner. That hardly seems like the most unconscionable outcome one could imagine and I'd say it's a small price to pay for a system that allows us to be secure in our persons and properties.

We can even take it a step further and say the person attempts to break-in through the window and you shove them back out. If they fall to their death, the apartment owner may well be legally on the hook for the death, because that was not the least violent available option to remove the trespasser (we may need a bunch of caveats here to address potential self-defense issues, though).