A Praxeological Account of Law

I’m only going to bother to comment on the strawmen against Rothbard.

"The Objective Approach to Law

Rothbard argued that the correct choice of means-ends is objective and, therefore, that morality is objective. However, I think this is incorrect. The correct choice of means-ends varies from individual to individual as a result of the fact of individual variation. One man likes chocolate ice cream and despises vanilla ice cream. Another man despises chocolate ice cream and loves vanilla ice cream. Morality, like taste, is subjective. However, certain patterns in morality emerge over time, just as patterns in taste emerge over time, in response to survival pressures. Rothbard (in EoL) uses the illustration of eating a poisonous mushroom as an example of an “objectively wrong” act. But here he is confusing the objective patterns of means-ends choices that exist in the population with right and wrong means-ends. There is no right or wrong, there just is. If you choose to eat a poisonous mushroom, you’ve chosen to eat a poisonous mushroom. If you die, leaving no offspring to pass on your proclivities for poisonous psychedelics to, it is less likely that people will choose the eating of poisonous mushrooms as a means-end to the ultimate end of satisfaction. This biological fact has created an observable pattern of poisonous-mushroom-avoidance in human behavior. But it is a mistake to confuse a pattern of human behavior with a moral norm."

No, no, no, no, no…