Well what do you define as society? Merely two people?
The presence of other people, as I clearly stated above. In this case, even one other person would be enough, and the absence of another person renders “natural laws” and the “natural rights” that supposedly stem from them completely useless at best. What’s the use of saying “I own this” if there’s nobody else to worry about?
So two people is ‘society’? I think you should grab your dictionary.
Well if humanity didn’t have natural law unless there was two people around, then how did it come to exist? We state that man has self-ownership therefore it is not that natural law doesn’t exist if there isn’t around, it is only that if there is another individual then the rights of A must be recognized by B and vice versa.
The natural rights theories we are criticizing are not mere codes of conduct. They contain assertions about objective reality.
“Society” is a shorthand way of saying “groups of people”. The point is that without other people you have no rights - there is nobody to recognize the fact that you have them or to deny them. For example, imagine you are in an avalanche. You can claim your right to live until you’re blue in the face, but there is nobody else around, nothing will come of it. Therefore, I can claim that your “natural right” to life is a fiction.
The whole point is that it didn’t. At least nobody’s been able to prove that it did.
Now you’re making no sense. Even if by self-ownership you simply mean the power to control your own actions, if someone else has more power over that than you, then where’s your “natural right” to self-ownership? And why does B have to recognize A’s rights? If A is not strong enough to enforce what he perceives as his rights, and there is no outside force to stop him, B can do exactly as he wishes. Therefore, in fact, A has no rights at all unless he has the means to enforce them.
I believe that ‘objective reality’ does ‘exist’ in the sense that I do not adhere to ‘ontological solipsism’. All ‘ethical’ systems contain assertions about ‘objective reality’ in the sense that they refer to ‘empirical observations’ (which ‘exists’ in ‘objective reality’).
I will clarify Lilburne’s sentence by rephrasing it like this: “‘Natural law’ theories derive their ‘moral codes of conduct’ from the mere laws of logic, without any reference to ‘empirical’ constructs such as ‘human biology’.”
thats so obviously false. like so many things you say.
Because they cannot be transgressed does not mean they don’t exist.
Just because I claim a right to life in front of a serial killer does not mean something will come of it. Having rights does not mean they cannot be transgressed or violated.
Again violation of rights does not mean rights don’t exist.
You are speaking of de facto rights and not recognizing normative rights. De facto rights are ‘I get my umbrella stolen, I temporarily lose my right to property over it’ however, how am I to reclaim my property if I lost my right to it in the first place? You seem to sound like a fellow who was here not to long along named Jacob Bloom.
Taking a page from your playbook. I reject everything you believe.
That’s true, but I am only coming at it from the standpoint of verifiability because many natural law proponents have done the same. In fact, I have not yet even seen a defense of “natural law” as a meaningfully-defined concept.
Yes, that would be productive and useful, and that is what I would like to see. I find the claim of logical proof to be poisonous to the whole effort of libertarian advocacy, which is fundamentally a persuasive and educational endeavor, not a logical-mathematical one.
Well, if a claim is not reasonable, how do you expect to convince others of it in the long run? We’re not talking religion here. The problem is not with the idea of logically proving your point, but the fact that some libertarian thinkers have deduced their ideas from unsupportable a priori assumptions. That’s why I think utilitarian arguments hold greater promise. If you want to convince someone of the correctness of a political idea, it’s better to show that it will have a positive effect than that it is the logical outcome of some abstract idea, especially if it’s not provable.
Indeed, Rothbard and Hoppe took ‘empirical’ references to ‘human biology’ into account. For instance, Rothbard, in his argument for the legalization of abortion, took ‘human biology’ into account in the sense that he believed in this biological fact: ‘the fetus grows inside the mother’. In addition, he assumed that humans must accept ‘proportional’ methods of punishment to “fit the crime” because humans have an innate sense of empathy even for criminals (he called this as the ‘intuitive sense of justice’). Hoppe, in his ‘proof’ of property rights, assumed that no two people can exist in the same place at the same time.
Lilburne still has not strawmanned Rothbard and Hoppe. Lilburne has trouble expressing his ideas clearly enough.
wait, was i qouting you ,or lilburne, im confused .?.
Fully agreed.
Quasi-, not pseudo-. My theory is an objective theory about how subjective morality arises.
your theory is about how morality is not morality.
You were quoting AM’s attempt to rephrase what I said.
ok, that clears that up.
In the light of that clarification, the obviously false statement was innapropriate since I find you (Lilburne) to be well informed and smart in many things. I just have disagreements with you in the narrow field of ‘morality’. with Anarcho-mercantilist my disagreements go a lot further.
No, but it means that they are a moot concept. If they also have no physical existence to ground them in reality, they can be disregarded in any practical sense - even if you insist that they exist, they make no difference in the real world.
I’d like to see an explicit confirmation of this ridiculous position of yours…
Yes or no, is the phrase “that statement is illogical” a moral value statement?