If you want to know why I think you are wrong, I’ll refer you to every thread all over this forum were we covered it. I have nothing else to say.
I found it interesting that there has been no substantial response to the Murphy-Callahan critique. Kinsella wrote something that was more like a rant, wondering how a libertarian can be against it.
Fallacy of composition, appeal to consequences.
No. I said “usually.”
Is that a bad appeal to make?
I always say rights are through contract - something between two people, two groups, two whatever. One person is the right-holder, another person the obligor. This is separate from what I feel is the most important thing about libertarianism - freedom. Freedom is the relation between one person and a set of acts. As far as we can see epistemologically, all acts are feasible to us. Even if one concurs with the existence of a God who is infinite (as I do), sovereign, etc. and knows all, that is not important at all to the premise - all acts, as far as we can see it, are feasible.
We are free to do all acts until we wrong another human being. Once that occurs, obviously we have a problem and a dispute that must be settled, and our freedom to do anything may be restricted in order to focus on that issue, perhaps then we must stop doing certain acts of the same nature in the future to avoid dispute, etc. At this point in society, it is easy to understand we have a sort of conscience, and that we do things because of our own psychological thoughts. We still can do those things we tell ourselves not to do (of course within our physiological limitations and other limitations not pertaining to the human conscious), but we have restrictions we put on ourselves, on our relations, etc. that prevent us from doing other acts.
We all do not want to be wronged. To say you have the right to freedom is tantamount to saying you have the right not to be wronged. That is redundant and absurd.
As I see it, all is derived from free will.
I, and only I, can command my will. As my will is irrefutably attached to my self, I by extension own myself. My actions are the expression of my will; therefore, products of my actions are derrived from my will/self-ownership.
Liberty is important because it is the environment under which the free will can be expressed.
If liberty is unimportant, it is to say the will is unimportant. If the will is unimportant, then self is unimportant. If the self is unimportant, life is futile and pointless, and it is your nihilistic duty to die quickly.
So it does, or it does not? If you’re making a claim, it should be consistent. It’s hard to draw conclusions from “usually”, wouldn’t you agree?
Yeah, because you have stepped outside logic now, and you’re making the same emotional appeal that you’re arguing against others making.
Also, your claim that negative rights logically leads to positive rights is beyond the pale. I’d like to see you defend that.
I’m saying that the overwhelming majority of libertarian moral arguments aren’t the sort that rest on personal preferences. Look at the arguments listed in the OP. In fact, I’m not even sure that it is possible to make a purely subjective ‘moral’ argument.
I’m not using this argument to say that such moral arguments are false. I’m using it to say that they (can) have bad consequences. So, yes, I’m “appealing to consequences.” Also, where did I argue against using emotional appeals?
Both negative and positive rights are privileges. They both place obligations on other people to treat you in a certain way. There is really no difference between the two notions, and, as it is always argued, positive rights are necessary to protect negative rights. A person without access to adequate health care doesn’t have much liberty, does he? I know this is silly, but the silliness isn’t within the positive rights doctrine, it’s within the confusion over what a ‘right’ is. ‘Rights’ are legal concepts, not moral ones.
How did you determine an overwhelming majority?
What is the difference between an immoral consequence and a “bad consequence”?
An appeal to consequences is an emotional argument. The weight or value of a consequence is subjective, what you consider a bad consequence I might not. Why do you argue against using objective morality, and then imply that your subjective preferences (good/bad) are valuable objectively in discourse?
We’re talking about morals, not legal policies. So why confuse the issue? It doesn’t serve your argument at all.
Yes it is silly. Why do you use silly arguments that you know do not support your claims?
Down with the rationalists! Up with reality! 
This isn’t quite true. Ethical values, even subjective ones, can fit into logical claims in a way emotions can’t because they assign an actual property to something.
For example
“Forcefully taking property is theft and bad, taxation is forcefully taking property, therefore taxation is theft and bad” is perfectly valid whereas “forcefully taking property: yuck, taxation is forcefully taking property, therefore taxation: yuck” is nonsense. Whether or not a person has the same emotional reaction to each instance of theft is a purely empirical matter but if theft has the property of badness and tax is an example of theft then tax logically must have the property of badness as well. If it’s true that our desires have some cognitive content, which seems obvious enough, then it makes more sense to view them as responses to apparent value rather than the creation of value. Even if someone says “I desire consequence X” that doesn’t mean it reduces to an appeal to emotion (and if it did there would be nothing wrong with appeals to emotion, the only reason they are bad arguments is they are devoid of logic).
As for the OP. The best justification is simply human well-being. It’s an easy goal for anyone to identify with. However unlike utilitarians do I wouldn’t stress happiness alone as criteria for well-being. Instead I would argue that it’s a complex concept with many constitutive aspects. Once you introduce constitutive means into the goal then it’s possible to allow some things to be goods-in-themselves. You end up with a nice balance between principles and pragmatism that’s flexible enough to actually make sense as a guide to living. From there I would go on to talk about more aristotelian stuff but alas that will take a while to explain in detail here. My (simplified) arguments for the NAP are:
-
No action can be in any sense ethical if you are forced to do it. You need to actually choose to do it before it’s the sort of thing that can be admired. Therefore freedom is necessary for morality.
-
Choosing to deal with people through persuasion instead of violence is to choose to develop reasoning as a character trait.
I also think with a bit of work Rothbard’s argument about the alternatives to self-ownership being absurd could be a good one too. Plus consequentialist arguments have their uses.
Can you given an example of a libertarian moral argument that appeals only to subjective preferences? Perhaps we’re using ‘moral’ in a different sense.
Moral claims, as per their everyday usage, are an appeal to a standard higher than individual preferences. I’m saying that it’s a bad idea for libertarians to attempt to do this. On the other hand, it is certainly legitimate to try to convince other people to adopt your subjective preferences. Do you not see the difference between doing this and appealing to moral standards?
You’re the one making the confusion. I agree, let’s not talk about ‘rights’ anymore.
I’m showing you the silliness of negative rights.
It’s funny, that you spend all of this time producing content, and yet you haven’t figured out the web is a social space.
I didn’t think any part of your response was relevant or coherent. Did I misunderstand it?
Why?
Because I care about liberty, and it pains me to see people use bad arguments in its name.
Who did that?
People who use the negative rights doctrine.
Could you provide a rudimentary good argument for liberty please just so I can see an example of how your ideas work out?
“those who attack argumentation ethics as being unsound1 miss the point: it doesn’t need to be sound, it just needs to destroy any opposition arguments that are based on the same unsoundness.”
Conflating the truth with persuasion. Try again.
“in other words, the unsoundness of argumentation ethics is feature, not a bug. Hoppe knows what he’s doing.”
Yes he does know what he is doing, though I’d suggest you don’t.
"Rights (and their corresponding obligations) are created by agreement or the command of the sovereign (and are verifiable by evidence from written contracts or legislation), but liberties are simply feasible acts that do not violate conventions against torts like murder, rape, theft, etc…"
Nope - are you blind, dishonest, or is this merely the start of an argumentum ad nauseam?
I responded to this earlier, you ignored it & dropped out of the thread - only to come back & repeat the same tripe on the next page.
"“I always say rights are through contract - something between two people, two groups, two whatever. One person is the right-holder, another person the obligor.”"
The above also applies to ^.
“appeal to consequences.”
“Is that a bad appeal to make?”
In ethics, illegitimate.
“As regards the utilitarian position, the proof contains its ultimate refutation. It demonstrates that simply in order to propose the utilitarian position, exclusive rights of control over one’s body and one’s homesteaded goods already must be presupposed as valid. More specifically, as regards the consequentialist aspect of libertarianism, the proof shows its praxeological impossibility: the assignment of rights of exclusive control cannot be dependent on certain outcomes. One could never act and propose anything unless private property rights existed prior to a later outcome. A consequentialist ethic is a praxeological absurdity. Any ethic must instead be “aprioristic” or instantaneous in order to make it possible that one can act here and now and propose this or that rather than having to suspend acting until later. Nobody advocating a wait-for-the-outcome ethic would be around to say anything if he took his own advice seriously. Also, to the extent that utilitarian proponents are still around, they demonstrate through their actions that their consequentialist doctrine is and must be regarded as false. Acting and proposition-making require private property rights now and cannot wait for them to be assigned only later.” - Hoppe, Economics & Ethics of Private Property, p354
“Could you provide a rudimentary good argument for liberty please just so I can see an example of how your ideas work out?”
I’d say that only duties should come through contract, not morality (or rights in a libertarian sense.) I don’t know if deontological or consequentialist morality is right, but I know, that using either one in the extreme cases leads to absurdities. That’s why I prefer “negative rights” because they do not impose “moral duties”, just forbid postive agression. And there is always a room for empathy, compassion etc. To forget that humans are biological creatures with their own feelings and try to construct absolutist morality (no matter how impossible it is) - that is a greatest evil. Same would be letting robots decide what is right and wrong. Dystopian future. [/rant mode]
Well, for example, the epistemological arguments from Hayek and De Jasay are pretty good. I trust that you don’t need me to spell these arguments out for you.
Consequentialist arguments a la Ludwig Von Mises are pretty good too, provided that you constrain yourself to an analysis of the means chosen for the attainment of given ends. There is nothing implicitly ‘moral’ about this sort of argument.