“not morality (or rights in a libertarian sense.)”
It’s ethics. That of which, political philosophy is a subset.
“that using either one in the extreme cases leads to absurdities.”
Please provide examples on the deontological one thanks.
“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.”
Empathy & compassion have nothing to do with political philosophy proper. What a red herring - who is talking about constructing an absolute morality (personal ethics) and impossing that on others? What a joke.
“To put it succinctly: the goal of libertarianism is freedom, period. No more and no less. Anything less is a betrayal; but anything more is equally a betrayal of liberty, because it implies imposing our own goals on others. To be a libertarian must mean that one upholds liberty as the highest political end not necessarily one’s highest personal end. To confuse the issue, to mix in any sort of vision - technocratic or futuristic or any other - with politics, is to abandon liberty as that highest political goal, and at the very least to destroy the very meaning of a political movement or organization.” ~ http://mises.org/daily/4491
No, arguing that libertarian rights appeal to our human senses of right and wrong is not a consequentialist argument, as I understand the term. It is saying that initiating coercion is just wrong, no matter what the consequences, in the minds of moral, reasonable people.
Arguing that libertarianism breeds prosperity is of course a consequentialist argument. I do not see why both cannot be used in persuasion.
This appears to me to be a strawman of the consequentialist argument, or at least the argument I am making. When I say that voluntary exchanges (libertarianism) have good consequences (like prosperity), and violent exchanges (non-libertarianism) have bad consequences (like destroying wealth), it is a generalization. I do not claim that this is always the case, ex post. So I am not saying that any particular exchange must have good consequences for it to be considered ethical.
Hence I do not fall into this trap Hoppe describes. I don’t need to “wait for the outcome” before knowing whether a given exchange - the one I am about to make - is ethical or unethical. Indeed the outcome of my action is irrelevant, because my claim is only that most voluntary exchanges will lead to better consequences than violent exchanges. If the exchange I am considering is voluntary, then that is good enough for the consequentialist-libertarian to know that it is ethical, regardless of whether it actually turns out to have good consequences or not.
Can you do an impression of a socialist claiming that socialism is objectively correct? Here are two examples that will fail… “I consider it unethical for rich people to keep all their money to themselves, so I support socialism and if you think this is unethical too, you should support socialism” (this is an appeal to our subjective ethics), and “Forced redistribution benefits the greater number of people, so I support socialism and you should too” (this is consequentialism).
Do the socialists claim to have some kind of proof - similar in function to argumentation ethics - that shows (or claims to show) that all non-socialist ethics are objectively incorrect?
Thanks for the links. I am not sure how your sentence here makes sense (doesn’t individualized values imply subjective values?), but I do need to read more about eudaimonia.
Just to aid my understanding of how it all fits together. Are you saying that Hoppe’s ‘proof of libertarian ethics’ is incomplete in the way I described (in that it presupposes objective ethics), but that eudaimonia shows that ethics is objective, so we need to invoke eudaimonia to complete the proof? If this is not what you are saying can you explain how eudaimonia is relevant? If this is what you are saying, why do you think Hoppe doesn’t mention that his proof is incomplete, or just complete it, by writing about eudaimonia?
I’m not following you. Moral duties are only imposed by moral claims, and ‘liberty’ is not a moral claim. If ‘liberty’ were constructed to be a moral claim, then it would be false, as all moral claims are.
You are seriously misusing the term ‘right’. Why can’t we let people enjoy these things without pretending that they have some metaphysical entitlement to them?
Frankly, this argument is disproven by a tiny bit of reflection and experience. It depends on giving “private property rights” a metaphysical status. But it is blatantly not true that one needs to have private property rights or assent to their validity to argue or act at all. To argue, all one needs to do is exist in a context with other language speakers. To act, one simply needs to be concious. Argumentation and action predate and do not require Hoppe’s norms. If it’s meant to be said that “legitimate” argument and action require such norms, then this is just beginning the question of those norms. But Hoppe wants to define all actual argumentation about those norms as self-destructing by simply taking those norms for granted via false claims which try to render libertarianism as a metaphysical foundation that is prior to all discourse and thought.
Not that I want to debate that [EDIT: that is morality being nonsensical] in this thread, I was just curious as to the context you were using the word “right”
I have no problem with ‘rights’ as a legal term, but do you think that we are obligated to respect other people’s ‘de facto’ rights? Why?
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Everyone? This is, at least empirically speaking, false. I submit myself as a counterexample. I have a view of justice, and I have some ideas as to what constitutes aggressive behavior, but that’s all they are: my ideas. Other people have different ideas. I do not pretend that my ideas somehow demand everyone’s assent.