I brought up Kant because he tries to work from a view about the world to a view about ethics, and is probably the best example of someone who does that in a philosophically respectable manner. Ayn Rand did try to do the same thing in The Virtue of Selfishness, and I guess you might be interested in reading it for the basic thrust of her argument, but as a piece of philosophy it was pretty awful. Hoppe tries to argue that libertarian ethics are presupposed in argumentation, and Molyneux tries to argue a similar point on the basis of universally preferred behavior, but Hoppe’s errors have been widely discussed (including by me), and Molyneux wasn’t able to explain what he meant by “universally preferred behavior” when I asked him about it a while ago. So right; if you want to read the work of a thinker who takes the approach discussed in this thread and is also a respected and worthwhile philosopher, then Kant is pretty much the way to go.