“A newborn human baby is no more a self-owner than a newborn baby animal, by any outwardly observable objective standard. As you say, it is also demonstrably incapable of rights. It therefore becomes the natural (conflict-free) property, by original appropriation, of the mother. If abandoned, it becomes the property of whomever first claims it. If you come to kill a baby, this will become readily apparent, as you will first have to initiate conflict against the mother. Self ownership is something the baby is expected to gradually express over time as it matures.
[…]
[Y]ou are confusing the meanings of ‘natural rights’ and ‘values’, then ‘natural rights’ and ‘legal rights’, and finally ‘legislation’ with the logical justifications for ‘legislation’. Starting with the latter, we can exclude any reference to legislation, government laws, human-decreed rules, etc. because those are all derivative and wholly dependent upon what we are discussing. That is, we are discussing their reasons and justifications.
”
Lets translate that to a no-nonsense talk, after all, I’m just an everyday d*mbass and I need to clarify if I’m correctly assessing what you guys are really talking about.
Say you’re walking down the street, minding your own business. So you check out this woman, she’s standing by what seems to be a baby stroller. She has a gasoline gallon on her hand, and she appears to be pouring some gasoline on the baby. And then she strikes a match. And you go and say “hey, what the hell you think you’re doing?” As she replies “whatever, moron! she’s my property and i can set her on fire whenever I want!”. Then what you’re saying is that you’re going to say “oh, excuse me lady, I didn’t mean to be rude, just checking… but carry on…” and you keep on walking your way and not caring at all when the air start smelling like baby barbecue. After all, you’re not supposed to take any ethical decision there.
Correct me if I said anything wrong here, but that’s precisely what your ethics says is right. If it is not, would you please point out where it breaks down so we can move on from there.
I’m always appalled by the extents some people go in order to defend their positions on Internet forums.
But I doubt that you would act that way. I doubt it kind of a lot. But who knows, maybe you would.
In any case, that’s precisely what most people would NOT do.
Our gut level reaction is to stop that from happening, even resorting to physical violence when necessary. And we instinctively know that no court in the world would disagree with that.
It’s not something we stop and consider the clear-cut principles for justified action based upon the theory of whatever libertarianism philosopher.
Our understanding of ethics is gained through experience and tradition, and its gradually distilled through the experiences we may live and be thought about.
It is not a pure mathematical abstraction derived from fundamental axioms revealed to some luminary mind.
Indeed, we can try to isolate abstract principles that somehow capture a fragment of the way we act, but we cannot do that perfectly. And those principles should be tailored by the decisions we actually make in the real world, and not the other way around.
The non-aggression axiom and its derivatives are a somewhat interesting approximation of some ethical distinctions we may have developed along History, but they are not the ultimate description of how people think, or worse, of how people “should think”. What the hell is that anyway?
So what if people generally agree that aggression should not be initiated? If it needs to be initiated to stop a mom from burning her daughter a live, there’s no Rothbardian analysis that will convince anyone here.
The same holds true to egalitarian ethics. It is not necessarily unethical to believe that a more uniform wealth distribution is something better or to look forward to. Not even to defend a social justice mechanism that seizes people properties in order to procure such goals.
What needs to be clarified though is that this is not economically doable.
That even if in principle it is a nice thing to force rich to help the poor - and I’m not saying it is, but just that it is not wrong to have such values - when redistribution of wealth is done by a central authority to whom certain powers are granted, we generally march to an authoritarian regime and we end up destroying all the wealth and liberties.
Since most liberal people that believe in egalitarianism also think that wealth and liberties are very important, what is more effective is to convince them not their vision of justice or values is ethically wrong, but to show that the means they traditionally think should be used to achieve such goals are actually working against them.
This may look as something of a digression, but I think it is a valid point here since we are discussing the implications of this natural rights fundamentalism in the application of ethics to real world matters.
I see this natural rights fundamentalism emerging as an apparent solution to ethical arguments raised by socialists. Socialists usually try to show that people are ethically inclined to accept socialist principles. So some guys that do not like socialism decided to revamp the whole understanding of ethics with their methodologically sound theory in order to create a framework that is more adapted to their free market preferences.
But it is not necessary, and as we’ve seen here, its implications are kinda absurd.
The socialism should be dealt with using economics arguments, not trying to prove that militant empathy for other people is evil, because that’s how real people act in the real world.
You do not need to go through all this mess of trying to redefine a moral agent and all human ethics in order to consistently argue against socialists.
It is a disservice. In the end of the day, it serves only to frame libertarians as a fringe group of people defending a totally selfish attitude towards justice.
As a final remark, I am deeply satisfied that you brought up this “legislation” vs “logical justifications for legislation” argument, because it is exactly what I’m doing here, showing that there is no such clear distinction.
Our understanding of the law is incremental, based upon experience and tradition.
It is not some top-down theory. There is no fundamentalist argument for ethics, what we have is custom, and perhaps some abstract approximations of how those customs seem to evolve. To attempt to understand moral issues outside the context of our values is an intellectually moot point. It leads to absurd claims such as “a baby is not a self-owner therefore it is owned by her mother or first claimer therefore her mother or first claimer can set her on fire.”
Perfectly logical within an ethical framework that nobody cares about.