well I read some of it and from first glance I can say that this guy really is confused. I got this impression from his misunderstanding of Kant’s Categorial Imperative. This imperative is not a rule, it is a principle that serves as a criterion for a valid moral norm. This principle is known as the universalization principle. Itself does not tell us what we should do. It is used to distinguish between valid ethical propositions and invalid. That is why the example of Jasay is completely irrelevant. I will read the whole of it tomorrow.
I actually have a hard time believing that after reading Rothbard you refer to a writing like this. To me Rothbard is the most brilliant thinker ever lived. And you should know that when criticizing his libertarian ethics you are actually criticizing a lot of philosophers who thought that absolute ethics exist. So it is not just “Rothbard’s ethics”.
the fact that a cat prefered to eat fish to bread shows us that preferable behavior exists in cat’s world. but this does not show us that universally preferable behavior exist, one that needs reason in order to be elaborated. today I prefered to eat an apple and I discarded eating an orange, but if I steal your money what kind of ethics am I proposing, am I acting morally?
so customs and learned behavior mean nothing to ethics. they are irrelevant. and I haven’t soon spoken to or writen with a cat or read her lips or body movements.
I am guilty of psychologizing now, but it seems quite clear to me from that response that reading the rest of the essay will be a waste of time, because Jasay is guilty in your eyes of being ‘not-Rothbard’.
Your confirmation bias will kill you intellectually.
If you are able to read it with a cool rational head then let me know if you have a critique of any of his main points (not one line asides about Kant), then we can discuss it perhaps in a separate topic.
“but if I steal your money what kind of ethics am I proposing, am I acting morally?”
If you are asking me that question personally I would say you are acting immorally in so far as my subjective judgement of the situation is that you acting against my wishes. But if you are going to attempt to universalise or politicise that statement and ask “Is it immoral to steal?” then I would say that that can only be determined by the individual who is being acted against, and you have no ability to determine FOR THEM how they feel about being stolen from, anymore than you have the ability to make a statement such as “Oranges taste good” and expect that to have universal truth.
guy A stealing guy B’s property is a coercive act. a coercive act that results in something taken away from someone without his consent is considered theft. if guy B surrendered with his property voluntarily then this is not considered theft. as you can see the very definition of theft includes some violent act on the part of one guy that results in a conflict about who should be the ultimate decision maker regarding a particular property. so the problem is who should be the rightful owner? should it be guy A or guy B? if it is the first this means that guy B should give his property to guy A without resisting or making a claim for a subsequent restitution. if it is the latter then guy B should keep what he already is in possession of and if A tries to take it away he is acting immorally. as you can see no one here is making a suggestion how should one feel or not. the conflict emerges not because someone does not agree with someone else’s assertion about his feelings. no one even has made such an assertion. and if someone tells me how I should feel but he does not act in any violent way against me there is no conflict. I could probably don’t like what he speaks about my feelings but there still no conflict arises if neither I act with aggression against him. And if I do so, what I am actually doing is trying to control his body. the conflict emerges because there is a rivalry for a scarce good. there are two separate human individuals who claim control over one and the same thing.
why is it his body? why should he decide whether to speak or not to speak? well the very fact that we are talking in terms of “coercion”, “voluntary”, “consent” means that humans are not will-less pieces of meat who do not do anything, but sit and don’t have any original intentions (internal principles of motion). someone choosing to consent to someone else’s proposal implies a choice. if he can do that this means he has got desires, he has got ends and employs means to achieve them. that is to say he acts on his own ends, using his body which he is in direct control of. he does not just sit there motionless and wait for someone else to tell him what he desires and what he should do. the question then is should guy A neglect his own desires and do what guy B tells him? well if we want to follow ethical norms that avoid conflicts then we must answer that guy A should not neglect his own desire, that he is the owner of his body and he is the rightful ultimate decision maker of the way it gets disposed of.
the task of ethics is to come up with a system of moral norms that helps humans avoid such conflicts. in order for a moral norm to be valid it must meet certain criterion. one of them is Kant’s Categorical Imperative. valid means that the proposed moral norm does not itself cause conflicts rather to resolve such. if an ethical rule propagate human suffering and dying then this is not a preferable rule to follow.
the beauty of the natural rights doctrine is its universality and internal logical coherence. there could and do exist a lot of propositions for conflict avoidance, but the thing is that actually they do not do a greater job of avoiding conflicts compared to the natural rights doctrine. most often other propositions even do not avoid them at all but rather create one class of people who has ethical superiority and is allowed to initiate violence and when someone is opposed to this they do not stop doing what they are doing, which would make the conflict disappear, but rather get rid of the guy who complaints about their action. this is neither conflict avoidance, nor conflict arbitrage, this is quelling the conflict by using more of the same means that in the first place caused it.
For a moment lets imagine that you are correct and that we do indeed have ‘natural rights’ that exist objectively. Even if you grant this I would still disagree that such a doctrine is a superior dispute resolution system. How about the ideas of John Hasnas in particular who has written extensively on customary law, that is law that comes about via spontaneous order, free-market law formation. This kind of dispute-resolution system requires no objective ‘meta-law’, only the subjective inputs of all the participants. If you disagree that free-market law is the best dispute resolution system, would you also disagree that the free-market price system is the best way to organise an economy?
So basically I would disagree with natural rights both on ontological grounds (as demonstrated by Jasay) and on consequentialist grounds (as demonstrated by Hasnas).
every law that comes into existence through the process of the free-market means that there is a consent of two parties willing to cooperate in a definite manner. the very fact of two human individuals interacting in a manner that is freed from coercion or the threat of such means there is voluntarism which implies that the non-aggression principle is kept. no individual has violated anyone else’s property rights, no one has coerced someone into doing something.
natural rights doctine is not itself an ethical system. the doctine only embodies the self-ownership axiom and the homesteading method. it does not state any ethical propositions for human behaviour. rational (or absolutist) ethics which use the doctine as its fundamental make the propositions themselves. the most quintessential of which is the non-aggression principle.
could you elaborate more on the “free-market law formation”?
These two things are equivalent. “who should own what” = “who should have ultimate decisionmaking jurisdiction over which objects” = “which property boundaries are legitimate” = “what constitutes a violation of property boundaries” = “what constitutes aggression” = “what violence should be allowed”.
This is a problem. What if someone thinks that who owns what (or what violence should be allowed) should be determined by different principles than you, i.e. not self-ownership and homesteading? Given a dispute between A and B over scarce resource X, say this non-libertarian thinks that the court should decide in favor of A (based on his principles) rather than B (based on libertarian principles). He is saying he thinks A ought to have a right to ultimate decisionmaking jurisdiction over X; he is saying A should own X; that A should have a property right to X.
But the way you have defined your terms, “A should have a property right to X,” is literally and gramatically incorrect, because to you ‘property right’ as a term without a descriptor implies homesteading and self-ownership are the principles being used. This does not facilitate clear discussion. This is entirely separate, by the way, from the objective/subjective ethics debate. Before considering that debate, your definition of property rights must be value-free, otherwise you will make equivocation errors.
So obviously no ethics is value free, but the language in which we discuss ethics must be value-free (neutral), if we are to make any sense of the debate. I would consider ‘private’ as a descriptor of the term ‘property rights,’ one which imparts an ethical value onto a value-free term.