Rothbard vs. Hume?

[AuthoritarianCommerc]

Is each person the full owner of his/her body & do they have the right to control it?

People don’t ‘have’ rights. Rights are technical terms relating to contracts, not normative entities. Property is not a ‘right’, it is a fact in the physical sense (you can or can not control some object) and it is a liberty in the legal sense (it is, or is not, tortious for you to actually use something).

Your whole argument assumes what it has to prove, in the first case, that there are positive normatives.

[I_Ryan]

What happened to this thread?

[AuthoritarianCommerc]

For some reason the thread code makes stuff get weird from time to time.

[charliehorse]

OP: I am currently in the same situation. I would advise you to check out Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperatives, they make a good basis for a society based on non-coercion.

(This comment will drive the Randians crazy.) The catagorical imperative, and Kantian ethics as a whole is highly problematic. I don’t think that it would make a good ethical basis for a free society.

[AuthoritarianCommerc]

The catagorical imperative, and Kantian ethics as a whole is highly problematic. I don’t think that it would make a good ethical basis for a free society

It’s comically easy to come up with bizarre and outrageous categorical imperatives (not to mention that there is no such thing as a ‘categorical imperative’). Coming up with universally suicidal or outright strange categorical imperatives is something of a game among philosophy students.

[charliehorse]

@**Grayson Lilburne

**Jesse, my first exposure to Hume’s thought was through that Rothbard passage. Even through the medium of a hostile interpretation, Hume’s analysis seemed so sound to me, and Rothbard’s attempted refutation so off-the-mark, that I became something of a Humean, oddly enough, through reading Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty.

Very interesting. I found Hume so convincing when I read him that I took it for granted that the doctrine of natural law had been laid permanently to rest. Later on, I was surprised to find out that Rothbard supported a debunked theory, particularly without giving any sort of proof for it.

[wilderness]

Nope. Natural law isn’t bunked. People still think and use reason.

• thanks

[charliehorse]

Have you even read Hume, Wildy?

[wilderness]

I’ve read some of him. Bits and pieces. I’ve read numerous sources that favor Hume but show his weakness. Hume was only able to make a psychological assertion and not a logical one in terms of skeptism. The debate isn’t over Jesse, and to some extant it is. I am very much up to speed by extant philosophers on the Kant v. Hume debate.

btw, I saw this today.

[charliehorse]

I’m not going to support everything Hume said; I certainly don’t agree with his empiricism, among other things. I would suggest that you read the parts of his writings that pertain to the is/ought distinction and natural law.

Esuric misrepresented what I said; I agreed with him, but only up to a point. Thanks for pointing it out. Here’s how the conversation went:

@Euric

What do you think of this argument? You are right when you say that moral sentiments are subjective in nature; but from this, we cannot conclude that an objective system of ethics is impossible. Let me use some economic analogies to better elucidate my point. Value is also subjective, but the interplay of subjective desires yields objective prices. Likewise, each individual firm sets up their own capital structure and combinations according to their own plans, but broad market forces (price mechanism) smoothes out the various individual plans into a coherent and logical capital structure in the aggregate or macro level. The realities of scarcity and human action necessarily make this so. The same can be said for ethical judgements. The subjective moral judgements, when confronted with reality (both social and natural) leads to an objective system of laws (not in the legal sense). This is the inevitable result of praxeology and other natural constraints (objective and unchangeable phenomena). It is the necessary and logical outcome. Governments interfere with this law for their own self-serving reasons, the same way that they interfere with the price mechanism and capital accumulation. But social interventionism, like economic interventionism, is an untenable condition. The thief who brakes into your house may not care about the natural law, just like the businessman who doesn’t care about current market conditions, but in both scenarios, there will be inevitable ramifications/consequences.

@Jesse

@Esuric

You are right when you say that moral sentiments are subjective in nature; but from this, we cannot conclude that an objective system of ethics is impossible.

Agreed. I do, after all, believe in an objective system of ethics. I just don’t think that a particular meta-ethical approach works; namely, natural law.

@Esuric

Value is also subjective, but the interplay of subjective desires yields objective prices. Likewise, each individual firm sets up their own capital structure and combinations according to their own plans, but broad market forces (price mechanism) smoothes out the various individual plans into a coherent and logical capital structure in the aggregate or macro level. The realities of scarcity and human action necessarily make this so.

so far so good.

@Esuric

The same can be said for ethical judgements. The subjective moral judgements, when confronted with reality (both social and natural) leads to an objective system of laws (not in the legal sense).

I agree with this up until your last parenthetical comment. The exchange of goods and services leads to prices, and the interplay between subjective ideas about morality leads to a (private) legal structure, nothing more. People with different ideas about morality can still engage in market exchanges if there is a legal framework that they both consent to. I don’t see how you can extrapolate from this the idea that an overarching moral law exists; one that everyone is accountable to, and which judges everyone indiscriminately.

@Esuric

Governments interfere with this law for their own self-serving reasons, the same way that they interfere with the price mechanism and capital accumulation. But social interventionism, like economic interventionism, is an untenable condition.

Agreed.

@Esuric

The thief who brakes into your house may not care about the natural law, just like the businessman who doesn’t care about current market conditions, but in both scenarios, there will be inevitable ramifications/consequences.

Sure, but what is it that makes his actions wrong? Other people don’t like what he’s doing. He’s probably violating a written law. You could maybe even argue that he is acting irrationally. But do you equate any of these things with morality? It would seem that his actions would stil be wrong even if other people liked what he did, if it wasn’t illegal, and even if it was rational.

He never wrote back again.

[wilderness]

The society determines what law is. It is every single person thinking for him or her self that contributes to what the law will be. The extent of the contributions to how the law will be maintained and how the law is formed varies. Because there are different theories on how to deal with conflict then there will undoubtedly continue to be different societies. That’s natural law. It is only natural it would be this way because of human action.

I have no idea where you recieved the idea that natural law is an overarching law that there will be only one theory. People think and reason quite differently. Individuals will intellectually apprehend what reality is in various ways including how to deal with conflict. That’s just life. It is only naturally that way.

[AuthoritarianCommerc]

The society determines what law is. It is every single person thinking for him or her self that contributes to what the law will be. The extent of the contributes and how the law is formed varies. Because there are different theories on how to deal with conflict then there will undoubtedly continue to be different societies. That’s natural law. It is only natural it would be this way because of human action.

If you mean ‘natural law’ in the sense Lon L. Fuller ocassionaly used it (that there will, in fact, be customary laws that are formed in almost any society and that these will vary but will tend to contain some uniform tendencies) then this is true. The problem is that this has basically nothing to do with ‘Natural Law’ from the Thomistic perspective. The former is a logico-traditionalist definition appropriate to a refined Burke, whereas the latter is something one would get from 18th century Liberal Rationalism (or Libertarianism).

[wilderness]

I mean in the sense of common law. The Thomistic perspective isn’t stuck in the 18th century. Rothbard and Hoppe have both said that the law will be determined by the free market and it will end up varying due to local circumstances.

That’s how common law is considered part of natural law. It is old and changes.

[charliehorse]

I have no idea where you received the idea that natural law is an overarching law that there will be only one theory.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Rothbard… And pretty much every other proponent of natural law. The whole point of natural law is that it is overarching and non-contingent. If it stems from the very nature of man, after all, how could the law be any different for people with the same nature?

I’m glad that you see the absurdity in this position. You’re on your way to rejecting natural law.

[charliehorse]

This.

@Liberte

If you mean ‘natural law’ in the sense Lon L. Fuller ocassionaly used it (that there will, in fact, be customary laws that are formed in almost any society and that these will vary but will tend to contain some uniform tendencies) then this is true. The problem is that this has basically nothing to do with ‘Natural Law’ from the Thomistic perspective. The former is a logico-traditionalist definition appropriate to a refined Burke, whereas the latter is something one would get from 18th century Liberal Rationalism (or Libertarianism).

[wilderness]

Jesse,

Read Democracy the God That Failed where Hoppe provides the free market approach to natural law. Rothbard does the same in ‘Power and Market’. You’re really shooting off the hip as you’ve already said you haven’t read how this can be true. It is. Natural law isn’t overarching. Nobody has said it is. It’s the whole point of human nature. People think for themselves, life changes, and the given circumstances will always flux. Human action is overarching, but think of what that means. Haven’t you ever been in a court room?

[charliehorse]

natural law ≠ Natural Law.

[AuthoritarianCommerc]

natural law ≠ Natural Law.

If there is any such thing as a ‘natural law’ which is consistent with all purposive action and subjective value, it is the one espoused by Thomas Hobbes:

“every man has a right to everything, even to another man’s body.”

[wilderness]

Liberte,

That’s only one sided. You’re perspective is narrow. Because in a conflict there are always two or more sides. One person supposes that they have a right to another’s body. Yet the other person who is being agressed against deny this agression. You don’t see the whole picture of all of the value judgments involved in the conflict. Epic Fail. Both you and Jesse. I recommend to both of you to start thinking for yourself. It would only be natural.

Good night.

[AuthoritarianCommerc]

Because in a conflict there are always two or more sides.

Yes, my side and the wrong side. Or, more accurately, the winning side and the losing side (as it would be unrealistic to presume I will actually defeat all takers).

One person supposes that they have a right to another’s body.

If by ‘right’ you mean that I have a ‘right’ because it is ‘right’ for me, that is to say, it is what suits my satisfaction. This is the only sort of ‘right’ that I am concerned with in a teleological sense, the only kind that has any meaning.

Yet the other person who is being agressed against deny this agression.

I deny that it is ‘aggression’, or what’s more, I do not protest aggression. I succeed or I fail, in accordance with my ability.