Rothbard's ethics circular logic?

[Charles_Anthony]

I believe there is nonsense in this thread.

@Ben Hofesh

I just don’t understand how life can be inherintly valuable simply because a person needs to be alive in order to express it’s non-value.

Life does not have inherent value. Nothing has inherent value. All value is subjective.

You seem to recognize the inadequacy of natural law theory and rightly so. Many libertarians go on advocating natural rights laws as if they are laws of physics or objective provable facts – they are nothing of the sort. Respecting natural rights is an article of faith or simply a preference.

I will refer you to an excerpt of a similar discussion that was carried out by one of the brightest libertarians on the internet, in my opinion. I wish he would post more often. You can learn a lot from his writing if you want. Here it is:

@Len Budney

@classiclib

Is there an objective reason why one shouldn’t abuse the free will of others (assuming there is no god), and can it be subjectively advantageous?

The answer is no, unfortunately. It can obviously be advantageous: that’s why people seek political power or commit crimes. Not everyone gets away with it, but allowing for the probability of failure it’s still the case that crime can pay. There’s no objective reason not to engage in it when the expectation (crudely, payoff times probability of success minus cost times probability of failure, if those things were cardinal quantities) is positive.

The counter-arguments all hold no water. The fact that you might be caught and punished is already factored into the expectation. The fact that others will call you “evil,” and other nasty names, is not an objective deterrent; it’s only a deterrent if you object to being called names, and that’s a textbook example of a subjective consideration. The fact that expectation isn’t really cardinal, and can’t be determined precisely, only means that one must allow a significant margin of error. The eudaimonean argument that you aren’t being true to your humanity is purely subjective, until someone can produce a trueness-to-humanity meter. The observation that your lack of ethics leads to contradictions if everyone else thinks like you is just a variant on saying that it “isn’t fair,” and there’s no objective reason to give a d*mn about fairness.

Since humans generally do care about fairness, down deep in the core of their souls, makes universality (aka fairness, aka symmetry, aka “the Golden Rule”) a mighty darn convincing argument. It is, however, a subjective one. A sociopath would consider the argument pure gibberish.

–Len.

drawn from the thread: Maximizing free will for the individual without God