You can take it to be self-evident but I don’t think that does you any good. My objection is to the supposed “necessity argument” or presuppositional argument that self-ownership must be assumed in any rational discussion. I think that it really is self-evident that each individual owns himself but I also think that doesn’t matter. Let’s say someone claims to be your master and you are their slave. You go to court to prove that you are not his slave. In the course of making your legal proof, you trot out Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics. But when you’re done, the master simply pulls out his Deed of Ownership of your body, and points out the legal statute which grants him ownership of you since he holds the Deed free and clear. The judge looks at the Deed, looks at the statute, says, “Sorry Mr. Collins, your argument was very beautiful but you’re the property of Mr. X”. The reality of coercion is that shared assumptions or self-evident truths are irrelevant. What matters is what rights can be defended and what the conditions are under which those rights can be defended.
The problem I have with focusing on creating clever arguments for self-ownership or natural rights is that they can lead a person astray into the idea that what is wrong with the world is that we don’t have good enough theory to explain the way things ought to be. This is simply not the case. There are many improvements which could be made to our legal system that would immensely enhance the rights which individuals enjoy. As David Friedman says, our legal system is about 1000 years behind the state of the art in legal theory by virtue of its disuse of one of the most important legal devices ever created… the performance bond.
But once you start to look at these particular rights which would be enhanced by simple changes to our legal system, you begin to perceive a pattern. The pattern is that our legal system is the way it is exactly because it is a territorial monopoly. We do not have less rights than we should because there is a lack of theoretical arguments that show why things should be different than they are. We have less rights than we should have because the territorial monopolist of law and security - the State - has devoted its full energy to ensuring that we cannot enjoy those rights. So, the root problem is the territorial monopoly of law and it is this which must be attacked by libertarians. I do not think attempting to raise self-ownership to the level of an axiom enhances the battle against the monopolist of law, in fact, I think it cheapens libertarian theory. Please note that I admire Hoppe’s philosophy in most ways but on the point of natural rights and his Argumentation Ethics, I take strong exception.
Clayton -