There isn’t a chance in the world that I could possibly catch up at this point. What I will say is this:
It is abundantly clear that at least some of you guys are not interested in actually providing a defense of your position. The idea that the issue turns on whether the cabin is “Tom’s cabin” is preposterous. People embracing all sorts of different ethical and politico-philosophical views could call the cabin “Tom’s” and support radically different perspectives on what we would be justified in doing with Tom’s cabin without his permission (including everything from “whatever we want” to “nothing at all”). A nihilist could say that possessive language is merely useful shorthand so that we can specify which cabin we’re talking about – the cabin is “Tom’s cabin” in the sense that it isn’t a different cabin; it’s the one Tom uses. In that case, the cabin’s being “Tom’s cabin” would not imply any moral duty not to enter it, regardless of the circumstances. A “hard” Lockean libertarian of the Rothbardian stripe could say (in line with an infinitely stringent principle of self-ownership and a nearly-literal interpretation of bodily extensionism) that Tom’s cabin was morally equivalent to Tom’s arm, and in line with an infinitely stringent principle of self-ownership, Tom’s right to determine the use of the cabin is infinitely stringent. In that case, the cabin’s being “Tom’s cabin” would imply a perfect moral duty not to enter it without Tom’s permission, no matter what.
The point is, you need to actually defend hard Lockean libertarian views of the Rothbardian stripe. They aren’t just magically true. And many of the defenses Rothbard offers in The Ethics of Liberty are non-starters. For example, Rothbard writes:
Let us set aside for a moment the corollary but more complex case of tangible property, and concentrate on the question of a man’s ownership rights to his own body. Here there are two alternatives: either we may lay down a rule that each man should be permitted (i.e., have the right to) the full ownership of his own body, or we may rule that he may not have such complete ownership. If he does, then we have the libertarian natural law for a free society as treated above. But if he does not, if each man is not entitled to full and 100 percent self-ownership, then what does this imply? It implies either one of two conditions: (1) the “communist” one of Universal and Equal Other-ownership, or (2) Partial Ownership of One Group by Another—a system of rule by one class over another. These are the only logical alternatives to a state of 100 percent self-ownership for all.
But this is a basic logical mistake. The idea is that if person P does not own some object A, then not-P must own it. If Oxa is “X owns A,” then Rothbard’s proposition is that ~Opa (the tilde is a sign for negation) translates to O(~p)a (where the universe of possible values of X is the set of all people). But this is not a truth-preserving move: it could logically be the case that no one owns a. And the possibility of non-ownership is actually present in Rothbard’s views, with regard to the unhomesteaded commons. If I said, “Who owns the unexplored areas of Antarctica, you, someone else, some group of people, everyone, or everyone besides you?” you would say, “None of those: no one owns them.”
Earlier, Rothbard seeks to demonstrate the same principle to an appeal to self-evidence:
The individual man, in introspecting the fact of his own consciousness, also discovers the primordial natural fact of his freedom: his freedom to choose, his freedom to use or not use his reason about any given subject. In short, the natural fact of his “free will.” He also discovers the natural fact of his mind’s command over his body and its actions: that is, of his natural ownership over his self.
But this is clearly a mistaken use of terminology. Crusoe discovers the natural fact of his natural control over his self, but not his natural ownership over his self. If Friday came along and snapped a leash around Crusoe’s neck, he would quickly discover the natural fact that ownership means nothing without ethics.
On property, Rothbard writes:
By finding land resources, by learning how to use them, and, in particular, by actually transforming them into a more useful shape, Crusoe has, in the memorable phrase of John Locke, “mixed his labor with the soil.” In doing so, in stamping the imprint of his personality and his energy on the land, he has naturally converted the land and its fruits into his property. Hence, the isolated man owns what he uses and transforms; therefore, in his case there is no problem of what should be A’s property as against B’s.
But this form of the argument was dismantled years before Rothbard’s book was even published. As Nozick pointed out in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it can’t be the mere fact that we mix something that is ours with something that is unowned:
Why does mixing one’s labor with something make one the owner of it? Perhaps because one owns one’s labor, and so one comes to own a previously unowned thing that becomes permeated with what one owns. Ownership seeps over into the rest. But why isn’t mixing what I own with what I don’t own a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I don’t? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so that its molecules (made radioactive, so I can check this) mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice?
And as property theorists have noted for decades, the Lockean argument for property is based on a Pareto criterion that can never be fulfilled: in a world where property rights inherently involve coercive boundaries, it’s not going to be strictly true that no harm is done to anyone by appropriation. As Cohen writes in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality (previously quoted in this thread):
The banal truth is, if the state prevents me from doing something that I want to do, then it places a restriction on my freedom. Suppose, then, that I want to perform an action which involves a legally prohibited use of your property. I want, let us say, to pitch a tent in your large back garden, perhaps just in order to annoy you, or perhaps for the more substantial reason that I have nowhere to live and no land of my own, but I have got hold of a tent, legitimately or otherwise. If I now try to do this thing that I want to do, the chances are that the state will intervene on your behalf. If it does, I shall suffer a constraint on my freedom. The same goes, of course, for all unpermitted use of a piece of private property by those who do not own it, and there are always those who do not own it, since ‘private ownership by one person presupposes non-ownership on the part of other persons’.
Cohen’s point applies to the state, but it would apply just as well to any enforced regime of private property. We simply can’t build our case on the Lockean Pareto view: it’s just not quite correct (though David Schmidtz makes some excellent points towards rehabilitating this view in “On the Institution of Property”).
Rothbard’s analysis is simply not going to work as a foundation for a political philosophy. That’s why I asked if you guys would try to explain it, since that would have enabled us to go through all the reasons why it’s obviously not right. We could do the same thing with Hoppe’s The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, but my copy is unfortunately in Arizona right now.
It’s important that you guys actually defend your view, because right now it’s leading you guys to a lot of implausible conclusions that really only seem to be supported by the fact that they follow from your theory. And as I’ve been pointing out, sometimes when that happens, you have to start questioning the theory instead of biting the bullet and accepting the implausible conclusions.
Now, Liberty Student posted a screed about a page ago in this thread where he basically attempted to argue that justificatory liberal theories are ethically nihilistic, collectivist, statist, emotional, and flawed, and that my position “has to necessarily lead to the end of private property rights.” And all this because someone would not be declared to be immoral for breaking into a cabin to save his life. What Liberty Student, and I think others here, has utterly failed to grasp is that law need not be identical to morality. If we need to have private property rules in order to appropriately order our society in a way that allows us to lead our own lives and to coexist peacefully, then that’s great – it could even give us reason to punish Klemm for infringing upon Tom’s rights even if he did nothing wrong. But what’s more important is that Liberty Student seems to be so vehemently committed to the conclusions of his moral theory – the market system – that any theory which he thinks might undermine the functioning of the market must necessarily be false, and evil to boot. So, for suggesting that rights represent merely prima facie presumptions which lead us to demand that infringements upon them be justified impartially, I have been deemed a James Taggart, the villain of Objectivist nightmares – someone who lives in a perpetual mist of evasions and half truths, denying that A is A and that the appropriate standard of value is the life of man qua man; a self-immolator and self-abrogator; a sacrificial animal who refuses to celebrate the fire of man’s mind (that is, a non-smoker).
The reality of the situation, unfortunately, is much less exciting. The market order stays intact through my criticisms; I have proposed no legal norms nor social institutions which undermine private property norms, nor have I attempted to justify infringing upon property rights for the benefit of others. My argument has been very limited, only applying to a small and relatively rare set of cases where people find themselves in horrifying situations where in order to avoid disastrous personal outcomes, they need to impose minor costs on other people. I maintain that no plausible view underpinning liberal or libertarian conceptions of rights can support the view that morality obligates someone in such a position to endure disaster so that the integrity of someone else’s property can stay intact. And I think most people agree. But this means only what it says: rights aren’t absolute, but we can only infringe upon them legitimately when we’re on the brink of disaster. The market system is built of much tougher stuff.
Thedesolateone offers a range of questions that I will hold off on answering them with the amount of rigor that they deserve. I’ll point out that I haven’t ruled out the idea that Klemm would have to compensate Tom, which seems to answer the “But all that hard work!” line of objections. I’m not sure why it should be so controversial that Klemm could be sure that the cabin would protect him from the blizzard…maybe there’s a really warm bed, a sturdy roof, and a board to cover the window he would break to get in? I mean, we can pretend that Klemm has his own food, and maybe even a camping stove for warmth, right? As for the idea that laws must always follow morality, that’s an argument to be taken up with the defenders of strict liability. One plausible defense would be that sometimes we need to infringe upon rights in emergencies, and it is not wrong to do so, but that it’s nevertheless important that we provide compensation later – the law enforces a standard of restitutive justice. The alternative view would likely respond that if we were not morally blameworthy in infringing the right, then we should feel no duty to pay compensation. I think the debate is an interesting one, and not as easily resolved as it might initially seem. Finally, Thedesolateone contends that whether Tom helps Klemm or not is a matter of mere taste, and is not a moral issue. But here I would point out that he has not yet explained his position on morality, which makes it difficult for me to respond; I could only say, “Well but by my conception of morality (which clearly you do not share), that is most obviously wrong.”
At this point, I’m not really sure what would be accomplished by continuing this conversation unless a rigorous defense of an absolutist conception of rights were offered here. Short of that, I don’t know what more I can say than, “I have defended my position in a way that I think most people would see to be definitive. You guys are committed somewhere along the line to my position being wrong, but you don’t seem to be able to grasp the force of the arguments in its favor and you have not been able to articulate a plausible alternative that has not been based simply on naked assertion or blatantly inaccurate claims about what my position commits me to. I can get us from “I am a person in a world of people” to “Klemm would be justified in breaking into Tom’s cabin”, and you don’t seem to be able to get us from “I am a person in a world of people” to “Klemm would not be justified in breaking into Tom’s cabin.” So show me how to get to your conclusion, and then we’ll talk. Otherwise, I’m going to get back to work on other things.”
