Beyond Entangling Law & Ethics
A response aimed at Beyond the NAP: Rothbard's Full Case for Liberty published at the LvMI. As per Rothbard himself, the authors approach is erroneous. Take a read of the article first. My comment: No—you're actually regressing the Austro-libertarian conversation...
[1] "...In order to come to a policy conclusion, I have long maintained, economists have to come up with some kind of ethical system. Note that all branches of modern "welfare economics" have attempted to do just that: to continue to be "scientific" and therefore value-free, and yet to make all sorts of cherished policy pronouncements (since most economists would like at some point to get beyond their mathematical models and draw politically relevant conclusions). Most economists would not be caught dead with an ethical system or principle, believing that this would detract from their "scientific" status. And yet, remarkably and extraordinarily, Hans Hoppe has proven me wrong. He has done it: he has deduced an anarcho-Lockean rights ethic from self-evident axioms. Not only that: he has demonstrated that, just like the action axiom itself, it is impossible to deny or disagree with the anarcho-Lockean rights ethic without falling immediately into self-contradiction and self-refutation. In other worlds, Hans Hoppe has brought to political ethics what Misesians are familiar with in praxeology and Aristotelian-Randians are familiar with in metaphysics: what we might call "hard-core axiomatics." It is self-contradictory and therefore self-refuting for anyone to deny the Misesian action axiom (that everyone acts), since the very attempt to deny it is itself an action. It is self-contradictory and therefore self-refuting to deny the Randian axiom of consciousness, since some consciousness has to be making this attempt at denial. For if someone cannot attempt to deny a proposition without employing it, he is not only caught in an inextricable self-contradiction; he is also granting to that proposition the status of an axiom..." — Murray Rothbard, Beyond Is and Ought, November 1988 (obviously after all the irrelevant quotes you cherry picked).
What is correct is disentangling law & ethics, except your approach obfuscates, not elucidates! To be clear, the distinction is there previously e.g. from Rothbard’s TEOL Chapter 20 on Lifeboat Situations:
“The error here on the part of the "contextualist” libertarians is to confuse the question of the moral course of action for the person in such a tragic situation with the totally separate question of whether or not his seizing of lifeboat or plank space by force constitutes an invasion of someone else’s property right. For we are not, in constructing a theory of liberty and property, i.e., a “political” ethic, concerned with all personal moral principles. We are not herewith concerned whether it is moral or immoral for someone to lie, to be a good person, to develop his faculties, or be kind or mean to his neighbors. We are concerned, in this sort of discussion, solely with such “political ethical” questions as the proper role of violence, the sphere of rights, or the definitions of criminality and aggression. Whether or not it is moral or immoral for “Smith” - the fellow excluded by the owner from the plank or the lifeboat - to force someone else out of the lifeboat, or whether he should die heroically instead, is not our concern, and not the proper concern of a theory of political ethics.[5]“
If you want to use the old dated terminology, Libertarianism is meta-normative, it establishes what you have a right to do. It does not say what you ought or should do. Which is precisely what those extreme hypotheticals ask. It only establishes whether your actions are justified or not. My response to those scenarios entails pointing this out, it is a personal decision. Which is why those questions go round in circles, "but what if that one person was Hitler etc.” Each person is going to value things differently and come up with a decision of action based on those judgements. Further: "Libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life… Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism." — Myth and Truth About Libertarianism, by Murray N. Rothbard
This is the clincher though if you're wanting to be 'value free', and realising that the author or this article above has it backwards:
“It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that ethical and legal theory need to be completely disentangled and that at the essence of what libertarianism is we find a legal position rather than an ethical position (sure, the legal position can and is combined with various ethical positions, but this does not make the two identical in content). Understanding what rights are (legal) is different than deciding how, whether and in what ways to actually respect them or not in action (ethical). Now when I look back at Rothbard, I am seeing that he effectively was already doing this (some passages above and elsewhere, even in Power and Market), but was still bogged down in the use of the word "ethics” in the effort to distinguish what he was talking about from economic theory (and this usage continues in Hoppe, with the word “ethics” subbing in for what I think is actually “property theory.”). Yet in looking at what they are actually presenting rather than some labels, it is much much more about legal content (definition of property rights), rather than whether or not one ought to violate or respect such rights (knowing what they are being a separate question) on ethical grounds.“ — Konrad Graf
I couldn’t recommend more highly the following journal article for anyone who actually wants to advance the Austro-Libertarian discussion: http://libertarianpapers.org/19-action-based-jurisprudence-praxeological-legal-theory-relation-economic-theory-ethics-legal-practice/
Just to wrap up the comment regarding the thrust of the original author’s article about going beyond the NAP for a ‘full case of liberty’:
“Libertarianism will get nowhere until we realize that there is and can be no “libertarian” culture. — Murray Rothbard, Left-opportunism: The case of S.L.S., part one, in Libertarian Vanguard, February 1981, p. 11.
