Natural Law, Rothbard Style
If we look at my 3, we will see that a human being is a combination of essence, accidents, and subjective well-being or happiness. These correspond to his powers, habits, and acts. A distinctive ethics can be built by looking at any of these three things. If we choose to look at happiness/acts, we will come up with a 4-sided ethical theory, consisting of (1-2) rule utilitarianism and (3-4) what I have tentatively decided to call “artistic integrity.” (I have yet to work out the latter half.) But we can examine human powers in isolation from their purpose, namely virtuous acts. If we do that, we will arrive at something very close to the Rothbardian natural law ethics. I will try to show how.
In examining human powers we are struck first and foremost by the primordial fact of one’s control over one’s body. I write that “the soul commands the body as a crane operator commands his machine, infallibly; while a human master commands his human slave through mere incentives of fear and reward.” In fact, in order for a master to control his slave, he, the master, has to control his own body first, because only through it can he influence the slave. Moreover, in order to execute the master’s command, the slave, too, has to control his own body! Now a master-slave ethics is not universalizable: it divides humanity into two arbitrary groups: those who control others and those who obey. Whatever it is, it is not an ethic for man as man.
(At this point we may ask, Why is this control a good thing? And answer, Because it allows one to tend to his needs, satisfy his desires. But this would be going away from the analysis of powers and into the ethics based on happiness/acts. So, we won’t be doing it here.)
If my body is being handled or attacked by another, then I am being used as a tool or an inanimate object, while the aggressor retains his humanity. This is again not an ethic for man as such. So, this kind of coercion must not be allowed; it is immoral. It is a very reasonable deduction to enshrine the goodness of self-ownership into law, to make illegal the immoral use of force. We are led immediately to the normative evaluation that one ought to own one’s own body so as to obtain a legal recognition of the natural exclusivity of his control of it. Now controlling the body allows one to control the external environment by moving particles of matter to and fro. Therefore, controlling objects requires a person to exclude others still more, lest the controller fails in his project, that is, fails in the exercise of his powers. Thus, one comes to own things, beside his body, which he uses for some purpose to mold the world according to his designs. If the thing that a person wants to appropriate is unowned, then he harms no one in taking ownership of it. But if it is owned, then one way for him to acquire it is to take it away from its current possessor by force. But this harms the current possessor. Hence the doctrine of initial appropriation of unowned goods: whoever comes first may lay claim on something in the state of nature (for what are the alternatives?), and subsequent transfers of ownership must be by his consent. In other words, all property must be justly acquired. And on we go deriving natural rights and duties in the manner of The Ethics of Liberty.
I’d like to move a little beyond Rothbard now and propose some precepts of human nature as it is constituted by its powers. For more power is metaphysically better than less power; power is a “great-making” property; it is something that makes its possessor good or noble or magnificent or even worthy of worship. The precepts are as follows:
1) Stay healthy, so that your body serves you well. Rothbard writes of Crusoe’s eating poisonous mushrooms: “If Crusoe, on the other hand, had known of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway — perhaps for “kicks” or from a very high time preference — then his decision would have been objectively immoral, an act deliberately set against his life and health.” (32) This judgment can be cashed out as involving a contradiction similar to what seems to happen in a suicide, and Rothbard proceeds to do precisely that. But an alternative view is that failing to look after one’s health is a “sin,” because it diminishes one’s power over oneself and nature. One becomes metaphysically worse.
The health in question is both 1a) of the controller, the mind, and 1b) of the controlled, the body.
2) Develop technology. Note that I do not say “develop your talents,” because that is a precept for good habits, while we are talking about powers. Technology is an extension of your body, enhancing its powers. For example, no matter how strong I am, I cannot uproot a large tree. But with a chainsaw, felling a tree is easy. Technology will be both natural and social. In the latter case we learn how best to use not merely physical objects but each other for our own goals. It might be argued that one might want to enhance his power by enslaving a lot of people. But I would reply that this is inappropriate social technology, in that it stupidly treats human beings as tools and machines, failing to squeeze much of them. The most efficient way for an arbitrary person to take advantage of other people is through a laissez-faire free market economy where slavery is simply not recognized. E.g., today “industry supplies the consumption of the masses again and again with new commodities hitherto unknown and makes accessible to the average worker satisfactions of which no king could dream in the past.” (Human Action, 605) In other words, slavery “does not work.”
3) Accumulate capital. Whereas technology represents “recipes” or means-ends connections, capital is the actual means to our ends. The more productive capital we as a society have, the greater our power over nature is.
Thus, given that power is the principle of all action, increasing human power over the world is a glorious endeavor and is for that reason a moral imperative for all human beings.