Notes on the Argumentation Ethics
1. Mitchell Jones writes: “Being alive surely presupposes access to food; but, just as surely, it does not presuppose that you have a right to access to food, or even that the particular food to which you have access is yours by right. (Consuming stolen food can sustain life and the ability to argue.)” This is reminiscent of Rothbard: “Similarly, if someone says that every man has a ‘natural right’ to three square meals a day, it is glaringly obvious that this is a fallacious natural law or natural rights theory; for there are innumerable times and places where it is physically impossible to provide three square meals for all, or even for the majority, of the population.” (The Ethics of Liberty, 43) But perhaps in order to argue as efficiently as possible, the debaters need three square meals a day. Has Hoppe proven too much again?
2. One can accept that he has no right to his body but keep using it in violation of his own norms. Or, as David Ramsay Steele argues, one can agree that he does have the right to his body but add that he opposes having this right: “It is mistaken to hold that having private property is being in favor of private property, or vice versa. Someone who owns private property might be against private property. Someone who owns no private property might be in favor of private property. Acting so as to exercise a right is not necessarily to claim or endorse that right, and does not commit one to favor that right.”
I don’t think this criticism works, however, because the right in question here is a natural right, derived from natural law, in this case a philosophical analysis of argumentation procedures. It’s not like this is a piece of positive legislation by Congress which the arguer wants repealed. It is just as absurd to oppose this law, Hoppe wants to say, as it is to oppose the law of gravity. You can abandon a particular item, by marking what was previously yours as “unowned,” but you can’t claim that you can’t in principle own anything or that no one can.
See also: a full critique.
Posted: March 17th, 2009 under Philosophy, Political.