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Jan. 18, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:10
2590 An Introduction to Libertarian Ethics

Stefan Molyneux and Stephan Kinsella speak with a student about the foundation of Libertarian Ethics.

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I don't know how we want to run this, Steph, Mr.
Molyneux.
So, I mean, I have the question laid out and some preface of how this all came about and how you want to run with it.
Yeah, let's do the question.
All right, so a little background on it is going to school and just listening to the academic nonsense happening all the time in terms of Teachers and students saying one thing and then dismissing a point such as profit.
And then right from there, they jump to another point and they profess how profit's good.
So for instance, I'm in a group for the legalization of marijuana.
Not that I really care for it per se, but past experience has given me reason to, you know, support the legalization.
So they'll show a video discussing the evils of capitalism and profit.
And how pharmaceutical companies block out the medicinal value of marijuana, etc., etc.
And then the next team will come along and say, well, this guy who wants to grow hemp for farm use, he can have all this profit and benefit all these people in society if the government would just let him do it.
So I see all this double-think, so to speak, going on.
And in terms of the professors, they don't even, as Maloney always says, you always say, you know, you've got to give the methodology and forget the conclusion, so to speak.
So the teacher will give a conclusion of why this theory she's going to expand upon, you know, altruism.
She'll give why it's such a good reason to be altruistic, and then she'll go provide it.
So she's already setting up the background for how the student should think, instead of having a discourse, a debate about why altruism is real or not real, or if it's good or bad, whatever be the case.
So that brought me to the question of morality.
And basically...
My question breaks down to, we can see ethics as in the interpersonal exchange of how individuals should interact and cooperate with each other or not cooperate with others.
But that's basically what it comes down to.
Whereas morality, as has been said through Nietzsche and other people, that's really more of a controlling mechanism.
And it's really not a...
I can't see the concrete evidence of morality.
Whereas with ethics, we're doing it right now.
Nobody had to force us to come onto the Skype chat.
We've all communicated through Facebook and been friendly with each other.
But morality really doesn't have an objective position, I don't think.
It just seems like it's a word that's thrown around where at least ethics can be shown.
Well, I mean, there's a lot of what you said.
I think that one of the things that always seems to happen with the word profit is, and this is an old objectivist argument that I think is very solid, is that people don't differentiate between free trade and what economists call rent-seeking.
So rent-seeking is when you attempt to use basically...
The advantage of the state or the power of the state for some economic advantage.
So you block, use the power of the state to create an embargo on other people.
You also use the power of the state to create licensing and monopolies so that you don't have people break ranks.
One of the big problems with monopolies is that the more you raise prices and the more you alienate customers, the more you invite competition and alternatives into the economic sphere, the greater incentive each member of that cartel has to break ranks and go and scoop up The only way that they can get these cartels to work is to make governments a license and protect and force everyone to use these cartels.
So there's rent-seeking, which is using the power of the state, and there is free trade.
And so this is why they say, well, pharmaceutical companies use these terrible state powers to do X, Y, and Z, and that's bad profit.
Right.
use the same word for both.
Like it's like using the word rape for rape and lovemaking.
It's really muddies the waters, which is kind of the point, I think.
So I don't know what great word there is to use.
I think rent seeking is a, you know, sounds like you're given up owning and you want to go rent a condo It's not a great word, I think, or a great phrase for it.
I don't know what a good word is.
So I think that's just important to differentiate.
Most people don't really.
They use the same word for both things, and that's kind of complicated and confusing.
But the altruistic argument goes, it's always funny to me when people who get paid for doing something insist on altruism.
I mean, the professors, it's like, if you're an altruist, just give your lectures away for free.
And if you want to ask for donations, you know, like those of us out here in the wild west of the free market do.
But somebody who wants tenure and a paycheck and summers off and sabbaticals and so on, talking about altruism is, I don't know, I just I always prefer people who lead by example.
So I just wanted to sort of touch on those things.
Steph, is there anything you wanted to add to that?
No, I don't disagree with any of that.
On the moral question, I mean I have some Randian influence like you do.
To my mind, morals is a practical thing in the sense that it's a set of rules that we consult to guide our behavior for a certain purpose.
And presumably that's to lead a happier or more successful life.
So I guess I would say let's step back from the social context and just ask whether the question of morals would ever enter into morality.
like on a desert island, like Crusoe.
And I think it would.
I think some things you would do would be moral and some would be immoral.
So obviously morality and its root has nothing to do with other people.
It's just how it applies in a social context.
Go ahead.
Can you give an example of the Robinson Crusoe?
What would be immoral for this single guy on the island?
What would the case be?
Well, assuming you're alive, which is the Randian sort of standard, you're living on the desert island.
You want to survive.
You have certain pride in yourself, and you want to live as a human, as whatever your nature is.
I don't know what else you could want to live as.
And so you have to take into account reality and your context or situation, and you should do certain things to further your life.
Maybe you can live a life of contemplation.
You need shelter.
You need food.
And so if you do something that's lawful or wasteful or short-sighted for no good reason, I think it would be immoral because you're following a rule that would harm your… Your reasonable self-interest or your long-term self-interest, and you can call that immoral because it's not the kind of rule that you want to follow that's going to further your life in this context on this desert island.
And when other people arrive, then we have interpersonal considerations, and so that's why when morality gets complicated, but really it's just an application of morality, I believe.
That's interesting.
I was just thinking about that.
It's never really...
I know Ayn Rand has the examples of the guy who lands in the spaceship and he gets sort of...
Does he stay in there and just huddle and hope for the best that he's to go out and explore his surroundings?
But the two...
I mean, to me, at least the two major components of...
Good moral philosophy, which is non-aggression principle and property rights, can't be violated in isolation.
Like, you can't initiate the use of force against a tree.
I guess if it's falling on you and you are a quick ninja nunchuck guy.
And you can't violate the property rights of a fern.
So I think that you would need other people in order to violate the two major tenets of, I think, good moral philosophy, non-aggression principle, and respect for property rights.
I think in terms of the Randian argument that to just sort of lie there and die is kind of ridiculous and silly, but it doesn't actually violate either property rights or the non-aggression principle to do that.
I agree with all that, but the question, you could say that it's immoral.
In the sense that if you have chosen to live, then you're not doing what you need to do to live.
If you really want to choose suicide, then there's really – as Rand calls it, it's a premoral choice whether to live or amoral or premoral choice.
But yeah, the interesting question is about interpersonal relationships.
To my mind, the interesting question is whether these interpersonal norms that we talk about like the non-aggression principle, whether they are what Rasmussen and Den Oil, these two Randian sort of neo-Randian philosophers… Call meta-norms or whether they are actual norms.
In other words, are they advice directed to the actual person?
In other words, is it immoral if you violate someone's rights?
Is it immoral if you violate the non-aggression principle?
Or when we say that the non-aggression principle is justified, are we simply saying this is the type of social rule that we can justify?
So that if you violate someone's rights, then punishment or some response against you… And I think it matters how we decide this question, and I lean towards the latter that it's not necessarily immoral to violate the non-adgression principle.
I think it's a principle that we can say ought to inform what the socially recognized legal rules should be, and you can't really deny that.
You can't argue coherently against it, but in a certain narrow case, in an emergency case or in a… A case where you have to choose between saving someone's life or trespassing someone's property.
You might morally choose to do one or the other and to pay the price for it.
I don't know.
I mean to me it seems like to say that rights is a subset of morals may be wrong.
Maybe it's an intersecting set rather than a subset.
My approach – sorry, just to – Sort of tailwind of that.
My approach is that the sort of four major bans in every moral system I've ever heard of, a ban against rape, theft, murder, and assault, what I like about these is if you just put them forward as principles, or as I call it, sort of universally preferable behavior, if you just take the example of theft, and you think of two guys, Bob and Doug, in a room, And Bob has an iPad.
And if you say that I have a rule called theft is universally preferable behavior, in other words, everybody should want to steal, Then it actually can't be implemented.
It logically self-detonates because theft is by definition like rape, assault, and murder.
It's something that's unwanted, right?
I mean, if you want sex, it's lovemaking.
If you don't want sex but it happens anyway, then it's rape.
And if you want to share your iPad with someone, then it's charity, generosity, or sharing.
If they take it from you by deception or force, then it is theft.
So you can't universalize Theft is a universally preferable behavior because then everybody should want to steal, but if everybody wants to steal, it's no longer theft because in order for stealing to occur, one person has to not want it.
Same thing with rape and assault and murder.
So what I do like is that I don't like arguments from effect.
I don't like arguments from society functions better if...
Because that is to assume that all human beings have the same motivation.
And humanity is like a jungle.
It's like an ecosystem.
It's like saying that to not be eaten is the best thing for all animals.
And that's not always the case.
So I think that if you just look at it for me from a purely rational standpoint and say...
What can we define that can be achieved by all people at all times?
Then you find that bans on rape, theft, murder and assault work really, really well in that and violations of that or when you start to propose things like murder is universally preferable behavior, then it doesn't work.
And this also, I think, goes towards You know, negative ethics, i.e.
thou shalt nots rather than thou shalts, right?
Because I think non-aggression people, non-aggression principle and respect for property rights definitely fall into the thou shalt not category.
And that's good because sleeping people then can be moral.
I call it sort of the coma test in the book, which is that if you have a moral rule and somebody in a coma or somebody who's sleeping or somebody who's dead is sort of found to be immoral, you know, like if a rule called Help the poor.
Well, a guy in a coma can't help the poor and all that.
But a guy in a coma certainly is not violating anyone's persons or property.
So I think it kind of dovetails kind of nicely.
That's sort of the approach that I take.
But sorry, that was just a tail end bit.
But Harrison, if you wanted to go ahead.
Yeah.
How does, for what it's worth, how would either argumentation ethics or UPB, just for the listeners and viewers, how would that actually work with a Robinson Crusoe.
I mean, because rape cannot be performed if there's only one individual, and theft cannot be because there must be property beforehand for someone to own it.
So these things, you can't argue with someone that's not there.
So, again, the morality thing, which I keep getting at, and Steph, Molyneux, you had the video, I don't know if it's called Bad is Good or Evil, or Good is Evil.
Good is Evil.
Yeah, with the monkey.
That was very influential to me and a lot of my friends because it really just showed that The hypocrisy of taxation is good and theft is bad, and that's kind of how I see the instance of morality, where you have these edicts or these dictates coming down from above, and it's always in this hazy fog where you don't know what morality is.
Sorry, just for those who haven't seen it, let me get two seconds on that.
So the argument of the video is that we have this society where we have these rules which we teach to children, don't use force, don't steal, blah, blah, blah.
And then what happens is those in power get to do it all the time.
So the question is, why do we even have this thing called morality?
And my argument is that morality was invented by very clever thieves so that they can convince other people to not steal.
Because the more you can convince other people to not steal if you are still dedicated to stealing, the more you can convince other people to not steal, the better off you're going to be.
Like if everyone steals everything, everybody starves to death and we're all dead.
If you can be the only—if there's only one thief in the world, you have the best possible life because nobody's going to protect anything and they'll say, oh, I guess I misplaced it or I guess space aliens beamed it up or something like that.
So the argument is that thieves generally will grow until such time as they begin to do real harm to society and then they're sort of culled with society and it's very negative.
But if you're a clever thief, you tell everyone else not to steal while creating an opposite moral rule for yourself called the state or the church or whatever it is.
And then you get a monopoly of power on thieving while convincing everyone else not to steal.
In other words, to trade and be productive, which gives you more to steal from them.
Now, the question of Robinson Crusoe, I don't really think that you can.
I think you can be impractical.
If you, you know, I think, I don't want to put word into Steph's mouth, but I think that he's saying, if you want to live, it's impractical to just sit there and eat sand.
So, I think you can be impractical, but I don't think you can be, I don't think you can be evil in solitary, in a solitary situation, because you cannot initiate the use of force against another person, and you cannot violate another person's property rights if you're in a solitary situation.
Right, so to Kinsella, very quickly.
Go ahead, go ahead.
Okay.
Two can sell very quick.
I mean, it's argumentation ethics because there's a rationale and a process and a logical, deductive understanding of why, when we engage in debate, that these certain principles or these certain proofs, so to speak, they become aware to us that we're engaging and understanding that your body, my body, there's sound waves.
So that's called argumentation ethics because of the process behind it, whereas morality, there's no process to what morality is.
It's just, as Molyneux was saying, there seems like there's just this It's a hazy fog of what it is in the time, and that's what it is.
But ethics, you can have a rigorous structure behind it to prove or to better show why ethics is legitimate versus morality, which I don't see what morality can be.
I think I agree with all that if we are using similar definitions for these terms, which gets to the importance of definitions and clear terms.
Ethics and morality have sort of interlaced meaning sometimes.
I mean sometimes professionals like lawyers – let's say you have legal or medical ethics, and they – so to them ethics means a narrow set of norms that guide a given profession or narrow interest.
I think in our sort of endeavor, morality has connotations linked with religion and with right and wrong and punishment and God and these kinds of things and natural law.
And I agree there are problems with all that connotation.
And ethics has to do more with interpersonal ethics, like how do we live together as a species?
And that's what concerns us as libertarians.
So in a sense, I would agree with you that in the Robin Crusoe example, UPB, as I understand it, and argumentation ethics have almost no applicability.
In a Robin Crusoe land or in a land where you're living with animals, the only question is a technical question.
How do I survive?
Or if even in a sense, if you live with other people but they're all basically might makes right types.
They won't respect your rights.
They're basically uncivilized.
In that case, if they're acting like an animal, you have no choice but to regard them as an animal.
And then everyone becomes – how you regard these other people and how you deal with means in this world is a technical question only.
It's just a factual question.
So I would say that… Every human being, whether they live in society or alone, has to employ scarce means to survive.
If there are no other people, there are no moral – there are no interpersonal ethical questions about it.
You don't have to bother about whether you're justified in using a given resource if you're Crusoe on the island.
You just use whatever you can, and you try to survive as best you can.
But when it comes to living in society with other people, that's when the question of ethics – In our sense arises, and we want to say who is justified in using this given resource when something that there's a potential conflict over because presumably in the UPB context, in the argumentation context, in the estoppel context, in other related contexts, we're assuming a context of discourse, of peace, of civilization, of rational discussion and inquiry about, look, how are we going to live in peace with each other?
How are we going to all survive and prosper?
I value myself, but I value you too.
I value you because I want to live in society with you.
So we come together to seek rules by which we can use these scarce resources in a peaceful, cooperative, productive way.
And the answer for us is that the economics tells us and common sense and consistency and logic tells us that the libertarian rules are the only ones that really make sense.
It's a pretty simple set of rules, even simpler than Richard Epstein laid out in his Simple Rules for a Complex World, just… First ownership and contract and trespass and crime.
I mean basically if you have these principles, you can determine who should have the right to control a given resource, and that is an ethical issue.
It's still a question about whether it's a metaethical or whether it's a personal ethical issue in my view, which is just an interesting sort of side question because you could imagine like the Les Miserables case.
Jean Valjean is hungry, starving.
He needs to survive.
He steals a loaf of bread.
action by stealing the loaf of bread?
Well, he committed an action that violated rules that we would agree should be respected in society, property rights.
But did his choice to disregard that rule in his personal case, was it immoral?
I don't know.
Maybe that's a metaphysical question that's beyond the realm of political philosophy.
It always drives me a little bit nuts, though, when moralists like Victor Hugo talk about should Jean Valjean steal a loaf of bread at a time when France has an empire and is defending slavery and is taxing the peasants and forcing them to work on the land.
Like, it's just insane, the amount of immorality that was going on around that produces that problem.
I will focus on the slave-on-slave violence rather than the slave-master violence.
That drives me a little, Betty.
Sorry, you were going to say.
I agree.
Kinsella, so – but what I'm getting at with this is – and I think your point brings up is that we don't really need the idea of morality per se in deciding if there's a loaf of bread, if it's being immoral to steal it because argumentation ethics, doesn't that necessarily put forth?
It undercuts morality by just saying – by showing how property through all the reasons – the ways that we know of argumentation ethics.
You're already – you don't need that word morality per se to show how it's wrong to steal a piece of bread.
I sense that you're detecting – you're equating in your mind morality with sort of the religious natural law type natural rights tradition, which may be fair.
And if so, I think you're right.
I mean Hoppe says in his articles about this and his chapters and his books that there are some problems with the natural law way of thinking.
There is a human nature, but it's very vague and diffuse, and you can only get so much out of natural law.
If only because of Hume's is-ought dichotomy, which is that even if you say what our nature is, it doesn't tell you what we should do.
You have to have a normative step to get there, which is what I think UPB and these transcendental approaches try to get at.
And the only time that really arises in a social context is when you have society and you have people that could have conflict with each other.
And with some subset of society or maybe most of society, they want to get along.
So they want to come up with a solution that works for everyone.
We can all get along, benefit from being part of society.
And when you have that conversation, you're having people adopt and agree with certain basic norms of the entire process of collaboration, discussion, learning… And so in a way, I think you're right.
You could dispense with this whole moral nomenclature, this whole moral overtone and just talk about rules that I can – to me, the fundamental concept is the concept of justification or justified.
When we come together, we're trying to find a rule that we can settle on together, that we can all agree is fair.
Now, what does fair mean?
I think we mean you can state the rule or the proposition, and you can come up with a good reason for it, some reason that is grounded in reality, in nature, something we can all recognize, something we can all accept as true.
To me, that is what justification is.
So we're trying to find a justified rule, and what UPB and argumentation ethics try to show is that if you reflect upon this process, you will realize that only certain types of norms could ever be justified.
Now, that only matters to people that care about justification, but if people don't care about justification, then we're doomed as a race.
We're not going to have society, but apparently we do have… All right, go ahead, Stephanie.
Oh, you're very good at reading body language.
It's very subtle.
Well, I mean, but the only dangerous stuff about morality is the institutional kind.
I mean, the only really dangerous aspect of moral violations are the institutional ones.
Because, I mean, just about everyone says don't steal.
And, of course, if someone does come and steal from you...
You've got self-defense, right?
I mean, the cost of going to steal from someone is that they may be armed, that they may have a pit of alligators around their house, that they might have trapdoors and Kato and spears and nanchucks, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?
So, as far as personal theft goes, I mean, I don't know.
I guess I've had maybe three things stolen from me in my whole life, one of which was my heart from my wife.
Anyway, but there is not much that gets stolen from me.
I had a bike stolen, I had a, you know, whatever, right?
That doesn't really concern me in terms of that private theft.
You're leaving taxes out.
Come on.
You're leaving taxes out.
Well, no, but see, but taxes, you know, they're taking 50-55% of my income every year, even with some fairly decent tax planning.
It's pretty brutal up here.
Yeah.
And so, to me, the value of ethics is not the, you know, the lifeboat scenarios, the hanging from a flagpole scenarios, the Jean Valjean scenarios, because the ethical violations, you know, we always, as doctors, you want to focus on the greatest diseases that you have the most capacity to cure, right?
I mean, that's, you know, and so...
For me, the focus, at least the value of UPB, is that the arguments from universality are put forward by those in power, right?
So, I mean, just for a tiny example, healthcare.gov, what does it say right underneath?
It says, welcome to the marketplace, you know?
It's like the.gov and marketplace are complete opposites.
They're not anything to do with each other.
They're total opposites, you know?
You know, it is literally like the rapist saying, welcome to your date.
You know, it is not voluntary.
It is coercive.
And so they're always putting things forward, those in power, putting things forward in moral and voluntary terms, right?
Social contract, you get benefits from the government, therefore you owe the government money just like you would your credit card company and so on, right?
So, to me, where we focus in on ethics, if we are looking at it sort of really objectively, is we say, well, let's just take what everyone accepts as universal and actually universalize it.
You know, that to me is really the essence.
Can you prove that theft is immoral?
Well, it depends what you define by immoral.
I think you can very easily prove.
In fact, my daughter is very good at UPP now, and she's taught me a few things about it.
You can teach a four-year-old That everyone can't value stealing at the same time.
That everyone can't want to steal everything at the same time.
That's easy peasy.
And of course, if we want ethics, it's one of the problems I have with some of the ethical theories that float around.
It's like, you've got to explain it to kids, otherwise you've just got to punish them, right?
And that's no good, right?
So it has to be something that a four-year-old can understand.
UPB can be gotten by a four-year-old.
In fact, she got it at three and a half.
And so what's great about it is it really focuses, it can prove that theft can't be universally preferable behavior, but since ethics is fundamentally about universality, ethics is to philosophy as science is to the universe.
It is a way of organizing in a consistent way universals that are valuable to us, or at least hopefully valuable to us.
And so we take what everyone accepts already, we universalize it, and that pushes back The entire process of institutional immorality that is the fundamental danger that we face.
The fundamental danger is not someone's going to steal from us in an alley.
That you can avoid, that you can defend against, that you can deal with very easily as a society.
You can't deal with inflation.
You can't deal with quantitative easing.
You can't deal with national debts.
You can't deal with war.
You can't deal with taxation.
You can't deal with any of that stuff.
And so really just universalizing what everyone accepts already is what is really powerful.
But that is, as I've argued before, the exact opposite of why morality was invented.
Morality was invented to provide a monopoly on immorality and to convince other people to act in a moral manner so they have more to steal from.
Uh, so you're kind of reversing the whole point of it, which is one of the reasons why it's such an uphill battle.
Yep.
Let me see what, uh, Stephan, uh, Kinsella, if you have anything but, uh, self-ownership.
Self-ownership.
Well, by the way, I agree with everything you just said.
I mean, I, I think we're on the same page, uh, Stephan, um, It makes perfect sense to me.
Self-ownership?
You had something about self-ownership, Steph, if you wanted to talk about that, or Harrison, if you have another question.
Yeah, I mean, so, Molyneux, I know a little more about your background of schooling in terms of your previous speaks on academic nonsense going on, but Kinsella, the same thing.
What have you...
I know you were engineering and all that, but the amount of stuff in the philosophy department that I run into in terms of Literally not going one question forward of when they say, well, we pay for taxes and therefore we reap all these benefits.
It's like they don't even go the one step saying, well, what if the government did not enforce taxes?
Who would pay it?
Because nobody would be paying it or the vast majority would pull out because why would they give their money to...
Well, that can be easily answered by, if I kidnap someone and feed them, do I get to send them a bill after they get free?
Of course not, because I have a monopoly on the provision of food to them after I have kidnapped them, so clearly they don't owe me money for the food and shelter I gave them while I had them kidnapped.
And so the fact is that we're born into this situation where the government has a monopoly.
It's very, very difficult to leave the country.
And so the government has a monopoly, and basically they're feeding you while they've got you captured.
Does that mean that you then owe them something?
Of course not.
I mean, we would never accept that in any other situation.
Although one of the most famous so-called libertarians, Robert Nozick, might disagree, right?
His whole argument...
When I read Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I thought it was a pro-anarchy book until I got done with it.
I mean he comes up with this convoluted argument that the dominant agency can arise and it can stop you from self-help, and it can put down the other competing agencies.
But because it's doing this to you, it's got to give you a benefit, which is to include you in the agency's protection and presumably then tax you for it.
I mean so it's this bizarre… Common law theory of what we call unjust enrichment.
If you do something accidentally to help someone, like you paint the wrong house under unjust enrichment, you can actually charge the person for the value or the equitable value of the paint job even though you didn't – they didn't hire you to do it.
I mean there's all these bizarre theories that if you do someone a quote favor, even if they don't agree to it, you can – they have to pay you for it, which is basically the idea of the state.
Yeah, except that still remains to be a tiny – I mean, that's an accidental tiny subset of society, whereas the state, of course, is by far the most dominant coercive institution.
So it's like saying it's nighttime because the sun has a sunspot.
To me, that just is kind of missing the ratio.
Let me ask a question.
Steph, what are your thoughts on self-ownership?
Well, I think, and I think, I'm no expert on Hoppy's arguments, but I think that the argument that you have to exercise self-ownership in order to make any kind of statement to anyone, right?
I have to exercise power over my brain, my vocal cords, my Italian-style gestures.
I have to do all of that.
And I accept that I have produced an argument.
So if I disagree with someone else on the call, I'll say, well, Harrison or Steph, I disagree with you because you have produced that argument.
I will say, your argument is false because, or I think your argument is false because.
So I have to exercise self-ownership in order to produce sound, produce an argument, and everybody in the argument recognizes that I have produced that argument and it's my argument.
Like, I've literally had people who will say to me, Steph, your argument that you own the effects of your actions is incorrect.
And it's like, The first word should give you a clue that you're incorrect.
You just said your.
In other words, I am responsible for the argument I have produced.
It's my argument.
So I think that I'm very much one for don't argue the abstracts.
Look at what you're doing first and then argue the abstracts.
Right.
As far as I know, I don't actually think we disagree on stuff.
Self-ownership just means we should own our lives and our bodies or really just our bodies.
I just think there's a little ambiguity in the literature in the term self-ownership because the term self is hotly debated.
I mean that's a philosophical issue.
What's the self?
If you're religious, you think it means a soul, and there's all these other things.
So if you use self-ownership as the concept that grounds the basic libertarian right – You can get into disagreement with people because you're not starting from the same premises.
The bottom line is if we believe in aggression, we believe there should be a prohibition against physical invasion of the borders of your body.
So technically when we say self-ownership, I think what we really mean is body ownership.
You mean you own your body, which just means people can't commit aggression against you.
But I think what you're getting at— But, you know, I have grown and watered and fed my kidneys, lo, these 47 years.
And if I have grown, fed, and watered a tree, then it's fundamentally no different.
It happens to be inside my skin versus outside my skin.
It's still property.
And, of course, lots of libertarians have these great arguments, which is, you know, there are some people who have no eyes.
We all have two.
So let's redistribute eyes.
And everyone says that's horrifying.
But the redistribution of income is fundamentally no different.
I don't like any artificial dichotomies.
And what's inside my skin that I have grown, fed, watered, and nurtured, and in a sense created over time or continued over time, it's no different that it's under my skin versus outside my skin.
It is still an effect of my actions.
So self-ownership and owning the effect of actions are axiomatic, I think, to any kind of debate.
And from there, I think moral responsibility and property rights are not even a hop, skip, and a jump away.
I don't – I would word it a little differently, but I don't think I disagree with the substance of that.
I think that – I do think there's a difference, like a categorical difference between the ownership of objects outside of your body and yourself because the justifications are slightly different, but they're basically the same thing.
You have a right to control your body for a certain reason.
You have a right to control scarce resources out there in the world for a certain reason.
When you talk about you own the effects of reaction, I think you use that broad term to cover two things, which is fine, but they're – so you own it to justify ownership of an object like if I till the soil of an unowned piece of land, then I own that land.
That means I have a – what should be a legally recognized property right and the exclusive right of control over that resource, which means someone shouldn't invade it.
They shouldn't use it without my permission, just like my body.
But you also use it – To talk about responsibility, like if I commit a tort or I commit an invasion with my resources, my body, whatever, and I hurt someone else, now I'm responsible for that action.
And you call that ownership of the effects of your actions, and I think that's perfectly fine.
What you're saying is actions have consequences.
Sometimes those consequences mean you now are the owner of this resource.
You have the right to use it.
And you're also saying that you have responsibility for actions that you commit, and that's fine.
I just use ownership more for the first category than for the second just as a legal term, but I think the concept is still the same.
So I'm actually not sure… I like the efficiency of using...
Because I think fundamentally what's important about what we do is what we create.
So my sort of basic argument is property is not something we find.
It's something we create.
Like if I go and fish to take a fish out of the bottom of a lake, that fish, for all intents and purposes, did not exist in a usable form.
So I've created that fish in a usable form.
And so I've created something.
Therefore, I'm responsible for it.
It's not like, you know, it's like magic kind of thing.
Oh, look, I've created this unicorn.
Therefore, it's mine.
Well, what do you mean responsible for it?
I mean, when you say...
In a sense, an unowned resource doesn't really exist as a good.
It's not a good, really.
Nothing's a good until someone regards it subjectively as a good and demonstrates in their action that's good.
So in a way, I agree with you.
When you find and homestead an unowned resource, in a sense, you create it because you bring about a good that didn't exist as a good before because no one regarded it as a good by demonstrating with their actions that they regarded it as a good.
But what do you mean that you're responsible for it, too?
What do you mean by that, that you're responsible for the things that you create?
Well, so what I mean is that if I go strangle a hobo again, then I have created that death.
I have created that death in the same way that I would create a house.
I have changed external circumstances through my choice and actions into a different state than they were before.
One obviously has hopefully some value in terms of property like a house and one is an evil action of killing someone.
But I like having the same kind of phraseology.
And the reason I like that is that for socialists, they will say if you go kill someone, that's bad.
And I say, okay, so I am responsible for the effects of my actions.
I have created a death that I'm responsible for.
And they'd have to say yes, right?
So you can hook people into property rights by getting them to accept that which they already recognize is bad.
Like if I go strangle a guy, then I've murdered him and I'm responsible for that.
And it's like, okay, well then if I go build a house, I've created that and I'm responsible.
I own that in the same way I own the murder.
You don't charge my hands.
You don't charge the guy who was driving by when I did it.
You charge me because I have created that through my body.
I own that murder.
That's why I'm responsible.
I have to pay for it through whatever.
I also own the house.
So I think it's a nice way of helping to bridge people from moral responsibility to property rights, which again, if you say own the effects of your actions, it's like that two-headed hydra that gets them from both sides.
Yeah, I think if you clarify what you mean by ownership, and it's pretty clear from the context, I don't disagree with that.
The only problem I had, I thought when you said like if you create a fish by catching the fish, you own responsibility for the fish.
I thought you were implying subtly a strict liability theory of liability.
This is my geek libertarian legal side.
And I don't think you are because I have trouble with strict liability.
For example, let's suppose you create a gun.
Wait, are you accusing me of subtlety?
I must admit that this is actually a first for me.
I apologize.
But I think, just as a point of clarification, I think you would agree with me that if you create a gun...
Out of metal that you created by finding it, and you own this metal, and you own a gun.
And then someone, say, breaks into your house and steals the gun, and they use the gun to kill someone.
You're not necessarily liable for the act of murder committed by the thief of your gun, which would be an implication of a sort of non-subtle… Strict liability theory, which I was worried your language was implying, but I don't think you are.
I just – I think you have to be careful not to say you're responsible for your property because then you could imply that whatever happens by anyone else using your property is a tort that you're responsible for.
And I think you're only responsible for your own actions.
You're only responsible for your own actions, not for actions other people commit, even if they use your property.
Oh, absolutely, for sure.
And we recognize this, of course, if you're not in control of your property, then you're not responsible in the same way that if I have epilepsy and I thump someone in the face, I don't get charged for assault because I'm actually not even in control of my own body at that time.
And of course, the person who steals your gun and commits a murder has committed two immoralities, the theft.
I would certainly say that the causality does not come back to the individual.
That's a great clarification.
For Molyneux, this is where it stems from.
I initially was listening to one of the call-in shows, and another person called in giving Kinsella's argumentation towards it, which was ownership.
And the person who called you said something along the lines of that they take ownership for it.
They were to punch an individual in the arm.
The bruise, they therefore own the bruise.
Or if they spray a statue with graffiti, they therefore were owning the statue because of the effects of their actions and their ownership of it.
I don't know if you remember that call-in.
And it got very heated quickly, but it really wasn't as objective as it should have been.
And I don't know if he was kind of skewing it.
To try to hit you in the wrong way or not, but I brought it up with Kinsella because there was the question of responsibility versus ownership, and I think that clarified it fairly well.
Well, let me just say, I've heard Stefan talk many times on this.
I haven't heard every one of your 17,000 amazing podcasts, but I've heard you talk about this many times.
Well, it's okay.
We can wait for you to catch up and continue.
It's a daily activity.
I'm doing a lot of walking and walking.
But I've never had trouble understanding what you meant.
I know that you're subtly emphasizing – you're using the word ownership in your sense as responsibility.
Like you own that, and I totally understand that.
I think it's – you're not writing an article with footnotes.
I mean so I've never had trouble.
I think if people have trouble with it, they either don't get it or they're trying to be disingenuous because it's pretty clear that you're talking about responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
Well, and people get upset with me about that because they say your argument is incorrect, where they've just accepted.
You know, again, I think this is what Hoppe's argument is as well, is that if you stop and think about what you're doing, you can answer most of these questions.
You know, instead of diving straight off into what...
Ayn Rand used to call philosophizing in midstream.
Instead of diving off into all these abstract questions, stop and look in the mirror and see what you're doing and all of the axioms and premises that you accept in the very act of communicating with someone, and you'll be able to solve almost all of your problems just by looking at that.
Rights and obligations are what we call correlatives in philosophy, right?
They're two sides of the same coin.
So once you get someone to admit, and they usually do, There's a property right.
Once we establish that there's a property right, like you said earlier, a negative right even.
If you get someone to admit that there is a property right in this resource or even in this person's body, then what that means is you have an obligation not to invade it.
But that has a meaning to say that too.
It doesn't just mean you have an obligation not to do it.
It means that if you do it, certain consequences arise from that.
If no consequences arise from my invasion of someone else's property rights, then it's not really a property right that makes any difference.
But then, to me, that goes to consequentialism, which is a problem.
What I would say is that you cannot have, as a universal value, the unwanted invasion of other people's persons and property, because it can't be logically sustained.
I mean, obviously, there are times, you know, someone...
Yeah, so I would say the consequences is always, I think, the great black hole of libertarian thinking.
And the reason is, is because it is obviously so positive for the vast majority of human beings for there to be property rights and the non-aggression principle.
For the sociopaths and so on, it's really quite a negative.
So I try to always try and avoid the consequentialist side and just say you can't sustain that as a logical argument that we can have unwanted invasions of persons and property.
No, I'm not talking about some physical consequence that necessarily happens in the consequentialist sense.
I'm actually trying to support your argument by saying that If you invade someone's property rights, there is a responsibility, a moral or an ethical responsibility to make restitution or to stop it or to be punished or whatever.
The point is there's an ethical normative consequence.
It has an implication is all I'm saying.
The implication of violating civil rights… Of being a trespasser, and the consequence or the implication is that now you're a trespasser, and that means something.
It means that you have a responsibility to make restitution, let's say, to the victim or something like that.
So when you say that you own the consequences of your actions, what you're saying is you're just stating the implication of the property right of the victim… The implication is that if you choose to violate these publicly visible borders on purpose and you harm this person by manipulating their property without their consent, then you have – you own the responsibility in your sense to make restitution or to be responsible in some sense.
That's all I mean.
I don't mean consequentialism.
I'm trying not to mean that because I have similar qualms as you do about consequentialism.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the existing system serves someone like Barack Obama extraordinarily well.
I mean, all that power, all that money, I mean, gosh, it's very juicy.
Now, I'd like to just dip back if we could, because this is one of the major bugaboos of ethical philosophy that short-circuits a lot of people's brains, myself included, for many years, which was Hume's famous is-ought dichotomy, which is, of course, that you can't say how things should be out of any description of how they are.
And I think a lot of people feel that this means that all ethics are culturally relative and subjectivist or consequentialist or relativist or all that kind of stuff because you cannot get an ought out of an is.
And I think the closest analogy is you have to put an if in front of things.
So is science better than mysticism?
Well, yes.
I mean, for a priest, mysticism is probably better than science.
For a scientist or for somebody who wants to make But you always have to put an if in front of things.
Like if you want to get reproducible results, you have to use science.
And if you want to build a church and have people pay for it, then you want to have mysticism or something like that.
That, I think, is one of the great challenges for people.
It really has infested and infected, I think, our minds so much that we really – I think it's one of the root causes of relativism and all this kind of stuff that I think is a big problem.
Where do you guys sit with that question?
Well, I'll say I kind of agree with you on this.
But I would say – look, I've got a couple of Aristotelian friends who have this idea – … of what they call an asertoric hypothetical imperative.
So you're saying if-then, that's the hypothetical imperative like if you want this, then this.
It's not a categorical imperative like you should want this no matter what.
And I think it dovetails with Ayn Rand's view and also with the universalizability of your UPB idea.
It's – asertoric means that you're not saying if-then.
You're saying since then.
You're saying since you evidently do value these things… The following follows, and the thing is that no rational conversation between beings that are respecting each other's space for the purpose of the conversation could ever deny certain basic norms.
So you do have to inject norms to build upon them, but those norms are injected by the process of people being civilized and having a social relationship with each other and trying to have a rational discourse to solve a problem.
So I think that It is if-then or maybe since then in an ascitoric sense, but I don't think that's a problem.
And I think that science – Mises, for example, was an if-then kind of guy.
If you want to have peace, prosperity, we need to have a free market because he was – he understood free market economics.
But the thing is this problem is almost a non-problem because you rarely meet someone who will admit to – in front of an audience that they do not favor – Peace and prosperity.
I mean, you really never meet anyone like that.
Never.
So you don't even have to prove that they're contradictory if they deny it, because no one really ever denies it.
Oh, you've got to spend a little more time around deep ecologists.
They want us to all go back to the caves.
So there are some, for sure.
There are some.
But these guys, we can treat like the gorillas and the elephants and the technical problems, I believe.
So anyway.
And Harrison, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?
No, I just, my initial question was answered, and I feel like we moved along pretty nicely, and I mean, if you guys got to leave, I'm glad we got to do this.
Let me just do two sacks, if I can.
Let me do two sacks on the is-all problem, because it's one of these ones that's bent my brain into a kaleidosopic mode.
Can you tell us to finish up, or did you get your rest out?
No, let me just do two sacks, and then I'll let Steph finish up, but...
The is-or dichotomy, I think, is obviously valid.
I mean, we don't like it when people get killed, but nature doesn't revolt against it, right?
In fact, one of the reasons we're alive, in fact, the only reason we're alive is because people have died before us, right?
That's the deal, right?
And of course, death is a part of evolution and efficiency and so on.
So there's nothing, you know, we are horrified by war, but nature just like, fine, you know, just whatever it does.
So I would certainly accept that.
But I think there's two ways around it.
The first is to say, if you say there is an is-ought dichotomy, you've actually just created, you've actually just bypassed the is-ought dichotomy or solved it.
Because when I say something that people perceive violates the is-ought dichotomy, they say you can't do that.
In other words, it's an is-ought not.
And once you've got an is-ought not, you've got an is-ought.
Yeah, yeah, they're introducing normative statements into their criticism in the first place.
Right.
So the moment you criticize someone for violating the is-ought dichotomy, you have just created and you've solved the is-ought dichotomy because they ought not to violate the is-ought dichotomy just based on the very nature of reality and the fact that the universe has no preferences and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
So I think that's sort of one way around it.
And the other one, I think, of course, which I defer to Hoppy, is that if you use language, you cannot claim that language is meaningless.
If you talk to another human being, you cannot say there is no such thing as other human beings.
And we're in this Cartesian demon's fish tank of radical brain experiments where everything's being fed to us through wires or some sort of matrix.
So the very act of expressing rational, coherent, hopefully thought to another human being solves so much of the is-or dichotomy and that you cannot engage in a debate without accepting the premises of a debate.
And most fundamentally, that reason and evidence is infinitely superior to force and fraud.
I mean, nobody comes into a debate saying, you know, if you don't agree with me, I'm going to strangle you.
So I think those two things can do a lot to solve, if not really repudiate the is-ought dichotomy.
And I'd really invite people to focus on that, because if you believe that there's no shoulds out of reality, no shoulds out of human interaction, then it is very easy to slide into that pit of relativism, which I think is so fundamentally dangerous to a society.
I agree, and I'm a...
Personally, I'm a big opponent of relativism and moral skepticism and these things.
I think that the is-ought problem is not really a problem.
It's just making you aware of the logical structure and the difference between norms and factual statements, and don't smuggle in a norm without – it's just the danger of equivocation.
It's simply saying, look, let's recognize what the norms that we're basing our reasoning on, and usually they're norms we all agree on, or maybe they're norms that you couldn't even deny without performative contradiction because you're engaging in a cooperative process.
But the point is that this is not really usually a problem.
We pretty much all, as humans, agree on certain basic norms.
The rational endeavor, the endeavor to talk about norms and rights pretty much always comes down in my view to a few things.
It doesn't come down to a dispute over the basic norms because no one is really going to deny these basic norms, peace, cooperative, prosperity, peace if we can achieve it.
They disagree over the means, and so if you have economic literacy, if you have consistency and logic… And you have honesty with yourself and with your partner.
Once you have those things, it's pretty hard to have disagreement on how to apply and come up with a principle that we'll achieve and are consistent with these basic norms that we all already admit that we agree with.
So I think it's basically an appeal to honesty and transparency in the argument.
Look, let's admit what our common norms are.
Let's find our common basis of understanding.
And then let's work from there, and you work from there with logic and reason and consistency and economic literacy.
That's sort of my take on this issue.
Alright, so for those who are watching who don't know anything about me, my name is Stephan Molyneux.
I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, freedomainradio.com.
Stephan Harrison, are there any plugs you want to put in for, you know, you can't do a show without a plug of some kind or anything?
Hair plugs?
My plug would be, thank you so much for your time, gentlemen.
You guys have been hugely influential to me over the past few years and spreading it to my friends and it's moving out there.
I sent Kinsella a little article the other day A kid in my class brought up a Jeffrey Tucker article on Out of the Blue, and I was wearing the Anarchy shirt.
So, I mean, it's moving and people are recognizing.
So, thank you once again, guys.
You guys are the best.
Thanks.
Thanks, guys.
I appreciate it.
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