 Are there some ethical truths that are inescapable? Whenever we argue, do we presuppose a set of values? And if so, do those values push you towards libertarian political conclusions? These are the questions I'm trying to answer on the 50th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Hello my friends. Welcome to the show. I'm Steve Patterson, your host. Today we're talking about political philosophy, political ethics, and we're talking about a specific idea that I've gotten lots and lots of requests to cover. I am persuaded by libertarian ideas, really rather extreme libertarian ideas. And the natural question arises, why? What's the justification for libertarian conclusions? Now I have my own set of justifications, but I know lots of libertarians who are persuaded by what is called argumentation ethics, which is an attempt to make a rationalist argument for a particular set of ethical values. By rationalist I mean there are certain foundational principles that we discover that are inescapable and then we use logical deduction to see what follows from there. Now if you guys have been following my work, you know that sounds like why would be a natural fit within the worldview that I'm trying to create, but I struggle with accepting some of the foundational premises that are presented by people arguing for argumentation ethics. So I've gotten lots of requests from people saying bring on Stefan Kinsella. He's one of the more prominent libertarians who is a vocal proponent of argumentation ethics. So he and I had a fantastic conversation on the subject. Now in the course of this interview, given that my guest and I are both on the same page on large parts of our political theory, if you're not already down with libertarianism, you probably won't find this persuasive at all. So this is definitely a little bit more inside baseball for those who are more disposed towards libertarian conclusions. But even if you're not in the libertarian bandwagon, I'm sure this conversation will elicit some insightful thoughts in your mind. There are lots of show notes for this particular episode, so if you want to learn more about argumentation ethics, check out steve-paterson.com slash 50. That will link you to Stefan Kinsella's page, some of the arguments from a gentleman named Hans Hermann Hoppe, who gets a lot of credit for coming up with argumentation ethics, at least in this form. You'll also find a link to the sponsor of this episode, which is the company currently in the process of changing the world, Praxis. If you are like me, and you're in school right now, let's say you're getting your undergraduate degree, and you are unsatisfied with your college experience because the professors maybe they don't know what they're talking about or not making good arguments, your peers have heads full of cobwebs, you're frustrated with the amount of busy work and inertia in the academic system, take heart my friend, Praxis is made for you. If you want to stop wasting your time in academia, and you want to go straight into the real world to get actual relevant job training and get paid off the get go, the Praxis program is a three month boot camp where you learn relevant things about the world that are applicable to your job, and then it's followed by six months of a paid apprenticeship and you make enough money getting paid at this apprenticeship where you can fully pay for the cost of the Praxis program. So it is massively superior in my mind to going and getting your degree in college. So if that sounds like you, check out steve-patterson.com slash praxis, P-R-A-X-I-S. So I hope you enjoy my interview with Stefan Kinsella who is a patent attorney, libertarian legal theorist, and one of the things that he's written that I very highly recommend is a book called Against Intellectual Property. I haven't done an episode on intellectual property yet on this show, I certainly will do one in the future and maybe I'll have Stefan back on the show to talk about it. I have a standard canon in a lot of libertarian circles and for good reason. Fun and arbitrary trivia fact about my guest's name today, if you've seen some of his writing his author name is sometimes N Stefan Kinsella. What does the N stand for? Well you're about to find out. Mr. Norman Stefan Kinsella, welcome to Patterson in Pursuit, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks, glad to be here. So I get a lot of requests from people to talk to different thinkers and a big part of my audience is they come from a libertarian background. And when talking about libertarian issues, libertarian ethics, there's this one concept that always comes up, argumentation ethics. And when I talk to people about it and they say, man you got to have Stefan Kinsella on the show. So it's a real delight to have you on. I want to be totally in the rationalist ethics camp and I'm hoping that after the course of this conversation I'll be there. So what I'd like to start is for all the listeners that aren't already kind of in the libertarian circle, argumentation ethics is an attempt to ground libertarian ideas in a kind of inescapable rationalist framework. There are these ethical principles that you cannot escape. Just kind of like the principle of the law of logic that you can't argue that you cannot argue or you can't argue that existence doesn't exist. There are just certain inescapable things that you have to acknowledge if you're going to be rational. And then supposedly the argument goes there are also inescapable ethical truths that if you discover what they are they lead you to kind of libertarian conclusions. Is that a fair kind of summarization of the approach? Yeah, perfectly right. Perfectly good. Okay, so let's start with that. Just working through the basics. What then is this the inescapable argument that leads us to some kind of ethical rationalist framework? All right. So let me give a little background first, which is that this is a theory that was pioneered by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and actually he would be your best guest on this, right? I mean he is the guy that originated this theory in the mid-80s, but I'm probably next to him. I'm the one who's written the most about it. And I've also written a kind of a complementary theory of rights which I came up on my own that kind of inspired by his called a stop-all. And I don't know if we'll get into that or not, but so before you start talking about the best proof of rights or libertarian principles, I think we need to have an idea of what the whole subject matter is, like what is it we're interested in. So first I think it helps to clarify basically what we conceive of as libertarian principles. What are they? Before we say them, then how they're justified, and what it means to justify and what other approaches have been. So if you want to do it that way, I can just kind of lay out a few things and you can interrupt me if you need to. The way I conceive of libertarianism in its most sort of distilled form is, you can call it a political ethic, you can even call it a meta ethic because it's really not a set of rules about how we should personally live, but it's a set of rules about what the law should be. And this is what Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas J. Denoyle, that's how they characterize rights to in the book Liberty and Nature. They're two sort of neorendian libertarian philosophers. Anyway, you don't have to view rights that way. That's how I view them. But the non-aggression principle I believe is core to what we believe, but I think it's just a shorthand version of what we believe in. It's really not an explanation of it, it's just a shorthand. And what it really means is this. In the case of your body, in the case of any scarce resource, there could be possibly conflict between human actors. And property rules arrived at in society as a means of identifying who is the one person that has the right to control that resource so that conflict can be avoided in the use of those resources. Okay. That's basically what any legal system is. Even the socialist legal system specifies owners of resources, whether it's human bodies, in the case of slavery or someone in prison, or whether it's other resources like land or cars or food, things like that. So the libertarian view is that we assign those resources in accordance with basically the simple principles of contract and first ownership, which is the Rulaki principle. So if something is unowned, the first person to start using it is the owner until he transfers it voluntarily to someone else, which is what contract is. So with a couple of supplementary rules, like if you hurt someone and you owe them restitution, then they can take some of your property in that case. But generally speaking, you can find out who the owner of a resource is by asking who has it now, who had it first, and was there a contract? So those simple principles give rise to what we call the non-aggression principle. I think we call the non-aggression principle because in the case of someone's body, if you attack someone, that's what the term aggression usually means, like attacking physically, attacking someone else's body. That's held to be a violation of their property right in their body. And then by extension, we would say something similar happens if you use another piece of property they own without their permission. Okay, that's trespass. But we lump it in with the concept of aggression as a type of shorthand. Okay, so basically you get from this the standard libertarian rules. If you notice there's a type of symmetry and a type of reciprocity in these rules in that you are entitled to do to someone only what they did to you. Because if someone is not violating my property rights, I'm not entitled to violate their property rights. So if someone is publishing pornography or smoking marijuana, they're not invading my property rights. And so I'm not entitled to use force against them, which means any law against those activities would be unjust. I can insult them. I can berate them because I'm not violating their property rights either. So there's a symmetry. But if someone attacks me physically, they have used force against me. And now I'm entitled to use force against them defensively or even after the fact for restitution or even for retribution, some would argue. Okay, so you see again, there's a symmetry there. And I think this is what libertarians like. That's why we always have this sort of scalpel. Like every time or normie, we call them right a normal person proposed the law. Let's just tax people or let's just ban this practice. We say, well look, you're using force against them. Did they use force themselves first? Did they initiate force? And if they didn't, there's an asymmetry there. And that's why we say that law is unjust. Okay, this strikes me as kind of a Kantian principle. That there's a kind of universal aspect to this way of conceiving about political ethic. Is that fair? Well, it may be compatible with Kantianism, but all I'm doing right now is trying to sort of observe what libertarians say and kind of condense their principles into more of a, just to figure out what their principles are and to restate them in a concise fashion. So I'm just trying to restate what they believe, not to justify it yet. Okay. I think you have to understand what they are before you start talking about what it means to justify. I mean, so from your perspective, would you say that is roughly a summary of what the core of the principles are that most libertarians believe in? I would say from my experience, that encompasses at least half of the kind of arguments that I encounter when talking with libertarians as it comes back to that notion of reciprocity, almost kind of getting at a golden rule mentality. You know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, except kind of as a basis for a legal system. You know, don't hit people, don't take their stuff, and they'll do the same to you. I do think there's another group of people that approach it just from purely kind of consequentialist ends. And they say, well, the only reason we're into this libertarianism stuff is because it results in human flourishing, something like that. And I find maybe a third or so, maybe a little bit more than that, take that approach. Yes. Yes. Okay, well, okay, but again, I think you're talking about justifications more than the principles that they believe. I think, and personally, I'm not really persuaded that there's a strong gulf between consequentialism and sort of a principled or deontological approach. I think they're just different ways of looking at the same world. So I'm not surprised that they're the same. But anyway, the point is, the typical libertarian, whatever his, even if he's, I don't know what the word would be, an atheist or agnostic in terms of he has no grounds for his principles whatsoever. But he believes in the libertarian principles. He will believe, you will hear libertarians, whether they're consequentialists or not, they will routinely say, you may not initiate force. Just by saying the words, you may not initiate force, there's a, you're recognizing implicitly a symmetry there, right? You can only use force in response to force. So you can use force in response to force. But if someone's not using force against you, you can only do other things that don't result in force. So that symmetry is just present in libertarian idea. I'm not really saying it's a, the justification is there. This is just what libertarians do believe. Yes. Yeah. I think if we take it from that standpoint, that is, that is pretty much ubiquitous that I think every libertarian would agree with that, that notion. Yes. And then you have to unpack what it means to say initiate force, because if I walk across your lawn at 2.30 in the morning when you're sleeping, it's not really the same as aggression like me punching you in the head. It's, we only call it aggression or force. I think by analogy, because it's a trespass. It's a use of, the general case is this. It's a use of someone else's resource without their permission. That is, whoever owns the resource, including human bodies, if someone else invades the physical borders of that property or uses it without their permission, that is what, it's trespass or that is what it's aggression in a generalized sense. So this is just what libertarians believe. Now, I don't know if you take your average liberal or your average conservative or fascist or egalitarian or environmentalist. And if you ask them, state what you believe, they could state it. And then if you said, now provide a justification, I don't know if everyone walking around the earth is walking around with their set of beliefs in their back pocket and their set of justifications than their other back pocket. A lot of people don't have justifications or they're not clear ones. And some libertarians don't really have a justification. It's just, they think it comes out of their Christian faith or they take it on faith or they just have a personal preference. Yes. And I think the way that you stated that earlier, probably most people in general, not just libertarians, would agree with this intuitive notion of, yeah, okay, I shouldn't, I shouldn't aggress on other people. I think that's, maybe not everybody, but I think I have a whole lot of people, even if they don't consider themselves libertarians, would agree to that principle at least. Yeah. And I think that actually the justification is project is not necessarily one that we even have to do. Some people are interested in it. And the reason it's because one thing we libertarians can do is simply identify the fact that most fellow humans that live in society do believe in our core notions, okay, however vaguely and however inconsistently, they do believe that basic idea, you shouldn't hurt other people. Right. And so the entire libertarian project, in my view, can be thought of as simply adding a little bit of economic literacy to the mixture and consistency. Right. Okay. And in fact, when you said most libertarians would agree with the principle as I specified it, I actually think that's not quite true because non-anarchists, that is, menarchists don't quite believe that. So you could say that the principled, consistent libertarian believes that aggression is never justified. It is impossible to justify. I think where the split comes in is when it's treated as an absolute versus a principle. I think pretty much everybody would agree that that's like the non-aggression principle is a good rule of thumb. I think where you get very strong disagreement is if that's kind of an absolute thing or if that's, or yeah, if it's a rule of thumb. Well, right. It was just what Robert knows it called side constraints. So rights are side constraints on what you can do. They just cannot be violated. No, well, I would say they cannot be violated, but they may not be violated, right? But so I would say, yeah, so when you talk about it as a rule of thumb, that's just a way of sort of putting a nice shiny gloss on what you're really saying, which is, I'm against aggression most of the time or some of the time. So, and you will see conservatives and even liberals sometimes will explicitly say something like this. They'll say, well, we agree with you libertarians that liberty is an important value. We just don't fetishize it. What they mean by that is like the Supreme Court doing some balancing test of competing interests. They want to take liberty into account, but it's just one of many values, which is just a pretty way of saying, in some cases, we're willing to condone or commit or authorize the use of aggression against you. If we don't agree with you, I'm going to bash you in the head in the end. So in the end, even a menarchist ultimately is like this. They'll say, look, I'm with you 99% of the way. I agree that most aggression is wrong, but we still need to tax people and blah, blah, blah for a minimal stuff or whatever. It's like, yeah, but that is actually aggression. Yes, but I think they would probably say then I am not an absolutist on the principle that I'm with you 99%. They would say it's probably not a criticism of my ideas just because I give these little exceptions. But when they say they're not an absolutist, what they mean is they're not against aggression. They don't have a principled opposition to aggression. They think that in some cases, it is permissible to initiate the use of force against innocent people. That is what they're saying. Now, the Randians had this complicated dodge. They'll look it into context and all this crap, and they'll say that, well, properly understood in context, we need a government as the rational framework for our rights, and therefore it's not really aggression, even though it is. Actually, the Randians, I think, have a lot of good points, but their two main failings are on intellectual property, which is their worst, and on anarchy, which I think they're quasi-anarchists. They just don't realize it. If you read the end of Atlas Shrugged, it's basically anarchists. So Rand was really wrong on anarchy and on IP. Other than that, a lot of her stuff I think is good, Well, somebody asked you. So on that point, if I were to say something like, as a general rule, I don't support aggression against people that aren't being violent, but I'll make some exceptions. So I could say something like, I don't think you should put your hands on other people when they don't give you permission to do that, but if somebody is running out in the street, I might actually do that. So I would give an exception. Are you saying that demonstrates that I support violence or that that's a reasonable exception to make? Because I think most people kind of view it like that. Yeah, I think that's wrong. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. First of all, I don't think there are any exceptions. If there's an exception, then there's one of two things going on. And remember, that's one reason I earlier said, I think rights are metanormative principles, or they're not principles that directly govern individual behavior. This is a brief aside, but most people, if you press them and if you go through this, I think most people, most libertarians would, most normal people treat ethics and political ethics as sort of the same sets. So if they see something that they believe is wrong, like racial discrimination, then why not have a law against it, right? Or if they think it's wrong to abuse your body with drugs, why not have a law against it? So they see these sets as the same. Most libertarians, if you ask them, they would see the set of political ethics as a proper subset of ethics. So that is, everything that's a rights violation is immoral, but not everything that's immoral can be made illegal, right? Okay. Now, most people don't ever get to the point of trying to formalize it like that, but I think if you press them, they would agree with that. So you think that with the case of the pulling the guy from the street, that that would be a circumstance of immorality, but not illegality or vice versa? No, so hold on a second, I'm getting there. Because I actually disagree with this subset set distinction. I think that the sets are overlapping sets. Again, because I think the principle of libertarianism, while they can inform your personal ethics, they're not the same as, okay? So just because we say as a community of people that it's a rights violation to do X, doesn't mean that it's immoral for you to do X. For example, for the exact same reason that it's not always morals to be within your rights. If I insult my grandmother, or if I don't let a starving neighbor come onto my proper, or a neighbor whose kid has been wounded in a car wreck, I just won't let them come onto my, into my house for 10 minutes to call an ambulance. I can do that and be within my rights. If I see a stranger drowning in a pond, I don't have a positive legal obligation to rescue them unless I push them in. But I might be totally immoral in refusing to help them even though I'm not violating their rights. And by the same token, it could be that it is not immoral in some cases to violate rights. The case of a friend about to commit suicide, and you use force to prevent them. Although there's a different argument that that's not even an exception that needs a justification. So let's give a couple of cases. Grabbing the kid. I don't even think that's a violation of, I don't think, see, you said violence earlier, of course libertarians are not against violence, we're against the initiation of violence, right? And that's again, just a compact way of saying you can't use one's property without their consent. Now a minor is considered to be not fully compost Memphis, right? So he has guardians that make decisions for him and on his behalf. And those guardians don't have to be only his lineal parents. They can be others in the community that we assume the parents would consent to them doing some things in emergency situations. So I think that, I think that in the case of saving the child, the child is consenting to it because his guardians would, of course, implicitly grant consent to that kind of action. Okay, what if somebody that's like an adult that's on his smartphone, you know, sort of, because when you come around here this is happening, I've noticed on the sidewalk people bump into you when they're looking at another smartphone. But if somebody is on adults on their smartphone and the bus is coming and you go, hey buddy, and you grab them. I think in a case like that, it's such an emergency situation. We don't have time to have a conversation with someone and find out whether they really want to commit suicide or whether they would consent to being briefly jostled to save their life. So all you can do in a split second is try to use the crude language that we have which is social conventions, right? Because this is all a matter of, when we talk about consent, consent is a human, it has to be communicated by a public language. But language need not only be words, right? You could have two people that don't even speak the same language, get along with each other. So there's always a background assumption of norms, customs, and things like that that inform language. So I think when you see someone, a regular businessman or the cell phone about to walk into the face of a bus that's coming and he's obviously distracted, the assumption is that he's implicitly communicating by his existence in a society like that, right? Without walking around with a sign saying, hey, if you see me about to die, don't rescue me. So he's not changing the default presumption of what communication is, right? So basically my point is most people would assume that the guy would consent to being rescued. So I think that's the best solution and I can't imagine a jury punishing the guy and you can't even imagine a victim wanting to go after his rescuer. In the rare case when it was, he would probably himself being laughed out of court or ignored or looked out as a troublemaker or something like that. And but even if we say it's an act of aggression to rescue your friend who wants to commit suicide because you think he'll see reason in the light of day, right? Or rescuing this businessman about to walk into the face of a Apache helicopter or whatever. Even in that case, what you could say is the rescuer is willing to take the risk of some slight legal liability in order to do a good deed for someone else. And so he just hopes for forgiveness. And that's one way to approach that issue as well. Okay, so let me ask you just on that question then we'll get to the the argumentation ethics justification part. Yeah, justification. So would you say that if we're going to be really strict in our analysis of rights, that in the case of pulling the guy out of the streets or he doesn't get hit by the bus, technically speaking, that would be a rights violation. But it wouldn't be something that's immoral and it would be under the assumption that the person would have permitted it. But if we're going to be technical, it still is a rights violation. No, if the assumption is he would have permitted it and if that assumption is correct, then it's not a rights violation because it's consented to. So it's not a rights violation based on the assumption of consent? Because that seems like a dubious, if I could say, oh, I thought you consented to take my television. I thought you consented to me taking your television. Well, I think opinions among libertarians would vary on that. You could say there's maybe three distinct views there. I mean, I have my own view. I lean a certain way. And by the way, I think we can from our armchair lay out different rules, but we're not doing this completely in a vacuum. We're sort of seeing these things play out through history. We see how society would tend to solve these things and I think that's probably what would happen in a pure private law society. So in other words, I think that even if we have different arguments right now, one or two of them is going to be settled on over time and then you're walking to this community and you know what the background expectations are in this respect. Okay, so in any case, I think that the difference... So you could argue, you could view it like you did. You could say that as the rescuer, I'm assuming the guy will retroactively say he consented and everything will be fine. There's like a 99.9% chance. So I'm taking a very small risk that I am violating. Like in other words, it's epistemologically or epistemically unknowable whether I'm violating his rights. I can't know until after the fact. I see. But I'm going to take the chance. That's one way of looking at it. And I think in some cases that is what is happening. I think in the case you mentioned, I personally would just say, look, the guy by his own action is putting his fellow neighbors into a position where they have no choice but to make a split second decision. And if anyone is his fault for putting them in that area of uncertainty. Okay, so then we have to say, well then what was communicated, if anything was communicated? I would say that there is actual consent. And even if the guy later says, look, I don't want to ever be rescued, I'm a 1% minority outlier or a 1 out of a million outlier. I think we say, well, you're just wrong. You did consent. If you don't want to consent, you need to have some kind of special clothing that, you know, do not resuscitate type idea. You can't expect everyone in society. And by the way, this all also, we never specify whether the property is public or private when we talk about these things. Sort of like we imagine this sort of, this ghostly realm of a non vaguely specified walking ground that's, you know, they're missed everywhere and no one owns it. You're just happy to bump into it. But in reality, you're always, especially in the libertarian society, you're always in a private property setting. So either you're on his property or he's on your property or you're on the shopping mall's property. And there are already some rules laid down for this kind of behavior, if only implicit rules. So really the resort might be the rules of the property owner. So if we were to, if we were to take that line of reasoning, though, couldn't you see in a line of argument that said, you know, oh, I groped you inappropriately because I assumed that you were consenting based on the, you know, your behavior and something like that. Doesn't that kind of open up the door to all kinds of claims of assuming consent? It does, but I think that's why the law is the sort of the art of actually making concrete decisions about concrete cases right by applying rules to them. And you have to take into account the dangers of having just a rule that could lead to a slippery slope. So, you know, for example, in the common law, and I think most libertarians would agree, that you don't have to respond to, you don't have to wait for someone to physically attack you before you respond. If someone is in a context where they've indicated they want to shoot you and they raise their weapon and they cock the trigger and it looks like they're about to pull the trigger and they have every intention of doing so as far as you can tell, then you don't have to wait for the bullet to start heading your way. You can raise your gun and shoot them first. That's preemptive, right, preemptive force. But the common law has drawn a very strict set of criteria around when you can actually say it has to be an immediate direct force, something that the reasonable every day man would interpret that way, etc., etc. Right, like if the guy's a raving lunatic or he's got a red tip on a plastic pistol where you should have known, then you wouldn't be... So these are, they do require judgment of the jury or the community or the judge, and over time, these standards do develop and people start adjusting their behavior to be guided by them. So in those circumstances, it doesn't seem like when it's clear cut, it seems like the rule is something that emerges or it's something, you know, when we're talking about a reasonable man, that, I think that's correct, but it lacks the kind of argumentative power of saying this is the black and white rule. It does. So if that's true in those circumstances, why couldn't somebody just say, well, that's true of all law. All law is all property rights and rules are just kind of communally agreed to. Well, that's a whole different issue, getting into the social contract and those kinds of issues. I would do two things here. Number one, I would say, well, Randy Barnett in his book, The Structure of Liberty, he talks about this. He's an anarchist, libertarian scholar. And what he tries to do is say that he distinguishes between abstract rules and legal precepts. Now, abstract rules are these things we would come up with from our armchair. Or at least we would sort of refine them deductively, after seeing inductively many cases over the centuries. And we sort of get rid of the inconsistencies and formalize and codify it. But when you have to apply them to particular cases, that's more of a concrete case. And you have to have judges and all these people take the facts into account. But the point is, compare this to any other system. I mean, any system, whether it's socialist or welfare status or democratic, any type of political legal system is going to have to deal with borderline cases, continuum issues. And just because those exist in life and just because libertarianism doesn't have a deductive answer, you can answer always from your armchair. Doesn't mean it's an inferior theory because every theory has these issues. You could have a dictator, a furor, just decide everything. It would be totally black and white. Just come to him and he'll give the answer. A wins, B wins, C wins, D wins. That's it. I mean, you would know who the owner is and who the winner is. It wouldn't, it would be bright, bright line, we would call it, but it wouldn't be just. Or wouldn't, you have another reason to think it's just. Okay, so this is a perfect segue into part two talking about justification. So we have the general intuition about non-aggression and respecting other people's property. And now we want to seek the justification through argumentation ethics. So how, make that transition for me. How do we do it? So let's talk about, like we said earlier, maybe not everyone has a justification, or it's only vague. I would say the prevailing view among most people is that it's either common sense or it's pragmatic. Or it's based upon common sense morals or even religious morals. Basically the natural law way of thinking versus the pragmatic or utilitarian or consequentialist way of thinking. I would say that in the first, I would say libertarianism started in the mid 50s with Ayn Rand and Leonard Reed and Rothbard and these guys and the modern libertarian movement. And for the first 30 or so years of the movement, maybe first 30 or 40, probably the prevailing ethos would have been the Randian one, which is more of a natural law one, which is the idea that certain natural principles of ethics or morality in the universe. And this is whether you're an atheist or not, by the way. And the non-atheists maybe have an easier time of that because they think that God basically sets up what's right and wrong and it's sort of somehow in the structure of reality. But the more secular natural law types think it's just inherent in reality or something like that. And their argument is something like, humans have a nature by the way we're organized and our social nature with each other and the laws of economics. These all combine to say that you just shouldn't you shouldn't do basic things. And like I said, libertarianism just makes those more consistent and applies a little economic logic to it. And you'll even hear the term like the basic laws of nature are engraved on your heart. This line is used sometimes. There's a doctrine of the law that ignorance of the law is no excuse, which in today's legal system is a travesty because there are so many laws, no one knows what these fake laws are. All right. So ignorance of the law should be an excuse. But in a natural law system where the only thing that's illegal is rape, murder, crime, I mean, sorry, theft, then it's okay to hold someone liable for those actions even if they claim they didn't know because we say everyone knows this. It's written on your heart, man. Everyone knows that you shouldn't hurt other people, right? So that's one sort of argument. I don't really know what they're drawing on there. Are they saying God put that in your heart or it's just common sense? So they don't, but the more strict version of natural law says that because of our nature, we shouldn't do certain things, right? Certain things are conducive to your flourishing, like you were getting at earlier. Right. The problem with this argument from the Hopiian point of view and the Kantian point of view and the Humian point of view, actually, I'm not sure about Kant, but Hume for sure, is the is-ought gap, right? So is the idea that you cannot get an ought or a normative or a moral statement just from your statement of facts. You have to somewhere insert an ought, right? So you can't say because man is what he is, therefore, he should do X, right? That's, and I agree with that, brother. I think the is-ought gap is logically unbridgeable. I do agree with Hopi on this. Now, some of the more sophisticated Randians like Roderick Long, they try to get around this by what they call an assortoric, I don't know if you've heard of this, assortoric hypothetical. They say, no, it's not an if then, it's a since then. So it's like, since we all agree with the following principles, therefore, which I think is perfectly valid. Most people do believe in certain core principles. You could say, since you and I both agree that we want humans to flourish, since you and I both agree that you shouldn't hurt people without a good reason. Therefore, then you conclude, you go on with your libertarian and your economic reasoning. It would be very similar to going to a Star Trek convention, and it wouldn't make sense for two people at a Star Trek convention to argue that people shouldn't like Star Trek because they're both fans already. So you say, look, since you and I are both Star Trek fans, I think that this movie's better than the other one or whatever. But if you're talking to a non-Star Trek fan, they say, I don't like movies at all. I don't like Star Trek. So I don't think either one's better. We don't have to decide. But if you're talking the same fundamental language, which I've called something called grund norms after Hans Kelsen, the grund norms are like sort of core basic ethical or legal principles. It's analogous to the a priori type or basic truths that I think you've talked about as well, just the kind of core logical truths that we can identify about reality and build up from there. They're sort of like fundamental, fundamental elemental principles. In any case, the problem with the Aristotelian approach, I believe, is that you have to introduce an ought somewhere. And then is it just arbitrary? Is that just subjective preference? Whatever. So the argumentation ethic approach is a different one. And let's talk about consequentialism. So consequentialism is just the idea that we ought to adopt rules that, well, utilitarianism is a subset of consequentialism, I believe. Right. And that says you should adopt a rule that benefits the, does the greatest good for the greatest number. Right. And I think, I don't think we need to elaborate the problems with that, like just from Austrian economics, right? The problem that you can't quantify preference or utility, sorry. And you can't intersubjectively compare it. And anyway, the statement is just arbitrary. You're just stating that this is preferable. Let's say it would help a thousand people to give them a million dollars each by robbing Bill Gates of it. That might be true. But why is it right to rob Bill Gates? See, it still doesn't answer that question. So it's sort of, it makes it more, it makes it a hidden moral leap. Okay. Now, now I think we're ready to talk about argumentation if that's what you want. Yes. So what Hoppe did, so Hoppe, Hoppe, do you want a little background on Hoppe's, where he came from and how he arrived at his ideas? Well, I think we should just go straight into the argument given I have still got lots of good questions for you. Okay. All right. So, Hoppe's argument is this, the only way to justify propositional truths, right, claims about the universe that are true, is in argumentation. And he believes that there's what we call as an a priori of argumentation. He draws upon Jurgen Habermas, who's a famous socialistic German philosopher, it was his PhD teacher actually, and Carl Otto Appel, Appel, who was a colleague of Habermas, and this is called the a priori of argumentation or discourse. And the idea is that you could never deny that to be true. You can never deny that all truth claims have to be settled in the course of some kind of discourse argumentation because you'd be engaged in a discourse argumentation in the attempt to say that it's not necessary to do so. Okay. So it's, you can see how it's similar to in structure to some of like the Misesian and even Randian type, a priori type arguments and proofs, right, like man acts. You can't deny that man acts because that's an action. It's so, right, right, right. So their basic idea is that anything that we want to decide upon is true. Anything that's a contestable proposition or claim has to be decided in the course of an argumentation. Okay. Now Hoppe is sort of a unique spin on it after being made aware of kind of Mises views on economics and the nature of scarcity in the world in Rothbard's views on libertarianism was that you could fashion this type of argument into a defensive libertarian principles. Okay. Okay. And what he does is he says, so you can only know what's true or not in the course of an argumentation. Now if it's a disagreement over what a factual matter is, right, like a scientific issue, that's called a disagreement. And again, we have to have discussion and discourse to figure that out. But in the case of physical conflict among people which again is what rights exist for to solve the problem of conflict and the use of scarce resources, in the place, in the situation where there's conflict, argumentation is designed to determine how to resolve the conflict. That's what it is. So whenever we talk about any given law or possible right, that discussion itself has to be done in the course of an argumentation. Okay. So his basic insight is this. Argumentation is not just some free-floating affair. It is a practical affair in the real world. And argumentation itself is not value-free or norm-free because it has some presupposed norms built into the very structural argumentation because of its nature. Because so argumentation is, think of it this way in terms of logical subsets. Argumentation is a type of speech act and a speech act is a type of action. So it's all in that framework. So you have action and one subset of action is speech acts like not all actions are speech acts and not all actions are some actions or things other than speech act. If I go spear efficient, I'm not speaking. Right. And then one type of action is speaking. But not all speaking is arguing. If I'm just having a conversation with you or if I'm reciting the lines for a movie play or something, I'm not engaging argumentation we're not trying to have a discussion about a contested issue where we're trying to figure out what the truth of the matter is. Right. So a proper subset of speech acts would be argumentation. And that's the one that always has to happen whenever we have a disagreement about what the right or the wrong thing to do is. Okay. So the kind of general framework is that whatever the normative or the ethical presuppositions of argumentation per se as an activity are, then any norm you're trying to justify would have to be compatible with that. So that's sort of the core initial insight he has that if there are some normative presuppositions of argumentation, you could never argue for something that contradicts that. Right. So just like you could never argue with a fellow Star Trek fan that people shouldn't be Star Trek fan in a sense. Because they both suppose that they love Star Trek, right? Okay. So what are some of those norms that are presupposed with argumentation? Okay. That's why you have to say, well, what is argumentation? It's a practical thing where the arguers are both trying to find the truth, right? That's number one. The goal is honesty and truth, and therefore consistency and logical consistency. But also, you have to draw a distinction between coercing someone and free choice. So one presupposition is that each person is not coercing the other to accept their claim. I'm not saying I think it's A, you think it's B, but if you don't agree with me, I'm going to bash you over the head with a sledgehammer at the end, because then I'll just confess and say you're right to avoid, but then we're not engaged in argumentation. It's just bullying or coercion. So one presupposition is basically peacefulness. The participants agreeing to effectively respect the bodily integrity of the other. They are not coercing them. Okay. So let me stop you there. What about if they're arguing about what happens at the end of their argument? So if they're arguing, saying once we stop, once we stop respecting each other's rights, or if you lose this argument, I'm going to take your money, or if I lose this argument, you take my money. Well, first of all, that's what every argument, every argument is about outside the argument. So in other words, we're living in society peacefully, or whether it's peacefully or not, we're living together in some kind of community and society, right? And then a dispute arises. I mean, we're going about our business non-argumentatively. We're not engaging argumentation all the time. Most of us. You know, we're making... Well, even us are not, right? I know it's funny, but the point is, the entire reason that you engage in a normative argumentation is to settle something that will be true after the argumentation is over. So you get the argument, you have a conclusion. You are trying to come up with a principle that would apply outside of the field of argumentation. So that's one criticism of this approach that Bob Murphy and Gene Callahan and others have made. They say, well, it's only true during the argumentation. It's like, as Hoppe points out in his recent talk on this, if that were true, well, then so is your criticism. In other words, your criticism of my argument is only true while you're making the criticism. And as soon as you're done talking, we go back to the point, we go back to the status quo where my argument was right. I mean, whenever we have a discussion, we're always trying to come up with rules and facts that apply outside. If you and I want to discuss whether the moon is made of cheese or not, we're not trying to figure out whether the moon is made of cheese for the duration of our argument. We're trying to find out whether it's really made of cheese. Okay, so let me rephrase that. And if I do it incorrectly, then correct my error. So to the extent that one is engaged in true argumentation, you might say, it is by definition something that is inescapably peaceful. Now, that doesn't mean you're restricted from knocking the other person on the head. It just means that by definition, if you're doing that, you're not arguing. Yes, and then it means you can't justify it. It doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means you can't justify doing it. So that's why we have to distinguish in a binary way whether a right, establishing that there's a right, doesn't mean it's going to be respected. It just means the action that violates a right can't be justified. So if I'm a person and I want to use your body or your property without your expressed consent against your oppositional claims, I've got two choices. I can either just do it anyway. I give up the attempt to reason or I can justify it. But to justify it, I have to be able to give reasons in an argumentation. Now, from the point of view of the other person, you view people in two categories, either like animals or what Hoppe calls technical problems, or as rational people. If they're rational people, they're willing to consider evidence and arguments and reason and respect your right to bodily integrity during the course of an argument at least. So just because there are some people that are criminals out there, in a sense, doesn't mean argumentation ethics is wrong. It just means that it's possible to violate a right. These are not physical causal laws that can't be violated like gravity. They are normative laws that tell you what action has justified. It doesn't mean that action can't occur. But we've missed a second. So let me just finish real quickly and then we can go. So you can see how this rendition of the argumentation ethics approach so far, you can see how bodily rights come out of that. So basically, you have to respect each other's bodily integrity, which implies that you both are recognizing your self-ownership and the other person's self-ownership, which is one of the core libertarian principles. But the other part of libertarianism is also the right of libertarians to own things outside their body, private property resources that they appropriate. And then Hoppe's argument goes on to extend it to that case, where he points out that argumentation is not just your bodies. This is a practical affair in the real world. You've had to actually get there. You have to survive. That requires resources. You have to be standing somewhere when you make your argument, right? So there's all these uses of resources that are also presupposed in the course of argumentation. And 95% of the time, the argument is about one of those resources. So the dispute is about who gets to control this bank of the river, who gets to control this field, who gets to control that plow that I made and that you took from me, things like that. So when two people enter into a discourse about that, they are both presupposing, number one, their self-ownership, which implies certain rules, right? It implies this sort of first-come rule, first-come, first-serve rule. In other words, one inherent aspect of the entire notion of property rights is the idea that a latecomer has to have inferior rights to an earlier comer. If you think about it, the very search, the very nature of property has to have this latecomer rule embedded in it because if latecomers don't have worse claims, and by that, by latecomer, I mean someone currently is recognized as the owner or the possessor of something, a latecomer, someone who comes on the scene after and claims superior rights to the resource. If latecomers did not have a worse claim, you could not have property rights at all because it would just be a world of might-makes-rights, and you would again be back to the pre-law, pre-right situation. So the latecomer rule has to be embedded in any property ethic. Whoever the owner is has a better claim than someone who comes later and just says, I want it because I prefer to have it. So therefore, when you have two people asking to be assigned the ownership rights of a resource, they're recognizing the principle of ownership, which recognizes the principle of that earlier users have a better claim than latecomers, and then the dispute comes a factual matter about which one was a latecomer in this particular case, and whoever the evidence indicates had a better claim would be recognized as the owner. Okay, so that is how I think that is sort of the essence of the argumentation ethics approach. Now the point you brought up about what after the argumentation ends, those are sort of later criticisms that came and that have been dealt with sort of in a like a response reply type fashion, but the basic core of the argument is that is that all normative claims have to be settled in an argument, and argumentation itself is a peaceful cooperative activity in which bodily integrity or self-ownership and the right to control resources which are necessary for the argumentation even to have happened are presupposed, and therefore any ethic that you propose during an argument that is contrary to these things could never be justified, there's a practical or performative contradiction, Hoppe would say. Okay. And therefore, if you advocate a socialistic ethic, then you're advocating something that's incompatible with the presuppositions of your argument, and it's just a contradiction, and therefore no socialistic ethic could ever be advocated or could ever be justified. Beautiful. Okay. So that is a, I think that's a great summarization. Now I want to ask you some of my skeptical problems with this, and I'm ready to be convinced because I love the conclusions. I love that it's rationalist, which is my very disposed towards that type of reasoning. But here's one of the areas that I don't see the connection. Okay. So I am totally on board that in the process of arguing, you are inescapably in control of your lungs, your vocal cords, you're demonstrating some kind of control over yourself when you aren't. How does that get you, though, to the concept of legitimate ownership? So if I would just say something like, it is true that in the process of arguing, you must have control over your vocal cords, but that doesn't mean there's any such thing as property. There's no such thing as like a legitimate property ownership or anything like that. Well, so here's where I think we have to really grapple with the distinction between causal laws or the factual world and normative things. When we establish a normative rule, it's not like a law of physics where you can't violate it. What are we really asking? So what does ownership really mean? And this, it really gets back to justification. So if I say I have a right to do something, what I really mean, and this is where I think you have to get more technical, I think what you're inherently saying is that someone else's propositional argument that you can't, what you're doing is wrong cannot be justified. That means they can't give a coherent argument against it. Okay, that's a little bit tight. I think that's really how you have to unpack the nature of what rights are. But you have to remember that in a society where there is the actual factual possibility and reality of conflict, whenever people come together to try to find a rule or a norm to solve this conflict, the entire endeavor of that argumentation is an attempt to find an owner. Now an owner means someone who's going to be recognized as having the right, the superior right to control the resource. So that's what they're trying to find out. What if it was just about, what if it was about trying to find a controller rather than owner? So not somebody that has a right, just somebody that actually physically gets that resource. But that, well, then I think language here is maybe the problem because if you just want to ask who the, so in the law we distinguish between possession and between ownership. So a simple way to look at it, not exactly technically accurate, but would be possession is the actual control of something. And ownership is the right to control. So in that sense you could distinguish between an owner and a possessor. So if I have a knife and I'm the owner of the knife and the possessor and you take the knife from me, you steal it. Now you possess the knife, but I still own it. So if the dispute is a factual dispute about who is the possessor, well, that's just not normatively interesting. I mean, why would you have a dispute about, so you took my knife and we go to court to ask who has the knife? You see what I'm saying? So what you're trying to do is you're trying to, when you say we just want to know who is the controller, I think you're really talking about ownership because we wouldn't really ask who is controlling it factually right now. It's gonna be obvious who controls it. There wouldn't be a dispute if someone didn't have control of it and someone else wanted it. So is the claim that ownership is inescapable or is it that control is inescapable? Well, yeah. Control or possession correspond to the to the Austrian economics or the praxeological concept of action. In action, you employ means, employ scarce means to achieve ends. Employing means is the dominion or use of something in the world that causally interferes with the way the world works to get you what you want. That is the use of something. That is what employment of means is. So for example, Crusoe on a desert island, right? He engages in human action. He doesn't own anything because there's no other people for him to have a right claim against. He controls some things. He might build a hut. So he's got use of these things and control. I mean, he might leave his fishing net on the other side of the island and it's not within arms reach but he can go use it when it's available for his use. When other people arrive on the scene, then there's an additional problem he has to face. Well, there's additional benefits he gets to, right? He has companionship. He has division of labor. He has the possibility of trade, cooperation, etc. But he he faces an additional problem. There's there's one more danger in the world now that he has to face before he only had to face tigers and mosquitoes and starvation and drought and all this stuff, right? And disease. But now he's also got to face the possibility that there's another human actor who he may have conflict with, who may want some of his resources. So he wants to possess and control a resource, but he wants to do so in a peaceful and quiet way where he doesn't have conflict with his neighbors so that they can have trade and harmonious relationships instead of continually, physically fighting each other. So if other people feel the same way, they come together in society and they attempt to come up with property laws, property rights. So that's what when you say ownership, all that really means is a property right. And every time we say the word right, right, a property right, all rights are property rights. All laws are based upon some implicit conception of property rights. All political theory, all legal theory, it all comes down to property rights. Who has the rightful ownership or control of a given resource? Okay. So is the claim then that really even more fundamental than ownership being inescapable, is the claim that rights are inescapable? Well, ownership means property rights. And whenever we have a normative dispute about a conflict over a resource, the participants in the dispute and everyone who's paying attention and arguing about it, they are all themselves talking about property rights. They're just disagreeing over who should be the owner of a resource, but none of them can dispute the concept of ownership. Now you could have people, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say you could have people that are not interested in this process. And these are basically renegade outlaws or renegades. And again, you just have to treat those people as a technical problem. They're like, like very smart monkeys. They're just like smart monkeys. And so that's, in fact, that's how I view the state. You know, that's how, that's how I survive in my mind as a libertarian living with the state. I just, I just view the state as a second typhus, you know, that we have to deal with. Okay. So, so how, how would you deal with the claim then that there's no such thing as rights or that rights? So this is kind of halfway my position that rights or concepts that I love, like if everybody agrees to play by the game of acting as if we have rights, while I love the conclusions is I think it's a very logically consistent theory. That still doesn't get you to this inescapability if rights are just a concept. I thought you were going to say if everyone agrees to play by the game as if we have rights, then effectively we do because that's what I would say in a sense. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't disparage it by calling it a game though, right? Because that, that's, that implies a type of moral cynicism or moral skepticism that I don't have. So the entire question, do rights exist? Yeah. Things like this. I think that's brought with difficulty because it plays into scientism a bit. Like you're trying to treat rights. And when you say it's just a concept, well, let's be, let's be clear about all of these things, right? I think then you have to have a whole theory of concept formation and epistemology, which is why I mentioned to you previous to our conversation, a lot of Ayn Rand's approach to concept formation and the way she just approaches knowledge, I think is, is one of the best that I've seen. I don't know if you have to go that way, but so I would view that I would just try to look at this simply and realistically and clearly and have clear terms. So I would say that we are rational beings, right? And we have the ability to have knowledge about the universe. That is factual knowledge and other knowledge. And our lines are complicated enough where we grasp so much. I mean, look, we have perceptual data. That's all we have, I believe, the five senses as far as we know, and our brains integrate those percepts, as Rand would say, into concepts. And the concepts lead to higher level thinking. And then to communicate this and to think with others and to make it more streamlined, we have language. So you have language that has words that correspond to concepts. So to say something is just a concept is kind of misleading. I mean... Well, so let me give you an example, though. So if I were to say something like, if I go to a chess tournament, there are rules of the game I have to follow. There's social rules if I want to participate. And I want to participate because I like going to chess tournaments. But the rules aren't something that are inescapable. I can just not follow them. I can consistently. And it sounds like the claim is that with the argumentation ethics, it's not something that is escapable in the same way as the rules of a chess tournament are. It's not escapable because all truth claims can have to be decided or decidable upon in argumentation. And therefore, if there are any particular ethics that come with argumentation as an activity, then that does delimit the universe of possible claims that could ever be justified. If you accept that there are such things as rights, I mean, what is the... Back up for a second. I look at it the other way. I think rights are an outcome of a way of thinking about what's justified. That's just a conceptual term we apply to it. So for example, the entire libertarian claim could just boil down to you can never justify aggression. Let's just assume we know what aggression is. Aggression cannot be justified. Now, what that means is aggression can't be argumentatively justified because every justification has to be done argumentatively. So when you say aggression can't be argumentatively justified, what you're saying is that actual people engaged in an actual argument are making certain presuppositions as a nature of the activity of argumentation. That means it is literally logically impossible for them to justify certain normative claims that would contradict the presuppositions of the argument. So to my mind, the only disagreement really that is left, that I say someone like you could have like as a libertarian, is do you believe that argumentation necessarily has certain normative presuppositions or not? So like in the Murphy Callaghan debate that I had, they seem to agree with me that they agree that argumentation has some normative presuppositions. They weren't clear about what they were and I don't think they understood the implications of them saying that. But once you admit that, the game is over. Well, so let's say I don't admit that. So if you don't admit that, then that's where the real dispute lies, right? But if you don't admit that, so then I would like logically classify people in the different camps and then at that point. I mean, if you don't even want to argue at all, then you're just a brute. And again, I just have to treat you as a technical problem, right? Just like, you know, I can argue with an IRS agent about why taxation is wrong. And he can basically agree with what I say, but say, anyway, pay your taxes. I've just got to regard him as a threat and keep an eye on him, right? And I've got to keep my hand on my wallet. So I can say coherently, though, that in the process of arguing, you demonstrate possession of your body. But I can also coherently say, in the process of argument, there's no such thing as legitimate ownership. Yeah, I think, yeah, I get what you're getting at. What I think what you're thinking is that you don't have to make an normative claims to an argument. Let me ask you, though. So when we're talking about, you were talking about justification, and you said rights are kind of an maybe an outgrowth of justification or something that follows from justification. Where do you get this concept of justification? Well, if I'm a justification skeptic and I say there's no such thing as any kind of object of justification, how do you how would you respond to that? Well, then you would lose in court. If you really don't want to object to my taking your property, then I'll just take it. In other words, if you want to mount, if you want to mount the sense of your right, if you want to take my stuff, or if you want to keep your stuff and we have a context, then you're in effect saying, I'm the owner, not you. You can't, it's not like saying, That's the case if you accept this idea of ownership, but if I'm an ownership skeptic, and I say all ownership is a concept we come up with that are mine, because it benefits society if we all agree that there's such a thing as ownership. I'm acknowledging that there is such a thing as concept of ownership that has logical implications if you agree to it, but I'm saying really it's just, it's kind of an agreement that sometimes I'll follow and sometimes I won't. Well, I guess you could, it's convenient to come up with a situation where we're like these angelic beings floating up in the clouds just having an abstract argument about what these silly humans down on the earth squabbling over resources are arguing about, right? And you can say, well, I just, it's just gameplay, it's a game, I'm going to reject it. But the point is that in any, in any actual dispute about an actual conflict over any actual resources, the two or more people that are part of the dispute, both actually are, they are claiming ownership of that resource. Okay. So I don't see how they can claim ownership of it and then deny the concept of ownership. Okay. Okay. So what about this? How about this example? Is it possible for me to, so I'm going to try to coherently argue, including the concept of ownership, but get to getting to a non-libertarian conclusion. Let's say that I say everybody that is under four feet tall, O's B, or O's everybody who is over six feet tall, 30% of their income. That's not a libertarian principle. Is that incoherent? Right. Yes. And we didn't get into that at all. That isn't the core part of Hoppe's argument. So what he, he goes into in his argument, and this is where he gets a little content, right? He says that there's something called the universalizability requirement. Okay. When you, when you, when you're in a sincere honest discussion about what rules are going to be the adopted and just rules, you have to adduce reasons for your position. They cannot be just arbitrary. Okay. Now to me, this is, this is something I think it took me a while to realize because it's kind of subtle, but people sometimes will say something like, well, what's the argument for the universalizability principle? Yeah. Okay. And again, universalizability means you can't have what, what's the opposite, which is called particularistic rules. A particularistic rule is like what sort of what you just said. It's saying like, okay, you and I both want ownership of this, of this house. My argument for why I get it is because I'm me and you're not. See, that's a petition, that's particularistic. So you're not giving a reason what Hoppe would call grounded in the nature of things, some objective reason that we can both point to and see as the explanation behind your claim. So let's make it universal. We'll say all people over six feet tall because of their superior ability to see over obstacles, that's the universal rule. And they're not talking about individuals, though I happen to qualify, but that's, it's a universal rule. Would that be incoherent? Well, I don't, I mean, I think personally that, I don't see that winning over people in arguments because it's the, you are finding a distinction between people, but it's a distinction without a difference. In other words, there's no, there's no connection between that ability and the ability to own resource. So I would say this. I don't think we have time to go into this whole thing, but there is an entire aspect of the argument that deals with the need for making universalizable arguments. So Hoppe, so let me give the example, Hoppe, he gives the example of a, you can avoid the, the, the particularistic fallacy, so to speak, by just being clear. You could say something like all red heads, right? Then it's, it's, but then it's just arbitrary. And to the extent your, your rule is arbitrary, you are literally not giving a reason. And if you're not giving a reason, you're not engaged in argumentation. Okay. Okay. Well, I'll make it. It's essentially, I've got a better one for you. So let's, this has been much more controversial. Let's say everybody with an IQ under 80 owes their 50% of their, whatever they make to people with IQs over 120. Now the reason is because the people with the higher IQs can more accurately, you know, can in make sounder investments, which makes everybody wealthier and then the other people would just squander their money. So that's an, that's at least a line of argument that doesn't seem totally arbitrary. Well, or just take it to the extreme, just you can, we can have slavery, I cast system slavery, the superior people own the inferior people because they know better than them or something. I mean, you could, you could take this to the extreme, right? I think the problem with those arguments is they're incompatible with the more basic presuppositions that are already have to be agreed to, which is basically any person, like let's say this capable of engaging in argumentation, they're, they have that kind of rational capacity, right? They're basically a human actor in the world. Any person that is capable of being an actor and that is capable of being the first appropriator and user of a resource has a better claim than anyone else. And that basic argument does not depend upon their, upon their quantity of intelligence. It just depends upon them being an actor. So it's sort of a binary thing. Once you're in the group, you have full rights. I mean, I love that. I think that's consistent. But why would that be a superior in any way to me just saying, you know, saying everything that you said, except like I say, but because it's, because it's primary. So in other words, it comes first, and it's the presupposition that we're basing everything on. So if you come up with a second criteria, it's got to undermine and undercut the first one, right? So in other words, it's just a fancy way of saying, I agree that, that I agree that for purposes of, for there to be argumentation, there has to be human life. For there to be human life, humans have to employ scarce means in the world. For them to employ scarce means in the world, someone has to be the first user of a resource, right? For someone to be the first user of a resource, he has to be free to take it and start using it. For there to be ownership, the latecomer principle applies, which means that, you know, the person who first used a resource has a better claim to it than anyone else. So we agree to all this. And then you say, yeah, but we're still going to take it from the guy anyway, because he's stupider. I mean, that's really what you're saying. So it's just, it's just a contradiction of all the essential presuppositions that you've come up with. In other words, if you, if you introduce a distinction, I mean, how about a more realistic example? Blacks or women at certain times in history, and in certain cultures, even still today, are considered to be inferior to men or to white men, right? And therefore, the standard arguments that we came up with only apply to like white men or something like that, right? Women don't have the right to engage in contract, they don't have the right to buy property, etc. I mean, this is an actual argument that's been used. And the argument is that the women are the frail or sex, blacks have a lower IQ, they're not as evolved, whatever the arguments are, right? But I think with these kind of grand questions, we have to really sit back and say, like it's really enlightened liberal thinking, realistic people. Is this a serious argument? Are we really saying they're not human actors? Are we really saying that it's impossible to imagine a black man alone on an island surviving and acting as a human employing scarce means or a woman? Yeah, it's just, it's an arbitrary distinction that is not grounded in the nature of things that everyone that's a potential arguer could, could in principle agree to as being fair. Well, I find it, I mean, I find it persuasive and I find the conclusions persuasive, but the thing that that's the sticking point for me is the notion of the inescapability of it. So I agree, it's not, I ain't going to persuade a lot of people to say, oh, we're going to give these exceptions for women, they don't qualify, totally not going to persuade anybody. Well, before we go, let me ask you, let me, let me give you one thing I haven't gotten to yet and see what you think about that's okay, especially when I deal with libertarians who are skeptics of argumentation ethics. Not skeptics really, I understand people being skeptical because this entire area is confused and difficult, but people that are outright hostile to it drive me nuts, right? So, because here we have, you know, we don't have a case where I'm talking to my neighbor who's like, you know, a normie and I'm trying to say, look, let's go back to principles. You agree with me that you should be fair to people and you shouldn't hurt people. Now, if you just apply economic logic, you could, and then I try to persuade them to be a little bit more consistent, right, whatever. I'm already talking to a fellow libertarian and sometimes a fellow anarchist, which I think you probably are, right? And so, now either you yourself have a justification for your normative views or you don't. Okay. If you don't, then what is the big fuss about? So, you have these libertarians walking around with no good argument for their views and they're upset that someone thinks that they do. I mean, what's the difference really? I mean, basically, in your view, everyone's walking around, it's just like this nihilistic desire to smash people that it's like, look, I don't know why that I don't know why we should be libertarian, but you don't either. So, shut up. That's like a nihilistic sort of impulse, I believe, right? I'm definitely partial, at least towards nihilistic ethics with some exceptions. But what's interesting, though, is I also see from the opposite point of view that as annoying as those extreme anti-Hapesians are, it's also on the other side that people who take argumentation ethics and say, there's literally no coherent way to argue against these libertarian conclusions, and they try to bash that over the head. I don't find that productive either. Wait a minute, wait, you lost me. So, the Hopians lose you or the anti-Hopians there? No, I see it from the other side as well. I don't want to say all Hopians, but there's definitely a flavor of argument when people take, this is something true not just in rationalist ethics, but in all types of rationalist reasoning to say, you can't disagree, there's no coherent argument against it, and if you disagree with any part, it's because you're stupid. I think that also does a totally unprojectable. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with you on that as a tactical or a strategical matter. But here's the thing. Let's suppose that you are a libertarian. That means you do believe, and I don't think most libertarians are like totally ethical relatives. They actually do believe that their libertarian ethic is superior in some way to competing ethics. They might not be able to induce reasons for it, good reasons, but they do think that they are right, which means that they effectively do believe that an argument for socialism is wrong for some reason. They do believe that an argument for socialism is incoherent for some reason. They do believe that already. Almost every libertarian, even non-Hopians, implicitly believes that libertarianism is the only justifiable argument, and because it is true that all justification has to be done argumentatively, they believe that libertarianism is the only one that's argumentatively justifiable. So they must believe to some degree that an argument for socialism is argumentatively incoherent, and yet they attack Hopians for basically saying that. Do you see? So it's kind of bizarre to me that people who basically agree with what he's saying attacking for saying what they believe. Right. And I think it's about the rationalist, like for me at least, because I play such high value on rationalist reasoning, I think it's, if done correctly, it's the most profound way of reasoning. Those initial steps before you get to if we agree on ownership, then X, Y, and Z follow is just getting to that agreement on ownership. Is that something that's truly inescapable? That's where I think there's needs to be, there's a lot of room for reasonable skepticism here. Oh, I totally agree. But let me, from your point of view, let's say you do believe libertarianism is the most coherent, intellectually defensible, justifiable, ethical position. So you have to believe that socialism is not intellectually defensible, right? So I would, here's the way that I would put it, because I'm partial towards the ethical nihilism with, there's one big exception with my ethical nihilism, that I think it is the case that if people in society agree to principles of ownership and understand them almost identically as we understand the rules of chess tournaments, then society flourishes and you get a maximization of not just peace, not just prosperity, but the ability for individuals to love, which that is my, that is my ethical value where I think that is, that kind of grounds my ethics is, love is the good. And so that system which maximizes the love is the good system. Yeah. And I would even myself disagree with what you just said. And let me make one other point. I think that the Hopi and argumentation ethic is, is really meant as a way to strategically persuade people. It's not that kind of argument. As I said, most people look society couldn't exist, in my view, without people mostly being decent and seeing these things practically, intuitively, and other ways. I was a libertarian before I read Hopa. It's just that when I read it, I was like, Oh, this is so it makes so much sense. And it was like, intellectually pleasing to me as someone interested in the theory of things. You follow me? Yeah. I don't know if you've had a bunch of socialists out there, doddering along and they read Hopa's argumentation ethics in 1988 Liberty magazine, they go, Oh, now I'm going to be libertarian. But that's that's really more a question of how to persuade people or tactics or strategy or psychology or something like that. So it's not that this is supposed to open people's eyes. But it is supposed to be a way to demonstrate to libertarians why it is like why it logically is that no one is able to defend a system competing with ours. No one's able to justify socialism. It's just contrary to the nature of things. I mean, they're not able to justify socialism given the presuppositions of this type of universal ownership principle. Yes. But the thing is when they engage in argumentation is a peaceful activity. This is what peace people do when they come together and they're trying to be civilized. They're trying to respect each other. They're trying to find a way to work with each other in this world of possible conflict and the people that are trying to do that. Now, I believe that it's because of evolution and psychology. I mean, humans because of the way we evolved, we have a social nature, but there is an advantage to being in you know, in society with each other in communities. But that gives rise to the possibility of conflict and it gives rise to human feelings of empathy. So I think that, for example, and I think the free market enhances empathy, but empathy to my mind is the kind of root source of rights in the sense that it makes us value other people, not just ourselves. But to the extent you value other people, these are the type of people that engage in these inquiries in the first place. I mean, even our opponents are basically civilized. So they recognize the ground norms, the basic norms that we do. They just go way off track, I think, because there's so much baggage and there's so much economic illiteracy and there's so much confusion, you know, about individualism versus the collective goods and things like that, right? You know, one of the biggest problems is the state is viewed as this kind of background entity that is separate from us, that is necessary and permanent and has to be taken into account and there's special rules for the state, right? That lets people use the state of safety valve for all the things they don't understand. They just shove it into the state. In their personal lives, they would never rob their neighbor, right? But they will consent to the state robbing their neighbor. Yeah, I think when you expand on even kind of common sensical ethical intuitions that people have, I do think it leads to some kind of a, some version of an anarchism, even though people don't immediately see that's where it leads. But this has been an awesome conversation. I have enjoyed it. We can do it again anytime or another topic if you like. Excellent. All right, that was my conversation with Mr. Norman Stephan Kinsella. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Wherever you fall on this particular argument, I hope that clarified things. I think many proponents of argumentation ethics are a bit too strong headed in how certain and complete and absolute and unquestionable the ideas are. And I think many people who criticize our commutation ethics are a bit too quick to do so. I think there's some middle ground here. I'm definitely not totally on board yet, but I think there is some truth to be discovered when at least thinking about some values that we demonstrate that we presuppose when we're in the process of argumentation. So though I'm not a rationalist ethicist yet, I've got an open mind and I'm still ready to be persuaded. Obviously, there's a lot more to say on this issue, but not today. That's all for me. I hope you guys have a great week.