 Guess what, Lions? For as little as $5 a month, you can get access to exclusive bonus audio content and help this program grow by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride. To learn more, head over to lionsofliberty.com slash support. I think that we naturally, most of us, want to live in peace and prosperity with each other. Most of us have a little degree of empathy with each other. So we want ourselves to survive, but we also want others just, you know, to prosper. Here's your host, your guide, your shining beacon of liberty, Mark Clare. Hello, my little Liberty Lemmings. Do not run. Do not run off the cliff. Stay. Stay for this conversation because we're gonna dig into some interesting things today. Specifically, we're going to address a concept which is used by many libertarians to justify libertarian beliefs and libertarian ethics known as argumentation ethics. And I'm going to have my very first guest ever on the show back to discuss it with him. But first, I got to remind you that this is not the first episode. No, this is the 318th episode of this program, which means you can find today's show notes over at lionsofliberty.com slash 318. And it's not only me here from here on Lions of Liberty. I have some compatriots, some wonderful Liberty Lions here along with me, including Brian McWilliams every single Wednesday when he brings you his weekly shot of comedy culture in liberty with electric liberty land. And then my man, John Odomat, wraps things up every single Friday with his look at the broken criminal justice system on Felony Friday. This is why you got to hit that darn subscribe button, whether it's on iTunes, Stitcher. I think like two of you might listen on YouTube, but I know some people do like to listen on YouTube too. So YouTube, wherever you guys listen to the show, be sure to hit that subscribe button. Be sure to leave us a five star rating and a great review over on iTunes. That stuff is a great help. But enough about us. Let's get into the show. I guess today is the founder and executive editor of Libertarian Papers and the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. He's also the author of the book Against Intellectual Property, which I discussed with him on the very first episode of this program a little over four years ago. I'm pleased to welcome back Stefan Kinsella. Stefan, are you ready to roar? Well, I'll give a freedom fiend saying meow. You're the second guest in the last three weeks to meow at me. As I mentioned, Walter Block gave me a nice little meow a few weeks ago too, but that was a little bit of a different tone. Well, you know, I love freedom fiends and Michael Dean and I've done that before. So that's my, that's my shtick now. And Walter's always a support. All right, fiends. You got one free plug. Next, the next one's going to cost you. But now Stefan, I brought you back onto the show today to discuss a concept that is used by many libertarians as a justification for libertarianism known as argumentation ethics. But, you know, believe it or not, even though I've done this with nearly every guest on this program, I went back and listened to my first episode with you the other week, and I actually didn't ask you the question I've asked every single other guest since then, pretty much. And that is, how exactly did you become interested in the ideas of liberty? What made you a libertarian? Well, I was sort of an agnostic in the, in political sense of just a young kid in Louisiana at a high school and at a Catholic high school. And the librarian, when I was 10th or 11th grade, told me to read at the fountainhead actually by Ein Rand. And that led to everything. So I think to Chile, you know, the famous book it usually begins with Ein Rand was correct, in my case at least. So I read Ein Rand and everything led from there. What was it about Ein Rand's work? Was it really just how her fictional work captured you? Or was it more like the concepts that you were reading through her work? Because I know even people that revere a lot of her, the ethical sort of concepts that come through in her fiction, don't necessarily always love every word of her fictional work, if you know what I mean? Well, I think in my case, it was that I was sort of coming from zero. Like I had no political thoughts at all. Right. And something about, I mean, I was adopted. So I was sort of an individualist in the sense of I'm my own man. I can make my own stuff. So I think the work story in the fountainhead resonated with me. Although to be honest, in retrospect, I am a little bit puzzled by why people think the fountainhead was libertarian at all, because the entire fountainhead story is basically a story of a IP intellectual property terrorism. I mean, Howard Work is not a libertarian hero, really. But there's something about the message of just doing what you want to do and being your own man that resonated with me and led me to other works that really made me libertarian, you know, Bastiat and Rothbard and Mises and the and out of the shrug, which is far more libertarian, I believe, than the fountainhead. So I think it's personal for everyone. In my case, it was just the timing and the fact that a Catholic librarian sensed that I liked stimulation and ideas and philosophy, and she said you should read the fountainhead. All right. Well, it starts differently for everybody. And sometimes it just takes a little spark, even if that spark isn't the refined concepts of libertarianism, as the fountainhead certainly isn't. But that that kind of concept of individualism overall is certainly in there. And sometimes it just takes something like that to get your brain moving in the direction of, oh, I should think deeper about these things. I should look more into the actual political concepts that are connected to these ideas of individualism. Yeah, I think that's right. I think for different people, most libertarians have a sort of philosophical bent at a certain point in their lives. And, you know, I got caught at the right point in time, I guess, or maybe the wrong point in time. I don't know. I would never know till it's all sorted out in the end of Armageddon or the day. Exactly. Maybe we'll all know someday. But, you know, as I mentioned at the top there, you are a proponent of argumentation ethics. It's a concept that was first put forward by Hans Hermann Hoppe, I believe, in the late 80s and later adopted by many libertarians, such as yourself, as as a justification for supporting private property rights and all the concepts of liberty, which spring forward from there. And I think you've been one of the more vocal supporters of argumentation ethics over the years. But I've read a lot about the subject. I've listened to a lot of interviews you've done and a lot of, you know, read a lot of articles, read Hop's work, read some critiques in the last week or two. But for the sake of my listeners, I'm going to try to sort of wipe my brain clean for a minute and just act like I've never heard of this concept before and kind of go from scratch here and try to look at it that way from someone who's never heard of it before. So why don't we just start with the very base concept? I'll let you spell out exactly what Hoppe's argument behind argumentation ethics is and why it is seen by some such as yourself as justifying the libertarian ethic of private property rights. Yeah, sure. So I mean, for my personal history, I was, you know, young teenager when I discovered this. And the question is like, why would I? Why do other libertarians get into this thing? Right. And I think it's a passion for justice and rights and consistency, liberty, freedom for each other, nonviolence. But when we come up with arguments, like more sustained arguments to try to justify what we believe to each other and then to outsiders, there's different, you know, there are different platforms we use. We say natural rights, you know, we say that. Some are utilitarians that just see it as like the more efficient way to go. Yeah, there's an empirical or utilitarian or consequentialist argument, which is that better results are produced by a set of rules that mimic the libertarian idea. But that presupposes that we all favor, you know, a certain set of outcomes and things like that. Look, of course, I was attracted in the beginning to Rand and to natural law ideas, but it was because I believe that I, like most libertarians, have a natural tendency to prefer the values that underscore what we all believe in, which is, you know, peace is better than conflict, cooperation is better than violence. We are all self-interested. We want ourselves to do better and our families to do, you know, we're more interested in our families than others. But we all basically generally want society to do better as well. Probably because of the division of labor and empathy and things like this, which Mises emphasized, et cetera. But the question is really what's the argument for that, right? And the essential problem with the fundamental argument of Rand and natural law argues is that they say that because of man's nature, we should value these things. Now, we know that some people don't, most of us happen to. But the question is, is it compelled by that? OK, so when I was a law student in 1989, like a young 20-something year old, I read Hans Hermann Hoppe's first public defense of his argumentation ethics, which was in Liberty Magazine, which was a popular thing back in the day. Reason Magazine is still around, Liberty's still around online. But back in the day, there were very few outlets for these things. So this is what we all read, right? Back in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, maybe. I'm just kind of curious first, if you don't mind. What was your, so you were already sort of a libertarian at this point. Obviously, you're subscribing to this magazine. So what did you have a concept already in your mind about about what a justification for libertarianism was before hearing about argumentation ethics? Or was it more a general thing, like you were saying before, where you knew you valued the concept of peace. You knew you've preferred cooperation over punching in the face, and that sort of basic stuff. But you just maybe hadn't had a well thought out argument for, you know, why other people should feel that way. Well, I think that the natural law or the natural rights arguments of Ein Rand and people like her resonated with me. But it was because I, like you and other libertarians, I suppose, we already value certain basic values. We don't maybe explicitly recognize those, right? But there's a certain appeal for us to this internally consistent idea and also one informed by economic economic knowledge, right? Like the laws of supply and demand is just basic, basic economics, which, you know, most of these ideas, what we hear make no sense in terms of economics. So for me, I think I was attracted to the natural rights ideas, but it was more intuitive. And the arguments that they put forth made some sense to me, but I sense that there was some problem with them. And when I read Hoppe, you know, he points out that according to Kant and Hume, I'm sorry, according to Hume, there is a logical problem with deriving an ought from an is. So if you're really hyper logical, hyper rationalist and you really want to find a proof of what you believe, if you realize that you can't go from facts to values, right, from ought to is, from is to ought, then you start questioning, well, then what's really the basis of our principles? And it could be either intuitive or just what we happen to believe or pragmatic. So I was, of course, a young libertarian thinking about all these things heavily at the time. So is the concept there with natural rights that, you know, even if you can sort of show someone that they are real or exist, that it's still difficult to take that and then argue that, therefore, everyone must respect them. And that sort of thing. Yeah, I think the natural rights idea is more based in sort of a natural law idea that, look, you can show that human nature is this, like, which is a fact, and therefore you can derive that this is the way we ought to react towards each other. But I sort of think that's an after the thought way of justifying what is an intuitive and natural proclivity among most, you know, civilized people. I think that we naturally, most of us want to live in peace and prosperity with each other. Most of us have a little degree of empathy with each other. So we want ourselves to survive, but we also want others just, you know, to prosper. So I think this has to be the basis of any workable system. So what happened was, you know, Murray Rothbard was like a natural rights-leaning libertarian progenitor, and he was also heavily involved with Ein Rand. So I believe that like Ein Rand, Leonard Reed, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, these guys were really the early originators of libertarian thought, right? And Rothbard was influenced by Rand and the natural law or natural rights type of thinking, but he split from her and he became more radical. And then when Hoppe, Hans Hermann Hoppe, became his sort of protege and moved over here in 1985 or 86 to become a student. And he was his close associate and student for like 10 years until Rothbard died in 1995. You know, they worked together on a lot of things and Hoppe introduced a more Kantian element, which is one reason why I believe Hoppe, well, he was more influenced by Mises, too, who was highly Kantian. So you have a blend of, I think, four thinkers. You have Hoppe. Well, let's start from the beginning. You have Rand, who was influenced by Aristotle and Thomism. So you have Ein Rand and then you have Rothbard and Mises and Mises was influenced by Rand and vice versa, but also by Kant. But then Rand hated Kant. So you have this weird blend of ideas, right? You have Hoppe, Mises, Kant, Rand, Rothbard. And Hoppe kind of put them all in a blender and pulled out argumentation ethics, sort of. Yes. What's interesting to know about Hans, and I've talked about this a little bit in the past. And of course, Hans is still alive and a good friend of mine. So it's a little bit odd to be speaking on his behalf because I have my actually own theory of rights, which is called Estoppel, which is complementary to and related to argumentation ethics. But I'm a big proponent of Hoppe's approach. But Hoppe was a young German, Kantian influenced and leftist student in Germany. And he was a student of Jurgen Habermas, who is a famous old now, but of socialist, but very smart philosopher in Germany and Europe. And he had a theory called discourse ethics or argumentation ethics. Now, Habermas and his sort of colleague, Appel, Carl Otto Appel. So these are the two big names that Carl Otto Appel, APEL and Jurgen Habermas were the originators in Europe of this idea of discourse ethics. Now, they used it to say that when people get together to decide on what the political norms should be, it's it's like a democratic thing. People have to agree on certain baselines or certain fundamental ground norms or base norms. Now, they took this idea and they worked it into a type of democratic socialism. OK. But the fundamental idea appealed to Hoppe, who was Habermas's student. And as he learned more and more from Mises and Rothbard later on, he blended these things together. So that's how it emerged. It's really interesting that he took kind of the concepts, these natural law concepts that he would later learn from Rothbard and ran and that sort of thing and sort of merged them with another concept that he was getting from a socialist. It's very interesting. Yeah. And there's another parallel to that, which was Roger Pallon, who is a PhD and legal theorist and at Kato, whose professor, I'm blanking on the name now, but he he was another famous American philosopher who had another similar thing, a discourse type ethics idea. And he also used it to argue for a type of democratic socialist welfare state ethics. I mean, not too hardcore socialist, but it wasn't libertarian and Pallon, of course, you know, being aware of economics and free market thinking worked it into a libertarian counterpart. So there there actually is a counterpart to this with Roger Pallon. So what happened was Hoppe moved over to the US to study under Rothbard as he got became more and more libertarian and Rothbardian and Mazzizian. In my mind, what's very fascinating is that Hoppe on his own in Germany as a as a young student, as a brilliant PhD student, discovered the works, I think, of Bombavark first, Eugen von Bombavark, which is a predecessor of Mises in the Austrian Economics School. He was already on the path himself, that is Hoppe, of sort of rediscovering Austrian economic principles on its own. OK, but finally he was led to the work of Mises through Bombavark and and other footnotes and things and works in Germany. And he realized, OK, Mises has it figured out already. And then he was led to Rothbard and became an anarchist. But what's to me so impressive about Hoppe is that he was on the verge of rediscovering Hoppe and praxeology or praxeology, which is Mises's methodology. But then he found Mises and he didn't have to do it. But I always wonder what would have happened if he had been in ignorance for, you know, 10, 15 more years. Maybe we'd have like a parallel praxeology. But in any case, when he met Rothbard and became more libertarian, he moved over here and he started propounding his his theory of libertarian ethics, which Rothbard, by the way, whole heartedly endorsed. So this is how it happened. And so around 1988, 89, I would say, you know, when I was a young law student and then Liberty Magazine was coming out with these symposiums, that's when I was introduced to it. So this is the sort of background, which is a little bit longwinded. But this is the background to Hoppe's argumentation ethics. And we can go into the details if you want. But that that's the background to how I was exposed to it and how it was introduced to the American libertarian scene. All right. Well, that's a hell of a history lesson, I think for people out there. And there's pretty much about, I think, eight different names that I think a lot of people will recognize from, you know, understanding the history of Austrian economics and libertarianism, that sort of thing. So it's interesting, all the different influences that helped Hans Hoppe arrive at this point. So let's get right into the actual concept then. I mean, let's say you just met me on this podcast for the first time, and you had to explain to me after never having heard of what this is. Again, how would you explain, argumentation ethics in the most concise way possible? Well, so first, I would, if it depends on the audience, right? Like, it depends on whether I'm talking to a libertarian or not. So if I'm talking to a libertarian. Let's say I just found out about Ron Paul, and I like the ideas, I think it's interesting, but I have no idea about, like, you know, the philosophy. So if you like the ideas, that means you already have a sort of resonance with me and with other libertarians, you already share certain basic values with us. You, for some reason, you like the idea of peace and prosperity, right, in cooperation, as opposed to violence and strife and impoverishment, things like that. Just generally sounds like a better world. Yes. And so there's a consequentialist basis to this. And the consequentialist means that you base your, your ethical rules on the consequences of those rules. And, you know, there's a lot of libertarian debate over whether we should be the ontological or consequentialist. And the ontological means like rigid principles that are just put out there for some reason, either God told told us or, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas told us or Aristotle or someone. And it's regardless of the consequences. And we just have to follow this according to our duty, which is some, you know, some people say this is Kantian duty ethics. Or people that say, I just want good results for my fellow man. And so I'm in favor of the rules that we, that we can figure out that make most sense to favor the prosperity of humankind in our family and our society and everyone else. And some people believe that there is a conflict between these two ideas, like you're either in favor of rigid rules, the ontological ethics or you're in favor of some kind of pragmatic consequentialist thing. Now, my personal view is I don't think there's a conflict. I think these things dovetail together, which was, you know, in a sense, I'm Rand's view. But in any case, Hoppe arrives on the scene and Hans says, I agree with Emmanuel Kant that I'm sorry, with Hume, that you can't derive a more a normative view, a rule deductively from mere facts because you can't say, because of man's nature, he should do this because to have a should statement or an odd statement, you have to base it on some earlier odd statement because there's a logical distinction in a nutshell, which is what you asked for. What Hoppe argues is this, the only norm, which a norm, by the way, is a rule, right? My first name is Norman, so I'm a norm myself. So the only norm, the only political norm that you could ever justify in a political norm is the ultimate norm by which we decide which legal rules could could be justified. And when we talk about this, we're asked, which one should we have, which one should be justified? So what Hoppe observes is that anytime we have a discussion about this, it has to be in the context of an actual interaction of two or more human beings, right, two human actors that have a rationality, they recognize each other as self owners, they recognize each other as distinct entities, and they're having a peaceful cooperative interchange of ideas. And the attempt of the discussion is always to try to figure out what the right result would be. This is just a general context of things. Okay. So argumentation ethics says that in any discussion about what norms should be in place, the people involved always have to presuppose things that are basically libertarian basic norms. They have to presuppose peace, cooperation, respect for each other's bodies and property. Otherwise, you couldn't even have a conversation. So the idea is that the background presuppositions for any discourse about what norms should be already have built into them certain presuppositions, which you could never disagree with without basically stepping out of the context of the argumentation in the first place. So his basic idea is that the only kind of norm you could ever argue for would be the libertarian norm and no socialist norms because any socialist norm, and I'll explain in a second what he means by socialist norm, but any socialistic norm would be contrary to what you're already presupposing, what everyone has to presuppose. Okay, so that's the basics of argumentation ethics. The idea that no argumentation happens in a vacuum. It always happens in a real context between real people who are actually they have to pause in their behavior and recognize each other's right to control their bodies just for purposes of having a conversation with each other. So if you're having a real conversation, and this is a key point Hoppe emphasizes that when you have a discussion with someone about what what should be the rule that we're going to adopt, everyone recognizes that we have to agree to disagree if we can't come to an agreement. In other words, okay, we're going to pause our activities, we're going to try to find a rule that will work for all of us, but we're agreeing to disagree if we can't come to an agreement. But that is a key thing and everyone thinks that's trivial, but it's a key thing because agreeing to disagree is in a sense the libertarian basic norm. It's the idea that, okay, we can walk away from each other. But when I'm having a conversation with you, and I'm trying to persuade you of this rule, you're trying to persuade me of that rule. We're not saying to each other. If you don't agree with me, I will beat you over the head with a club. So we're both agreeing that if we don't agree, we're going to walk away and respect each other's space, basically. So the general idea is that by having the argument, by even having a verbal argument about whatever, you're already sort of putting forward the concept that we are individuals with individual rights of some kind and that is sort of putting a mutual respect in that sense that we are already agreeing not to use violence on each other by having this conversation and then that that should essentially extrapolate into our political views, even if it doesn't for everybody. Yes. So the basic idea is that everyone that ever enters into a sincere discussion about what we should do with these political norms or how we should act with respect to each other, they're already admitting that they agree on certain basic norms. And if you take these basic norms and if you apply a little bit of logical consistency and common sense and you apply a little bit of economic reasoning, then the only thing that can remain is the libertarian ethics, which is honestly what Mises himself argued. He thought we could never justify the basic norms, but he said that to the extent people want the same ends, which is like social cooperation and prosperity and people getting along with each other, then the only means to achieve that would be the free market. So he was an economist in that sense. So if you just have a shared set of norms, basic norms, and you apply some economic wisdom and logical consistency, then the only thing that can remain is the libertarian political ethics. Hey, guys, this is Roger Paxton. And if you're fed up with the government running every single aspect of your life, but you're not listening to the lava flow podcast yet, then what's wrong with you? 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So OK, so let's say I'm just kind of trying to see how how we get from I mean, I sort of agree with the base concept in the context of having the argument. So if you're having an argument with somebody or trying to convince them of something, you are saying, you know, I'm going to use words on you. I'm not going to use violence. You're already sort of saying that. But then what if, say, I'm arguing with a socialist? We both agree in the context of this argument just by having it that we're not using violence. We're using our words. We're using our thoughts. We're trying to persuade. And then he walks away and he goes and votes for Bernie Sanders and votes for us to be tax heavily. Like how where is the I mean, how do we connect the the initial concept within the content within the confines of the argument and relate that to why those people should actually then continue to support libertarianism or start to support libertarianism? Well, yeah, and I think that gets to be more difficult. But I think that the ultimate thing there is you you basically have to just argue for consistency then. But once you establish a baseline of shared principles and to be honest, this is not really a problem because most people mean we have civilization. We have society for a reason. We have it for because most people actually are decent and they are empathetic and they do care about each other and they do want to be decent and just and right. They just only have limited time and limited understanding to figure out all the nuances. But to the extent people really care about justifying laws and they talk about what laws can be justified, you know, we have to say, OK, we all agree on these basic principles at the bottom. So then the question would be, are the libertarians correct in saying that? If we agree on certain basic principles like peace and cooperation and the division of labor and if we understand how economics works, do we agree that people fighting over, you know, do we what property rules do we think make sense and comply with this with which property out? So I think in a sense you have to go back to property rights. And this is what Hapa does, which I sort of left out. But sure. Actually, if you don't mind actually want to read a statement from Hapa that was in, I think it was from what book was it from? It was from economics and ethics of private property. That's a book where he details this. But what Hapa said was I want to demonstrate that the libertarian private property ethic and only the libertarian private property ethic can be justified argumentatively because it is the praxeological presupposition of argumentation. So maybe we can expand on that little statement there. Maybe we'll start with what he says at the end there where he says, because it is the praxeological presupposition of argumentation. Now, you already touched on that earlier. But maybe we can expand on a little bit. I mean, what what is that praxeological presupposition and how is a praxeological presupposition as you relate to Mises? How is that different from just a general presupposition? Like is the is the is the praxeological concept? Is that something people really have to understand to understand argumentation ethics? Or is just the mere presupposition of argumentation? I guess I guess what I'm wondering is how does this praxeological concept will fit in? Why is it so necessary? Yeah, I think intuitively, you could understand it without that. But yeah, to understand it fully, I think you do need to understand praxeology, which is why I do believe that Misesian slash Rothbardian and primarily Misesian economics is so crucial to this. So praxeology is the idea that the way we perceive and understand what other human beings do is we understand them as actors. Okay, like ourselves, we have to understand ourselves as actors as to this to the extent that we're actors. And this seems like a trivial observation, but it's not trivial because you could view other people as behaviors, or as just clouds of quarks or molecules behaving according to deterministic laws. But the way we understand ourselves is is that we have purposes, right? And we use means to achieve certain purposes. And the way we understand other people is that they're like us, they're other human actors. And so we, we format in our minds, and this is the Kantian idea, like we, we have almost a dualistic epistemology. We format in our minds, we understand other people's actions as actions, instead of as just consequence deterministic events. What this means is we think of people as having purposes. Okay, so that's what praxeology is about. Now what Hoppe is talking about is that he extends this sort of logical reasoning to the ethical realm. And he says that, look, when we talk about ethics, we are also formatting our thoughts into an ethical or normative realm. So if you and I are talking about what the norm should be, we are both agreeing that there's a should there, there's an ought there because that's what we, we mean when we say what should the rule be? Now if someone, if some human beings and some human beings are like this, I would call them outlaws, right? Some people don't care about just finding their behavior. And as Hoppe talks about in some of his articles, you just have to regard those people as technical problems, you know. So in life, we have dangers and challenges that we face. We have scarcity, we have immiseration, we have, we have droughts, we have storms, we have animals that are dangerous. And we have to regard those as problems that we have to try to solve in the world, right? Technical problems. Now, if we have a fellow human being, either we regard them as an actor who's amenable to reason and wants to sit down and reason with us and shares common goals, or they don't. And if they don't, then we just have to regard them as an enemy and it's sort of like an elephant or disease or hurricane and just regard them as a challenge to overcome and regard them as an enemy, basically, or an outlaw, right? But to the extent we have society and we have civilization, there are people that come together and they do happen to share these common values. I think the essence of Hoppe's insight is that the people that are part of this core group of society necessarily do and factually do share certain basic values. And so it would make no sense for someone to come in and say, well, you've demonstrated that if I don't want everyone else to die or I want people to survive or prosper, that I shouldn't violate their property rights. So why shouldn't I do that? If you ask a question like that, there's really no answer to it. It's like, well, because we share the same values and I've demonstrated by logic and economic reasoning that the consequence of this is that we should have certain social rules, right? We should all agree on certain property rules. Now, if you want to get down to brass tacks, what Hoppe's view really amounts to is an endorsement of the natural property rights that we have to have and that have to make sense for all these things to work out for us to have a conflict free society, which is the Lockean and the sort of consistent libertarian view of property rights. So the basic view is self ownership, which means everyone is the natural owner of their body. Okay. And this idea here is that you're okay, like if I'm having a conversation with you right now, I'm already agreeing with what you just said by having that conversation because if I'm not the natural owner of my body and my thoughts, how can I possibly convince you of anything? How can I possibly even have that capacity in the first place? That's the basic idea? Yeah. So Hoppe is trying to show this what he calls a practical contradiction. If you agree to have a conversation with someone and to sit down and discuss what should the rules be, so you have to recognize the other person's ownership of their body for them to even have a discussion with you. But if your proposition is that you don't own yourself, I own you instead, that's a non-starter. It's not a consistent with the presuppositions of what you're saying in the first place. So what he's saying is that it's impossible to argumentatively justify a socialist norm. Now, by socialism, this is why he gets criticized sometimes for people for defining socialism in a somewhat extremist or idiosyncratic way, because he says socialism is basically the institutionalized interference with property rights. And capitalism, on the other hand, is the institutionalized respect for property rights, whereas the common definition would be socialism is the centralized governmental control of the means of production. But he extrapolates from that and sort of broadens it because he's getting at the essence of it, the fundamental essence, which is either you have private control of resources according to natural links, okay, which everyone can justify to each other. So if we have a dispute, which is the basis of all property rights, if there is no possibility of disputes, which arises because of scarcity, we would have no need to formulate property rules. So property rules are always a response to the fundamental fact of scarcity and the possibility of disputes or conflicts between people. Meaning that, you know, if I if I want this little certain plot of land on the beach here in California and someone else wants that exact same plot of land, you know, we either have to settle this through some sort of conversation through some sort of property norm that's agreed upon, or we have to fight or we have to use violence. These are the two or your or your body to like in the case of slavery or domination of other people, rape and murder and and assault and battery. And so the any dispute is always the result of a practical dispute. And this is why Hoppe refers to praxeology, because praxeology means is his idea of the logic of human actions is basically the idea that human beings are actors. Okay, we're not just behaviors where we are beings with a purpose in mind. So we have an intelligence, we have a purpose, we have knowledge. And we have control over our environment. And we can choose to employ certain means to achieve our ends. So the entire framework is a very rich framework. So praxeology seems simple. It's humans use means to achieve ends. But that is very rich. And you can, you can, you can deduce many basic economic rules from that, right? Opportunity cost, means and ends, lots of things like that. Okay, but so the basic idea is that humans employ means to achieve ends, but means are necessarily scarce, as Mises talks about. So these are the things we're talking about, the things that you can have, you can have conflict over. So the way I think about it is, you have human beings who are actors. And in, in theory, you can imagine them in a world, a crucial world like by themselves. Okay, now this is not exactly to like the hypothetical worlds of the evenly rotating economy imagined by Mises and Rothbard, which is a thought construct, but it's not quite realistic because it's not quite attainable. You could never have an evenly rotating economy. But you could, in theory, have an actor who lives alone with no other safe, enter intelligent beings. And in that context, the actor isolated would employ means to achieve ends. He would still do human action. But the thing is there would be no possibility of conflict. When there's other human beings introduced, which is the case, in most cases, right? There's a possibility of conflict. And to the extent that these people want to live in society and have some empathy for each other, and want to find a way to use these resources in a cooperative way, instead of in a violent conflictual way, they search for norms, which are property rights, right, which say, who can use this resource? Okay, so this is the entire genesis of these things, right? So and this is, by the way, not just libertarianism. This is every legal system or every political system. There's always an answer to the question of what property rights should there be? Who should be able to control the resources? Because there's always the possibility of conflict. So basically what Hoppe recognizes is that if you're going to search for different types of systems that would allocate property rights in a certain way, the only argument that can pass the test, right, that can be compatible with the presuppositions of the people entering into any discussion in the first place is the libertarian system. So that's why he calls it the ultimate justification of the libertarian property ethic in the Liberty article. It's ultimate in the sense that it shows that you self refute yourself when you try to deny what you're already agreeing with. Okay, so to my mind in a practical sense, that's the value of this is to just tell your interlocutor, tell your other, you know, your participant discourse, just say, listen, I'm pointing to the fact that you and I both agree with these basic norms. If you didn't agree, you wouldn't be discussing with me in the first place. And if you just have a little bit of consistency and a little bit of economic reasoning, you see that if you go up from there, the only thing that can be justified is a libertarian norm. Any other norm is socialistic or governmental or statist in a sense. So this is really kind of sort of pointing out the contradictions of people that would hold very anti libertarian philosophies, be it socialism or some other thing, and still having these arguments and then trying to point out by having this argument, you are you are contradicting this other ideology that you are arguing for, I guess. So, you know, a lot of people might look around and say, well, I see a bunch of people having conversations all in the world. People are having arguments left and right. And yet we also live in a world, if we look around, we see property rights being violated left and right. So clearly in today's society, people aren't taking that logical, you know, thought of I use my body to argue, therefore, I'm going to apply a libertarian property ethic. But I guess the concept behind Hoppa's idea would be like, that's true. But they're all contradicting themselves. Is that that general idea? Yes, I think is exactly right. And I would say one thing that Hans emphasizes a few key concepts in his argument over and over again. And some of them seem somewhat redundant with what he said before. But over time, I've developed an appreciation for why he does this. But one thing he emphasizes is that all justification is argumentative justification necessarily. And we know this because you can never deny this without contradiction, right? So it's it's a little bit like some of the Randian proofs of metaphysics and the law of identity and things like this, like you have to contradict yourself to deny it. So we know that it's sort of true because it's something that you could never deny. And it has to be true that every justification, and that is an important word, has to be argumentative. That is, it has to be something that people arrive at by a discussion between themselves. And you could never deny that because to deny it, you'd have to engage in argumentation, right? So that's one insight is that all justification has to be argumentative. And the second insight is that argumentation is not just an it's not like an abstract idea. It's a practical activity that acting human beings actually engage in in the real world. And when they do that, they have to have a body, they have to have scarce resources, they have to have existed and survived to get there, they have to be actually respecting each other's space and their bodies and their belongings during the argumentation. So there's a host of practical presuppositions of any actual argumentation. And because argumentation has to be the basis, you know, it has to be what is the background of any justification. The point is you could never, as a real matter in the real world, you could never justify a socialistic ethics because any justification of a socialistic ethics would be trying to argue something that's contrary to the to the presuppositions of the people that have to be engaged in this in the first place. So that's the foundational idea, I think of Hoppe. It's it's hard to grasp. For some people, it's easy to grasp for others, but that is my view. And I do think it's correct. And I think that it identifies something fundamental about libertarian ethics. I think the base concept is pretty easy to grasp, especially for people that are already sort of familiar with libertarian ethics. I think when where we might have more trouble applying it or using it effectively is against someone who doesn't already have that libertarian ethic of some kind. I mean, say I try to think of weird examples, but say there's just someone who is has an axe and they come over to my house with this axe, and they're ready to chop me to pieces and just take all my stuff. But, you know, maybe on the way in the door, they're saying, Well, I guess I'll just tell him, you know, if you give me all your stuff, I won't chop you to pieces, you know, chopping and I'm not against chopping into pieces. I don't really want to make an argument for why I have to or not. I'd better just chop the guy to pieces. But you know, I will exert a lot of effort if I do chop into pieces. So I will first just ask, would you like to be chopped to pieces or would you like to just give me all your stuff? And how like how does and I think we have a lot of people in society that are criminals in the sense that they certainly don't support private property rights, they might come and stick a gun at me and mug me and ask if I'll give them their stuff first. But at the end of the day, their presupposition was violence at the forefront. So even even in the small context, sometimes of where I can see where there is an argument of sorts, words are being spoken, the presupposition isn't always going to be that, you know, with certain people in our society. So how do you sort of mesh those concepts together? I think part of the problem here is, is people really need to appreciate the distinction between facts and values or between is an art between norms and facts. So we have a lot of especially libertarian activists, I think this is one reason there's a lot of skepticism towards Hoppa's approach. And the approach of a lot of normatives is that these guys want results, right? So they want results. So yeah, if a guy's trying to kill me, my goal is for him not to kill me. And if an argument I hurl at him is not persuasive and doesn't stop him, then someone might say, well, the argument is worthless. Okay. And that might be true. It might be worthless. It might not be an effective way of stopping someone from acting. Okay. But the question is, if and to the extent we care about actions being justified, what can be justified? Now the guy trying to kill me, if he's beyond reason, or he doesn't have the same core values, right that I have, then he doesn't care that his actions weren't justified. He's not trying to justify his actions. He just trying to get what he wants. So to that extent, these people have to be regarded, as I said earlier, as like an animal or a mere technical problem. So and that is what would sort of justify retaliatory retaliatory violence against that person because they've sort of removed themselves from the game. They've removed themselves from the peaceful society and said, I'm something different. I'm an outlaw. And now you can't use violence against me because I'm only trying to use that against you. Yes. And to my mind, this complements perfectly the libertarian sort of intuition, right? That I mean, the liberty, libertarians are not pacifists, but we're not against violence or force, we're against initiation of force. But we, most of us admit and believe that it's permissible to use force in response to someone who use force, right? So what we're trying to do is in a society of people that mostly agree with us, we try to say which laws should be justified because we care, we do care about justification. So the question is which kind of response by me or by the legal system in response to one of these outlaw guys, which kind of response is justified? And so then the libertarian rule falls out, which is that, well, you're entitled to or you're justified in responding in a retaliatory in a proportionate way, sorry, with retaliatory force or defensive force against someone who is harmed you or is trying to harm you. So we're the ones who care about defensive force. So we're talking about what the law should be, what the rules should be, not what you should do as individuals, although there's some there's some connection, I believe. But I think that this is too far afield, but I don't think the libertarian non-aggression principle, if you want to summarize it like that, I don't think it's directly a moral rule telling us what to do in every case as individuals. It's more of what kind of rule should we use to say which laws institutionally in society, in a community, which ones are justified. So in other words, if someone does try to attack me, what am I entitled to do in response? Right, you can try arguing with them, but you know, the axis swinging, you might not have time, you can try to argue. But if you can't, then the question is, am I entitled to use lethal force and self defense? And the answer is yes. And after the fact, am I entitled to use force to hunt them down and and try to get some recompense? Then the answer is yes. And that is a societally, societally recognized rule. And that's where the justification and the argument comes in. Informing what laws are, it's not some kind of mystical sci-fi or fantasy barrier. It's not an incantation you can wield. You can't just you can't just say, you know, like a Harry Potter character, you may not use force against me and it stops them in their argumentation ethics and then at all, it all does ends. Yes. And and this is the problem is that people are not Misesian dualists. They don't recognize the distinction between fact and value or between is and ought. And they think that if you have a right or if you say you have a right and someone is able factually to violate it, that sort of means that you didn't have the right. But if you believe that kind of way, you don't really believe in rights because, you know, property rights are the way people should act or the way the law should allow you to act or the rules that govern behavior. But it it encompasses the idea that people could violate those rules. So then the question is what are the consequences when you do violate those rules? All right, well, stuff. And it's certainly a concept that like we said, it is in some ways very simple, but in other ways it can require many, many, many hours of reading to really think about further and get to the core of and I will be sure to link to in today's show notes, which everyone can find at lines of liberty.com slash 3 18. I'll link to, you know, maybe you can send me a couple articles. I have got a bunch of links of my own. So I'll make sure to to and I'll link to critiques as well. There are critiques out there. Not everybody agrees with the concept, but a lot of prominent libertarians agree and several disagree as well. So I'll be sure to try to put up, you know, some views from all sides of this thing. But I certainly think it's a good food for thought. And I think as libertarians, we're always looking to at some point, we have to really be able to justify our beliefs by by more than just I want it. I think it, I feel it. So I think any attempts to try to do that are definitely once worth discussing. And I was glad to have you on here today to dig into this further before I let you go, Stefan, is there anything else you've got going on anything you've gotten the works, anything you want to promote, feel free to plug away at anything you've got happening. Everything I'm doing can be found on my page, StefanCancella.com. So yeah, I've got a thing at Yale in December where I'm arguing on IP and also property. And I've got a book coming out, but that'll be at least six months. But other than that, now people can just follow my stuff there. Well, great. Well, it's been a blast. And you know, maybe we'll try to make it a little less than four years before the next time we bring you on. How about that? Maybe when that book comes out. That sounds good. All right, Stefan, take care. Keep up the great work and keep on roaring. Thanks, Mark. All right, kitty cats, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with the returning from way back in episode one, StefanCancella. I would say I recommend going back and listening to my first interview with StefanCancella. But quite frankly, it's very difficult to listen to myself in my first episode. But I will post it in today's show notes. I will post the link over at lionsofliberty.com slash 318. So if you really want to hear a very rusty very did not know what the F he was doing, Mark Clare, you can listen to that interview with StefanCancella all about intellectual property. Despite being rough around the edges at the time and the editing being not that great and the audio being not amazing. But I leave it up to you. If you can ignore the host, you may find episode one pretty interesting. If you weren't around way back then, of course, the show has grown quite a bit since then. So I'm so thrilled to have all you guys here with me now on this journey. We did take a little break from the philosophy last week and we sure did dive right back into it today with Stefan Cancella. I do think it is a very important issue ultimately. I mean, this is probably not the kind of stuff you're going to be talking to the with somebody the first time you're introducing them to these ideas. The very first time you talk about libertarianism, you're probably not going to do a deep dive on argumentation ethics. Heck, maybe you will. I don't know. Maybe maybe that's what will work on some people. But to me, it really feels like it totally makes sense to me and I get it and I can explain it to other libertarians and they will understand the concepts of body ownership and a lot of the implications that come from that. I don't know if it's going to be effective on a socialist. I don't know if it's going to be effective on someone with an already diametrically opposed view. But you know, effectiveness is one thing and getting to the truth and why something is is another thing. And I do think that these the quest out there, the legitimate quest that many have made to try to justify the ideas of liberty or justify their beliefs is a valid one. And I think it's something that we need to be doing at all times, not necessarily justifying libertarianism per se, but just trying to get to what the truth is. What is the truth out there? And I think that's something we're going to continue to explore here on lines of liberty. Like we talked about in the show, there are a lot of different justifications for political ideas, natural rights, utilitarianism slash consequentialism and of course, this argument here of argumentation ethics. I think they all have interesting aspects that need to be explored. I have explored them on the show before, but we're going to be coming back to it a little bit more in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for this continued discussion. In the meantime, if you're interested in some stuff that goes in a totally different direction than what you heard today, not really the philosophical direction, but the conspiracy direction. Let's just call it what it is. We did just record and it is already up now for members of the Lions of Liberty Pride, the latest edition of Conspiracy Corner where we did a whole deep dive on the Las Vegas shooting looking at all the various angles, possibilities, possible theories, possible oddities in the mainstream narrative. And you know, the security guard, Jesus Campos was just on Ellen the other day, telling his exclusive story, which will, according to him, never be told in any other format again. And that's a it's an interesting interview. And we talk about that quite a bit as well. So be sure to tune into that. 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