 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell and I'm joined today by my colleagues Jason Kuznicki and Grant Babcock. Today we're recording the first of a series on Murray Rothbard's 1982 book, The Ethics of Liberty. This is the book where he attempts to set out his full moral theory of the state, his ethics of what liberty requires and what it prohibits government from doing. This is his big statement of libertarian ethics. Part one of the book is this short little part about natural law before he gets into all the questions about the state. What is Rothbard doing here? This is an interesting book to me. I guess I should start by saying because I've long been calling myself a Rothbardian, but I've never actually read Ethics of Liberty. I'm mostly more familiar with his economic works and some of his journal articles and that sort of thing. So like you said, this is Rothbard's attempt to sort of formally lay down his ethical system. And chapter one is he's situating that project in this sort of broader natural law tradition. So he identifies certain historical strains of natural law thinking. He's especially interested in this classics. He says, I'm not going to attempt to lay down a full proof that natural law thinking is the right way to think about ethics, but I'll at least give you some context. This is one of the interesting things in this book is that I think a lot of our criticisms, especially at this part one, a lot of things we're going to say are he didn't do a very good job of defending this or he didn't even work out this argument very much. And so he's telling us up front, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm going to basically assume that these arguments have already been made or made well enough by others and just see where they go. Well, the fact is a lot of these arguments had been made in other books that his audience was likely to have read already. I think that for a lot of this entire first part, the sort of elephant in the room is Ein Rand, who also claimed to advance a natural law theory that was secular or not necessarily religious at least, and that would be a foundation for a classical liberal understanding of property rights and market process and the like. And I think Rothbard knew very well that just about everyone would have read Ein Rand and he seems to take that as a sort of background knowledge and I don't believe even mentions are once in the text, but that has to be what he's relying on, I would say. What is natural law? We should probably get that out right up front before we go into the specifics of Rothbard's theories. What is natural law? How is it different from, say, other moral theories like utilitarianism? Well, first I guess you have to distinguish natural law and natural rights, which are slightly different. So I think a lot of libertarians are familiar with natural rights thinking because we say, okay, well, these are the rights that we have as human beings that are either God-given or discoverable by reason. But natural law is sort of a broader concept. Rothbard here talks about it in terms of these are, to the social sciences, but the laws of physics are to the natural sciences almost. That's a really, really strong claim. I mean, that's something that seems like it's not necessarily so easy to justify because I can readily agree that reason is a part of man's nature, but it doesn't seem quite so clear without doing a lot more explanation why reason is the part that should always control or why reason is the essential. And that's something I felt like was kind of deficient in the text. I could easily see someone coming up with a very different social theory and also claiming that it was based on man's nature and saying that survival of the fittest is man's nature and the natural end toward which we all incline is, in fact, a violent competition. And reason might be useful in that, but it's not to the end at which we aim. It's a means to the end of passing down our genes, for example. He does make the argument, and this is similar to something Rand says, that reason is effectively infallible, that reason is a legitimate means if we apply our reason, then we get at truths about the universe, that this is how we do it. Right, this is big R rationalism. So what reason do we have to think that that's true? Well, I don't know if we're going to solve the rationalism and periscism debate in an hour-long podcast, but I mean, it seems reasonable, right? Well, I mean, I would say that if we consider the alternative to reason, I think we find ourselves in a preferable place operating by reason. What I see as his real target here, though, is not necessarily rationalism and imperialism, not necessarily rationalism and empiricism, excuse me, but rather what he takes as proper role of reason. He criticizes David Hume in particular for Hume's famous line that reason is the slave of the passions, and Rothbard wants to elevate reason to something much more than that. Now, he may be right about Hume saying this. He certainly is right about Hume saying this, but he is not right that all philosophy after Hume is in the same vein. It just is not true. The entire tradition of Kantian philosophy, for example, says that no, in fact, reason has certain objective laws to it and that these have a foundation on which morality is built, that it's not necessarily in human nature, but it is in reason and we can conform ourselves to reason if we choose. And if we want to be reasonable, then there are things that we are obliged to do. So then he moves on in the second chapter to argue that natural law is in effect a kind of science. It's facts about who we are, what we are, what we ought to do, that we can discover through reason. And he contrasts this with other methods, faith-based methods of discovering truths. So what do we think of that? I mean, he's certainly making more controversial claims in this chapter than he was in the first chapter, which was mostly just expositive. I guess on the very first page of this, I wrote in my margin. So Rothbard writes, if A, B, and C, et cetera, have different attributes, it follows immediately that they have different natures. And I wanted to know the worry here seems to be not so much, you know, do people have natures, right? You know, is there something we can posit of all humans that's, you know, but it's essentialism about human nature, right? That, you know, like I could say that, I don't know, what's the thing we say is essential about human nature? Classical liberals often talk about humans, they truck and barter, right? Well, that seems kind of silly and reductive to me. Like, you know, someone who's an existentialist might say human nature, like, you know, look, I can... And I can readily supply reasons to truck and barter that have nothing particular to do with nature. And I can, in fact, say that I don't think that humans are, by nature, disposed to truck and barter because if we were, then you would see humans doing that even at an encouraged disutility. You would see them doing it even when it made no sense to do it, when it was economically disadvantageous to truck and barter, but we don't. We trade when we think we can get an advantage by trading. So that's not human nature that may be reasonable, but that's not something that we do just because it's who we are. Well, this is where he... I mean, when he's pointing to some of the basics of human nature, he begins with things like we need to eat, right? And that these are just physical characteristics. If we don't get enough sustenance, we die. But that seems slightly different from behavioral traits. And then it brings up this... When he wants to make this natural law of science, he has this line where he says that... Where does he say it? He says that natural law, a criticism of natural law is who is to establish the alleged truths about man, which is going to be important because he drives everything from these unbreakable truths about man's nature. So who's going to establish those? Because one of the problems we run into is most people disagree with Murray Rothbard about the varieties of ethics and tales about the state. So there's lots of disagreements. So who's to do this? And he says, this is where he gets back to. He says it's man's reason. I mean, he says man's reason is objective. I.e. it can be employed by all men to yield truths about the world to ask what is man's nature is to invite the answer. But that doesn't seem... I mean, to analogize this to science so we can run these experiments and see what happens, we don't really have a method. We can test what temperature the water boils at, right? And we can test physical properties or do experiments with them. But if you and I disagree about the characteristics of ethics, how are we to know who's reason? Let me interrupt you here because Rothbard isn't using science in this sense of experimental lab coats and beakers, right? Because he thinks praxeology is the science of human action, right? It just means systematic, justified knowing, right? So it's not that we need to look out in the world and see that this is true or false, right, and that's science. Well, I mean, that's a kind of science if we can use the word that sits rather badly with the philosophy of science, as it is more often described elsewhere, where what scientists do is that they set up hypotheses and try to knock them down. And if you look at science as that sort of discipline where it proceeds by falsification, then praxeology isn't a science. Praxeology is a set of deductive arguments from axioms. And that's a very different thing, a completely different thing. Yeah, right. So what I'm trying to point out is that, you know, this is a, I don't know if you want to call it a nonstandard usage of the word science when Rothbard says. Yeah, I would say certainly it is. And this isn't the only time he does that. And we'll get into that a little later. I guess the most obvious one is that when Rothbard says someone is a libertarian or that an outcome is libertarian, he means that, you know, libertarian is an adjective, meaning agrees with Murray Rothbard. Yeah, and I would say also, just as a pure aside, for claiming to advance a non-religious argument, he certainly relies on a lot of religious authorities. There's William Keneally, there's Henry Veach, there is Alvin Plantina, there's a professor Sadowski who's a Jesuit. I mean, there's a lot of religion in his footnotes for advancing a non-religious argument. Well, is this just because, call it the accident of Thomas Aquinas? It could be. You know, I mean that this particular natural law, it's not dependent upon religion, but the main guy who articulated it happened to be Catholic? Well, the main guy, if you don't count, I'm Rand, yes. So on page 11, Rothbard says, the natural law ethic decrees that for all living things, goodness is the fulfillment of what is best for that type of creature. Goodness is therefore relative to the nature of the creature concerned. And then a little farther down, he says, in the case of man, the natural law ethics states that goodness or badness can be determined by what fulfills or thwarts what is best for man's nature. Do any of you buy this? Well, this is so later on, he clarifies because it's not it's not exactly clear what that would even mean because we now we've just taken a step backwards and said, whatever is good is whatever is good is whatever is good. I mean, this is circular. So if I were if I were to play David Hume here, I would I would be rolling around on the ground laughing at him. He's defined goodness by that, which is good. I think it's actually worse than that because I think he's equivocating about good, right? Because so if if we're talking, this is sort of who's the, you know, the good the goodness of a hammer is is how well it hits a nail, right? Who's that? Well, this is I mean, I'll tell you Aristotle Aristotle, right, right. So, you know, so Aristotle says like, you know, the virtue of a knife is cutting, right? But I don't say that a dull knife is an evil knife. I say it's a poor knife, right? Well, this is okay. So this is to, I mean, that's something that's that's to misunderstand because so for ethics for Aristotle and for the ancients was how to live well. Right. So we weren't you didn't necessarily need to bring in like moral condemnation, like a knife that doesn't cut is a bad knife. Yeah. It's not it's not a good knife. We wouldn't call it an evil knife. I'm not a person who doesn't live the way that a person ought to is a bad person. Right. I must say I'm not saying Aristotle is making that equivocation. I'm saying that Rothbard is here where he's talking about look, you know, you know, the what's what's good is, you know, what what's, you know, depends on what with answers man's end, right? I mean, I think one potential problem with making that kind of argument is when you point to say, so on the one hand, we point to the knife and the knife is a tool that was created by something, someone for a purpose. And so therefore we baked into the very concept of knife as the purpose of a knife. And so a knife that doesn't cut is one that fails the purpose of a knife unless say it's decorative. Maybe it was created to be decorative and it's not supposed to cut well, in which case, then it's not a bad knife of that sort. For for animals, we might say, well, their purpose is simply to reproduce. That's what their genes are pushing them to do. So one that doesn't successfully reproduce is not a good example of its species. But neither one of those things seem to apply well to man, right? Like we don't man was unless we import a divine creator man was not created by something for a purpose. Right. And and then we also, I mean, we're unconscious saying, well, the only purpose that you have in life is to reproduce. Well, because then of course people who don't reproduce are just bad. But it's trivially easy to look through history and find examples of good people who were childless. I mean, I can't say that George Washington was a bad person because he didn't have kids. He was a great person. You know, the same could be said of Jesus. He didn't have any kids that we know about. He may have, but we don't know about them. And if he didn't, would that make him a less good person? That's a that's a definition that clearly does not seem to accord with what we usually mean by someone being a good person. Could you potentially solve it by saying a that there's a capacity level. So so a knife that isn't used for cutting. I have a knife that's in the back of my drawer that I've never used to cut anything. But if I did, it would be really good at it is a good knife. And a person who potentially could reproduce is a good person, even if they don't. I mean, Washington was married and he never had any kids. And I don't know. Does that's beside the point, though. I mean, the the idea here, the distinctive move that a Thomas would make is that we have the ability to reason, not the ability to reproduce and that that reasoning capacity is the distinctive thing that we have that that is our purpose, like the the sharpness or not of a knife and the knife can be closer to its telos toward its its destined end by by being sharper and by holding the edge for longer. Humans, similarly, could be more in accord with their telos if they were more reasoning or if they were more logical or more more devoted to reason or practice reason better. All right. I guess that that sums it up. Before we head on, let's talk a little bit about how Rothbard thinks we get from these I guess value free statements about what man is to to motivating normative statements about what man ought to be. So he says Wilde asks a question crucial to all non theological ethics. Why are such principles felt to be binding on me? And then he says, well, it's because quoting Wilde, if I made no mistake in my tendential analysis of human nature, and if I understand myself, I must exemplify the tendency and must feel it subjectively as an imperative urge to action. And then he goes on to talk about Hume's is ought thing, right. And in the footnote, he says, human fact failed to prove that values cannot be derived from facts. It is frequently alleged that nothing can be in the conclusion of an argument, which was not in one of the premises, and that therefore an ought conclusion cannot follow from descriptive premises, but a conclusion follows from both premises taken together, the ought need not be present in either one of the premises so long as it has been validly deduced to say that it cannot be so to do simply begs the question. See, Philippa foot virtues and vices, and then he gives a page number. So I mean, have we has Rothbard escaped Hume? I have my own preferred ways of escaping from Hume's difficulties. I don't find this necessarily so satisfying. It does not seem clear to me that we can derive an ought from a set of iss. It seems like seems like that as well is somehow importing the ought in inappropriately. Right. I mean, so how I like to put this when I'm when I'm talking to people who maybe aren't as familiar with philosophy is when we're when you're trying to go from a nature to a normative system right about well, you know, people are this way, you know, in fact, and therefore, the way you ought to be is this right is so in the movie The Matrix, there's the scene where where Agent Smith are antagonist confronts Neo played by Keanu Reeves and he has this this speech called the I don't know what it's actually called, but I call it the humanities of virus speech. Oh yeah, right. And basically the point is that, you know, Agent Smith is trying to make is that, you know, hey, Neo, you think that humans are good and worthwhile and worth saving, but actually no, actually humanity is a virus that spreads and destroys and we'd be better off without them. So if agent Smith is right about about, you know, humanity, then what's good for humans isn't good, right? It's it. So you're sort of smuggling in this is this this assumption, you know, that you probably can't if you're trying to do sort of foundational ethics kind of move. Does that make sense? I think so. I mean, what's good for the malaria parasite is not good for humans. They're in fact opposed to each other. And of course, we're talking about humans. I mean, it would be it would be dropping the context entirely to say that that we're trying to find a universal good among among different species. The question is, is what does the good consist of for us? Now, if I had been told by someone that my reasoning was defective on some point, I might if I were a good person carefully, soberly, calmly reexamine it and consider that I might be mistaken and perhaps come to a higher understanding of the problem or a better understanding of the problem. And one in in this account of moral reasoning would say that I had had gotten better. I'd improved. I had become in a sense a little bit of a better person. It's not clear to me that that's the best account. I would say I would say that it is not clear to me at least that I have become more true to my nature. It might actually be my nature that I am unreasonable more often than I am reasonable and that all of my distinctive moves in life are toward unreason, in which case I might not really be of the same type as you. I might I might look human, but I'm not really. We decided this is the essential of human nature. Right. And my my my response to this would be to say that the the decision to make this the essential of your nature is is actually a voluntary one. We decide that we want to be reasonable and then say how does how does one derive conclusions from that, which is not what not what a Thomas would say. That doesn't even get you where you want to go because you've you've made ethics a hypothetical rather than a categorical imperative, right? That is that is the objection. But then if the imperative, the hypothetical imperative is we ought to be reasonable. Or if you want if when you want to do ethics, you ought to be reasonable. That is is if it counts as a hypothetical imperative, which is something it knows that actually suggested in philosophical explanations. If that counts as a hypothetical imperative, then it's a pretty broad one. I mean, that's that's a really big, very, very all encompassing hypothetical imperative. And it seems to exclude it seems to exclude almost nothing because because it's not if you if you stay outside of that hypothetical imperative, you can't have an argument. You can't even have a discussion. Chapter three. Yeah. On natural law versus positive law. So this is where he's attacking the positive law notion that law is basically whatever we decide it is that that we, you know, we create the law through our actions. And then there it is versus the natural law, which is a process of discovery that the law exists prior to us or exists outside of us. And we have to find out what it is. And he so he says, I highlighted this because this one of the things that Rothbard likes to do a lot is say, there's in any given question, there's only two or three possible answers, and then show that one or two of them leads to nonsense or is impossible in some way. And therefore, the last one which lines up with what Rothbard wants us to think is the correct answer. And he does that here. And oftentimes when he does this, he's leaving out a lot of possibilities. You're talking about where the three legal principles of society can follow our traditional custom of the tribe or community obeying arbitrary ad hoc will and the use of man's reason in discovering the natural law. So he says to me, he says in short by slavish conformity to custom by arbitrary win or by the use of man's reason. These are essentially the only possible ways for establishing positive law. So what one, I mean, my sense is in almost every instance where he does this, he's missing other possibilities. So what possibilities is he missing here? The one that I just don't find this a very good picture of the world. I don't think that it's so easy to divide societies up into these three types and say, this is a society that relies on reason. This is a society that relies on tradition. I don't think I don't think life works that way. I think even in the most traditionalist societies at times, someone has a new idea and even in societies that are run by the arbitrary will of one individual, you can often find people who disagree. They might do it quietly. They might be in prison. But I don't know that this is really a good way of categorizing things. Well, I think I didn't have as much of a problem with this because I think all he's saying is like, you know, look broadly, there's there's three ways of saying what the law is, right? And you could you could make reference to a lawgiver, which is B, which is the he calls it the you know, basically the arbitrary authority of some group of people. Okay. You know, you could have a traditional custom and he has common law in mind here, right? You know, or you could have natural law. And yet the common law is the product of lots and lots and lots of individual acts of reason. Right. It's really not that simple, right? This is my just, you know, you can't decompose in this way. This is my reaction to it because I think, Grant, you've given us a charitable reading of those three. And it's, I want to say not it's not compatible with his then paraphrasing of himself with his in short, because he says in short by slavish conformity to custom, which is not the same thing as just respecting custom by arbitrary whim and or by the use of man's reason. And it's clear just by the language, which ones he thinks is the best. I mean, it seems like this would be a lot of the times we have say a Berke and approach tradition or a Hayekian approach tradition, which is not to say like, we've got these traditions and we should slavishly follow them. But to instead say, if these traditions have persisted for as long as they have, it's because they probably contain some important truths, some knowledge and experience that's been built up over time. And so we should, we can certainly use our reason to critique them. But we shouldn't just toss them out willy-nilly. We shouldn't simply ignore them or just, you know, whatever first idea comes to our mind, institute that instead, because we would be ignoring the generations of wisdom baked into these things. See, I think that's that's what Hayek is explicitly denying though, that we can use our reason to make judgments about the goodness or badness of inherited traditions, right? Like Hayek says, you know, you can, you can tinker around the edges and you should do it carefully. But he thinks that, you know, if you want to understand, you know, why this rule is the way it is, that that's beyond the scope of human capability. And that's that's that position is what Rothbard's attacking here, right? I think that's what he's attacking. I'm not so confident that it's Hayek. I do think that Hayek leaves a significant space for individuals to act on what they believe to be true despite tradition or despite convention and that this process is exactly what improves convention over time. And in fact, if you look closely enough at all of tradition and all of convention, it all came from something like that. But that's that's different than making rational judgments about the goodness or badness of traditional law, right? That's that's more of a naturalistic evolutionary approach, right? We have random mutations, which is people just trying stuff, right? And then some of them are, you know, successful in that they replicate themselves and spread, right? Which is, you know, but if we're trying to and Hayek even says, you know, look, I you know, I wouldn't say that a cockroach is good just because it's survived, right? Well, it's not a random process, though. I mean, it's it's an attempt to redress flaws that over time emerge in traditional ways of doing things. So a good example of this would be the history of the equity courts, which were created first to try to redress problems that the common law seemed to validate or seemed to to sanction and that these courts were created to to undo conclusions that were otherwise inexorable. And how through a an articulation of a reason that could command common ascent. Rothbard also wants to rule out basically anyone but a natural law theorist doing C, which is using man's reason to discover the natural law. And so what he what he seems to be saying is that unless you're doing natural law, the only way that you can organize society is by either slavishly following customs or being subject to the arbitrary whim of representatives of the state. But it certainly isn't unique to natural law to say we can use our reason to critique the legal system of the society we find ourselves in. I mean, a utilitarian can say, I've got this system of utility and it creates a certain ethics and I can use my reason to look at that and see how it lines up. That laws that laws not utility maximizing, you know, therefore by this standard outside of the law, I can say the law is good or bad. Right. I think that's right. Yeah, somewhat later, he takes a very odd swipe at utilitarians. This is in chapter nine to skip head just a little bit. He takes this swipe where he says for the utilitarian who has no conception, let alone theory of justice, must fall back on the pragmatic ad hoc view that all titles to private property currently existing at any time must be treated as valid and accepted. So he would actually put the utilitarian into the category of a slavish follower of tradition, which is which is really odd to me because first of all, I don't see utilitarians doing that in practice. They seem very happy, maybe more happy than I would like to tinker with the traditional systems of land title. And second, that's not what they say that they're doing in terms of just theory. They don't they don't claim to be traditionalists in theory. Bentham and Mill were pretty radical. They are quite the opposite. They're quite the opposite of traditionalists. So it's I'm not sure that he really can account for utilitarianism in this system that he's developing. Yeah, I was confused by that too, but I actually figured it out. Oh, yeah, I solved the mystery explain. So in that section, there's a this is page 50 52 footnote two, he says, you know, for an example of a justification of property rights, blah, blah, blah, see Mises and socialism. Alright, so I got out Mises and socialism. And Mises makes almost exactly this argument that Rothbard is attributing to all all all utilitarians, right? So Mises starts out by dismissing the possibility of a social contract or of a of a natural law, he says, you know, nonsense on stilts. He says necessarily it's you're going to have to pick a moment in time and say, okay, now. And then at that point you you you have the existing property relations and we're no longer in a war of all against all and we're just going to proceed according to this process, right? And he says that's justified because, you know, having the law is better than not having the law. And he says this this idea that, you know, the subjection that Rothbard makes that, you know, know you, you know, because you might be then perpetuating some unjust, you know, holding of property by enshrining it in law. He says that's that silly. You can't say that, you know, by what standard, right? It's not illegal because there wasn't law before, right? Well, I quite agree with Rothbard on that and either moral or technological progress can cause us to rethink property distinctions with good justification. So when people came to reject slavery as a moral evil, there was absolutely nothing wrong with rejecting the slave as property and saying, no, actually, they're human beings and we've committed a terrible mistake. We've perpetrated an evil here. And and we have to we have to redress that or or likewise with technology where once we realized the value of the electromagnetic spectrum, we came to regard that as something that is best administered as a form of property or best viewed as a form of property simply because otherwise it's not it's not going to contribute to to human well being at all. So I agree with that, but I don't see how a utilitarian would disagree. I don't see how a utilitarian would be forced to say, well, no, we have to stick with the existing system. Well, I mean, Mises just says it, right? He says, we who only see the effective law, which is to make peace, must realize that it could not have originated, except through a recognition of the existing state of affairs. However, that has arisen, attempts to do otherwise would have renewed and perpetuated the struggle. Peace can come about only when we secure a momentary state of affairs from violent disturbance and make every future change dependent upon the consent of the person involved. This is the real significance of the protection of existing rights, which constitutes the kernel of all law, right? So like Mises is just massively wrong about this, right? I would have to disagree with him there. Yeah, I would have to disagree. So I think Grant's point, though, is that when Rothbard is attacking utilitarians, he is simply attacking Mises and assuming that Mises speaks for all utilitarians. And this, as far as a teaching moment goes, in general, one of the things that you need to be really careful about when you're reading works like this, works of political, I mean, any sort of argumentative work. But if you're reading political philosophy, and especially if it's within your bubble, this is stuff that you're inclined to agree with, is when you come across an instance of the author saying, here is a long intellectual tradition with lots of people who believe it, and it can be dismissed really easily. Or they're simply mistaken here and it's totally silly and now we're done. I've refuted it. You should approach those claims with a huge amount of skepticism because if very smart, very educated people accept a theory, even if it's one you disagree with and hold to it and have for a long time, then it's probably not something that can be dismissed in a sentence or two. And so it would benefit you greatly to go to the advocates of those theories and read them and try to understand what they're saying, because you'll often find out always. I mean, there are a lot of thinkers who are good at characterizing the argument to the other side fairly, but we all have a, you know, it's easy to be unfair to our opponents. And so take a moment and just think like if it sounds like this long tradition is stupid, it's probably not being characterized correctly. And what's more, that particular passage, the one that Grant read, is very strange for Mises because Mises did support historical reforms. He did not say, well, you know, there was a traditional system and everything since then that changed was wrong and we are not allowed to change anything now. There were things that he did support in the way of changes to how property was administered. So I'm not sure that he, maybe he was just having a bad day when he wrote that. I don't know. Yeah, the whole thing's bizarre to me. And what Aaron said about, you know, maybe if you're trying to attack utilitarianism, don't substitute a few paragraphs from Mises for all of utilitarianism is a good rule. I'm curious as to why he makes this only footnote reference to Mises right when he's talking about the utilitarians, but he calls out explicitly Robert Lefebvre. Is that how you say that name later when he's when he's talking about, you know, self-defense? Like is this just a, does he have a bone to pick here? Because I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, Rothbard has lots of bones to pick, right? But, you know, and he didn't want to offend his teacher by, so he attacked utilitarianism instead or? One reason he might leave out mentioning Mises specifically here while going after specific thinkers elsewhere in the book is I feel like this early part of the book, he's talking about a clash between grand intellectual traditions. So he's trying to rehabilitate natural law, theory, bring it back from the exile that it's been under for so long. And so he wants to take out the whole sweep of its opponents rather than just Mises. And so maybe he's making this mistake where he thinks that Mises represents all utilitarians, but it would make sense to just attack utilitarianism as opposed to one particular thinker if that's his project here. It could be that he thinks Mises is the best utilitarian. That's a more charitable reading and it's a thing he might actually believe. And yet I know some Austrians who would say Mises was not a utilitarian at all in any sense. So I don't know. And interestingly, Mises is not among those Austrians who thinks that. But I think you might be onto something. So then we move into we've established natural law and how we get at those rules. And so there next he moves into what's really important for the project of the rest of the book, which is natural rights and how humans get at rights. And so he defines, he ends up defining rights later on. He says we shall be speaking throughout this work of rights, in particular the rights of individuals to property and their persons and material objects. But how do we define rights? And then he quotes as he often does another thinker to fill in the definition. So in this case it's a professor Sadowski who says, when we say that one has a right to do certain things, we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, a loaner in combination to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any man, that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral one. And I think this is this is an important point right here that's worth mentioning because it comes up again and again. And as often, at least when I hear forms of what I'll call crude Rothbardianism, it gets forgotten, which is Rothbard is very clear that the arguments he makes in this book and when he places limits on what the state may do and what we have a right to do with our person and property that this is not what necessarily what morality dictates. So he's clear that there are instances where we have a right to do something and therefore the state cannot prohibit us from doing it. But it would say or anyone else by the violence. But it would be still morally impermissible for us to carry out that action. And I think that's that's an important qualifier throughout because I get a sense again from the crude Rothbardian notion that often there's this if I have a right to do it, it's fine. Like that that rights and moral permissibility mean the same thing. And Rothbard is clear that that's not the case. I would agree. I think that's that's a very important distinction to make. Another another sort of side point on this definition is that I sometimes hear from crude opponents of natural rights that you have this proposed these proposed things that it would be wrong if somebody were to interfere with. Well, there's a problem with that claim being natural because there's nothing in nature that would stop people from interfering. And so these these rights claims are not they're not self enforcing. Like, for example, the law of gravity, it's not it's it's fatuous to say, well, obey the obey gravity. It's the law. You don't talk that way. You don't talk that way because gravity just happens. And and that's what nature is. And if it's not doing just like gravity, then it's not nature. And this is this is to my mind kind of a it's a very poor argument because first of all humans are volitional creatures. And it's it's possible for a human who is who is conceivably quite similar to you, but differently disposed to behave very, very differently. And then we have to ask whether that whether that distinction is is is important. And clearly it is in terms of in terms of how we judge people. If I were if I were slightly otherwise inclined, I might have been late to this podcast. And that would have been a perhaps a minor moral failing on my part. Well, it's major moral failing. Oh, yeah. So this this this objection you bring up is it's it's one that annoys me too, because it just seems to strike me as just the mere gain saying of the idea that there are moral truths independent of any mind. Yes, right. And that's that's not an argument. That's just asserting the contrary and claiming you've refuted it. What do we make of Rothbard's claim in this chapter that the culmination of net liberal natural light theory, you know, he says it starts with lock, but then it reaches its culmination in the 19th century works of Herbert Spencer and Lysander Spooner. Are they the peak of, you know, natural rights, ethics, those guys? I mean, I like both. I like both. Well, I do too. Yeah. Yeah. I would like to think that maybe there will be still better arguments in this tradition in the future. And it's it's one that I can't say I exactly belong to, but it is one that is often very productive and very interesting. So who knows? Okay, so then to move to the end of part one here, he has a short chapter about the task of political philosophy. And basically, this is a it's short, but it's it's mostly a, I guess, vociferous and forceful restatement of his annoyance with these people who think that, you know, we're not describing, you know, that we we should only describe human behavior rather than comparing it to an independent standard. And he has this sentence that I quite enjoyed. Let us then cast out to the hobgoblins of vertus fryhite of positivism of scientism, where vertus fryhite is value neutralness. Rather than an exorcism, I think a better way of sort of dealing with these might be just to note that these people always, always, always sneak back to normativity in one way or another. Inevitably they do. But what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, this is this is David Hume's famous claim that whenever whenever someone proposes simply to set forth a neutral description of and then of how ethics is and then there's a transition to ought. There's a mysterious transition to ought. A positivist still makes policy prescriptions and presumably still wants them to be carried out and to be value free. Well, that's a very difficult thing to do. It's a notoriously difficult thing to do. A lot of I don't want to endorse I don't want to endorse postmodern social theory, but a lot of postmodern social theory does aptly consist of pointing out that supposedly value neutral science is in fact laden with values. Yeah. And then this is Rothbard's big gripe with Coase, right? He says, you know, the Coasean conception of property rights is, you know, claims to be scientific, but actually it's it's it's a moral one and a incorrect moral one. And that, you know, my my own natural law conception of give us the thumbnail sketch of Coase. So Coase, he's famous for several things, but he's an economist and one of the things he's famous for is is this paper that says you if you assume away transaction costs, then it doesn't matter at all where you assign the initial allocation of property rights that you can just let people barter and they will arrive at some efficient outcome, right? So for example, maybe I have a toxic sludge producing factory and you have a lawn, right? And I'm dumping my my toxic sludge factory sludge onto your lawn and you don't want it there. But I do want it there because, you know, and they got to someplace to put it. Yeah, right. So so Coase would say, you know, that, you know, we can't, you know, from first principles say that one of us is right, you know, he, you know, he just says, you know, look, just assign property rights somewhere and it works out. Now, that's not an entirely accurate presentation of Coase. No, it's actually it's actually quite unfair to him what he was really noting was that this system would work great if there were no transaction costs, if there was no cost of bargaining. Yeah. And and this is an assumption that doesn't actually happen in the real world. And what he was trying to point out was that a lot of real world behavior can be explained by the fact of those of those costs. Right, right. Yeah, everything you said is correct. I will say, however, that I do think reading Coase you do get the sense that he thinks property rights are just these in arbitrary instrumental constructions, right. And yes, and that's the attitude that Rothbard is attacking. So that brings us to the end of part one of ethics of liberty, where Rothbard is sort of setting out, you know, what the natural law is its character and a bit of its contents. And then in part two, which we'll be continuing with in the future, he talks a little bit more about, you know, sort of first of all, filling in, you know, how we apply natural rights and natural law, you know, to ethical questions. And then what what this means for the state? I mean, this is the next part of the book is really the meat of it and the fun part where he tells us, you know, what this means is that the state can't do X, Y and Z. Yeah, I know you may have gotten the impression listening today that that I'm not a big fan of Rothbard. That's not true at all, actually. I'm a huge fan of Rothbard. I'm a I'm a deontological anarchist libertarian. So, you know, I just I just eat this stuff up. I think maybe not all, but, you know, a large number of his conclusions about about human liberty and about ethics are correct. That that said, I think especially for someone like me, who is sympathetic to Rothbard's conclusions, you have to be careful to then not, you know, miss any any sort of, I guess, jumps in logic, right? Because because it could be the case and that you agree, right, that, you know, all of all of Rothbard's conclusions, right, but the arguments he gives for them might leave something to be desired. And that's something I found reading Rothbard elsewhere is he's a really original thinker. He's he sometimes is less rigorous than he should be. He sometimes is a little sloppy in the way he uses technical vocabulary, especially when he's going outside of his central area of expertise, which is economics. But that's not to say that his conclusions are necessarily false. One of the frequent frequently mentioned informal logical fallacies is sometimes called the fallacy fallacy. When you find a logically fallacious argument or even a factually fallacious argument leading up to a conclusion, we can't necessarily conclude from that that the conclusion is false. It's just not yet supported. There are ways of refuting, but finding a logical fallacy or a defective argument is not necessarily one of them. It doesn't necessarily lead to rejection of the conclusion. The short version of that being it's possible to make a bad argument for a good conclusion. Exactly. In our next episode in this series, we'll be looking at part two of the ethics of liberty, where Rothbard begins to apply these ideas to more concrete political problems, including the nature of private property and exchange, land monopoly, self-defense, punishment and all sorts of other fun topics. I hope you'll join us. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.