 Hello, my friends, and welcome to the 93rd episode of Patterson in Pursuit, talking about a difficult but important topic this week, which is abortion and natural rights. My guest is Dr. Walter Block, who has carved out a really interesting position on abortion. Usually we only hear one side of the argument, either the loud pro-life side or the loud pro-choice side that are very angry with one another. There's not a lot of middle ground positions, but actually Dr. Block has created a position called evictionism, which I think takes the best arguments from both sides, and I personally find very persuasive. Dr. Block has been a well-known libertarian for many a decade now. He's written more than a dozen books, more than 500 scholarly journal entries. He's written thousands of articles online, and I was really pleased to have him on the show. He also mentioned at the end of our conversation that he's always looking for new students. So if you want to talk to Dr. Block, you want to study under him, or find out some more information about his ideas, you can check him out at walterblock.com. Also, before we start, if you guys could do me a favor, and if you've been enjoying this show for a while, or you're a new listener, or you like this episode, please head over to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a rating and or a review for Patterson in Pursuit. It really goes a long way. All right, thanks, guys. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Walter Block. Dr. Walter Block, thank you very much for coming on Patterson Pursuit. It's great to see you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on your show. I'm really looking forward to talking to you about an idea that is unique because it splits, it finds middle ground between two camps that often don't see eye to eye. And it's the hardest issue for practically any political philosophy is dealing with children and dealing with kids and especially the topic of abortion. So this is a really sticky situation that you have two angry camps of people who argue with each other, don't see eye to eye, and you have put forward a position called evictionism, which finds a very reasonable middle ground between the two. So I want to, I'm really excited to be able to talk to you about it. Well, you're very kind. Thank you. I just want to correct you. They don't argue with each other. They yell at each other. Fair enough. Okay. So before we talk about evictionism, the one step prior to talking about abortion is talking about rights because an essential part of your argument and lots of people's arguments really on both sides deals with the nature of rights. So when you use that term, when you talk about natural rights, let's say the rights of the fetus to live, the rights of the mother to do with her body what she wants. What are you, what are you talking about when you talk about rights? Well, I'm a libertarian. And for libertarians, the be all and end all are really two things. The non-aggression principle and private property rights. I see them as sort of opposite sides of the same coin. So the non-aggression principle means I can't punch you. Or if I do, I should have severe penalties placed on me. And I shouldn't take your car. That's the non-aggression principle. But now we need private property rights because that car that you're driving, I claim you stole it from me yesterday. And now we have to have a little theory as to, well, whose car is it? You know, just because you've been driving it, you know, doesn't make it yours. So I think we start from the individual and I'm a fan of John Locke here and Murray Rothbard and Hans Hoppe and Stefan Kinsella who've done great work on this sort of a thing. And I think we start you own that body. The one that you're inhabiting now, I own this body. And why? Why do I own this body? You own that body because you homesteaded it. I now have grandchildren age three and I can see them homesteading their bodies when they were one month old. They, they were really not awake enough to do any homesteading. But as you get older, you start controlling, you realize this is your hand, you can move it, you can pull your ear, whatever. You sort of homestead your body and you own it. And don't ask me why it is that your parents don't own it, given that every bit of your body comes from them. There was a sperm, there was an egg, and then there was food. And here you popped up. That's a very intractable question. And I don't want to get into it because I don't really know the answer. But I've written about it just because I don't know anything about it. Doesn't mean I can't write about it. And other people have written about it. But that's a very tough one. We're going to start, you own you and I own me. Okay. So I, I like it's a very sensible starting point to develop any political theory. However, there's a, there seems to be a big schism, even in the natural rights camp, trying to answer the question, well, what actually are rights? When you say you own you or you have a right to your body, what is that actually saying? Are you saying there is a, there is a metaphysical thing called a right that you are in possession of. And when you are in possession of it, it, it means something. Or is it just like convention? Are we just saying, Hey, you and I live in the same world. We got to try to get along. So let's act as if there are these things called rights, and it'll make our engagement more streamlined. Well, I like the first a lot better than the second. I wouldn't reject the second. I think, you know, we do have to live together with each other. And we want to know who's going to be able to drive your car. Or I have a brown shirt, you have a black shirt, you know, maybe, uh, you know, we have to know that you can wear that shirt. I can wear this shirt and we don't want to fuss. So the practicality of the pragmatism is in there too. But I think more deep, more deeply is that you own yourself. And if I grab your body, uh, uh, rape you, hit you, murder you, I'm, I'm a bad guy and vice versa, of course. So what it means is that, uh, we libertarians believe in negative rights. You have no positive rights, namely, uh, you don't have a right to a car or to, or to food or clothing or anything like that. You only have a negative right. And the negative right is that no one should molest you or if they do, then they're criminals and they should be made to pay a penalty. Okay. But we need more than just you own you and I own me because we have to have cars, we have to have food and we have to have other things if we're going to live. And now John Locke says that how do you get to own non persons or, you know, the physical reality and the way you get to own physical reality is by mixing your labor with it. So I go out to virgin territory and they've been touched before. I clear the rocks away. I knocked down a tree. I plant some corn. I own the corn and I own the land. Now there's disputes as well. How intensively do I have to homestead it for how many years? Uh, that's a complication, but let's just forget about that for the moment. Now what you do is you go out and you domesticate a cow or two. And now you own the milk. Why? Because you mixed your labor with the, the virgin territory cow and I mixed my labor with the virgin territory land and I now have corn and you have now have milk. And now the libertarian says, uh, uh, Robert Nozick says, uh, these are legitimate title transfers. I say, Hey, I'll trade you some corn for some milk. And now I have some milk, even though I didn't produce it, you have some corn, even though you didn't produce that, but we can trace it back to a legitimate title transfer, namely barter, uh, or gifts or, uh, selling or whatever. And we can trace that back to the original homesteading of the land and the cow, and we can trace that back to I own myself. So I can now mix my body with the land. You can mix your body with the cow, so to speak, milk it, whatever the domesticate it. And that pretty much is libertarian theory of property rights. So the reason you own that car is because you honestly, you know, you have a job, you've got some money, you bought the car. And if I grab that car or your shirt, I'm a criminal and vice versa with my car or my shirt. Okay. So this sort of establishes the ground, the ground rules or the basic premises, uh, uh, before we get into the abortion issue. And then one more question before we, we get into the abortion issue that again, that strikes me as eminently practical. But it does seem like there's a distinction between ownership and maybe control of a resource. So when you say, we start from the premise that you own your body. Well, where do you get the concept of ownership? There are some people who say, well, nobody really owns anything in a minute, in a cosmic sense, you may control your body, maybe able to move your fingers, but that doesn't get you to this concept of property ownership. So how do you make that next step? That's a vicious question. I'm hanging up on you. That was not exactly a softball. Well, ownership means, uh, control is, uh, what's the word in economics? We have this thing called positive economics and normative economics. Positive economics is just the, what causes what? And yes, I can control my fingers. You can control your fingers, but then we have normative economics or ethics. And when I say I own my body, that means it would be wrong of you to interfere with, with my body, uh, to, uh, engage in a salt and battery, unless you have my permission. For example, if you're a masochist, I'm a sadist and, and, uh, our relationship as I whip you, well, you agree, you're an adult, or we get into a boxing match. And, and now you punch me in the nose. I can't say, oh, assault and battery, because I've agreed to be hit above the belt. Uh, if you hit me below the belt, I can complain, but so it's a right space thing. So when we say we own something, it, that means it would be wrong. It would be a criminal act for you to interfere with the ownership of the shirt or the body or the car. Okay. But isn't there a difference between it would be wrong and it would be criminal? It does seem like you're, so there's, we're getting kind of at the distinction between ethics, like and morality. Are you saying that your conception of rights is that it is like wrong in a cosmic sense, like in the big, it is objectively wrong for somebody to punch somebody else in the nose, whether out of the permission, or are you saying it is actually criminal, but it's not, we don't get to the cosmic principles of justice here. Well, I'm saying both, but as a libertarian, I can only say the one, because libertarianism is a theory of what the law should be. And what the law should be is you keep your midst yourself. I'll keep my midst myself unless we have permission. But as an individual, as a non libertarian, I think would be wrong for, you know, somebody to steal somebody's shirt or shoes or whatever. And I also, as a libertarian, say it would be criminal because that's what the law is. The law is non aggression principle based predicated on private property rights. Okay, so we've got this conception of rights. I think it's beautiful. I think pretty much whatever your political identity, you can see the at least practicality in this idea of ownership and property rights. If you want a smooth functioning society, even if you don't want to talk about ethics, but it immediately gets us a sticky problem because there's this phenomena that happens in the world with human beings called conception, where we don't seem to have independent humans kind of voluntarily interacting anymore. We have women that suddenly grow new humans inside them. So now you have a, it seems like a conflict of rights. Well, you have the rights of the mother, but maybe you have the rights of the, the young human inside the mother. What if there's tension between the two? What if the mother doesn't want the human insider? So immediately you were presented with big, big problems here. So let me just kind of kind of present the both sides of the argument and then I'll let you resolve the tension. Okay. So the standard pro life side focuses, let's say on the rights of the unborn child. They say, well, abortion must everywhere and always be off the table because you're killing an innocent life and that's just murder. Therefore, murder is never justified kind of end of case. The pro choice side is saying, well, no, the focusing on the rights of the mother saying, no, the unborn fetus is part of the mother's body. The mother can do whatever she wants with her body and therefore if it's abortion or if it's getting rid of fetus, whatever it is, that's okay. It doesn't matter if the child dies or we kill the child, that's let's say that group of cells doesn't have any rights. There's no violation there. Okay. What is your third option here? You seem to disagree with both camps and agree with them in different ways. So what's your position? Well, first of all, I believe we have to ask when is a person become a human being. Now, the one side, the pro choice side would say, well, it becomes a human being when it's born. For nine months, it's indistinguishable from the spleen or the appendix or the toe. The mother owns her spleen, the mother owns her toe, the mother owns her appendix, the mother owns her nose. If she wants to cut off her nose, kill her nose or whatever, God forbid, but it's her right because the baby is no more than a bunch of her cells. I disagree with that. Here I take the pro life side. I say that a birth is just a change of address. If you take a baby one minute before birth or one hour before birth, and then you look at the baby one hour or one minute after birth, it's the same baby. I mean, you and I have been talking now for 15, 20 minutes, we've changed subtly, but very little in 15 times. I'm growing older, I'm older than you, but even I haven't aged all that much in 10, 20 minutes. So if you look at the baby, this, this bunch of cells, five minutes before birth, and then you look at the baby, which everyone concedes is a baby five minutes after birth, it looks the same. So I say that the baby is just a, it's just a change of address when you get born. You're in distinguishable. Okay, they cut off the umbilical cord, but what the heck? I say that when, so when does life start and here you have the different, what do you call it? Views. In the Jewish tradition, and this is a joke, so you better laugh, the baby, the fetus is viable when it graduates medical school. Actually, the Jewish view is that it's viable when it has a heartbeat. That would be the official view. And I'm not, I'm not sure other views, but in my view, the fertilized egg is a human being. Why? Because the sperm alone will not become a human being. The egg alone will not become a human being, but the fertilized egg, namely when the sperm gets into the egg, it will become a human being if it's in the right environment. And you and I need the right environment. If they plunked us down on Mars without a space suit, we die. The baby would die if it didn't have this, that and the other. But if it does have the proper environment, that baby, that, that bunch of cells will become a baby or will become a human being. So here I'm on the pro life side. I say human beings start with the fertilized egg. One question before you continue. So are you saying that the fertilized egg is a human being because it will become a human being? No, it's a human being right then and there. It's a young human being. It doesn't look like it's going to look later on. But then again, how old are you? 28. I'm 76. When I was 28, I looked a lot different. When you become 76, you're going to look a lot different. Okay. So yes, the fertilized egg looks a little different than, than the fetus of six months or the fetus of eight months or the baby of one month or the baby of three years or the baby of 28 years. You're a 28 year old baby. Yeah, we take on different appearances. But there is a difference in the, there is a difference in the internal experience, the way I assume that the, the fertilized egg doesn't have like a consciousness or rationality where you and I, even with the age difference between us, we still both have the consciousness. No, no, no. Last night, when we were asleep, we had no consciousness, assuming we were not dreaming. I don't know what we were doing with last night when we were asleep, but I'm happy to, and if you look, I had an operation the other day. I just had knee replacement surgery. And when they put me out, I had, I was out. I had no consciousness and it was, I don't know, two or three hours of my operation. So I don't think consciousness is the key. I think when we're asleep or unconscious or getting back to the boxing match, you now knock me out and I'm out for a week because you gave me a real good punch and then happily I recover. Well, for a while, I have no consciousness. So I don't think consciousness is the key. I think the key is that that baby, that fertilized egg is a rights bearing creature. It has rights. And if you take a knife to it and break it up or take a hammer to it and smush it or something, it would be just as much a violation of rights as if I were to shoot you or you were to shoot me. That is a baby. And I don't care whether it has consciousness or not. I'm willing to concede that it doesn't. But I think that's irrelevant because, you know, sleeping in unconscious people don't have consciousness either. And yet they're human beings. OK, so that sounds like the pro life position. So now how do you nuance it? Well, the way I nuance this is. I say, first of all, I want to say that my compromise is a what's the word I'm looking for a principal compromise. If you say two plus two is four and I say two plus two is six, a compromise would be two plus two is five. But that wouldn't be a principal compromise because what's the justification of two plus two equals five, except that it's a compromise. But there's no justification for that other than it's a compromise. My claim is that evictionism is a principal compromise between pro life and pro choice. It's not just a plain old ordinary compromise, which has no other justification at all. OK, so now I ask who owns the house within which that baby or that fetus is now occupying? Who is the first owner of the womb? Who is the first owner of the woman's body? The woman, she's the owner. It's her hotel or her house or her factory or whatever it is. And the fetus, the unwanted fetus is a trespasser. Yes, it has rights, but it's a trespasser. Take a case of rape. The woman's walking along the street. She gets grabbed. She gets impregnated. And now there's something, not something, a human being growing in her. Well, it's as if you have a boat and you're two hundred miles away from the shore and all of a sudden you find me. I was unconscious. I was put on your boat. I'm an innocent trespasser. The fetus is innocent. I mean, the rapist, the father is a bad guy, but the product of the rape is not a bad guy. It's a little baby and it's innocent, but it's a trespasser. It's an innocent trespasser, just as I would be an innocent trespasser if I was in your boat. Now, it would be nice if you would say, hey, Walter, you know, you're trespassing and I might have to charge your rent, but I'll bring you back to shore or, you know, I'll give you a little rowboat and you can row to shore or something like that. On the other hand, if you said, hey, block, get out of my boat. And I said, well, you know, I can only swim two miles and I'm two hundred miles away. So I'm going to die. Now it would be nice of you to say, OK, I'll keep you here. But remember, we libertarians believe in property rights. It's your boat. You have the right to expel me from it. Now, Murray Rothbard has this beautiful thing. Brilliant analysis. And he says, well, suppose that the two of us are we're in a boat and and all of a sudden the boat capsizes and we're swimming and we see a piece of wood and the piece of wood will only hold one of us. It can't hold both of us. If we both grab it, we'll both sink. Who is the rightful owner of that log or that piece of wood? The first homesteader. If I beat you to it by five seconds, I own it and it's tough on you. You beat me, vice versa, it's tough on me. So the key is who owns it and the mother owns it. So here I'm coming out a little pro-choice. The mother has a right. Again, we're in the case of rape. Not voluntary sexual intercourse. We'll get to that in a minute. But here is a case of rape. The mother has got a human being growing in her and it would be nice. She'd be a good guy if she said, well, you know, a baby's innocent. I'll keep the baby around for nine months and then I'll give it up for adoption or maybe I'll love the baby. Who knows? But she doesn't have to because it's her property. She can evict, but she can't kill. Now, getting back to me. I'm a stowaway on your boat. I'm an innocent stowaway. I was stuck on your boat unconsciously. You can't shoot me. You can't take a knife and say, block your trespasser, I'm gonna shoot you, but you're gonna evict me. So I say it's the same thing. The mother can evict the baby, but she can't kill it. Even if the eviction results in the person's death. That's a different issue. I don't care. Well, I mean, I care. I'm a human being. I don't want me to die stowing on your boat and I don't want the baby who is a product of rape to die. But I'm speaking purely as a libertarian with just looking at the legal case and legal cases, she has a right to evict, but not to murder, not to kill. Whereas now we come up with the principle of compromise. The pro-life people say she has no right to evict and she has no right to kill. The pro-choice people say she has a right to evict and to kill. And I say she has a right to evict, but not to kill. So it's a pure compromise. It's a perfect compromise. It's two plus two equals five, but it's predicated on property rights, which as a good libertarian, I'm supposed to predicate everything on. I like this theory a lot. And in fact, the first time that I heard this, I don't know if I heard it or I read it from some of your articles, I was pretty much converted. I thought, wow, that actually makes quite a lot of sense. That is a reasonable compromise, but I want to play devil's advocate. So I want to take some questions from the pro-life side, some skeptical questions from the pro-choice side and see how this resolves them. So let's start with the pro-life objections. It sounds like there's a, this valuation of the property rights is at the expense of human lives. So if you're saying let's have intellectual consistency and logical rigor with regards to natural rights, that's more important than the actual effect of when the child is evicted at two months that the child is going to die. It seems like there's a problem there. If you got to give up one, give up the consistent natural rights theory to preserve the life of the child. How would you respond? Well, I'm not a utilitarian. I don't believe, look, there's a clash of rights here. If you take that position, namely it's the mother versus the baby, both can't win the mother. And then we're still in the case of rape. Yes, the baby will die, but otherwise the mother has to bear the product of her rape for nine months. That's a burden. Now you might say, well, life is more important than the inconvenience of nine months. But now you're getting into utilitarianism. You're having all sorts of, what is it, interpersonal comparisons of utility, which are invalid. The big problem with utilitarianism is you can't compare utility of you and me. And you have this thing called the utility monster. The utility monster is somebody who really enjoys cannibalism, killing people and eating them. He really enjoys it much more than we normal human beings disenjoy being eaten up alive. He really gets off on this. So if you're a utilitarian, we should all march into his house and let him eat us. So I'm not a utilitarian. I'm interested in rights. I'm interested in seeing what libertarianism have pushed to its logical extreme will yield us. So I admit that, yes, here, if you take an ordinary case of utilitarianism, the mother, it's only a nine month inconvenience. For the baby, it's life itself. Therefore, we should be on the side of the baby and the hell with the mother. But utilitarianism is not a valid theory. It's not a valid theory of rights. It doesn't, because I can come up with all sorts of counter examples. For example, the utility monster. Or I can say, I'm bigger and stronger than you and I enjoy beating you to a pulp more than you disenjoy it. And how can we prove that wrong? That we, you know, we have measures of things. We have height, we have weight, we have speed. We have body temperature in 98.6. We do not have measures of happiness or utility. So I'm now gonna beat you up to a pulp. I'm gonna pulverize you and you're gonna be in the hospital for six months. But I enjoyed it a lot more than you disenjoyed it. How can you prove me wrong? I think that presupposes that it's a binary distinction between the natural rights theory and the utilitarianism. Maybe somebody can just be kind of a nihilist here and say, well, I don't subscribe to either, but it seems like you take these circumstances on a case-by-case basis. And we have, let's say an arbitrary valuing of life, not for its, not because of pleasurability or the utility of the psychological happiness it brings, but just as its own principle. And so when you have the juxtaposition, or not juxtaposition, the tension between somebody's significant inconvenience for nine months and life or death for a human being, in that case, you would err on the side of just defending the baby's life rather than making sure we protect this theory, this construct of rights in the first place. Where it's like, if you get out of the the philosophic framework and just look at what's happening in the world, it seems like you are valuing rights consistency more than life. Which kind of seems like it puts the cart before the horse. And the rights consistency about preserving life in the first place. Well, once you mention the word case-by-case basis, you've given up all principles. I mean, anyone can say anything. Well, in this case of pregnancy due to rape, we'll go one way. And on that case, we'll go the other way. Look, suppose the mother commits suicide. The mother says, I can't bear the ignomy of bearing that man's child for nine months. I'm gonna commit suicide. And now I'm gonna kill, obviously, if I commit suicide, the baby dies too. So now it's a life versus a life. So whose life is more important? I mean, once you go down that road, down the utilitarian road, anyone can say anything. So I'm not a real big fan of that. I'm rather, I'm a libertarian and I'm willing to tolerate the criticism. Well, I don't really care about people. I just care about disembodied philosophical rights. Yeah, I do care about disembodied philosophical rights because I think that's the best way we can get along with each other. Because if we don't, we're gonna have mass murder. Oh, that sounded like a little bit of utilitarianism there though, right? Well, just a little bit. Look, look, Hitler wanted to have an Aryan race 1,000 year rike. According to the utilitarians, maybe he was right. Look, those Aryans, they were pretty good, you know? They had virtues and they had benefits. Suppose they got more utility out of killing, I happen to be Jewish. Suppose they got more utility out of killing. We vermin, Jews, we're vermin and they're Aryans and maybe they were case by case basis. Maybe we should support them. Why should we be such anti-Nazis? Just because of stinking lousy rights, you philosophical righteous person. No, no, no, Nazism is the way to go. I hope nobody takes this out of context. I was gonna say, I know you had some issues before with media taking your words out of context. Yes, I favor slavery and now I'm favoring Nazism. But hopefully anyone listening to this will listen to the context. I'm really not pro-Nazi. But I'm just saying that if you go down that road of utilitarianism, we have no way of saying nay to the Nazis. The Nazis can say, look, we're Aryans. We're better than you people. You Jews are vermin and case by case basis. Let's give this one to the Nazis. The next one, we'll go the other way. So I'm not a big fan of that way of looking at it. And yes, I think that the best way, I think that libertarianism is utilitarian in the macro sense. Namely that if we adhere to libertarianism, we won't have any Nazis. We won't have any mass murder. We won't have any rape. We won't have any starvation. So I reject this dichotomy that you're putting before me. You're saying, well, it's either human life or bloodless rules. Well, I say these bloodless rules are the best way to promote human life. Yeah, I actually, I think I agree with that. I like the phrase that you use. It's utilitarian in the macro sense. I had an interview with Jeff Myron at Harvard about welfare. And he was talking about the libertarian principles as applied to welfare, that in some micro cases, you could say, reducing the amount of welfare would actually, in principle, harm individual people. It would be bad in those cases. But if you take the macro sense, and if you look at it from a rules perspective, that actually would be better for everybody in the long run, kind of the utilitarian approach, which I agree with. Well, I'm not a utilitarian, nor am I a rule utilitarian, nor am I a big fan of his either. I've got to blast away at him for not being as pure a libertarian as I would like him to be or as I try to be. But that's neither here nor there. But I think that in the overall sense, the libertarianism will lead to the most happiness for the most people. I'm not a utilitarian, but I make that utilitarian claim. So I reject the idea that I'm hard-hearted, cold-blooded, or I don't really care about people. I care about people. But I think the best way to promote human flourishing is to uphold property rights and the non-aggression principle. OK, so one more objection from the pro-life side, and then I'll do some pro-choice questions. This is half-ingest, but it actually is an interesting idea. So if you're talking about eviction in practice, like the legal concept of eviction, doesn't there have to be a 30-day notice? You can't just, if you're renting out your property and then your tenants aren't paying or you change your mind, you can't just stomp in and say, out, out, out. You push them out the door. So wouldn't you have to give some kind of developmental 30 or 60-day notice to the fetus prior to evicting? Well, maybe a nine-month notice. All right. Let's get back to this boat. I'm a still way on your boat. How much notice do you have to give me before you tell me to jump? Or I'm a still way on your plane. And you say, leave my plane. I say, do you have a parachute handy? And you say, no. Or I've got just as many parachutes as I need. I don't have an extra one, and I'm at 30,000 feet. How much notice do you have to give me? I don't think you have to give me any, well, maybe a second or two. I don't know. Look, just because in landlord-tenant law, you have to give your tenant 30-days notice, doesn't mean that that's libertarian law. That's not libertarian law. Libertarian law means you have a right to your property. Look, suppose I break into your house and I steal that shirt. I now have that shirt and you're naked from the waist up. And I now have that shirt. How much notice do you have to give me before you get the shirt back? None. I should give you that shirt back immediately if I stole it from you. Is there a difference, though, between the ownership of a good and, I guess, in practice, the landlord-tenant relationship? So I guess what you're saying is in the libertarian legal system, landlords can evict on the spot. Well, on the spot, I mean, you can't do it in one second because they're entitled to take their clothes. And it's going to take an hour to get their clothes in a box or something like that. So they're practical things. Sometimes when people are fired, they're given one hour to clear out their desk and there's a campus cop or somebody who overlooks overseas this. So I'm not saying it's instantaneous because, look, I stole your shirt and I'm now 10 feet away from you. Even if I throw the shirt back at you, it's going to take three seconds for the shirt to get back to you. So there's a practical element. But if you want to push this, I have to give nine months notice. For the baby to get her things together, baby. That's it. Well, I reject this argument that you have to give more notice than reality requires. Reality requires some notice. Again, I took your shirt. It's going to take at least three seconds for me to get the shirt back to you because I'm now 10 feet away from you. But wouldn't it be, couldn't we say something like the principle you're drawing from when you say you have to give as much notice as reality requires? Couldn't you say reality would require the baby in this circumstance to be given enough notice to be viable to leave so that it doesn't die? Nice try. I appreciate the power of your argument. You're a good, what is it, negative? What were you saying? Devil's advocate. You're a good devil's advocate. I think that's a very powerful argument. But I think that the amount of notice that you'd have to give is you have to go to a doctor. And you might need a doctor's appointment might take a week. Or if the doctor is right there, he just can't evict the fetus right away. It's going to take him an hour. He's got to put the woman out. He's got to clean his forceps or whatever it is. So there's a certain amount of required time to evict the fetus. But it's not nine months. It might be nine minutes or more reasonably nine hours. All right, so I want to push this one step further because it just popped in my head. So let's say that you are a property owner. And on your tenant's land, he builds something like a nuclear power plant. And it just so happens that in the construction of that nuclear power plant, you can't disassemble it immediately. So he wants to take his power plant. He wants to disassemble it properly, then take it to another location and rebuild it. That might be a year-long process, right? So if in that circumstance, we'd say, well, you can't evict immediately. The person has this property that has to be disassembled. That's a long-term eviction. Couldn't we say the same about the baby? No, because the baby, let's look, you're talking something very practical. It's going to take a year to disassemble the nuclear power. Otherwise, it's going to blow up the whole world. OK, well, then reality requires one year. But how much does reality require for the woman that wants to have an eviction or an abortion? It requires nine hours, maybe, or maybe nine minutes. Not nine months. Yeah, but you're looking at the practicality of the eviction from the property owner's standpoint and not the baby. So couldn't you say reality? How much time does reality require for the baby to get its stuff together? Right. It might not be nine months. It might be six months or something like that. Just like you can't say the property owner would only take a few minutes to repossess the land of the nuclear power plant tenant, you have to look at how long it would take for the tenant to disassemble the nuclear power plant. It seems like the tenant in the baby's case takes a few months to get their belongings together and then can leave. Where I disagree with you is that you see it bifurcation. You see the length of time could either be from this side or that side, either from the owner or the trespassers side. I don't see it that way. I see it much more objectively. How long will it take for me to get that shirt back to you? Three seconds. How long will it take to have an eviction or an abortion? A day. There are abortion centers where a woman can go in and she can't get it done in one minute. She's got to undress first. She's got to get on the operating table. You've got to get a doctor in there. But it's not you have to get a doctor in there for this side or for that side. It's an objective thing. How long will it take? Well, for an abortion or an eviction, it will take an hour or two, not nine months. Whereas the nuclear power, it'll take a year. But you can't transfer the year from the nuclear plant to the baby. And it's objective. How long will it take? And not how long will it take from this side or how long will it take from that side? It's how long will it take to evict? How long will it take for you to get me out of that boat or that plane? Oh, a minute. You have to open the door. If you want to kick me out of the plane, you've got to open the door. Well, it takes five minutes to open that door. How long will it take to get me off the boat? Well, if I'm downstairs in the boat and it's a big boat, it'll take a minute for me to be frog-matched upstairs and then kicked overboard. But it'll take from my side or from your side. It's how long will it take, period? I do think there are some more lines of attack on this particular idea that are there. But I do want to transition while we have time to skeptical arguments from the pro-choice side for evictionism. So I guess most fundamentally, maybe the biggest criticism or skepticism that somebody could have towards evictionism from the pro-choice side is the premise, the starting premise, that the group of sales is a human being. So when you were talking about this, there's a less popular philosophic position on the rights of, let's say, newborns. That shocks some people. But I forget, it's off the top of my head who holds this belief. His argument is that, well, in order to be a person with rights, you have to have some kind of, he calls it personhood, that you don't get when you're a newborn. You don't even get necessarily when you're a year old. You're still completely dependent on the mother, and you don't have these certain properties which makes you a human being. So his position is you can have post-birth abortion. I don't know how long it is. It's something like a year or maybe longer than that. In those circumstances, those toddlers or babies aren't actually full human beings, so they don't have rights yet. Just like we would say a dog doesn't have rights or a lesser developed creature doesn't have rights, neither does a newborn. What do you think about that approach? I think the guy's name begins with an S. I've got it that's simply my tongue. I know you're speaking of. I think he's a menace. Look, the refutation of that is, last night, we were both asleep at three in the morning. So it would have been okay if somebody shot me while I was asleep? No. And yet when I was asleep, I was helpless and I wasn't coherent, I wasn't cogent. So I think the refutation of that is that the problem is with unconscious or sleeping people are just like newborns. They're helpless. They don't know what's going on. If there was a fire, I'd have to wake you. If you were a heavy sleeper and there was a fire, you'd just burn to death, right? So you're no better than a one year old when you were asleep, if you were a heavy sleeper. So we can kill heavy sleepers? I regard that as an utter and total refutation. Okay, in that though, I don't think the idea is as much the consciousness or like the nature of the existence of the internal experience if you're conscious or subconscious, it's this idea of personness. Like what makes a human, what makes a person a person is some kind of mental development. And if I'm not mistaken, I really should know this guy's name. And I think it does start with an S. Anyway, they're saying even in cases like severely mentally handicapped people who cannot take care of themselves should be on the spectrum for abortion, a very late term abortion. So it's a mental development rather than the existence of consciousness. Well, you know, I'm 76, I'm almost senile. My critics say I'm already senile. So we can kill senile people. I regard that as grotesque. It's certainly against the libertarian view of non-murder and against the libertarian view of the non-aggression principle. You know, as I say, I'm 76. When I'm 86 or 96 or 106, I might be senile. And I think it would be murder if somebody just killed me. You know, they're old people's homes and I can go in with a machine gun and start shooting the senile people. That's grotesque, that's crazy. So I reject that. What I'd like to do is get, so far we've only talked about the rape case, but I'd like to talk about as voluntary sexual intercourse. In one second, we'll transition to that. One more, just to end that line. Go get them. So are you saying then you're kind of appealing to maybe a genetic argument that what is the distinction when the sperm and the egg actually meet? Well, you now have a genetic code that was not there before. Are you saying at that moment when the genetics are unified into one human being, that's what a human being is from the genetic standpoint? Well, you know, Murray Rothbard once said, look, suppose we go to Mars and we see these creatures that look sort of half like a gorilla and half like a snake and half like, I don't know, a kangaroo and half like a worm or something. And they're not human, but do they have rights? And what Murray said is if they can petition for their rights and respect our rights, then they are rights-bearing creatures. They're not human beings, but they're rights-bearing creatures. Well, I think that's right. I agree with Murray on that. I think Murray is a genius libertarian. He's missed the libertarian. And I think he's absolutely right here. By the way, Murray was pro-choice. Ron Paul was pro-life. Ron Paul is pro-life. And you can't get two more highly credentialed libertarians than those two. And they are 180 degrees off from each other, which gets back to your point very much at the beginning of the show that, you know, this is an intractable problem. And, but to get back to, so I think that obviously the fetus can't promise the respect rights and he can't petition for his rights, but he is not a potential human being. He's a human being right then and there because when he grows up, he will be. Just as, you know, I had this operation and while I was out and I was unconscious for a day or two, I couldn't petition for my rights then. I couldn't promise to respect anyone else's rights then. You couldn't do it when you're asleep, but you had that potential namely when you awoke or when I got out of my unconscious stage and when the fetus gets a little older and not one year old, but, you know, maybe 10 years old, 13 years old, 15 years old, that's when they become an adult, but we're not talking about that. So I think my view, which is pro-life that the human life starts at the fertilized egg, I think is much better than it starts when birth or it starts when the heart beats. Who cares about the heart beating? Who cares about a change of address? That's relatively unimportant. The key is that the fertilized egg has the potential to become, we were all fertilized eggs at one time and look at us now, we're coherent, we can respect rights. So I think that view of mine is very defensible. Okay, I think it's Peter Singer, by the way, isn't that the- That's it, that's it. So it's the, just to be specific, it is the potential for the future respecting of rights, which is what makes a creature a rights-bearing creature. Is that correct? Yeah, look, when you were asleep, you might have violated rights, be, you know, let's say you thrash around or something like that. You're not respecting rights when you were asleep, or let's say you're a sleepwalker. You might bump into someone and commit assault and battering on them. Now you wouldn't be responsible, it would be a tort, not a crime, right? But when you woke up, you would then be able to respect rights. But when you're a sleepwalker, you don't respect rights. Well, I know this is gonna get us into a whole nother thing that it would take many hours to talk about, but it makes me think, if what you're saying is true, then what do we do about animals? Because it might be the case that some particular animal might at a future date be capable of respecting rights. So how would you kind of prove or confidently conclude that a particular animal does not have the capacity to be a rights-bearing creature? Well, they say chimpanzees and dolphins and pigs are the three of the smartest animals. I'm not sure about pigs, but I think dolphins and chimpanzees and maybe pigs. Well, if there were one of them, then you've got a point. But so far, I don't know if any chimpanzee or any dolphin or any pig that can petition for his rights and respect other people's rights. And once we get one, it goes by the species. Well, how does one petition for rights? How does that, what does that process look like? Who do you call? Well, I'm assuming we have a translator or we have a God's eye view or something. Look, when we come up with these Martians that look half like a kangaroo and half like a snake, we're in theoretical a bill here. And so if I can invent that, I can invent a translator. And also I can determine, are they biting us? And if they're not biting us, well, then they haven't violated rights yet. Okay. Okay, so let's transition then. We were talking about the rape case, which is the hardest case for abortion. What are the other cases that you have analysis of? Well, the other case would be voluntary sexual intercourse. And now we have the claim on the part of the pro-choice people that you made a contract with the baby. Namely, you knew that intercourse could result in a baby and therefore there was a contract with the baby. And the contract, the implicit contract was nine months. So what's this crap about evicting at the two month stage or at the one month stage, you voluntarily engaged in sexual intercourse and you made your bed, lying it or you made a contract with the baby. Now, there is such a thing called a host mother. A host mother is a mother who is paid to have a baby and she should not be allowed to evict because that would violate her contract. But forget about the host mother, just take an ordinary couple or whether they're married or not, it really doesn't matter. You know, suppose they're using protection, a condom or birth control and it breaks. Well, it's hard to see how there was a contract. Secondly, a second refutation of this argument is at the time of sexual intercourse, there is no fertilized egg. It takes a little time for the sperm to get up through the, I think the fallopian tube or some tube or other to get to where the egg is. So at the time of intercourse, you see, if you wanna have a contract, you and I can have a contract because there are two people. Now, forget about the father and forget about host mother. At the time of intercourse, there aren't two people. There's not the mother and the fetus, there's just the mother. It takes a half hour or an hour or so, I'm not sure how long, a minute, doesn't matter for the sperm to get to the egg. Only then is there a contract but a contract implies two people. Now I'm willing to admit that the fetus is a contractual party. It's a little difficult but I'm willing to admit it because I'm bending over backwards against my own view. But there at least has to be the existence of another party. And at the time of sexual intercourse, there is none. So I reject this argument. Now I just wanted to make one more point. Sure. My heart is with the pro-life people. And I notice that right now we pro-lifers are losing in the United States. The law of the land is abortion, is legal. So we're losing. I notice also that right now a fetus is viable in the third trimester. So if you evict in the seventh, eighth, or ninth month, that fetus is viable. But as medical technology improves, the fetus will be viable in the sixth month and the fifth month and the fourth month and the third month. You know that in 5,000 years from now, taking a long view, the baby will be viable in the first minute outside of the womb because we'll have artificial wombs or whatever it is. So if we adopt, I now speak to my fellow pro-life people, if we adopt evictionism, we will win eventually thanks to medical technology. If we don't adopt evictionism, we're losing right now and I don't see how we're gonna win. So it's really profoundly a pro-life argument but I'm not taking the pro-life position because I think that the mother has the right to evict and right now with present medical technology, the fetus will die in the first two trimesters up to the sixth month. I think that's a very compelling point and I would add to that that there is a distinction in my book between the law and morality. So it's an entirely separate question of whether the mother who has a legal right to evict an unviable fetus is doing a moral good or a moral bad by evicting. And though it is tempting to say that morality and the law should be unified in all cases, I actually don't think that is a wise long-term approach. People disagree on their morality is if you're gonna live in the same society you gotta have some kind of rules that govern your behavior that aren't just moral rules. So I kind of like from the macro perspective, if it's the case that you're pro-life and you're living in a society where not everybody has the exact moral system that you have, then it makes sense, evictionism really does make sense as a reasonable middle ground where it's saying, yes, you do have the right, though you might be doing something that's not morally respectable, we're still going to respect your legal right to evict. Well, look, I think prostitution is immoral. Not good. I have a daughter, I wouldn't wanna be a prostitute. I mean, I'd rather she found some guy and got married, a nice guy. Prostitution, yuck. It doesn't pass the smell test, the moral test, but should we put them in jail for adult consensual behavior? Not according to libertarianism. So here you have a divergence between morality and what the law should be, similar with the heroin. I don't think taking heroin is moral. Well, morphine, if you're in the terminal cancer stages or something like that, I don't think is immoral. But recreational heroin, I think is immoral. And also getting drunk, I think is immoral. So should we? Really? So you're a Puritan, I didn't realize this. Yes, morality-wise, I'm a teetotaler, well, I have a little wine once in a while, but I don't think that it would be justified to bring back a prohibition of alcohol. I don't think the drug war is justified. So you're quite right, I think that there's a divergence between what is moral and what should be legal. And the libertarianism is only concerned about what the law should be. And we say only if you violate the non-aggression principle. And murdering a fetus is a violation of that, whereas evicting is not. Well, I think that's a great note to end on. Thanks very much for this conversation, it's been great. My pleasure, I really appreciated talking to you and I look forward to doing it again sometime. Thanks.