One thing I haven’t talked about enough in my travails of challenging Rothbard and anarcho-capitalism within the bitcoin community, is Rothbard’s moral axiom of “self-ownership”. For the uninitiated: Rothbard makes the claim that all human rights are *property* rights, because all the things that a human being could possibly do are extensions of one’s right of ownership over themselves.
At first glance, this is a compelling construct. It also seems to be neat and self-consistent. Assuming you buy that, you eventually reach the notion that the *moral* *consequence* of this, is that that the only truly moral society is a purely capitalistic one.
Some have seen me wholesale dismiss this argument several times, only to suggest that I don’t understand Rothbard or have not carefully studied Rothbard’s *Ethics* *of* *Liberty* enough to realize how rock solid his moral epistemology actually is. Instead, I’d argue his “ethic of liberty”, such as they are, that he sells as universal moral truths from a self-evident natural law, that can be “praxeologically” deduced, are sitting atop epistemic quicksand. I won’t get into my quibbles with praxeology here, specifically. But it *is* implicated in the issue I’m going to get at here.
First and foremost, I don’t think Rothbard’s definition of “property” is property constrained. For a few reasons. The first reason is: it is not parsimonious. Secondly, it offers no explanatory power in all conceivable situations. Thirdly, it doesn’t think very carefully about the *social* dependencies of its definition.
What is the difference between having the *exclusive* *possession* of a thing, and *owning* a thing? In my view, the difference is that in the latter case, you have a *right* to exclude *others* from the use and enjoyment of that thing. But let’s consider a thought experiment where you are alone on an island, and will always be alone on an island: what possible explanatory power does “owning” yourself have, if it is not in relation to others? It’s kind of strange that, on one hand, you often hear anarchist and libertarian philosophers advance the argument that “true rights are things that you can do alone on an island”, rejecting any social dimension, insisting that rights are purely individualist in nature. But if this is true, then what’s with the social implication of self-ownership? Saying you own yourself, as a matter of natural rights, in a universalist morality, doesn’t tell you anything useful about the person alone on the island. It has zero moral purchase. If a wave washes away their hut on the beach, we don’t say that’s a property rights violation because another *person* did not do it. There mere fact we need another human moral agent in relation to the concept of property to offer any moral implication, to me, makes the concept of self-ownership as a universal conception of one’s own rights *completely* social in nature. It’s only in the social realm that it’s relevant. But humans can, in theory, subsist in a unitary way, so how can one’s self-ownership be a universal truth in the universe on which to base an entire metaphysics?
In this sense, the supposed self-evident nature of property rights, and that you are your own owner (which among other things is tautological) as the basis for concluding that anarcho-capitalism is the most moral state humans can be in as a necessary consequence of natural law… is just not believable. Property is being asserted as self-evident, in a way that is not parsimonious, does not account for the unitary context, and takes for granted that other moral agents are necessarily implicated, while insisting the contour of the concept is inherently individualistic with no collectivist implication.
These kinds of glaring definitional problems, mental shrugs, and simply being satisfied with intuitive understanding and definitions around these categories is why I continue to argue this is all “dorm room philosophy”.
