That’s the part I loved about Rothbard’s formulation, is that he essentially defined and separated personal moral and social ethic for me.

From my understanding the social ethic is derived from natural rights and law, but the personal moral is driven by one’s personal moral compass (what they believe to be good / moral action).

Rothbard mentioned utilitarian a lot, but I feel like the word carried a slightly different meaning back when he was writing too. From what I understand utilitarianism is trying to maximise the “social good” for the most people for the most time. This fell short in my mind because it’s an attempt of someone to coercively push their own personal moral into the social ethic. The social ethic being derived by sound, logical, natural law / rights (to me) ensured that rules for all remained consistent, easy to understand, and tended away from being arbitrary.

I could have a very poor understanding of utilitarianism and be selling it short here though (my ignorance is unending haha).

The balance between personal moral and societal ethic is an interesting question to ponder though.

In my mind the two should be considered sort of like a Church and State relationship; where we acknowledge that they’re both useful frameworks, but they deserve to be kept seperate.

Too often it seems we lose sight of the objective foundation that sits behind our societal ethic (i.e. natural law / rights), and short term whim leads us into adopting some widely agreed personal morals into the fabric of the societal ethic. The prime issue being, if you do it once, you can be sure it’ll happen again and again.

It then becomes a heated debate of what personal morals should next be written into the wider public law / ethic, which makes us lose sight of our own personal accountability to act morally / properly / with the good (because we can just legislate all the bad personal moral behaviour away, right?)

We must all abide by the natural right derived societal ethic, and it’s up to us to ensure that this doesn’t get corrupt, co-opted or lost entirely.

However, provided the above holds true, our personal moral compass is up to each individual to define, hone, and live with.

The question of balance is a tough one because the personal moral is entirely up to the individual to define; it is almost their journey of character building when defining that compass.

The societal ethic I think depends on the current interpretation and understanding of the natural law / rights interpretation(s). I’m guessing, like everything, there’s no entire set of agreement there, so to some “life, liberty and property” might not be their understanding of the modern derivation of natural rights. There will have to be a balance within that conversation, an investigation of past writings, a sound debate, etc.

Unless these natural rights / laws are unequivocally defined, set, objective and unchanging / unchallenged? I think that’s the core thing I’m trying to discover with my question(s) - for now.