What school of anarchism?

Do you describe yourself as an anarchist?

What are you comparing and contrasting it to?

Going to be going on a major recruiting campaign as soon as Damus is approved.

What is the purpose of these questions? Do you think you're going to walk me into realizing some fundamental mistake or contradiction in my morality? Or are you just genuinely curious?

I'm not sure I would agree with the term "rulers".

Not to establish tyrannical majorities that "rule by decree", I don't.

What philosophical liberal would argue that rights come from the "decree" of another?

Oh, I'm a philosophical liberal. I advocate for liberal democracy, and I am a moral constructionist in terms of my moral epistemology.

I keep asking you, and you keep avoiding it: what is the crux of Spooner's argument that you would like me to respond to?

You haven't presented Spooner's argument, though. I've told you I don't recall him making a metaphysical argument around self-ownership. I invited you to correct that if I'm mistaken. You have so far declined, and gone on an unhinged rant about how you think that I think that I'm intellectually superior.

You seem upset that I'm not going to go and re-read Spooner at your request to then respond to it. But if you have a solid grasp of Spooner's arguments, as you seem to suggest you do, then you might try to advance those arguments directly, rather that throw up your hands and get frustrated. You'll note that every argument I've made in this thread is *my* argument. Every argument you've made is someone else's argument that you want me to respond to.

Where does Spooner make a robust case for the concept of self-ownership? I actually think Rothbard makes a more compelling case epistemically. Spooner just sorts of treats it as self-evident, in my recollection, without going anywhere deep into the metaphysics of it. Correct me if I'm wrong. But I'm not going to go do my own research, here.

That is a deontological claim, which I disagree with, because I am a philosophical naturalist.

Well, I'm going after self-ownership as a concept, here. That's why.

People got upset about my "Bob's Island" thought experiment, because of its supposed improbability. Which I think is a non-argument, actually. Arguing something isn't relevant in a moral system because the edge case is improbable is an intellectually empty argument, IMO. That was a consequentialist argument, which I recognize is usually never convincing to natural law theorists. The above comes at it from a different angle, and I believe is an even bigger deal in many ways.

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”.

So I object to Rothbard's natural law conception of property merely on the basis it offers no definitional parsimony, and holds universalist elements in its descriptions when those elements have *no* purchase in all conceivable contexts. That's what one might call an "overloaded definition".

It seems to me, that a lot of people who think this definition of "property" can be relied upon axiomatically to support the notion that *capitalism* is therefore a natural state at a moral maxima, are simply not thinking too deeply about it. In fact, at least in the case of Rothbard, I'd argue he's actually goal-seeking in his definition to get the moral conclusions he wanted to get to.

But why is that a useful definition of ownership? It doesn't fit any of the desirable properties of a useful definition, in my opinion. It provides no explanatory power. since other definitions like mere possession or just happenstance describe the state of the system equally well. Better even, since they don't rely on a theoretical capacity, dependent on shared moral understanding with other agents to describe that property.

The difference between mere possession of a thing, and the ownership of it, is tied up in the capacity to exclude other moral agents from the use and enjoyment of that thing. Therefore, insisting on the idea that we "own" ourself in the first instance, as matter of natural law, in the unitary person thought experiment, yields no useful explanatory power for what property even is. It's just messy philosophical reasoning.

Yes. In our concept of property in most societies, dead people continue to own things. That's what estates and wills are all about.