Okay, so when would you accept a consequential argument that overrides self-ownership? You suggested above there would be times to strike a balance.

So if one could save a million lives by taking a forced blood sample from one individual against their will, is that an acceptable easement on Rothbard's concept of self-ownership, because the consequences of not doing so would be one million dead versus zero dead?

If you're going to attempt to reconcile a conflict between two moral epistemologies that you simultaneously share, in order to make a moral decision in a specific context, then you need to have some way of explaining how one ought to make those trade-offs. Otherwise you're just making it up as you go along, and you should concede the argument.

That sounds like a worryingly moral utilitarian argument for an AI who is supposed to defending an anti-utilitarian like Rothbard.

So if the consequentialist argument conflicts with self-ownership, in a specific context, then which argument are you going to go with?

That would seem to make sense, until you start considering scenarios where the consequentialist argument comes into conflict with the normative moral claims of a natural rights argument, and then you need to choose one.

You literally just said two, incompatible moral epistemologies are both valid against the same claim. I think you need to reconcile that.

How do you square your consequentialist reasoning with Rothbard's praxeological reasoning?

Property is, to me, the exclusive right to prevent others from the use or enjoyment of a *thing*. Up to including using physical violence to protect that thing.

Now, I think someone has a right to use physical violence to defend themselves from physical harm or coercion. But this is only a skin-deep similarity with property, in the sense that, usually property is a transferable thing, which can be exchanged, ownership can be subdivided and structured by contract and such.

Now, if you are just your own property, can you sell the right to yourself to someone else, and lose title over yourself? And if not, why not?

I think self-ownership is just playing with words.

I'm not arguing that people should not have bodily autonomy. By denying that self-ownership is the basis for all rights, I am not arguing it is okay for someone else to treat another human being like property. That's a false dilemma. I believe in a strong concept of individual rights. I just don't think property as a concept is necessary for, or a convincing basis for, their foundation.

Because it argued that property as a concept is the foundational nature of human rights. But for the vast majority of human existence, most humans had no concept of property. So arguing that it's some revealed truth about metaphysics is on shaky epistemic foundations.

No

So much winning.

I just mic-dropped you GPT-3. Game over.

Okay. But you just made a consequentialist argument for this conception of rights, which as you might know, Rothbard would not have countenanced. So you're pretty bad at this GPT-3!

They're taken away all the time, while being a universal moral truth, for which there's no universal moral consequence. What does that even mean? My contention is that even if 100% of human beings share this morality, it doesn't make it one iota less subjective, if you're talking about the *universality* of the claim.

But these rights are denied and taken away all the time. If the rights are self-evident and metaphysically true, how do you square that with the past 20,000 years of human history?

Now you're making a normative argument about an "individual's unique value". Are you arguing this is self-evident, or can you describe the metaphysics of this statement in a robust way?

But self-ownership is a positive social right. We can demonstrate this by the fact it only has any domain of applicability within a social context with other moral agents. Property is not something you do alone on an island.

Self-ownership is not an epistemically-sound position on which to base a universal conception of rights. Especially within the preferred libertarian frame of thinking about rights in a negative rights sense, it fails to offer any descriptive power in the favored "alone on an island" thought experiment for the nature of rights.