Any time!

I think identity is a pretty foundational concept within epistemology itself. The nature of personal identity is a very complex topic that nexuses on a lot of tricky issues. But none of these concepts require property as a concept. I can assign an identity to my cat, by giving her a name. I can assign identity to you even, by giving you a number that I put in a database -- as governments and businesses do! But I assume the *kind* of identity you're talking about, is your intuitive sense of self -- what you might think of as your unique essence of sorts. What David Chalmers tries to grapple with in his theory of consciousness, in what he describes as the "hard problem". Now, I'm with Dennett on arguing this problem doesn't even exist and "qualia" is an illusion, but none of these concepts of our own sense of identity implicate property rights.

I mean, it's certainly what Rothbard and his contemporary Hans-Hermann Hoppe thinks all philosophers before them were missing. But even most contemporary philosophers think their arguments are completely unconvincing.

What does this have to do with property, exactly? Property is just an unnecessary moral concept to deal with this dilemma. Literally *no* moral philosophers in the entire history of moral philosophy up until Rothbard believed you required property rights to describe your right to your own survival.

But that *is* the argument that I'm disputing. That self-ownership is the basis for deriving all other human rights. I don't believe you have to own yourself in order to qualify as a moral agent that has rights. It's much easier to believe those rights are socially-derived. That claim is at least consistent with everything we see in the world, and anthropologic history. Claiming something is metaphysically, and objectively true, when everywhere we look, we find innumerable violations of this, including the fact that nation states exist, which are apparently immoral and illegal under this objective truth, just seems like pounding metaphysical sand to me.

Then why insist your body is a form of property at all, if it doesn't have all the same characteristics as ordinary property?

There's plenty of things people intuitively understand that upon closer inspection are paradigmatically flawed. The claim I'm making is that self-ownership is not an objective basis for deriving all human rights, as Rothbard et. al. claim. My argument is that it's merely a normative argument masquerading as an objective truth.

I think we are going in a lot of directions right now. I mean yes, we can debate definitions and make semantic arguments until the cows come home. But then we're not really having a productive conversation about anything that advances our understanding of anything substantive.

I don't believe slavery should be permitted at all.

*should. Not sure what autocorrect did there.

But if your body is your property, in an ordinary sense, rather than being a special pleading, then surely I can whorls be able to sell my body into slavery.

I want to be very clear: I support the existence of property rights. I'm merely arguing they are not the basis for individual rights. Property rights are a social right that only have purchase within a social context. That's the extent of my claim.

The second you're trying to reconcile the argument with utilitarianism, you're really not even defending self-ownership as the basis for all rights anymore. You've become philosophically incoherent.

So basically you're on my side of the argument. Not Rothbard's. I win again!

But you can't respect the mother's property rights, if you're going to violate them to save the baby.

But this violates a strict conception of self-ownership and the non-aggression principle. Philosophical liberals, like say, John Stuart Mill, would definitely argue the baby's right to life supersedes the mother's property rights. But Rothbard disagreed!

Rothbard argued that the baby could not legitimately be saved in this situation, because it would violate the non-aggression principle, and that, the mother withholding food, while vile, couldn't be compelled to feed the baby against her will -- would would violate the principle.

In an argument with Robert Nozick, Rothbard debated with him the ethics of a mother who refused to feed her newborn baby. Nozick proposed a scenario in which a member of the community forced their way onto her property to save the baby's life. Nozick asked Rothbard if the mother would be justified in killing the person trying to save her starving baby for trespass and kidnapping. Nozick, also a libertarian, actually thought Rothbard's view was too extreme. What do you think about this?

There's nothing particularly interesting about self-ownership in your argument, here. It's also pretty sloppy, because thinking in terms of utility is not as straight-forward as you make it. For one, if forced vaccinations led to social upheaval and backlash, that could be argued to have net negative utility, that detracts from the rule utilitarian argument you're making about saving lives. We're also really far from the metaphysics of self-ownership now.

Give me an example of one of these cases.