Here's my semi-lengthy article on the right to exclusive ownership of one's self and one's property. Just a few disclaimers- Any errors in my representation of Rothbard and Hoppe's positions are mine, and if I have interpreted their arguments incorrectly do not hesitate to inform me of my error.
Libertarian political philosophy, particularly in its Austrian-derived variants, is unique in its unyielding defense of property rights. Such a rigorous defense often brings about much controversy between libertarians and mainstream political philosophers, but also between libertarians themselves, i.e., the Austrian School vs. the Chicago School on the nature of property rights. It is the purpose of this paper to examine a common objection to Austrian property rights theory and show the logical foundations of this objection to be untenable.
I. Austrian Property Rights theory
It is useful to first define just what I mean by "Austrian Property Rights" theory.
It was not until Murray Rothbard, a 5th generation Austrian economist, that the Austrian school began examining the fields of ethics and rights theory in any detail. Since Rothbard's initial works on the subject, the mantle has been taken up by numerous Austrian thinkers, namely Drs. Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Walter Block. While Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty, did establish a solid base for his libertarian ethics, it is Dr. Hoppe who has made the libertarian private property ethic truly logically unassailable.
So just what is the Austrian view of property rights? Rothbard writes,
THE LIBERTARIAN CREED rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the "nonaggression axiom." "Aggression" is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
If no man may aggress against another; if, in short, everyone has the absolute right to be "free" from aggression, then this at once implies that the libertarian stands foursquare for what are generally known as "civil liberties": the freedom to speak, publish, assemble, and to engage in such "victimless crimes" as pornography, sexual deviation, and prostitution (which the libertarian does not regard as "crimes" at all, since he defines a "crime" as violent invasion of someone else's person or property). Furthermore, he regards conscription as slavery on a massive scale. And since war, especially modern war, entails the mass slaughter of civilians, the libertarian regards such conflicts as mass murder and therefore totally illegitimate.
Rothbard's conception of property rights as elaborated in For a New Liberty rested upon the right to self ownership- that is, the right to exclusive control over one's self and one's faculties free from any coercive interference on the part of other individuals. Rothbard establishes this position of self-ownership by showing that the other options are impossible. He writes,
There are then only two alternatives: either (1) a certain class of people, A, have the right to own another class, B; or (2) everyone has the right to own his own equal quotal share of everyone else. The first alternative implies that while Class A deserves the rights of being human, Class B is in reality subhuman and therefore deserves no such rights. But since they are indeed human beings, the first alternative contradicts itself in denying natural human rights to one set of humans. Moreover, as we shall see, allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is allowed to exploit, and therefore to live parasitically, at the expense of the latter. But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirement for life: production and exchange.
The second alternative, what we might call "participatory communalism" or "communism," holds that every man should have the right to own his equal quotal share of everyone else. If there are two billion people in the world, then everyone has the right to own one two-billionth of every other person. In the first place, we can state that this ideal rests on an absurdity: proclaiming that every man is entitled to own a part of everyone else, yet is not entitled to own himself. Secondly, we can picture the viability of such a world: a world in which no man is free to take any action whatever without prior approval or indeed command by everyone else in society. It should be clear that in that sort of "communist" world, no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly perish. But if a world of zero self-ownership and one hundred percent other ownership spells death for the human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the natural law of what is best for man and his life on earth.
As we can see, a denial of the right to self ownership only gives us two alternatives: slavery, in which men are no longer equal under the protection of law, or communism, in which no one would even be capable of acting. Since the alternatives are both morally indefensible and completely impossible, it is reasonable to say that the only legitimate position on the question of self-ownership is unequivocal support.
Rothbard then uses this position of self-ownership to support the right to exclusive control of property which man has legitimately acquired. It is quite simple to see that if we have a right to property in our body, that assault against another's body would be illegitimate and criminal, a violation of rights. However, it is trickier as we attempt to apply this right to the physical world outside of our bodies. Rothbard reasons as follows- If man has a right to self ownership as we have established, then man has an equally inviolable right to his labor. That is, man has a right to use his self in any way he wishes as long as it does not conflict with another's right to self ownership. By extension then it follows that if one has a right to his labor, then he has a right to the fruits of his labor. Locke writes,
…every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to…
This brings us to Rothbard's conclusion as to the status of property rights. Rothbard concludes that the only rational position on property is that one has a right to the ownership of one's person, and from that his labor, and from his labor, property. In the same way that he does for self-ownership, Rothbard establishes this right by ruling out all other possibilities.
Moreover, if a producer is not entitled to the fruits of his labor, who is? It is difficult to see why a newborn Pakistani baby should have a moral claim to a quotal share of ownership of a piece of Iowa land that someone has just transformed into a wheatfield—and vice versa of course for an Iowan baby and a Pakistani farm. Land in its original state is unused and unowned. Georgists and other land communalists may claim that the whole world population really "owns" it, but if no one has yet used it, it is in the real sense owned and controlled by no one. The pioneer, the homesteader, the first user and transformer of this land, is the man who first brings this simple valueless thing into production and social use. It is difficult to see the morality of depriving him of ownership in favor of people who have never gotten within a thousand miles of the land, and who may not even know of the existence of the property over which they are supposed to have a claim.
While Rothbard's position on the issue is undeniably strong, it stops just short of establishing property rights as a logically unassailable institution. Here Dr. Hoppe takes up the challenge and actually establishes property rights as such: an absolute and logically unassailable axiom which cannot be refuted without engaging oneself in a performative contradiction. Hoppe's argument goes as follows.
Hoppe states that the libertarian nonaggression or extreme private property position is in fact the logical presupposition of argument. That is, simply by arguing, one demonstrates his or her recognition of these principles, and thus any argument against them involves him or her in a performative contradiction, much like asserting that there are no true assertions.
Hoppe defends this quite lucidly and clearly. The only reason that we have discussions and debates is that as rational beings, we are able to engage in argumentation and proposition-making. Two stones clearly cannot discuss or debate an issue of ethics because they are incapable of interpersonal argumentative exchange. As such, all ethical proposals, and in fact all propositions in general, must assume that they are capable of being validated through argument. In simply arguing, one concedes his or her preference for argumentative exchange in establishing ethical propositions as valid, and as such accepts this first insight to be irrefutable.
Hoppe's second insight is that argumentation is an action. This is a quite simple statement, however it has momentous implications. As it is an action, it requires the use of scarce means, namely one's body and any other property which facilitates the argument. This means that by the simple act of arguing, one then shows his or her preference for the use of private property as a means to achieve his or her ends. Hoppe writes,
For one thing, obviously, no one could ever propose anything, and no one could be convinced of any proposition by argumentative means, if a person's right to make exclusive use of his were not already presupposed. It is this recognition of each other's mutually exclusive control over one's own body that explains the distinctive nature of propositional exchanges that, while one may disagree about what has been said, it is still possible to agree on at least the fact that there is disagreement. And obvious, too: Such property right in one's body must be said to be justified a priori. For anyone to try to justify any norm whatsoever would already have to presuppose an exclusive right to control his own body as a valid norm in order to say "I propose such and such."
In this line of reasoning, Dr. Hoppe has established the right to self-ownership as an irrefutable axiom. To assert anything to the contrary would be a performative contradiction in which the one asserting that self ownership is illegitimate is only able to assert such because of an exclusive ownership of their body. It would be no different than asserting "all assertions are false."
After establishing self ownership, Dr. Hoppe proceeds to property rights to the natural world. Hoppe argues that man is only capable or arguing insofar as he is alive, and man can only survive in the natural world if he has the right to use elements of the natural world to sustain him. Obviously, if man had no right to do so, the species would have gone extinct within a few days of its conception. Furthermore, if property could not be legitimately acquired by original appropriation, that is, establishing a link between one's self and a particular scarce resource by using it before anyone else did, and we were instead to give other people the right to what we originally appropriate, we again could not survive in nature. For if I do not have a right to establish an exclusive property title to a scarce resource by mixing my labor with it, then too the human race would not have survived passed day 5 or so.
Hoppe concludes that by merely being alive and arguing, one has presupposed the validity of the libertarian property ethic. No proposition can be made that is incompatible with the libertarian private property ethic without the advocate of such ethic involving him in a performative contradiction, in which he is unable to validate his position.
II. My Opponent's Objection and its Flawed Logic
An acquaintance of mine who opposes this theory posited to me one night this question. If we are to hold this to be true, then would he be justified in stealing a glass of water from me to save himself from dehydration.
Of course, being a logically consistent libertarian, I answered no. He challenged me on this issue, asserting that he would have a right to do such to save his life. Now let us analyze why this position is untenable.
The core of his argument against this position is that property rights are violable as long as the consequences of such a violation are good. He would be justified in stealing from me because my bottle of water is less important that his life.
First, let me deal with the problems of this argument from the position of Hoppe's conception of rights. By entering into an argument, my opponent is presupposing two things: Our right to exclusive control over our bodies, and our exclusive rights to ownership of our property. Dr. Hoppe has laid out the reasons why in the manner that I have explained above. Now the problem with his position then becomes that he is asserting something that is totally inconsistent with the act of interpersonal argumentative exchange, namely that I do not have an exclusive right to my property. If I do not have a right to exclusive control over my property, then because rights are universal and apply to all men equally, then he too lacks such a right by his own argument. If he and I lacked exclusive rights to our bodies and property, we would be incapable of arguing at all. Thus his proposal is a self-defeating contradiction in which he attempts to deny the validity of an ethic in argumentation that he must presuppose to engage in an argument in the first place. His proposition is no more valid than the proposition that humans action is not purposeful behavior.
Secondly, let me examine further the implications of this position. Let me reiterate that the position my acquaintance takes is that property rights can be violated as long as a good consequence follows from the violation. By this logic any numbers of rights violations are easily justifiable. For example - If someone needs a kidney transplant to save his life, and I have two perfectly functioning kidneys, my opponent would, if his is consistent in the application of his implicitly stated doctrine, find nothing wrong with taking one of my kidneys and giving it to the needy individual. Losing a kidney would be a mere inconvenience to me, whereas going without a kidney would be death for another person, why should I be allowed to greedily keep one of my kidneys? Certainly someone’s life is far more important than my kidney. This is the logic of my opponent's position.
Let us also take it further. Once again, if we are to consistently apply my opponent's logic, then killing one person is justified if it saves the lives of two other people. If I am not killed, then two people will die. However, if I am killed, two people will be able to continue their lives. If we hold then, that certainly having less unnecessary death is a good thing, killing one innocent person can justified to save two other people. Obviously this has definite extensions into the real world- Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. My opponent must see no problem at all with the incineration of half a million innocent people and the radiation of millions more if he views that this prevented a larger loss of life. Once again, if he is consistent he would have no problem with such action. If he did have an objection to this action, then, the objection would not be that the killing of innocent people is wrong, but that it would not satisfy high enough goals to justify the killing.
We now see that by taking my opponent's position, we put ourselves in a position in which there is nothing inherently wrong with a violation of rights. As long as the violation leads to a good consequence, then it is ok. Thus, if we accept this, we are complete moral relativists to whom there is no longer an absolute right or wrong. Now, I think that most people would have a problem with a complete absence of morality, my opponent included. However this is the logical conclusion of his argument, and if he has a problem with this conclusion then he should re-examine his reasoning.
