A Natural Rights Foundation Of Ethics

In this article I will attempt to present a very brief construction of a foundation of ethics based on our very nature as men, and how it thereby applies to libertarianism and property rights. While this is by no means sufficient to determine a full construction of any refutation to the ethical systems I hereby refute, or any ethical system I attempt to construct from this point I hope this will suffice as a general introduction into those theories, and that I provide enough of those casual relations to bridge man’s nature within its essence and libertarianism.

We hereby begin our analysis within the substance of mans own nature, and upon this consideration it becomes evident as noted by Rothbard that the first contingency lies within the insight that within existence, exists more than one entity, and in-fact numerable entities. Each entity having a vast range, and distinct properties which can all be investigated and analysed by man’s reason. The activity of all these entities, whether organic or inorganic is a consequence of first it’s own nature, and that of the influence exerted by the external entities it interacts with.

The nature of man is so to say, they must necessarily be preconditioned to act, such that man must necessarily choose his own desired ends and deploy his own reason to analyse the most appropriate means necessary to achieve these ends. Thereby it becomes of vital importance that man has free association, that he be free to learn, develop his own faculties of reason, and act upon those values that he is preconditioned to by the nature of action. To interfere using coercion or a violent state of affairs with mans free association is thereby to be distinctly unjust as it goes against the very nature of man, and thereby becomes ‘anti-human’

The individualist has often be charged with a sort of vacuum analysis unable to account for those societal influences over the individual, and he thereby cannot claim to have a true analysis of reality. But this claim is mischarged and misses the point. No good individualist would forget to include societal influence in his analysis. It is very self evident that within the nature of mans development, cooperation and interaction with his fellow man is an integral variable, i.e., something required for mans continued survival and prosperity as a being. However, what this charges fail to note as that even with societal influences, at the end of the day the individual still has ultimate control over his own being. This will only impact his values so long as he choose to adapt them into his being, it is his final choice whether to affirm, adopt, negate, reject, etc these societal influences.

The starting point of these natural rights thereby starts with an analysis of the individual, and thereby the nature of ownership, or ‘self-ownership.’ This right asserts absolute and ultimate control over ones own self by virtue of his own nature. Meaning this individual must always be free from those forces of evil, coercion and violence. As previously noted, as a precondition to mans own nature, survival and prosperity he must necessarily be free from those coercive forces preventing him from being free to learn, develop his faculties of reason, and freely choose his own ends and means to employ to achieve them. To interfere with these conditions is to be in direct opposition to human nature. The right to self-ownership thereby allows for these rights to be embodied implicitly within a general concept.

If this is to be so denied, there exists only two possible alternatives. One of the two is to say that a certain group of people, or class A have a right to own another class, that is to say they are in a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. Or second, that everyone within the society has an equal right to own and have a say over everyone else. The first option is necessarily to say one class is ‘subhuman’ and thereby has a pretext of inferiority. However, as under any consideration this class B is indeed, human it falls into direct contradiction of itself. Not only this but to say that class A owns class B is to distinctly violate the basic economic requirements preconditioned for mans survival, production and exchange.

The second proposition can be said again to fall under multiple considerations, first the communalism idea rests upon a fallacious argument, that every man is entitled to a select part of everyone else, and yet not entitled to ownership over himself. This logic is entirely fallacious and subsides different categorisations of truth over different groups of people, and thereby engages in polylogism or outright special pleading. Secondly, this argument clearly falls on the condition that if it was really true everyone communally had a say in regards to everyone else then mans survival would quickly fall, and the way that action is preconditioned would quickly reflect this to be an impossibility. Every man must get distinct permission from everyone else before acting in any manner, but clearly this falls into regress quickly. If every man is owned by everyone else surely the person giving the other man permission for action much also have been given permission by someone else who also must have been given permission by someone else and so on into infinity. Now don’t confuse this argument with Rothbard’s work, the argument just proposed is something I myself have formulated. The second argument I have formulated is that the way action is preconditioned makes this a physical impossibility, if every man was really owned by every other he must thereby have permission before he commits any action, but abstaining from action itself is just as much as an action as not abstaining from action. Man is necessarily always acting at all times unless he is in the state of reflex but obviously man cannot sustain this state. Thereby this thesis of property becomes untenable.

While these arguments are my own, Rothbard also notes that this directly contradictions the essence of human nature, as mans survival is of importance to mans nature, a thesis in which dictates that for any man to act he must necessarily have permission from everyone else, the human race as a whole would quickly perish, and thereby distinctly becomes antithetical to mans nature. Secondly, it is a physical impossibility that the existent entities can keep sufficient tabs, and exercise their partial ownership over all other entities. Thereby this concept becomes not only a complete dystopian fascist nightmare and an enemy of mans nature but also a physical impossibility due to the nature of man.

From this we also need deduce a natural principle of property for those objects that do not reside as a property of the body, and this is generally a more difficult task and aggression can be a little more ambiguous with property external of the body. For example, if we say that X directly assaults B, he is distinctly acting within an aggressive format. However, if the same X were to take B’s watch, would it be this easy to the claim the same format of aggression? well, not necessarily. X could claim to be the true owner/appropriator of B’s watch, and thus a distinctive property theory must be developed in order to understand the ethical principles behind these issues.

Before I attempt to construct a systematic property theory, I want to begin with a critique of certain libertarian views on property. Some libertarians take the position that assigning those certain property rights should be the left to government decree. But from the outset this seems to the observer to be fallacious. For a group who claim to supposedly be skeptical of government, to then claim that we can trust government to decree property titles to society in a fair and unjust manner is absolute absurdity and by its very nature, a special pleading fallacy. For a group who views government as evil, and an aggressor to them give it ultimate power over that very thing that makes aggression as horrid as it is will surely lead to disastrous consequences from those in the ruling class (the state) exploiting homesteaders as we have seen all throughout history.

If, for example the government decided enough was enough for its reign and unilaterally assigned property titles to those cronyists who bid highest for the titles, the utilitarian libertarian, if he be consistent must thereby have no issue accepting this new government decree as the new social order and allowing those new property owners to collect rent thousands-fold. This shows however the brutal inefficiency of the utilitarian argument, so how do we overcome this? the simple answer is by taking the natural rights construction of property rights and justice. Only those proponents can look at the newly unilaterally assigned property titles and scoff at them as invalid, and this also allows for a theory of property completely independent of government.

The first thing to note is that even while a theory of property has been developed within ones own self, man as an entity is not self-sustainable, it is a precondition for his very survival that he adapt and conform to the natural environment around him, and take usage of the natural resources to develop closer to his goal, or his particular chosen ends that he wishes to acquire. To do so he must apply his labour with the natural environment, engaging in a productive process that takes time to complete, transforming those relatively higher order goods into consumer goods, ready for consumption. As it’s of necessity that these capital goods are necessarily employed to achieve mans desired ends as a necessary precondition for his own survival, the question then arises of who gets to use what capital goods and how can they be assigned, i.e., we come back the question of property titles.

If we look at the example of a productive process, let’s say someone producing a fishing rod to catch fish for his own consumption how do we say that the materials that are distinctly the producers? the natural rights theorists would say because these materials are in fact the producers ‘creation’ in the sense that he has expended his energy to accumulate those natural unowned resources and ‘transform’ them by ideas he has picked up and put into agency by the usage of his own body. If by nature, man has the right to own his own body then surely by a precondition to his own survival he must also have the right to own those objects he expends his own being in, making an expression of himself.

He has in essence, embodied himself within the said object and by the usage of his prior owned characteristics he thereby claims ownership of this object he has embodied part of his owned possessions in to begin with. This was founded on the theories of John Locke which is best reflected in this quote “… every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we must 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 of 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 the right to what that is once joined to.”

In applying this to our analysis of our ownership over ourself we can say now there is three possible generally formulated arguments, either that the transformer, sculptor, creator, or whatever other term one may deem an appropriate terminological placement comes to thereby be the owner over his own creation, by the very virtue of his essence as a creator. Alternatively one may say that one man, or a group of men may have justification in the title of ownership over a certain creation after a sequence of coercive appropriation of another’s homesteaded resources, i.e., slavery in this case. One last alternative, is a previously mentioned rejoinder, as in a solution of communal ownership, where each man in society possesses that equal claim right over every other man, but for some distinct and never elaborated upon reason, he does not possess this same fractional claim over himself.

It should be asked for those proponents of aggression and theft, what necessarily gives that man the right to take something that is a formation of any other man, something that has been distinctly shaped within its own properties to embody those preferences and properties of its sculptor, embodying it with a distinct connection to himself, or we may say necessarily an extension of oneself to those material possessions. One may claim such arbitrary ridiculous dogmatism as “By allowing for this coercive violation of property rights, or aggression against certain homesteaders producers produces the highest amount of utility for the totality of those members of society, and thereby produces the most positive consequences for the vast amount of society.” However this view is the optimum of ethical incoherence. First each man who comes into contact with this these people that are proponents of this arbitrary dogmatism must ask himself one fundamental question, if these events, such as the specified relation discussed earlier occur, can be shown through those property rights over oneself to be so, then why is producing that highest utility for society even relevant to any extent? If such an event can be shown with inference to its own substance to be a cognitively unjustifiable position then why should we take such arbitrary stipulations such as a utility argument to mean anything but emotional whims? There is no distinct reasoning that we should even infer to a higher utility, this is purely an claim made from emotion. Why shouldn’t we strive for lower utility? What is the substance behind these claims to begin with?

A second point that may be raised against this so called ‘utilitarian’ argument is one of pointing the distinct possibility of one entity to possess the totality, or even a sufficient fraction of the totality of local knowledge to thereby determine what would produce the highest utility on the general prescription of each subject, and we may also say in the absence of a formulated price mechanism utilitarianism further becomes an impossibility to formulate any pragmatic application, and thereby will consistently lead to any society with the absence of private property in factors of production to misjudge any calculation of utility and continually take part in cognitively unjustifiable acts, i.e., continued unethical acts.

As first noted, one entity can never possess the totality of local knowledge within any society pertaining to numerous amounts of existing entities, within these societies the innumerable amounts of action that occurs within a relatively small time frame, under this basis we can say that the amount of local, or private knowledge created even in a matter of seconds will consistently outpace more than any actor can physically comprehend, or have the physical capabilities to do so spatially speaking. No actor can be present for every action that can possibly occur, as this would require he be in numerous positions at once, and be able to comprehend all the information around him. Clearly, not to appeal to common sense but I do not think this requires much elaboration upon why this cannot occur, I trust the reader can intuitively see the point I am advancing here but for a more exponential elaboration of this, check Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order (1948). The main point here however, is that as no planner, or entity for that matter can possess all this local knowledge, this also includes the totality of that interpersonal utility. So long as we take that no entity can thereby possess all the knowledge upon each actor’s ends we can also thereby say the course of action embarked on can never be said with certainty to ‘produce the highest utility for those general members of society’ as no entity can know this knowledge. If one retains the position that all these ends are necessarily arbitrary and thereby ends within themselves cannot be that of a cognitive problem, and possess nothing within their substance that makes them preferable, based on this lack of informational availability one can never say that ‘x course of action is more preferable than y course of action based on the utility generally gained by its existence.’ This will very quickly be seen to reduce not into a ‘generally gained utility’ but the utility gained by the one actor alone by taking that course of action, possibly harming the general utility that could have been gained upon any course of action.

One way in which may generally be understood as a guide, or an indicator of general consumer preferences is the price mechanism. Implicitly contained within those pretexts of profits and losses is an indication of what consumers at the time are in general demand for, businesses are entirely reliant on consumers to invest in their produce, and the only way consumers will do as such is if it fulfills some degree of utility to themselves. So by analysis of those profitable industries one can see some degree of reflection on interpersonal utility. While it should be noted that price can by no means serve as a yardstick of measuring utility, it can only serve as a sort of rough estimate of relative prescriptions of interpersonal utility this still makes the utilitarian argument lean towards a system of absolute privatisation of all industries, so utility can thereby be maximised as more knowledge about interpersonal utility is possessed. While this position can still be critiqued on many grounds, this is certainly a more substantive take than the Marxist utilitarian argument, that as I have hopefully constructed own argumentation falls on its own grounds.

This denotes the same idea within those labourers in productive processes, they too embody themselves within these created products, they use their own being and combine it with that of nature as a necessary extension of his own being. So long as man is seen to own himself, the necessary extension is that an embodiment of his own ownership into a said other product results in that claim right to that product by virtue of his own essence within the said product. While this could be used as a claim against those capitalist productive ventures using the ‘Marxian Exploitation Thesis’ in deducing that surplus is extracted from those workers, and thereby it becomes an exploitative relationship which ought to be removed. The only way in which this can be justified is if a necessary concession to that homesteading principle of property is so, and thereby they claim that that as the capitalist is expropriating that labourers property unethically. However, not only is this completely antithetical to the basic doctrines of those communist societies, i.e., the total absence of private property but also it is removing a vital factor that must be considered, that the capitalist in question possesses that ownership over those factors of production being utilised by the worker in order for the creation process to occur. As these producers possess this ownership antecedent to any utilisation by the worker, the worker is merely utilising another’s property to transform it into something that may or may not be more profitable with that free association with the property owner. So no, the labour is not entitled to any monetary surplus he may create in the process of moving products through the capital structure.

While this is relatively brief and I’m sure will generate a fair due response, this is the best brief categorisation of the natural rights argument I can offer at the current moment. Of course, I’m certain many areas have been left open to critique, and there is many grey areas I have not sufficiently addressed, as the argument stands in its own state we can say that in order for any consistent theory to be applicable and understood by us beings as man, it must be directly applicable to our own nature as men. The only way in such this comes to be, is to take the libertarian approach to these specific ends and come to the conclusion, only these ends are sufficiently applicable to man’s nature, and thereby as men we ought operate on these principles.

For a more substantive exposition on the ideas proposed here check Rothbard (For a New Liberty 1973), Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty 1982), Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Economics and Ethics of Private Property 1993) and such related works.