KOL155 | “The Social Theory of Hoppe: Lecture 3: Libertarian Rights and Argumentation Ethics”

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 155. This is the third of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course "The Social Theory of Hoppe." I’ll release the remaining lectures here in the podcast feed in upcoming days. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for "suggested readings" for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 3: LIBERTARIAN RIGHTS AND ARGUMENTATION ETHICS Video [fvplayer id="12"] Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 3: Libertarian Rights and Argumentation Ethics Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, July 25, 2011 00:00:01 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … later.  So tonight we’ll talk about argumentation ethics.  I have a lot of slides, but some of them will go very fast because they’re just background in case you want to look at them later or if we need some quotes.  But let’s go ahead and dive right into tonight’s lecture.  By the way, before we start, I’m curious.  Who here – well, let me get to the readings page first.  I don’t know if I have that up there.  Who here read more than the required or suggested reading and onto the more optional reading?  I’m just curious how many students have actually read into the argumentation ethics literature beyond the basic stuff I recommended.  Anyone? 00:00:49 00:00:54 Okay, Jacob has.  Jacob, I’m curious.  What did you read beyond the basic stuff?  Method essay.  For argumentation ethics?  Okay.  In any case – oh, just by the way, so we’ll have a short quiz for the first – covering the first three weeks, which will start – I’ll have it posted in a few days.  I’m leaving tomorrow morning, by the way, for the Mises University, so I’ll be traveling tomorrow, but I’ll try to get it up in a couple days.  I wanted to finish this class first before I finish the test so I could make sure I covered only what we talked about in class.  Oh interesting, Jacob.  Good, so you’ve read a lot.  Well, maybe you can help me with some of the difficult questions in here. 00:01:45 So the multiple-choice test will be up in a few days.  It’s optional.  Don’t feel compelled to take it if you don’t want to.  It’s not meant to make anyone feel like they’re going to fail or anything.  It’s just a refresher on the course.  It’s going to be fun, test your knowledge, and to get the certificate if you’d like.  And again, it’s based upon what I say in the lectures, the slides, and also the reading material I mark as suggested but not on the optional reading material. 00:02:11 00:02:15 Okay, so last class we talked about various property issues, how the state arises and the nature of the state, the types of socialism.  We started to talk about de-socialization.  I don’t know if we’ll have time to get to that tonight.  I do have some slides on it at the very end, but I doubt we’ll be able to get to it very much.  Anyway, the article is pretty self-explanatory in any case.  Maybe we can cover it in lecture number six on political topics or number five on economic topics. 00:02:46 By the way, let me – well, we’ll talk at the end a bit about – next class will be on epistemology and methodology.  Okay, so today we’re going to talk about libertarian rights and argumentation ethics.  By the way, I have this little mini ad for my last course because I just want to remind people, I did cover some of this in that course in a more summary fashion.  And some of that’s included in these slides.  I modified it for tonight, and there’s extra stuff here too, but for anyone who took the previous course, some of this I talked about before.  But I’m actually leaving out here a lot of the stuff I talked about in the Libertarian Legal Theory course because it’s not directly pertinent to Hoppe’s approach, but some of this will look familiar to some of you. 00:03:29 So tonight we’re going to talk basically about two main questions.  We’re we talk about what libertarianism is, at least in different conceptions.  And then we’re going to talk about the justification Hoppe provides for it.  And if we have time, we can talk about some related approaches to argumentation ethics.  The readings for tonight – the suggested readings were primarily my kind of concise overview and Hoppe’s article “From the Economics of Laissez Faire to the Ethics of Libertarianism.”  And also his “Justice of Economic Efficiency” and this his “Appendix: Four Critical Replies.”  So that was – there’s a lot more out there, but that’s a good sort of overview of what to read to get the flavor of this whole debate. 00:04:18 Now, this will be a little bit elementary for everybody, so I’m going to go over this quickly because I think we probably already know this, but just to kind of get us in the right framework and to refresh us on where we’re going.  So let’s think about what is libertarianism about.  So it’s a type of political theory compared to other types would be Marxism, forms of leftism and socialism, conservativism, and even modern liberalism or welfare statism or social democracy. It’s concerned with justice in a certain way, and if you think about the traditional classic formulation of justice by – in The Institutes of Justinian, the Roman emperor who helped codify a lot of Roman law, he had said “Justice is a constant and perpetual wish to render everyone his due. 00:05:08 And the maxims of law are these: to live honestly, to hurt no one, to give everyone his due.  Now, these are nice formulations.  They’re a little bit circular.  They sort of – they circle back on each other because – it’s like defining ought is what you should do, and should – what you should do is what you ought to do.  Some of these normative terms are kind of basic, and they feed back on each other. 00:05:31 So we talk about political theory and justice, and we say, well, justice means giving someone his due.  You say, well, what are they do?  Well, the most coherent way to think about it is that what you’re due depends on what your property rights are.  And you’ll see the significance of this in a second when we talk about aggression. 00:05:50 Now, what’s different about libertarians – oh, thanks Rick.  You read Hülsmann’s too.  Thanks.  By the way, the Hülsmann article and also the Larry Seacrest article as well as one of Hoppe’s and one of mine all arose from a seminar we did at Mises on Reinach, Adolf Reinach, who was an amazing and fascinating German thinker.  He was killed I think in World War I.  He died very young, but he was a brilliant guy, produced some great stuff before then that was on the a priori of the civil law and on the criminal law as well. 00:06:32 In any case, a lot of good stuff resulted from that seminar.  It’s on my website if anyone is interested.  And that’s where Guido’s piece came from.  They were all published in the QJAE maybe ten years ago.  In any case, we don’t own the word justice, we libertarians.  But we do have a particular conception of what it means.  And according to that conception – so basically, I think of it like this.  Our conception of justice tells us what the rights we have are, and that tells us what laws there should be. 00:07:06 So it tells you what we’re due, what others owe you, which are obligations and duties, and that corresponds to your rights.  So our idea is that the actual law enforced in a given society, whether there’s a state or not, should conform to what we conceive of as natural law.  So you can think of natural law as an ideal template of laws that should exist, so we’re always aspiring or trying to make laws that do exist conform to that to be just.  So you can think that a conception of justice informs your conception of what rights there are, and that informs your idea of what laws there should be.  So this is just sort of general orientation of framework here. 00:07:47 Slide number seven.  Now, libertarianism is sort of described in a lot of pithy sayings, examples, analogies, metaphors, aphorisms, and kind of summary or condensation statements.  So, for example, Leonard Read, the founder of FEE, in a famous libertarian book in ’54 said people should be free to do anything that’s peaceful.  That’s a pretty good summary of some of the basic normative aspects of libertarianism, but it doesn’t tell you too much. 00:08:21 Dave Boaz said: Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.”  That’s a pretty good – gives you the flavor of it too, but what does it mean to respect the equal rights of others?  I mean if everyone had a right to welfare, then you’re respecting their equal rights, and I mean it only gets you so far.  Ayn Rand put it a little bit colorfully in Galt’s speech: “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me?  No man may start the use of physical force against the others.”  And this is a sort of a good capsule way of stating the – what we call the non-aggression principle. 00:09:05 Rick asks about Bastiat, whether I consider him a libertarian in the strict sense.  I mean I’ve read a lot of Bastiat.  I’ve read him early on.  He was influential to me.  I haven’t revisited him lately on a lot of his issues.  I don’t believe he was an anarchist, but I do believe that – well, for his time I’d say he was a strong libertarian, very radical, very clear thinking.  And the things I’ve heard him write on seem to be pretty much all compatible with libertarianism.  I don’t know if I heard him write on a lot of other libertarian or political views like drug regulations and social and moral regulations, but he seemed to be leaning strongly in the libertarian direction.  He seems to at least be a classical liberal. 00:09:45 So let’s go on, slide number eight.  So we’ve come to a better formulation, the non-aggression principle.