Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Its Critics

• Re the approach of Habermas and Apel (which is similar and it’s hard to find translations of concise statements by Habermas online—I’ve relied mostly on some chapters by him that are not online, plus Apel, plus some criticism/summary/discussion of Habermas by others):
  •  “Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia,” by Karl-Otto Apel;
  • Apel, Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia, in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib & Fred Dallmayr, MIT Press, 1990
    • Discussion: of Habermas/Apel: Davies, Kim, Review of K-O Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy(1980), Radical Philosophy 30 Spring 1982
    • Habermas, Jurgen: discussion: Leeds, Gary Charles, The Discourse Ethics Alternative to Rust v. Sullivan; Lawrence Byard Solum, Freedom of Communicative Action: A Theory of the First Amendment Freedom of Speech, 1989; Michel Rosenfeld, Book Review of Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contricutions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy [many of these are mainstream law review/law professor type discussions]
    • Also see views of noted libertarian thinker Jeremy Shearmur, below
• Re Gewirth: The Basis and Content of Human Rights, Alan Gewirth
  • Gewirth discussions, reviews: Encyclopedia of Ethics, 1992 (summary); Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue; Jan Narveson, Gewirth’s Reason and Morality–A Study in the Hazards of Universalizability in Ethics, Dialogue, Dec. 1980 and Negative and Positive Rights in Gewirth’s Reason and Morality; Henry Veatch, in Human Rights and Book Review, Ethics
  • Gewirth, Alan, Appendix: Replies to Some Critics, Nomos XXIV, 1982
  • Gewirth, Alan, Why Agents Must Claim Rights: A Reply, 79 J. Phil. 403, 1982
  • Also discussed by noted libertarian theorist Roger Pilon, below
• re Madison, G.B., The Logic of Liberty, 1986 (excerpts re discourse ethics)

• Rasmussen, Douglas B., Political Legitimacy and Discourse Ethics, 1992
• Jeremy Shearmur, Habermas: A Critical Approach, Critical Review 2 (1988): 47;  From Dialogue Rights to Property Rights: Foundations for Hayek’s Legal Theory, Critical Review, 1990
• Machan, Tibor R., Individualism and Political Dialogue, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of Science and the Humanities 46 (June 1996): 45-55; also included as chapter 13 of Classical Individualism (Routledge, 1998)
• Pilon, Roger, A Theory of Rights: Toward Limited Government (Ph.D. dissertation, U. Chicago, 1979; draws on Gewirth); Ordering Rights Consistently: Or What We Do and Do Not Have Rights To, Roger Pilon
• “Praxeology, Economics, and Law: Issues and Implications,” by Larry Sechrest
• “The A Priori Foundations of Property Economics,” by Guido Hülsmann
• Marian Eabrasu’s thorough and scholarly A Reply to the Current Critiques Formulated AgainstHoppe’s Argumentation Ethics.
• Steven Yates’s De-Kanting Mises and Hoppe: Notes Toward an Austrian-School Metaphysics;
• Jude Chua Soo Meng’s Hopp(e)ing Onto New Ground: A Rothbardian Proposal for Thomistic Natural Law as the Basis for Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Praxeological Defense of Private Property;
• And of course my own e.g. Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach, 12:1 Journal of Libertarian Studies 51 (Spring 1996) (also published—in a law review—A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights 30 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 607-45 (1997))

NOT TO MENTION echoes of the general type of logic and insight that undergirds the general Hoppean AE approach in various thinkers over the centuries: See Quotes on the Logic of Liberty—a few selections only:

• “The only proof that can be offered for the validity of the liberal position is that we are discussing it and its acceptance is a presupposition of discussion, since discussion is the essence of the position itself.” —Frank H. Knight, Freedom and Reform (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982): 473–74.
• “[T]he various values defended by liberalism are not arbitrary, a matter of mere personal preference, nor do they derive from some natural law . . . . Rather, they are nothing less and nothing more than what could be called the operative presuppositions or intrinsic features and demands of communicative rationality itself. In other words, they are values that are implicitly recognized and affirmed by everyone by the very fact of their engaging in communicative reason. This amounts to saying that no one can rationally deny them without at the same time denying reason, without self-contradiction, without in fact abandoning all attempts to persuade the other and to reach agreement. . . . [T]he notion of universal human rights and liberties is not an . . . arbitrary value, a matter of mere personal preference . . . . On the contrary, it is nothing less and nothing more than the operative presupposition or intrinsic feature and demand of communicative rationality itself.” —G.B. Madison, The Logic of Liberty (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986): 266, 269.
• “[O]ur existence is due to the fact that we do not, indeed cannot accept a norm outlawing property in other scarce resources next to and in addition to that of one’s physical body. Hence, the right to acquire such goods must be assumed to exist.” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy (Kluwer: 1993): 185.
• “[J]ust as one cannot win a game of chess against an opponent who will not make any moves–and just as one cannot argue mathematically with a person who will not commit himself to any mathematical statements–so moral argument is impossible with a man who will make no moral judgements at all . . . . Such a person is not entering the arena of moral dispute, and therefore it is impossible to contest with him. He is compelled also–and this is important–to abjure the protection of morality for his own interests.” —R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (1963): A7 6.6
• “TO argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” —Thomas Paine, The Crisis No. V
• “A man who would consider himself a bandit if, pistol in hand, he prevented me from carrying out a transaction that was in conformity with my interests has no scruples in working and voting for a law that replaces his private force with the public force and subjects me, at my own expense, to the same unjust restrictions.” —BASTIAT, FREDERIC, Harmonies
• “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.” —Herbert Spencer, from Facts and Comments (1902)
• “[T]he victim is entitled to respond according to the rule (‘The use of force is permissible’) that the aggressor himself has implicitly laid down.” —John Hospers, “Retribution: The Ethics of Punishment,” in Assessing the Criminal: Restitution, Retribution, and the Legal Process, Randy E. Barnett and John Hagel III, eds., (Cambridge: Ballinger, 1977): p. 191.
• “The injury [the penalty] which falls on the criminal is not merely implicitly just–as just, it is eo ipso his implicit will, an embodiment of his freedom, his right; on the contrary, it is also a right established within the criminal himself, i.e., in his objectively embodied will, in his action. The reason for this is that his action is the action of a rational being and this implies that it is something universal and that by doing it the criminal has laid down a law which he has explicitly recognized in his action and under which in consequence he should be brought as under his right.” —G.W.F.Hegel, The Philosophy of Right A7 100 (T.M. Knox trans., 1969) (reprinted in Philosophical Perspectives on Punishment (Gertrude Ezorsky ed., 1972): 107 (Emphasis in last sentence added; brackets in Ezorsky)
• “It is easier to commit murder than to justify it.” —Papinian (Aemilius Papinianus), quoted in Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law, p. 30 n.2 (1962).
• Alternative quote to the above: “Papinian [a third-century Roman jurist, considered by many to be the greatest of Roman jurists] is said to have been put to death for refusing to compose a justification of Caracalla’s murder of his brother and co-Emperor, Geta, declaring, so the story goes, that it is easier to commit murder than to justify it.” —Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law, p. 30 n.2 (1962).
• Old saying: “What you do speaks so loud I can’t hear what you are saying.” —Quoted in Clarence Carson, “Free Enterprise: The Key to Prosperity”, in The Freedom Philosophy Vol. 27, 27 (1988).
• “With him [an aggressor] we are returned to the first-stage state of nature and may use force against him. In so doing we do not violate his rights or in any other way violate the principle of right, because he has broken the reciprocity required for us to view such a principle [of rights] as binding. In this we find the philosophic grounding for the moral legitimacy of the practice of punishment. Punishment is just that practice which raises the price of violation of the principle of right so as to give us all good reason to accept that principle.” —J. Charles King, A Rationale for Punishment, 4 J. Libertarian Stud. (1980): 154.
• “In transgressing the law of Nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity . . . and so he becomes dangerous to mankind; . . . every man . . . by the right he hath to preserve mankind in general, may restrain, or where it is necessary, destroy things noxious to them, and so may bring such evil on any one who hath transgressed that law, as may make him repent of the doing of it . . . .” B6 11: A murderer “hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security.” —John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government B6 8
• “It has been noted that one who wishes to extinguish or convey an inalienable right may do so by committing the appropriate wrongful act and thereby forfeiting it.” —Randy E. Barnett, “Contract Remedies and Inalienable Rights,” Social Philosophy and Policy 4 (Autumn 1986): 186, citing Diana T. Meyers,Inalienable Rights: A Defense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 14.
• “[W]hen someone is punished for having violated others’ rights, it is not the case that the criminal has alienated or otherwise lost his rights; rather, it is the case that the criminal’s choice to live in a rights-violating way is being respected.” —Douglas B. Rasmussen & Douglas J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991): 85
• “[I]f someone attacks another, that act carries with it, as a matter of the logic of aggression, the implication that from a rational moral standpoint the victim may, and often should retaliate.” —Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (1989): 176
• “[T]hose who do not want peace, or want it only for others in relation to themselves rather than vice versa, are on their own and may in principle be dealt with by any degree of violence we like.” —Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (1988): 210

Update:

• “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (May 27, 2011) (includes “Discourse Ethics and Liberty: A Skeletal Ebook”) (supplemental resources) (archived version of the comments on the Mises blog)
• Łukasz Dominiak, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Argumentation Theory of Ethics (Mises Institute, July 19, 2019)

  Update:

  Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s ed. (Auburn, Ala: Mises Institute, 1998), pp. 23–24:

  The champions of mechanicalism do not bother about the still unsolved problems of the logical and epistemological basis of the principles of causality and imperfect induction. In their eyes these principles are sound because they work. The fact that experiments in the laboratory bring about the results predicted by the theories and that machines in the factories run in the way predicted by technology proves, they say, the soundness of the methods and findings of modern natural science. Granted that science cannot give us truth—and who knows what truth really means?—at any rate it is certain that it works in leading us to success.

  But it is precisely when we accept this pragmatic point of view that the emptiness of the panphysicalist dogma becomes manifest. Science, as has been pointed out above, has not succeeded in solving the problems of the mind-body relations. The panphysicalists certainly cannot contend that the procedures they recommend have ever worked in the field of interhuman relations and of the social sciences. But it is beyond doubt that the principle according to which an Ego deals with every human being as if the other were a thinking and acting being like himself has evidenced its usefulness both in mundane life and in scientific research. It cannot be denied that it works.

  It is beyond doubt that the practice of considering fellow men as beings who think and act as I, the Ego, do has turned out well; on the other hand the prospect seems hopeless of getting a similar pragmatic verification for the postulate requiring them to be treated in the same manner as the objects of the natural sciences. The epistemological problems raised by the comprehension of other people’s behavior are no less intricate than those of causality and incomplete induction. It may be admitted that it is impossible to provide conclusive evidence for the propositions that my logic is the logic of all other people and by all means absolutely the only human logic and that the categories of my action are the categories of all other people’s action and by all means absolutely the categories of all human action. However, the pragmatist must remember that these propositions work both in practice and in science, and the positivist must not overlook the fact that in addressing his fellow men he presupposes—tacitly and implicitly—the intersubjective validity of logic and thereby the reality of the realm of the alter Ego’s thought and action, of his eminent human character.