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Libertarian Answer Man: Argumentation Ethics Questions

by on February 1, 2025

From an email:

Hello Mr. Kinsella,
I have been interested in Libertarianism for some time now and Hoppes AE has especially fascinated me.However,I have some questions which were left open.Hoppes central claim seems to be,that you cannot argue without accepting NAP and self -ownership .

Not exactly. It is that all truth claims must be established in argumentation, including claims about what norms or conduct is justifiable. Also, that the activity argumentative justification necessarily presupposes certain norms or values, such as peace, universalizability, non-contradiction, truth, the ability to homestead unowned resources, the ability to control one’s own body, the value of avoiding conflict, and so on; and that these norms–which we may think of as “grundnorms”–cannot be denied without contradiction since they are inevitably presupposed by every participant in argumentative justification; and finally, that any political norm other than libertarianism (that is, all forms of socialism) are incompatible with these grundnorms and thus cannot be argumentatively justified. It is essentially a proof by contradiction: that any non-libertarian political norm contradicts more basic norms that are necessarily presupposed by all participants in argumentation. Socialism is aggression and violence and contradicts the norms presupposed by the participants by virtue of participating in the peaceful activity of argumentation. 

 
I go into some of this in Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) (LFFS), e.g. ch. 2, n. 22, ch. 14 Part II.C, et pass.
 
But I could be a utilitarian or a moral nihilist ,who just uses argumentation to maximise utility or for selfish reasons.It doesn’t require me to accept that me or you own our bodies,just that we control them.Hoppe seems to use  ownership and control interchangeably .
I actually address this issue in LFFS, e.g. ch. 22, Part II.G. I think he does use them interchangeably sometimes (English was not his native language) but it does not seriously affect his argument. Hoppe correctly observes that for argument to take place actors must have the ability to control their body, to use standing room, and to have previously acquired and used natural resources; and he also is correct that participants in argumentation cannot object to the right of the parties to have done this. So it does not matter if a nihilist is just pretending to be sincere; it is still the case that it is impossible to argumentatively justify institutionalized aggression, since if and to the extent he is engaging in argumentation then he does recognize the value of peace and the value of he and the other participant being alive and being able to use resources and thus being able to acquire them in a conflict free way, which thus implies grundnorms that are compatible only with libertarianism and not with any form of socialism.
Also saying that one cannot speak is a performative contradiction,but saying that one should not speak seems more like hypocrisy.I would be thrilled,if you could clarify.

I am not sure what you are referring to. AE does not rest on the notion that it is a contradiction to say “one should not speak”.
 
You should review the more recent literature on this—by Hoppe, me, and others, before coming back with more questions. Many of your questions may be already answered there. See for instance the sources linked below, which I take from an answer to an email I received just a few days ago:
 
Meanwhile you might check out these in case you are not aware of them: namely, the material listed here, “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide,” including:
these updated chapters in my book Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023):

As well as more recent pieces by Hoppe and others listed in the Supplemental Resources and Updates section of that post, e.g. 

***

Followup:

Thank you for clarification. One last criticism I have of Hoppe, is that he seems to follow the neo-Kantian mystic tradition of Mises rather than Rothbards Aristotelian approach. However, this is a separate issue.

I think Rothbard’s approach is actually somewhat confused, as the natural rights/natural law idea has flaws, in that it attempts to go from is to ought: e.g., the way something is (its nature) determines what it ought to do. But there is a problem with this approach as Hoppe rightly points out: “[O]ne can readily subscribe to the almost generally accepted view that the gulf between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ is logically unbridgeable.” See Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society, ch. 6, text at n.12 (p. 119). In fact Rothbard himself recognized this:

In a dazzling breakthrough for political philosophy in general and for libertarianism in particular, he [Hoppe] has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the scholastics, and that had brought modern libertarianism into a tiresome deadlock. Not only that: Hans Hoppe has managed to establish the case for anarcho-capitalist, Lockean rights in an unprecedentedly hard-core manner, one that makes my own natural law/natural rights position seem almost wimpy in comparison.  (Ibid., p. 121)

As for Kant’s “mysticism,” I am not quite sure what you mean but I suppose this is the bound up with the Randian criticism of “mysticism” and Kant and his idealism. In my view, =there is nothing mystical about Hoppe’s argument nor about Mises’s own epistemology and methodology which is based on some Kantian concepts and insights (Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics, 3d ed., George Reisman, trans. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2003)).
I assume by mysticism you mean the idealistic interpretation of Kant made by Rand. A few things here. First, I tend to agree with Rand that the Kantian idealism (skepticism, subjectivism) they describe is flawed and their criticisms of it are largely accurate. However, it is far from clear that this is actually what Kant’s views claim. Kant’s writing is complex and sometimes murky, and it appears there are two interpretations of him: the American one which reads him as promoting idealism; and the European interpretation of Kant which is essentially realistic. This latter one is the Kantian approach adopted and employed by Mises and Hoppe, who are realists, and it is perhaps why this realist-Kantian perspective is similar in some respects to the more Aristotelian approach of Rothbard (in ethics, say) and why Rothbard had essentially no problems with the Misesian approach to economics, praxeology, “apriori” truths, and so on, even if he would use different terminology. For more on this see Kinsella, “Mises and Rand (and Rothbard)” and Kinsella, LFFS, ch. 22, n.53; also Rothbard, “The Mantle of Science,” “In Defense of ‘Extreme Apriorism,’” and other chapters in Section One: Method, of Economic Controversies (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011). On Mises’s realism, see Ludwig von Mises, “Epistemological Studies,” in Memoirs, Arlene Oost-Zinner, trans (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2009) (formerly Notes and Recollections); Mises’s dismissive remarks on Popper in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1962), chap. 4, §8 and chap. 7, §4; idem, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2007 [1957]), chap. 1, §3. See also Edward W. Younkins, “Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond,” J. Ayn Rand Stud. 6, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 337–74, p. 342 et pass. (also in Edward W. Younkins, ed., Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond (Lexington Books, 2005)), and Heidi C. Morris, “Reason and Reality: The Logical Compatibility of Austrian Economics and Objectivism,” Rebirth of Reason (May 10, 2005).)
I do not really trust Rand’s interpretation of Kant; as noted, her critiques of the idealism she is describing are mostly well taken, but it may be aimed at a straw man. As Hoppe wrote:

Among some followers of Austrianism, the Kant interpretation of Ayn Rand (see, for instance, her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology [1979]; or For the New Intellectual [1961]) enjoys great popularity. Her interpretation, replete with sweeping denunciatory pronouncements, however, is characterized by a complete absence of any interpretive documentation whatsoever. On Rand’s arrogant ignorance regarding Kant, see B. Goldberg, “Ayn Rand’s ‘For the New Intellectual,’” New Individualist Rev., vol. 1, no. 3 (1961).

Kinsella, LFFS, ch. 22, text at n.53.

***

My interpretation of Kant came largely from Liquidzulu. I think he is an objektivist. His recent video goes into detail on this topic. You should check out his content sometime. … here are the two sources for my critiques of AE and Kant:https://youtu.be/QoU3KsZaj-M?feature=shared and https://youtu.be/W-NQWJn-AHw?feature=shared

I know of Zulu and like a lot of his stuff. See my post LiquidZulu’s Free Course: “The Fundamentals of Libertarian Ethics”. However I am not sure about all of it and only have limited time at present to look into this.

In any case, this is another reason it’s important not to rely only on secondary (or tertiary) sources, or at least to be wary of it. I think if you are serious about this, about forming views about Kant and how it relates to Hoppe’s work, you need to actually read scholarly works about Kant, at the very least, if not Kant himself, and not just rely on Youtube video especially those by amateur scholars instead of professional philosophers. Unfortunately many younger libertarians seem not to actually read anymore but learn mainly from informal sources like youtube videos. To really understand libertarian theory one must read the world of past thinkers. Like … books.

Ok, I have one question left. Do you consider the Action axiom a law of thought or of reality?

I would not call it an axiom. That is an idiosyncratic usage by Rand to describe truths we know that are self-evident or whose denial leads to contradiction. Instead I would refer to what Mises calls apodictic knowledge or truths–what he would call apriori true knowledge.

Such knowledge includes Descartes’ cogito: I think therefore I am. I.e., I know that I exist, because I (know that) I am thinking. It cannot be denied by any thinking person that he exists. This is apodictic knowledge. Likewise other knowledge like consciousness, the law of non-contradiction, and so on. E.g. see Rand’s comments about consciousness.
To assert that “man acts” reads at first like an assertion fact, like “monkeys eat bananas.” We can imagine a world with no acting men, but to the extent there is anyone wondering about whether man acts, there must be a man in existence to ask the question, and if he exists, he does act: he employs means to achieve ends. This seems apodictic to me, though it is not simple and it is somewhat complicated. For example I accept Mises’s dualist approach where he sees the methods of the natural sciences are appropriate to the study of causal phenomenon and other methods appropriate to the study of teleological phenomenon.
Thus we can view humans in the causal realm as behavers and in the teleological realm as actors, and the latter us usually more useful. Introspectively we are aware that we experience life as a series of actions: choices to pursue a given end in an attempt to overcome felt uneasiness by employing efficacious scarce means to achieve those ends. We reasonably assume that other humans with a similar biological makeup have a similar internal experience and thus we characterize their motions not as mere behavior but as action: we impute meaning to what they do, we impute purposes to their motions. This is neither right or wrong; it is a useful framing. To say that humans act is to say that one way to understand what we observe is to think of it in terms of the means-ends framework.
But it is conceivable to view humans purely causally in which case they do not “act” any more than a lawnmower acts. God could view us this way, for example. Or as Hoppe writes, in Economic Science and the Austrian Method,
“One might hold this conception of freedom to be an illusion. And one might well be correct from the point of view of a scientist with cognitive powers substantially superior to any human intelligence, or from the point of view of God. But we are not God, and even if our freedom is illusory from His standpoint and our actions follow a predictable path, for us this is a necessary and unavoidable illusion”.
But for us, it seems unavoidable to understand what we ourselves do as actions, that is, from the teleological framework, and thus to apply this to understanding what others do as well. It is undeniably useful and probably unavoidable and indispensable. Does this mean humans “really” “act” “instead of” being “caused”? I am not sure. I am not sure it matters to be able to answer this question, and I do not think I am enough of a philosopher to answer this—but I am beginning to suspect no one is. I am a dualist, in the Misesian sense (see Human Action and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science).
Causality is apriori true since it is presupposed in any action and any inquiry into either the causal or teleological realms of phenomena. As Mises explains, “we may speak of causality as a category or an a priori of thinking and acting. … All we can say about causality is that it is a priori not only of human thought but also of human action.” The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, ch.1, §4.
So it is an undeniable “fact” “that” “humans act”? I would say that it is true enough so as to not matter.
It is a truth; I am not sure how to easily answer the question as to whether it is a law of thought or of reality. I am not sure it is a “law” at all. It is an assertion about one aspect of reality, in the end, but it stems from the way we understand reality conceptually and according to various categories and framings. As Mises writes, “Eminent philosophers have tried to elaborate a complete list of the a priori categories, the necessary conditions of experience and thought. One does not belittle these attempts at analysis and systematization if one realizes that any proposed solution leaves a broad margin for the individual thinker’s discretion.” I.e., it is useful to think of humans as acting; within that framework, yes, humans “do” “act.”
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Kinsella profile-head - 1Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His  publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), and International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020).

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