Dear Mr. Kinsella,
I wrote the same to prof. Hoppe and I hope to hear your opinion as well.
My name is Augustin. In my research and pondering, I got stuck with a limit in the libertarian ethics that left the question of whether it truly permits the survival of mankind (as any ethic should be able to do in all conceivable scenarios) unsolved.
I observed the following dilemmas:
- If everyone suddenly decides to commit suicide, the non-aggression principle has nothing to oppose it.
- If everyone peacefully stops having children and goes on living for themselves — humanity goes extinct.
The problem is rooted in the fact that Rothbardian ethics (especially) implies no positive obligation whatsoever, but that would also imply no positive obligations to live or to reproduce as well.
We may assume another scenario: a cataclysm killed almost all mankind except 10 individuals. 9 of them fell asleep in a house where gas started to leak; the tenth person is awake and discovers it. He will remain free to choose not to save them and go on living the rest of his solitary life — thus mankind will end with him. He violated nobody’s property rights, committed no aggression, and yet his conduct failed to preserve the species.
I thought of a solution that is compatible with argumentation ethics — since one’s self-preservation and previous birth thanks to their parents’ engagement are the preconditions of the very possibility to argue and act, one cannot meaningfully deny a kind of “soft” imperative to preserve the life of others and the reproductive capacity of a group as much as one could (that would eventually be in their best interest) — to deny a positive obligation to reproduce is a contradiction to self, since if that norm was indeed invalid, the very birth of the denier would not have occurred; therefore, its necessity is already implied in the very act of living, arguing, etc.
Please let me know if this problem, in your view, has other solutions.
Thank you for all your contributions!
A quick answer as I am too busy to look into this closely. My initial take:
The purpose of libertarian ethics is pragmatic: in a world where we need to possess and use resources, because of the fundamental fact of scarcity, we need to identify ways we can live together and enjoy society and reduce conflict so that we can use resources but still benefit from intercourse with others. So emerge laws and norms that provide normative support for the fact of and need for possession. On Property Rights in Superabundant Bananas and Property Rights as Normative Support for Possession
It must be kept in mind that all such norms and rights are not causal laws and can be violated; they are prescriptive only. Their very purpose is to permit normal human life in a social context: to permit use of one’s body and other resources that were originally unused and unowned, but in a world where there are other actors with free will who might interfere with this. The normative rules as supports and extensions for the natural actions of possession and use of resources must of course permit original appropriation and if they are to be normative just protect ownership from this point on — the prior-later distinction must be a normative aspect of any property rights system.
Obviously these prescriptive norms can serve their purpose only if widely respected, and this can only be the case when they are fair (justifiable as being compatible with the necessity of original appropriation) and justified, and also where peace is possible. Peace is not possible when someone does not value peace or respect rights, and for them they can only be responded to with force. Hoppe on Treating Aggressors as Mere “Technical Problems”. It is also not possible in some cases like some lifeboat scenarios. It is futile to criticize libertarian ethics for not guaranteeing a just solution when survival or co-survival is not possible. No ethic can erase the problem of scarcity or the inevitable conflict that results when peace is impossible because mutual survival is not possible.
The purpose, then, of libertarian norms is not to guarantee that others will respect rights, since rights are normative and prescriptive; not causal laws. It is to guide us in determining which laws are justified. It is not to come up with positive obligations to ensure that any of this is the case.
Now it is true that we cannot favor an ethic that would mean the extermination of human life since the purpose of norms is normative support for successful human action in a world of scarcity and in a world of other actors with sometimes incompatible ends. As Rothbard and Hoppe both have written:
From Stephan Kinsella, “How We Come To Own Ourselves”, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) [LFFS]:
In the text above, I noted that “first use” is not the ultimate test for the “objective link” in the case of body ownership, but that rather it is a person’s direct and immediate control over his body. See also, on this, Rothbard, who argues in favor of self-ownership because the only logical alternatives are “(1) the ‘communist’ one of Universal and Equal Other-ownership, or (2) Partial Ownership of One Group by Another—a system of rule by one class over another.” However, Alternative (2) cannot be universal, as it is partial and arbitrary; and Alternative (1) either breaks down in practice and reduces to Alternative (2), or, if actually implemented, would result in the death of the human race. As Rothbard writes:
Can we picture a world in which no man is free to take any action whatsoever without prior approval by everyone else in society? Clearly no man would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly perish. But if a world of zero or near-zero self-ownership spells death for the human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the law of what is best for man and his life on earth.
Hoppe also writes on this:
If a person A were not the owner of his own body and the places and goods originally appropriated and/or produced with this body as well as of the goods voluntarily (contractually) acquired from another previous owner, then only two alternatives exist. Either another person B must be recognized as the owner of A’s body as well as the places and goods appropriated, produced or acquired by A, or else all persons, A and B, must be considered equal co-owners of all bodies, places and goods.
In the first case, A would be reduced to the rank of B’s slave and object of exploitation.… such a ruling must be discarded as a human ethic equally applicable to everyone qua human being (rational animal). From the very outset, any such ruling can be recognized as not universally acceptable and thus cannot claim to represent law. For a rule to aspire to the rank of a law—a just rule—it is necessary that such a rule apply equally and universally to everyone.
Alternatively, in the second case of universal and equal co-ownership, the requirement of equal law for everyone is fulfilled. However, this alternative suffers from another even more severe deficiency, for if it were applied, all of mankind would instantly perish. (And since every human ethic must permit the survival of mankind, this alternative must be rejected.)
But imagine a small society of 100 people with more or less similar values, who recognize the need for possession and also prefer to find a way to cooperate in the face of possible incompatible interests and ends, but for some reason this group chooses to commit suicide for some valid reason — say, they are the last people on earth and know some calamity is approaching and bringing more children into the world is not in their interest — maybe you are all in a concentration camp, or you know that everyone alive has an incurable terminal disease and having children will doom them to die as infants whose parents have all died from some disease. Perhaps it is moral or rational to choose to die instead of live or go on. And any number of variants can be imagined. I cannot think of any way that a pragmatic norm arrived at as a way to simply allow us to live together better in a world of scarcity, where peace is possible, and where most people value peace over conflict, can give rise to an obligation to procreate just to keep people being generated so that they can face anew this dire situation where peace is not really possible anyway and the norms that we might normally adopt as adjuncts to the daily societal conflicts of interest are totally futile. To use a system meant to help us live a better life in the face of scarcity and of possible interpersonal conflict to generate a bunch of positive obligations to do things not really in our interest seems to me to be bizarre and excessive rationalism and to lose the focus of the very endeavor and purpose of rights. We have to remember that there is a reason libertarianism does not have positive obligations: it is because ownership does not give rise to obligations; only actions do.
