(The following is a bit messy–it’s extracted from comments I gave at a colloquium a year ago. But I’d like to share anyways.) I never make self-ownership-type arguments. Yet, if…
In my last post, I argued that Rothbard’s discussion of self-ownership in chapter six of The Ethics of Liberty rests on a fundamental confusion between descriptive and normative claims. Individuals in the…
In the previous post in this series, I discussed the natural law foundation of Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty, and suggested that it runs into difficulties with David Hume’s famous “is-ought” problem. In…
First, I would like to thank all those commentators who responded to what I wrote in “Natural Rights and Natural Stuff.” Second, I would like to clarify or restate a…
What kind of external property rights are consistent with self-ownership? It seems to me that once one acknowledges self-ownership, one cannot acknowledge any other rights unless those rights are themselves…
I thought BHL readers might be interested to learn about two cool new companion papers arguing against the Self-Ownership Thesis (SO) written by philosopher David Sobel. Sobel argues that SO…