In regards to what Kevin wrote I agree with Mr. Wisniewski. Shortness and conciseness of new groundbreaking arguments are the characteristics of not only breakthroughs in philosophy but also in other fields of thought and research.

“Speaking as a philosophy graduate student at one of the more prominent graduate programs in the world…”
That is simply pulling rank and as such a un-respectful behaviour. Even the hoi polloi (which Hoppe certainly is not, but I probably am might stumble upon a truth or two.

Best wishes,
Jakub

No offense, but that makes me less likely to believe what you say is true.

To Michael: I gave reasons for concern about Hoppe’s argument above. As for the others, I take it that Habermas thinks that the rules of justice are those that citizens would converge on under ideal discourse conditions. You might think (a) that this allows for relativism, (b) that the discourse conditions are rigged to get social democratic outcomes, (c) that some idealization of the citizens are needed beyond the discourse conditions, (d) that the best form of deontological constructivism isn’t completed with a discourse procedure but something like an evolutionary procedure. I’m happy to go into more detail.

The law of contradiction analogy fails. We don’t think the law of contradiction is true because we presuppose it in argument. That’s a fine indicator of its truth, to be sure, but that’s not the truth-maker. The reason we think it is universally true is because it cannot be conceived to be false. But the self-ownership thesis is not like that. Lots of reasonable people deny it and while I affirm a version of it, it is certainly not a truth that cannot be *conceived* to be false. Hoppe must argue that *because* there’s a performative contradiction in denying the thesis of self-ownership that *therefore* it is universally valid. But I don’t see any reason to accept the implication.

Incidentally, about eight years ago I poured over the Hoppe literature in detail. The fact is, there isn’t that much of it, and it’s embarrassingly bad. Hoppe does not address the point I made to any significant degree nor does the literature that follows it. Nor are there good replies to Roderick’s devastating criticisms.

And yes, it really is *that* implausible to think that Hoppe – an economist, not a philosopher – accomplished in five pages what the finest political philosophers in history could not. The self-ownership thesis is notoriously complex and subject to many penetrating criticisms (See G. A. Cohen’s, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality for a lot of them). The criticisms can be defeated. But not with tricks like Hoppe’s.

Let me explain my agitation a bit. I spent quite a few good years hanging around LvMI, ones that were very important to my intellectual formation. Hoppe’s argument is one of the first ethical arguments I ran across. At 18 I accepted it and began mulling it over, trying to see how it could be true. At 19 Roderick convinced me it was false but its falsity was illuminating. The idea that the norms of justice were implicit in the structure of practical reason fascinated me. In 2006, Roderick gave a series of lectures developing a comprehensive conception of practical reason that would generate libertarianism out of its conceptual structure, but many of the key moves were missing – something he acknowledged. Since then I’ve been studying the public reason tradition (from which this view arises in great detail) under one of the world’s great public reason theorists.

So when I run across this issue again, and Stephan, et al. don’t see the complexities that this topic raises – the profound complexities which show why many reasonable people would laugh at Hoppe’s formulation of the argument – it seems to me that it is either the result of an early introduction to the topic (which is cool) or of someone making a culpable error about the ease of moral philosophy (which is not cool). Stephan is not guilty of the first error.

I think a lot of the economists at the Mises Institute think that economics is complex even if the basics can be grasped by anyone. But when it comes to the principles of justice, they often follow Rothbard in thinking that the theory of justice is pretty easy vis-a-vis the truths of economics. Rothbard gave us 1000+ pages of writings on economics. When it comes to the foundations of ethics, we are cheated by The Ethics of Liberty. And you know what? It makes the Mises Institute’s ethical theorists look really shallow. It looks like a lot of folks there just think that the theory of justice is easy and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is just a jerk statist.

I wish for these Hoppe-esque Mises Institute scholars (by no means all or even a majority), that they would follow Roderick’s lead and think that the theory of justice and economic theory contained equal levels of complexity and were worth equal levels of detailed argumentation.

While it was plain to see that you were trying to make a point, you did not substantiate it with any meaningful argument I could discern. Instead, it seems to me you sought to discredit Hoppe on the peculiar grounds that some people who think that his argument is essentially correct might not pay enough attention to the thoughts of other political philosophers. Well, so? Hoppe might still be right.

Your follow-up responses based on agitated nerves (you obviously have a case of Hoppephobia) is a little better. You might be too excited though because I’m not sure you are thinking clearly.

There is nothing in your post that Hoppe does not explain in his writings. I suggest you reexamine the primary sources where Hoppe tells you what those X, Y, and Z are all about. Then you can address those specific arguments.

The nature of the so-called performative contradiction establishes that the ethic applies beyond whether or not someone is actually arguing. Hoppe likens his argument to the law of contradiction. I’m sure you are familiar with that law. You cannot justify that it is false, as Bradley said, because “either in endeavoring to deny it or even attempting to doubt it, we tacitly assume its validity.” You cannot argue that the law of contradiction is false without contradiction. This does not imply that the law of contradiction is only true when someone is arguing.

Some aspects of moral philosophy might be easier than you think. Is it really THAT implausible that an argument that justifies propositions like “stealing is wrong” or “murder is wrong” might be pretty simple? And I say this as someone who deeply appreciates the writings of the folks you mentioned in your first post (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Rawls, Habermas).