Chapter ǴǸ: Ļe Moral Element in Mises’sHuman Action ȃȄȆEmpirical evidence has absolutely no bearing on it.” He explicitly rejects
utilitarianism; his approach is an alternative (“Hoppe’s Rights Ļeory”
ȀȈȇȇ).
Murray Rothbard had been preaching for over thirty years that econ-
omists cannot arrive at any policy conclusion in a strictly value-free way;
they have to come up with some kind of ethical system. Ļen Rothbard
said that Hoppe had proven him wrong. “[H]e has deduced an anarcho-
Lockean rights ethic from self-evident axioms.... Hoppe has managed
to establish the case for anarcho-capitalist-Lockean rights in an unprece-
dentedly hard-core manner, one that makes my own natural law/natural
rights position seem almost wimpy in comparison.... [I]t is impossible
to disagree with the anarcho-Lockean rights ethic without falling imme-
diately into self-contradiction and self-refutation.” Hoppe appeals to the
concept of the “ethics of argumentation.” “[A]nyargument whatsoever ...
must imply self-ownership of the body of both the arguer and the listeners,
as well as a homesteading of property right so that the arguers and listen-
ers will be alive to listen to the argument and carry it on” (contribution to
the symposium on “Hoppe’s Rights Ļeory,”ȀȈȇȇ).
Hoppe seems to say that espousing nonlibertarian policy positions
commits self-refutation in the same sense that I would be refuting myself
if I wrote a letter saying that it is impossible to write a letter or made
an oral statement saying it is impossible for anybody to speak. Ļe self-
contradiction of a nonlibertarian ethic may be more complicated and
require more attention to expose, but it still is a self-contradiction, and
of the same general type. Ļe exposure of self-contradiction is a neat kind
of argument and has great appeal—when it works.
In the present case, it just does not work. Hoppe simply asserts, but
does not demonstrate, a logical contradiction. Being emphatic and repeti-
tious is not enough. A slaveowner and his slave might conceivably engage
in an intellectual discussion, even about the moral status of slavery itself,
without either necessarily falling into self-contradiction.
ŠŔő şŕœŚŕdžŏōŚŏő śŒ ŞŕŢōŘ ŐśŏŠŞŕŚőş
One reason for mentioning Hoppe’s and other alternatives to Mises’s
utilitarianism (and, more broadly, to the indirect utilitarianism of David
Hume, Mises, and Henry Hazlitt) is to show that utilitarianism is not
so plastic and all-encompassing as to be vacuous. Ļe existence of rival
positions defuses that charge. One envisages a just society in the sense of