Argumentation Ethics

Argumentation ethics is Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s attempt to justify libertarian rights a priori — not merely as useful, and not as a deduction from human nature, but as a presupposition of argument itself. The claim: anyone who argues for any norm has already, by the act of arguing, conceded self-ownership and the non-aggression principle, so that denying them is to refute oneself in the very act of speaking. It is a major and much-debated contribution to libertarian theory.

The aim: an ultimate justification

The defenses Hoppe sets his argument against bottom out somewhere the skeptic can decline — in a list of goods to maximize (utilitarianism), in human nature (classical natural law), or in a premise one is simply asked to share. Hoppe, in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, wants an ultimate justification: a norm whose denial is self-defeating. He finds it not in nature but in the act of argument.

The argument

The starting point is what Hoppe calls the a priori of argumentation: that we can argue, and know what truth and validity mean, cannot itself be argued away. “It is impossible to deny that one can argue, as the very denial would itself be an argument.” Argument is therefore presuppositionally secure.

The decisive step is that argument is not just free-floating propositions; it is also a form of action. To argue at all, a person must exercise exclusive control of his own body — and an exchange of reasons rather than blows presupposes that each party recognizes the other’s like control. So the norm of self-ownership is built into the practice: “the norm implied in argumentation is that everybody has the right to exclusively control his own body as his instrument of action and cognition.” Anyone disputing self-ownership must use his own body to do so, performing exactly the right he denies — and “any person who would try to dispute the property right in one’s own body would become caught up in a contradiction.”

From self-ownership Hoppe derives the non-aggression principle: justification proceeds by reasons, not force, so “justifying means justifying without having to rely on coercion.” A norm licensing uninvited aggression could never be defended in argument, because arguing for it already presupposes the peaceful, non-aggressive recognition it would abolish. And because human beings need scarce external goods merely to survive and to keep arguing, the same logic extends from the body to property in scarce resources — acquired by original appropriation (mixing one’s labor with unowned things) and transferred only by consent.

Relation to Mises, Rothbard, and praxeology

Argumentation ethics is built on two foundations the wiki already documents. Its method is praxeological: Hoppe reads Mises as having grounded economics in the a priori axiom of action while holding that ethics could not be given the same ultimate foundation — and his wager is that it can, by turning the same method from action in general to argumentation in particular. On his telling this answers Hume’s is/ought gap not by deriving an ought from an is, but by identifying which norms cannot be argued against without contradiction. Its conclusion is Rothbard’s (Murray N. Rothbard): Hoppe presents the proof as essentially Rothbard’s defense of self-ownership and property, recast so that the foundation is not “human nature” but the narrower, harder-to-deny fact of argumentation. Where the natural-law tradition reasons from what man is, Hoppe reasons from what the act of justification requires.

Where it is contested

Argumentation ethics is disputed even among libertarians — Hoppe took the objections seriously enough to devote an appendix of replies to his critics — and the wiki documents the argument rather than endorsing it. The central objection is one of scope: granting that I must presuppose control of my body while arguing does not obviously establish that I own it at all times, in all places, against all comers; the performative presupposition may be local to the discourse, not a standing property right over the whole of life. Critics also charge that the move from factual control to a right of self-ownership, and from self-ownership to full Lockean property in external goods, does more work than the argument licenses. Defenders reply that a norm one must violate in order to contest is thereby vindicated; skeptics answer that this establishes a rule of argument, not a rule of life.

Place in this wiki

Argumentation ethics is one of the most ambitious justificatory arguments in the propertarian tradition: an attempt to put self-ownership and the non-aggression principle beyond the reach of the skeptic by making them the price of admission to debate. It sits alongside the natural-law lineage as the other main road by which libertarians have tried to ground rights — reason-from-argument rather than reason-from-nature.

See Also

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe - originator of the argument
• The Economics and Ethics of Private Property - the source text
• Nonaggression and Property Rights - the norms the argument claims to ground
• Praxeology - the a priori, action-based method it extends to ethics
• Ludwig von Mises - whose action-axiom method Hoppe carries into ethics
• Murray N. Rothbard - whose property ethic Hoppe recasts
• Natural Law and Natural Order - the rival route to grounding libertarian rights
• Homesteading - The libertarian theory of how unowned things first become property: by being put to use — Locke’s labor-mixing, Rothbard’s first-use-first-own.
• Self-Ownership - The libertarian first principle: each person is the full owner of his own body and, therefore, of his labor and its products — the axiom from which the whole structure of property rights is derived.

Sources

• The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (Full Text Aggregate) - Hoppe’s “On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property,” the a priori of argumentation, the derivation of self-ownership/nonaggression/property, and the appendix of replies to critics