Moral Libertarians
I'm fascinated by the thought of Murray Rothbard, though I haven't read much by him. He seems to be a libertarian with a moral streak, which is rare. Not illogical, mind you, but rare. I just ran across this lengthy essay (book excerpt) from the Lew Rockwell site. It's by Rothbard, and it's about the Greeks. I haven't read it all yet, but from what I've seen, Rothbard agrees with the Natural Law--at least with the idea that there is one, which is a big deal for a modern thinker. I'm going to keep plowing through it, though I hate lengthy screen reads (I might have to go to the drastic step of printing it out). In the meantime, here are two excerpts that may help others understand what appears to be Rothbard's ideas of Natural Law:Â
Natural law rests on the crucial insight that to be necessarily means to be something, that is, some particular thing or entity. There is no Being in the abstract. Everything that is, is some particular thing, whether it be a stone, a cat, or a tree. By empirical fact there is more than one kind of thing in the universe; in fact there are thousands, if not millions of kinds of things. Each thing has its own particular set of properties or attributes, its own nature, which distinguishes it from other kinds of things. A stone, a cat, an elm tree; each has its own particular nature, which man can discover, study and identify. . . .
The consciousness of animals is narrowly perceptual and lacks the conceptual: the ability to frame concepts and to act upon them. Man, in the famous Aristotelian phrase, is uniquely the rational animal – the species that uses reason to adopt values and ethical principles, and that acts to attain these ends. Man acts; that is, he adopts values and purposes, and chooses the ways to achieve them.
Man, therefore, in seeking goals and ways to attain them, must discover and work within the framework of the natural law: the properties of himself and of other entities and the ways in which they may interact.
It's a Rothbardian set-up. Consistent with his major work, Man, Economy, and State, he is establishing the principle that we must treat man as he is, not as he ought to be or how we want him to be--hence, economic models must rest on an element of self-interest, even though that may not be the Christian or Socialist ideal. The approach of MES is a Natural Law approach, so I'm not surprised by a Rothbard essay that deals with Natural Law, but I am a little surprised to see it so explicit.
