One thing I've never understood about argumentation ethics and one thing that many anti-Hoppeans bring up against Hoppe is what would happen if one human being would forgo arguing/discourse to simply violate the self-ownership of the other.
So while it seems that argumentation ethics is the ethical system that all civilized humans must accept, it would not be a truly universal system of ethics.
How do Hoppeans respond to this?
Political Atheists Blog
I'm not too keen on AE anymore, but I suppose it could be said that Hoppe states that discourse is the only way to reach truth, and as such any individual who refused to engage in this in order to violate the rights of another would be implicit accepting that any ethical theory that involves violence cannot be logically proven.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Bob Dylan
i suppose by failing to enter into discourse with any party including himself about the rights and wrongs of his actions he is a abandoning recourse to moral language in his own defence, as such to others he is nothing but an ammoral object in the world, not to be regarded as a self owner. he is like a rabid dog.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
These are the standard answers, they look plausible. The main problem with AE is something else.
nirgrahamUK: i suppose by failing to enter into discourse with any party including himself about the rights and wrongs of his actions he is a abandoning recourse to moral language in his own defence, as such to others he is nothing but an ammoral object in the world, not to be regarded as a self owner. he is like a rabid dog.
That seems like a good answer. This problem has always been my biggest issue with AE and why I never fully accepted it.
AE does not state that it is impossible for humans to act unethically, it states that it is impossible to argue for anything other than unlimited private property rights as doing so would be a logical contradiction of argumentation. This means that any argument in favor of socialism or communism is wrong.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power