Locke’s
approach, rejecting as it does the traditional Scholastic grounding of
natural law in natural ends and functions, is notoriously problematic. Without any appeal to such natural ends or purposes, it is hard to see how to give natural law any detailed content. Merely
referring to God’s ownership of us may suffice to show that we cannot
do just anything we want to each other, but deriving specific moral
principles is much harder. Yet Rothbard’s position seems if anything in worse shape. For
if Lockean natural law is a watering down of the traditional Scholastic
conception of natural law, Rothbardian natural law theory seems itself
little more than a watering down of Locke.
To
be sure, Rothbard does pay lip service to the Scholastic tradition, and
even endorses the general idea that human beings have natural purposes. But
there the similarity to the Scholastic tradition ends, for Rothbard
appears to accept none of the distinctive ends or purposes that that
particular tradition would attribute to us. Instead, he formulates the content of the natural law in terms of the thesis of self-ownership, which he borrows from Locke. Now
for Locke, talk of self-ownership is really just a shorthand way of
talking about the lease God has given each of us on our own lives. Locke’s view is that it is, strictly speaking, really God who owns us and that we are merely stewards of His property. If we “own” ourselves at all, it is only in a loose sense and only relative to other human beings. But Rothbard rejects any such theological foundation for self-ownership. His aim is to give it a purely secular basis.
That basis seems to me to be severely inadequate, however. Rothbard’s
defense of self-ownership is stated in the form of a dilemma: if a
person A does not own himself, then either some other person B owns him
or A and B have joint ownership of A; and either alternative to
self-ownership, Rothbard goes on to argue, will have absurd
consequences. I will not bother
discussing those consequences here, though, because I think Rothbard’s
argument has gone wrong already insofar as the dichotomy he describes is
a false one. There is a third alternative he fails to consider, namely that no one at all owns either himself or anyone else. To
own oneself, after all, is just to have certain rights over oneself,
and there are certainly philosophers who would deny that we have any
rights, or at least any natural rights, at all. So
before Rothbard can establish that a person A owns himself rather than
being owned by B or sharing ownership of himself with B, he first has to
establish that anyone owns anything at all, and thus that anyone has
any rights at all.
The
only hint Rothbard gives of how this might be done is to suggest that a
person has by nature and in general a need to use his body and its
parts in order to interact with the world in a way that will allow him
to survive, and in particular a need to use his cognitive faculties,
vocal chords, and the like in order even to argue about whether or not
there are any natural rights. He
seems to think that this shows that a person does in fact have rights
over his body, cognitive faculties, vocal chords, etc., otherwise he
wouldn’t be able to survive or do so much as consider the question of
whether he has rights. But in fact it shows no such thing. To
have a mere need is not to have a right: a maggot might need rotting
tissue to consume if it is to survive, but it does not follow that
maggots are self-owners or have rights. Nor
does the pragmatic self-contradiction Rothbard seems to think is
entailed by using your vocal chords, etc. to deny the existence of
rights establish what he seems to think it does. The
most this argument would prove, if it really proves anything, is that
we have to act as if we have rights over our body parts; it does not
show that we really do have them. Moreover,
even if Rothbard’s argument succeeded in proving that we have any
rights at all, it would at most show that we have rights to the use of
our body parts to the extent required to stay alive. It would not establish that we have full ownership of ourselves in the sense Rothbard thinks we do. After
all, a person might have a right to use something for certain purposes
without having full ownership of that thing, or any ownership at all for
that matter.
Now the Catholic natural law tradition would argue that the fountainhead of all rights is the natural end human beings have. And by “end” it means purpose or aim, not mere need. The
Catholic natural law tradition, that is to say, is teleological through
and through, committed to the objective existence of final causes or
purposes in nature. This is one
reason why even though Catholic natural law thinking, unlike Locke’s
natural law theory, does not appeal directly to God’s will in order to
determine the content of natural law, it nevertheless does insist on the
existence of God as a precondition of the intelligibility of natural
law, because without God there can be no objective ends or purposes in
nature. There can at most be,
perhaps, certain naturalistic/evolutionary analogues to ends or
purposes, but without God these can only be ersatz, “as if” purposes,
not real ones, and thus they cannot be the source of genuine moral
obligation.
Given
that we do have an objective end or purpose, however, and that we have
moral obligations that follow from this end or purpose, it follows
according to the Catholic natural law tradition that we have certain
natural rights. But the ground
of these natural rights is nothing other than the fact that the
recognition of certain rights is necessary if we are to be able to
follow our moral obligations and fulfill our natural end. The
natural rights we have just are, and can only be, the rights that we
require in order to fulfill those obligations and realize that end.
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