VoxVocisCausa

VoxVocisCausa t1_j76vkov wrote

Reply to comment by Smallpaul in There Are No Natural Rights (without Natural Law): Addressing what rights are, how we create rights, and where rights come from by contractualist

It's important to examine ideas on their own merit and within a vacuum. But it's also important to acknowledge that we carry our own biases and perspectives into our examination of these ideas and to consider why these ideas and thinkers are popular enough that we're talking about them now. Also if we're going to use these ideas as a basis to comment on public policy we need to examine them within the context under which they're being applied. If we want to place Rothbard's ideas within the context they were written we need to consider that on this topic he's writing against a backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and that while his ideas are often used by Libertarians as a defense of individual rights Rothbard's conception of individual rights was influenced by who he considered worthy. I am not necessarily criticizing OP for referencing Rothbard, who was a prolific and influential writer, but at the same time in the context of amateur discussions of philosophy on this subreddit I don't think it's necessarily out of line to point out the nature of the non-academic organizations who have made his papers available online.

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VoxVocisCausa t1_j76prbd wrote

Reply to There Are No Natural Rights (without Natural Law): Addressing what rights are, how we create rights, and where rights come from by contractualist

NAP is a philosophical trap. In its very conception it's just a simplistic defense of systemic power structures. Also I think it's pretty obvious that Rothbard's rejection of defamation laws was based in his (often vocal) animosity towards black people and I don't think you can discuss his contributions to philosophy without an in depth discussion on white supremacy.

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