By Dr. Wanjiru Njoya
Key Takeaways:
- Debates over “property rights” often stall on definitions instead of the thing people want protected. The author, citing Krabbe and van Laar, calls that a “quagmire of quibbles”—like asking “what is a woman?” to dodge women’s sports. Definitions matter; making them the whole fight does not.
- Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty, does not restart Locke from scratch. He takes self-ownership and private property from the natural-law line (Thomas, Aristotle; Elisha Williams 1744) and treats all human rights as property rights. Hoppe’s point: Rawls’s Justice indexes “equality” heavily and barely mentions scarcity or property.
- You can spend a career on what “property in one’s person” means, or whether Rothbard read Locke right. That is not answering Rothbard; it is changing the subject—sometimes on purpose. Rawls skipped a dictionary definition of justice too. Context, not gotcha, is how the terms do work.
Property rights are defined in many ways. It often happens that academics who are interested in the scope, regulation, or protection of private property rights debate endlessly at cross purposes because they do not share the same definition of property rights in the first place.
Some debaters attempt to beat their opponents by initiating a definitional game of “gotcha.” So, you agree—or do not agree—with copyrights. But what is your definition of property rights? Gotcha!
It is not a case where they agree on the definition of property rights but one has simply fallen into a taxonomical error which the other wishes to correct. Rather, they do not agree on what we are (or should be) trying to protect when we insist that the law must protect “property rights.” The definitional debate then becomes circular—we use the term “property rights” to describe what we want to protect, and the definition we adopt is designed to serve the substantive goal we have in mind.
Substantive disagreement over the meaning and importance of property rights cannot be resolved by logomachy. Erik Krabbe and Jan Albert van Laar describe such superficial definitional games as “cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue.” They call it “the quagmire of quibbles.” In this quagmire, “none of the points raised by your opponent may be fallacious in itself; yet, one has the impression that some kind of fallaciousness inheres in this quibbling behavior as a whole.”
An example of definitional quibbling is the debate over including men in women’s sports. When people defend the integrity of women’s sports, it is contextually clear what they mean by “women.” Launching into definitional trench warfare is a common diversionary tactic of their opponents who ask, “What is a woman?” As Bentham’s Bulldog puts it, this is “almost always a cheap gotcha.”
The requirement that the other side defines their term is the ultimate gotcha. It seems like such a simple request: just tell me what you mean by your terms. But it often turns out to be rather difficult, and for this reason, the questioner can look victorious, like they’ve stumped the other person.
It is difficult to avoid the quagmire of definitional quibbles, because defining terms undoubtedly plays an important role in debate. As Krabbe and van Laar argue, “simply outlawing all quibbling behavior in a normative protocol for reasonable argumentation would be disastrous.” We do not want to debate the definition of “property rights” all day, but it is, of course, important to understand what we are talking about when we use the term “property rights.”
In the Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard shows no interest in resetting the classical debate on human liberty to square one. He does not launch into debate on the many triumphs and failings of Lockean theory. Instead, he sets out forthrightly his goal of treating self-ownership and private property as the foundation of human liberty. For this purpose, he relies on Thomistic and Aristotelian theories of natural rights.
The classical natural law tradition establishes the philosophical and theoretical framework for Rothbard’s ethics of liberty. That context defines his terms—the classical theory of natural rights serves to clarify what is meant by “property rights” in his philosophy. The meaning of “property rights” in this context is not obscure, as implied by those who demand definitions. The meaning is contextually clear to anyone who studies the substantive principles in which these words are invoked.
Political philosophy cannot be understood simply by looking up words in a dictionary. Rothbard’s aim was not to address abstract definitional questions of basic terminology. His aim was to restore the concept of private property, which had been almost completely displaced by egalitarian doctrines, to a scientific political philosophy of liberty. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his “Introduction” to the Ethics of Liberty,
. . .when political philosophy finally made a comeback in the early 1970s, in the wake of John Rawls and his Theory of Justice, the recognition of scarcity as a fundamental human condition and of private property and private property rights as a device for coordinating the actions of individuals constrained by scarcity was conspicuously absent. Neither “property” nor “scarcity” appeared in Rawls’s elaborate index, for instance, while “equality” had several dozen entries.
Rothbard argued that liberty must be founded on property rights. He argued, further, that all human rights are property rights: “not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.”
To the quibbler who asks, “But what do we mean by property rights?” his book gives an answer rooted in the natural law tradition. A quotation from Rev. Elisha Williams (1744) establishes the context:
Thus every man having a natural right to (or being proprietor of) his own person and his own actions and labour, which we call property, it certainly follows, that no man can have a right to the person or property of another: And if every man has a right to his person and property; he has also a right to defend them. . .and so has a right of punishing all insults upon his person and property.
One could respond by quibbling even harder. What does “property in his own person” mean, anyway? Many scholars have devoted their careers to debating precisely that. The scope for semantic inquiry is endless. What is “right,” and what is “person”? If we set context aside, all words used by any philosopher are inherently ambiguous.
But digressing to a general definitional debate whenever anyone advances a philosophical argument would be a form of definitional stalling and theoretical quibbling. As Krabbe and Jan Albert van Laar put it, “quibbles are prone to lead the discussion away from what really is at issue, and they may do so by a seemingly unproblematic appearance of problematically ambiguous expressions but also by a seemingly serious appearance of insignificant objections.”
Any philosophical argument could be derailed by such attempts to “problematize” the basic lexicon. The argument would never get off the ground. Perhaps that is what the quibblers hope. It is no wonder that even the influential progressive philosopher, John Rawls, did not trouble himself with formulating a dictionary-style definition of “justice” in his Theory of Justice. Instead, he explained how he thought the demands of justice should be met by those whose goal is to advance what he called “social justice.”
This does not mean that influential philosophers cannot be criticized for imprecise or obscure use of language. Antony Flew rightly criticized Rawls for lacking any clear understanding of justice and being far more interested in justifying socialist interventions.
One could, by the same token, attempt to overturn the very foundations of Rothbard’s ethics by criticizing the classical natural law or debating whether he correctly understood John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, or Aristotle. Many scholars have devoted their entire careers to discrediting great philosophers by doing just that. Ayn Rand, for example, argued that Immanuel Kant had no idea what he was talking about. She called his philosophy “intellectual poison” and accused him of having “closed the door of philosophy to reason.”
Debating the philosophy of the great classical thinkers is interesting and valuable in itself—no one would call that mere quibbling. But debating Lockean theory is a very different discussion than debating Rothbard’s ethics of liberty. To give Locke fair criticism would require devotion to studying his work—a task that has engaged the entire careers of Lockean philosophers.
Far from being a way of addressing Rothbard’s arguments on their merits, this would be a digression—a way of saying we should put aside Rothbard and debate Locke. It would distract us from substantive engagement with Rothbard’s political philosophy, which may be precisely what the quibblers intend.
- About the author: Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow for the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with David Gordon), “You Stole Our Land: Common Law, Private Property, and Rothbardian Principles of Justice” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 28 (1): 91–119 (2024) and “Individual Liberty, Formal Equality, and the Rule of Law” (Palgrave Handbook of Classical Liberalism, forthcoming, 2026).
- Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute
