This blog post explains and defends an Aristotelian-Thomistic, Austro-libertarian ethics, grounded on the metaethics from the previous blog post.
The core argument is that if we are ethically bound to preserve the social conditions for truth-seeking (SPT), we must also preserve the objects of that search (the Intelligibility Principle, IP). By combining this with a specific “modern-scientific” Aristotelian hierarchy of being (HMSAT), I defend human rights and reject animal rights. Then, by combining that with a theory of agency, I argue that respecting private property preserves the intelligibility of the world, while aggression causes an “ontological crash,” degrading complex human plans into mere physical collisions; under the adopted metaethics, this amounts to defending a specific, limited form of the libertarian nonaggression principle (NAP). Although this ethic basically vindicates the laissez-faire result of Murray Rothbard’s demonstrated-preference theory of welfare, it does not vindicate all of his Ethics of Liberty, since we lack a suitable theory of punishment and damages, as I explain in the third part of the post, where some limitations of the theory are highlighted.
