different outcomes. But they are not to the point.

In an actual case, you have to use the best judgement you can in the circumstances. You don’t then have to take account of the merely fanciful—that the owner was deliberately in the blizzard and was planning to chop up his own furniture.

You asked why is life more important than property? Which would you rather lose? What would you give to save your life? And do you think that your life is more important than those of others? I took it that the answer is obvious.

Light snowfalls? When I was a child, my parents broke into a relative’s house to give me and my siblings a place out of the cold. There had been unexpectedly heavy rain, and we couldn’t cross the rivers in order to get home. (They knew where out relatives were.) No blizzard, but justified, I think.

Does it negate the right to property? No, it relegates it to its proper place. The trespasser incurs a debt, to be paid once he can. And he should endeavour to earn the money to do so.

Peter, I’ll take these remarks first.

“(a) justification is propositional or argumentative (a priori true is-statement);
(b) argumentation presupposes the recognition of the private property ethic (a priori true is-statement);
(c) no deviation from a private property ethic can be justified argumentatively (a prior is-statement).”

5.
To say that slavery may exist is no refutation. The issue is as to the justification, not the fact of power.”

You miss the point, which is a logical one. The possibility that you are a slave shows that the proposition that you own your body could be false. It is not a priori, but a posteriori.

Why do I think that the assumption that

you are embodied is not a priorI? Because you could be an angel or a god.

You may want to argue that it is not logically possible for either to exist. That would be interesting. (It has been tried, in the distant past. I don’t know about recent work.) But unless that can be done, I am not forced by logic alone to assume that you have, or better, are, a body.

Still, when I assume you are human, I do assume you are a body. But I do not have to assume that you own your body. Because you might not. Slavery is an immoral institution—certainly. But that does not make it an a priori matter that you own your body. I could argue with you quite well if you were in fact owned by someone else.

Do you have the exclusive use of your body? You are not, for instance, employed in manual labour? Okay that is not what you meant. But what did you mean, and what has that to do with property?

I am glad you reject the institution of slavery. In doing so, however, you are denying slave owners’ right to retain their property. That is a deviation from a private property ethic. Once you are into the business of determining which private property institutions are morally acceptable and which are not, then you cannot logically get from the right to own your body to a general right to retain your all property, of all kinds, no matter what.

Different societies have had different property institutions. Australian Aborigines, as you will be aware, held their property in common. New Zealand Maori, I understand, retained an interest in their property when they sold it. (The ensuing disputes were adjudicated by the chiefs. In the mid

twentieth century, Maori who had migrated to the cities having no chiefs to appeal to, took their disputes to the police, who prosecuted them for theft. There were swingeing penalties I read about in the papers (“there is far too much theft amongst these people”) until the confusion was sorted out.) Property is not one institution. Taxation is part of our institution of property.

If you were right, and I have to accept your right to the ownership of your body, it still would not follow that I have to accept the whole of an ethic of property. I could not, without pragmatic self-contradiction, assert that all property is theft. But I could still hold that most property is.

A standard way to show that an argument is fallacious is to take a true premise and use the same argument form to derive a false conclusion. So what do you think of this? In arguing with you I have to assume that you are alive. It should follow, if your argument is valid, that I cannot, without pragmatic self-contradiction, argue with you that you should die. The conclusion however is plainly false. In hospitals, when a dying patient wants to stay alive for an extra few hours in the vain hope of a miracle cure, and that can only be achieved at the expense of someone else’s life (ie they could be cured) or in lifeboat situations (women and children first; old men last), it makes perfect sense to argue that a person should be prepared to die. Just wars may provide other examples. (Jardine, these are real situations.)

So, a true premise, the same argument form, and a false conclusion. So your argument—and that of Mises—is invalid. Happy new year.