Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty is a sweeping treatise which creates nothing short of a normative political philosophy of liberty. Contra Hume, Rothbard attempts to derive an “ought” from an “is,” using natural law precepts and rigorous logic. Professor Walter Block joins the show to discuss the first section of the book, and gives us his unstinting (and always deontological!) take on Rothbard’s vitally important treatment of natural law philosophy as the foundation for a free society. There are also lots of great Blockean anecdotes you’ll want to hear!
The Audiobook version of The Ethics of Liberty is available at Mises.org/EthicsAudio
Read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s introduction to the 1998 edition work at Mises.org/EthicsHoppe
Find David Hume’s A Treatise on Nature at Mises.org/Hume
The Mises Institute exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. These great thinkers developed praxeology, a deductive science of human action based on premises known with certainty to be true, and this is what we teach and advocate. Our scholarly work is founded in Misesian praxeology, and in self-conscious opposition to the mathematical modeling and hypothesis-testing that has created so much confusion in neoclassical economics. Visit https://mises.org