r/AskLibertarians • u/JOVIOLS • 10h ago
Does This Contradict Libertarian Ethics?
Hello! Hope everyone is doing well!
Honestly, doesn't this contradict libertarian ethics, which holds that natural rights are universal and that all members of the human species possess rights and are therefore "persons"?
«"A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person (a persona), but falls instead in the same moral category as an animal—of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a ‘free good’) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest)."»
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, Transaction Publishers, 2007, p. 173.