I don't speak for anybody else, but here's my personal take on your question:  Rights don't exist.  The way I see it, a "right" is actually the result of a lack of privilege.  When I say "I have the right to speak freely", what I am actually saying is that nobody else has the right to stop me.  Any natural right is, in my opinion, actually an expression of a negative privilege.  Life, liberty, and property -- nobody has the right to deprive you of those, so therefore you can say you have the right to them.  Same thing applies to other natural rights.  Personally I prefer the negative statement because it's meaning is clearer and it avoids the collectivist confusions about things like health care (if you have the right to life, don't you then have the right to health care?)

At a deeper level, I see this as stemming from the fundamental premise of human equality.  If you believe that no human has the moral right to control another, then all of the natural rights and self-ownership follow as logical consequences.  Societies that violate the natural rights are inconsistent with the concept of human equality, and in order to defend them effectively it is necessary to concede that the fundamental premise of the system is privilege rather than equality.

This is a great question, especially for those who might be new to the site or audios.

Many people think that morality is not subjective. This is false. Morality, like all other things, is subjective in nature because humans are subjective creatures. No matter what 100 people say is moral, there could be 1 or 99 others who disagree. COULD be. What we find, however, is that human beings tend to view pleasure and pain in similar ways -- generally speaking. Thus, what some people might call "natural rights" or "rights" ( ie, those things people are supposed to be able to do free from coercion and arbitrary influence by others -- like live, work, retain property to support one's life and thrive), I would call "organically, societally agreed to modes of behavior." Thus, without any reference to "My Morals" trumping "Your Morals", when human beings come into contact with one another, they tend to produce certain rules for their interaction, rules they don't need government to create or codify. They congregate with people who will leave them and their property alone. They do business with people who won't cheat them. They protect themselves and allow others to reserve the prerogative to protect themselves. Without government or Lockean "rights" theory, people naturally come to these societal constructs, whereby the bad actors are shunned, reputations are built or destroyed based on hw people adhere to the societal modes, and prosperity is fostered.

Once people decide they want those rules of behavior written down by any entity other than a voluntary one; once they say, "We want a body with the monopolistic prerogative to use force and steal from people in order to exist, but this entity will then write the rules that will prevent us from stealing from one another," the natural form of negative reciprocity that had been created societally, without coercion is destroyed. The State exists.

So, like you, Lysander, I don't see how morality is anything other than subjective. And since this is the case, just like markets, the only way one can determine how best to get along with others is through non-governmental interactions. Through trial and error, we determine our mutual rules for interaction. No need for gubment, no need to try to define in some so-called "objective" way what morality is.

Gard,

It sounds as though you support libertarianism because it results in good things like peace, prosperity, and social harmony. Don't get me wrong.  That's a perfectly legitimate reason to support libertarianism.  But what if liberty resulted in more bad than good, would you still support it?  Bad and good being defined on your value scale, not some quantitative measure. 

I wouldn't exactly say that I think morality is subjective.  For me, it is objective.  I just recognize that others may not subscribe to my version of morality.  Murder, in my eyes, is an absolute wrong no matter how manner or few people agree.  I think that if we were honest, we would define libertarianism as just another religion.  I believe it is superior because it is consistent with, and complements, other religions.

I still think that the atheistic libertarian/anarchist is caught in a bit of a problem.  They want morality to be subjective at the same time they want to impose the NAP, which is a moral statement, on all. 

All the evidence is on our side.  Wherever societies have followed libertarianism or something close to it, good things have happened.  The only caveat I want to throw in is that we can't assume that what most regular people think is good is what all people think is good.  I remember Rothbard criticized Mises in one of his books.  He brought up the example where Mises was demonstrating that price controls (ceilings) lead to shortages.  Mises assumed that the people supporting the ceilings wanted the same thing that the free market economists wanted, low prices.  But Rothbard pointed out that maybe the advocates wanted some other outcome, namely more controls due to the shortages.

Gard,

Well said, though I would disagree in a minor way -- I think it is certainly true that morality is subjective in an absolute sense (i.e. there is no set of rules that all people will agree with).  I think any given moral system has at its core some fundamental premise, and that moral rules are absolute with respect to that premise.  While the selection of that premise is arbitrary, once selected it has absolute consequences.  Also, because it is a simple statement I think it is much more likely to be widely accepted than any given codex of specific moral rules.  In a free society, the premise might be something like "All people are equal in rights."  In a statist society, it might be "one person is arbitrarily selected as ruler, and all other people must obey him."  People seem to like being able to justify why they hold some moral beilef or other, and the choice of the premise I think is the key to that justification.  It also provides a nice way for a person to measure a given behavior to determine whether it is moral or not and have confidence in the answer.  It allows people to have meaningful debates about issues of morality when they can trace something back to a foundational belief.  If this approach were applied in the United States (where virtually everyone at least gives lip service to the premise "All men are created Equal"), I think things would be quite different.  Without identifying the premise and using it to expose immoral behavior, we're in a situation where the strongest emotional appeal sets the rules.

Lysander,

It's an interesting point you bring up about imposing the NAP.  In my view, the NAP is more like the opposite of imposition.  Imposing it would be like imposing free will.  What it says to me is that no person can be morally obligated to accept the aggression of another.  When you say I impose the NAP it sounds like you mean that I would enforce it with some form of coercion.  If I were acting in self defense or the defense of another I would, but outside of that I'm not actually a fan of coercive means.  The only thing I would be imposing on anyone is that I will not allow them to aggress against me.  If that philosophy were widespread, it would certainly limit aggression, but I don't think you can say that it is imposed on others.

2,

What if person A doesn't think humans have any rights?  Who is the NAP adhering anarchist to tell him what he may or may not do?  He may stop him with defensive force but he can't claim to be following some higher law because each person is the sole determinant of their own morality. 

That's more or less what I was saying -- if person A thinks humans have no rights, it doesn't matter to me so long as he doesn't try to inflict himself on me.  If that attitude is widespread, then the effect is the same as if there was some kind of prohibition, even though no such prohibition actually exists.  I'm not trying to make a case for higher law, just a case that given a single simple premise such as "people are naturally equal in rights" you can derive absolute answers to moral questions.  Whether you subscribe to the premise is a personal choice, but if you claim to do so it has consequences.   

I would argue that there is no objective definition of good and evil outside of some fundamental premise.  For Christians, the premise would be based on the word of God or the Bible, for me the premise is that no person has more or less privilege than I do myself, and for a statist it is that some people can rightfully control the lives of others.  I would like to find a group of people who agree with my fundamental moral premise and live with them.  It would then be possible to define morality in absolute terms as being logically consistent with our shared premise.  It would not be an enforced thing except insofar as aggression is not tolerated by its victim.  If you disagree that's fine, you can live here too, but I (and everyone else) will defend myself against any aggression you attempt.

For the record, I don't think that religion helps with this problem.  Most religions I'm aware of (I'm no expert) seem to contend that the will of God is not a knowable thing.  For that reason, it is open to interpretation, often by some figure of authority in the religion.  It may be that the Pope, minister, or preacher has some special ability to glean understanding from the materials available, but this is impossible for anybody "outside the club" to verify.  That means that morality based on religion usually springs from a human source outside of the self, which puts a great deal of power into the hands of certain individuals.  The higher power is not directly knowable, and it is therefore up to regular humans to try to guess what its intentions might be.  Not only that, but there is no way to reliably apply logic and reason to the situation because the fundamentals underlying it are unknowable by definition.  There are plenty of historical examples where this has had undesirable consequences.

Hey, Lysander! That's an interesting position, that libertarianism is a religion. I disagree, though mildly. I suppose it depends on terminology, as most things do. I believe that practical libertarianism is actually the default mechanism of society. Without most people adhering to the "negative reciprocity"/"non-agression"/"market interaction" approach, whereby they leave each other alone to pursue their goals and others leave them alone to do the same, society does not grow, doesn't thrive. So no one really has to intellectually label it anything, or adhere to an abstraction the way they do religion, they just have to try to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in association with others who are trying to do the same, and common practice shows that negative reciprocity tends to arise. It's the way most people are hard-wired, in my view.

G-man

G-Man,

I won't beat this topic to death.  I think all of us who have commented on this thread are saying pretty much the same thing.  We're just speaking a different language.  I think man is always looking for meaning to life.  Those who abandon a theistic view will replace it with a secular one.  I use the term "religion" in the same broad way Thomas Szasz does.