“From my point of view (somewhat biased by the training in formal logic and natual sciences, I admit) Hoppe is guilty of forgetting the old maxim: Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

There is that maxim, but there is a more complete form of it which people tend to neglect even more: “Keep things as simple as possible; but no simpler.”

However, it is you who violates a different old maxim which is equally important and suggests why your comments are not useful here. The maxim? “Know the question before you criticize the answer.”

“Ethics is an entirely evolutionary phenomenon; and its only raison d’etre is that it helps society of its carriers to survive.
“There is NO NEED to invoke anything supernatural to explain ethics.”

The purpose of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is not to explain the reason for the existence of ethics, or what problem it proposes to solve. He merely points these things out as a starting point from which people can begin to follow his thesis. His purpose is to show how and why only the libertarian ethic is justified.

“In fact, any theory of ethics is total and complete garbage if it fails to explain the existence of various damaged kinds of ethics.”

Hoppe shows that the libertarian ethic allows for peaceful cooperation and conflict avoidance and that all non-libertarian ethics fails because they all necessitate and encourage aggression. He shows that reason and argumentation demand no less of an ethic. What more can you ask for?

In all seriousness though, I found Hoppe’s arguments and logic absolutely impeccable. I consider myself a market-anarchist, so Hoppe’s ideas did not catch me off-guard. Unfortunately, some of my classmates would disagree.

Quantum psychology is at best an implausible speculation, a literalist reading on Copenhagen interpretation of QM. I’m not aware of any neurophysiologist taking it seriously. I guess we should credit Penrose’s Platonism for this hobgoblin.

Ethics is an entirely evolutionary phenomenon; and its only raison d’etre is that it helps society of its carriers to survive.

There is NO NEED to invoke anything supernatural to explain ethics.

In fact, any theory of ethics is total and complete garbage if it fails to explain the existence of various damaged kinds of ethics.

I have not of yet explored that field, and I wouldn’t know if its a crankish psuedoscience, but I would really like to know how it squares with Aristotelian logic, and what a student of that field would make of Hoppean argumentive ethics.

The problem is not that it is nonsense. The problem is that you’re missing the point of the observation and Gordon’s comment. If you had read further you possibly would have seen it.

One outcome of Hoppe’s reasoning is simply this: one cannot put into question the validity or existence of reason. The act of attempting to cast doubt on reason would in fact presuppose the use of reason. It would constitute a dialectical contradiction.

To ask “why should i be reasonable” both presupposes the need for a justification, and the use of reason and so, as Hoppe puts it, it is “impossible to argue against it”. The validity of reason is an aprioristic truth that simply cannot be denied. One cannot defend anything other than the proposition that reason “is”, without demonstrating a knowledge that reason “is”.

When we know that reason is an “is”, rather than an “ought”, we can show that the entire realm of ethics is within the “is” realm as well.

…But the one phrase “If Hoppe is correct…”, compels me to ask for fun: Does David Gordon think Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” is correct?

“Hoppe rejects the view that ethics is goal oriented…sidestep altogether the vexed “is-ought problem.” No factual statement, it is claimed, implies a judgment of value. [What] I [Hoppe] offer is an entirely value-free system of ethics. I remain exclusively in the realm of is-statements and nowhere try to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” (p. 401).

If Hoppe is correct, we know the form of a system of ethics: it will consists of demands of reason, not hypothetical judgment that tell us how to get what we want.”

MY Comment:

As soon as you assume Reason, you assume that it is of value to humans, such an assumption implies a (the) nature of humans (the “is”) and, therefore the need or disrability of Reason based on that nature (the “ought”). Hoppe’s way of stating it is simply a pragmatic, after the fact rationalization of reason while trying, clumsily, to avoid actual morality.