Why the term “Natural Law” in the first place?
Murray Rothbard claims that “Natural Law theory rests on the insight. . . that each entity has distinct and specific properties, a distinct ‘nature,’ which can be investigated by man’s reason” [For a New Liberty, p. 25] and that “man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man.” [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 155] To put it bluntly, this form of “analysis” was originated by Aristotle and has not been used by science for centuries. Science investigates by proposing theories and hypotheses to explain empirical observations, testing and refining them by experiment. In stark contrast, Rothbard invents definitions (“distinct” “natures”) and then draws conclusions from them. Such a method was last used by the medieval Church and is devoid of any scientific method. It is, of course, a fiction. It attempts to deduce the nature of a “natural” society from a priori considerations of the “innate” nature of human beings, which just means that the assumptions nece
