I can see your frustration with their point of view, RJ, but I think mostly it boils down to a pretty straightforward difference of perspective. Those folks (I think, anyway) don't actually believe that there are literal rights which exists, nor does it seem that they believe there is some sort of empirical attribute which is self-ownership. Consider the following quote from Knight of Bawaa:

Knight of Bawaa wrote:

No one is claiming that the VALUE OUGHT to be different. Rather they are claiming that THEIR VALUES are such that if you do something to violate their self-ownership and corallary rights, there will be certain consequences.

He (or she, I suppose) is being very clear that he's speaking about a subjective valuation, combined with related consequences. There's nothing funny or supernatural about this sort of statement. Your objection to it stemmed from his use of the phrases "self-ownership and corollary rights", but I think you interpreted the meaning wrong.

In your own posts you occasionally make subjective statements in ways that suggests objectivity. e.g. "Libertarianism in practice has many merits." Now, should I assume that you believe libertarianism literally has merits, in some kind of supernatural way? No, because I can tell that you presumably mean that libertarianism holds merit to you. Nonetheless, such a statement is literally incoherent by your own arguments.

If you give them the benefit of the doubt, I think you'll see that you misunderstand their beliefs about natural rights. I can't say that for certain, because I don't know precisely what they mean in all cases. Still, I suspect, based on some of their comments, that they don't actually disagree with you on the bulk of the issue; they simply talk about natural rights and self-ownership in a way which, I admit, is confusing, but which might not seem so illogical if you better-understood their actual meaning.

If I misunderstand their belief about natural rights, it's because they haven't explained what their beliefs are. Every book by Rothbard et al. on this I have read involves arbitrarily shifting focus and defintions, with no actual argument as to the relevance of an acting individual's satisfaction. They also make logically impossible assertions about the 'definiteness' of satisfaction despite the fact that satisfaction only exists in relation to some specific person's makeup and the specific makeup of the situation he is in. One can not make a priori judgements about this, as Mises has argued extensively.

Rothbard has made my point for me, when discussing natural rights as relating to human nature he says that natural rights would not apply between humans and vampires who must feed on them. But, of course, all human beings are existentially and biologically unique, so then are each persons requirements for satisfaction. Therefor a compatibility of satisfactions through 'natural rights' can not be worked out, a priori.

I love Rothbard, but reading the parts justifying NR in both For a New Liberty and Ethics of Liberty always left me going, "what?"

One thing that has bothered me about NR (specially the randian version of it) is thinking: couldn't someone spin this in such a way to make suicide or homossexualism seem evil (since they might be deemed to be contrary to certain predetermined values of a "good life")? If most people talking about NR did do this, would I like NR?

I think one of the problems a lot of libertarian natural rights supporters have with morally skeptical anti-statists is that they can't claim we have some hateful leftist bias against Rothbard, since von Mises himself shared this 'bias'. Moral skeptics must be very frustrating to people who believe the primary and perhaps sole justification for libertarianism is a metaphysically cooky version of 'rights' and 'ethics'.

I actually have never read Rothbad's "The Ethics of Liberty" wherein he supposedly gives a justification for natural rights. A friend of mine said that Frank van Dun's "Het Fundamenteel Rechtsbeginsel" was the best (and for him convincing) defense of natural rights.

I'm highly skeptical though

I actually think more moral skepticism would do a lot of good for libertarianism. Between libertarians and statists, it is the latter which proclaim the greatest amount of "oughts".

oddly enough, I happened to be browsing the lvmii board right before I saw this thread and replied to it (I'm "majevska" over there)

there's a flurry of topics involving objections to NR now, two in addition to the two you started. Most mises folks really do look at it as a religion though so I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a serious discussion on that topic.

Fortunately, you can get some good laughs from such a spectacle; one of Plauche's responses in "Natural Rights: a self refuting idea?" was basically "well I have a PhD in political science so..."