I'm going to respond to your last sentence first. You say I'm grasping at straws making the claim that self-ownership is inherent, but, while you've said a lot, you haven't actually responded to that. You haven't explained why people don't own their own bodies, or where their rights to life come from in the absence of self-ownership.
Having read some pragmatism, I have a solution to settle the question why you would assign property as inherent in people. (Do cats own themselves? Bonobos?). I'll just quote and offer a brief application and our question dissolves quite nicely.
“All realities influence our practice,” he wrote me, “and that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way: In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense.”
That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical, there is for us none....
What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the otherÂ’s being right.
So to quickly analyze your proposal, you sad humans walked onto the scene immediate in hand was property, namely themselves. So pragmatism asks, what difference would it make if this were not true? Well, simply using real world examples, I do not need to own something in order to sell it. In fact, people can live whole lives without concepts of property and live rich lives, trading in the market everyday. The only evidence I see for calling my body a property of mine is because I control it. I can hack off an arm and sell it or I can choose to keep it. Other than such relatively nonsensical applications of owning myself, there is not meaning, no practical significance whether I own myself or not. The idea of inalienable rights are not typically derived from the concept of property. The simply just are and joining rights to humans though property is quite an unnecessary step that has no practical value in the real world.
The only significance comes in when rights can be big or small depending on property. But the crux of your, or rather Rothbards argument, is property is defined this way and once you define property as innate to human beings then and only then do these more or less rights flow. But I've already flat denied this premise. And the reason is that it makes no difference if you use this ideation or any number of other ideations to link humans to rights producing universal basic rights.
Rothbard's view that humans own themselves makes no real world difference, no important distinction so the only reason to accept it is because you want to. That, for me, is no reason at all. You should admire Rothbard's attempts at making sense of the world but you don't need to accept his beliefs. You should want to try to make sense of the world too but don't use concepts that have no practical value except to serve ulterior motives of re-arranging society the way that seems best to Rothbard's narrowed vision of life.
The practical result of viewing humans as deriving rights from property means certain people naturally have more rights than others (born with more property). This must have been the quite appealing to Rothbard trying to design a rich white male dominated society that we already have. Whites are a minority on the planet but own much of the wealth and resources. By virtue of having more property, and wealth/property accumulates in capitalism, so over generations rights also accrue and blot out the minuscule rights of those without property (homeless and debtors--which is the average American). I can see it now: a few individuals owning all the property of the world and therefore have all the rights in the world. What a lovely place! A most terrible place!
You say murder and slavery are obviously bad from a cultural perspective, but why is that? I say it's because people inherently believe that they own themselves, but you've rejected this. You say it's a genetic pre-disposition not to murder, but where's the science on that, and why is there murder if that's the case? Are people who murder genetic mutants?
I cited one book already and if you've ever read anthropology or studied it, sociology etc. you know murder is among the universal crimes (intra-tribe). Additionally I cited a source that designs and even tests a few experiments precisely along the lines you are asking. Your first reply to it was to reject it outright. My suggestion is be skeptical, fine, but be willing to learn.
To your last question of genetic mutants, I mean, really, the questions devolved into trivial jabs. The only response is one you already know: volition.
As for the bold portion of your post, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that murder is bad because it violates a person's property right in their own body. External laws against murder were simply made because of this fact.
This is good to know. So taking away property violates the idea behind property. Property being the concept that an individual (or collective) is in full and maximum determination of the existence of the property. When another individual or collective introduces their determination into said property, that is indeed a violation. But why does that matter? Specifically used in this ideation of property, violation carries no moral weight. It simply is a descriptive fact that is the second individual is violating the concepts in mind by the first. Morality, on the other hand, is prescriptive. Prescription offers why one should not violate another. Why should the second individual care that the first has claimed the property first? That the first thinks he has a right to the property is subjective because the second also views this property as his right.
You say this violates the notion of property, so why does that give one any reason to not violate it? If people don't agree to your idea of property or doesn't care (because "violates" carries no moral, prescriptive component) then you have not offered justification that is non-circular, logical, sensible to all times and all people (i.e. universal) though I think this is the aim of rooting human rights in property.
