Debates over “property rights” often stall on definitions instead of the thing people want protected. The author, citing Krabbe and van Laar, calls that a “quagmire of quibbles”—like asking “what is a woman?” to dodge women’s sports. Definitions matter; making them the whole fight does not.

Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty, does not restart Locke from scratch. He takes self-ownership and private property from the natural-law line (Thomas, Aristotle; Elisha Williams 1744) and treats all human rights as property rights. Hoppe’s point: Rawls’s Justice indexes “equality” heavily and barely mentions scarcity or property.

You can spend a career on what “property in one’s person” means, or whether Rothbard read Locke right. That is not answering Rothbard; it is changing the subject—sometimes on purpose. Rawls skipped a dictionary definition of justice too. Context, not gotcha, is how the terms do work.

Property rights are defined in many ways. It often happens that academics who are interested in the scope, regulation, or protection of private property rights debate endlessly at cross purposes because they do not share the same definition of property rights in the first place.

Some debaters attempt to beat their opponents by initiating a definitional game of “gotcha.” So, you agree—or do not agree—with copyrights. But what is your definition of property rights? Gotcha!

It is not a case where they agree on the definition of property rights but one has simply fallen into a taxonomical error which the other wishes to correct. Rather, they do not agree on what we are (or should be) trying to protect when we insist that the law must protect “property rights.” The definitional debate then becomes circular—we use the term “property rights” to describe what we want to protect, and the definition we adopt is designed to serve the substantive goal we have in mind.

Substantive disagreement over the meaning and importance of property rights cannot be resolved by logomachy. Erik Krabbe and Jan Albert van Laar describe such superficial definitional games as “cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue.” They call it “the quagmire of quibbles.” In this quagmire, “none of the points raised by your opponent may be fallacious in itself; yet, one has the impression that some kind of fallaciousness inheres in this quibbling behavior as a whole.”

An example of definitional quibbling is the debate over including men in women’s sports. When people defend the integrity of women’s sports, it is contextually clear what they mean by “women.” Launching into definitional trench warfare is a common diversionary tactic of their opponents who ask, “What is a woman?” As Bentham’s Bulldog puts it, this is “almost always a cheap........

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