#title Natural Law Egoist
#author Sidney E. Parker
#SORTtopics book review, egoism, natural law, Robert Anton Wilson
#date 1987
#source Retrieved 10/16/2021 from https://www.unionofegoists.com/journals/ego-1982/ego-09/
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-10-17T01:40:28
#notes Printed in <em>The Egoist</em> (Formerly EGO), Issue 9 (1987)


<biblio>
<em>Natural Law or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy</em>. By Robert Anton Wilson. Loompanics Unlimited, PO Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368, USA. $5.95
</biblio>

Robert Anton Wilson’s new booklet is an appropriately savage attack on the “natural law” doctrines of certain “libertarian” pundits – in particular Murray Rothbard, George H Smith and Samuel Konkin III – and is an extended version of an essay he contributed to the controversy on this question in The New Libertarian in 1985. Wilson convincingly distinguishes between “natural law” as a scientific description of phenomena and “natural law” as a prescriptive ideal of behaviour. The first he accepts, the second he dismisses with scorching contempt.

When Wilson is analysing the absurdities of the natural law theorists, their vagaries, their intellectual roots in Platonic hocus pocus and Medieval Catholic dogma, he is excellent. In his remarks on Max Stirner, however, he claims that the reason for Stirner rejecting morality is because “morality is a human invention”. He gives no evidence for this claim, which is not surprising since Stirner does not reject morality on this ground. Wilson’s wish to retain morality, despite his brilliant demolition of the case for natural law, shows that he is still “spooked”.