The purpose of the presented paper is the presentation and critical assesment of the two arguments for the principleof self-ownership raised by the founding father of libertarianism – an economist and political philosopher Murray Newton Rothbard (1926-1995). As author points out, both arguments are rooted in the theory of natural law and natural rights. He argues that this theory, in addition to being untenable per se, is incompatbile with the ethics of libertarianism and therefore every libertarian argument set on its stone must inevitably fail. However, according to the author, Rothbard’s second argument – that is, the argumentum a contrario, is logically indipendent of the natural law theory and, thus, can be defended on different philosophical grounds, although Rothbard himself derived it from the erroneous natural law premises
