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Journal articles on the topic 'Libertarians'
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1
Reiff, Mark R. "Left Libertarianism for the Twenty-First Century." Journal of Social and Political Philosophy 2, no. 2 (August 2023): 191–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jspp.2023.0057.
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There are many different kinds of libertarianism. The first is right libertarianism, which received its most powerful expression in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), a book that still sets the baseline for discussions of libertarianism today. The second, I will call faux libertarianism. For reasons I will explain in this paper, most ‘man-on-the-street’ libertarians and most politicians who claim to be libertarians are actually this kind of libertarian. And third, there is left libertarianism, which is what I shall spend most of this paper explicating. But I will not simply be surveying the views of those who identify as left libertarians and put this forth as if I were engaged in an exegetical exercise. Instead, what I shall set forth is a kind of manifesto, a statement of why I consider myself a left libertarian, one that takes this approach to political morality well beyond where it was left around the end of the last century by the previous generation of left libertarians. My hope is to provide those who find certain left libertarian ideas attractive a guide by which they can explain and harmonise their own views, recognise left libertarianism as a distinct comprehensive political doctrine, and feel more open to identify themselves as left libertarian too.
2
Dumler, Denis A. "Political and Civic Identity of Libertarians in Contemporary Russia: Problems and Perspectives." RUDN Journal of Political Science 23, no. 4 (December 15, 2021): 560–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.22363/2313-1438-2021-23-4-560-569.
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Libertarianism is a new ideological trend, popular among young people. We try to find out whether libertarianism rises as independent political movement or it is the reaction on the fall of popularity of traditional political parties. For that purpose, the author made the comparative analysis of the program documents of the Libertarian Party of Russia with the classical works of the American libertarians and analyzed the published interview both of the party leaders/activists and of the experts. The author used the interview which he took from some activists in order to clarify the political identification of the Russian libertarians. The political identity of libertarians is characterized by the broadest possible interpretation of personal and economic freedom. Libertarians believe that such freedom is compatible with law and legality and is opposite to anarchy. At the same time, they avoid definitions and norms that could constrain freedom by both the state and the adherents of certain, including liberal, values and slogans. This broad approach makes it difficult to politically identify libertarians, but contributes to their attractiveness among young people.
3
Perez, Nahshon. "Libertarianism, Rectification and Property Rights: A Re-evaluation." Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 27, no. 1 (January 2014): 123–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0841820900006251.
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A famous libertarian argument is that any allocation of property is just, if it is the result of legitimate original acquisitions and legitimate transfers (‘justice in holdings’). However current ownership of property rarely follows ‘justice in holdings’. This creates a dilemma for libertarianism. If libertarian principles point to protecting current holdings, the result is a violation of ‘justice in holdings’. If the libertarian position requires that only holdings resulting from justice in holdings are legitimate, this will entail a policy of rectification and redistribution. Three major libertarians attempted to offer solutions to this problem: Nozick, Narveson and Epstein. The goal of this essay is to demonstrate that their solutions face two challenges. First, their solutions come into conflict with certain core libertarian principles. Second, their solutions are so different from one another as to be incompatible with each other. This demonstrates that libertarianism is struggling with a fundamental challenge, and a satisfying solution is yet to be suggested by libertarians.
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Cesario, Anthony J. "Reconciling the Irreconcilable: A Property Rights Approach to Resolving the Animal Rights Debate." Studia Humana 10, no. 4 (November 20, 2021): 36–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/sh-2021-0022.
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Abstract Libertarianism is understood to be a “deontological theory of law” that purportedly applies exclusively to humans. According to some libertarians, however, “one of the greatest weaknesses of libertarian theory” is that there are no provisions outlawing the abuse and torture of animals even though this seems to be one of “the most heinous acts it is possible to do”. Moreover, a few of these libertarians go even further and claim that this legal philosophy of non-aggression should actually be extended to include other animals. The purpose of this paper is to reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable situation by arguing that it is a “continuum problem” and offering a principled, libertarian compromise that resolves the animal rights debate using the non-aggression principle (NAP) and private property rights.
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Stillman, Peter G. "Total Freedom: Toward A Dialectical Libertarianism. By Chris Matthew Sciabarra. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. 390p. $65.00 cloth, $24.50 paper." American Political Science Review 96, no. 1 (March 2002): 193–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003055402424318.
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Sciabarra's book attempts to conjoin dialectics with libertarianism to produce total freedom. He is led to this seemingly odd conjunction by a concatenation of concerns. He sees dialectics as the logic or method most attentive to contexts and libertarianism as a radical political ideology of freedom. He sees the opportunity to free dialectics of its totalitarian (including Marxist) overtones and libertarianism of its apparent irrelevance, which is the more galling now that once-popular Marxism has failed as radical social theory. He wishes to combine his own academic appreciation of the dialectical elements of Marx's method with his long-standing love of libertarian ideas. Primarily, he hopes to expand libertarian thought from a narrow concentration on economic self-interest and the state as repressive to a broader concern with the cultural, social, and historical preconditions of freedom, and he sees dialectics, with its emphasis on contexts, dynamism, and relations, as a method that can be appropriated by libertarians to realize these broader concerns and to propound a comprehensive and radical social theory. No longer need libertarian thought be seen as atomic individualism struggling for freedom against state violence; building on dialectical thinking shorn of its Marxist content, libertarians can embrace whole individuals living in rich social environments that can carry out, without violence, the social powers that the state has illegitimately appropriated.
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Zwolinski, Matt. "THE LIBERTARIAN NONAGGRESSION PRINCIPLE." Social Philosophy and Policy 32, no. 2 (2016): 62–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026505251600011x.
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Abstract:Libertarianism is a controversial political theory. But it is often presented as a resting upon a simple, indeed commonsense, moral principle. The libertarian “Nonaggression Principle” (NAP) prohibits aggression against the persons or property of others, and it is on this basis that the libertarian opposition to redistributive taxation, legal paternalism, and perhaps even the state itself is thought to rest. This essay critically examines the NAP and the extent to which it can provide support for libertarian political theory. It identifies two problems with existing libertarian appeals to the NAP. First, insofar as libertarians employ a moralized understanding of aggression, their principle is really about the protection of property rights rather than the prohibition of aggression. Second, the absolutist prohibition on aggression, which libertarians typically endorse and which is necessary to generate strongly libertarian conclusions, is grossly implausible. The essay concludes by setting forth a version of the NAP that does not suffer from these problems. It argues that this more moderate and defensible version of the NAP still has important libertarian implications, but that a full defense of libertarianism cannot rely upon appeals to nonaggression alone.
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Sekatskaya, Maria A. "Libertarian Volition and the Problem of Luck." Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 57, no. 4 (2020): 87–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/eps202057460.
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The most important difference between contemporary compatibilist and libertarian theories is not the difference in their positions regarding the truth of the thesis of physical determinism, but their different approaches to the causal role of agents. According to libertarians, volitional acts performed by agents constitute a specific type of causes, which are not themselves caused by other causes. In this respect, event-causal libertarianism is similar to the agent-causal libertarianism, because it insists that in performing a volitional act an agent can choose one of the alternative outcomes without being caused to do so by anything else, where ‘anything else’ includes all the facts about the past and the present. Since event-causal libertarians maintain that volitional acts and the causal role of agents can be explained naturalistically, they must solve the problem of luck, i.e., they must explain how an agent is able to control her choices, given that she can choose one way or another without there being any difference in her state immediately preceding the moment of choice. This problem arises not from the indeterminism per se, but from the way it is coupled with the causal role of agents.In section one, I consider the historical development of compatibilist views on physical determinism and indeterminism. In section two, I present an overview of conditional analyses of alternative possibilities. In section three, I analyze the reasons why libertarians reject any type of conditional analysis, and show that intuitive objections against physical determinism, which portrait it as an obstacle to freedom, are untenable. In section four, I consider the consequence argument and show how it is related to the libertarian condition of sourcehood. In the final section, I analyze the problem of luck and show that it inevitably arises for any version of libertarianism. I demonstrate that indeterminism is a problem for libertarians, although they need it. And it is not a problem for compatibilists, who, while they do not need it, can incorporate it in their theories without facing the problem of luck.
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Bekana, Dejene Mamo. "Legitimising the illegitimate: a review of the libertarian accounts of taxation." Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice 35, no. 2 (October 1, 2020): 237–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/251569119x15687301500951.
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This article analyses the libertarian accounts of taxation. It discussed how libertarians view taxation and why (and where) they disagree on certain points. While anarchist libertarians advocate the idea that taxation is never acceptable because they believe that the state itself possesses no legitimacy, minarchist libertarians believe that the state can have a legitimate role, and therefore that taxation can be accepted to the extent that there is no alternative to fund the state’s legitimate activities. This article argues that anarchist-libertarian views of taxation are untenable, and suggests that the furtherance of libertarian ideals on taxation is possible through: (1) taking ideas from other non-libertarian schools, particularly from the social contract theory of the state; and (2) advancing the minarchist-libertarian perspective from within the libertarian paradigm.
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Yagublu, N. N. "Is Libertarianism the new future? Analyzing ideological and philosophical roots of the libertarian thought in the United States." Актуальні проблеми політики, no. 67 (May 25, 2021): 125–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.32837/app.v0i67.1163.
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Libertarianism as a political ideology and movement has garnered big curiosity in American political discourse in recent years. This support was further solidified with the achievement of getting the most votes ever in the history of the Libertarian Party, in 2016 U.S. presidential election. This research paper thoroughly examines the characteristics, main concepts and criticism of the ideology by continuously providing detailed outlook on the important libertarian notions and elaborating the discussed ideas through carefully-thought, case by case examples. The scientific work is multidimensional and multifaceted in its scope, and contains arguments with their counter-arguments to depict a broad, rational picture. Thus, the reader can see, fathom and compare the shortcomings and advantages of the talked ideas more effectively. Libertarian philosophy gives huge importance to the notions of liberty, freedom and individualism. Apart from this, another common thing that brings all libertarians together is their lack of trust to the government. Hence they always aspire to limit the role of it. Libertarians always emphasize the importance of free markets and vigorously express their discontent with any outside intervention to it, especially the one by the government. There are many different forms of libertarianism, some of them are more radical and support no-state structure. Libertarians, in principle, are not really concerned with inequality; they actually consider it positive to some extent. Although on the surface level the rationale behind many libertarian ideas seems reasonable and convincing, the empirical evidence and analyzing the results of actions which occur as the direct implementation of these principles show the necessity of a more comprehensive and accommodating approach. As society, economy and governing are so interconnected and intertwined with each other, certain actions have unintended consequences and in long term may yield destructive effect. The empirical reality should be taken into account in order to formulate effective policies for the benefit of the people.
10
PINCIONE, GUIDO. "The Trolley Problem as a Problem for Libertarians." Utilitas 19, no. 4 (November 12, 2007): 407–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0953820807002713.
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Many political libertarians argue, or assume, that negative moral duties (duties not to harm others) prevail over positive moral duties (duties to aid others), and that the legal system ought to reflect such pre-eminence. I call into question this strategy for defending a libertarian order. I start by arguing that a successful account of the well-known case of a runaway trolley that is about to kill five innocents unless a passer-by diverts it onto one innocent, killing him, should point to (i) the ex ante advantage to all six of being subject to a policy of redirection of runaway trolleys, and (ii) the causal structure of killing vs. letting-die choices. I then argue that this account of the trolley case entails that legal systems reflecting the relative stringency of negative and positive moral duties should uphold redistributive measures at odds with libertarianism. The assumption that the legal system ought to reflect, through non-causal routes, moral principles and their relative weights leads to either an ideal-theory (in Rawls's sense) assessment of libertarianism or a symbolic account of the relationships between morality and law. Libertarians should undermine this assumption if they hope to offer an all-things-considered case for free markets.
11
Franklin, Christopher Evan. "THE HEART OF LIBERTARIANISM: FUNDAMENTALITY AND THE WILL." Social Philosophy and Policy 36, no. 01 (2019): 72–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265052519000256.
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Abstract:It is often claimed that libertarianism offers an unattractive conception of free will and moral responsibility because it renders free agency inexplicable and irrational. This essay aims, first, to show that the soundness of these objections turns on more basic disagreements concerning the ideals of free agency and, second, to develop and motivate a truly libertarian conception of the ideals of free agency. The central contention of the essay is that the heart of libertarians’ ideal of free agency is the ideal of agential fundamentality.
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Mele, Alfred. "Can Libertarians Make Promises?" Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55 (September 2004): 217–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1358246100008699.
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Libertarians hold that free action and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism and that some human beings occasionally act freely and are morally responsible for some of what they do. Can libertarians who know both that they are right and that they are free make sincere promises? Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, contends that they cannot—at least when they assume that should they do what they promise to do, they would do it freely. Probably, this strikes many readers as a surprising thesis for a libertarian to hold. In light of van Inwagen's holding it, the title of his essay—‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’—may seem unsurprising.
13
Warren, Paul. "Self-Ownership, Reciprocity, and Exploitation, or Why Marxists Shouldn't Be Afraid of Robert Nozick." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (March 1994): 33–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1994.10717358.
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A common theme of libertarians is that there is a conflict between the values of liberty and equality. Achieving equality, so libertarians often argue, would require frequent interference in individuals’ lives, creating constraints on freedom and obstacles to the development of individuality. Although not himself endorsing a libertarian conception of liberty, Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen recently has advanced the surprising thesis that there is a tension in Marxist normative thought that in an interesting way parallels the often heard libertarian challenge to egalitarianism.
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Thornton, Mark. "Libertarianism: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective." Studia Humana 9, no. 2 (July 1, 2020): 100–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/sh-2020-0018.
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AbstractThis retrospective, covering half a century, is a personal history of modern libertarianism. It provides some historical perspective on the growth of libertarianism and its impact on society, especially for those who were born into an existing libertarian movement, including political and academic paths. As outsiders, Austrians and libertarians can expect more than their share of difficult times and roadblocks, although that situation has improved over time. It also shows the limitations of the political path to liberty and the importance of the Austrian view that society changes via emphasis on sound economic science, its practicality, and its subsequent impact on ideology. Finally, it conveys the importance of solving practical problems and puzzles via the thin, radical version of libertarianism.
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Blunden, Charlie T. "Libertarianism and collective action: is there a libertarian case for mandatory vaccination?" Journal of Medical Ethics 45, no. 1 (August 7, 2018): 71–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2018-104752.
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In his paper ‘A libertarian case for mandatory vaccination’, Jason Brennan argues that even libertarians, who are very averse to coercive measures, should support mandatory vaccination to combat the harmful disease outbreaks that can be caused by non-vaccination. He argues that libertarians should accept the clean hands principle, which would justify mandatory vaccination. The principle states that there is a (sometimes enforceable) moral obligation not to participate in collectively harmful activities. Once libertarians accept the principle, they will be compelled to support mandatory vaccination. In my paper, I argue that the cases Brennan uses to justify this principle are disanalogous to the case of non-vaccination and that they are not compelling to libertarians. The cases Brennan offers can be explained by a libertarian using the individual sufficiency principle: which states that if an individual’s action is sufficient to cause harm, then there is a (sometimes enforceable) moral obligation not to carry out that action. I argue that this principle is more appropriate to Brennan’s examples, and more appealing to the libertarian, than the clean hands principle. In order to get libertarians to accept the clean hands principle, I present a modified version of one of Brennan’s cases that is analogous to the case of non-vaccination. Using this case, I argue that whether the clean hands principle will justify mandatory vaccination is dependent on whether the herd immunity rate in a given population is approaching a threshold after which a collective risk of harm will be imposed onto others.
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Burns, Jennifer. "O Libertarian, Where Is Thy Sting?" Journal of Policy History 19, no. 4 (October 2007): 452–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jph.2008.0001.
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With the 2008 Democratic National Convention slated for Denver, the libertarian concerns of Western voters, denizens of the so-called purple states, are suddenly of high interest. Pundits and commentators see in the “live and let live” ethos of the West a chance for the Democracy to reshape its faltering coalition and enter the twenty-first century rejuvenated and strong. Ryan Sager, a critic from the right, notes that from the Democratic perspective, “the West looks abundant with opportunities. And the same might be said of a long-neglected, long-suffering political demographic: libertarians.” This optimism in part underlay the party's choice of Denver over the traditional Democratic bastion of New York. Colorado is often identified as a libertarian-leaning state, and it was where the Libertarian Party was founded. But what exactly is libertarianism?
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Long, Roderick T. "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class." Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 2 (1998): 303–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265052500002028.
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Libertarianism needs a theory of class.This claim may meet with resistance among some libertarians. A few will say: “The analysis of society in terms of classes and class struggles is a specifically Marxist approach, resting on assumptions that libertarians reject. Why should we care about class?” A greater number will say: “We recognize that class theory is important, but libertarianism doesn't need such a theory, because it already has a perfectly good one.”
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Setiawan, Yudi, Zaid Zaid, Nanik Prasetyoningsih, and Mahbub Pasca Al Bahy. "A Libertarian Legitimacy for Mandatory Covid-19 Vaccination." Jurnal Media Hukum 29, no. 2 (October 14, 2022): 94–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.18196/jmh.v29i2.14313.
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Since its inception, the 2019 coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak has become a major health problem. At the same time, countries worldwide have been waiting for a Covid-19 vaccine to be sufficiently available. When the Covid-19 vaccine became available, several countries began to adopt mandatory Covid-19 vaccination policies. However, mandatory Covid-19 vaccination has received strong opposition from the start. Rejections have emerged from various parties, including from libertarians. The researcher observes that the current research attempting to analyze the mandatory Covid-19 vaccination still revolves around the perspective of human rights and utilitarianism. Then, this study aims to explore and find out how the libertarian perspective toward mandatory vaccination. Normative research methods with conceptual and comparative approaches were used in this study. After analyzing secondary data sources with prescriptive analysis methods, this study finally succeeded in finding that mandatory Covid-19 vaccination has its place, legitimacy, and justification on the ideological side of libertarianism. It is because libertarians accept that the government may require a mandatory vaccination program against Covid-19. In addition, due to the libertarian framework, the government is still justified in enforcing coercive policies that violate the rights of certain individuals if the policy is necessary to avoid greater harm to others.
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Hinton, Timothy. "IS TAXATION FORCED LABOUR?" Think 18, no. 51 (2019): 11–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1477175618000313.
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Libertarians frequently complain that when a government taxes some of its citizens in order to help others, it is forcing them to behave altruistically. And obviously, we are meant to think, that use of force is morally objectionable. But what exactly makes taxation objectionable? One answer that many libertarians supply is that forcing some people to benefit others is wrong because it involves forced labour. The underlying thought seems to be that there is something morally troubling about making some people work for others. In this article I scrutinize this thought. After describing two different kinds of taxation, I show how the libertarian argument about taxes depends on a distinction between posing a threat to other people and failing to help them. This brings us to the moral bedrock of the argument that taxation is forced labour, namely the idea that no one has a right to force you to do something unless you pose a threat to other people. The bulk of my article is devoted to showing (1) that this idea cannot deliver the conclusion that libertarians want because it conflicts with other things that libertarians believe; and (2) once you give up on that idea, it turns out that taxation to benefit others is not necessarily wrong by libertarian standards.
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Hicks, Daniel J. "On Okin’s critique of libertarianism." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45, no. 1 (2015): 37–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2014.996118.
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Susan Moller Okin’s critique of libertarianism in Justice, Gender, and the Family has received only slight attention in the libertarian literature. I find this neglect of Okin’s argument surprising: The argument is straightforward and, if sound, it establishes a devastating conflict between the core libertarian notions of self-ownership and the acquisition of property through labour. In this paper, I first present a reconstruction of Okin’s argument. In brief, she points out that mothers make children through their labour; thus it would seem that mothers own their (adult) children; but this implies that the children are not self-owners. I then examine the two most common objections to this argument in the literature: mothers do not make children, and acquisition by labour includes an exception for persons. I give several replies to each objection, including an extension of Okin’s argument that I call Okin’s dilemma. This dilemma argues that the libertarian can avoid Okin’s conclusion only by requiring an involuntary property transfer. And this alternative, it seems, is just as unacceptable for many libertarians. I close with some speculation about the further implications of Okin’s dilemma for libertarianism.
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Shtuler, Iryna, Valentyn Kostiuk, and Viktoria Nam. "INFRASTRUCTURAL CONDITIONS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ON THE BASIS OF LIBERTARIANISM." Actual Problems of Economics 1, no. 237 (March 2021): 86–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.32752/1993-6788-2021-1-237-86-91.
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The article reveals infrastructure conditions for the development of the economy on the basis of libertarians. It is established that since the national economy is characterized by a number of problems associated with infrastructure conditions and technological retardation, then the method ology of proactive management of the development of Ukraine's economy on the basis of libertarians, characterizes it as such that covers a wide range of models, methods, mechanisms and instruments. The question of infrastructural conditions for the development of the economy on the basis of libertarians is reimeted under the influence of scientific and technological progress and global crisis phenomena. It is the study of the infrastructure conditions of economic development to become a benchmark for the formation of future socio-economic prosperity. All this necessitates the adjustment of traditional views on the directions and ways of infrastructure conditions for the development of the economy in terms of global scale of libertarian ideas. In the course of the study it has been established that in various evolutionary periods, elements and mechanisms of the new system of management of the country were originally necessary. At a certain stage in its formation, the economic system of each particular country was in equilibrium, the characteristics of each of its components (subsystems, elements) were agreed with each other, and the links between them were evolutionary, from time to time with different moods: from the confession of ideas Libertarianism to a rigid position of necessity of state regulation. It is determined that effective development management of the economy, as shown by the examples of many countries, is primarily involved in the creation of infrastructure conditions, which requires the substantiation of methods and tools for managing the development of local, regional and state levels. The article presents a copyright understanding of the reasonableness of the choice of methods and tools for managing the development of the economy on the basis of libertarians. It is proved that the basis for understanding the essence of such infrastructure conditions for the development of the economy on the basis of libertarians is an understanding of the essence of the public network. It is determined that effective implementation of substantiated organizational, economic, logistic and political decisions are created new opportunities for the development of the economy on the basis of libertarians and will contribute to the successful implementation of the existing potential.
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Preiss, Joshua. "Libertarian personal responsibility." Philosophy & Social Criticism 43, no. 6 (February 3, 2016): 621–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0191453716629710.
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While libertarians (by most accounts) affirm personal responsibility as a central moral and political value, libertarian theorists write relatively little about the theory and practice of this value. Focusing on the work of F. A. Hayek and David Schmidtz, this article identifies the core of a libertarian approach to personal responsibility and demonstrates the ways in which this approach entails a radical revision of the ethics and American politics of personal responsibility. Then, I highlight several central implications of this analysis in the American political and economic status quo. First, this analysis makes a mockery of so-called libertarian/conservative ‘fusionism’, such that libertarian personal responsibility cannot partner with meritocratic conservative thought to provide a plural grounding for rejecting progressive or redistributive economic policy. Next, preferred libertarian policies threaten the status, esteem and social bases of self-respect of citizens who are worse-off through little or no fault of their own. Finally, these policies undermine the ethics of personal responsibility that Americans from across the ideological spectrum value and many conservatives and libertarians celebrate. In the American status quo, those who value personal responsibility must reserve a central place for policies that mitigate opportunity and distributive inequalities.
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Christmas, Billy. "Rescuing the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle." Moral Philosophy and Politics 5, no. 2 (November 27, 2018): 305–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/mopp-2017-0007.
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AbstractMany libertarians ground their theory of justice in anon-aggression principle(NAP). The NAP is often the basis for the libertarian condemnation of state action – that it is necessarily aggressive and therefore unjust. This approach is often criticised insofar as it defines aggression, in part, as the violation of legitimate property rights, and is therefore parasitical upon a prior – and unjustified – theory of property. While it is true that libertarians who defend the NAP sometimes fail to give a satisfactory account of its relationship to libertarian property rights, such an account is in fact available. A commitment to property rights and to non-aggression can both be grounded in a commitment tonon-interference. Such a principle, then, brings together the NAP and the theory of property it is parasitical upon, thus saving the unity and austerity of the overall approach.
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Simmons, A. John. "CONSENT THEORY FOR LIBERTARIANS." Social Philosophy and Policy 22, no. 1 (January 2005): 330–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265052505041130.
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This paper argues that libertarian political philosophers, including Robert Nozick, have erred in neglecting the problem of political obligation and that they ought to embrace an actual consent theory of political obligation and state legitimacy. It argues as well that if they followed this recommendation, their position on the subject would be correct. I identify the tension in libertarian (and especially Nozick's) thought between its minimalist and its consensualist strains and argue that, on libertarianism's own terms, the consensualist strain ought to prevail. I then describe the form of the consent theory that I recommend to libertarians. The paper concludes with an extended defense of this form of consent theory against contemporary liberal-egalitarian criticisms of it (both explicit and implicit), including those of Dworkin, Rawls, and their followers.
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Rosenthal, Jacob. "Libertarianism and the Problem of Clear Cases." Grazer Philosophische Studien 96, no. 4 (November 21, 2019): 518–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18756735-000069.
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New varieties of libertarianism connect not only free will and moral responsibility to indeterminism, but also agency and choice as such. In this paper, the author highlights what seems to be an embarrassment for all libertarian accounts, but especially for the ones just mentioned. The problem is brought out by clear cases of decisions in which there are strong and rather obvious reasons for one of the options and only relatively weak ones in favour of the alternatives. It is hard to insist that there be indeterminism even in such cases. Either it has no significant role to play, which means that libertarianism is in effect largely abandoned, or it has a purely negative role, being linked to some serious and thoroughgoing defect in the agent’s rationality. Thus, a dilemma for libertarians arises, which the author spells out in the text. Furthermore, he argues that some versions of compatibilism face essentially the same difficulty.
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Korobko, M. I. "LIBERTARIANISM AND AYN RAND'S PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTIVISM." UKRAINIAN CULTURAL STUDIES, no. 2 (5) (2019): 12–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/ucs.2019.2(5).02.
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The article gives an overview of the ideology of libertarianism. The purpose of the article is analyzing the main ideas of the libertarian move- ment and how they relate to the philosophy of Ayn Rand's objectivism. The essence of this ideological and political direction can not be imagined without the philosophical work of American writer Ayn Rand. The main idea of libertarians is to uphold market freedoms and to object to redistribu- tion through taxation to implement the liberal theory of equality. This movement gets its modern meaning in the late 30's and early 40's of the twen- tieth century in the United States, when enough opponents of the New Deal policy of US President F. Roosevelt appeared. Ayn Rand was one of the first to support libertarians, but later she began to distance herself from them for a variety of reasons, both personal and philosophical. In Ukraine today, this movement has gained popularity due to the ideological direction of the political party "Servant of the People". Today, members of the libertarian political movement are engaged in promoting and spreading the ideas of "objectivism" among the masses in the United States. This movement, which took classical liberal theory as a basis, originated in the American tradition of individualism as a result of dissatisfaction with the transformation of the liberal idea in the practice of political liberalism toward socialism and developed into a sufficiently strong political flow. Ayn Rand's achievements do not lose their relevance in times of global crisis as a means of overcoming the state of despair. It inspires hope that man himself can achieve a happy life unlike most modern ethical theories that cannot refute a person's ultimate dependence as a small screw in the world mechanism. But the ideology of libertarianism, inspired by the American writer, though tempting uninformed people with their possible "independence" of society from the state machine, still remains a rather ambiguous political ideology.
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Morozov, Konstantin E. "Left-Libertarianism and Genetic Justice." Ethical Thought 23, no. 1 (2023): 95–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/2074-4870-2023-23-1-95-108.
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Distributive justice is one of the central questions of contemporary moral and political philosophy. Discussions on this topic are often presented as a confrontation between two groups of thinkers: libertarians and luck egalitarians. The former emphasize the dependence of the existing distribution on the individual choice and personal responsibility of people, and therefore are skeptical about various redistribution programs. The latter, on the contrary, emphasize the influence of morally arbitrary luck on the economic situation of people, and therefore welcome redistributive measures to compensate for this brute luck. Left-libertarian claims to reconcile these two types of moral considerations. The classical left-libertarian point of view seeks to offset the influence of brute luck through an egalitarian distribution of the benefits of owning natural resources that are independent of anyone’s choice and responsibility. However, this position does not sufficiently take into account the influence of other factors of brute luck and, in particular, genetic endowments on the distribution of economic wealth. This article discusses three approaches that allow left-libertarians to take into account the factor of genetic luck in interpersonal distribution. First, it is Hillel Steiner’s proposal to attribute genetic information to natural resources, the benefits of which are subject to egalitarian redistribution. Second, it is the concept of equal opportunity for welfare by Peter Vallentyne, Michael Otsuka and Eric Roark. Thirdly, it is the universal dominance criterion of Philippe Van Parijs and Kasper Ossenblok. The first two approaches face a number of moral and practical difficulties, but the third approach is able to overcome them. Thus, the universal dominance criterion is the most promising way to reconcile left-libertarianism and justice in the distribution of genetic endowments.
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Russell, Daniel C. "EMBODIMENT AND SELF-OWNERSHIP." Social Philosophy and Policy 27, no. 1 (January 2010): 135–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265052509990069.
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AbstractMany libertarians believe that self-ownership is a separate matter from ownership of extra-personal property. “No-proviso” libertarians hold that property ownership should be free of any “fair share” constraints (e.g., the Lockean Proviso), on the grounds that the inability of the very poor to control property leaves their self-ownership intact. By contrast, left-libertarians hold that while no one need compensate others for owning himself, still property owners must compensate others for owning extra-personal property. What would a “self” have to be for these claims to be true? I argue that both of these camps must conceive of the boundaries of the self as including one's body but no part of the extra-personal world. However, other libertarians draw those boundaries differently, so that self-ownership cannot be separated from the right to control extra-personal property after all. In that case, property ownership must be subject to a fair share constraint, but that constraint does not require appropriators to pay compensation. This view, which I call “right libertarianism,” differs importantly from the other types primarily in its conception of the self, which I argue is independently more plausible.
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Dare, Tim. "Kronman on Contract: A Study in the Relation Between Substance and Procedure in Normative and Legal Theory." Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 7, no. 2 (July 1994): 331–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0841820900002733.
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Anthony Kronman’s 1980 article “Contract Law and Distributive Justice” has become something of a classic in the philosophy of private law. Kronman argued that any theory of contract which relied upon voluntariness was necessarily concerned with distributive justice, since voluntariness was itself a distributive notion. The argument targeted libertarian accounts of contract. Given the distributive nature of voluntariness, the claim went, libertarians could not give an adequate account of contract without violating their own injunction against appeal to the “fair division of wealth among the members of society”(472). It is easy to see why Kronman’s article attracted so much attention. The idea that voluntariness is not distributive is central not just to libertarianism but to liberalism generally. Kronman’s critique, though targeting a not terribly common species of liberalism, threatens the genus itself.
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Wysocki, Igor, and Łukasz Dominiak. "How Does Justice Relate to Economic Welfare?" Croatian journal of philosophy 23, no. 67 (May 6, 2023): 51–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.52685/cjp.23.67.3.
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This paper argues—contra some Austro-libertarians—that whether a given exchange is welfare-enhancing or welfare-diminishing does not depend on whether that exchange is just or unjust, respectively. Rather, we suggest that in light of our two thought experiments, Austro-libertarianism has at least a pro tanto reason to conceive of justice and welfare as two logically distinct ideals. This would in turn, most interestingly, predict the possibility of (a) just but welfare-diminishing exchanges and (b) unjust but welfare-enhancing ones. Upon considering possible rejoinders to our points, we suggest that Austro-libertarians abandon a justice-based notion of welfare.
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Dominiak, Łukasz. "Must Right-Libertarians Embrace Easements by Necessity?" Diametros, no. 60 (June 25, 2019): 34–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.33392/diam.1241.
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The present paper investigates the question of whether right-libertarians must accept easements by necessity. Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof. As we demonstrate in the paper, however, the homestead principle understood in such an absolutist way generates contradictions within the set of rights distributed on its basis. In order to avoid such contradictions, easements by necessity must be incorporated into the libertarian theory of property rights and the homestead principle must be truncated accordingly.
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FREEMAN, SAMUEL. "Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View." Philosophy Public Affairs 30, no. 2 (April 2001): 105–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2001.00105.x.
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Togni, Andrea. "The War on Privacy – or, Privacy as a Strategy for Liberty." Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Politica, no. 3 (January 25, 2023): 243–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/rifp-2025.
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In the last chapter of The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard discusses his theory of strategy for liberty, and recommends tools such as education that libertarians can lean on to attain the highest political goal of freedom. Building on Rothbard’s shoulders, the main thesis of this paper is that an effective theory of strategy for liberty cannot dispense with privacy, which needs to be understood as a condition for the enjoyment of liberty and not as a right per se. In the first section, the discussion is framed in the context of natural rights libertarianism. Then, a metaphysical taxonomy of property is provided, which articulates the functioning of property rights and privacy in the realm of the body and of the mind, in the realm of alienable goods and services, and in the realm of information. The third section deals with the war on privacy that is raging nowadays; not coincidentally, the ultimate enemy of this war is private property. The last part of the paper contends that Rothbard is correct in reducing privacy rights to property rights, but this doesn’t mean that privacy has no place in libertarian thought; on the contrary, privacy is one of the main conditions for the defense and preservation of property rights, and, in the case of information, property cannot even exist without it. If these theses are true, libertarians need to find a proper place for privacy in their theory of strategy for liberty.
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Ferguson, Benjamin. "CAN LIBERTARIANS GET AWAY WITH FRAUD?" Economics and Philosophy 34, no. 2 (January 10, 2018): 165–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266267117000311.
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Abstract:In this paper I argue that libertarianism neither prohibits exchanges in which consent is gained through deceit, nor does it entail that such exchanges are morally invalid. However, contra James Child’s (1994) similar claim, that it is incapable of delivering these verdicts, I argue that libertarians can claim that exchanges involving deceitfully obtained consent are morally invalid by appealing to an external theory of moral permissibility.
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HAJI, ISHTIYAQUE. "Luck, Compatibilism, and Libertarianism." Dialogue 54, no. 4 (July 24, 2015): 611–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0012217315000682.
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Many have thought that libertarian accounts of free action succumb to a problem about luck. Recently, it has been proposed that compatibilist accounts, which unlike libertarian ones, maintain that free action and determinism are compatible, are also vulnerable to a problem about luck. In this paper, I argue that the problem of compatibilist luck is not novel insofar as it is one manifestation of a more general concern to which compatibilists and libertarians have responded. Furthermore, these responses are not effective responses to the problem of libertarian luck.
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Iyer, Ravi, Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, Peter Ditto, and Jonathan Haidt. "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians." PLoS ONE 7, no. 8 (August 21, 2012): e42366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366.
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Olsaretti, Serena. "RESCUING JUSTICE AND EQUALITY FROM LIBERTARIANISM." Economics and Philosophy 29, no. 1 (March 2013): 43–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266267113000072.
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One of the central motifs of G. A. Cohen's work was his opposition to capitalism in the name of justice. This motif was fully in view in Cohen's work on Robert Nozick's libertarianism: Cohen carefully reconstructed and relentlessly criticized Nozick's apologetics of the free market, which, he thought, was internally coherent but unconvincing. This article suggests that Cohen's opposition to libertarianism did not, however, go far enough, and identifies two respects in which Cohen's position could and should have been more critical of that philosophy.The first concerns Cohen's negative agenda, that is, his critique of Nozick's libertarianism, the second Cohen's more positive agenda, the formulation of his egalitarian view. With regard to the first, this article argues that Cohen did not subject to full critical pressure the idea of self-ownership libertarians endorse, and consequently accorded it greater inequality-engendering power than libertarians may claim for it. With regard to the second point, this article suggests that Cohen implicitly assumed a market-friendly answer to the question of what consequences people who make choices should be held responsible for, which he could and should have questioned.
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Block, Walter E. "Russian Roulette; Rejoinder to Robins." Acta Economica Et Turistica 2, no. 1 (September 1, 2016): 85–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/aet-2016-0006.
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AbstractThis paper is an attempt to understand and elaborate upon libertarian punishment theory. It is completely non-controversial, even amongst non-libertarians, that the criminal must be forced to return his ill-gotten gains to the victim. At least among libertarians, it is agreed upon, in addition, that the punishment for the criminal must be proportionate to his crime. This, typically, implies that what he did to the victim should be done to him. For example, if A steals a car from B, A must be compelled to return that automobile to B, and, then, to give B a vehicle owned by A. But what about the fact that A scared B when he committed his dastardly crime? Should punishment theory take that into account too, and, if so, how? That is the subject of the present paper.
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Mickelson, Kristin M. "THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM: AN ABDUCTIVE APPROACH." Social Philosophy and Policy 36, no. 01 (2019): 154–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265052519000207.
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Abstract:This essay begins by dividing the traditional problem of free will and determinism into a “correlation” problem and an “explanation” problem. I then focus on the explanation problem, and argue that a standard form of abductive reasoning (that is, inference to the best explanation) may be useful in solving it. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of the abductive approach, I apply it to three standard accounts of free will. While each account implies the same solution to the correlation problem, each implies a unique solution to the explanationproblem. For example, all libertarian-friendly accounts of free will imply that it is impossible to act freely when determinism is true. However, only a narrow subset of libertarians have the theoretical resources to defend the incompatibilist claim that deterministic laws (qua deterministic) undermine free will, while other libertarians must reject this traditional incompatibilist view.
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Nock, Christopher John. "The Welfare State: An Affront to Freedom?" Canadian Journal of Political Science 21, no. 4 (December 1988): 757–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008423900057437.
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AbstractLibertarian writers such as Hayek, Friedman, Hospers and Nozick have insisted that welfare state policies are, per se, inimical to the classical liberal notion of freedom. The purpose of this article is to test the internal coherence of the libertarian attack upon the welfare state. Special attention is given to Friedman's contentions in his Capitalism and Freedom. It is argued that the libertarian attack upon the welfare state is misguided. Indeed, it is suggested that in order to achieve the type of individual liberty that libertarians wish to secure the state must be assigned a positive welfare role.
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Dominiak, Łukasz, and Igor Wysocki. "Libertarianism, Defense of Property, and Absolute Rights." Analiza i Egzystencja 61 (2023): 5–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.18276/aie.2023.61-01.
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The present paper argues that libertarians (e.g. Murray Rothbard, Stephan Kinsella) who subscribe the proportionality principle while embracing the view that to have a right to property is to have a right to defend it run into what we call the Property Defense Dilemma. For if the only way to defend property is to defend it disproportionately, then a private property right – contrary to what these thinkers claim – is not accompanied by a right to defend it. The most plausible way out of the dilemma – the present paper argues – is to conceive of private property rights as only weakly absolute, to use Matthew H. Kramer’s illuminating distinction. On the other hand, libertarians who as Walter Block would like to escape the dilemma by replacing the proportionality standard with the gentleness principle run into other sorts of problems (moral implausibility, incoherence) which also shows that it is the libertarian view on rights as infinitely stringent side constraints that calls for revision and attenuation.
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Dominiak, Łukasz. "Mixing Labor, Taking Possession, and Libertarianism: Response to Walter Block." Studia z Historii Filozofii 14, no. 3 (December 11, 2023): 169–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/szhf.2023.026.
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In his recent rejoinder to my paper Walter Block argues that only the Lockean labor-mixing theory of first acquisition is compatible with libertarianism. Block’s claim is in turn directed against a position held by me in the said paper that it is the first possession theory of original appropriation that is a better fit for libertarianism. Upon reading Block’s rejoinder and thinking intensely about this issue, in the present paper I agree with Block and disagree with my former self, accepting the view that it isindeed the Lockean labor-mixing theory that should be embraced by libertarians. This verdict is mainly motivated by the following arguments that I develop in detail in the paper: (1) no libertarian arguments against the labor-mixing theory seem to work, (2) the first possession theory is unable (contrary to the labor-mixing theory) to accommodate the idea of original appropriation tracking objective links between actors andthings; (3) the labor-mixing theory better fits our intuitions about justice in property acquisition. However, in order not to make things too easy for Block, I also argue that there are some surprising and problematic consequences of adopting the labor-mixing account. I am fully prepared to accept them. The question is whether so is Block.
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Mahoney, Joan, and Samuel Walker. "Controversial Civil Libertarians." Harvard Law Review 104, no. 4 (February 1991): 936. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1341510.
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Dobuzinskis, Laurent. "Real Libertarianism Assessed: Political Theory after Van Parijs." Canadian Journal of Political Science 37, no. 4 (December 2004): 1053–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000842390441021x.
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Real Libertarianism Assessed: Political Theory after Van Parijs, Andrew Reeve and Andrew Williams, eds., London: Palgrave, 2003, pp. x, 223Philippe Van Parijs' Real Freedom for All (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) is one of the most stimulating contributions to left-libertarianism published in the last decade. It is, therefore, not surprising that an edited volume that critically examines his ideas has now been published. The contributing authors (two of whom, Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, are other well known left-libertarians) raise interesting and often pointed questions, but they all have some good things to say about Van Parijs' original proposal.
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Mele, Alfred R. "Two Libertarian Theories: or Why Event-causal Libertarians Should Prefer My Daring Libertarian View to Robert Kane's View." Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80 (May 16, 2017): 49–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1358246117000108.
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AbstractLibertarianism about free will is the conjunction of two theses: the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism, and at least some human beings sometimes exercise free will (or act freely, for short).1 Some libertarian views feature agent causation, others maintain that free actions are uncaused, and yet others – event-causal libertarian views – reject all views of these two kinds and appeal to indeterministic causation by events and states.2 This article explores the relative merits of two different views of this third kind. One is Robert Kane's prominent view, and the other is the ‘daring libertarian’ view that I floated in Free Will and Luck.3 (I labeled the view ‘daring’ to distinguish it from a more modest libertarian view that I floated a decade earlier.)4 I say ‘floated’ because I am not a libertarian. I do not endorse incompatibilism; instead, I am agnostic about it. But if I were a libertarian, I would embrace my daring libertarian view (or DLV, for short). This article's thesis is that event-causal libertarians should prefer DLV to Kane's ‘dual or multiple efforts’ view.5
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Haynes, Sandra D., Don Rojas, and Wayne Viney. "Free Will, Determinism, and Punishment." Psychological Reports 93, no. 3_suppl (December 2003): 1013–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.2466/pr0.2003.93.3f.1013.
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Determinists were compared with weak, moderate, and strong libertarians with respect to philosophy of punishment. Data provided support for the contention that determinists are less punitive than libertarians.
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Nilsson, Ulf. "Making Peace with Libertarians." Social Philosophy Today 16 (2000): 227–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/socphiltoday20001628.
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FRANCIS, MARK. "Human Rights and Libertarians*." Australian Journal of Politics & History 29, no. 3 (April 7, 2008): 462–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8497.1983.tb00212.x.
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Nelkin, Dana K. "GOOD LUCK TO LIBERTARIANS." Philosophical Explorations 10, no. 2 (June 2007): 173–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13869790701305996.
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Gligorov, Vladimir. "Pareto Liberals and Libertarians *." Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice 9, no. 3 (October 1, 1991): 203–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/251569298x15668907345397.
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Abstract La teoria della scelta sociale è stata criticata dai libertari, i quali hanno ripetutamente tentato di trovare soluzioni alternative ai problemi di scelta sociale. In questo lavoro viene messa in discussione la soluzione libertaria del paradosso liberale di Sen prospettata da Harel e Nitzan, sulla base di una serie di considerazioni relative all’interpretazione etica e pragmatica del ruolo dei diritti nella teoria della scelta sociale.