Monthly Archives: February 2013

The purpose  of this post is to emphasize a problem in our thinking about social safety nets that I believe is often ignored. Virtually all non-libertarians, and even most minimal state libertarian philosophers, will endorse  the following: “If a state social welfare program, funded by coercive taxation, is both a necessary and sufficient means of preventing grave harm to the welfare of innocent persons, its implementation is morally justified” (“Proposition #1”).   Continue Reading »

This is the third in an ongoing series of commentaries on the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” Bader and Meadowcroft eds.  In this post,  I will analyze Richard Arneson’s contribution, “Side Constraints, Lockean Individual Rights, and the Moral Basis of Libertarianism.”  For reasons that will soon become clear, I found this essay rather disappointing. Continue Reading »