Monthly Archives: April 2013

Guest Post by Danny Frederick, http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick

In Part 1 we considered the following example. 

HIKER. A hiker on a back-packing trip in the high mountain country is beset by an unanticipated blizzard which strikes the area with such ferocity that her life is imperilled. She stumbles onto an unoccupied cabin, locked and boarded up for the winter, clearly somebody else’s private property. She smashes a window, enters, and huddles in a corner for three days until the storm abates. During this period she helps herself to her unknown benefactor’s food supply and burns his wooden furniture in the fireplace to keep warm.

It is permissible for the hiker to do as she does, even though she thereby infringes the property rights of the cabin-owner (throughout, ‘permissible’ means morally permissible). However, in virtue of infringing the cabin-owner’s rights, she owes him appropriate amends, where what amends are appropriate depends upon the full circumstances of the infringement.  Continue Reading »

by Danny Frederick, http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick

I am delighted to host a three-part essay by Danny Frederick, starting with the first installment below. He has degrees from the LSE and Birkbeck (London), and taught philosophy at King’s College London before working for eighteen years in management and accountancy. Since his return to academic philosophy, he has compiled an enviable publication record, appearing in both libertarian periodicals and prestigious philosophy journals of general interest.  His recent publications include ‘Doxastic Voluntarism: A Sceptical Defence’ (International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2013); ‘Popper, Rationality and the Possibility of Social Science’ (THEORIA, 2013); ‘A Puzzle about Natural Laws and the Existence of God’ (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, forthcoming); ‘Pro-tanto Obligations and Ceteris-paribus Rules’ (Journal of Moral Philosophy, forthcoming); and ‘Free Will and Probability’ (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming).

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Many libertarians believe that persons have moral rights which set the boundaries to what may be done to them by other persons. Those rights are commonly taken to include a right to self-ownership, a right to retain and use, or to transfer, any justly acquired property, and a right to acquire unowned natural resources (subject to appropriate constraints). Few libertarians assume that these rights are absolute. That is, libertarians generally assume that, for any right, there are some possible circumstances under which it is permissible to infringe it (throughout, when I say ‘permissible,’ I mean morally permissible). An example of a permissible infringement is given by Joel Feinberg (1977, p. 233).

HIKER. A hiker on a back-packing trip in the high mountain country is beset by an unanticipated blizzard which strikes the area with such ferocity that her life is imperilled. She stumbles onto an unoccupied cabin, locked and boarded up for the winter, clearly somebody else’s private property. She smashes a window, enters, and huddles in a corner for three days until the storm abates. During this period she helps herself to her unknown benefactor’s food supply and burns his wooden furniture in the fireplace to keep warm. Continue Reading »

In a previous post (http://naturalrightslibertarian.com/2011/10/natural-rights-libertarianism-and-ip/) I critiqued a carefully reasoned attack on intellectual property rights by Tom Palmer, an influential libertarian theorist.  As discussed in my earlier essay, one of the arguments deployed by Palmer is that there is an inconsistency between upholding libertarian rights on the basis of a labor-based moral desert theory (such as the self-ownership thesis) and the restrictions on liberty implied by IP.  His claim is based on the idea that the enforcement of IP rights conflicts with the right of self-ownership because it would preclude persons from using their own bodies in certain ways, i.e. in ways that infringe patents or copyrights. Continue Reading »