Author Archives: Mark Friedman

In my last post I argued that anti-discrimination laws could not, absent extraordinary circumstances, be countenanced under natural rights principles. A similar argument applies to the affirmative action programs instituted by all of our leading public colleges and universities.  In both cases, social policy is pursued by impermissible means, violating basic moral principles.

Anti-discrimination laws contravene our right to associate (or not) with whom we please, while affirmative action offends every person’s right to be treated justly  under the rule of law. If a state is going to undertake the production of certain goods, say roads and highways, it must–if it respects the rule of law–do so in a way that does not consciously favor one group of citizens over another.  It can’t build safe, well-engineered roads in communities where one ethnic group predominates, and shoddy, unsafe roads in others. By the same token, public colleges and universities must apply the same criteria for admission to all citizens.[1]  Continue Reading »

One of the undesirable side-effects of the drive toward marriage equality under law (which I support) is that it has given new momentum to the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.  All states have them, and they prohibit businesses, charitable groups and civic organizations from discriminating on the basis of certain specified characteristics; twenty-one states include sexual orientation in the list.  As argued below, all of these laws are inconsistent with basic notions of individual liberty.  

The latest high-profile case involves a New Mexico commercial photographer who refused to memorialize the commitment ceremony of a same sex couple (marriage being currently unavailable to them in this state), because such relationships clashed with her sincerely held religious convictions. The NM Supreme Court held that the law applied to her, and that she may therefore be coerced into compliance by fines. See http://verdict.justia.com/2013/09/04/new-mexico-supreme-court-anti-discrimination-law-to-wedding-photographere Thus, dissenters from the “official” moral stance taken by New Mexico may be put to a choice between adhering to their beliefs and earning a livelihood. Continue Reading »

In 2005, Larry Summers, the illustrious economist and former president of Harvard University got himself into considerable hot water when he articulated the following hypothesis regarding why relatively few women occupy senior-level science and engineering positions:

So my best guess, to provoke you…[is] that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them. [1]

Were Summers an academic philosopher, he might have asked himself the following question before speaking: “If it turns out to be an unalterable fact that as a society we can have either a meritocracy or the relatively even representation of men and women in high-level STEM professions, but not both, this will cause many people, especially feminists and egalitarians, great anguish; so wouldn’t it be better to simply keep my mouth shut on this subject?” In other words, if the dissemination of a particular truth will produce more harm than good under a utilitarian calculation, why should we not suppress it? (assuming of course that this were somehow within our power)    Continue Reading »

The now-infamous Dr. Gosnell routinely performed abortions by inducing labor,  delivering live babies, and then severing their spinal cords. If the babies were more than 24 weeks old, this “procedure” constitutes first degree murder under Pennsylvania law.  His jury found him guilty of three counts of this crime, but the number of murders he committed was certainly much higher. See the Report issued by the investigating grand jury in this case, pp. 5-6 (readily available online).

Gosnell’s unsuccessful legal defense was that he had already killed these fetuses in utero by means of  injections of the drug Digoxin. Because the fetuses were past the 24-week cutoff, this would still have been a felony, but not murder, under the laws of Pennsylvania. The jury rejected this claim, which is why Gosnell will spend the rest of his life in prison. Continue Reading »

This is the first in a two-part series. Part I will analyze whether there exists a doctrinaire rights-based position on the ethics of abortion, i.e. a persuasive view that can be derived from our first principles. Part II will discuss what the recent murder convictions of Kermit Gosnell, the now infamous Philadelphia late-term abortionist, tells us about the current state of our society, and why libertarians should care about this.

It is certainly the case that most committed libertarians tend to hold strong (if not extreme) pro-choice views, as reflected in section 1.4 of the Libertarian Party’s 2012 platform, which provides that:  “…we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.” On its face, this would permit legal abortions up to the actual moment of birth. Continue Reading »

There is a lively debate taking place in libertarian/classical liberal blogosphere over whether the concept of social justice plays a useful role in political philosophy. See, e.g. here:  http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/  and here:  http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/05/specificity-and-overspecificity-about-social-justice/#comments.  Most of this dialog has centered on the question whether this idea can be given a sufficiently precise definition and whether it is internally coherent. While I believe these issues are certainly worth exploring, I am going to argue that even if it satisfies these tests, the inclusion of the concept of social justice in rights-based political theories constitutes a large step down the road to confusion and error.     Continue Reading »

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

In Parts 1 and 2, we considered the following case.

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.

We came to the conclusions that:

• the hiker’s action is a permissible infringement of the cabin-owner’s rights;

• it is permissible even if the cabin-owner refuses to consent to it;

• the net social benefit of the action is not sufficient to make it permissible;

• its permissibility depends on the hiker’s duty to herself, because only another duty can override the hiker’s duty to respect the cabin-owner’s rights;

• the hiker’s duty to save her own life makes the action permissible, rather than obligatory, because she can release herself from her duty to herself;

• in virtue of infringing the cabin-owner’s rights, the hiker owes him appropriate amends. Continue Reading »

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).

__________

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 »