Author Archives: Mark Friedman

About two months ago I was interviewed by Kosmos Online about my book. This interview is now available here, http://www.kosmosonline.org/group-post/podcast-mark-friedman-nozicks-libertarian-project, both as an audio file and as a transcript. Unfortunately, due to a technical problem the answer to one of the four questions was inaudible and thus not included as part of the Kosmos podcast. However, I have included the fouth question below, together with my (reconstructed) answer. Kosmos, a project of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, describes itself as an online community “that provides career advice and intellectual content for liberty loving academics.” Of course, all comments and questions regarding my interview are welcome. Continue Reading »

Libertarianism is generally associated with what is traditionally called an “isolationist” stance in matters of international relations. At the extreme edge, the anarcho-capitalists regard all states, of whatever form and function, as intrinsically evil. Therefore, they (following Rothbard) tend to see little distinction between the desirability of living under the authority of one state relative to others, and their foreign policy prescription will be to simply to devolve all states, while urging what is virtually a pacifist foreign policy. Continue Reading »

The question of whether external resources, including land, can be justly acquired in the first instance remains a highly controversial subject in political philosophy. The reason for this is that the possibility of appropriating natural assets in a morally unobjectionable fashion is an essential part of the larger narrative that justifies the institution of private property for those who follow in the tradition of Locke, including most particularly Robert Nozick. On this account, a just claim to natural resources is established when an individual invests his/her time and labor improving the asset in some substantial way, and other persons are not disadvantaged in the process, either because there remain other equally good resources available for appropriation or because of the general benefits gained from the institution of private property. Continue Reading »

For those of my readers not already familiar with the Institute for Humane Studies (“IHS”), I would like to provide here a brief introduction. Founded in 1961 by F.A. (“Baldy”) Harper, a Cornell University economist, IHS has for the last 50 years been one of the leading institutions promoting the virtues of classical liberalism/libertarianism. It does so through educational outreach, providing opportunities for faculty members to interact with peers, and through scholarships, seminars and conferences for graduate and undergraduate students on its campus at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, and at other academic institutions around the nation. Its alumni are well represented in the economics, political science, philosophy and history departments of our leading colleges and universities.

Online learning has long been a part of the IHS mission, and it is now in the midst of a major initiative to bring cutting edge scholarship to a wider audience. It has recently launched Liberty Academy, a free, self-paced online education resource featuring leading scholars within the classical liberal tradition. Its first two online courses, The Economic Way of Thinking and Political Philosophy: Liberty and Rights, consist of a series of original 2-5 minute videos, which in their totality provide an excellent introduction to each topic. After each video, students are referred to additional resources where they can delve deeper, discuss the ideas with others, and take a self-assessment to test their understanding.

I encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity, and to share it with your friends. There is a link (“Learning Liberty”) to Liberty Academy on the right margin of this page.

In my last post, “Style and Substance in ASU,” I critiqued Barbara Fried’s 2005 essay “Begging the Question With Style: Anarchy, State and Utopia at Thirty Years.” An electronic version of Fried’s piece is available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=523743. My post showed that Fried was deeply misinformed about or deliberately ignored what Nozick claimed for ASU and the substance of much of his argumentation. Moreover, her partisan attack on Nozick was rife with intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy. Apart from these quibbles, it was a noble effort.

With the one exception described below, Fried’s essay was not a frontal attack on the principles Nozick articulated and defended in ASU. Rather, she sought to undermine them through the rather strange method of attacking his style, and specifically by identifying and describing the alleged rhetorical trickery that enables him to cleverly disguise the underlying weakness of his arguments. She thus sought to discredit his entire enterprise “on the cheap,” i.e. without offering any new or interesting reasons to reject any of his central principles.

As just mentioned, Fried departed from her analysis of Nozick’s “devious” style just long enough to offer her readers a single substantive objection to his reasoning. She claims to have noticed a startling inconsistency between Nozick’s insistence on a near-absolute prohibition on the coercion of competent adults in Parts I and II of ASU, and the discussion in Part III of his own conception of what would constitute a “framework for utopias” under libertarian principles. According to Nozick, “Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others” (ASU, 312). Continue Reading »

In 2005, Barbara Fried, a law professor at Stanford, published a 34-page essay titled “Begging the Question With Style: Anarchy, State and Utopia at Thirty Years.” Fried’s piece appeared in an anthology of philosophical writings dedicated to the memory of Robert Nozick, who had passed away three years before. (Natural Rights Liberalism from Locke to Nozick, Paul et al., eds.). An electronic version of Fried’s contribution is available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=523743.

As we shall see, Fried’s essay is a strange, bordering on the bizarre piece of work, rife with intellectual dishonesty and manifestly unfair in its treatment of Nozick. Until now, it has received no rebuttal in the philosophical literature. I address it here both to challenge its characterization of Nozick’s most famous project, but also as an illustrative case study of the hysterical reaction of egalitarian-minded theorists to arguments that challenge their dogma. References to this essay below are in the form of “Begging,” plus the relevant page number in Natural Rights Liberalism. Continue Reading »

I wish to discuss a problem I have encountered in prescriptively applying libertarian theory to real world situations.  I believe that this difficulty is not idiosyncratic, and that other theorists have encountered the same issue, but I cannot find much discussion of it in the literature. I am referring to common situations, such as those covered by motorcycle helmet laws, where it is impossible (in practice) to realize the libertarian ideal because our laws do not (and most probably never will) require individuals to assume full responsibility for their free choices. Continue Reading »

If pressed to sum up their political philosophy in a single sentence, many libertarians will cite the following proposition, formulated by Ayn Rand in her essay “Man’s Rights”:

A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships–in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate force.

In a second essay, “The Nature of Government,” she expresses the same essential idea in a slightly different way:

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships–thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The moral stance referenced above has come to be known as the “non-aggression principle” (or”axiom”). Continue Reading »

One of the major fault lines in libertarian theory runs between those who regard the state as inherently evil (the “anarcho-capitalists”) and those who contend that the minimal state, i.e. one limited essentially to the provision of national defense and  domestic law enforcement, is morally legitimate. The anarcho-capitalist indictment of the state is quite simple and straight-forward: any coercion employed against innocent persons (those not themselves engaged in aggression against others) is wrong (the “non-aggression principle”). Since the minimal state, among other things, collects taxes on a non-consensual basis to fund its activities, it is morally objectionable. Continue Reading »