Natural Rights Libertarian

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).

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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 »

Depending on one’s perspective, one of the joys (or frustrations) of reading Nozick is his unique style. As Matt Zwolinski recently wrote in reviewing The Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, (Bader and Meadowcroft eds): “One cannot read too far in it without coming across an idea that is brilliant, fecund, intriguing . . . and dropped almost as soon as it is introduced. Whole books, if not whole academic careers, could be devoted to working out in detail the ideas that Nozick relegates to mere footnotes and asides.” One supposed example of Nozick’s tendency in this regard is his thought experiment involving the “experience machine” (see ASU, 42-5).

This apparent digression has been the subject of extensive analysis and discussion in the literature, and is thus the subject of one of the essays comprising The Cambridge Companion, Fred Feldman’s “What We Learn From the Experience Machine,” at 59-86. I will cut to the chase, and simply say that Feldman’s contribution represents a classic case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. More explicitly, while he correctly identifies what this imaginary case is not about, he misses its point entirely. Continue Reading »

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 »

Natural rights libertarians hate coercion, particularly when employed by the most powerful and dangerous entity of all, i.e. the state. We despise it because it robs us of the moral discretion that is the birthright of every competent adult. It can be justified only in very narrow circumstances, as argued here: http://naturalrightslibertarian.com/natural-rights-libertarianism/ and here: http://naturalrightslibertarian.com/2012/10/justifying-the-minimal-state-part-ii/.  The fact that this coercion is administered by officials elected by a majority of our fellow citizens is irrelevant from the moral point of view. Continue Reading »

This is the second in a series of commentaries on the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” Bader and Meadowcroft eds.  My first review is here: http://naturalrightslibertarian.com/2012/10/justifying-the-minimal-state-part-ii/ .  In this post,  I will analyze Chandran Kukathas’s contribution, “E Pluribus Plurum or, How Not to Get to Utopia in Spite of Really Trying.” While Prof. Kukathas provides a useful exegesis of Nozick’s libertarian conception of utopia, along with a number of interesting observations, I do not believe that his critique lands any substantive blows against it. Continue Reading »