Susan Moller Okin's critique of libertarianism in Justice, Gender, and the Family has received only slight attention in the libertarian literature. I find this neglect of Okin's argument surprising: The argument is straightforward and, if sound, it establishes a devastating conflict between the core libertarian notions of self-ownership and the acquisition of property through labour. In this paper, I first present a reconstruction of Okin's argument. In brief, she points out that mothers make children through their labour; thus it would (...) seem that mothers own their children; but this implies that the children are not self-owners. I then examine the two most common objections to this argument in the literature: mothers do not make children, and acquisition by labour includes an exception for persons. I give several replies to each objection, including an extension of Okin's argument that I call Okin's dilemma. This dilemma argues that the libertarian can avoid Okin's conclusion only by requiring an.. (shrink)

Agents do not merely have duties – they often have directed duties to others. This paper first reveals problems with traditional attempts to equate these directed duties with claims and claim rights. It then defends a novel account of directionality that locates the unifying element of directed duties in a counterparty’s prioritization of the duties owed to her. If one agent has a directed duty to another, then the degree to which fulfilling the duty matters to the agent to whom (...) it is owed itself matters – in a distinctive, special and inherent sense. This subject-determined normative significance of directed duties can be used to articulate a priority account of directionality, an account that can demonstrate why many have taken control powers, interests or the authority to demand compliance to be so important in analyzing the directed duties we owe to others. (shrink)

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the second (...) can better justify a right to rear. (shrink)

I defend the idea that a liberal commitment to value neutrality is best honoured by maintaining a pure cardinality component in our rankings of opportunity or liberty sets. I consider two challenges to this idea. The first holds that cardinality rankings are unnecessary for neutrality, because what is valuable about a set of liberties from a liberal point of view is not its size but rather its variety. The second holds that pure cardinality metrics are insufficient for neutrality, because liberties (...) cannot be individuated into countable entities without presupposing some relevantly partisan evaluative perspective. I argue that a clear understanding of the liberal basis for valuing liberty shows the way to satisfying responses to both challenges. (shrink)

This article helps to clear up some misunderstandings about the Will Theory of rights. Section 2 briefly outlines the Theories of Rights. Section 3 elucidates some salient differences amongst self-described anti–Interest Theory accounts. Section 4 rebuts Carl Wellman’s and Arthur Ripstein’s respective arguments about the Will Theory differing from “Choice” or Kantian theories of a right. Section 5 then offers a candidate explanation of why people might subscribe to the Will Theory in the first place.

According to some accounts of exploitation, most notably Ruth Sample’s degradation-based account and Robert Goodin’s vulnerability-based account, exploitation occurs when an advantaged party fails to constrain their advantage in light of another’s disadvantage, regardless of the cause of this disadvantage. Because the duty of constraint in these accounts does not depend on the cause of the disadvantage, the advantaged’s duty of constraint is what I call a ‘come-what-may’ duty. I show that come-what-may duties create moral hazards that can themselves be (...) exploited by the disadvantaged parties. In such cases these accounts of exploitation are either self-frustrating or over-demanding. (shrink)

:In this paper I argue that libertarianism neither prohibits exchanges in which consent is gained through deceit, nor does it entail that such exchanges are morally invalid. However, contra James Child’s similar claim, that it is incapable of delivering these verdicts, I argue that libertarianscanclaim that exchanges involving deceitfully obtained consent are morally invalid by appealing to an external theory of moral permissibility.

This paper aims to offer a plausible and renewed defence of the axioms of the already well-known account of political philosophy ‘luck egalitarianism’. By finding certain support not only in the Kantian moral programme but also in widely accepted intuitions of our time, it is contended that luck egalitarianism possesses sufficient justification to become an ethical guide at the global level, revealing plausibly the existence of a compelling positive moral duty to terminate global poverty and denouncing its toleration as nothing (...) but a matter of injustice. The arguments provided to embrace such a proposal are built upon the widely accepted claim in moral philosophy that ‘all persons are equal in fundamental moral worth’. From this standpoint, I argue that the luck egalitarian doctrine can not only satisfy such a claim to its ultimate consequences, but it also reasonably overcome its most severe challenges that have diminished its merits in recent times when it aspires to become a tenable theory of justice. (shrink)

Analytic political philosophy tries to make our political language more precise. But in doing so it risks departing from our natural language and intuitions. This article examines this tension. We...

The present paper investigates the question of whether right-libertarians must accept easements by necessity. Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof. As we demonstrate in the paper, however, the homestead principle understood in such an absolutist way generates contradictions within the set of rights distributed on its (...) basis. In order to avoid such contradictions, easements by necessity must be incorporated into the libertarian theory of property rights and the homestead principle must be truncated accordingly. (shrink)

In this thesis I present a rights-based theory of exploitation. I argue that successful conceptions of exploitation should begin with the ordinary language claim that exploitation involves `taking unfair advantage'. Consequently, they must combine an account of what it means to take advantage of another with an account of when transactions are unfair. Existing conceptions of exploitation fail to provide adequate accounts of both aspects of exploitation. -/- Hillel Steiner and John Roemer provide convincing accounts of the unfairness involved in (...) exploitation, but because they fail to provide restrictive `advantage taking' conditions, their theories of exploitation include cases that we would not ordinarily describe as exploitations. Ruth Sample and Robert Goodin provide accounts that place a stronger emphasis on the attitudes involved in exploitation and the processes that bring it about. Unfortunately, these theories do not properly incorporate the unfairness aspect of exploitation. Consequently, they are either self-frustrating or incomplete. -/- I provide a conception of exploitation that combines both aspects. I claim that a bilateral, strictly Pareto improving, and voluntary transaction t between A and B is exploitative just in case (1) there exists an unrectified property rights violation at some point in the history of exchanges leading to t that (2) reduces B's bargaining power by altering her status quo point, and (3) the degree to which B's preferences are satisfied in t is less than it would be had B's bargaining power not been reduced (by the alteration of her status quo point). Further, (4a) A's egoistic preferences are better satisfied in t because B's bargaining power is limited, and (4b) if the previous conditions also hold for A, then the reduction in A's bargaining power is less than the reduction in B's bargaining power. Finally, (5) A truly believes the previous conditions hold. (shrink)

In this paper, the author offers a synoptic view of different theories of intergenerational justice, along two dimensions (savings/dissavings) and three modalities (prohibition, authorisation, obligation). After presenting successively the indirect reciprocity, the mutual advantage, the utilitarian and the Lockean approaches, special attention is given to the egalitarian theory of intergenerational justice. Two key differences between the egalitarian view on intergenerational justice and the sufficientarian interpretation of sustainability are highlighted.

Do non-human animals have an interest in sociopolitical freedom? Cochrane has recently taken up this important yet largely neglected quest ion. He argues that animal freedom is not a relevant moral concern in itself, because animals have a merely instrumental but not an intrinsic interest in freedom (Cochrane 2009a, 2012). This paper will argue that even if animals have a merely instrumental interest in freedom, animal freedom should nonetheless be an important goal for our relationships with animals. Drawing on recent (...) work on the value of freedom, it will be argued that freedom is non-specifically instrumentally valuable. Accordingly, freedom is a means to other goods, but often it is not possible to identify those goods in advance or aim for them directly. Some of the reasons that make freedom non-specifically valuable for human relationships, it will be argued, also apply to relationships between humans and animals. Amongst other implications, it will be shown how this argument provides a response to those who fear that stricter animal protection policies might undermine people’s freedom: A concern for freedom actually requires stricter protection policies rather than speak against them. (shrink)

Domesticated animals need to be treated as fellow citizens: only if we conceive of domesticated animals as full members of our political communities can we do justice to their moral standing—or so Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue in their widely discussed book Zoopolis. In this contribution, we pursue two objectives. Firstly, we reject Donaldson and Kymlicka’s appeal for animal citizenship. We do so by submitting that instead of paying due heed to their moral status, regarding animals as citizens misinterprets (...) their moral qualities and thus risks treating them unjustly. Secondly, we suggest that Donaldson and Kymlicka’s reinforced focus on membership should draw our attention to the moral standing of a further ‘species’, namely robots. Developments within artificial intelligence have advanced rapidly in recent years. With robots’ gaining ever greater capacities and abilities, we need to ask urgent questions about the moral ramifications of these technical advances. (shrink)

Despite many points of divergence, social scientists and social theorists seem united by one primary concern: to identify what it is people are doing. The thought that this might count as not only a viable but centrally important concern is grounded in a scepticism about the ability of societies’ ordinary members to reliably correctly identify their own and others’ actions. In this scepticism, such social scientists and social theorists usually situate themselves in opposition to ethnomethodologists and Peter Winch. This scepticism (...) is grounded in a belief that ordinary or competent members of societies are unreliable authorities on the identity of their own and others’ actions because they are subject to systems of sociological refraction. The idea being that ordinary members of society are systematically misled as to the identity of their actions and those of their peers because they — or their perceptions of actions — are subject to the refractive properties of ideology, or folk theories of action, and so on. In this paper, I subject to analysis this core commitment of much social science and social theory. (shrink)