In this article, I argue that God is authoritative over us because he is our divine, causal parent. As our causal parent, God has duties to relate to us, but he can only fulfill those duties if he has the practical authority to give us commands aimed at our sanctification. From ought-implies-can reasoning, I conclude that God has that authority. After I make this argument, I show how the view has significant advantages over extant arguments for divine authority and can (...) help solve other significant problems in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Robert Nozick is the most discussed libertarian philosopher of these days. The paper examines the question of whether he supported forced taxation. The normative basis of Nozick’s position, the neo-Lockean theory of natural human rights are analyzed. On the basis of this theory, his argument in favor of the moral justification of the minimal state is reconstructed. While this reconstruction leaves it ambiguous whether such the state should be funded by taxation, six arguments are offered in favor of such tax (...) funding. These arguments are based on the same normative premises as Nozick’s own argument and can therefore be supported by contemporary Nozickians even if Nozick himself rejected taxation. These arguments are shown to help overcome some of the critical objections faced by Nozick’s theory and neo-Lockeanism as a whole. However, accepting these arguments entails accepting not only the tax financing of the minimal state, but also the expansion of the functions of this state to provide citizens with a social minimum in the form of an unconditional basic income or some other form of redistribution. (shrink)

According to the standard story, there are two defensible theories of property rights: historical and institutional theories. The former says that you own something when you’ve received it via an unbroken chain of just transfers from its original appropriation. The latter says that you own something when you’ve been assigned it by just institutions. This standard story says that the historical theory throws up a barrier to redistributive economic policies while the institutional theory does not. In this paper, I argue (...) that the standard story is wrong in almost every detail. For a start, neither of these theories are defensible. Both generate absurd consequences when combined with our non-ideal circumstances. In actuality, no unbroken chains of just transfers stretch from original appropriation to what we now possess. And our actual institutions are very seriously unjust. So both theories imply that we actually own almost nothing. I revise these theories so that they avoid this absurd consequence. Yet, when we do this, their distributive implications flip. The institutional theory throws up serious barriers to redistribution while the historical theory tears them down. In our non-ideal circumstances, the distributive implications of these theories are the opposite of what is standardly presumed. (shrink)

Recently, there has been an effort to make libertarianism compatible with a redistributive inheritance tax: When the tax is levied, the taxpayer in question is already dead and as such she cannot be a bearer of rights. The state is therefore allowed to redistribute the (value of) the estate according to some distributive principle. I consider (and finally dismiss) four successive arguments, each concluding that the state is allowed to use the estate for redistributive purposes. I show that neither of (...) them is able to reconcile (right-) libertarianism with a redistributive inheritance tax. Instead of trying to square the circle, proponents of such a tax should meet the theoretical essentials of (right-) libertarianism head-on. (shrink)

According to the nonworseness claim, it cannot be morallyworseto exploit someone than not to interact with them at all when the interaction 1) is mutually beneficial, 2) is voluntary, and 3) has no negative effects on third parties. My aim in this article is to defend the moral significance of exploitation from this challenge. To that end, I develop a novel account of why sweatshop owners have a moral obligation to pay sweatshop workers a nonexploitative wage despite the fact that (...) their relationship is entirely optional. More precisely, I defend two main claims. First, I show that sweatshop owners are morally obligated to pay sweatshop workers a nonexploitative wage even though they have a right not to hire them and even though that will require them to pay sweatshop workers a wage that is higher than the one they voluntarily accepted. Second, I explain why this obligation on the part of sweatshop owners is not defeated by the fact that other individuals not party to the transaction would benefit even more than sweatshop workers from receiving this additional level of pay. (shrink)

RésuméCette analyse situe la théorie du soin d'Asha Bhandary, telle que définie dans Freedom to Care, dans l'histoire de la philosophie, note certaines caractéristiques distinctives de la théorie qui font clairement évoluer la tradition de la théorie du soin, et soulève des énigmes et des questions concernant des éléments spécifiques de la théorie. Mes remarques portent principalement sur la première partie du livre et sur les quatre sujets suivants : (1) les racines rawlsiennes de la théorie de Bhandary ; (2) (...) les échanges de Bhandary avec Eva Feder Kittay ; (3) le choix de Bhandary de prendre J.S. Mill et John Rawls comme principaux interlocuteurs historiques ; et enfin (4) le choix méthodologique de Bhandary de cibler les « hommes/pères », les « femmes/mères » et les « enfants/filles/garçons » dans une grande partie de son analyse. (shrink)

According to the sufficiency principle, distributive justice requires that everyone have some sufficient level of resources or well-being, but inequalities above this threshold have no moral significance. This paper defends a version of the sufficiency principle as the appropriate response to moral uncertainty about distributive justice. Assuming that the appropriate response to moral uncertainty is to maximize expected choiceworthiness, and given a reasonable distribution of credence in some familiar views about distributive justice, a version of the sufficiency principle strikes the (...) optimal balance between the competing moral risks posed by implementing these views. In particular, it avoids the moral risk posed by views like Nozick’s libertarianism, which forbid redistributive taxation even for the sake of helping to provide for people’s basic needs: failing to do the latter, if it turns out that justice does require it, would be very morally wrong. This “uncertainty argument” has the advantage of minimizing reliance on controversial intuitions about distributive justice, helps to specifying a non-arbitrary threshold for sufficiency, and shows that the substantive moral implications of moral uncertainty are not limited to high-stakes applied ethics issues such as abortion and vegetarianism but instead extend to an issue at the heart of political philosophy. (shrink)

It is common to posit a clear opposition between the values served by property systems and the value of the environment. To give the environment its due, this view holds, the role of private property needs to be limited. Support for this has been said to be found in Locke’s famous ‘enough and as good’ proviso. This article shows that this opposition is mistaken, and corrects the implied reading of Locke’s proviso. In reality, there is no opposition between property and (...) the environment. This is shown using Locke’s theory of appropriation, as well as the real-life case of instream water appropriation. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I investigate the implications of libertarian morality in relation to the problem of climate change. This problem is explicated in the first chapter, where preliminary clarifications are also made. In the second chapter, I briefly explain the characteristics of libertarianism relevant to the subsequent study, including the central non-aggression principle. In chapter three, I examine whether our individual emissions of greenhouse gases, which together give rise to climate change, meet this principle. I do this based on the (...) assumption that we are the legitimate owners of the resources we use in those activities. In the fourth chapter, I question this assumption and scrutinize libertarianism’s restrictions on appropriations of climate-relevant resources, which leads me to distinguish between some different versions of the libertarian view. Toward the end of the chapter, I also examine libertarianism’s answer to the political question regarding how emission rights should be distributed. The fifth chapter investigates libertarianism’s verdicts for mere risks of infringement, as stemming from people’s emissions and acts of appropriations. In chapter six, I investigate the libertarian right to self-defense against both the effects of climate change and other people’s climate-relevant activities. In chapter seven, I discuss two intergenerational issues related to climate change: what libertarianism says concerning future generations and how libertarianism might deal with the problem of historical emissions. The eighth chapter explores the implications of libertarianism regarding collective moral wrongdoing in connection to climate change. In chapter nine, I take a look at the libertarian room for governmental responses for tackling climate change. The tenth and final chapter is a summary. The overall conclusion of the dissertation is that libertarianism recommends that we reduce our emissions and decrease our extraction of natural resources such as forests and fossil fuels. Furthermore, governments are permitted to undertake some quite substantial actions in order to fight the causes of climate change. I end with some bottom-up reflections on what these conclusions might say about the plausibility of libertarianism. I claim that although libertarianism after all manages to explain some of our moral intuitions regarding climate change, it is questionable whether libertarianism’s explanation is better than those offered by alternative moral theories. (shrink)

In discourses on digitization and the data economy, it is often claimed that data subjects shall beownersof their data. In this paper, we provide a problem diagnosis for such calls fordata ownership: a large variety of demands are discussed under this heading. It thus becomes challenging to specify what—if anything—unites them. We identify four conceptual dimensions of calls for data ownership and argue that these help to systematize and to compare different positions. In view of this pluralism of data ownership (...) claims, we introduce, spell out and defend a constructive interpretative proposal: claims for data ownership are charitably understood as attempts to call for theredistributionof material resources and the socio-culturalrecognitionof data subjects. We argue that as one consequence of this reading, it misses the point to reject claims for data ownership on the grounds that property in data does not exist. Instead, data ownership brings to attention a claim to renegotiate such aspects of thestatus quo. (shrink)

What can international courts say when criminals ask, by what right do you try me? Some authors attempt to draw a connection between humanity's responsibility to call offenders to account and the harm humanity has suffered as a consequence of the offender's crimes. Others have argued that there need not be a special connection between those calling to account and the offenders, as the right to punish offenders is a general right each and every person has. Both lines of argument (...) are ultimately unconvincing. Instead, I argue for a modified version of the second position which proposes a democratically based theory of responsibility for punishment held by international criminal law institutions. (shrink)

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679- 1749) fu poetessa, drammaturga e filosofa. La vivacità intellettuale e la forte determinazione le permisero di aggirare il pregiudizio di genere e di sottrarsi alle dinamiche di marginalizzazione femminile tipiche dell’età moderna. Pur celandosi dietro l’anonimato, Cockburn prese parte attiva al dibattito filosofico del tempo, intervenendo soprattutto in materia di morale. Le sue opere filosofiche, scritte in difesa di Locke o di Clarke, custodiscono, nonostante il dichiarato intento apologetico, tratti di originalità e indipendenza, particolarmente evidenti nella (...) teoria dell’obbligo morale, nell’interpretazione modale della dottrina lockeana d’identità personale, nell’ipotesi di una natura ontologica dello spazio. (shrink)

Sufficientarian libertarianism is a theory of justice that combines libertarianism’s focus on property rights and non-interference with sufficientarianism’s concern for the poor and needy. Persons are conceived as having stringent rights to direct their lives as they see fit, provided that everyone has enough to live a self-guided life. Yet there are different ways to combine libertarianism and sufficientarianism and hence different types of sufficientarian libertarianism. In the article I present and discuss three types, and I argue that the last (...) one overcomes the problems of the other two. The first type combines libertarianism with a sufficiency principle in what is sometimes called the ‘ethics of distribution’. The second incorporates modest welfare rights into a libertarian theory of justice. The third endorses a sufficientarian Lockean proviso for practices of private property within a libertarian theory of justice. I argue that it is superior to the others. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia la aplicación de la ley de la naturaleza en el estado de naturaleza. En este sentido, se analizará la definición abstracta de libertad, su correspondencia con el concepto práctico de libertad natural y la oposición de este último con la esclavitud que supone nacer sometido a un gobierno despótico. Posteriormente, se considerará la potestad de infringir castigos bajo pena capital y su derivación, a través de la guerra justa, en la figura de esclavitud legítima. De este modo, (...) se plantearán las tensiones que surgen al contrastar la crítica del absolutismo y la conquista con la legitimación de un poder privado despótico. (shrink)

:Following Locke, philosophical discussion of private property has tended to focus on the acquisition of natural resources as central. In this paper I first pursue the idea that the resource paradigm doesn't apply to most developed economies, and show how this creates problems for many accounts of property. My second ambition is to draw a normative conclusion by showing that redistribution of wealth generated in the context of services is more difficult to justify compared with the natural resource paradigm philosophers (...) have often focused on. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to the people of sinking island states. When their territories inevitably disappear, what, if anything, do the world's remaining territorial st...

William Perm summarized theMagna Cartathus: “First, It assertsEnglishmento be free; that's Liberty. Secondly, they that have free-holds, that's Property.” Since at least the seventeenth century, liberals have not only understood liberty and property to be fundamental, but to be somehow intimately related or interwoven. Here, however, consensus ends; liberals present an array of competing accounts of the relation between liberty and property. Many, for instance, defend an essentially instrumental view, typically seeing private property as justified because it is necessary to (...) maintain or protect other, more basic, liberty rights. Important to our constitutional tradition has been the idea that “[t]he right to property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” Along similar lines, it has been argued that only an economic system based on private property disperses power and resources, ensuring that private people in civil society have the resources to oppose the state and give effect to basic liberties. Alternatively, it is sometimes claimed that only those with property develop the independent characters that are necessary to preserve a regime of liberty. But not only have liberals insisted that, property is a means of preserving liberty, they have often conceived of it as an embodiment of liberty, or as a type of liberty, or indeed as identical to liberty. This latter view is popular among contemporary libertarians or classical liberals. Jan Narveson, for instance, bluntly asserts that “Liberty is Property,” while John Gray insists that “[t]he connection between property and the basic liberties is constitutive and not just instrumental.”. (shrink)

In debates about the moral foundations of intellectual property, one very popular strand concerns the role of labor as a moral basis for intellectual property rights. This idea has a great deal of intuitive plausibility; but is there a way to make it philosophically precise? That is, does labor provide strong reasons to grant intellectual property rights to intellectual laborers? In this paper, I argue that the answer to that question is “yes”. I offer a new view, different from existing (...) labor theories of intellectual property, which I call the productive capacities view. This view gives us a way to make sense of the idea of labor as the basis for intellectual property rights, as well as a tool for critically evaluating existing intellectual property institutions. (shrink)

Some have argued that Locke's failure to condemn contemporary slavery is best viewed as a personal moral lapse which does not reflect on his political theory. I argue to the contrary.

For classical liberals, natural property rights are the moral foundation of the market and of individual freedom. They determine the initial position from which persons legitimately make contracts and assess the validity of collective action. Since they establish the initial conditions of legitimate agreements, they cannot be dependent upon agreements. Persons possess these rights apart from social institutions. Natural rights typically not only prohibit interference with a person's body and mind but also forbid interference with a person's appropriation of unowned (...) natural resources and with his freedom to do as he chooses with the products that he makes from them, so long as he does not infringe upon the equal rights of others. These rights prescribe, as Locke put it, that persons be free “to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit … without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man”. (shrink)

In this paper, I first argue that waste is best understood as (a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process. I next argue for the immorality of waste. My concluding suggestions are that (W1) if one person needs something for her preservation and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it, and refuses (...) to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second may be morally wrong and that (W2) if one person needs something for her preservation understood according to her metric and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it according to his own metric, and refuses to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second is morally wrong. (shrink)

The typical method of acquiring a property right involves transfer from a previous owner. But sooner or later, that chain of transfers traces back to the beginning. That is why we have a philosophical problem. How does a thing legitimately become a piece of property for the first time ? In this essay, I follow the custom of distinguishing between mere liberties and full-blooded rights. If I have the liberty of doing X , then it is permissible for me to (...) do X . But the mere fact that I am at liberty to do X leaves open the possibility that you might be at liberty to interfere with my doing X . Accordingly, liberties are not full-blooded rights, since my having a right to do X has the additional implication that others are not at liberty to interfere with my doing X . When it comes to mere liberties, interference is not a violation. You can violate rights, but you cannot violate liberties. (shrink)

The idea that labor mixing confers property in unowned resources is, for many, the very heart of the Lockean system of property. In this essay I shall argue that this common view is mistaken. Locke...

This article discusses five attempts at justifying the provision of welfare on Kantian grounds. I argue that none of the five proposals is satisfactory. Each faces a serious challenge on textual or systematic grounds. The conclusion to draw from this is not that a Kantian cannot defend the provision of welfare. Rather, the conclusion to draw is that the task of defending the provision of welfare on Kantian grounds is a difficult one whose success we should not take for granted.

The Lockean theory of property licenses unilateral appropriation on the condition that there be ‘enough, and as good left in common for others’. However, the meaning of this proviso is all but clear. This article argues that the proviso is centered around the Lockean theory of freedom. To be free, I argue, we must be ‘non-subjected’ in the exercise of our rights, including our rights to appropriate. We enjoy such freedom only when the ability to exercise our rights does not (...) depend on others. That can obtain if literally enough and as good is left in common. But it can also obtain in other ways, for example through competitive labour markets. The latter offer something as good as ‘enough and as good’. (shrink)

This article is interested in the general question of what justifies territorial rights over unoccupied places, including places that are not occupied but are situated within the territorial borders of a state. This question arises because one of the most common defenses of rights over territory makes use of the idea of occupancy and has difficulty explaining such rights in places that are not occupied. It explores this question through an examination of the claims and arguments in the Canadian Arctic, (...) which provides an historically specific test case for the merits and plausibility of the various arguments appealed to. It argues that territorial rights in unoccupied places, including the Canadian Arctic, are justified on different grounds than in occupied parts of the territory, and that the justification also affects the kinds of rights—particularly over resources—that such states can claim. (shrink)

En Anarquía, Estado y utopía, Robert Nozick sostiene que los derechos naturales liberales se siguen de las restricciones morales indirectas a la acción y que éstas, a su vez, reflejan el principio kantiano subyacente de que los individuos son fines y no simplemente medios. En el presente trabajo se indaga en los supuestos fundamentos kantianos de la filosofía política de Nozick y en las relaciones que existen entre el concepto kantiano de dignidad y la propiedad sobre sí mismo, concepto este (...) último que suele ser aceptado como el fundamento último de la teoría de la justicia de Nozick. Se concluirá que, pese a ciertas similitudes, el concepto de propiedad sobre sí mismo resulta incompatible con el concepto kantiano de dignidad. Se concluirá, asimismo, que el concepto de propiedad sobre sí mismo ofrece una clave de lectura consistente de la obra política de Nozick y que en consecuencia, para tales fines, debe ser preferido por sobre el concepto kantiano de dignidad. (shrink)

This article examines John Simmons’ Lockean theory of territorial rights and defends the superiority of the rival nationalist theory that he rejects. It begins by arguing that all philosophical acc...

In the United States, the identities of criminal offenders are matters of public record, accessible to prospective employers, the press, and ordinary citizens. In European countries, the identities of offenders are routinely kept hidden, with some exceptions. The question addressed in this discussion concerns whether the public disclosure of the identities of offenders is part and parcel of their legal punishment. My contentions are that public disclosure is not conceptually part of legal punishment, necessary to serve substantive penal aims, or (...) likely to enhance penal aims. At times, it will conflict with defensible aims of legal punishment. Other values might support or require the public identification of criminal offenders, but the aims of legal punishment do not appear to do so. (shrink)

Although John Locke’s theory of appropriation is undoubtedly influential, no one seems to agree about exactly what he was trying to say. It is unlikely that someone will write the interpretation that effectively ends the controversy. Instead of trying to find the one definitive interpretation of Locke’s property theory, this article attempts to identify the range of reasonable interpretations and extensions of Lockean property theory that exist in the contemporary literature with an emphasis on his argument for unilateral appropriation. It (...) goes through Locke’s argument point-by-point discussing the controversy over what he said and over what he perhaps should have said to make the most valuable and coherent argument. The result is an outline of Lockean theories of property: a menu of options by which one might use appropriation to justify property rights. Supporters only need to pick the version they find most plausible, but opponents should be aware of the entire menu. Anyone claiming to refute appropriation-based property rights must address not only one but all potentially valid versions of it. (shrink)

When officials of some political society portray their state as legitimate - and when do they not! - they intend to be laying claim to a large body of rights, the rights in which their state's legitimacy allegedly consists. The rights claimed are minimally those that states must exercise if they are to retain effective control over their territories and populations in a world composed of numerous autonomous states. Often the rights states are trying to claim in asserting their legitimacy (...) go far beyond this minimum. But whether a state's claims are modest or extravagant, the rights claimed invariably fall into three categories. The first category is a set of rights held over or against those persons who fall within the state's claimed legal jurisdiction - what I will call rights over subjects. The second is a set of rights claimed against those persons without the state's jurisdiction - what we can call rights against aliens. And the third category is a set of rights held over a particular geographical territory (whose extent largely determines the scope of the state's jurisdiction) - call these rights over territory. The rights states claim in these three categories jointly define their conception of the sovereignty that they (or their governments or institutions) enjoy, sovereignty that is more extensive (strong, absolute) as the rights asserted in these categories are more numerous and wide-ranging. It is principally on the third of these categories - on the nature and possible moral bases for the claims states make over geographical territories - that I will focus in this essay. The modern state is a territorial entity, and it claims to be legitimately so. Sidgwick was surely correct when he wrote that "it seems essential to the modern conception of a State that its government should exercise supreme dominion over a particular portion of the earth's surface ... Indeed, in modern political thought the connection between a political society and its territory is so close that the two notions almost blend." Common sense seems to view the territoriality of the modern state as natural and unquestionable. That, perhaps, explains why so little has been written, either by contemporary theorists or by the authors of the classics of modern political philosophy, on the moral bases of the modern state's claimed rights over territory. States typically claim not only legal authority over their territories (i.e., that their rights over those territories should be affirmed by international law), but moral authority as well - at the very least insofar as the relevant principles of international law are thought themselves to have moral weight. My concern here, then, will be with the possible moral bases for the kinds of claims made over geographical territories by typical modern states. (shrink)

Research Articles Thomas G. West, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

This paper argues that the Lockean proviso can be utilized as a relevant principle of justice for food security under global climate change. Since reducing GHG emissions is key to enhancing food security, we suggest a global food security scheme that systematically allots, among all people, access to GHG sinks in food systems impacted by global climate change. For consideration of the scheme, it is important to have a principle of justice. Furthermore, it should incorporate the value of fairness. A (...) relevant principle of climate justice for food security should meet the following criteria: (1) the parties concerned under the scheme are states; (2) fairness does not undermine the requirement that the basic needs of all people must be met; (3) when determining fair burdens, a fair distribution of the rights to use GHG sinks should be sensitive both to each state’s responsibility for its GHG emissions and to (4) each state’s effort to reduce such emissions. With them in mind, first, we argue that the Lockean proviso can provide legitimate guidance for each state. Second, the Lockean proviso reasonably enjoins that a state has a right to a food system that secures its citizens’ basic needs, and a duty to meet the basic needs of other people. Third, the Lockean proviso can be deployed as a principle of both global justice and intergenerational justice for food security. Finally, the Lockean proviso enables us to count the reduction of GHG emissions by each state as “the fruits of its labors”. (shrink)

By virtue of the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, the territorial claims to Antarctica of seven of the original signatories were held in abeyance or “frozen.” Considered by many as an exemplar of international law, the Antarctic Treaty System has come to be increasingly questioned, however, in a very much changed global scenario that presents new challenges to the governance of the White Continent. In this context, it is necessary to gain a clearer understanding of the moral weight of those (...) initial claims, which stand as a cornerstone of the treaty. The aim of this article is to offer an appraisal of such claims, which may be divided into two main kinds: those grounded on some relevant link to the territory, and those grounded on official documents and geographical doctrines. After pointing to the limitations and challenges that they face, I conclude with some remarks about how this assessment ought to serve as a starting point to rethink the territorial status of Antarctica. (shrink)

Do territorial rights include the right to exclude? This claim is often assumed to be true in territorial rights theory. And if this claim is justified, a state may have a prima facie right to unil...

This essay attempts to clarify the distinction between property and sovereignty, and to bring out the importance of that distinction to a liberal nationalism. Beginning with common intuitions about what distinguishes our rights to our possessions from the state's rightful governance over us, it proceeds to explore some historical sources of these intuitions, and the importance of a sharp distinction between ownership and governance to the rise of liberalism. From here, the essay moves into an exploration of group ownership, and (...) the ways in which group ownership can in practice turn into an illiberal kind of sovereignty The point is to shed new light on problems that nationalist states — states purporting to represent or foster a particular group identity — characteristically face. Examples of these problems, from the Israel/Palestine conflict, are put forth in the conclusion. (shrink)

Writers of very different persuasions have relied on arguments about self-ownership; in recent years, it is libertarians who have rested their political theory on self-ownership, but Grotian authoritarianism rested on similar foundations, and, even though it matters a good deal that Hegel did not adopt a full-blown theory of self-ownership, so did Hegel's liberal-conservatism. Whether the high tide of the idea has passed it is hard to say. One testimony to its popularity was the fact that G. A. Cohen for (...) a time thought that the doctrine of self-ownership was so powerful that an egalitarian like himself had to come to terms with it; but he has since changed his mind. I have tackled the topic of self-ownership glancingly elsewhere, but have not hitherto tried to pull together the observations I have made in passing on those occasions. The view I have taken for granted and here defend is that self-ownership is not an illuminating notion—except in contexts that are unattractive to anyone of libertarian tastes. (shrink)

C.B. Macpherson's “Possessive Individualist” reading of Locke is one of the most radical and influential interpretations in the history of exegesis. Despite a substantial critical response over the past five decades, Macpherson's reading remains orthodox in various circles in the humanities generally, particularly in legal studies, and his interpretation of several crucial passages has unwittingly been followed even by his sharpest critics within Lockean scholarship. In order to present the definitive rebuttal to this interpretation, and so finally to lay it (...) to rest, I argue that every one of Macpherson's key pieces of textual evidence can be rejected entirely on its own terms; that is, by reference to no more than its immediate context. In this way I contend that fault of the Possessive Individualist reading lies far deeper than mere cherry-picking of the Lockean corpus, but centrally involves misreading, misplacing and misrepresenting the very parts of Locke's work Macpherson cites as evidence for his reading. (shrink)

In this article, I examine A. John Simmons’s philosophical anarchism, and specifically, the problems that result from the combination of its three foundational principles: the strong correlativity of legitimacy rights and political obligations; the strict distinction between justified existence and legitimate authority; and the doctrine of personal consent, more precisely, its supporting assumptions about the natural freedom of individuals and the non-natural states into which individuals are born. As I argue, these assumptions, when combined with the strong correlativity and strict (...) distinction theses, undermine Simmons’s claim, which is central to his philosophical anarchism, that a state may be justified in enforcing the law, even if illegitimate or unjustified in existing. (shrink)

The Basic-Income Guarantee is a governmental programme of income redistribution that enjoys an increasing predicament among academic and political circles. Traditionally, the philosophical defence for this programme has been articulated from the standpoint of social liberalism, republicanism, or communism. Recently, however, libertarian philosopher Matt Zwolinski also tried to reconcile the Basic-Income Guarantee scheme with libertarian ethics. To do so, he resorted to the Lockean proviso: to the extent that the institutionalization of private property impoverishes certain people by depriving their access (...) to natural resources, these people deserve compensation and the most pragmatic way of providing this is through a Basic-Income Guarantee. This paper examines Zwolinski’s arguments and responds by demonstrating that the Basic-Income Guarantee is incompatible with libertarian ethics: the current levels of poverty are not caused by the institutionalization of private property and the Basic-Income Guarantee does not constitute a pragmatic approach to eradicate poverty. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that received accounts of the concept of human dignity face more difficulties than has been appreciated, when explaining the connection between human dignity and the duty of respect that dignity is supposed to generate. It also argues that a novel, relational, account has the adequate structure to explain such connection.

Creo que la defensa de John Locke del derecho a castigar está en tensión con su defensa de la igualdad humana. El propósito central de este artículo es mostrar que esta tensión podría ser resuelta si la justificación del derecho a castigar de Locke se basa en el concepto de confianza. Este concepto es claramente usado por Locke para justificar el derecho de resistencia. Pienso que también es posible usarlo para justificar la existencia del derecho a castigar. Pero, incluso si (...) esta justificación fuera exitosa, algunos problemas permanecen. I believe that John Locke's defense of the right to punish is in tension with his defense of human equality. The main purpose of this article is to show that this tension could be resolved if Locke's justification of the right to punish is based on the concept of trust. This concept is clarley employed by Locke to justify the right of resistance. I think that it is possible to use it also to justify the existence of the right to punish. But, even if this justification were succesful, some problems remain. (shrink)

Allen Buchanan has argued that a widely defended view of the nature of the state – the view that the state is a discretionary association for the mutual advantage of its members – must be rejected because it cannot adequately account for moral requirements of humanitarian intervention. This paper argues that Buchanan’s objection is unsuccessful,and moreover, that discretionary association theories can preserve an important distinction that Buchanan’s alternative approach to political legitimacy cannot: the distinction between “internal” legitimacy (a state’s ability (...) to morally justify itself to its own members) and “external” legitimacy (a state’s ability to morally justify itself to humanity more broadly). (shrink)

This essay examines three potential arguments against high-frequency trading and offers a qualified critique of the practice. In concrete terms, it examines a variant of high-frequency trading that is all about speed—low-latency trading—in light of moral issues surrounding arbitrage, information asymmetries, and systemic risk. The essay focuses on low-latency trading and the role of speed because it also aims to show that the commonly made assumption that speed in financial markets is morally neutral is wrong. For instance, speed is a (...) necessary condition for low-latency trading’s potential to cause harm in “flash crashes.” On the other hand, it also plays a crucial role in a Lockean defense against low-latency trading being wasteful developed in this essay. Finally, this essay discusses the implications of these findings for related high-frequency trading techniques like futures arbitrage or latency arbitrage—as well as for an argument as to why quote stuffing is wrong. Overall, the qualifications offered in this essay act as a counterbalance to overblown claims about trading at high speeds being wrong. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare two prominent positions within contemporary “Analytic” and “Continental” political philosophy: philosophical anarchism and the paradox of politics. I compare each through an analysis of their respective criticisms of state legitimacy and the internal difficulties each position has in accounting for the legitimacy of state violence. I argue that these internal difficulties force each position to ask questions and criticize assumptions commonly found in the other position. I hope to show through this comparison that work across (...) the analytic/continental divide can tell us a great deal about a range of intractable political phenomena. (shrink)