In “Libertarian Natural Rights,” Siegfried Van Duffel endeavors to illuminate shortcomings in libertarian defenses of natural‐rights theory. Noting that defenses based on freedom beg the question, Van Duffel explores whether libertarians can find salvation in the concept of the sovereignty of the will, and concludes that this approach leads to incoherence. But because his arguments ignore the actual moral basis of natural rights, they at best fell a straw man, not libertarianism. They do, however, call into question the viability of (...) the entire moral enterprise. (shrink)

ABSTRACT G. E. Morton tries to defend libertarianism against my claim that it relies on an implausible secularization of ideas of divine sovereignty. But it is not true, as he claims, that morality itself entails human sovereignty: witness the moral theories of divine‐command theorists and philosophical consequentialists. Nor is it true that sovereignty can be conceptually transferred from God to equal human individuals, since they would have no legitimate way to legislate over each other, short of a unanimous “general will.” (...) Nor, finally, does the idea of first possession rescue private property rights, since it is as applicable to animals and children as to adult human beings. (shrink)

: Many people have lamented the proliferation of human rights claims. The cure for this problem, it may be thought, would be to develop a theory that can distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights. I argue, however, that the proliferation of human rights mirrors a deep problem in human rights theory itself. Contemporary theories of natural rights to welfare are historical descendants from a theory of rights to subsistence which was developed in twelfth-century Europe. According to this theory, each human (...) being has a special role to fulfil in God's plan and therefore has inalienable rights to subsist. Later theories have secularized this idea by claiming that human beings are purposive agents. Secularization, however, comes at a price. In the case of these theories, the price is a failure to provide satisfactory answers to the most basic questions we would expect of a theory of natural rights to answer. They have failed to provide a basis for ascribing these rights to all and only to human beings. They have not been able to generate a clear and viable criterion for ascribing duties correlative to these rights. And they cannot limit rights-claims in a non-arbitrary way. Hence we should abandon these theories. (shrink)

Ecological thought has made a deep and apparently lasting impact on virtually every tradition in political theory (cf. e.g. Dobson, 2007) with the exception of libertarianism. While left- and right...

G. E. Morton’s attempt to defend libertarianism against my claim that it relies on an implausible secularization of ideas of divine sovereignty fails. It is not true that morality itself entails human sovereignty, as witnessed by the moral theories of theological voluntarists and of consequentialists. Nor is it true that sovereignty can be conceptually transferred from God to equal human individuals, since they would have no legitimate way to legislate over each other short of a unanimous “general will.” Nor, finally, (...) does the idea of first possession rescue libertarian philosophy, since it is as applicable to animals and children as to adult human beings. (shrink)