Results for 'Libertarianism'

262 found
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  1. Libertarianism and agentive experience.Justin A. Capes - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):33-44.
    Libertarianism about free will conjoins the thesis that free will requires indeterminism with the thesis that we have free will. Here the claim that we have experiential evidence for the libertarian position is assessed. It is argued that, on a straightforward reading, the claim is false, for our experiences as agents don't support the claim that free will requires indeterminism. However, our experiences as agents may still have a role to play in an overall case for libertarianism, insofar (...)
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  2. From Libertarianism to Egalitarianism.Justin Schwartz - 1992 - Social Theory and Practice 18 (3):259-288.
    A standard natural rights argument for libertarianism is based on the labor theory of property: the idea that I own my self and my labor, and so if I "mix" my own labor with something previously unowned or to which I have a have a right, I come to own the thing with which I have mixed by labor. This initially intuitively attractive idea is at the basis of the theories of property and the role of government of John (...)
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  3. Arguing with “Libertarianism Without Argument”: Critical Rationalism and How it Applies to Libertarianism.J. C. Lester - manuscript
    “Critical-Rationalist Libertarianism” (CRL) was replied to in “Libertarianism Without Argument” (the reply). Various points in that text are here given responses. Both critical rationalism and how it applies to libertarianism are elucidated and elaborated. This response will proceed by quoting the reply where relevant (virtually all of it) and then responding immediately after the quotations, following the order of the reply’s very brief “critique” (605 words).
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  4. Left Libertarianism for the Twenty-First Century.Mark R. Reiff - 2023 - Journal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (2):191-211.
    There are many different kinds of libertarianism. The first is right libertarianism, which received its most powerful expression in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), a book that still sets the baseline for discussions of libertarianism today. The second, I will call faux libertarianism. For reasons I will explain in this paper, most ‘man-on-the-street’ libertarians and most politicians who claim to be libertarians are actually this kind of libertarian. And third, there is left libertarianism, (...)
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  5. Libertarianism and collective action: is there a libertarian case for mandatory vaccination?Charlie T. Blunden - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (1):71-74.
    In his paper ‘A libertarian case for mandatory vaccination’, Jason Brennan argues that even libertarians, who are very averse to coercive measures, should support mandatory vaccination to combat the harmful disease outbreaks that can be caused by non-vaccination. He argues that libertarians should accept the clean hands principle, which would justify mandatory vaccination. The principle states that there is a (sometimes enforceable) moral obligation not to participate in collectively harmful activities. Once libertarians accept the principle, they will be compelled to (...)
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  6.  77
    Left-Libertarianism and Genetic Justice.Konstantin Morozov - 2023 - Ethical Thought 23 (1):95-108.
    Distributive justice is one of the central questions of contemporary moral and political philosophy. Discussions on this topic are often presented as a confrontation between two groups of thinkers: libertarians and luck egalitarians. The former emphasize the dependence of the existing distribution on the individual choice and personal responsibility of people, and therefore are skeptical about various redistribution programs. The latter, on the contrary, emphasize the influence of morally arbitrary luck on the economic situation of people, and therefore welcome redistributive (...)
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  7. Libertarianism and the Problem of Flip-flopping.John Martin Fischer - 2016 - In Kevin Timpe & Daniel Speak (eds.), Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns. Oxford: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 48-61.
    I am going to argue that it is a cost of libertarianism that it holds our status as agents hostage to theoretical physics, but that claim has met with disagreement. Some libertarians regard it as the cost of doing business, not a philosophical liability. By contrast, Peter van Inwagen has addressed the worry head on. He says that if he were to become convinced that causal determinism were true, he would not change his view that humans are free and (...)
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  8. Compatibilist Libertarianism: Advantages and Challenges (Conference Report).Jan-Felix Müller - 2022 - Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy 36 (3-4):323-334.
    This paper tries to summarize the main lines of discussion at the conference "Compatibilist Libertarianism: Advantages and Challenges" (October 29, 2021). This conference, organised by Alexander Gebharter and Maria Sekatskaya, served the discussion of Christian List's account of compatibilist libertarianism. Speakers were Taylor W. Cyr, Nadine Elzein, Alexander Gebharter, Christian List, Alfred R. Mele, Leonhard Menges, Tuomas K. Pernu, and Maria Sekatskaya.
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  9. Libertarianism Left and Right, the Lockean Proviso, and the Reformed Welfare State.Steve Daskal - 2010 - Social Theory and Practice 36 (1):21-43.
    This paper explores the implications of libertarianism for welfare policy. There are two central arguments. First, the paper argues that if one adopts a libertarian framework, it makes most sense to be a Lockean right-libertarian. Second, the paper argues that this form of libertarianism leads to the endorsement of a fairly extensive set of redistributive welfare programs. Specifically, the paper argues that Lockean right-libertarians are committed to endorsing welfare programs under which the receipt of benefits is conditional on (...)
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  10. Metaphysical libertarianism and the epistemology of testimony.Peter J. Graham - 2004 - American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1):37-50.
    Reductionism about testimony holds that testimonial warrant or entitlement is just a species of inductive warrant. Anti-Reductionism holds that it is different from inductive but analogous to perceptual or memorial warrant. Perception receives much of its positive epistemic status from being reliably truthconducive in normal conditions. One reason to reject the epistemic analogy is that testimony involves agency – it goes through the will of the speaker – but perception does not. A speaker might always choose to lie or otherwise (...)
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  11. Libertarianism Behind the Caricature: Reply to a Befuddled Author.J. C. Lester - 2011 - In Jan Lester (ed.), Arguments for Liberty: A Libertarian Miscellany. Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press. pp. 72-76.
    The editors of the Journal of Applied Philosophy allowed Alan Haworth to reply to my short review of his Anti-Libertarianism. The editors would not allow me to respond to Haworth. Thanks to the openness of internet publication and the Libertarian Alliance website, this can now be rectified and Haworth's reply can no longer escape a public critical response.
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  12. Libertarianism and the state.Peter Vallentyne - 2007 - Social Philosophy and Policy 24 (1):187-205.
    Although Robert Nozick has argued that libertarianism is compatible with the justice of a minimal state—even if does not arise from mutual consent—few have been persuaded. I will outline a different way of establishing that a non-consensual libertarian state can be just. I will show that a state can—with a few important qualifications—justly enforce the rights of citizens, extract payments to cover the costs of such enforcement, redistribute resources to the poor, and invest in infrastructure to overcome market failures. (...)
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  13. Libertarianism and Conjoined Twins.Amos Wollen - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (4):2183-2192.
    This paper presents a new challenge for libertarianism. The problem, in a nutshell, is that libertarianism appears to self-destruct in cases where conjoined twins—who share body parts—disagree over what to do with them. The problem is explored, and some solutions are proposed. The verdict is that accepting any of them will make libertarianism harder to defend.
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  14. Eleutheric-Conjectural Libertarianism: a Concise Philosophical Explanation.J. C. Lester - 2022 - MEST Journal 10 (2):111-123.
    The two purposes of this essay. The general philosophical problem with most versions of social libertarianism and how this essay will proceed. The specific problem with liberty explained by a thought-experiment. The positive and abstract theory of interpersonal liberty-in-itself as ‘the absence of interpersonal initiated constraints on want-satisfaction’, for short ‘no initiated impositions’. The individualistic liberty-maximisation theory solves the problems of clashes, defences, and rectifications without entailing interpersonal utility comparisons or libertarian consequentialism. The practical implications of instantiating liberty: three (...)
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  15. Libertarianism Allows Retributive Restitution (Which is Optimally Deterring): a reply to Joseph Ellin’s “Restitution not Retributive: A Mini-paper”.J. C. Lester - manuscript
    The following essay responds to a draft article that criticises the theory of libertarian restitution in “Libertarian Rectification: Restitution, Retribution, and the Risk-Multiplier” (LR). The article was freely available to internet search engines. Hence, it seems fair and useful to reply to these very welcome objective criticisms. It is not intellectually relevant that its author might subsequently and subjectively have thought better of them, possibly as a result of the earlier version of this reply. Generally, the article misconstrues the position (...)
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  16. Lucky Libertarianism.Mike Almeida & M. Bernstein - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 113 (2):93-119.
    Perhaps the greatest impediment to a viable libertarianism is the provision of a satisfactory explanation of how actions that are undetermined by an agent's character can still be under the control of, or ‘up to’, the agent. The ‘luck problem’ has been most assiduously examined by Robert Kane who supplies a detailed account of how this problem can be resolved. Although Kane's theory is innovative, insightful, and more resourceful than most of his critics believe, it ultimately cannot account for (...)
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  17. (1 other version)Rawls, Libertarianism, and the Employment Problem: On the unwritten chapter in A Theory of Justice.Larry Udell - 2018 - Social Philosophy Today 34:133-152.
    Barbara Fried described John Rawls’s response to libertarianism as “the unwritten theory of justice.” This paper argues that while there is no need for a new theory of justice to address the libertarian challenge, there is a need for an additional chapter. Taking up Fried’s suggestion that the Rawlsian response would benefit from a revised list of primary goods, I propose to add employment to the list, thus leading to adoption of a full employment principle in the original position (...)
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  18. (1 other version)Libertarianism, the Family, and Children.Andrew Jason Cohen & Lauren Hall - 2022 - In Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism. Routledge. pp. 336-350.
    We explain libertarian thought about family and children, including controversial issues in need of serious attention. To begin our discussion of marriage, we distinguish between procedural and substantive contractarian approaches to marriage, each endorsed by various libertarians. Advocates of both approaches agree that it is a contract that makes a marriage, not a license, but disagree about whether there are moral limits to the substance of the contract with only advocates of the substantive approach accepting such. Either approach, though, offers (...)
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  19. What's Wrong with Libertarianism: A Meritocratic Diagnosis.Thomas Mulligan - 2017 - In Jason F. Brennan, Bas van der Vossen & David Schmidtz (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism. Routledge. pp. 77-91.
    Some people may think that libertarianism and meritocracy have much in common; that the libertarian's ideal world looks like the meritocrat's ideal world; and that the public policies guiding us to each are one and the same. This is wrong in all respects. In this essay I explain why. -/- After providing an overview of meritocratic justice, I argue that meritocracy is a more compelling theory of distributive justice than libertarianism. Meritocracy better protects the core value of personal (...)
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  20. Thomist Libertarianism is Committed to Mysterianism.Armand Babakhanian - forthcoming - New Blackfriars.
    In recent years, a large amount of scholarship has been written about St Thomas Aquinas's views on free will and determinism. This paper is an attempt to bring some Thomist views of libertarian free will into dialogue with analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen and his ‘mysterianism’ about free will. The thesis of this paper is that Thomist libertarians about free will are committed to Peter van Inwagen's mysterianism about free will. The paper intends to accomplish this aim by showing how (...)
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  21. Agent-causal libertarianism, statistical neural laws and wild coincidences.Jason D. Runyan - 2018 - Synthese 195 (10):4563-4580.
    Agent-causal libertarians maintain we are irreducible agents who, by acting, settle matters that aren’t already settled. This implies that the neural matters underlying the exercise of our agency don’t conform to deterministic laws, but it does not appear to exclude the possibility that they conform to statistical laws. However, Pereboom (Noûs 29:21–45, 1995; Living without free will, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; in: Nadelhoffer (ed) The future of punishment, Oxford University Press, New York, 2013) has argued that, if these neural (...)
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  22. The Possibility of Thick Libertarianism.Billy Christmas - unknown - Libertarian Papers 8.
    The scope of libertarian law is normally limited to the application of the non-aggression principle (NAP), nothing more and nothing less. However, judging when the NAP has been violated requires not only a conception of praxeological notions such as aggression, but also interpretive understanding of what synthetic events count as the relevant praxeological types. Interpretive understanding—or verstehen—can be extremely heterogeneous between agents. The particular verständnis taken by a judge has considerable moral and political implications. Since selecting a verständnis is pre-requisite (...)
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  23. Libertarianism: an Extremely Short Introduction.J. C. Lester - 2011 - In Jan Lester (ed.), Arguments for Liberty: A Libertarian Miscellany. Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press. pp. 1-6.
    (Revised 31-10-17) This is only one view on the topic; other views may be rather different. It starts at the more philosophical end and then becomes more empirical, and possibly easier to understand, as it proceeds.
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  24. Libertarianism and the Rejection of a Basic Income.Peter Vallentyne - 2011 - Basic Income Studies 6:1-12.
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  25. (1 other version)Left-Libertarianism and Liberty.Peter Vallentyne - 2009 - In Thomas Christiano & John Christman (eds.), Debates in Political Philosophy. Blackwell. pp. 17--137.
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  26.  33
    Right-Libertarianism and Luck Sufficientarianism.Konstantin Morozov - 2024 - Tomsk State University Journal of Philosophy, Sociology and Political Science 79:125-133.
    Most right-libertarians deny the permissibility of government redistribution, referring to the inviolability of private property rights. In a rare exception, Eric Mack offers a right-libertarian argument for luck sufficientarianism based on the catastrophe clause. In this view, people who find themselves in trouble through no fault of their own may violate someone else’s property rights in minor ways to save their own lives. But since a literal interpretation of this clause makes property rights too uncertain, Mack proposes a system of (...)
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  27. Abortion, Libertarianism, and Evictionism: A Last Word.Jakub Wiśniewski - 2013 - Libertarian Papers 5:153-162.
    This paper is my last word, in the present journal, in the debate I have been having with Walter Block on the subject of evictionism as an alleged libertarian “third way,” capable of transcending the familiar “pro-life” and “pro-choice” dichotomy. In this debate, I myself defended what might be regarded as a qualified “pro-life” position, while Block consistently argued that the mother is morally allowed to expel the fetus from her womb provided that no non-lethal methods of its eviction are (...)
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  28. (1 other version)Kymlicka on Libertarianism: A Critical Response.J. C. Lester - 2012 - Libertarian Papers 4 (2):31-52.
    This essay examines sections relevant to libertarianism in Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (2nd ed.), making and explaining the following criticisms. Kymlicka’s “preface” misconstrues political philosophy’s progress, purpose, and its relation to libertarianism. In his “introduction”, his “project” mistakes libertarianism as “right-wing”, justice as compromise among “existing theories”, and equality as the “ultimate value.” His “a note on method” in effect takes as axioms, beyond philosophical examination, various alleged desiderata and the necessary moral role of (...)
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  29. (1 other version)Left-Libertarianism as a Promising Form of Liberal Egalitarianism.Peter Vallentyne - 2009 - Philosophical Exchange:56-71.
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  30. Indirectly Free Actions, Libertarianism, and Resultant Moral Luck.Robert J. Hartman - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1417-1436.
    Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and (...)
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  31. On Libertarianism as an Explanatory Hypothesis.Andrew Kissel - 2019 - Southwest Philosophy Review 35 (2):91-110.
    Recently, several libertarian philosophers have argued that we appear free on the basis of widespread experience, and that this appearance justifies believing that we enjoy libertarian free will (e.g. Pink 2004 and Swinburne 2013). Such arguments have a long history in philosophy but have been easily dismissed on one of two grounds: either the appearance of freedom does not exist, or else it is an illusion. In this paper, I argue that although presentations of the argument have been historically inadequate, (...)
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  32. The Incoherence of Libertarianism.Richard Oxenberg - manuscript
    In this essay I argue that the ethical and political position known as libertarianism is logically incoherent and, as such, cannot serve as a sound basis for either political theory or public policy. Given that the libertarian position is frequently used to provide the rationale for many of the economic (if not the social) policies of the right, a recognition of this incoherence is especially relevant to us today.
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  33. Left-Libertarianism.Peter Vallentyne - 2012 - In David Estlund (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press USA. pp. 152.
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  34. Conservative libertarianism and ethics of borders.Enrique Camacho Beltran - 2015 - Tópicos: Revista de Filosofía 48 (1):227-261.
    Many conservatives endorse a defence of closed borders grounded in basic liberal rights such as the basic right of association. Some conservatives also endorse libertarian principles of legitimacy. It is not clear though that this sort of defence of closed borders is somehow coherent with these libertarian ideals. I argue that conservative libertarians of this kind must reject this defence of closed borders because either it collapses into a form of statism incoherent with libertarian principles of legitimacy, or into an (...)
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  35. Libertarianism, Moral Character, and Alternative Possibilities in Thomas Reid.Juan Garcia Torres - 2018 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 35 (1):59-75.
    In the following paper, I wish to examine a problem for the theist libertarian. On the one hand, libertarians insist that freedom requires possible alternatives open to the agent. On the other hand, God’s perfectly formed moral character implies that He always does the morally best. Give His moral character, then, it appears that there are no possible alternatives open to God. We thus get a dilemma for the theist libertarian: either a) God is not libertarian free – because His (...)
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  36. The luck argument against event-causal libertarianism: It is here to stay.Markus E. Schlosser - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (2):375-385.
    The luck argument raises a serious challenge for libertarianism about free will. In broad outline, if an action is undetermined, then it appears to be a matter of luck whether or not one performs it. And if it is a matter of luck whether or not one performs an action, then it seems that the action is not performed with free will. This argument is most effective against event-causal accounts of libertarianism. Recently, Franklin (Philosophical Studies 156:199–230, 2011) has (...)
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  37. Dialectical libertarianism: the unintended consequences of both ethics and incentives underlie mutual prosperity.S. M. Amadae - 2016 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 9 (2):37.
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  38. Avoiding Interpersonal Utility Comparisons in Eleutheric-Conjectural Libertarianism.J. C. Lester - manuscript
    Until quite recently, it has appeared that eleutheric-conjectural libertarianism (ECL) could not avoid some degree of, very broad, interpersonal utility comparisons (IUCs). And this has been objected to by some of its libertarian critics, notably economists and propertarians. Indeed, this aspect does make the theory less compatible with economics than the rest of the theory and it is thereby a significant problem. This is because one of the main problems that ECL is intended to solve is how an abstract (...)
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  39. Bleeding Heart Libertarianism and the Social Justice or Injustice of Economic Inequality.Andrew Jason Cohen - 2019 - In Christopher J. Coyne, Michael C. Munger & Robert M. Whaples (eds.), Is social justice just? Oakland, California: Independent Institute.
    We live in a market system with much economic inequality. This may not be an essential characteristic of market systems but seems historically inevitable. How we should evaluate it, on the other hand, is contentious. I propose that bleeding heart libertarianism provides the best diagnosis and prescription.
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  40. Counterfactuals of Freedom and the Luck Objection to Libertarianism.Robert J. Hartman - 2017 - Journal of Philosophical Research 42 (1):301-312.
    Peter van Inwagen famously offers a version of the luck objection to libertarianism called the ‘Rollback Argument.’ It involves a thought experiment in which God repeatedly rolls time backward to provide an agent with many opportunities to act in the same circumstance. Because the agent has the kind of freedom that affords her alternative possibilities at the moment of choice, she performs different actions in some of these opportunities. The upshot is that whichever action she performs in the actual-sequence (...)
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  41. Du Châtelet’s Libertarianism.Aaron Wells - 2022 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 38 (3):219-241.
    There is a growing consensus that Emilie Du Châtelet’s challenging essay “On Freedom” defends compatibilism. I offer an alternative, libertarian reading of the essay. I lay out the prima facie textual evidence for such a reading. I also explain how apparently compatibilist remarks in “On Freedom” can be read as aspects of a sophisticated type of libertarianism that rejects blind or arbitrary choice. To this end, I consider the historical context of Du Châtelet’s essay, and especially the dialectic between (...)
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  42. On the Luck Objection to Libertarianism.David Widerker - 2015 - In Andrei Buckareff, Carlos Moya & Sergi Rosell (eds.), Agency, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 94-115.
    Abstract -/- Libertarians typically believe that we are morally responsible for the choices (or decisions) we make only if those choices are free, and our choices are free only if they are neither caused nor nomically necessitated by antecedent events. Recently, there have been a number of attempts by philosophers to refute libertarianism by arguing that because a libertarianly free decision (choice) is both causally and nomically undetermined, which decision an agent makes in a deliberative situation is a matter (...)
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  43. The Heterodox 'Fourth Paradigm' of Libertarianism: an Abstract Eleutherology plus Critical Rationalism.J. C. Lester - 2019 - Journal of Libertarian Studies 23:91-116.
    1) Introduction. 2) The key libertarian insight into property and orthodox libertarianism’s philosophical confusion. 3) Clearer distinctions for applying to what follows: abstract liberty; practical liberty; moral defences; and critical rationalism. 4) The two dominant (‘Lockean’ and ‘Hobbesian’) conceptions of interpersonal liberty. 5) A general account of libertarianism as a subset of classical liberalism and defended from a narrower view. 6) Two abstract (non-propertarian, non-normative) theories of interpersonal liberty developed and defended: ‘the absence of interpersonal initiated imposed constraints (...)
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  44. The deep error of political libertarianism: self-ownership, choice, and what’s really valuable in life.Dan Lowe - 2020 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (6):683-705.
    Contemporary versions of natural rights libertarianism trace their locus classicus to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But although there have been many criticisms of the version of political libertarianism put forward by Nozick, many of these fail objections to meet basic methodological desiderata. Thus, Nozick’s libertarianism deserves to be re-examined. In this paper I develop a new argument which meets these desiderata. Specifically, I argue that the libertarian conception of self-ownership, the view’s foundation, implies what I (...)
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  45. A Critical Commentary on the Zwolinski 2013 "Libertarianism and Liberty" Essays.J. C. Lester - 2014 - In Jan Lester (ed.), _Explaining Libertarianism: Some Philosophical Arguments_. Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press. pp. 64-84.
    The Zwolinski 2013 "libertarianism and liberty" essays on libertarianism_org are argued to have the following problems: taking libertarianism to be a "commitment" to the view that "liberty is the highest political value" ; examining and rejecting the maximization of liberty without a libertarian theory of liberty; accepting a persuasive sense of "coercion" ; misunderstandingliberty in the work place; conflating, to varying degrees, freedom of action and freedom from aggression and justice/rights/morals; focusing on logically possible clashes instead of practically (...)
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  46. How the Calvin Hayes Review is Wrong about Libertarianism.J. C. Lester - manuscript
    The review cites the “Open Society” twice in its title—and is clearly pro-Popperian—but then fails to mention the fourteen-point list, and surrounding discussion, that explicitly compares Popper’s critical rationalism with anarcho-libertarianism (strong similarities) and liberal democracy (strong dissimilarities); EfL, pp.135-142. If the review had engaged more closely with the arguments of EfL and been more informed by the relevant social scientific literature, then it would probably have found the anarcho-libertarian case to be far more robust and realistic than such (...)
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  47. The political compass (and why libertarianism is not right-wing).J. C. Lester - 1996 - Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (2):176-186.
    The political distinction between left and right remains ideologically muddled. This was not always so, but an immediate return to the pristine usage is impractical. Putting a theory of social liberty to one side, this essay defends the interpretation of left-wing as personal-choice and right-wing as property-choice. This allows an axis that is north/choice (or state-free) and south/control (or state-ruled). This Political Compass clarifies matters without being tendentious or too complicated. It shows that what is called ‘libertarianism’ is north-wing. (...)
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  48. (1 other version)A response to "Libertarianism and pollution: the limits of absolutist moralism".J. C. Lester - 2011 - In Jan Lester (ed.), Arguments for Liberty: A Libertarian Miscellany. Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press. pp. 155-159.
    Most self-identified libertarians unwittingly have a moral muddle without a central factual theory of liberty. They cannot yet see that they first need to sort out what liberty is, and therefore entails if instantiated, and only after that can moral questions about it be coherently raised and tackled.
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  49. Explaining the First Thing about Libertarianism.J. C. Lester - manuscript
    Escape from Leviathan (EfL) is a first attempt at explaining a somewhat complex philosophical theory of libertarianism. The theory is far from being as clear as it has subsequently become possible to make it. Consequently, most reviews have misunderstood it to varying degrees. What is striking is the great confidence with which some of these reviews assume they have completely understood it and refuted it. This is odd because it does not seem entirely reasonable to suppose that EfL’s errors (...)
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  50. A Critical Commentary on Block 2011: "David Friedman and Libertarianism: a Critique" and a Comparison with Lester [2000] 2012's Responses to Friedman.J. C. Lester - 2014 - In Jan Lester (ed.), _Explaining Libertarianism: Some Philosophical Arguments_. Buckingham: The University of Buckingham Press. pp. 106-143.
    David Friedman posed a number of libertarian philosophical problems (Friedman 1989). This essay criticizes Walter Block’s Rothbardian responses (Block 2011) and compares them with J C Lester’s critical-rationalist, libertarian-theory responses (Lester [2000] 2012). The main issues are as follows. 1. Critical rationalism and how it applies to libertarianism. 2.1. How libertarianism is not inherently about law and is inherently about morals. 2.2. How liberty relates to property and can be maximized: carbon dioxide and radio waves. 2.3. Applying the (...)
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