Online research in philosophy

This essay treats the Progressives' critique of the Founders' doctrine of natural rights. Natural rights had been attacked before the Progressive erabut the Progressives launched the most thoroughgoing and systematic critique in American history. The leading thinker conducting the critique was America's foremost philosopher John Dewey. His critique had five major points: (1) that America had entered an entirely new age of social and economic organization requiring a different political theory; (2) that all theoretical claims of truth, like natural rights, (...) are relative to the age in which they were born and thrived; (3) that theoretical ideas serve the aims of different classes, with natural rights representing the economic and political interests of the emerging bourgeoisie; (4) that natural rights encouraged a diminished goal for human beings, emphasizing the fulfillment of individual self-interest rather a higher idea of human development and of social cooperation; and (5) that any metaphysical claim in politics is undemocratic by virtue of ascribing a standard of right that is prior to and higher than a decision of a democratic majority. The paper concludes by briefly sketching the influence that this critique had on the heirs of the Progressives, the modern liberals. (shrink)

After summarizing the ways in which Progressive intellectuals attacked individualist understandings of rights and mechanistic understandings of constitutional government, a series of second thoughts on this argument are pursued. The first centers on the ways in which progressivism differed from New Deal liberalism, especially regarding Progressive understandings of politics rest on a distinction between and derived from Tocqueville and Lincolnpublicprivate,” that serve the common good. The Civil War experience was their model, one which they first thought would be reincarnated in (...) the preparation for World War I. Given both private and public assaults on free speech, Progressives in the 1920s often led the movement for protections of civil liberties and for a new respect paid to the First Amendment. The conclusion examines the continuities and discontinuities of Progressive political thought in contemporary political discourse. (shrink)

This essay examines the far-reaching attack on individualism and property rights which characterized the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. Scholars and political figures associated with Progressivism criticized the individualist values of classical liberalism and rejected the traditional notion of limited government espoused by the framers of the Constitution. They expressed great confidence in regulatory agencies, staffed by experts, to effectuate policy. Progressives paved the way for the later triumph of statist ideology with the New Deal in the 1930s.

The main purpose of this essay is to articulate the ideas of the last powerful advocate of natural rights in nineteenth-century America. That last powerful advocate was the Massachusetts-born radical libertarian Lysander Spooner (1808-1887). Besides his powerful antebellum attacks on slavery, Spooner developed forceful arguments on behalf of a strongly individualistic conception of natural law and private property rights and against coercive moralism, coercive paternalism, and state authority and legislation. This essay focuses on the theoretical core of Spoonera doctrine that (...) is primarily developed in Spoonerss thought and support this contention in part by showing how much more Lockean Spooner was than either Hodgskin or the early Spencer. (shrink)

Scholarly discussions of the turn of the 20th century progressive movement frequently ignore or give but glancing attention to the progressivesparadoxicals core, principles. The purpose of this paper, accordingly, is to explain the origin and nature of the movement racial views and policies, far from being inconsistent with these principles, were in fact their natural outgrowth. The progressives rejection of the of the American founding in favor of a new conception of chiefly inspired by early 19th century German idealism.

The labor theory of value is fundamental to John LockeJustifying Intellectual Property,s physical labor contributes only proportionally to this socially-created market value. Robert Nozick, G. A. Cohen, and other philosophers similarly dismiss the labor theory of value as illogical or incoherent. But these philosophers redefine Lockes labor theory of economic value. The principle of interpretative charity demands reconsideration of Lockes property theory within the context of his natural law ethical theory, as presented in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and in (...) other works. In this context, Locke’s concept of labor means production, which has intellectual as well as physical characteristics, and his concept of value means that which is useful in the flourishing life of a rational being, which is a conception of the good that is more robust than merely physical status or economic wealth. This not only disabuses modern scholars of the absurdities they impose on Locke, it also explains why Locke says that inventions exemplify his labor-based property theory and why he argues for property rights in writings (copyrights), arguments that seem to have been lost on his critics in intellectual property theory and beyond. (shrink)

The American Progressive Movement argued for both a democratization of the political process and deference to expert administrators. Relying on the work of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the article endeavors to explore this tension and make some preliminary suggestions as to how it might be reconciledinto a single democratic theory. Both Roosevelt and Wilson criticize the principles of the original Constitution for being insufficiently democratic and overly suspicious of the popular will, and they want to make public opinion a (...) more direct force in national politics. Yet both are also suspicious of politics and its potential for corruption by and thus look for ways of empowering expert administrative agencies and insulating them from political influence. Wilson seems to understand the potential conflict between these two aims more than Roosevelt does, although both look to a popularized presidency as a means of reconciling consent and expertise. (shrink)

When Woodrow Wilson, in the course of his campaign for the Presidency in 1912, attacked Thomas Jefferson and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brfor the constitutionalism articulated by the latter and embraced, in turn, by the Framers of the American Constitution was a systematic attempt to put into practice something very much like the first principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Montesquieu was not a doctrinaire. He feared that, in his own country and elsewhere, revolution would eventuate (...) in the establishment of a despotism, and so he gently, quietly promoted unobtrusive reform. But the cautious, prudential political science that he outlined in his Spirit of Laws was anything but value-free. If the American framers found his legislative science of use, it was because the hatred of despotism and love for liberty animating its author was grounded in an account of natural right closely akin to the one, espoused in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, that had inspired their revolution. (shrink)

This article examines the moral theory of the American Revolutionary and Founding periods by focusing on two key concepts of that doctrine: the moral laws and the moral rights of nature. In particular, the article will examine several important questions from the perspective of Americas moral laws and rights descriptive, prescriptive, or both? What are the attributes and sanctions of natures laws and rights? And finally, how did Americas revolutionary mind and moral theory: the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration’s deepest (...) philosophic meaning is herein illuminated by also examining the broader, extant literature of the period. (shrink)

This essay will show that Lockes writings. Locke draws his reader into an amazingly complex line of reasoning, scattered up and down in several of his books, leading finally to the real basis of his teaching on the law of nature. Locke engages the reader in a dialogue, in which initially plausible arguments are put forward, then implicitly questioned, leading to new arguments, which again are questioned, and so on. Locke says that are necessary to discover the law of nature. (...) Locke writes treatises, not Platonic dialogues. Nevertheless, a dialogical thread will take us from one of Locke’s books to another, until we put together all the relevant passages to show the complete picture of his argument. (shrink)

This essay examines the idea of rights advanced by the American colonists in the imperial crisis (1763-1776). It argues that the colonists viewed all English subjects as having the same fundamental rights as individuals everywhere in the empire. These individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) were in turn guaranteed by the right to consent to taxation. In the empire, the colonists insisted, these rights could only be protected by the colonial legislatures as they were not represented in the British (...) Parliament, which in turn meant that the colonies must have the ability to govern themselves in all internal matters, a claim which ultimately led to the idea of each colony as a independent of King and Parliament. While the colonists began by defending these rights on the basis of their legal inheritance as Englishmen, they gradually moved towards a more radical claim: that these rights were theirs based on the law of nature, and thus open to all men in principle. This move to natural rights was based in part on the colonial claim that they had migrated to America, a place inhabited by indigenous peoples whom they viewed as and thus outside of the jurisdiction of the English common law. The radical move to natural rights, however, was in tension with the loose confederation which emerged in the years after 1776 in which each colony was now a quasi-independent republican state and in which the rights of minoritiescould not be effectively protected by the federal government. (shrink)

One of the main targets of Progressive constitutional critique was the system of separation of powers. Woodrow Wilson was especially critical of that feature of American constitutionalism. As has been noted by others, Wilson wanted to replace the separation of powers with the conceptual and institutional distinction between politics and administration. Wilson, however, had an extremely truncated and on the whole inaccurate view of the point and intended operation of separation of powers, as an examination of the doctrine in the (...) philosophy of John Locke demonstrates. (shrink)

Genocide and crimes against humanity are among the core crimes of international law, but they also carry great moral resonance due to their indissoluble link to the atrocities of the Nazi regime and to other egregious episodes of mass violence. However, the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity are not well understood, even by the international lawyers and jurists who are most concerned with them. A conceptual fog hovers around the discussion of these two categories of crime. In this (...) paper, I draw a number of distinctions aimed at clarifying the concepts. I distinguish three concepts of genocide, two legal and one moral, and two concepts of crimes against humanity, a legal and a moral one. I criticize the current legal concept of genocide and, using the idea of discrimination, propose a model for developing a more adequate legal concept and for better understanding the moral concept. I also criticize the moral concept of crimes against humanity, which many thinkers have conflated with the legal concept of such crimes. (shrink)

This paper concerns the question of whether the political liberties tend to be valuable to the people who hold them. (In contrast, we might ask whether the liberties are valuable in the aggregate or are owed to people as a matter of justice, regardless of their value.) Philosophers have argued that the political liberties are needed or at least useful to lead a full, human life, to have one's social status and the social bases of self-respect secured, to make the (...) government responsive to one's interests and generate preferred political outcomes, to participate in the process of social construction so that one can feel at home in the social world, to live autonomously as a member of society, to achieve education and enlightenment and take a broad view of the world and of others' interests, and to express oneself and one's attitudes about the political process and current states of affairs. I argue that for most people, the political liberties are not valuable for these reasons. (shrink)

This is an essay on the limits of the Criminal Law. In particular, it is about what principles, if any, determine whether it is legitimate for the state to criminalize certain conduct. Joel Feinberg in his great work on the moral limits of the criminal law argues that we need only two principles. One is a principle regulating harm to other people and the other is an offense principle regulating certain kinds of offensive conduct. I explore various aspects of his (...) argument. In particular I concentrate on his use of the Volenti Principle: He who consents cannot be wrongfully harmed by conduct to which he has fully consented. Feinberg uses the principle to argue that certain kinds of consensual conduct cannot be forbidden unless we adopt some kind of legal moralism, i.e., conduct can be forbidden on the grounds that it is immoral even though the conduct harms no other person. I explore the possibility of avoiding legal moralism by limiting the use of the Volenti Principle. (shrink)

Neither a doctrine of rights nor a doctrine of justice can provide a non-question-begging foundation for political philosophy. Instead, all political philosophical theories must rest on the recognition of the existence of moral agents, individual members of a natural kind capable of entering into associations with other moral agents. Beginning with moral agency, we can deduce that for there to be any associations, political or otherwise, there has to be the mutual recognition of self-ownership. The nature of moral agency excludes (...) the possibility that groups like states or societies or nations can be moral agents. From moral agency and self-ownership, we can deduce the exigency of property ownership. On this basis, we can explain a state of affairs as just when and only when there is no aggression against moral agents. And we can show that the only nonarbitrary right is the right to self-ownership and property ownership. Thus, A has a right to p means: to deprive A of p is unjust. So, rights are founded on justice and justice is founded on property and property is founded on self-ownership and the recognition of self-ownership is a necessary condition for the mutual recognition of moral agency, the only possible basis for the existence of human associations. Thus, rights and justice are derivative or dependent concepts; they are not basic or foundational. (shrink)

The question of ownershipis important in addressing many issues of public policy. But the attempt to subsume all questions of rights under what I describe as exerts a distorting influence on debates about a variety of complex moral issues. More specifically, I argue that the application of the property paradigm deformed discussion of the nature and basis of parental rights. The claim that parental rights are not best understood as property rights is now widely acknowledged. However, while the property paradigm (...) exerts only vestigial influence on contemporary discussions of parental rights, it still exerts a significant distorting effect on discussions of reproductive rights. I argue that focusing on the question of the ownership of gametes, in particular of sperm, tends to warp the moral dialog concerning reproductive rights. Those sensitive moral debates are better framed in terms of individuals' legitimate interests than in terms of property. (shrink)

Neuroscience is commonly thought to challenge the basic way we think of ourselves in ordinary thought, morality, and the law. This paper: (1) describes the legal institutions challenged in this way by neuroscience, including in that description both the political philosophy such institutions enshrine and the common sense psychology they presuppose; (2) describes the three kinds of data produced by contemporary neuroscience that is thought to challenge these commonsense views of ourselves in morals and law; and (3) distinguishes four major (...) and several minor kinds of challenges that that data can reasonably be interpreted to present. The major challenges are: first, the challenge of reductionism, that we are merely machines; second, the challenge of determinism, that we are caused to choose and act as we do by brain states that we do not control; third, the challenge of epiphenomenalism, that our choices do not cause our actions because our brains are the real cause of those actions; and fourth, the challenge of fallibilism, that we do not have direct access to those of our mental states that do cause our actions, nor are we infallible in such knowledge as we do have of them. (shrink)

State power is widely thought to be coercive. The view that governments must wield force or that their power is necessarily coercive is widespread in contemporary political thought. John Rawls is representative in claiming that (political power is always coercive power backed up by the government(s use of sanctions, for government alone has the authority to use force in upholding its laws.( This belief in the centrality of coercion and force plays an important but not well appreciated role in contemporary (...) political thought. I wish to challenge this belief and the considerations that motivate it. States are not necessarily coercive or coercive (by definition.( Their claimed authority is prior to the force they wield. Legitimate states should need to resort to coercion and force much less than other states, and that fact seems unappreciated in contemporary political thought. (shrink)

In this paper I show how modern democratic states are likely to be inimical to traditional liberal education. Drawing on theoretical considerations and recent history I show how any attempt to promote traditional educational values through state interventions, such as national curricula or state regulation, is bound to be illusory. The preservation of liberal education will best be served by the wholesale removal of education from the progressive state and its bureaucracies.

The article argues that free trade is required by any plausible conception of justice. Free trade is supported by a host of consequentialist and deontological reasons. Empirically, trade increases global and national wealth, and in particular helps the poor. Morally, those who benefit from protectionist laws are not deserving beneficiaries of wealth redistribution. Both economic theory and evidence amply warrant the view that trade is beneficial. Protectionism by rich countries is harmful, not only to those countries' consumers, but to producers (...) in poor countries. Given this, and given the fact that protectionism is almost always the result of political pressure by inefficient producers, there is no plausible moral reason to support it. Protectionism by poor countries is equally harmful. Relying on the institutionalist literature, the article shows that protectionism is yet another bad institution that contributes to economic stagnation in those countries. The article considers and rejects two criticisms of free trade: the problem of stolen goods, and the pauper-labor argument. (shrink)

Libertarians and classical liberals typically defend private economic liberty as a requirement of self-ownership or on the basis of consequentialist arguments of various sorts. By contrast, this paper defends private economic liberty as a requirement of democratic legitimacy. In recent decades, many philosophers have converged upon a certain view about political justification. If a set of social institutions is to be just and legitimate, those institutions must be acceptable in principle to the citizens who are to lead their lives within (...) them. This deliberative or democratic approach to justification is traditionally associated with thinkers on the left who are skeptical of the importance of private economic liberty. This article shows how the protection of private economic liberty is a requirement of citizens' developing and exercising the moral powers they have as democratic citizens. Democratic legitimacy does not require the affirmation of absolute economic liberty rights as sometimes defended by libertarians. But democratic legitimacy does require that a wide range of private economic liberties be meriting constitutional protection on a par with the civil and political liberties of democratic citizens. This opens the way for a wider defense of classical liberalism based upon the idea of democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

In the wake of G. A. Cohen's masterful critique of Rawls's work, this paper discusses Rawlsian justice in general and the difference principle in particular. It argues that Rawlsian arguments for the difference principle present a puzzle and that to respond adequately to the puzzle we must engage in rational reconstruction. After explaining the puzzle and considering and rejecting a number of responses to it, the paper begins its reconstructive project. It presents the case for viewing the difference principle as (...) a maximizing prioritarian principle of justice, one that that contains no trace of commitment to equality as a distributive norm. The paper concludes by bringing out some of the implications of viewing Rawlsian justice in this light. (shrink)

In this article I argue that critics of John Rawls's The Law of Peoples wrongly presume that Rawls sought to offer a comprehensive theory of global justice, when he meant more minimally to respond to a specific practical problem: I concede that my reading is not uniformly supported by all aspects of the text, but The Law of Peoples is a rich and complex work that does not univocally recommend any single reading, and my construal squares with Rawls's own description (...) of the project. More importantly, my interpretation is recommended by the principle of charity, insofar as it provides Rawls with plausible responses to the commonly-voiced objections. In other words, if Rawls is understood as offering a comprehensive theory of global justice, then many of the standard criticisms appear quite damning. But if his aim is the more modest one of recommending how liberal (and decent) societies might permissibly organize their foreign policies so as to help eliminate unjust war, oppression, religious persecution and the denial of liberty of conscience, starvation, poverty, genocide and mass murder, then Rawls's book is not problematic in the ways that so many have supposed. (shrink)

It is commonly claimed that workers in sweatshops are wrongfully exploited by their employers. The economist's standard response to this claim is to point out that sweatshops provide their workers with tremendous benefits, more than most workers elsewhere in the economy receive and more than most of those who complain about sweatshop exploitation provide. Perhaps, though, the wrongfulness of sweatshop exploitation is to be found not in the discrete interaction between a sweatshop and its employees, but in the unjust political (...) and economic institutions against which that interaction takes place. This paper tries to assess what role, if any, consideration of background injustice should play in the correct understanding of exploitation. Its answer, in brief, is that it should play fairly little. Structural injustice matters, of course, but it does not typically matter for determining whether a sweatshop is acting exploitatively, and it does not typically matter in a way that grounds any kind of special moral responsibility or fault on the part of sweatshops or the Multinational Enterprises with which they contract. (shrink)