Following hints in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, some political theorists hold that the thesis of value pluralism is true and that this truth provides support for political liberalism of a sort that prescribes wide guarantees of individual liberty.1 There are many different goods, and they are incommensurable. Hence, people should be left free to live their own lives as they choose so long as they don’t harm others in certain ways. In a free society there is a strong presumption (...) in favor of letting individuals act as they choose without interference by others. William A. Galston has developed this argument with exemplary clarity.2 He is wrong. The idea that value incommensurability is a reason for toleration of diverse ways of life and protection of the individual’s freedom to choose among diverse ways of life is a mistake. In his paper for this volume, What Value Pluralism Means for Legal Constitutional Orders, Galston undertakes to resolve a further problem, namely, whether the presumption in favor of individual liberty that value pluralism establishes can be kept within bounds. In his words, “Within the pluralist framework, how is the basis for a viable political <span class='Hi'>community</span> to be secured?”3 On one construal of these words, Galston is seeking the solution to a non-problem. Value pluralism does not establish any normative presumption in favor of liberty, so the worry “does this presumption hold without limit” or, “are there good reasons that constrain it at some point”, is otiose. On another construal, Galston is addressing a different question: if most of the members of society came to believe that given value pluralism, they ought to be left free to live according to their own conception of values, then would a “decently ordered public life” be impossible to sustain?4 On the second construal, the issue being posed is a genuine empirical question, which philosophical arguments cannot answer. (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)

Hate groups are often thought to reveal a paradox in liberal thinking. On the one hand, such groups challenge the very foundations of liberal thought, including core values of equality and freedom. On the other hand, these same values underlie the rights such as freedom of expression and association that protect hate groups. Thus a liberal democratic state that extends those protections to such groups in the name of value neutrality and freedom of expression may be thought to be undermining (...) the values on which its legitimacy rests. In this paper, I suggest how this apparent paradox might be resolved. I argue that the state should protect the expression of illiberal beliefs, but that the state (along with its citizens) is also obligated to criticize publicly those beliefs. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action—coercive and expressive—I contend that such criticism should be pursued through the state’s expressive capacities in its roles as speaker, educator, and spender. Here I extend the familiar idea that law, to be legitimate, must be widely publicized; I contend that a proper theory of the freedom of expression obligates the legitimate state to publicize the reasons that underlie rights, in particular reasons that appeal to the entitlement of each citizen subject to coercion to be treated as free and equal. My theory of freedom of expression is thus “expressive” in two senses: it protects the entitlement of citizens to express any political viewpoint, and it emphasizes a role for the state in explaining these free-speech protections and persuading its citizens of the value of the entitlements that underlie them. (shrink)

This book shows that civil disobedience is generally more defensible than private conscientious objection. -/- Part I explores the morality of conviction and conscience. Each of these concepts informs a distinct argument for civil disobedience. The conviction argument begins with the communicative principle of conscientiousness. According to this principle, having a conscientious moral conviction means not just acting consistently with our beliefs and judging ourselves and others by a common moral standard. It also means not seeking to evade the consequences (...) of our beliefs and being willing to communicate to them to others. The conviction argument shows that, as a constrained, communicative practice, civil disobedience has a better claim than private objection does to the protections that liberal societies give to conscientious dissent. This view reverses the standard liberal picture which sees private 'conscientious' objection as a modest act of personal belief and civil disobedience as a strategic, undemocratic act whose costs are only sometimes worth bearing. -/- The conscience argument is narrower and shows that genuinely morally responsive civil disobedience honours the best of our moral responsibilities and is protected by a duty-based moral right of conscience. -/- Part II translates the conviction argument and conscience argument into two legal defences. The first is a demands-of-conviction defence. The second is a necessity defence. Both of these defences apply more readily to civil disobedience than to private disobedience. Part II also examines lawful punishment, showing that, even when punishment is justifiable, civil disobedients have a moral right not to be punished. (shrink)

Employing the techniques of modern economic analysis, Professor Buchanan reveals the conceptual basis of an individual's social rights by examining the ...

The paper focuses on Anthony de Jasay's "anarcho-liberalism" as based oon his game-theoretic approach to the problem of public goods provision.

This paper presents an argument for the value of privacy that is based on a purely negative concept of freedom only. I show that privacy invasions may decrease a person’s negative freedom as well as a person’s knowledge about the negative freedom she possesses. I argue that not only invasions that lead to actual interference, but also invasions that lead to potential interference (many cases of identity theft) constitute actual harm to the invadee’s liberty interests, and I critically examine the (...) courts’ reliance on a principle of ‘no harm, no foul’ in recent data breach cases. Using a number of insights from the psychology of human belief, I also show that the liberal claim for protection of privacy is strengthened by the observation that often the privacy invader cannot be held responsible for the influence on the invadee’s negative freedom. (shrink)

Contemporary developments in American epistemology, by R. M. Chisholm.--Contemporary metaphysics in the United States, by D. F. Gustafson.--Philosophy of physics, by H. Putnam--The influence of continental philosophy on the contemporary American scene: a summons to autonomy, by G. A. Scharader, Jr.--The influence of the later Wittgenstein on American philosophy, by J. O. Nelson.--Philosophy of mind, by F. H. Donnell, Jr.--Some remarks on the philosophy of language, by J. A. Fodor.--Ethics in the United States today, by D. Kading.--Social philosophy; philosophy of (...) social science, by P. Diesing. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the freedom gained through virtue builds on the Socratic tradition. On the Socratic view, when morality is our end, nothing can hinder us from attaining satisfaction: we are self-sufficient and free since moral goodness is (as Kant says) “created by us, hence is in our power.” But when our end is the fulfillment of sensible desires, our satisfaction requires luck as well as the cooperation of others. For Kant, this means that happiness requires that we get other (...) people to work for our ends; and this requires, in turn, that we gain control over the things other people value so as to have influence over them. If this plan for happiness is not subordinated to morality, then what is most valuable to us will be precisely what others value. This is the root of the “passions” that make us evil and make us slaves whose satisfaction depends on others. But, significantly, this dependence is a moral slavery and hence does not signal a loss, or even diminishment of the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility. (shrink)

I defend pornography as an important aspect of freedom of expression, which is essential for autonomy, self-development, the growth of knowledge and human flourishing. I rebut the allegations that pornography depraves and corrupts, degrades women, is harmful to children, exposes third parties to risk of offence or assault, and violates women’s civil rights and liberties. I contend that suppressing pornography would have a range of unintended evil consequences, including loss of beneficial technology, creeping censorship, black markets, corruption and extensive social (...) costs. (shrink)

A talk on the morality of money lending, which looks at three different approaches to the problem of usury: political regulation, religious prohibition and economic toleration.

Discusses the respects in which religiously grounded considerations can have an appropriate---even important--role in the public and political discourse of a liberal polity. Examines the role tradition can have in enabling people to attain a reasoned justification for moral ideas and ideals, i.e., tradition is not always an impediment to universally valid or objective considerations. Also, discusses respects in which modern liberalism owes an important debt to religious ideas.

Criminal law theorists overwhelmingly agree that for some conduct to constitute punishment, it must be imposed intentionally. Some retributivists have argued that because punishment consists only of intentional inflictions, theories of punishment can ignore the merely foreseen hardships of prison, such as the mental and emotional distress inmates experience. Though such distress is foreseen, it is not intended, and so it is technically not punishment. In this essay, I explain why theories of punishment must pay close attention to the unintentional (...) burdens of punishment. In two very important contexts — punishment measurement and justification — we use the term “punishment” to capture not only intentional harsh treatment but certain unintentional harsh treatment as well. This means that the widely accepted view that punishment is an intentional infliction requires substantial caveats. It also means that any purported justification of punishment that addresses only the intentional infliction of punishment is woefully incomplete. [This paper has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.]. (shrink)

Wheeler, Stark, and Stell have raised many interesting points concerning gun control that merit extended treatment. Here, however, I will focus only on two. I will then briefly expand on the proposal I offered in the original paper.

Taxing the income of some people to provide goods or services to others, even those with urgent needs, is unjust. It is a violation of the wage earner's rights, a restriction of his freedom. At least that is what the libertarian tells us. I disagree. Not all redistribution of income is unjust; or so I shall argue.

Susan Okin read Robert Nozick as taking it to be fundamental to his Libertarianism that people own themselves, and that they can acquire entitlement to other things by making them. But she thinks that, since mothers make people, all people must then be owned by their mothers, a consequence Okin finds absurd. She sees no way for Nozick to make a principled exception to the idea that people own what they make when what they make is people, concluding that Nozick’s (...) theory of entitlement must be false, and that entitlement must instead be rooted in people’s needs. I say Okin misreads Nozick’s Libertarianism. In fact, its fundamental principle is that, simply by being persons, people are entitled to the maximum negative liberty compatible with a like liberty for all persons. Further, Nozick, and Jan Narveson, who has taken on the advocacy of Libertarian ideas, analyze liberty as freedom to interact with things, and analyze being entitled to or having property in something, as freedom to interact with it, to determine what may be done with it. People therefore have such freedom to do what they want with themselves, and such freedom to do what they want with other things, as is compatible with all persons having similar freedom. The former is what self-ownership amounts to, the latter, ownership of other things. Libertarianism’s fundamental principle therefore both grounds and delimits entitlements in ways entailing that mothers don’t own persons by dint of making them. Otherwise, since it would then be the prerogative of mothers to determine what shall be done with the persons they made, the persons made would lack equal liberty, this violating the fundamental principle. (shrink)

This essay is the introduction to a special debate issue of the journal "Basic Income Studies" on the topic of whether libertarians should endorse a universal basic income. The essay attempts to clarify some common uses of the term 'libertarianism" as it is used by moral and political philosophers. It identifies some important common features of libertarian normative theories.

Jan Narveson is one of the most significant contemporary defenders of the libertarian political position.

The sexual abuse of women and girls, such as sexual harassment, battery, varieties of rape, prostitution, and pornography, is statistically pervasive in late modern society. Yet this fact does not register adequate ethical concern. I explore this gap in moral perception. I argue that sexual abuse is conceptually supported by an ontology of women that considers a lack of bodily integrity as natural and by a sex-specific idea of freedom that considers sexual violations as liberating. This conceptual framework is pernicious (...) because it supports abuse and interferes with our moral perception of harm, encouraging us to see harms as normal and as positive. I argue that Heidegger’s idea of philosophy and the resources of his epistemological and ontological project in Being and Time can help show the pernicious function of this conceptual framework and thus help us better understand this abuse. (shrink)

Reeder’s article offers a new and intriguing approach to the study of people’s ordinary understanding of freedom and constraint. On this approach, people use information about freedom and constraint as part of a quasi-scientific effort to make accurate inferences about an agent’s motives. Their beliefs about the agent’s motives then affect a wide variety of further psychological processes, including the process whereby they arrive at moral judgments. In illustrating this new approach, Reeder cites an elegant study he conducted a number (...) of years ago (Reeder & Spores, 1983). All subjects were given a vignette about a man who goes with his date to a pizza parlor and happens to come across a box that has been designated for charitable donations. In one condition, the man’s date then requests that he make a donation; in the other, she requests that he steal the money that is already in the box. In both conditions, the man chooses to comply with this request. The key question is how subjects will use his behavior to make inferences about whether he is a morally good or morally bad person. The results revealed a marked difference between conditions. When the man donated to charity, subjects were generally disinclined to conclude that he must have been a morally good person. It is as though they were thinking: ‘He didn’t just do this out of the goodness of his heart. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose to look closely at certain crucial aspects of the logic of Rawls' argument in Political Liberalism and related subsequent writings. Rawls' argument builds on the notion of comprehensiveness, whereby a doctrine encompasses the full spectrum of the life of its adherents. In order to show the mutual conflict and irreconcilability of comprehensive doctrines, Rawls needs to emphasise the comprehensiveness of doctrines, as their irreconcilability to a large extent emanates from that comprehensiveness. On the other hand, (...) in order to show the possibility and plausibility of the political liberal solution he needs to emphasise that most of these doctrines are reasonable: i.e., they are willing to cede a portion of their authority to political liberalism for the right reasons. Yet, if they are willing to cede a portion of their authority to a political conception they cannot be as comprehensive as we initially thought they were. All these elements highlight the tension in the argument itself. I suggest that many of these tensions can be removed by making Rawls' account more flexible. In this context I propose certain amendments to Rawls' account, which may overcome some of the tensions mentioned above. (shrink)

takes a stand for liberty, and explores important topics such as punishment, capitalism, and the limits of government. If you are sick of the left and tired of the right, you just might like this.

The four talks in this collection are based on impromptu lectures by Mark Sharlow. Explores the topics of freedom, justice, punishment, capitalism, distributism, and the limits of government.

This chapter introduces debates about freedom of speech and argues that very few if any individuals support no restrictions whatsoever on freedom of speech. The question is therefore not should we restrict freedom of speech but rather what sorts of speech and how?

What reactions are legitimate when someone is pursuing an experiment in living that has, in your considered view, gone awry? This essay discusses how the way Mill expressed his concern over the cultivation of individuality places some stress on the harm principle and on the permissibility of making the sort of judgments about another person that seem fairly natural to make when someone is pursuing an experiment in living that has gone considerably awry. It is surprisingly difficult, but I argue (...) not impossible, to provide a representation of Mill’s view about such cases in a way that accommodates everything that Mill seems to commit himself to: the harm principle; antipathy towards conformism; and the permissibility of making some very negative appraisals of certain modes of living. (shrink)

Despite the increasing amount of literature on the legal and political questions triggered by a commitment to liberty of conscience, an explanation of the normative significance of conscience remains elusive. We argue that the few attempts to address this fail to capture the reasons people have to respect the consciences of others. We offer an alternative account that utilizes the resources of the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy to explain why conscience matters.

Historically, republicans were of different minds about markets: some, such as Rousseau, reviled them, while others, like Adam Smith, praised them. The recent republican resurgence has revived this issue. Classical liberals such as Gerald Gaus contend that neo-republicanism is inherently hostile to markets, while neo-republicans like Richard Dagger and Philip Pettit reject this characterization—though with less enthusiasm than one might expect. I argue here that the right republican attitude toward competitive markets is celebratory rather than acquiescent and that republicanism demands (...) such markets for the same reason it requires the rule of law: because both are essential institutions for protecting individuals from arbitrary interference. I reveal how competition restrains—and in the limit, even eradicates—market power and thereby helps us realize “market freedom,” i.e., freedom as non-domination in the context of economic exchange. Finally, I show that such freedom necessitates “Anglo-Nordic” economic policies. (shrink)

A liberal antinomy of parenting exists: strong liberal intuitions militate in favor of both denying special resources to parenting projects (on grounds of project-neutrality) and granting them (on grounds of respect for personhood). I show that we can reconcile these two claims by rejecting a premise common to both--viz. that liberalism is necessarily committed to extensive procreative liberties--and limiting procreation and subsequent parenting to adults who meet certain psychological and especially financial criteria. I also defend this argument, which provides a (...) Kantian complement to utilitarian arguments for restricting procreation, against a variety of objections. (shrink)

In newly emerging democracies, succeeding governments have numerous policy tasks for the purpose of developing the free market and the democratic process. In such legal systems, policy-oriented views of law, which regard law as a policy tool for diminishing public problems, seem descriptively pertinent and prescriptively helpful. This is also the case in mature democratic legal systems, where the public problems faced by governments become more and more complex. Policy-directional views of law do not necessarily imply that law is a (...) value-neutral means that can serve any possible political ends. It is widely recognized among legal theorists and practitioners, with notable exceptions represented by exclusive legal positivists, that the law involves moral values, including justice and liberty. In the present essay, I focus on one version of policy-oriented views of law that is based on the fundamental ideals of justice and interest. By sketching out this version, I attempt to shed new light on some concepts and issues in jurisprudence. To begin, I articulate the concept of justice and identify the difficulties that interest-based conceptions of justice encounter, by referring to some classical works. I also make a distinction between different conceptions of interest. Next, the two basic concepts in law — rights and liberty — are explained in terms of justice and interest. Efficiency, which has been largely neglected in traditional jurisprudence notwithstanding its practical significance, is also briefly discussed. Then, I turn to exploring the implications that the law-as-policy theory grounded on justice and interest might have for the foundations of two legal domains: criminal law and laws governing political participation. Some allegations and objections against this theory are described, and responses to them are given. The essay concludes by noting the questions that remain open in this theory. (shrink)