Political Libertarianism

There is a long and continuing debate on the correct libertarian approach to immigration. This essay first imagines a minimal-state libertarian UK, and then the introduction of several relevant anti-libertarian policies and their increasingly disastrous effects. It is argued that ‘reversing’ these imagined policies, as far as is politically possible, would be the correct way forward. Several open-border texts are then criticised, mainly for overlooking the likely huge scale of immigration. The conclusion outlines three broad options on immigration and suggests (...) that directionally-libertarian policies are far more libertarian and practical than open borders. (shrink)

From libertarian and critical-rationalist assumptions, the moral permissibility of abortion and infanticide can be explained and defended in three principal ways; although non-libertarians and justificationists could also accept these arguments. These include theories of personhood and harm-infliction. The three defences are independent of each other but collectively consistent. 1) The unborn and infant human is not a person in the relevant intellectual and moral sense. 2) There is no overall proactive imposition (harm-infliction), as the unborn or infant human is only (...) denied the benefit of support. 3) The better welfare consequences of allowing abortion and infanticide seem clear. It is inconsistent to accept any versions of these arguments as defending abortion rights but reject them for infanticide—as pro-abortion rights advocates tend to do. Some related rights and duties of the parents are briefly addressed with regard to contracts and property rights. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s famous and influential essay is criticised in three main ways that can be considered libertarian, although many non-libertarians could also accept them: 1) it mistakes the relevant moral principle, which more plausibly relates to easily-satisfied local contracts (fitting Hayek’s “Great Society”) rather than impractically-onerous global intuitions (with evolutionary origins); 2) its suggested principle of the immorality of not doing good is paradoxical as it overlooks the converse aspect that would be the positive morality of not doing bad, and (...) thereby it conceptually eliminates innocence; and 3) free markets—especially international free trade—have been overwhelmingly demonstrated to be the real solution to the global “major evils” of poverty and pollution, while “overpopulation” does not really exist in free-market frameworks; hence charity is a relatively minor alleviant to the problem of insufficient free markets. (shrink)

Recently, Eric Mack, Edward Feser, and Daniel Russell have argued that self-ownership justifies a constraint on the use of property such that an owner’s use of property may not severely negate the ability of others to interact with the world. Mack has labeled this constraint the self-ownership proviso. Adopting this proviso promises right-libertarians a way of avoiding the extreme implications of a no-proviso view, while maintaining a consistent and cohesive position. Nevertheless, I argue that self-ownership cannot ground the constraint on (...) property use that Mack, Feser, and Russell think that it can. (shrink)

A legal system is any institution or set of institutions in a given society that provides dispute resolution in a systematic and reasonably predictable way. it does so through the exercise of three functions: the judicial, the legislative, and the executive. The judicial function, the adjudication of disputes, is the core of any legal system; the other two are ancillary to this. The legislative function is to determine the rules that will govern the process of adjudication (this function may be (...) merged with the judicial function, as when case law arises through precedents, or it may be exercised separately), while the executive function is to secure submission (through a variety of means, which may or may not include violence) to the adjudicative process and compliance with its verdicts. A government or state (for present purposes i shall use these terms interchangeably) is any organisation that claims, and in large part achieves, a forcibly maintained monopoly, within a given geographical territory, of these legal functions, and in particular of the use of force in the executive function. now the market anarchist objection to government is simply a logical extension of the standard libertarian objection to coercive monopolies in general.1 First, from a moral point of view, among people regarded as equals2 it cannot be legitimate for some to claim a certain line of work as their own privileged preserve from which others are to be forcibly excluded; we no longer believe in the divine right of kings, and on no other basis could such inequality of rights be justified. Second, from an economic point of view, because monopolies are insulated from market competition and hold their customers by force, they lack both the information and the incentive to provide consumers with fair, efficient, and inexpensive service. The anarchist accepts these arguments, and merely asks why they should apply with any less force to the provision of legal services. (shrink)

This question presupposes a prior question: would a free nation need to defend itself from foreign aggression? Some would answer no: the rewards of cooperation outweigh the rewards of aggression, and so a nation will probably not be attacked unless it first acts aggressively itself.

What would the constitution of a free nation look like? In trying to answer that question we immediately think in terms of a Bill of Rights, restrictions on governmental power, and so forth. And any constitution worth having would certainly include those things. But if a constitution is to be more than a wish list, it must also specify the political structure necessary to ensure that these freedoms are not eroded or ignored. Consider the old Soviet Constitution, which guaranteed all (...) sorts of fine sounding freedoms for its citizens -- but which in practice proved only an empty promise, since its interpretation and enforcement lay in the hands of an unfettered monolithic centralized state. (shrink)

While the classical Greco-Roman tradition is not ordinarily thought of as associated with radical individualism, many of the central concerns of such radical individualists as Frédéric Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Tucker, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Ayn Rand—including their views on human sociality, spontaneous order, and the relation between self-interest and non-instrumental concern for others—are shown to be inheritances from and developments of Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic ideas. Hence those working in the classical tradition have reason to (...) explore the radical individualist tradition and vice versa. (shrink)