Robert Nozick addresses the idea of egalitarian redistribution in an argument standardly considered original: the “Wilt Chamberlain Argument”. However, this argument is found in David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, first published in 1751. Placing this argument within a Humean and Hayekian, rather than a Lockean or Kantian, perspective radically changes its import for issues of economic justice. Rather than vindicating the radical individualism of Nozick and other libertarians, applied to our circumstances using Hume's conventionalist and evolutionary (...) account of justice, Hume's Wilt Chamberlain argument vindicates moderate redistribution constrained by the rule of general laws and the goal of fostering innovation and industriousness. (shrink)

The imperativist strand of positivism derives law from an actual person or set of persons wielding a monopoly of force. The rule-based positivism of H.L.A. Hart has more sublty identified a matter-of-fact rule of recognition in place of such a sovereign one or many. But sovereignty is not a matter-of-fact of any kind; rather it is partly the product of what I call qua arguments. I reconstruct the reasoning, in the extradition case of Augusto Pinochet in the British House of (...) Lords, providing a focus for an account of the limits of legal positivism in the application of the principle par in parem non habet imperium. Sovereign power is interpreted through reasoning that is at its margin more moral than technically legal. (shrink)

Universal Human Rights brings new clarity to the important and highly contested concept of universal human rights. This collection of essays explores the foundations of universal human rights in four sections devoted to their nature, application, enforcement, and limits, concluding that shared rights help to constitute a universal human community, which supports local customs and separate state sovereignty. The eleven contributors to this volume demonstrate from their very different perspectives how human rights can help to bring moral order to an (...) otherwise divided world. (shrink)

The liberal principle of tolerance limits the use of coercion by a commitment to the broadest possible toleration of rival religious and moral conceptions of the worthy way of life. While accepting the communitarian insight that moral thought is necessarily rooted in a social self with conceptions of the good, I argue that this does not undermine liberal tolerance. There is no thickly detailed way of life so embedded in our self-conceptions that liberal neutrality is blocked at the level of (...) reflection. This holds true for us in virtue of the socially acquired reflective self found in the pluralist modern world. I reject Michael J. Sandel’s argument that to resolve issues of privacy rights we must reach a shared view of the moral worth of, for instance, homosexual conduct. The view of community most consistent with our situation is a simple causal conception: we are all members of the same community to the extent that we inhabit the same world of causes, physical and social. Any attempt to call us to some thicker, stronger conception of community fails to speak to us in our modernity. (shrink)