Libertarian Critique of Distributive Justice

The institutional theory of property is that view that property rights are entirely and essentially conventional and are the creatures of states and coercively backed legal systems. In this paper, I argue that, although states and legal systems have a valuable role in defining property rights, the institutional story is not the whole story. Rather, the property rights hat we have reason to recognize as part of justice are partly conventional in character and partly rooted in universal human interests and (...) dispositions. (shrink)

I argue that taxation for redistributive purposes is a property rights violation, responding to arguments (due to Nagel, Murphy, Sunstein, and Holmes) claiming that individuals lack ownership of their pretax incomes.

Classical liberals have a long and convoluted history with the welfare state. Welfare policy has engaged liberals ever since the debates round poor relief, land ownership, and distributive justice in authors like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. However, the majority of the welfare state debate, from David Hume and Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and Richard Epstein, has been conducted primarily on the basis of rule-consequentialist reasoning, weighing the expected (long-term) costs and benefits of different institutional (...) rules. Classical liberals tend to be primarily concerned with welfare in the “happiness of individuals” sense and only secondarily with welfare in the “government handout” sense. This necessitates an investigation into the expected benefits and costs of various institutional rules and social policies. As a result, any disagreements about the best institutional pathway forward must be settled through comparative institutional analysis. Today, it seems to me that the classical liberal perspective must choose between two alternative pathways, each of which has its pros and cons, and each of which seems compatible with the abstract and general rules of the market society: 1) The Minimally Redistributive State based on a classical liberal constitution supported by robust market institutions and a civil society mosaic of polycentric mutual aid networks; or 2) The Welfare State of Law which, in addition to all of the above, adds a few carefully rule-bound and market-conforming redistributive mechanisms, the most important of which is the robust guarantee of something like a conditional minimum income scheme or an unconditional UBI/NIT scheme. In addition, the 3) “Third Way” models of the Social Market Economy and the Free Market Welfare State are also sometimes included as a third option. (shrink)

John Rawls was a major 20th-century political philosopher, and his work was animated by his loathing of the fact that many of the circumstances of human lives were due to fortune. Why should there be inequalities among men, he asked, that were produced by mere blind luck? To support his intuition, he came up with a version of social contract theory built around the device of the "original position." We imagine that people gather up for a discussion of what social (...) institutions are best, but they forget, in order not to be swayed by their own personal interests, who they are in the actual society. They do not know their religion, social position, wealth and income, their particular ends, or anything else that might prejudice their judgment. Under this veil of ignorance, they – or rather the philosopher who is shattered into numerous ghostly persons – seek to come to an agreement regarding the just basic structure of society. This book demolishes Rawls' every argument in support of his egalitarianism and shows that the original position, to the extent that it is not completely sterile, outputs libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism. It defends the view of justice as either a virtue or a legal system that promotes harmony and progress in human affairs. (shrink)

Egalitarianism, Rothbard wrote, is a revolt against nature. Yet such was precisely the creed of the analytical Marxist and socialist Gerald Cohen. Cohen's basic morality was twisted by his communist upbringing but not _completely_ which makes uncovering his errors interesting. Which is what this book does. Cohen believes that justice consists in equality. Though he is brilliant and lucid, his attitude can be summed up as follows: "Humans are my toy soldiers. I happen to like all my soldiers equally, and (...) so will give all of them the same stuff and make sure they are equally well maintained. I will then play with these toy soldiers, and all shall be well." Negatively, his case is dismantled; positively, a view is advanced, building on the author's book on John Rawls, Distribute This, that justice is a social order that fosters harmony and progress among men, and that it is libertarian capitalism that realizes this virtue. By drawing attention to this key thinker, this book fills an important gap in the refutation of egalitarianism, a task that is still unfinished and that desperately needs doing today. (shrink)

Many political and moral philosophers try to reconcile freedom and equality. One such theory is left-libertarianism, which establishes exclusive property rights over one’s own body and egalitarian property rights over natural resources. These rights are realized through the policy of unconditional basic income. Recently, left-libertarianism has come under fire from another similar approach, reciprocal libertarianism. This concept combines exclusive rights over one’s own body with the requirement for an egalitarian distribution of the fruits of social cooperation among those who make (...) a fair contribution to its system. On the face of it, reciprocal libertarians reject basic income because it doesn’t satisfy the fair contribution condition. This article explores the case for a basic income from a reciprocal libertarian perspective. In particular, two institutional regimes will be examined: reciprocal left-libertarianism and libertarian socialism. Each is compatible with a basic income coupled with broader redistribution according to the principle of reciprocity. (shrink)

Is a basic income ethically justifiable? This article offers several arguments in favor of a basic income from the perspective of Robert Nozick’s historical theory of justice. The first section outlines three basic principles of Nozick’s theory and explains its connections to libertarianism and natural rights theory. The second section argues for the adoption of the Lockean proviso as a limitation on the principle of original appropriation. It then presents three interpretations of the Lockean proviso: the Nozick’s proviso, the sufficiency (...) proviso, and the egalitarian proviso. All three provisos, albeit on different grounds, offer justification for a basic income. The third section turns to the principle of rectification of historical injustice. Together with Rawls’s difference principle and Steiner’s liberal theory of exploitation, the principle of rectification can also provide a justification for a basic income. The article concludes that, from an ethical perspective, a basic income is a promising form of redistribution. (shrink)

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick made the argument that income redistribution violates the Kantian categorical imperative. Nozick’s retrospective enslavement argument is still used today in discussions about the moral justification of taxation. This article explicates four implicit premises of Nozick’s argument: the self-ownership principle, its fullness, the absence of restrictions on the appropriation of natural resources, and the absence of restrictions on the distribution of the fruits of cooperation. Without additional justification for each of these premises, Nozick’s argument (...) cannot show that income redistribution violates the categorical imperative. (shrink)

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 (...) redistribution that will protect people from dire circumstances. As it only applies to those who find themselves in poverty through no fault of their own, Mack’s argument rules out a basic income. However, one can combine Mack’s argument with basic income by arguing that responsibility-insensitive sufficientarianism is superior to luck sufficientarianism. First, luck sufficientarianism allows for the counterintuitive conclusion that people who have made mistakes in their lives do not deserve help from the rest of the community, even if they are engaged in some socially important activity. Second, luck sufficientarianism unduly interferes with people’s private lives to distinguish between deserving and undeserving recipients of social assistance, and inevitably excludes some deserving recipients from the pool of recipients. Third, a condition for holding people responsible for their choices is that they have agency. But maintaining agency requires the presence of some kind of material resources that would protect people from the fear and stress associated with poverty. Thus, responsibility-insensitive sufficientarianism is superior to luck sufficientarianism as an interpretation of the catastrophe clause. And within a libertarian framework, this requires introducing a basic income. First, a basic income technically guarantees everyone protection from extreme poverty and destitution. Second, a basic income guarantees everyone autonomy in how they manage their resources. Third, a basic income does not require means testing and is therefore responsibility-insensitive. Mack’s catastrophe clause therefore offers a right-libertarian argument for a basic income. (shrink)

I argue here that our rights in our bodies are not well explained by self-ownership – and thus, also, that we cannot infer any further distributive implications of self-ownership from intuitions about body rights via inference to the best explanation. And I sketch an alternative view, on which we do indeed own our bodies, but not because we own ourselves. Self-ownership, I argue, provides a satisfying explanation only if we take it seriously: not as a mere metaphor, but as an (...) expression of a literal, reflexive ownership relation between me and myself, whatever I myself am. I go on to canvas the most prominent theories of what human beings like me literally are, arguing that each of these theories makes it hard to see how our self-ownership can ground our rights in our bodies. In the second half I consider and refine alternative, interest-based, explanations of our rights in our bodies, drawing on suggestions in this direction from Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Alan Wertheimer. I show how it is possible in principle to affirm that body ownership rights remain (in a sense) natural rights, even on the sort of interest-based view of ownership that many (including myself) take to preclude all or most fully natural property rights. I argue that many body rights can be grounded prefiguratively, in facts about the possible emergence of sufficiently just authority-assigning practices, rather than (as with most property rights) in their actual existence. Finally, I return to the distributive issues that motivated much interest in self-ownership in the first place – particularly, the question of whether and in what way our rights in our bodies generate rights in other things, by labor or otherwise. Without actually answering this question, I show how the account developed here would proceed in doing so: not by positing body rights as a methodologically prior constraint on rights of other kinds, but rather by considering the implications entire systems of rights and duties have for the interests of those who possess and are bound by them. (shrink)

How can libertarianism—which is thought to be hostile to any redistribution—support universal, unconditional cash transfers in the form of a Basic Income? Surprisingly, many vocal proponents of programmes similar to Basic Income—such as economist Milton Friedman, public intellectual Charles Murray, and eBay co-founder Pierre Omidiyar—are self-described libertarians. As this chapter demonstrates, these and other libertarian proponents are not deviating from libertarian thought: instead, they reflect the nuance and diversity of its theoretical foundations. To that end, this chapter explores several justifications (...) for a Basic Income grounded in libertarianism. By libertarianism, we mean a family of theories that emphasize the right of the individual to be free from coercion, a strong respect for private property rights and the free market, and a presumption that market distributions are just and should be disturbed only in limited circumstances. We argue that each variant of libertarianism justifies, but does not mandate, redistribution, although for differing reasons and at different levels. Because this conclusion runs counter to most readers’ impressions of libertarianism, this chapter focuses on making the libertarian case for redistribution. We further show that once one accepts the case for redistribution, providing such redistribution through unrestricted, unconditional cash transfers best reflects core libertarian principles. (shrink)

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 (...) measures to compensate for this brute luck. Left-libertarian claims to reconcile these two types of moral considerations. The classical left-libertarian point of view seeks to offset the influence of brute luck through an egalitarian distribution of the benefits of owning natural resources that are independent of anyone’s choice and responsibility. However, this position does not sufficiently take into account the influence of other factors of brute luck and, in particular, genetic endowments on the distribution of economic wealth. This article discusses three approaches that allow left-libertarians to take into account the factor of genetic luck in interpersonal distribution. First, it is Hillel Steiner’s proposal to attribute genetic information to natural resources, the benefits of which are subject to egalitarian redistribution. Second, it is the concept of equal opportunity for welfare by Peter Vallentyne, Michael Otsuka and Eric Roark. Third, it is the universal dominance criterion of Philippe Van Parijs and Kasper Ossenblok. The first two approaches face a number of moral and practical difficulties, but the third approach is able to overcome them. Thus, the universal dominance criterion is the most promising way to reconcile left-libertarianism and justice in the distribution of genetic endowments. (shrink)

This handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines and from around the world to examine the history, characteristics, effects, viability and implementation of basic income. The first edition of this book contributed a comprehensive treatment of multiple aspects of the basic income debate. This updated, expanded edition tackles new topics that are becoming increasingly prominent in the global debate. New chapters are devoted to recent research on the history of basic income; the development and peacemaking potential of basic income in (...) conflict zones; municipal experiments in the United States; requirements for pilot projects and experiments; and the public health implications of basic income. Existing chapters on the implementation of basic income have also been substantially updated to take account of new research on microsimulation, land value tax, local currencies, and blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, along with new material on the increasing use of opinion polls and the difficulties related to that. New political and ethical perspectives on the role of trade unions and their increasing engagement with the basic income debate are also introduced, while the section on pilot projects and experiments has been updated to cover recent political developments. Fully updated to reflect new global developments in the basic income debate, this handbook will be of interest to researchers, teachers and research-oriented policymakers in a range of fields. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming public health-care systems around the world. With demand exceeding the availability of medical resources in several regions, hospitals have been forced to invoke triage. To ensure that this difficult task proceeds in a fair and organised manner, governments scrambled experts to draft triage guidelines under enormous time pressure. Although there are similarities between the documents, they vary considerably in how much weight their respective authors place on the different criteria that they propose. Since most (...) of the recommendations do not come with ethical justifications, analysing them requires that one traces back these criteria to their underlying theories of distributive justice. In the literature, COVID-19 triage has been portrayed as a value conflict solely between utilitarian and egalitarian elements. While these two accounts are indeed the main antipodes, I shall show that in fact all four classic theories of distributive justice are involved: utilitarianism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, and communitarianism. Detecting these in the documents and classifying the suggested criteria accordingly enables one to understand the balancing between the different approaches to distributive justice—which is crucial for both managing the current pandemic and in preparation for the next global health crisis. (shrink)

Libertarianism is a theory of justice that places significant moral weight on exclusive property rights. On this basis, many libertarian philosophers, from Robert Nozick to Michael Huemer, criticize any form of income redistribution. Ironically, some libertarians, following Philippe Van Parijs, Matt Zwolinski, and Charles Murray, have supported the introduction of an unconditional basic income. This essay seeks to prove that this support is not just a political compromise. By contrast, libertarian justice advocates have a strong moral basis for supporting income (...) redistribution in the form of unconditional cash payments. This essay explores one such reason, the Lockean proviso. The Lockean proviso is a moral requirement for the appropriation of unowned resources to leave “enough and as good” for others. There are many interpretations of the Lockean proviso, but the most ambitious are the egalitarian proviso and the sufficiency proviso. Each of them, but for different reasons, requires the introduction of a basic income. The egalitarian proviso establishes the equal rights of all people to natural resources, and therefore requires that all benefits from the ownership of natural resources be shared egalitarianly — in the form of unconditional equal payments. The sufficiency proviso establishes some threshold of sufficiency, and then imposes a restriction on exclusive property rights so that they can’t prevent redistribution in order to raise all people to the threshold of sufficiency. However, while both provisos require a basic income, they diverge on three important dimensions in assessing this basic income: applicability, taxable base, and amount of cash payments. (shrink)

A libertarian theory of justice holds that persons are self-owners and have the Hohfeldian moral power to justly acquire property rights in initially unowned external resources. Different variants of libertarianism can be distinguished according to their stance on the famous Lockean proviso. The proviso requires, in Locke’s words, to leave ‘enough and as good’ for others, and thus specifies limits on the acquisition of property. Left-libertarians accept an egalitarian interpretation of the proviso, ‘right-libertarians’ either reject any kind of proviso or (...) accept rather weak versions of it. In be-tween there is room for moderate interpretations of the proviso, and in particular for a sufficientarian interpretation: a ‘sufficiency proviso.’ The resulting theory of justice can be called ‘moderate libertarianism.’ In this article I make a case for moderate libertarianism, so understood. I argue that moderate libertarianism has advantages over both left- and right-libertarianism because it better coheres with the most plausible rationale for endorsing a libertarian theory of justice in the first place. (shrink)

The Lockean theory of property licenses unilateral appropriation on the condition that there be ‘enough, and as good left in common for others’. However, the meaning of this proviso is all but clear. This article argues that the proviso is centered around the Lockean theory of freedom. To be free, I argue, we must be ‘non-subjected’ in the exercise of our rights, including our rights to appropriate. We enjoy such freedom only when the ability to exercise our rights does not (...) depend on others. That can obtain if literally enough and as good is left in common. But it can also obtain in other ways, for example through competitive labour markets. The latter offer something as good as ‘enough and as good’. (shrink)

We live in a market system and witness much economic inequality. Although such inequality may not be an essential characteristic of market systems, it seems historically inevitable. How we should evaluate this inequality, on the other hand, is contentious. I propose that bleeding heart libertarians provide the best diagnosis and prescription.

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.

Sufficientarian libertarianism is a theory of justice that combines libertarianism’s focus on property rights and non-interference with sufficientarianism’s concern for the poor and needy. Persons are conceived as having stringent rights to direct their lives as they see fit, provided that everyone has enough to live a self-guided life. Yet there are different ways to combine libertarianism and sufficientarianism and hence different types of sufficientarian libertarianism. In the article I present and discuss three types, and I argue that the last (...) one overcomes the problems of the other two. The first type combines libertarianism with a sufficiency principle in what is sometimes called the ‘ethics of distribution’. The second incorporates modest welfare rights into a libertarian theory of justice. The third endorses a sufficientarian Lockean proviso for practices of private property within a libertarian theory of justice. I argue that it is superior to the others. (shrink)

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

Abstract: This paper restates the thesis of 'The Requirements of Justice and Liberal Socialism" where it was argued that liberal socialism best meets Rawlsian requirements of justice. The recent responses to this paper by Jan Narveson, Jeppe von Platz, and Alan Thomas merit examination and comment. This paper shows that if Rawlsian justice is to be met, then non-personal property must be subject to public control. If just outcomes merit the public control of non-personal property and this control is not (...) utilized, then justice has been subordinated to the objectively less important institution of private property. (shrink)

Various U.S. laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Food Quality Protection Act, require additional protections for susceptible subpopulations who face greater environmental health risks. The main ethical rationale for providing these protections is to ensure that environmental health risks are distributed fairly. In this article, we (1) consider how several influential theories of justice deal with issues related to the distribution of environmental health risks; (2) show that these theories often fail to provide specific guidance concerning policy (...) choices; and (3) argue that an approach to public decision making known as accountability for reasonableness can complement theories of justice in establishing acceptable environmental health risks for the general population and susceptible subpopulations. Since accountability for reasonableness focuses on the fairness of the decision-making process, not the outcome, it does not guarantee that susceptible subpopulations will receive a maximum level of protection, regardless of costs or other morally relevant considerations. (shrink)

Gordon Barnes accuses Robert Nozick and Eric Mack of neglecting, in two ways, the practical, empirical questions relevant to justice in the real world.1 He thinks these omissions show that the argument behind the Wilt Chamberlain example—which Nozick famously made in his seminal Anarchy, State, and Utopia—fails. As a result, he suggests that libertarians should concede that this argument fails. In this article, we show that Barnes’s key arguments hinge on misunderstandings of, or failures to notice, key aspects of the (...) entitlement theory that undergirds Nozick’s and Mack’s work. Once the theory is properly understood, Barnes’s challenges fail to undermine the Chamberlain example, in particular, and the entitlement theory, in general. (shrink)

Libertarians often bill their theory as an alternative to both the traditional Left and Right. _The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism_ helps readers fully examine this alternative, without preaching it to them, exploring the contours of libertarian thinking on justice, institutions, interpersonal ethics, government, and political economy. The 31 chapters--all written specifically for this volume--are organized into five parts. Part I asks, what should libertarianism learn from other theories of justice, and what should defenders of other theories of justice learn from (...) libertarianism? Part II asks, what are some of the deepest problems facing libertarian theories? Part III asks, what is the right way to think about property rights and the market? Part IV asks, how should we think about the state? Finally, part V asks, how well can libertarianism deal with some of the major policy challenges of our day, such as immigration, trade, religion in politics, and paternalism in a free market. Among the _Handbook_’s chapters are those from critics who write about what they believe libertarians get right as well as others from leading libertarian theorists who identify what they think libertarians get wrong. As a whole, the _Handbook_ provides a comprehensive, clear-eyed look at what libertarianism has been and could be, and why it matters. (shrink)

After Marx, dissenting economics almost always used 'the labour theory' as a theory of value. This paper develops a modern treatment of the alternative labour theory of property that is essentially the property theoretic application of the juridical principle of responsibility: impute legal responsibility in accordance with who was in fact responsible. To understand descriptively how assets and liabilities are appropriated in normal production, a 'fundamental myth' needs to be cleared away, and then the market mechanism of appropriation can be (...) understood. On the normative side, neoclassical theory represents marginal productivity theory as showing that (a metaphorical version of) the imputation principle is satisfied ('people get what they produce') in competitive enterprises. Since that shows the moral commitment of neoclassical economics to the imputation principle, the labour theory of property is presented here as the actual non-metaphorical application of the imputation principle to property appropriation. The property-theoretic analysis at the firm level shows how the neoclassical (and much heterodox) analysis in terms of 'distributive shares' wholly misframed the basic questions. Finally, the paper shows how the imputation principle (modernised labour theory of property) is systematically violated in the present wage labour system of renting persons. The paper can be seen as taking up the recent challenge posed by Donald Katzner for a dialogue between neoclassical and heterodox microeconomics. (shrink)

This article outlines the foundations of a nomos-observing theory of social justice, termed ‘rule egalitarianism’, that explains how the seemingly contradictory merger of classical liberalism and s...

Robert Nozick initiated one of the most inspired and inspiring discussions in political philosophy with his 1974 response in Anarchy, State, and Utopia to John Rawls’s 1971 account of distributive justice in A Theory of Justice. These two works have informed an enormous amount of subsequent, especially liberal, discussions of economic justice, where Nozick’s work typically functions as a resource for those defending more right-wing (libertarian) positions, whereas Rawls’s has been used to defend various left-wing stances. Common to these discussions, (...) as found in politics generally (where similar kinds of arguments frequently are used to defend right and the left-wing policies and conclusions) is that they end in rather stubborn stalemates: the right defending minimal states while the left defends more extensive states. Interesting, too, is that both Nozick and Rawls take themselves to be consistent with, inspired by, and furthering Kant’s freedom project in the development of their own theories of justice. In this paper, I start by outlining the structures of these debates with an emphasis on the original disagreements between Nozick and Rawls. I then show how neither theory actually employed Kant’s own theory of justice, but rather drew on or out (presumed) implications of his ethical theory. In the final sections, I argue that if Nozick and Rawls had instead used Kant’s theory of justice and not his ethics, not only would their individual theories have been stronger, but they could have found ways of overcoming the unproductive stalemates that characterize their own as well as subsequent related discussions of economic justice as we currently find them in much scholarly and contemporary political debate. (shrink)

Gini coefficients, which measure gross inequalities rather than their unfair components, are often used as proxy measures of absolute or relative distributive injustice in Western societies. This presupposes that the fair inequalities in these societies are small and stable enough to be ignored. This article presents a model for a series of ideal, perfectly just societies, where comfortable lives are equally available to everyone, and calculates the Gini coefficients for each. According to this model, inequalities produced by age and other (...) demographic factors, together with reasonable choices under equal opportunity, can raise the Gini coefficients for perfectly just societies to levels at least as high as those of any current Western country, and can as easily account for differences in Gini coefficients between such societies or within one such society over time. If Gini coefficients at these levels are possible for ideal societies without distributive injustice, then they should not be used as proxy measures of distributive injustice in real societies. (shrink)

If ever there were a time in which concerns about equality as a primary issue for social policy disappeared from public view, now is not that time. Recent work in economics on inequality has climbed to the top of best-sellers lists, and the issue was a major talking point in American midterm elections in 2014. The sheer bewildering volume of scholarship and discussion of equality makes it difficult to distinguish signal from noise. What, of all that we know about ways (...) in which we are equal and ways in which we are unequal, matters? If, as seems plausible, we neither are nor should desire to be equal in every respect that we could in theory be equal, in which ways ought we to care about being equal? Does the kind of equality of outcome — perhaps equality of income or wealth — that is frequently the focus of discussion matter most? Does opportunity matter more? What about less material forms of equality such as equality of status, or power, or authority? How do these various forms of equality interact with each other? The essays in this volume represent the work of a number of leading scholars from different disciplines on these questions. Drawing on sources in philosophical analysis, empirical science, and history, they sort through competing claims and counterclaims about the intuitions that drive our concern for equality. Their conclusions are not in unison, but nonetheless represent important advances in our attempts to grapple with this crucial social value. (shrink)

The classical liberal paradigm has always argued for strong economic freedom combined with limits on government power. But it has also been always openminded about using government programs to improve the society. These principles, if applied to today’s society, are simultaneously a criticism of “really existing” welfare state ideology – with its lack of economic freedom and its reliance on the expansive bureaucracy – but also an opportunity for reforming welfare states toward more freedom-based alternatives. There is a utopian potential (...) in classical liberalism. This book articulates how several strands of liberalism, including Austrian school liberalism and Chicago school liberalism, may support something like universal basic income (UBI). (shrink)

I argue that Tomasi’s most fundamental “bleeding heart libertarian” insights are not adequately served by Rawls’s lexical framework and his idealized theory of institutional choice. Perhaps paradoxically, using Rawls’s lexical framework to articulate Tomasi’s declared concerns for both economic liberty and “social justice” gives the latter concern very little weight. For that reason, Tomasi’s own objections against classical liberalism would ultimately apply to his own positive contribution as well: the satisfaction of a distributional adequacy condition is secured on purely contingent (...) grounds. Furthermore, Tomasi’s endorsement of Rawls’ conception of the first tasks of political philosophy might render his case for laissez-faire forms of capitalism immaterial. This is because Rawls fails to appreciate the very narrow theoretical relevance of identifying institutional arrangements purely as a matter of “ideal theory”. Feasibility concerns have always been an important element in the classical liberal critique of interventionist and redistributive politics. Yet they have invariably failed to be featured, in any theoretically prominent way, within the most philosophically oriented defenses of the classical liberal order. A formulation of bleeding heart libertarianism along Rawlsian lines would be equally wanting in this regard. (shrink)

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two (...) concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect. (shrink)

This paper shows that implicit assumptions about the numeraire good in the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency-equity analysis involve a "same-yardstick" fallacy (a fallacy pointed out by Paul Samuelson in another context). These results have negative implications for cost-benefit analysis, the wealth-maximization approach to law and economics, and other parts of applied welfare economics--as well as for the whole vision of economics based on the "production and distribution of social wealth.".

John Tomasi's “market democrat” is right to suppose that Rawlsians have erred in omitting economic liberty from their theories of justice. A Rawlsian ought to include economic liberty as a basic freedom because it facilitates individuals' development and pursuit of their conceptions of the good. However, the most plausible version of economic liberty will require the state to guarantee, if possible, that no one will be driven by economic desperation to engage in immiserating work, which may impair rather than facilitate (...) his or her pursuit of the good. There is reason to worry that contemporary economies such as the United States fall seriously short of that ideal. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss a powerful challenge to high-liberalism: the challenge presented by neoclassical liberals that the high-liberal assumptions and values imply that the full range of economic liberties are basic rights. If the claim is true, then the high-liberal road from ideals of democracy and democratic citizenship to left-liberal institutions is blocked. Indeed, in that case the high-liberal is committed to an institutional scheme more along the lines of laissez-faire capitalism than property-owning democracy. To present and discuss this (...) challenge, I let John Rawls represent the high-liberal argument that only a narrow range of economic liberties are basic rights and John Tomasi represent the neoclassical liberal argument that the full range of economic liberties are basic rights. I show that Rawls’s argument is inadequate, but also that Tomasi’s argument fails. I thus conclude that high-liberalism is in a precarious situation, but is not yet undone by the neoclassical liberal challenge. (shrink)

Aeon Skoble and other libertarians fail to show that libertarianism supports anarchism. The focus on whether persons would rationally consent to the state misses the issue. Instead, the truth of anarchism depends on whether all or most persons actually have consented to the state. Tacit consent to the acquisition of property rights in previously unowned things provides us with a model as to how valid consent might occur. However, whether persons actually have done so is an empirical issue.

This is a review of Gerald Gaus's recent book, _The Order of Public Reason_.

I show that the standard libertarian conception of justice is vulnerable to a kind of basic collective self-defeat not characteristic of its rivals. All deontological liberals, including the libertarian, ought to be committed to two very general claims regarding the nature of justice. The RSC (Reasonable Stability Criterion) is the requirement that in the just society, human beings will typically exhibit genuine literacy with the relevant conception. The MEC (Moral Education Condition) consists in the thought that a necessary condition for (...) any such literacy is a proper moral education. It is consistent with full respect for standard libertarian justice that a society living under its auspices will fail to satisfy the RSC, by failing to provide moral education to those who need it. This issues in the collective self-defeat of the conception, for by respecting all and only the constraints constitutive of libertarian justice, the group will have undermined the achievement of a characteristic aim. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I believe that the first correspondence I received from Hillel Steiner was an email in 1998 in which he generously praised a recently-published article of mine and added: ‘I hope it’s not presumptuous of me to say “Welcome to the wonderful world of left-libertarianism!”’ The piece (Otsuka 1998) that prompted this unpresumptuous welcome was left-libertarian in spirit, as it was an attempt to reconcile self-ownership with equality. I was not yet convinced, however, that I was a left-libertarian, so it (...) was not clear at the time whether my exploration of this world was as a curious and sympathetic visitor or as someone who had just begun a period of permanent residency. It turned out to be the latter, and Hillel deserves much of the credit for my settlement in this world that he had himself rediscovered in the 1970s and elegantly reshaped during the past three decades through his essays that lead up to, constitute, and develop and extend his marvellous Essay on Rights (Steiner 1994). (shrink)

This book explores how traditional theories of economic justice, both from the libertarian right and the egalitarian left, have failed to appreciate the objection against exploitative behavior that would be possible through the exercise of property rights. This failure also underlies the recent plea for a so-called unconditional basic income.

Are positive duties to help others in need mere informal duties of virtue or can they also be enforceable duties of justice? In this paper I defend the claim that some positive duties (which I call basic positive duties) can be duties of justice against one of the most important prin- cipled objections to it. This is the libertarian challenge, according to which only negative duties to avoid harming others can be duties of justice, whereas positive duties (basic or nonbasic) (...) must be seen, at best, as informal moral requirements or recommendations. I focus on the contractarian version of the libertarian challenge as recently presented by Jan Narveson. I claim that Narveson’s contractarian construal of libertarianism is not only intuitively weak, but is also subject to decisive internal problems. I argue, in particular, that it does not pro- vide a clear rationale for distinguishing between informal duties of virtue and enforceable duties of justice, that it can neither successfully justify libertarianism’s protection of negative rights nor its denial of positive ones, and that it fails to undermine the claim that basic positive duties are duties of global justice. -/- . (shrink)

The orthodoxy on the concept of ownership is given by Honoré's list of incidents. The idea this portrays is as ownership as a very flexible concept. The main purpose of this paper is to argue that the concept of property has much more integrity than the notion of a bundle of incidents may suggest. The Libertarian Challenge claims that redistributive theories of Justice, in so far as they impose involuntary taxes, are inconsistent with property rights, and are therefore unjustifiable. One (...) response to the libertarian challenge is to present alternative conceptions of ownership that are based on less than the complete list of incidents. These conceptions, we are told, avoid the inconsistency inherent in redistributive taxation by rejecting the incidents that are the source of the inconsistency, while retaining the moral appeal by leaving in place the core incidents and thus remaining faithful to what is primarily justifiable in property rights. Such an approach has been taken by several writers (notably, Waldron, Christman, and Fried). These different attempts to present a "truncated", "bifurcated", or "purist" concept of property invariably fail. Taxation must be an infringement of property. The upshot of this is that a justification of redistributive taxation requires a restriction of property or abandoning it altogether rather than redefining it. (shrink)

In the longstanding debate between liberals and libertarians over the morality of redistributive labor taxation, liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin have consistently taken the position that such taxation is perfectly compatible with individual liberty, whereas libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard have adopted the (very) contrary position that such taxation is tantamount to slavery. In this paper, I argue that the debate over redistributive labor taxation can be usefully reconstituted as a debate over the incidents (...) (or components) of self-ownership, with liberals arguing for a narrow definition of the concept and libertarians arguing for a broad one. By using what Alan Ryan has called the “language of proprietorship,” I pinpoint precisely the source of the disagreement between liberals and libertarians and assess the relative strengths of their arguments. I also show that the respective definitions of self-ownership used by liberals and libertarians are deeply problematic—though for strikingly different reasons. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an analysis of equal opportunity. I argue that equal opportunity occurs where two or more persons with equal natural abilities and willingness to work hard have chances at various jobs that are in the aggregate of equal value. I then argue that equal opportunity is neither valuable nor something that the government ought to pursue. First, it is not clear why we should value opportunities rather than outcomes. Second, the value of equal opportunity rests on (...) the value of interest satisfaction. However, if interest satisfaction is relatively constant across different jobs and different job opportunities, then the concern for interest satisfaction will not ground the value of equal opportunity. Third, equalizing opportunities is not in itself valuable because persons are not equally valuable. Fourth, even if equal opportunity were valuable, the government can pursue it only by trespassing on individual rights. (shrink)

Part I of this essay supports the anti-egalitarian conclusion that individuals may readily become entitled to substantially unequal extra-personal holdings by criticizing end-state and pattern theories of distributive justice and defending the historical entitlement doctrine of justice in holdings. Part II of this essay focuses on a second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion. This route combines the self-ownership thesis with a contention that is especially advanced by G.A. Cohen. This is the contention that the anti-egalitarian conclusion can be inferred from (...) the self-ownership thesis without the aid of additional controversial premises. Cohen advances this contention, not because he wants to support the anti-egalitarian conclusion, but rather because he wants to emphasize the need for one to reject the self-ownership thesis if one is to reject the anti-egalitarian conclusion. In Part II of this essay, I support this second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion by reinforcing Cohen's special contention while rejecting his challenges to the self-ownership thesis. Cohen's special contention is reinforced by way of an explanation of why the redistributive state must trench upon some people's self-ownership rights. One important challenge to the self-ownership thesis is answered through the articulation of a new and improved Lockean proviso. Another challenge offered by Cohen is answered by arguing that the philosophical costs of denying the self-ownership thesis are as great as the self-ownership libertarian maintains. Thus, I defend both of the key elements of self-ownership libertarianism, the self-ownership thesis and the anti-egalitarian conclusion. Key Words: autonomy • distributive justice • egalitarianism • exploitation • Lockean proviso • self-ownership • slavery. (shrink)

This two-part article offers a defense of a libertarian doctrine that centers on two propositions. The first is the self-ownership thesis according to which each individual possesses original moral rights over her own body, faculties, talents, and energies. The second is the anti-egalitarian conclusion that, through the exercise of these rights of self-ownership, individuals may readily become entitled to substantially unequal extra-personal holdings. The self-ownership thesis remains in the background during Part I of this essay, while the anti-egalitarian conclusion is (...) supported in two ways. First, I offer a reconstruction of Robert Nozick's well-known `How Liberty Upsets Patterns' argument against all end-state and pattern theories of distributive justice; and I defend this reconstructed stance against what might (otherwise) seem to be telling criticisms. Second, I defend the two key principles of Nozickian historical entitlement theory (the principle of just transfer and the principle of just initial acquisition) against criticisms offered by G.A. Cohen. Part II will center on Cohen's contention that the crucial basis for the anti-egalitarian conclusion is the self-ownership thesis. There I argue that Cohen is correct to hold that he must reject the self-ownership thesis if he is to avoid the anti-egalitarian conclusion; but he is wrong to think that he has an adequate basis for rejecting this thesis. Thus, both elements in the libertarianism under consideration are vindicated. And, the self-ownership thesis plays a surprisingly direct role in vindicating the anti-egalitarian conclusion. (shrink)

How can we allocate scarce health care resources justly? In particular, are markets the most efficient way to deliver health services? Much blood, sweat and ink has been shed over this issue, but rarely has either faction challenged the unspoken assumption behind the claim made by advocates of markets: that efficiency advances the interests of both individuals and society. Whether markets actually do increase efficiency is arguably a matter for economists, but the deeper ethical question is whether efficiency is the (...) correct criterion, in terms of social justice and individual needs. (shrink)