Ethics 123 (1):32-60 (
2012)
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Abstract
Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very
powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This
stringency yields very counter-intuitive results when we consider trivial infringements
such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead.
Maintaining that other people's rights against all infringements are very powerful
threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this paper I consider the most
sophisticated attempts to rectify this problem within a libertarian self-ownership
framework. I argue that all of these responses are significantly flawed.