Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership

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.

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David Sobel
Syracuse University

Citations of this work

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References found in this work

The Nature of Rationality.Robert Nozick - 1994 - Princeton University Press.
Left‐Libertarianism: A Review Essay.Barbara H. Fried - 2004 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 32 (1):66-92.

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