The essay is an overview of libertarian literature. It begins dealing with lexical issues concerning the meaning of liberalism, classical liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism. There are two meanings of libertarianism: a large one, as a free market oriented liberalism, and a strict one, as an extreme classical liberalism which calls in question the State as the main enemy of liberty. Novelist Ayn Rand is one of the main sources for contemporary libertarian theory, although she never called herself libertarian. Murray N. Rothbard is the most important libertarian thinker; he was an "austrian" economist and a natural law theorist who considered free market as the social institution capable to satisfy every human need, security and justice included. In response to rothbardian society without a State, Robert Nozick exposed a minarchist position, in favour of a minimal State limited to the function of protecting individual rights. This distinction between anarchism and minarchism is a crucial one for libertarian theory. The most interesting current literature is that in rothbardian, natural law and natural rights style. There is also an italian libertarian literature, including works of political theory, philosophy of law, environmentalism and history.
Libertarianism is an ideology which reveals its contradictions when it is implemented. The libertarian denial of the right to what Rawls calls fair quality of opportunity, especially to the right to education, would negatively impact any libertarian society in adapting to its environment. Further, a libertarian society would lead to a caste society and the domination of the political system by an elite primarily interested in protecting its own privileges, not the freedom of the masses.
In this dissertation, I investigate the implications of libertarian morality in relation to the problem of climate change. This problem is explicated in the first chapter, where preliminary clarifications are also made. In the second chapter, I briefly explain the characteristics of libertarianism relevant to the subsequent study, including the central non-aggression principle. In chapter three, I examine whether our individual emissions of greenhouse gases, which together give rise to climate change, meet this principle. I do this based on the assumption that we are the legitimate owners of the resources we use in those activities. In the fourth chapter, I question this assumption and scrutinize libertarianism's restrictions on appropriations of climate-relevant resources, which leads me to distinguish between some different versions of the libertarian view. Toward the end of the chapter, I also examine libertarianism's answer to the political question regarding how emission rights should be distributed. The fifth chapter investigates libertarianism's verdicts for mere risks of infringement, as stemming from people's emissions and acts of appropriations. In chapter six, I investigate the libertarian right to self-defense against both the effects of climate change and other people's climate-relevant activities. In chapter seven, I discuss two intergenerational issues related to climate change: what libertarianism says concerning future generations and how libertarianism might deal with the problem of historical emissions. The eighth chapter explores the implications of libertarianism regarding collective moral wrongdoing in connection to climate change. In chapter nine, I take a look at the libertarian room for governmental responses for tackling climate change. The tenth and final chapter is a summary. The overall conclusion of the dissertation is that libertarianism recommends that we reduce our emissions and decrease our extraction of natural resources such as forests and fossil fuels. Furthermore, governments are permitted to undertake some quite substantial actions in order to fight the causes of climate change. I end with some bottom-up reflections on what these conclusions might say about the plausibility of libertarianism. I claim that although libertarianism after all manages to explain some of our moral intuitions regarding climate change, it is questionable whether libertarianism's explanation is better than those offered by alternative moral theories.
Thin (or pure) libertarianism is a political philosophy which claims that violence is justified only in defense, not for invasion of other people or their (justly owned based on homesteading) property. Thick libertarianism typically but not always includes this non-aggression principle (NAP) but adds to it a whole host of additional requirements: views on egalitarianism, free association, homosexuality, discrimination, and more. The present essay constitutes a defense of the former vis a vis the latter.
Thin (or pure) libertarianism is a political philosophy which claims that violence is justified only in defense, not for invasion of other people or their (justly owned based on homesteading) property. Thick libertarianism typically but not always includes this non-aggression principle (NAP) but adds to it a whole host of additional requirements: views on egalitarianism, free association, homosexuality, discrimination, and more. The present essay constitutes a defense of the former vis a vis the latter.
Despite libertarianism's political popularity, tax scholarship is largely silent about the interaction between libertarian principles and the structure of our tax system. To fill that gap, this Article mines the nuances of libertarian theory for insights into one feature of our tax system—the charitable tax subsidies—and finds some surprising insights. Although one strand of libertarianism suggests that charitable tax subsidies are in and of themselves illegitimate, several other understandings of libertarianism see a role for the state to engage in a varying amount of redistribution or to provide varying amounts of public goods. Surprisingly, some readings even lend weight to the common criticism that the charitable tax subsidies do not do enough to assist the poor and disadvantaged. Only a lenient interpretation of classical liberalism that conceives of a vibrant non-profit sector as a public good in and of itself and an expansive reading of left-libertarianism support something akin to our current structure, in which elite cultural institutions such as the opera are subsidized even if they provide no free or discounted services to the poor. In addressing these questions, this Article rounds out a series on the interaction of distributive justice and the charitable tax subsidies.
This paper argues that hard libertarianism is not a social philosophy guided by the 'presumption of liberty'. Instead, hard libertarianism is more appropriately conceived of as a 'property-rights-based theory of justice'. Moreover, libertarians maintain that institutionalizing their avowed theory of justice will sufficiently secure individual liberty. This too is inaccurate: for it will be shown that libertarian theory overlooks relevant social threats to the freedom of persons. The classical understanding of liberty holds that one's freedom is compromised when their will is subordinated to the will of an arbitrary power. As we will see, libertarianism shows concern for only one mechanism by which arbitrary powers can subordinate the will of others to their own: aggression. However, I will show that there exist other significant mechanisms beyond aggression by which people can see their will subordinated to an arbitrary power. In what follows, I offer the mechanism of 'dependency exploita-tion' as one such example. Thus, a theory of justice focused exclusively on preventing aggression – as libertarianism does – fails to adequately address other meaningful mechanisms of will-subordination. Alternative political theories committed to the presumption of liberty – such as neo-republicanism – takes seriously the problem of dependency exploitation (in addition to aggression), and therefore offer a more compelling social philosophy for freedom lovers.
Quotas, including youth quotas for representative institutions, are usually evaluated from within the social justice discourse. That discourse relies on several questionable assumptions, seven of which I critically address and radically revise in this contribution from a libertarian perspective. Temporal justice then takes on an entirely different form. It becomes a theory in which responsibilities are clear and cannot be shifted onto the shoulders of the weak and innocent. I shall only briefly sketch some outlines and general implications of such a theory, arguing that it offers too little guidance for our imperfect world. While that implies more tolerance for quotas, I nevertheless propose an alternative more suited to a representative, deliberative democracy: veto rights.
There is by now broad consensus in the critical literature that neoliberalism and social conservatism have frequently coexisted in practice. Yet the alt-right fits none of the previously identified alliances: this is not the neoliberal neoconservatism of the Reagan and Bush years, nor the neoliberal communitarianism of the Third Way, nor even a form of neoliberal authoritarianism. Instead, the alt-right claims intellectual descent from economic libertarianism, on the one hand, and paleo- (as opposed to neo-) conservatism on the other. This paper traces the contours of this 'paleolibertarian' alliance, first by following the volatile political trajectory of Murray Rothbard, the foremost philosopher of American libertarianism, and, second, by uncovering precedents in the longer history of the American far right. It will be argued that paleoconservatism makes for a uniquely powerful ally because it offers a workable response to libertarianism's intrinsic contradictions.
The central vision of liberalism and the Left may be seen as trying to achieve more social equity by subjecting business and the rich to greater controls, usually through government. Libertarianism stresses extension of the free market as far as possible, seeing the state itself as the source of the inequities the Left points to. Frequently, the authoritarian Right and the liberal Left have indulged in culture wars where policies or norm change are sought for individual behaviors, often to the dismay of libertarians. Is it possible to have libertarian liberals, or does liberalism mean greater control of culture? This panel, representing a range of political and economic opinions, seeks to see if these perspectives are truly at odds, or if they can contribute to one another.
Libertarian ideas of self‐ownership and the priority of bodily autonomy have featured prominently in the political debate over vaccination programmes and the justifiability or otherwise of restricting the liberty of the unvaccinated. In this article we look at a selection of recent right‐libertarian literature to show that there is a considerable divergence between the application of consistent libertarian principles to this issue by academic libertarians and the strident opposition to vaccination programmes and vaccine mandates expressed by people who profess to be libertarians in the public‐political debate.
Bibliography: p.191-197. ; This dissertation adopts as its starting point the beliefs that moral truths can be known and that political philosophy is a branch of ethics. The author identifies three variants of libertarianism on the basis of their different treatments of the right to private property, which all three consider to be the cornerstone of political libertarianism. The author evaluates the arguments of Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, John Hospers and Ayn Rand for the moral foundations of libertarianism and finds them to be methodologically inadequate. None is able to furnish libertarianism with the moral foundations it requires. Following the example of Jan Narveson in his recent defence of the libertarian idea, the author adopts as the correct metaphysic of morality the method of hypothetical contract. The contractarian method is capable of determining both the nature and the extent of moral obligation. From application of the method of hypothetical contract, the author concurs with the above-mentioned authors that morality is a system of rights and duties, i.e. deontological in character, and that persons are indeed bearers of moral, non-conventional rights. One of these rights is the negative right to equal social liberty. The author differs, however, in finding that contractarianism favours also a positive right to basic, standard welfare. Recognition of this latter right commits the author to a form of moderate or Lockean libertarianism that endorses the in-principle justice of coercive redistribution to meet persons' basic welfare. Consequently, the orthodox libertarianism advocated by Nozick, Rothbard, Hospers, Rand and Narveson which recognises only negative moral rights is rejected by the author. All of the libertarians cited accept in one form or another John Locke's labour theory of appropriation. However, the author eschews the standard reading of Locke they are wedded to. The standard reading premises the labour theory on a person's ownership of himself. This reading is rejected on the grounds that the idea of self-ownership is insufficiently determinate to act as a sure basis for establishing property rights in things one has mixed one's labour with. A reconstructed defence of the moral right to private property through labouring which avoids this difficulty is given. That defence is premised not on self-ownership but on the right to equal social liberty. Save for the requirement to meet basic welfare there are no limits to the extent of acquisition. The author argues that, despite his avowals to the contrary, Nozick in fact endorses a positive right to welfare, and that this positive right is one that is co-extensive with the right to basic welfare established by the method of hypothetical contract. Two arguments are given. The first argument draws on Nozick's Lockean proviso that an act of appropriation not worsen the position of others. The second is based upon the application to an envisaged society of libertarian-rights bearers of Nozick's clause that permits the violation of rights in order to avoid catastrophic moral horror. This latter argument the author believes to be successful against any libertarianism that is wedded to absolute property rights. Redistribution to meet the demands of basic welfare necessitates taxation. Taxation is to be levied proportionately and not progressively, and is to be coupled with a system of private social insurance. None of the three variants of libertarianism identified, and which the author maintains sustain redistribution as a matter of justice, is ostensibly committed to redistribution more extensive than required to meet persons' basic welfare~ Ernest Loevinsohn's argument to the effect that libertarians are - by the very principle they defend as libertarians - committed to more far-reaching welfare and redistribution is examined and rejected. Because Loevinsohn's argument is directed against a consequentialist defence of libertarianism and not a deontological version it is misplaced. Furthermore, it fails to establish the conclusion Loevinsohn supposes it.
A study of the 'moral' libertarianism which emerged in America during the 1960's and 1970's, and exploring the intellectual history and possible theoretical implications of the moral libertarianism.
Recently, legislative campaigns to totally decriminalize the sex trade industry in a handful of U.S. states and the District of Columbia failed, but a look at campaign supporters and their arguments demonstrates that libertarian principles are mainly guiding their efforts. This article explores how libertarianism principles, when applied to the sex trade, could bring about severe and lasting harm to others, including sellers of sex, potential victims of sex trafficking to meet the new demand, and the general community. Philosophic principles of liberty have been incorporated by courts, which find that liberty is never absolute and requires a balancing test in order to create a "decent society."
