About the Blog

Bleeding Heart Libertarians is a blog about free markets and social justice. All of us who blog at this site are, broadly speaking, libertarians. In particular, we are libertarians who believe that addressing the needs of the economically vulnerable by remedying injustice, engaging in benevolence, fostering mutual aid, and encouraging the flourishing of free markets is both practically and morally important.

The libertarian tradition is home to multiple figures and texts modeling commitment both to individual liberty and to consistent concern for the marginalized, both here and abroad. We seek here to revive, energize, and extend that tradition—to demonstrate that contemporary libertarians can, in addition their traditional vindication of individual liberty, offer effective, powerful, and innovative responses to the problems of economic vulnerability and injustice and to their social, political, and cultural consequences.

You can contact us at bhlblog@gmail.com.

New readers are especially encouraged to look at some of the following posts for a better introduction to some of our core ideas:

About the Bloggers

Andrew J. Cohen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. He has published articles in journals including Ethics, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, the American Philosophical Quarterly, the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and the Journal of Ethics. He holds a PhD from Georgetown University.

Daniel Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy at the University of West Virginia. He is the author of Is the Welfare State Justified? (2007) and of close to twenty scholarly articles appearing in books and in journals including the Journal of Political Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Philosophical Studies. After graduating from Vassar College, he earned a PhD from the University of Minnesota.

Fernando Tesón, a native of Buenos Aires, is the Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University College of Law. He is known for his scholarship relating political philosophy to international law (in particular his defense of humanitarian intervention), and his work on political rhetoric. He has authored Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality (3rd ed fully revised and updated, Transnational Publishers 2005); Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation (Cambridge University Press 2006) [with Guido Pincione]; A Philosophy of International Law (Westview Press 1998); and many articles in law, philosophy, and international relations journals and collections of essays. He is currently working on a book on global justice with Loren Lomasky of the University of Virginia. Before joining Florida State in 2002, he taught for 17 years at at Arizona State University. He has served as visiting professor at Cornell Law School, Indiana University School of Law, University of California Hastings College of Law, the Oxford-George Washington International Human Rights Program, and the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. He holds dual U.S. and Argentine citizenship.

Gary Chartier is Associate Professor of Law and Business Ethics at La Sierra University, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the School of Business. He is the author of three books— The Conscience of an Anarchist (2011), Economic Justice and Natural Law (2009), and The Analogy of Love (2007)—and of some thirty scholarly articles in journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Theory, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and Ratio Juris, as well as the co-editor (with Charles W. Johnson) of Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. A graduate of the University of Cambridge (PhD, 1991) and the University of California at Los Angeles (JD, 2001), he serves on the advisory board of the Center for a Stateless Society and blogs at LiberaLaw.

Jacob Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University; he has also taught at the University of Chicago and at Princeton University. He holds an LLM from the University of Chicago Law School and a PhD from Princeton. He is the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear (2000) and of over twenty articles in books and in journals including Political Theory, the American Political Science Review, and Hypatia, as well as the editor or co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Classics in Political Theory (forthcoming), Nomos LV: Federalism and Subsidiarity (forthcoming), Colonialism and Its Legacies (forthcoming), the Encyclopedia of Political Theory (2010), and the Broadview Anthology of Political Thought (2007, 2008).

James Stacey Taylor is Professor of Philosophy at the College of New Jersey. He holds a PhD from Bowling Green State University. He is the author of Stakes and Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts are Morally Imperative (2005) and of articles in journals including the American Philosophical Quarterly, Social Philosophy and Policy, the Public Affairs Quarterly, and Philosophia, and the editor of Personal Autonomy: New Essays (2005).

Jason Brennan is Assistant Professor of Business and Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2011), and A Brief History of Liberty (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), co-authored with David Schmidtz. He has published scholarly articles in journals such Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Quarterly, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Ratio, and Social Philosophy and Policy.He was formerly Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Research, at Brown University. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Arizona. Brennan writes primarily on competence and political power, democratic theory, voting ethics, and civic virtue.

Matt Zwolinski is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, and co-director of the university’s Institute for Law and Philosophy. He has published close to twenty articles on the morality of sweatshop labor, price gouging, liberty and libertarian political theory. He is the editor of Arguing About Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2009), and is currently writing two books, one entitled Exploitation, Capitalism, and the State, and another called A Brief History of Libertarianism, with John Tomasi. He holds a PhD from the University of Arizona and serves as a member of the editorial board of the Business Ethics Quarterly.

Roderick T. Long is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, and president of both the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society. He is the author of Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand (2000) and Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action (forthcoming), as well as of articles in journals including Social Philosophy and Policy and Utilitas and the co-editor (with Tibor Machan) of Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? (2008). He holds a PhD from Cornell University and blogs at Austro-Athenian Empire.

Steve Horwitz is Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY and an Affiliated Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center in Arlington, VA. He is the author of two books, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective (Routledge, 2000) and Monetary Evolution, Free Banking, and Economic Order (Westview, 1992), and he has written extensively on Austrian economics, Hayekian political economy, monetary theory and history, and the economics and social theory of gender and the family. His work has been published in professional journals such as History of Political Economy, Southern Economic Journal, and The Cambridge Journal of Economics. He has also done public policy research for the Mercatus Center, Heartland Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Cato Institute, with his most recent work being on the role of Wal-Mart and other big box stores in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Horwitz serves as the book review editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, is a contributing editor of The Freeman, where he also has a weekly online column, and is a frequent guest on Fox Business’s Freedom Watch. He has a PhD in Economics from George Mason University and an AB in Economics and Philosophy from The University of Michigan.  He is currently working on a book on classical liberalism and the family.

Kevin Vallier is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University and is presently on leave as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Political Theory Project. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2011 and has published articles appearing in journals including Utilitas, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Public Affairs Quarterly, Philosophy and Social Criticism and The Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Vallier’s areas of interest lie within political philosophy, political economy, normative ethics and philosophy of religion. He is presently writing a book manuscript on the proper place of religious commitment in liberal politics tentatively titled Beyond Separation: Uniting Liberal Politics and Public Faith.

Jessica Flanigan works on political philosophy and applied ethics. This year she is a ABD at Princeton’s Program in Political Philosophy and a visiting scholar at Brown University. Next semester, she will join the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at University of Richmond. Her dissertation, Liberal Medicine, explores the ethics of pharmaceutical regulation. There she argues that prohibitive pre-market testing requirements and prescription drug systems are seriously unjust because they violate citizens’ rights of self-medication and are discriminatory. More generally, she is interested in bioethics, leadership ethics, feminism, liberalism, business ethics, normative ethics, political economy, and philosophy of law.

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