Posts by: Jason Brennan
Some conservative libertarians oppose expanding legal marriage to include same-sex marriage. (For example, see here.) Like the author in the link, a number of them have made the following argument:
Marriage establishes number of positive rights and privileges by government fiat. Positive rights and privileges established by government fiat are unjust. If 1 [...]
Last set of comments on Tomasi. Today: ideal theory, and the argument for social justice.
Justice in Fairyland
When Tomasi was writing Free Market Fairness, I predicted it would have the effect of making left-liberals more skeptical of the value of “ideal theory”. They would see that it’s relatively easy for institutions to satisfy [...]
Here’s part II of my comments on Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness for the Pacific APA. Much of this material today will be familiar to regular readers of this blog. Tomorrow I’ll post some newer stuff you haven’t heard here yet.
The Exclusion Problem
For Rawls—at least most of the time—the first principle of justice has lexical [...]
Tomasi Book Workshop Part I
By Jason Brennan On March 15, 2013 · 74 Comments · In Book/Article Reviews, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Rights Theory
The Pacific APA is holding an author meets critics session on John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness in late March. I’m one of the critics, along with Steve Wall and Paul Gowder. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post my comments for the session. I’ll blog after the session about Tomasi’s response (or perhaps he’ll blog his [...]
My review of Chartier’s most recent book is here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/38159-anarchy-and-legal-order-law-and-politics-for-a-stateless-society/ Perhaps I have the minority point of view here. Tesón calls it “required reading”. Zwolinski says that book is “one of the most important books of libertarian political theory to be published in the last forty years.”
Chartier responds to me here: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/03/jason-brennan-did-not-like-gary-chartiers-book/
I [...]
Advocating having other people fight isn’t bravery. Advocating not sending them to fight isn’t cowardice.
Duh.
UPDATE: This in response to Coulter, at SFL, calling libertarians [bleep! cowards] for advocating peace.
I concur. I’ll add a quotation from Schmidtz and Brennan 2010:
Some theorists think a minimal set of protected negative liberties is all people need to launch a society that over generations produces explosive gains in positive liberty. Other theorists seek guarantees and do not find them in a system [...]
People often say that BHL violates the “non-aggression axiom.” After all, BHL is in principle okay with certain forms of government-sponsored social insurance schemes, if these turn out to be the best way to realize social justice, consistent with our economic rights. (Notice this is a necessary, but not sufficient condition…)
Certain critics of BHL [...]
Orthodox libertarians think quite a bit hinges on the definition of “liberty”. They try to revise the English language and reject what philosophers call “positive” conceptions of liberty, saying that whatever “positive liberty” might refer to isn’t liberty, but is really something else. Orthodox libertarians don’t think they’re engaging in ideologically motivated linguistic revision. Instead, [...]
I don’t know why Palmer keeps accusing Schmidtz and me of conflating wealth with freedom. We explicitly disavow this in the book.
Anyways, here’s our view:
1. In normal English, we in fact use the words “liberty” and “freedom” to refer to more than just negative liberty.
2. This isn’t a [...]
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