Like my fellow Bleeding Hearts I’m surprised and delighted by the attention that this blog has been getting, both of which have made me feel rather guilty for not joining the conversation sooner.

The term “libertarian” has a rather fuzzy scope, with libertarians often bearing more of a family resemblance to each other than meeting any set of necessary or sufficient conditions to be so described, and the phrase “bleeding heart libertarian” is, if anything, even fuzzier, so it might be useful to outline some of my (ever-expanding) interests before I start posting more substantively.

I’m primarily interested in the nature and legitimate scope of voluntary transactions, and hence when it would be morally acceptable either to use force to restrict these, or, more weakly, when it would be morally acceptable for third parties to fail to recognize the legitimacy of a transaction, even if they did not outright take steps to prevent it occurring.  (To see the difference between these responses, consider how we could approach a market in kidneys from live vendors: We could use force to prevent persons transacting in this way by prohibiting this market and punishing those who tried to take part in it, or we could simply fail to recognize the legal legitimacy of any contracts that concerned kidney sales.) Given this, I’m interested in analyzing just when a person’s act is voluntary–and so what sort of internal and external obstacles or pressures could preclude a person from acting voluntarily—and also in attempting to evaluate the value of voluntary action. Should we, for example, value voluntary action for its own sake, or should we value it instrumentally, on the grounds that when persons act voluntarily they are more likely to enhance their well-being than when their actions are directed by another?

These interests have led me to become concerned with issues (such as oppression and exploitation) that have typically been the province of what might loosely be termed the Left. For example, I'm very concerned with whether persons in dire economic straits can legitimately be said to consent voluntarily to economic opportunities offered to them, or whether their consent is somehow invalidated by being subject to the “coercion”, “force”, or “duress” of their economic situation. I’m also interested in whether having more options is necessarily better for persons than having fewer. One might, for example, hold that persons should lack options (“individual constraining options”) that, if pursued, are likely to restrict the number of (other) options that they have in the future. Similarly, one might think that persons should lack options (“group constraining options”) that, even if they were not likely to make the chooser have fewer options in the future, would, if chosen by some, tend to reduce the future options of persons who live in situations similar to the original situations of those who made the choices in question. And, of course, I’m also interested in whether it is ever legitimate for third parties to manipulate persons’ choice-sets to render them more likely to make choices that the third parties believe would make the persons so manipulated better off.

Obviously, one’s answers to the questions that surround the issues of exploitation and oppression will have practical implications concerning the morality of many types of market transactions, ranging from sweatshops to kidney sales. Rather than taking a dogmatic, pro-market stance (which, as Rod Long notes, is not the same as being pro-business) I think that it’s important to get the theoretical grounding of the relevant concepts (“voluntariness”, “autonomy”, “coercion”, and so on) clear before trying to address the moral questions that draw on them. Moreover, and in a similar vein, I also think that it’s important to find common ground with persons whose conclusions might be opposed to mine, so that we can have a genuine conversation about the issues that concern us rather than simply talking past each other from behind our respective ideological barricades.

And I’m looking forward to having part of that conversation here!