March 07, 2011
Positive Liberty and Legal Guarantees
We often equate freedom with an absence of constraints, impediments, or interference. For instance, you have free speech when no one stops you from speaking your mind. Philosophers call this…
Author: Jason Brennan
March 06, 2011
Half Joking, Half Serious: Which Liberties Matter?
On one reading of Plato, he advocates rule by philosopher kings.* He might be right, but you’ve got to be suspicious, given that he's a philosopher. On one reading of…
March 06, 2011
What is Liberty?
If you were to catalog all the ways people use the words “freedom” or “liberty”, you’d probably come up with a pretty long list. (Here’s an experiment: Search your iTunes…
March 05, 2011
On Bad Grounds to Reject Positive Liberty
I’m going to have a few posts on liberty. In particular, I will explain why the libertarian opposition to positive liberty is misguided. If you’re going to philosophize about liberty,…
March 04, 2011
This Ain’t Left-Libertarianism
We’re still in the introductory phase. So, here’s another “what are we talking about” sort of post, in which I make distinctions rather than arguments. The words ‘libertarian’, ‘right libertarian’,…
March 04, 2011
Neoclassical Liberalism vs High Liberalism
John Rawls argues that the basic structure of society ought to be evaluated according to two principles. The first principle concerns liberty; the second concerns social justice. In a simplified…