October 07, 2011
What is the Point of BHL?
After Matt’s recent on-line interviews where he discussed BHL (for example, here–well worth listening to, as is another on Kosmos), I saw numerous comments circulating about the view. Some of…
All posts in: Liberty
August 29, 2011
Libertarianism and the Civil War
A number of commentators to my previous post (to my surprise) agree with Rothbard’s view that the American Civil War was unjust. They support this claim with a variety of…
August 27, 2011
Libertarian Wars
Libertarians are opposed to war. They see war as a terrifying and self-serving exercise of state power. As Murray Rothbard put it in 1994: war is “an instrument for the…
June 28, 2011
Strange Absences in Anarchy, State, and Utopia
I’ll write a more serious post tomorrow. But here’s a little lighthearted fun. Nozick is often interpreted as grounding his main arguments in Anarchy, State, and Utopia on self-ownership. People…
June 15, 2011
Reason as Weapon?
Interesting article in the NY Times about the so-called “argumentative theory of reasoning.” The claim, in a nutshell, seems to be that reason developed evolutionarily in order to allow us…
June 08, 2011
Judging States
One way to define liberalism, as I have previously indicated here is by reference to the normative principles of toleration it is committed to (as I suggested in that previous…