December 21, 2012
On the Right to Own a Gun
In light of the recent calls for a “national conversation” about gun violence and gun control, and in light of the admiration that some of us here at BHL have…
All posts in: Rights Theory
December 20, 2012
Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know, on Free Speech
Some excerpts from Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know. On the dangers of restricting “offensive speech”. In a free society, everyone has the right to offend others. A society in which…
November 28, 2012
Self-Ownership? An Uncontroversial Conclusion (among Liberals), Not a Controversial Premise
(The following is a bit messy–it’s extracted from comments I gave at a colloquium a year ago. But I’d like to share anyways.) I never make self-ownership-type arguments. Yet, if…
November 24, 2012
Libertarianism, Self-Defense, and Innocent Shields
Suppose A is unjustly attacking V, and using I as an “innocent shield.” In other words, A has positioned himself (or I) in such a way as to make it…
November 20, 2012
Property-Owning Democracy
IN a recent Boston Review article, philosophers Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson develop and defend Rawls’s ideal economic regime, property-owning democracy. Given that these two authors have recently put out…
October 01, 2012
Reading The Ethics of Liberty, Part 3 – Rothbard’s Confusion About Self-Ownership
In the previous post in this series, I discussed the natural law foundation of Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty, and suggested that it runs into difficulties with David Hume’s famous “is-ought” problem. In…