Brian Kogelmann

In “The Impossibility of Pure Libertarianism” Braham and van Hees prove that four conditions on rights—completeness, conclusiveness, non-imposition, and symmetry—cannot be satisfied simultaneously. If Braham and van Hees’s proof is to have any relevance, at least some prominent libertarians must endorse their four conditions, and libertarianism as a philosophical position must in some way be committed to all the axioms. In this paper we demonstrate the irrelevance of Braham and van Hees’s proof by showing that some of the most prominent libertarians do not endorse the completeness and conclusive conditions, and that there is nothing about libertarianism as a philosophical position that commits the libertarian to these two axioms. Indeed, we show that, more generally, there are strong reasons for libertarians to reject both conditions. As such, libertarians should not lose any sleep over Braham and van Hees’s proof

This article explores public reason liberalism’s indeterminacy problem, a problem that obtains when we admit significant diversity into our justificatory model. The article argues first that Gerald Gaus’s solution to the indeterminacy problem is unsatisfactory and second that, contra Gaus’s concerns, social choice theory is able to solve public reason’s indeterminacy problem. Moreover, social choice theory can do so in a way that avoids the worries raised against Gaus’s solution to the indeterminacy problem as well as the worries Gaus himself raises against the use of social choice mechanisms. Social choice theory thus rescues public reason liberalism by aggregating out of indeterminacy.

One unchanging feature of John Rawls’ thought is that we theorize about well-ordered societies. Yet, once we introduce justice pluralism—the fact that reasonable people disagree about the nature and requirements of justice, something Rawls eventually admits is inevitable in liberal societies—then a well-ordered society as Rawls defines it is impossible. This requires we develop new models of society to replace the well-ordered society in order to adequately address such disagreements. To do so, we ought to remain faithful to those reasons Rawls has for introducing the idea of the well-ordered society in the first place. It is shown that two models that resemble closely Rawls’ model of the well-ordered society but are also capable of dealing with justice pluralism do not perform well when judged against such criteria. Yet a new model of the well-ordered society—one that looks radically different from what Rawls originally imagined—does succeed.

This paper develops an account of what it is that rational agents choose and what it is that rational agents prefer. There are three desiderata to satisfy when offering such an account. First, the account should maintain canonical axioms of rational choice theory as intuitively plausible. Here I focus on contraction and expansion consistency properties. Second, the account should prevent canonical axioms of rational choice theory from becoming trivial—it should be possible to actually violate these axioms, less rational choice theory becomes useless for many purposes. Third, the account should allow rational choice theory to be put to several different philosophical projects. I show that existing accounts of what we choose and prefer fail along at least one of these metrics. The account I develop does not fail across any of these metrics.