Jan Narveson

Bastiat's great contribution to economics, in his own view, was his identification of service as the source of economic value. What is anything worth to anybody? In the cases where we are not dealing with what our fellow men do for us, the answer is to be found in its utility - how much the thing contributes to our satisfaction. In the case where we deal with our fellows, we are interested specifically in what they can do for us, that is, how much service they can render us - how much they can or could, by their actions, contribute to the purchaser's satisfactions. If the providers are free beings, then the recipient will obtain those satisfactions only by agreement with that provider. It is to be assumed that the purchaser will get the best outcome he can: he will pay the lowest price feasible, for the option that is better than any known alternative.

The invention of computers, and especially their communication capabilities is revolutionary in several ways. They show the paramount importance of communication in human life, as well as facilitating revolutionary improvements in virtually all areas of social life: business, the arts, agriculture, and others. They put in perspective the erroneous outlook of "materialism" -the idea that human well-being is a matter of accumulating material objects, with a corollary that we must be using up the material resources that make such life possible. In fact, we use fewer and fewer material resources to make life better. Given human ingenuity, natural resources simply do not pose any basic restriction on human potential. Humanity can be in for a great future, provided our politics can be kept from wrecking it all. Will we have the wisdom to leave people to their devices and continue to forward all this progress?

Most books defending the position now know as “libertarianism”, the thesis that government ought to confine itself only to the most minimal functions of preventing or punishing force and fraud, can be dismissed with little scruple as the work of cranks. And some have already done so with this one as well: but wrongly. It is clearly the work of a person of extraordinary brilliance, penetration, and learning, possessed of a pungent style and an uncommon flair for paradox and counterexample. Those who are inclined to reject it out of hand because its conclusions will seem incredible might also bear in mind that its author is a man to whom his colleague John Rawls has expressed gratitude and indebtedness. At any rate, I propose to take the work with complete seriousness. And after all, should there not be considerable attraction i n the view that the only enforceable duty is that of respecting the freedom of our fellows as completely as possible? Surely it behooves us to see just why this will not do, if it won't; and no better opportunity for examining the view has arisen than that provided by the publication of this book.

It is widely thought that Robert Nozick’s views on rectification of past injustices are of critical importance to his theory of distributive justice, even perhaps justifying wholesale redistributive taxes in the present because of the undoubted injustices that have pervaded much past history. This essay undertakes to correct this impression—not mostly by disagreeing with Nozick’s claims, but nevertheless proceeding on basic libertarian theory. Of enormous importance is the role of putative innocents, who are defrauded by miscreants carefully covering their tracks so that these recipients have no reason to think they are buying stolen property. But of equal importance is simply that the duty to rectify past injustices is not comparable to the original duty to respect property rights in the first place

Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality is G.A. Cohens attempt to rescue something of the socialist outlook on society from the challenge of libertarianism, which Cohen identifies with the work of Robert Nozick in his famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sympathizing with the leading idea that a person must belong to himself, and thus be unavailable for forced redistribution of his efforts, Cohen is at pains to reconcile the two. This cannot be done – they are flatly contrary. Moreover, equality is a nonsense principle, calling for such things as equal distribution of natural resources. But resources, as goods, are not natural: all require work to utilize. The only thing exchanged on markets is services, and estimates of value received are relevantly made only by those party to the exchanges in question. Imposition from above on voluntary exchange can only be socially counterproductive

In this paper, I shall be concerned to explore the utilitarian account of promising, which for some time has had, in many circles, the status of a dead horse. My aim is not to flog it, however, but to show that perhaps it yet lives. At least, I hope to show that some prominent and apparently powerful objections to this account do not find their mark. In the course of this, several subjects of wider interest will come in for review as well, and it is hoped that some further light on the utilitarian position in general, as well as the concepts of expectation and obligation, may glimmer forth.At the outset, some clarification of the question at issue about promising is essential. Briefly, the question is: why ought we to keep our promises? Less question-beggingly put: why, if at all, should we keep promises, and to what extent?; where by talk of ‘extent’ it is meant that the question of whether we sometimes should not keep them, of its being a matter of attaching a “degree of stringency” to the obligation, is to be kept open.

The general anti-abortionist line is that abortion is wrong because it is the killing of innocent people. The main pro-abortionist response to this has been to deny that what is killed in an abortion is, properly speaking, a person. Killing these things merely prevents another person from being added to the world, just as would contraception, except at a later stage in the total process; abortion is not, therefore, any kind of murder, any deprivation of a person's life. Kelly and Schedler now raise an interesting new question about this: suppose we do not kill the fetus, but merely painlessly prevent it from developing? This process they call ‘tinkering’. And they infer, from an apparently reasonable reconstruction of this standard pro-abortionist argument that “5′, Therefore, any non-viable fetus may be tinkered with”, and they affirm, “Presumably 5′ is morally repugnant”, And from this, in turn, they eventually infer that abortion itself is morally wrong, the argument being that there is no relevant difference between abortion and tinkering. This is an interesting argument. It is a good one? I will argue that it is not.

This critical notice of Skorupski's large work is for the most part strongly positive: "Both as a work of scholarship and as a contribution to philosophy in its own right, an outstanding work". There are careful and detailed discussions of Mill's semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, logic of the moral sciences, and ethical writings (but not on religion, democracy, or women). Some issue is taken with Skorupski's account of and support for Mill's utilitarianism; broad agreement is expressed with Skorupski's interpretation and criticism of Mill's other writings. Mill's naturalism emerges as a more coherent view than is usually thought

The general subject of Professor Bond's book, Reason and Value, is, as the title implies, the relation between reason and value, or more precisely the connections between concepts of motivation and value, with reasons as the contested notion in between. Bond offers a thesis that at least appears to go very much against the current trend on these matters. Whereas most recent theorists of note have tied justificatory reasons as well as explanatory reasons to desire, thus holding, in effect, that values are somehow a function of desire, Bond wishes to cut the link between value and desire altogether. The first three chapters are devoted to developing this argument, mainly negatively. He distinguishes between “motivating” and “grounding” (or “justifying”) reasons in the customary way (e.g., Baier distinguishes “explanatory” from “justificatory” reasons to much the same effect'), and argues that “whereas desire or wanting and the reasons tied to it belong to the theory of motivation, where they are central, reason, in the sense of the reason(s) that a person has for or against doing a thing, is tied essentially to value, and the two are not to be confused” (9). “… The existence of grounding reasons (though not of motivating reasons) has no internal or necessary connection with desires of any kind” (37). “… All value is necessarily objective, in the sense that it is never a function of desire (or will); nothing is ever valuable or desirable in virtue of being desired” (84). “Value is not to any extent whatever a function or product of desire” (155).

This article discusses the question of poverty and wealth in light of several theses put forward by Larry Temkin. The claim that there is a sort of cosmic injustice involved when great disparities of ability or of wealth are found. He is concerned especially about disparities that are undeserved. It is agreed that this is unfortunate, but not agreed that they are unjust in a sense that supports the imposition of rectification on anyone else. Nor is poverty typically "undeserved" in the only really relevant sense: the poor simply do not produce enough to earn them high incomes, and probably correct incomes they derive are indeed what such efforts are worth in the circumstances. That persons with very low incomes may merit our sympathy is accepted, but sympathy leads to charity, rather than to the involuntary exploitation of the better off. The essay concludes with further observations about the relevance of free markets, and points to the iniquities of the restrictions on commerce that are the most potent source of perpetuated poverty today.

This book investigates the idea of inequality. According to the author, it does not address the question whether one should care about inequality nor which version is more plausible. Instead, its purpose is “to understand egalitarianism”, to “elucidate the notion of inequality”. The general thesis is that inequality is a “complex notion,” as shown by the fact that there are many different ways of measuring it. This is relentlessly detailed in a series of chapters that many will find rather hard on the brain, with their panoplies of diagrams and technical distinctions, complete with acronyms. Still, the diagrams are clear enough, and the terminology to the point.