Jan Narveson

This paper aims to state the obvious – the commonsense, rational approach to child-producing. We have no general obligation to promote either the “general happiness” or the equalization of this and that. We have children if we want them, if their life prospects are decent – and if we can afford them, which is a considerable part of their life prospects being OK – and provided that in doing so we do not inflict injury on others. It’s extremely difficult to do this latter, but affording them, in rich countries, is another matter. With that qualification, by and large people should just go ahead and have (or not have) children – as many as they think they want and can handle – as it suits them.

I take issue with the view that libertarian theory does not imply any particular stand on abortion. Liberty is the absence of interference with people’s wills—interests, wishes, and desires. Only entities that have such are eligible for the direct rights of libertarian theory. Foetuses do not; and if aborted, there is then no future person whose rights are violated. Hence the “liberal” view of abortion: women (especially) may decide whether to bear the children they have conceived. Birth is a good dividing line between the freedom to abort and the point at which society is permitted to take an interest. Once born, children detach from their mothers; no invasion of their bodies is necessary to separate them. Yet some ways of bringing them up can have a negative impact on society. There is a thus legitimate interest in protecting ourselves from the results of truly bad parenting.

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

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

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

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 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.

Morality for the purposes of this paper consists of sets of rules or principles intended for the general regulation of conduct for all. Intuitionist accounts of morality are rejected as making reasoned analysis of morals impossible. In many interactions, there is partial conflict and partial cooperation. From the general social point of view, the rational thing to propose is that we steer clear of conflict and promote cooperation. This is what it is rational to propose to reinforce, and to assist in reinforcing in society; it is not necessarily what it is individually rational to do. Even so, given the general situation, the rationality of its reinforcement will typically support the rationality of individual action as well. Game theory makes it possible to clarify these interactions, and these proposals for social solutions

This article argues that there is no sound basis for thinking that we have a general and strong duty to rectify disparities of wealth around the world, apart from the special case where some become wealthy by theft or fraud. The nearest thing we have to a rational morality for all has to be built on the interests of all, and they include substantial freedoms, but not substantial entitlements to others' assistance. It is also pointed out that the situation of the world's poor is not that of victims of disasters, but simply of less-developed technology, which can be repaired by full and free trade relations with others. The true savior of the world's poor is the businessman, not the missionary. What we do need to do is strike down barriers to commerce, rather than requisition "aid."

I suppose I’m writing this because of my 1965 paper on Pacifism. In that essay I argued that pacifism is self-contradictory. That’s a strong charge, and also not entirely clear. Let’s start by trying to clarify the charge and related ones.Pacifism has traditionally been understood as total opposition to violence, even the use of it in defense of oneself when under attack. I earlier maintained (in my well-known “Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis” (Narveson, Ethics, 75:4, 259–271, 1965)) that this position is contradictory, if it is intended to mean that one has no right to use violence. While that is perhaps going too far, pacifism as so characterized is surely, as I have later argued, self-defeating in an obvious sense of that expression. But in any case, contemporary theorists who describe their views as pacifist profess to hold no such doctrine—they regard that familiar characterization of pacifism as a caricature. They do express strong opposition to war, but even that is not unlimited. If the chips are genuinely down, they will approve going to war-level self-defense—but they deny that it ever is really necessary, or at least that it is necessary nearly as often as actual war-making behavior among nations would suggest.In this it is not clear that we have a purely philosophical disagreement. How much opposition to war qualifies a view as “pacifist”? That is now very hard to say. After all, all decently liberal thinkers are against violence as a standardly available way of pursuing one’s ends. We all agree that if violence is to be justified, it takes something special. It should be a “last resort,” Just War theorists have classically said, and while ‘last’ is very difficult to pin down, at least, violence should be very far from the first thing a responsible nation thinks of. What’s more, the “something special” is not just that one’s ends are so important. It has to be that the violence would be employed in defense, of self or of other innocent parties under threat. So if there is genuine disagreement, it must be along this line: that we are morally required to make very substantial sacrifices in the pursuits of our otherwise legitimate interests, including our interests in security, in order to avoid using the violence of war.Is this reasonable? I think not. We should, of course, be reasonable, and that includes refraining from violence—except when the violence is necessary to counter the aggressive violence of others. For we reason, on practical matters, in terms of benefits and costs. Agents, especially political agents, can, alas, benefit from violence where that violence is unilateral. Thus it is rational to see to it that it won’t be unilateral. And when it is not unilateral, then the balance is in favor—strongly in favor—of peace. It remains that we must, alas, be able to make war in the possible case that we can’t have peace. When everybody shares the preference for peace, then we can scale down and hopefully even eliminate war-making capability. (Contemporary nations have already scaled down considerably—there have been few wars in the classic sense of military exchanges between states as such in recent times.) But until the scaling down is universal and includes a genuine renunciation of the use of warlike methods to achieve ends other than genuine self-defense, what most of us think of as “pacifism” is a non-option in the near run

Egalitarians hold that some good things should, in principle, be distributed equally among all people. Which good things? Why just those and not others? Why are they to be equalized only among humans and not, say, between humans and cats? And why is the equalization to be confined within the borders of the author's State, rather than practiced over the whole human race (at least)? Those are all matters for the particular egalitarian to explain, as best he can. None, I think, can be explained satisfactorily, but we cannot press such matters in the present short..