Jan Narveson

The argument of the "Invisible Hand" is that the system of free enterprise benefits society in general even though it is not the aim of any particular economic agent to do that. This article proposes an analysis of why this is so. The key is that the morality of the market forbids only force and fraud; it does not require people to do good to others. Nevertheless, when all transactions are voluntary to both parties, that is exactly what we can expect to happen. This is both because the sum of the benefits of innumerable transactions, which are beneficial to both parties, is very great, but also and especially because of Positive Externalities. People use the particular products and services they get in market exchanges in ways that benefit others in ways not at all foreseen by the agents to those transactions at the time. These externalities range from the benefits of invention and ingenuity to the exercise of charity and philanthropy, all of which flourish in developed capitalist societies

This essay addresses the on-going controversy between supporters of minimal government, or minarchists, and supporters of no government, or anarchists. Both lay claim to the Libertarian principle, which holds that the only justification for the use of force is to deal with aggressive force initiated by someone else. Both agree that force is justified in dealing with aggressors. The only question is, who wields it, and how? The essay explains, briefly, the role of private property in all this. Private property is really just the operation of the liberty principle in the area of the use of things outside ourselves: those who initiate use of such things will have their activities subject to continual invasion unless property is recognized, and so property is the natural outcome of liberty, taken seriously. But the trouble is, states are monopolies, and maintain themselves at public expense, by taxation. This inevitably means interference with private property rights. And so, if we deal with aggressors via the state, we turn into partial aggressors ourselves, it seems. The essay points out that and why both minarchism and anarchism are virtually impossible in contemporary circumstances, but at the level of basic theory, at any rate, the anarchist appears to have the better of it

As I sit down to begin this essay, the strains of “Tristan und Isolde” are still ringing in my ears; meanwhile, another dozen or so Pakistanian refugees have died for lack of sufficient food, shelter, or medical attention, probably, during the time it will have taken to compose this paragraph. The Isolde in that performance commanded, probably, a fee of four or five thousand dollars; each member of the audience paid, on the average, perhaps ten dollars to see the performance. This works out, probably, to an average of one year’s worth of refugees kept alive and in some sort of health for every two members of the audience, or about two hundred for the wages of the leading soprano for one evening. The arithmetic is doubtless inaccurate: possibly it would require as much as three opera tickets to keep our refugee going, and Isolde could manage but fifty. But the orders of magnitude are about right.

At the present time and for the foreseeable future, likely, there is no defence, strictly speaking, against nuclear weapons. Nations facing a threat of attack involving nuclear weapons, therefore, have only three alternatives: resort to deterrence, try to get by with conventional defences, or surrender. It is discussable which of these is the most prudent option for any given nation, but I argue that we cannot accept any view entailing that the first is not a right. What we can do, however, is to insist that even deterrence be as nearly as possible a purely defensive effort. This can be done by maintaining a military establishment which is incapable of serving offensive purposes, however capable it is of serving defensive ones. If all of the world’s States were thus equipped, there could be no rational prospect of nuclear war. The recently developed Cruise Missile exemplifies a weapons system that would make this possible.

The general thrust of Neil Levy's paper is that a certain amount of paternalism should be viewed as compatible with liberalism.1 I am not quite convinced that what he is defending is properly paternalism. In addition, I am not entirely sure what his proposal is. Here are a few comments about several points in the paper.1. A possibly small question is worth raising when Levy says, ‘That is, the state may not interfere with individuals’ actions, even to promote their own conception of the good. This claim is typically justified on epistemic grounds: individuals are best placed to judge for themselves how to pursue their conception of the good.’But I don't think that this is quite the right picture, though admittedly, it has often been suggested by liberals. Still: if it's a matter of ‘epistemic’ grounds, then that implies that there is something out there to be known, so that the question is, how do we go about knowing it? But this way of putting it is misleading. For liberalism says that whenever anybody, B, other than the individual we are considering, say A, claims that what is good for A is something ‘out there’—something that can strongly contradict what A thinks for his own case—then that outsider has no authority to override A's preference. This isn't epistemic—it's a moral position.If we were to talk of ‘epistemic’ here, presumably what is known in this case is how the individual …

In As Free and as Just as Possible: The Theory of Marxian Liberalism, Jeffrey Reiman proposes to develop a theory of “Marxian Liberalism.” ‘Liberalism’ here is defined by the principle that “sane adult human beings should be free in the sense of free from coercion that would block their ability to act on the choices they make.” While the idea of coercion could use some glossing, it is not obvious that poverty, unemployment, racism, and sexism are as such coercive. In this book, it is, very broadly, economic inequality that is the focus, and the argument is that a previously insufficiently appreciated idea that is broadly Marxian shows us that we need a Rawlsian Difference Principle to counteract inherent coercion in the system of free enterprise capitalism. I argue that the book wrongly places the component of labor in the system of economic exchange. We do not as such exchange labor: we exchange services; and because of this there is no normative pull toward his thesis that there is something fundamentally wrong—some people are being unjustly exploited—when several hours of one person’s labor are required to purchase the output of just one of another person’s. Liberalism, I argue, rejects Marxism

Gibbard accuses me of having an “extreme” view of property rights, even though he agrees that liberty is a good thing. But is it good enough to justify excluding handouts to the poor? He thinks not. I argue that the “social contract” idea of justice, which he in general shares, would underwrite the sort of strong property rights I plump for—noting that voluntary assistance to the poor (or anyone) is, after all, not only perfectly acceptable but much to be commended. I believe I agree entirely with Laurence Thomas, who argues that although decency calls for assisting the poor, we are not literally bound to do that. Contra Peter Vallentyne, I argue that liberty doesn’t permit the exceptions to the acquisition principle that he proposes: when we prevent someone from an acquiring that would harmno one, we do him a harm, which is forbidden by the liberty principle. The arguments, though, rather defy brief summary.

What do we owe to the lower animals, if anything? The issues raised by this question are among the most fascinating and fundamental in ethical theory. They provide a real watershed for the moral philosopher and, on perhaps the most widely professed view, a trenchant test of consistency in ethical practice. Among the virtues of these two challenging books is that they make painfully clear that there has been a paucity of clear and plausible argument in support of the nearly universal tendency of humans to eat animal flesh, and to visit varying degrees of pain, discomfort, and unfreedom on the animals in question in the process.When we are asked why it is all right to do this, given our strong belief that it is not all right for us to eat other humans, we tend to give answers that won't readily wash. We may say, for example, that animals are stupid; but we don't think it all right to eat stupid people, including people less apparently competent than many of the higher animals. Or we may say things that are patently untrue, such as that the other animals don't really feel pain anyway.

The subject of this essay is political, and therefore social, philosophy; and therefore, ethics. We want to know whether the right thing for a society to do is to incorporate in its structure requirements that we bring about equality, or liberty, or both if they are compatible, and if incompatible then which if either, or what sort of mix if they can to some degree be mixed. But this fairly succinct statement of the issue before us requires considerable clarification, even as a statment of the issue. For it is widely, and in my view correctly, held that some sort of equality is utterly fundamental in these matters. We seek a principle, or principles, that apply to all, are the same for all. In that sense, certainly, equality is fundamental and inescapable. But this is a very thin sort of “equality.” It will almost equally widely be agreed that the principles in question should in some more interesting sense “treat” people equally, e.g., by allotting to all the same set of rights, and moreover, rights that are – again we have to say “in some sense” – nonarbitrary, so that whatever they are, persons of all races, sexes, and so on will have the same fundamental rights assigned to them. Taking this to be, again, essentially uncontroversial, though not without potentially worrisome points of unclarity, it needs, now, to be pointed out that this characterization does not settle the issue that this essay is concerned with. That issue is about economic matters in particular