Jan Narveson

Few questions about utilitarianism have been more vexed than that of its relation to rights. It is commonplace to hold that there are nonutilitarian rights, rights not founded on considerations of utility. And it is even thought that the very notion of rights is inherently incapable of being significantly employed within the utilitarian framework. In the present paper, I wish to consider both of these matters. I propose to give reasons—mostly not really new—for rejecting the stronger, conceptual claim; and on the former, substantial question, I want to argue that the utilitarian at least has a respectable way of handling the vocabulary of rights, even a useful one. Further, I shall argue that what the utilitarian—in particular, J. S. Mill—has to say about rights is quite plausible, though I shall conclude with a question about how illuminating it is.

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 question is what the mandated medical minimum for all should be. The correct answer is zero. That is to say, the government should not be forcing anyone to pay for anyone. The most popular arguments within the liberal framework, presumed to be shared by all, are briefly surveyed. Health care is provided by someone to someone else, and that someone else should either be paying for it, or recognize that someone is providing it charitably to him or her. Compelling someone else to pay for it is something we have no basic right to do

Jeffrey Friedman broaches a number of criticisms of Libertarianism as a conceptual basis for opposing the extensive modern welfare state, examining several variants and concluding that they are fundamentally unsupported. He opts for a “consequentialist” view of foundations. Nevertheless, he thinks that the modem welfare state is subject to effective critique along such lines. But rational contractarian individualism works and does provide foundations for libertarianism, while “consequentialism” is an ill‐defined theory.that is quite unpromising for the proposed critique; nevertheless, Friedman's empirical and economic critique of the welfare state is valid.

Brettschneider argues that the granting of property rights to all entails a right of exclusion by acquirer/owners against all others, that this exclusionary right entails a loss on their part, and that to make up for this, property owners owe any nonowners welfare rights. Against this, I argue that exclusion is not in fact a cost. Everyone is to have liberty rights, which are negative: what people are excluded from is the liberty to attack and despoil others. Everyone, whether an owner of external property or not, benefits from this and thus rationally exchanges that liberty in exchange for a like abandonment of it by others. The proper social contract trade is thus liberty for liberty—not liberty for owners and positive welfare rights for nonowners (though the latter in fact benefit greatly from the property rights of owners).

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

Are the political ideals of liberty and equality compatible? This question is of central and continuing importance in political philosophy, moral philosophy, and welfare economics. In this book, two distinguished philosophers take up the debate. Jan Narveson argues that a political ideal of negative liberty is incompatible with any substantive ideal of equality, while James P. Sterba argues that Narveson's own ideal of negative liberty is compatible, and in fact leads to the requirements of a substantive ideal of equality. Of course, they cannot both be right. Thus, the details of their arguments about the political ideal of negative liberty and its requirements will determine which of them is right. Engagingly and accessibly written, their debate will be of value to all who are interested in the central issue of what are the practical requirements of a political ideal of liberty.

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