Loren Lomasky

Despite what one may be led to believe by breathless reports in the media, the acme of misery in America is not the woes, financial and otherwise, of Donald Trump and Michael Jackson. People lose their jobs, have their assets drained by reversals of fortune, suffer from illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of shelter, and other mishaps. The circumstances in which they find themselves are genuinely distressing. It would be an odd understanding indeed that failed to find these circumstances directly relevant to what morality asks of us. If morality is to count for anything, then surely it must take notice of exigent need. This is not merely the deliverance of a late twentieth-century Western moral consciousness massaged by the blessings of comparative affluence and graced with a newfound awareness of social justice. All traditional ethical codes of which I am aware, sacred and secular, demand that one take the distress of one's neighbor as bearing on one's own activities. “Am I my brother's keeper?” is the question; the well-nigh universal answer is “Yes.” The disposition to be moved by and respond to distress is the virtue ofcharity.

There are no first principles etched in stone from which all moral philosophers must take their bearings. We must deliberately choose our point of departure in any attempt to respond to the question: “Must any defensible theory of justice incorporate both a commitment to personal liberty and to economic equality?” Basic to our own approach is a suspicion of seers and visionaries who espy an external source of values independent from human choices. We presuppose, instead, that political philosophy commences with individual evaluation. 1 A near-corollary of this presupposition is that each individual's preferences ought to be taken into account equally with those of others. That is, we suppose that there is no privileged evaluator, whose preferences are accorded decisive weight. Conceptual unanimity as a criterion for institutional evaluation follows naturally from the other two presuppositions. If there is neither an external standard of value nor a corps of resident value experts, only unanimity can ultimately be satisfactory as a test of social desirability. Our perspective then is subjectivist, individualist, and unanimitarian. These presuppositions inform our contractarian analysis. There are, however, two separate contractarian traditions that we shall find useful to distinguish, the “Hobbesian” and the “Rawlsian.” In the first, persons find themselves in the anarchistic war of each against all. They contract away their natural liberties in exchange for the order that civil society – through its sovereign – affords. In this contracting process, individuals are assumed to possess full self-knowledge; they know who they are, what conceptions of the good they hold, and what their endowments are.

The two major functions of vouchers are, first, to provide the poor with the means to avail themselves of medical services they could not otherwise afford; and second, to allow persons to choose health care providers and services for themselves rather than have them imposed benignly (or otherwise) intentioned goverment functionaries. When vouchers are combined with other measures to promote diversity and competition within the health care industry, a third goal can be achieved: the provision of health goods at lower cost.

THE LIBERTARIAN IDEA by Joseph Raz Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. 435 pp., $59.00 Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom offers a subtle and arrestingly original reconstruction of liberal theory. Raz argues that standard liberal linchpins such as neutrality, rights, equality, anti‐perfectionism, subjective preference, and individualism fail adequately to ground a liberal order. Rather, he enshrines autonomy as the core value of a justifiable liberalism. Many of Raz's subsidiary arguments are insightful, yet his liberal structure ultimately founders. In large measure that is because Raz oscillates uneasily between two opposed rationalesfor the centrality of autonomy. The result is a major contribution to political theory, but also a book that is less than the sum of its parts.

In this paper I shall concern myself with the ontological argument as found in Leibniz. In recent years several authors, notable among them Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm, have contended that to speak of the ontological argument or the Anselmian argument is ambiguous, as in Anselm are to be found two logically independent ontological arguments. The more well-known version is from Proslogion II, and it takes existence as a perfection. This is the form of the argument rejected by Gaunilo, Aquinas, and eventually Kant. Today it is in all but universal disfavor.

Theorists increasingly tum to autonomy (rather than liberty per se) as a grounding value for liberalism. This is, I argue, an iII-advised strategy. If autonomy is understood to differ from (negative) liberty insofar as it demands from agents significantly greater feats of self-determination, then it is not clear that autonomy is worth having. And, irrespective of whether autonomy is judged to be valuable, autonomy-based liberalisms eilher prescribe essentially the same constraints as classical liberalism - and thus are poIitically innocuous - or else require that the stale act non-neutrally with respect to its citizens - and thus are illiberal.

In this essay Loren Lomasky wryly proposes that the views of Rawls and Nozick might not be as radically divergent as is conventionally supposed. To demonstrate this proposition, Lomasky invents “Twin Harvard” counterparts of Rawls and Nozick. The twist is that Twin Rawls turns out to be a leading libertarian theorist while Twin Nozick endorses a regime of sweeping redistribution. In each case the position follows from familiar elements in the theories of their respective, real-world counterparts. Lomasky concludes that Twin Rawls actually makes better use of familiar Rawlsian themes-such as the veil of ignorance, strains of commitment, and the priority of liberty-than does Rawls himself. Moreover, Rawls's own attempts at combating libertarianism are seen to be weak, sometimes embarrassingly so. Libertarianism is a specter that he devoutly wishes to exorcize, but cannot. Conversely, the rejection of libertarianism by Twin Nozick (and Nozick?) is striking but shallow. Footnotesa A draft of this essay was prepared while I was enjoying a residential fellowship from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University, in Canberra, Australia. I have benefited from discussions following talks at the Social and Political Theory program seminar at the Australian National University and the Harvard College Department of Government.

While citizens of developed countries enjoy lives of unmatched affluence, over a billion people struggle to subsist on incomes of less than $1/day. Can't we conclude that their poverty constitutes a glaring injustice? The answer almost certainly is yes—but not because some countries are rich, nor because of inadequate levels of redistribution. Liberal political theory traditionally maintains that persons are rights-holders, and the primary duty owed them is noninterference. Corrupt and tyrannical governments flagrantly violate the liberty rights of their captive populations. External governments conspicuously fail to respect noninterference, however, when they erect barriers to trade between foreign nationals and their own citizens, subsidize domestic industries, prevent innocent movement across borders by would-be workers, and when they tender assistance to abusive states (such as foreign aid that lines the pockets of kleptocrats and enhances their power). The theory advanced here is similar to that of Rawls in rejecting an international difference principle, but unlike Rawls it advances an account of international justice as continuous with domestic principles of justice.

The financial Crunch of 2008 was easily explained by both the left and right–too easily. Each insisted that events thoroughly confirmed its own long-held views and utterly refuted those of the opposed camp. This essay argues that there are indeed new lessons to be drawn from the Crunch, lessons that involve balancing the bounty of the Invisible Hand against perils of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Liberal moral imperatives are traced to variables of Personal Choice and External Cost that are typically in tension with each other and thus generate needs for institutional reconstructions that change according to time and circumstance. Personal bankruptcy protection, limited liability corporations, and intellectual property are cited as examples. It is argued that the Crunch occurred because of failure adequately to balance these variables. Three paradoxes came to a head in 2008: Paradox of Efficient Markets; Paradox of Reduced Risk; Paradox of Hard-won Knowledge. The essay concludes with suggestions concerning specific lessons to be drawn from the Crunch and a corresponding list of lessons not to be drawn.

A theory of basic moral rights ought to aim at telling us who the beings are that have rights and of what those rights consist. It may, however, seek to achieve that goal via an indirect route. In this paper I shall attempt a strategy of indirection. The first stage of the argument is a consideration of why moral theory can allow any place at all to rights. Acknowledging rights can be inconvenient. An otherwise desirable outcome is blocked if the only ways in which it can be attained involve the violation of rights. Why not jettison rights and thereby render these outcomes achievable? The answer that will be suggested trades on it being a deep fact about human beings that they can and do order their lives by reference to long-term commitments and aspirations. In my terminology, they are project pursuers. If people were rational animals all of whose interests were flickering and evanescent, an ethic entirely resting on maximization of impersonal value would be appropriate. But because projects entail commitments to values not subject to trade-offs, the introduction of rights is plausible. That is the first major stage of the argument. The second builds on it and tries to show that the recognition of rights or their equivalent is morally required, that only an ethic in which basic rights are acknowledged can be properly responsive to persons' status as project pursuers. More particularly, is suggested that rights take the form of constraints imposing minimal forbearance on others such that one has reasonable expectations of being able to pursue one's projects amidst a world of other project pursuers