Gary Chartier

Gary Chartier elaborates a particular version of economic justice rooted in the natural law tradition, explaining how it is relevant to economic issues and developing natural law accounts of property, work, and economic security. He examines a range of case studies related to ownership, production, distribution, and consumption, using natural law theory as a basis for staking positions on a number of contested issues related to economic life and highlighting the potentially progressive and emancipatory dimension of natural law theory.

Mark Murphy contends that, whatever the merits of any philosophical argument for anarchism, most people are obligated to obey the law. Murphy defends a moral argument designed to show that most people in reasonably just political communities are obligated to obey the law. And he advances epistemological arguments calculated to support two key claims. First, people who believe they are obligated to obey the law are entitled to retain their belief in the face of anarchist criticism. Second, a credible account of political obligation can accommodate the concerns that drive anarchist arguments in such a way that no anarchist argument against political obligation could, in principle, be successful. I argue that Murphy's moral argument yields relatively limited results, and that his epistemological arguments do not succeed in showing that anarchists could not convict folk-believers in political obligation of unreasonableness.

Many anarchists believe that a stateless society could and should feature laws. It might appear that, in so believing, they are caught in a contradiction. The anarchist objects to the state because its authority does not rest on actual consent, and using force to secure compliance with law in a stateless society seems objectionable for the same reason. Some people in a stateless society will have consented to some laws or law-generating mechanisms and some to others – while some will have consented to none. Someone’s obedience to a legal requirement could be justly enforceable absent the state, nonetheless, given either her actual consent to the requirement or to a mechanism responsible for generating it or the coextensiveness of the legal requirement with a moral requirement. And it could thus be just on the anarchist’s own terms to enforce a narrow range of positive legal requirements even against outlaws who had declined to consent to them.