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.

Aggregation in moral philosophy calls for the summing or averaging of values or utilities as a guide to individual behavior. But morality, it is argued, needs to be individualistic, in view of the evident separateness of persons, especially given the great disparities among individuals who nevertheless interact with each other in social life. The most plausible general moral program is the classical liberal (or “libertarian”) one calling for mutual noninterference rather than treating others as equal to oneself in point of demands on our action. Why, then, would we ever aggregate? The reason is that we are affected by behavior that has general effects, especially unintended side effects, on all sorts of people among whom we ourselves are often to be found. When we are randomly situated among such groups—as we sometimes are and often are not—minimizing aggregate harm is the plausible strategy, and sometimes promoting aggregate benefit as well.

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

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 …

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.

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

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.

Kukathas, in “Two Constructions of Libertarianism,” concludes that “the choice confronting libertarians is an invidious one. … The Federation of Liberty can, in principle, turn out to contain no communities of that federation which actually value or respect liberty; and even slavery might have a lawful place within it. The Union of Liberty, on the other hand, can, in principle turn out to be society ruled by a strong authority with little respect for dissenting moral traditions, including some self-styled libertarian moral traditions.” However, no such choice needs to be made. The one libertarian principle calls upon us to permit all voluntary association. It allows intervention to correct involuntary association, except in the case of relations of parents and children, the latter being not yet exactly persons. But the criterion of voluntariness is difficult, since people frequently submit themselves to authorities, even to ones who are authorized by those persons to use force against them. And it does not require us to intervene to correct injustices generally.It is not clear what a “libertarian community” would be, beyond one in which relations among individuals and groups are fundamentally voluntary. But there is no difference between allowing and forbidding the disallowing of various practices, and that is the distinction which in essence the Federation versus the Union is defined in terms of. And the question whether to attempt to realize the libertarian principle better by erecting a single government with the kind of authority governments by definition have, versus making do with a fully anarchic society, is, I think, not settled to this day. Fortunately, as I have argued, the choice is not required by the alternatives Professor Kukathas’s interesting essay poses for us. In short: the libertarian principle remains univocal: no aggression against those not themselves guilty of any aggression. And therefore, no aggression against those with whom we disagree, including about the legitimacy of the libertarian principle. But, certainly, we may use force against those who compel others to go along. The touchstone remains the liberty of the individual

James Sterba advances several arguments designed to show that libertarianism, contrary to what this author and other libertarians think, actually implies support for welfarism and even egalitarianism. This discussion shows why his arguments do not work. There is preliminary discussion of our parameters: how much is Sterba claiming we have a minimum right to in the way of welfare? It is argued that if this is set very low, a libertarian society would easily eliminate the poverty he is concerned about, and if it is set very high, then the standard could be unmeetable and certainly could not have been met until very recently at the least. More abstractly, it is argue that Sterba is in error about the normative assumptions required for libertarianism’s strong distinction between nonharm and outright help. Once these are cleared up, it is seen that his case depends on equivocation. The duty not to harm simply does not imply a duty to help. In the closing pages, a contractarian framework is advanced to explain the libertarian’s disaffection for the kind of ‘strong’ rights Sterba wants to uphold.

This collection addresses the central issue of political philosophy or, in a couple of cases, issues very close to the heart of that question: Is government justified? This ancient question has never been more alive than at the present time, in the midst of continuing political and social upheaval in virtually every part of the world. Only two of the pieces collected here have been published previously. All the other contributions were, at the time of the inception of the volume, fresh from the pens, or still to emerge from the pens, of their authors.

1. INTRODUCTION Professor Dworkin's writings on moral and political subjects have never failed to interest me in the past, and the two-part article “What is Equality” which is the subject of this paper, is no exception. Its wealth of relevant distinctions is bound to be useful to every serious student of the subject, whatever – or, in view of the range of opinions on these matters now current, perhaps I should say almost whatever – his ideological proclivities, and whether or not he is sympathetic to Dworkin's position. The present treatment will be devoted, needless to say, primarily to disagreements, criticisms, and the raising of further questions, most of them designed to call in question either the general idea that equality should be regarded as a legitimate and important goal of social institutions or Dworkin's particular formulations of that equality. This largely negative-seeming consideration, I need scarcely add, is not intended to discount or detract from the positive contributions of Dworkin's work, which are very substantial indeed. It's just that having been ably set forth by Dworkin himself, they scarcely need seconding from this source