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.

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

The discovery that people far away are in bad shape seems to generate a sense of guilt on the part of many articulate people in our part of the world, even though they are no worse off now that we’ve heard about them than they had been before. I will take it as given that we are certainly responsible for evils we inflict on others, no matter where, and that we owe those people compensation. Not all similarly agree that it is not in general our duty to make other people better off, and therefore not in general our fault when people are not better off than they happen to be, even if perhaps we could have made them so by efforts of our own. Nev ertheless, I have seen no plausible argument that we owe something, as a matter of general duty, to those to whom we have done nothing wrong. Still, morally commendable motives of humanity and sympathy support beneficence, and if we wish to call those “duties,” there is something to be said for that, too. I shall, in fact, try to say it later in this essay.

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.

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

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.

There are fourteen original papers in this substantial volume devoted to the general problem of the relation of Marxism, or at least Marxism as found in the works of Marx, and moral theory. The questions are, in Nielsen's words, “whether there should be or even could be a Marxist moral theory and if there could be a Marxist moral theory, what sort of a moral theory it should be”. Why does he not include the question what Marx's moral theory is? For a few of these writers do think that Marx had some moral views that inform his writing, and attempt to say what they are. But Nielsen is justified in putting the questions they treat of in the way he does, for as is commonly known, Marx had no explicit, worked- out moral theory. So if one wishes to argue that he nevertheless has a morality or part of a morality, one has no alternative to attempting to infer it from what he does say.

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