PUBLICATIONS
Libertarianism (co-authored with Bas van der Vossen)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023
Libertarianism is a family of views in political philosophy. Libertarians take individual freedom as the paramount political value and understand coercion to be the antithesis of that freedom. While people can justifiably be forced to do certain things—most obviously, to refrain from infringing the liberty of others—they cannot be coerced to serve the good of other members of society, nor even their own personal good. Within philosophical debates over justice, libertarian positions are most controversial in the realm of distributive justice. In this context, libertarians typically endorse something like a free-market economy—an economic order based on private property rights, freedom of contract, and voluntary cooperation. Libertarians usually regard contemporary democratic states’ redistribution of wealth as an unjustified use of coercion that violates the rights of individuals. The same is true of many forms of economic regulation. Just as people have strong rights to individual freedom in their personal and social affairs, libertarians argue, they also have strong rights to freedom in their economic affairs. Thus, rights of freedom of contract and exchange, freedom of occupation, and private property are taken as seriously as rights to choose who to be friends with, what kind of clothes to wear, and which religion to follow, and so forth.
John Locke: Property Rights and Labour-Mixing
Global Encyclopedia of Territorial Rights, Springer, 2024
John Locke was an English philosopher writing during and immediately after the Glorious Revolution. His political philosophy, found in his Two Treatise of Government, is one expression of the early modern, Protestant natural law tradition. Typically regarded as proto- liberal, Locke’s political philosophy is grounded in a view of human beings as moral equals, each endowed with natural rights that can be invoked to critique and resist political institutions such as the state. To Locke, the state is created by a society of equals already endowed with rights, rather than an institution that created those rights ex nihilo. Importantly, then, the territorial rights held by a state are strictly a function of the property rights of its citizenry, administration of which they voluntarily yield to the state for the sake of mutual convenience.
Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property, and Pollution, Palgrave, 2023
This essay outlines the way in which natural rights theory regards pollution and on what basis it will say that pollution violates persons' rights. I will also outline some key objections that have been made to its response to pollution, but argue that these are surmountable. More serious ontological objections can be made -- unfortunately I present these without offering any way out for the natural rights theorist. However, these ontological objections also raise surprisingly interesting insights about the relationship between how we determine that a purported pollutant constitutes a rights violation, and the social context in which it is purported to occur. The self-understanding that social groups have of their activities are essential to determining what counts a a harmful interference in them, and therefore what counts as rights violating pollution. These are important issues worthy of discussions even in lieu of a full solution.
The Journal of Politics, 2022
Kantian statists believe that the state is a conceptual pre-requisite for the acquisition of property rights, and hence of freedom itself. They argue that under statelessness, property rights are indeterminate, unilateral, and unassured, and therefore remain merely provisional until a state is instituted. We are not morally bound by merely provisional rights and hence there can be no justice (or injustice) without a state. This paper makes two arguments. Firstly, that property rights need not be conceptually indeterminate under statelessness. Social conventions that fall short of a state can determinacy in ways that Kantians have not adequately considered. Secondly, that the problems of unilateralism and non-assurance are parasitical upon the problem of indeterminacy. Therefore, overcoming indeterminacy overcomes the overall thesis. I argue, therefore, that the state is not conceptually necessary to our freedom, and we have no unconditional natural duty to institute and obey a state.
Nozick and the Natural Duty of Justice
Defending Liberty: Essays in Honor of David Gordon, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2022
The two main rival theories of political legitimacy are Lockean consent theory and the Kantian natural duty theory. The Lockean theory says that a political organisation may only legitimately coerce if, inter alia, it is consented to by those it coerces. The Kantian theory says that we have a duty to the state because it is only through the state that we are able to extinguish our duties to respect one other’s freedom. Our obligation to the state is therefore not acquired through any voluntary act, but is rather naturally incumbent upon us. Robert Nozick’s libertarianism is famously Lockean, however, his justification for the state involves no affirmative act on the part of the governed. Instead, he offers an “invisible hand argument” in which we come to have an obligation to the state in virtue of the processes through which that state emerged, even though none of them involve our expression of consent. In this essay I will argue that Nozick’s argument, with a little reconstruction, is a far more plausible alternative to both Lockean philosophical anarchism and Kantian statism. It affirms the normative importance of even imperfectly just coercive institutions that all acknowledge deference to, whilst affirming the normative reality of our rights outside of those contingent institutions. What is missing in Nozick’s account is the assurance problem. Kant thinks that it applied to anarchy; actually it applies to all situations of distrust.
Routledge Companion to Libertarianism, 2022
The claim that force and coercion are only permissible when necessary to protect individuals from initiatory force and coercion is at the heart of deontological or natural rights approaches to libertarianism. This chapter will give an overview of this rather austere ethical system, the political-economic commitments that flow from it, and some challenges to it. I will discuss the three main theories of political legitimacy that are self-conscious applications of this view: the consent theory, Nozick’s invisible hand theory, and market anarchism. I will then discuss potential tensions with private property rights; the moral status of the marketplace, and the potential egalitarian grounds for the parsimony of the approach.
Answering the Conventionalist Challenge to Natural Rights Theory
Res Publica, 2021
Ben Bryan argues that the strongest challenge to natural rights theory is to explain how it overcomes the Problem of Authority. Given that our natural rights are multiply realisable by a range of equally reasonable social conventions, how or why ought one particular realisation have authority? I argue that Thomistic and Kantian solutions to this problem do not count as solutions from natural rights theory, and therefore offer my own solution. When theories of natural rights describe the rights we have in terms that refer not only to moralised act-types, but rather, tell us which non-moralised act-types ought to be moralised in the relevant way, they avoid the Problem of Authority altogether. Such theories of natural rights are singularly realisable at the level of regulative conventional rules, and only multiply realisable at the level of constitutive conventional rules. The latter form of multiple realisability does not raise the Problem of Authority.
Methodological Anarchism (coauthored with Jason Lee Byas)
The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought, 2021
There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally – both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are on the right side of this difference. We call the insight that undergirds the anarchists’ understanding of politics and justice “methodological anarchism,” and its antithesis "the policy frame We seek to exorcise the policy framework in favor of methodological anarchism. Indeed, we believe it should be embraced by all political philosophers, not only the anarchists among their ranks. Political philosophers ought to abstain from the policy framework for two reasons. Firstly, it is analytically impoverished inasmuch as, when followed to its logical conclusion, it is unable to engage with enormous areas of analysis that are relevant to what makes a society just or unjust. Secondly, it instills subtle prejudice against other important approaches to mitigating injustice that are unconcerned with public policy. This also carries the danger of lending ideological support for existing injustices and thereby entrenching them. Accepting our critique of the policy framework and adopting methodological anarchism does not necessarily require the acceptance of any kind of substantive political anarchism. But it does mean thinking a bit more like an anarchist about how to make society more just – thus our characterization of it as “methodological.”
Economics and Philosophy, 2020
Lockean approaches to property take it that persons can unilaterally acquire private ownership over hitherto unowned resources. Such natural law accounts of property rights are often thought to be of limited use when dealing with the complexities of natural resource use outside of the paradigm of private ownership of land for agricultural or residential development. The tragedy of the commons has been shown to be anything but an inevitability, and yet Lockeanism seems to demand that even the most robust common property arrangements be converted to privatised units. This often motivates a move away from natural law in the moral analysis of property rights. I argue however that it is not the deontological nature of Lockean principles that are at fault, but rather the manner of their application. Lockean theory often exhibits a bias in favour of private property: assuming that only private property can protect one’s interest in autonomy, and therefore asserting that each individual has a power of private acquisition. Starting with a claim against interference however enables us to mould the appropriate property rights to each individual’s particular interest in autonomy. This sometimes leads to private ownership, but often leads to various forms of commons.
The Neoliberal Turn: Libertarian Justice and Public Policy
Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines, 2020
In this paper I criticize a growing movement within public policy circles that self-identifies as neoliberal. The issue I take up here is the sense in which the neoliberal label signals a turn away from libertarian political philosophy. The are many important figures in this movement, but my focus here will be on Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, not least because he has most prolifically written against libertarian political philosophy. Neoliberals oppose the idea that the rights that libertarianism claims people have are useful guides for making the world a freer place because they forestall too much governmental/democratic political action that they purport to be necessary for increasing freedom. Wilkinson mistakenly takes libertarianism to be a set of ideal public policies for achieving a perfectly free society. If it were, he would be right to turn away from it. But placing rights to freedom at the center of their theory of justice does not commit libertarians to an all-or-nothing approach to political change. Consequences and strategy matter – particularly in a non-ideal world – without abandoning the idea that each individual has a right to freedom.
Hugo Grotius and Private Property
Raisons Politiques, 2019
Hugo Grotius famously argued that a system of private property could only justly emerge by the agreement of those living within it. He took this view because he could not see how the supposedly primitive rights to use natural resources that each person has in a state of nature could, on their own, justify fully fledged private ownership. More specifically, the broad right to exclude others from one’s own property that he considered to be essential to private property could not be justified with the set of original rights he ascribed to persons in a state of nature. Many natural rights theorists have followed Grotius in this error. The need for communal agreement can be avoided, however, when one recognises that any use-right necessarily includes some right to exclude others. Moreover, the extensive right of exclusion that is characteristic of full liberal ownership can, in certain cases, come attached to use-rights where those uses are themselves extensive. Private property can therefore emerge through unilateral use, without recourse to communal agreement. Grotius’s account of natural rights, then, ought not be used to support social contract theoretic approaches to property and justice.
A Reformulation of the Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights
The Philosophical Quarterly, 2019
Hillel Steiner argues that a necessary and sufficient condition for the compossibility of a set of rights is that those rights be extensionally differentiable. However, given that two or more actions can extensionally overlap without thereby being mutually unperformable, if such actions are specified in the relevant rights, then those rights will not be incompossible, notwithstanding their extensional overlap. The set of compossible sets of rights then is greater than the subset of extensionally differentiable rights, and extensional differentiability is a sufficient but unnecessary condition of compossibility.
Rescuing the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle
Moral Philosophy and Politics, 2019
Many libertarians ground their theory of justice in a non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP is often the basis for the libertarian condemnation of state action – that it is necessarily aggressive and therefore unjust. This approach is often criticised insofar as it defines aggression, in part, as the violation of legitimate property rights, and is therefore parasitical upon a prior – and unjustified – theory of property. While it is true that libertarians who defend the NAP sometimes fail to give a satisfactory account of its relationship to libertarian property rights, such an account is in fact available. A commitment to property rights and to non-aggression can both be grounded in a commitment to non-interference. Such a principle, then, brings together the NAP and the theory of property it is parasitical upon, thus saving the unity and austerity of the overall approach.
The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018
Social egalitarianism is the view that persons ought to relate to each other as equals. Insofar as justice regulates the use of force in our interpersonal relations, a socially egalitarian account of justice will tell us when it is appropriate for moral equals to use force against one another. This essay argues that socially egalitarian account of justice is coextensive with the libertarian account – that one only use force in defence of prior force. Libertarianism is therefore part of a broader set of socially egalitarian political and social values. Liberty is necessary but insufficient for social equality.
Responsibility, Respect, and Justice: Skepticism about Metanorms
Reason Papers, 2018
Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen present a compelling argument for a responsibility-based account of liberal politics in preference to a respect-based account. A key move in their argument against respect-based accounts is the pivot from normativity to metanormativity. The concept of metanormativity is used to tether politics to ethics in way which preserves the normativity of political rules, without collapsing them into the same kind of rules that govern individual, normative conduct. The concept of metanormativity, however, may be unnecessary, given that the content of metanorms is already included in what is normatively required (in the non-meta sense) of our social relations anyway. A necessary condition for our social relations contributing to our individual flourishing is that they be just in the political sense. Whilst the notion of metanormativity describes an important function of political rules, I do not think it is needed as a source of obligation.
Incommensurability and Property Rights in the Natural Environmental
Environmental Politics, 2017
Cost-benefit analysis has been criticised on the basis that it cannot compute the value of environmental goods whose value constitutively defies monetary valuation. Two forms of incommensurability make monetary valuation problematic: constitutive incommensurability and quantitative incommensurability. These pose a threat only to shadow pricing, and not the formation of prices in an actual market. Where property rights to environmental goods are appropriately assigned, the prices that form reflect the actual uses persons put them to, given their value commitments. In a real market, the formation of prices does not depend upon the assignment of cardinal values via monetary valuation; rather, the formation of prices is a side effect of the way in which environmental goods are used. A property right gives one the right to reject terms of exchange one deems inappropriate. Where sale of an environmental good is deemed inappropriate, it is kept out of the cash nexus. Incommensurability therefore precludes cost-benefit analysis, but not markets in environmental goods where property rights are appropriately allocated.
Molinari Review, 2017
Libertarians often justify class privilege and gender privilege by pointing to that fact that when the privileged party benefits, it is not the result of said party’s coercing the disadvantaged. However when we broaden the lens of our enquiry to looking not only at whether proximate coercion exists in social relations, but if it had a role in creating the conditions under which parties voluntarily assent to exploitative relationships, we get a far richer analysis of privilege. State coercion is essential to maintaining division between those with and those without access to the means of production. Likewise, rape is essential to maintaining men’s material leverage over women. In both cases libertarians often overlook the most pervasive effects of violations of the non-aggression principle, but they need not and should not.
The Possibility of Thick Libertarianism
Libertarian Papers, 2017
The scope of libertarian law is normally thought to be the application of the non-aggression principle (NAP), nothing more and nothing less. However, judging when the NAP has been violated requires not only a conception of praxeological notions such as aggression, but also interpretive understanding of what synthetic events count as the relevant praxeological types. Interpretive understanding – or verstehen – can be extremely heterogeneous between agents. The particular verständnis that is taken by a judge has considerable moral and political implications. Since selecting a verständnis is pre-requisite to applying the NAP, the NAP itself cannot tell us which one we ought morally to take. Therefore the application of the NAP calls upon moral and political considerations outside of the NAP itself. Since some of these moral and political considerations are going to be more consistent with an endorsement of the NAP than others, libertarianism is not a “thin” commitment to the NAP alone, but a “thick” commitment to the NAP and other supporting moral and political considerations.