Green Libertarianism

People evolved as part of an ecosystem, making use of the Earth’s bounty without reflection. Only when our ancestors developed the capacity for moral agency could we begin to reflect on whether we had taken in excess of our due. This outlines a ‘green libertarianism’ in which our property rights are grounded in fundamental ecological facts. It further argues that it is immune from two objections levelled at right- and left- libertarian theories of acquisition: that Robert Nozick, without justification, divided people into those who were able to acquire unowned resources, and those would could not; and, that left-libertarian attempts, such as Hillel Steiner’s, to separate choice from circumstance cannot account for the fact that not only people’s decisions to have children, but even their decisions to continue living, affect people’s entitlements to use the natural world.     

Lucky Libertarianism

Perhaps the greatest impediment to a viable libertarianism is the provision of a satisfactory explanation of how actions that are undetermined by an agent's character can still be under the control of, or up to, the agent. The luck problem has been most assiduously examined by Robert Kane who supplies a detailed account of how this problem can be resolved. Although Kane's theory is innovative, insightful, and more resourceful than most of his critics believe, it ultimately cannot account for the type of control that moral responsibility and (ultimate) agency legitimately require.     

理解信仰问题的主要视角

信仰的问题十分复杂,基于不同的立场和视角完全可能对其给予不同的理解。本文即是对这些不同的视角做一个概略地考察,并在此基础上扼要分析考察信仰问题的若干维度。这些视角主要包括:基于宗教哲学的对信仰与理性的区别;基于人类学或社会学的广义的信仰概念;基于高端信仰的狭义信仰概念;基于亚伯拉罕宗教系统的一神信仰概念;基于宗教多元论的多元信仰概念;基于发展角度的考察:信仰可能由高端向低端的回归趋势。     

Libertarianism and Conjoined Twins

Philosophia - This paper presents a new challenge for libertarianism. (Or rather: for any version of libertarianism committed to absolute, indefeasible self-ownership rights). The problem, in a...     

Libertarianism and agentive experience

Libertarianism about free will conjoins the thesis that free will requires indeterminism with the thesis that we have free will. Here the claim that we have experiential evidence for the libertarian position is assessed. It is argued that, on a straightforward reading, the claim is false, for our experiences as agents don't support the claim that free will requires indeterminism. However, our experiences as agents may still have a role to play in an overall case for libertarianism, insofar as they give us some (defeasible) reason to think that we have free will. This latter claim is defended against a pair of objections that have been leveled against it.     

Libertarianism and Free Determined Decisions

Free determined decisions are free decisions that are causally determined by the character of the agent. Robert Kane is a libertarian about free will who believes some of our free decisions are determined in this way. According to Kane, for a determined decision to be free it must proceed from the agent's character and the agent must have shaped that character through previous undetermined free decisions. In recent writings, Mark Balaguer has argued that human beings may well possess libertarian freedom, but he rejects Kane's view that free determined acts must proceed from a character that is constructed from prior undetermined free decisions. This essay explains Balaguer's argument for rejecting the Kanean view and critically responds to it in defense of Kane's position on free determined decisions.     

Three Types of Sufficientarian Libertarianism

Res Publica - Sufficientarian libertarianism is a theory of justice that combines libertarianism’s focus on property rights and non-interference with sufficientarianism’s concern for...     

"自由至上主义"如何为国家辩护--以诺齐克国家观为例

诺齐克的"自由至上主义"认为,国家是个人自然权利在道德边际约束作用下、在利益目标最大化或损害最小化的市场中逐步产生的,所以,国家对任何个人保持中立.与此相对照,功利主义与契约论的国家观实现的只是"仅仅以人为工具";无政府主义则把"以人为目的"虚拟化.然而,依据诺齐克自由至上主义国家观的逻辑,其"最小国家"应弱化为"非模式化国家"更为合理.     

Soft Libertarianism and Hard Compatibilism

In this paper I discuss two kinds of attempts to qualify incompatibilist and compatibilist conceptions of freedom to avoid what have been thought to be incredible commitments of these rival accounts. One attempt -- which I call soft libertarianism -- is represented by Robert Kane's work. It hopes to defend an incompatibilist conception of freedom without the apparently difficult metaphysical costs traditionally incurred by these views. On the other hand, in response to what I call the robot objection (that if compatibilism is true, human beings could be the products of design), some compatibilists are tempted to soften their position by placing restrictions on the origins of agency. I argue that both of these attempts are misguided. Hard libertarianism and hard compatibilism are the only theoretical options.