The Fair Value of Economic Liberty

In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi tries to show that ‘thick’ economic liberties, including the right to own productive property, are basic liberties. According to Tomasi, the policy-level consequences of protecting economic liberty as basic are essentially libertarian in character. I argue that if economic liberties are basic, just societies must guarantee their fair value to all citizens. And in order to secure the fair value of economic liberty, states must guarantee that citizens of roughly similar dispositions and talents are roughly equally able to use their economic liberties to develop and pursue a conception of the good. This, I will argue, is a very demanding standard that requires aggressive taxation and redistribution.     

Is the Free Market Acceptable to Everyone?

In this paper we take issue with two central claims that John Tomasi makes in Free Market Fairness (2012). The first claim is that Rawls’s difference principle can better be realized by free market institutions than it can be by state interventionist regimes such as property-owning democracy or liberal socialism. We argue that Tomasi’s narrow interpretation of the difference principle, which focuses largely on wealth and income, leaves other goods (such as control of the workplace and access to economic assets) worryingly unsatisfied. The second claim is that a wide set of economic liberties ought to be protected because they realize responsible ‘self-authorship.’ We argue that this claim also fails because, crucially, whether economic liberties serve individuals in pursuing their ambitions will depend on the nature of those ambitions and how the use of those liberties by others would affect their pursuit of them. If an expansion of liberty is good for us in some ways, but bad in others, we need to assess whether, all things considered, we would be better off with or without such expanded economic rights. We argue that the expansion Tomasi proposes is likely to fail this test.     

The Irrationality of Choosing Egoism—A Reply to Eshelman

Despite the vast literature on Rawls's work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy. When his arguments have been discussed, they have received staunch criticism. Some critics have charged that Rawls's arguments are not deeply democratic. Others have gone further, claiming that Rawls's arguments denigrate democracy. These criticisms are unsurprising, since Rawls's arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete. In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil liberties, Rawls does not say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties.

In this paper, I complete some of Rawls's arguments and show that he has grounds for including political liberties, particularly those of a democratic nature, in the principle of equal basic liberty. In doing so, I make some beginning steps toward illustrating the genuinely democratic nature of Rawls's arguments. Rawls believes that a few different arguments can be given for democratic institutions and that these arguments work together to support the value of democracy. In this paper, I focus on Rawls's arguments relating to self-respect. I focus on this set of arguments because they are among the strongest of Rawls's arguments for equal political liberty and its fair value.     

Putting Liberty in its Place: Rawlsian Liberalism without the Liberalism

To be a liberal is, among other things, to grant basic liberties some degree of priority over other aspects of justice. But why do basic liberties warrant this special treatment? For Rawls, the answer has to do with the allegedly special connection between these freedoms and the ‘two moral powers’ of reasonableness and rationality. Basic freedoms are said to be preconditions for the development and exercise of these powers and are held to warrant priority over other justice‐relevant values for that reason. In the first half of the article I mount an internal critique of this Rawlsian line, arguing that it is flawed in two main ways. First, it overestimates the contribution of basic freedom to moral personality. Second, it underestimates the contribution of non‐liberty resources (such as basic material necessities, but also opportunities for culture, education, leisure, and social contribution) to moral personality. In the second half of the article I repair these flaws (thus putting liberty in its proper place, if you like). The result is a new, intriguingly radical version of justice as fairness, one with surprising—yet plausible—implications for economic and gender justice.     

John Stuart Mill and the Conflicts of Equality

John Stuart Mill commented on the relationship between equality and liberty in general terms, and he also discussed the relationships between equality and four more concrete social goals: equality vs. diversity and individual spontaneity, equality vs. freedom of trade and entrepreneurial activity, equality vs. economic incentives for workpeople, and equality vs. welfare. In his more general statements he wrote off potential conflicts between equality and liberty, claiming that only those liberties that can be enjoyed by all are real liberties—or at least they are the only ones worth defending. However, in several of his more concrete discussions he gave higher priority to various liberty-related goals than to equality. This seeming contradiction can be resolved if we assume that he distinguished between valuing a liberty per se and valuing it as a means to achieve something else.

     

Market Equality and Social Freedom

ABSTRACT Conflicts between the good of each and the good of all are often presented in terms of freedom versus equality, with liberals pulled one way by libertarians and the other by social democrats. When we distinguish between negative and positive notions not only of freedom but also of equality, the liberal freedom 'to pursue our own good in our own way'is a positive freedom involving a negative idea of equality (or 'equity'). Yet 'equity'is not strong enough to deal with the problem of public goods. Trust is a public good, essential if markets are to work and dependable only where there is a moral commitment to a positive basic equality among citizens.     

Social Democracy and Economic Liberty

Tomasi’s view of social democracy is shown to mischaracterize it as hostile to private economic liberties, which all real-world social democracies guarantee. The supposed Manichean choice between social and market democracy, seen as requiring contrasting accounts of fairness, results from combining Rawls-style idealization of regime types, the Hayekian presumption that social democracies are advancing along the road to serfdom, and tendentious appeal to scant and unconvincing historical evidence. The proposed constitutional protection of ‘thick,’ market-based economic liberties, as favoring both individual self-authorship and fair equality of opportunity, is defended by Tomasi against high-liberal and social democratic views as compatible with what Rawls’s social justice demands, but as their scope expands in the course of the book this fails to convince. Finally it is argued that the ever-expanding reach of the market across all social life, with feedback effects on the formation of preferences, renders questionable Tomasi’s claims that his account of market fairness is neutral with respect to ways of life and that it specifies conditions under which individuals can live lives that are truly their own.     

The liberty principle and universal health care

A universal entitlement to health care can be grounded in the liberty principle. A detailed examination of Rawls's discussion of health care in Justice as Fairness shows that Rawls himself recognized that illness is a threat to the basic liberties, yet failed to recognize the implications of this fact for health resource allocation. The problem is that one cannot know how to allocate health care dollars until one knows which basic liberties one seeks to protect, and yet one cannot know which basic liberties to protect until one knows how health care dollars will be allocated. The solution is to design the list of basic liberties and the health care system in tandem so as to fit each other, such that every citizen is guaranteed a set of basic liberties and access to the health services needed to secure them.     

RAWLS AND THE STATUS OF POLITICAL LIBERTY

Abstract:  In his late work, Rawls makes strong claims about the status of political liberty. These claims, if accepted, would have significant implications for the content of "justice as fairness." I discuss the nature of these claims, clarifying Rawls's fair value guarantee of the political liberties and critically discussing the arguments that he and others have given for assigning special importance to the political liberties. I conclude that justice as fairness, properly understood, is not a deeply democratic conception of justice.     

Self-Respect or Self-Delusion? Tomasi and Rawls on the Basic Liberties

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional (and important) ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument (the ‘greater wealth thesis’) in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when (and why) citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect.     

Against the Moral Powers Test of basic liberty

In Rawlsian political philosophy, “basic liberties” are rights subject to a high degree of protection, such that they cannot easily be overridden for concerns of stability, efficiency, or social justice. For Rawls, something qualifies as a basic liberty if and only if bears the right relationship to our “two moral powers”: a capacity to form a sense of the good life and a capacity for a sense of justice. However, which rights are basic liberties is subject to frequent ideological debate, which Rawlsian libertarians and Rawlsian socialists arguing that Rawls's own view is mistaken or incomplete. I argue that problem is that Moral Powers Test does not quite work. Only a small amount of liberty—not enough to qualify a society as liberal—can clearly be shown to pass the Moral Powers Test. One might attempt to rescue the Moral Powers Test by relaxing or modifying its requirements, but, I will argue, there appears to be no unproblematic and nonquestion‐begging way to do so. The Moral Powers Test must be abandoned or, at least, requires some unknown but radical revision or require supplements from outside Rawls's own theory.     

Medical Liberty: Drugless Healers Confront Allopathic Doctors, 1910–1931

Education, medicine and psychotherapeutics offer exemplary sites through which liberty and its dreams are realized. This article explores the social history of medical freedom and liberty in North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The National League for Medical Freedom (NLMF) and the American Medical Liberty League (AMLL) offered fierce resistance to allopathic power. Allopatic liberties and rights to medical practice in asylums, clinics, courts, hospitals, prisons and schools were never certain. The politics of these liberties and rights represents a fascinating story that neither intellectual nor social historians have fully appreciated.     

Epistemic justice as a condition of political freedom?

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom.     

Moral reframing: A technique for effective and persuasive communication across political divides

The political landscape in the US and many other countries is characterized by policy impasses and animosity between rival political groups. Research finds that these divisions are fueled in part by disparate moral concerns and convictions that undermine communication and understanding between liberals and conservatives. This “moral empathy gap” is particularly evident in the moral underpinnings of the political arguments members of each side employ when trying to persuade one another. Both liberals and conservatives typically craft arguments based on their own moral convictions rather than the convictions of the people they target for persuasion. As a result, these moral arguments tend to be unpersuasive, even offensive, to their recipients. The technique of moral reframing—whereby a position an individual would not normally support is framed in a way that is consistent with that individual's moral values—can be an effective means for political communication and persuasion. Over the last decade, studies of moral reframing have shown its effectiveness across a wide range of polarized topics, including views of economic inequality, environmental protection, same‐sex marriage, and major party candidates for the US presidency. In this article, we review the moral reframing literature, examining potential mediators and moderators of the effect, and discuss important questions that remain unanswered about this phenomenon.     

Against liberty

Conclusion There are no private particular actions that should be altogether free of social interference. No absolute distinction can be made between types of actions affecting others and those affecting only the agent. Relative to a purpose in formulating an act of law, for instance, such a distinction can, however, be made. The idea of social freedom could therefore be thought to imply that even if there are no absolutely private particular actions, and even if society could interfere for any purpose to regulate the actions of the individual, not any reason for such interference is acceptable from the point of view of liberty. Acts of law should not be made unnecessarily inclusive with respect to their purpose and they should be designed to further public security. Not even in this weak formulation, however, can the principle of social liberty be defended against moral criticism. Some illiberal laws, in this sense, should after all be passed. Examples can be found in taxation law.The only reasonable conclusion to draw from all this is that there is no tenable principle of liberty.That there is no tenable principle of liberty does not mean that everything that has been condemned in the name of liberty should now be regarded as right. Many things said to result in a limitation of freedom could be wrong for other reasons. But probably not all of them are. So it will, I think, have some effects on our political views in general, if we accept the conclusion of this essay.     

The Implicit Argument for the Basic Liberties

Most criticism and exposition of John Rawls’s political theory has focused on his account of distributive justice rather than on his support for liberalism. Because of this, much of his argument for protecting the basic liberties remains under explained. Specifically, Rawls claims that representative citizens would agree to guarantee those social conditions necessary for the exercise and development of the two moral powers, but he does not adequately explain why protecting the basic liberties would guarantee these social conditions. This gap in his argument leads to two problems. First, the Rawlsian argument for the priority of liberty would fail if the gap could not be filled. His argument would still support the protection of individual freedoms, but these freedoms would be treated like other primary goods and regulated by the difference principle. Second, without a full argument, there is not sufficient reason to favor Rawls’s left-liberal conception of the basic liberties over a more right-leaning conception that would prioritize the protection of free-market rights. To address these two problems, this paper fills in the gap in order to better explain Rawls’s full argument for egalitarian liberalism.     

A new solution to the problem of luck

The issue of whether and how we have the control necessary for freedom and moral responsibility is central to all control accounts of freedom and moral responsibility. The problem of luck for libertarians aims to show that indeterministic agents are ill-equipped with the control required for freedom and moral responsibility. In view of this, we must either endorse scepticism about the possibility of free and morally responsible agents, or make some form of, possibly revisionary, compatibilism work. In this paper, I shall offer a new solution to the problem of luck for libertarians. After outlining the problem of luck, I shall argue that, given a particular approach to mental causation, indeterminism can be viewed as an essential requirement of free and morally responsible action. After this, I shall distinguish between different types of inability and show how this provides us with a solution to the problem of luck. Finally, I shall consider some advantages and objections to the proposed solution.     

NEGOTIATING CLOSE FRIENDSHIP: THE DIALECTIC OF CONJUNCTIVE FREEDOMS

An empirical study was conducted to investigate the practical management of interactions sustaining close friendships. Ten pairs of close friends were interviewed individually on two occasions and together on a third occasion. An interpretive analysis of subjects' remarks identified a dialectical principle governing the communicative organization of friendship. The dialectic of the freedom to be independent/freedom to be dependent conceptualizes the patterns of availability and copresence in a close friendship. Basically, while each person is free to pursue individual interests apart from the other and without the friend's interference or help, each retains the liberty to rely on the other should it be necessary. In granting each other a combination of these two freedoms, the individuals co-create a basis for patterns of interaction in their relationship that may curtail their individual liberties. The paper closes with an overview of the choices and possible corruptions experienced by self and other due to the mutually contingent nature of these contradictory freedoms.     

Why liberals should accept financial incentives for organ procurement

Free market libertarians have long supported incentives to increase organ procurement, but those oriented to justice traditionally have opposed them. This paper presents the reasons why those worried about justice should reconsider financial incentives and tolerate them as a lesser moral evil. After considering concerns about discrimination and coercion and setting them aside, it is suggested that the real moral concern should be manipulation of the neediest. The one offering the incentive (the government) has the resources to eliminate the basic needs that pressure the poor into a willingness to sell. It is unethically manipulative to withhold those resources and then offer payment for organs. Nevertheless, the poor have been left without basic necessities for 20 years since the passage of the prohibition on incentives. As long as the government continues to withhold a decent minimum of welfare, liberals should, with shame, cease opposing financial incentives for organ procurement.     

The Virtue of Freedom in Capitalism

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the sort of liberty associated with a capitalist economic system is of particular value because it ensures moral self-responsibility. Two conceptions of freedom are considered but only one is invoked. It is contended that one, namely, positive freedom, is actually a kind of ability or power. One's positive freedom may be lost as a result of events not initiated by other human beings. Negative freedom, by contrast, is a distinctively normative notion. It is a social condition that members of a community ought to maintain out of respect for human dignity, that is, each person's responsibility to choose to live rightly.
It is argued that since 'ought' implies 'can', persons can only be morally responsible for what they can choose to do. If they lack negative freedom, then in addition to natural limitations, they will also be limited by the voluntary conduct of others. Yet this limitation could be prevented by the choices of others, including governments, to secure for all persons their negative freedom. Because of the universality of the requirement that each person be left free, such negative freedom is the quintessential public good.
Finally, the concrete expression of negative freedom is the right to private property— one's sphere of moral authority. This makes the capitalist economic system an essential aspect of the society that secures negative freedom.