The Hard-Heartedness of some Libertarians

Abstract

In “The Moral Hardness of Libertarianism” (2002), I accuse libertarians of being morally unsympathetic if they hold three widely shared beliefs: that persons are morally responsible only if they make libertarian choices; that we should hold persons morally responsible; and that we lack epistemic justification for thinking persons make libertarian choices. In “Hard-Heartedness and Libertarianism” (2013), John Lemos, relying on the Kantian principle of ends, suggests a way for libertarians to accept these three beliefs while avoiding the charge of hard-heartedness. In this paper, I criticize Lemos’s rebuttal.