Libertarian Position Research Articles

Mental Privacy, Cognitive Liberty, and Hog-tying.

As the science and technology of the brain and mind develop, so do the ways in which brains and minds may be surveilled and manipulated. Some cognitive libertarians worry that these developments undermine cognitive liberty or "freedom of thought." I argue that protecting an individual's cognitive liberty undermines others' ability to use their own cognitive liberty. Given that the threatening devices and processes are not relevantly different from ordinary and frequent intrusions upon one's brain and mind, strong protections of cognitive liberty may proscribe neurotechnological intrusions but also ordinary intrusions. Thus, the cognitive libertarian position "hog-ties" others' use of their own liberties. This problem for the cognitive libertarian is the same problem that ordinary libertarianism faces in protecting individual rights to property and person. But the libertarian strategies for resolving the problem don't work for the cognitive libertarian. I conclude that the right to mental privacy is weaker than what cognitive libertarians want it to be.

Libertarianism and agentive experience

AbstractLibertarianism 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.

Class voting for radical-left parties in Western Europe: The libertarian versus authoritarian class trade-off

Which classes vote for radical-left parties (RLPs) in Western Europe? Previous research indicates that RLPs are strong among production workers and socio-cultural professionals, though not necessarily among both at the same time. Starting from the observation that these two classes take opposite stances on cultural issues, we trace variation in class voting back to RLPs’ positions on the cultural dimension. Combining voter-level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2018) with information on the positions of 23 RLPs from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we report robust evidence of a libertarian versus authoritarian class trade-off: RLPs with less libertarian positions receive relatively less support from socio-cultural professionals and relatively more support from production workers. These findings add to evidence that class voting varies with party positions. Ours is the first study to demonstrate this for RLPs, showing how, in the early 21st century, cultural positions matter for class voting.

Mechanical Choices: A Compatibilist Libertarian Response

Michael S. Moore defends the ideas of free will and responsibility, especially in relation to criminal law, against several challenges from neuroscience. I agree with Moore that morality and the law presuppose a commonsense understanding of humans as rational agents, who make choices and act for reasons, and that to defend moral and legal responsibility, we must show that this commonsense understanding remains viable. Unlike Moore, however, I do not think that classical compatibilism, which is based on a conditional understanding of the ability to do otherwise, provides a sufficiently robust account of free will, even when it is amended as Moore suggests. I argue that free will and responsibility can be defended more robustly by observing that, at the level of agency, there can be alternative possibilities and mental causation in a stronger sense than recognized by classical compatibilism, even if physical determinism is true. Moore’s arguments could thus be strengthened by embracing this compatibilist libertarian position. At the same time, I note that, although the idea of responsibility is robustly defensible, there are independent reasons for rejecting a retributivist approach to punishment.

The role of socioeconomic status and political attitudes in the spread of Covid-19 in Austria

Abstract This study investigates the role of socioeconomic status (SES) and political attitudes marked by populism and libertarianism in the spread of Covid-19 infections across Austria. A spatial regression approach is adopted based on official registry data on Covid-19 cases at the municipality level, granted by the Austrian National Public Health Institute. This allows the consideration of spatial dependencies between observations in close geographic proximity. Moreover, to uncover potential temporal (in)stabilities in the effects, the associations are examined over two pandemic phases, namely the second (06/20 to 02/21) and third wave (02/21 to 07/21) of infections. The analysis shows that low educational attainment and income led to higher infection rates during both periods under investigation. In contrast, unemployment was negatively related to the Covid-19 incidence. While the findings for income and education were more pronounced during the third wave of infections, unemployment had a more significant impact during the second wave. Contrary to what was expected, the findings report that populist attitudes were associated with lower case numbers during the second wave. This association reversed and became positive in the third wave but was no longer significant. A positive yet non-significant relationship was detected between libertarian attitudes and Covid-19 cases for both periods studied. The findings suggest that low-income and less-educated groups carry a higher Covid-19 disease burden in Austria. This provides vital information for policymakers to develop targeted public health strategies to protect vulnerable groups and achieve a more equitable distribution of health in society. Only limited evidence was provided regarding the impact of populist and libertarian sentiments on the spread of Covid-19. As polarisation has increased throughout the pandemic, further research on attitudes characterized by skepticism towards state intervention and science is needed. Key messages

Afraid of whom?: Threat sensitivity's influence changes with perceived source of threat.

Taking insights from the fields of psychology and biology, a growing body of scholarship considers the psychophysiological foundations of political attitudes. Subconscious emotional reactions to threat, for example, have been shown to predict socially conservative attitudes toward out-groups. However, many of these studies fail to consider different sources of perceived threat. Using a combination of survey and physiological data, I distinguish between fear of others and fear of authority, finding that threat sensitivity predicts divergent political attitudes depending on the strength of each. Those who are more sensitive to threat from others tend to hold socially conservative attitudes, while those who fear authority generally take more libertarian positions. As sensitivity to threat is at least partially inherited, these findings highlight the genetic role of political predispositions.

Varieties of censorship: Hate speech, pornography, and the First Amendment

ABSTRACT Until the 1960s, governmental limits on speech and expression, particularly around issues of pornography and obscenity, were common. These restrictions were enacted to reinforce a set of standards that had broad support among the American people. Since the 1960s, we have seen a great expansion of the right to free speech and expression. Today, however, the libertarian consensus has fractured. The new censorship that favors regulating hate speech confronts the underlying premises of the old censorship. Rather than comparing and contrasting the libertarian position with the censorship of hate speech position, as is so often done, in this article, I will compare and contrast two pro-censorship positions, one group favoring the censorship of hate speech, the other favoring the censorship of pornography and obscenity. My purpose is not to advocate for censorship. Rather, my idea is to examine and explain the different rationales that exist in the two opposing approaches to censorship, to better judge the merits of censorship and free speech.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

The sense of agency does not evidence regulative control

Libertarians assume that the sense of agency supports their belief in the agent’s ability to have done otherwise; however, they do not present arguments in favor of their assumption beyond introspection. Although agents may hold this belief, the mechanisms that give rise to the sense of agency—the comparator model and the perception of the relation between action and events in the environment—do not provide reasons to support it. Nonetheless, these mechanisms can help explain why agents hold the belief in the first place, and the investigation makes clear that the workings of the mechanisms that give rise to the sense of agency are compatible with determinism. Here, I will defend that a compatibilist explanation can be given as to why the sense of agency may seem to support libertarian beliefs. Hence, the sense of agency does not support the libertarian position in the free will debate; it is merely the pre-reflective experience of action as self-caused, and it is associated with control mechanisms.Keywords: Sense of agency, Regulative control, Incompatibilism, Comparator model, Guidance control.

Suicidism: A new theoretical framework to conceptualize suicide from an anti-oppressive perspective

Anchored in queer and crip perspectives, this essay proposes the neologism "suicidism" as a new theoretical framework to conceptualize the oppressive system in which suicidal people experience forms of injustice and violence. The thesis proposed here is that suicidal people suffer both individually and collectively from suicidist violence, an oppression that remains unproblematized in all current interpretations of suicide, including those taken up by anti-oppressive scholars and activists. I pursue three interrelated objectives: 1) interrogate dominant ideas and perspectives on suicidality; 2) make visible and denounce the power relations between suicidal and non-suicidal people; 3) enrich intersectional analyses by naming and problematizing an oppression that has been neglected. In sum, this essay proposes to analyze suicidality by asking the following epistemological questions: What and who is missing from current conceptualizations of suicide? What can we learn from these absences? How might new understandings of suicide, from queer and crip perspectives, help anti-oppressive scholars and activists avoid reproducing forms of oppression toward suicidal people? This essay is divided into two parts. The first part reviews some of the predominant models of suicide to illustrate how they all arrive at the same conclusion—that suicide is never an option—and how this results in a silencing of suicidal subjects. In so doing, I also demonstrate how suicidism is intertwined in forms of ableism/sanism. I conclude this first part by mobilizing the notion of epistemic injustice to theorize both the testimonial and hermeneutical injustices experienced by suicidal subjects. In the second part, I explore additional interpretations of suicide that contrast with the dominant "negative" conceptualizations that seek to prevent it in all circumstances. I demonstrate how even "positive" perspectives of suicidality (e.g. the libertarian position) are founded in forms of ableism/sanism, and that even though they may critique the marginalization of suicidal subjects, they don't conceptualize their oppression as systemic, nor address it from an anti-oppressive perspective. Critiquing the "positive" conceptualizations of suicide allows me to delineate an alternative conceptualization of suicide rooted in queer and crip perspectives. Mobilizing a queer perspective to study suicide doesn't mean offering only analyses that take queer theories as a starting point or queer communities as the objects of the study. The intention is rather to queer suicide in a more holistic sense, that is, by applying queering and cripping methods, theories, epistemologies and prevention strategies to the topic of suicidality. Based on a harm-reduction and a non-coercive suicide approach, I suggest that assisted suicide should be a possibility for suicidal people, a position that relies on an ethics of living and a responsibility toward suicidal people.

Transgresión banal: discursos, identidades y estereotipos de género entre los años 70 y 80

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las diversas manifestaciones de transgresión que tienen su origen en los últimos años de la década de los 70 y en los 80 en España, y su reflejo en los estereotipos de género. Desde las actitudes libertarias, pasando por la superwoman como modelo de mujer emancipada, hasta los nuevos modelos de maternidad intensiva que comienzan a introducirse a finales de los ochenta, la transgresión se ha manifestado de diversas formas durante este periodo en el que las españolas a duras penas lograron superar el modelo tradicional impuesto por el franquismo. En este contexto, la transgresión se manifestó como un fenómeno superficial, inherente al momento sociopolítico y vaciada de un contenido reivindicativo.

Libertarianism and Pollution

Libertarians are strong defenders of the rights of person and property against trespass or invasion. Taken to its logical conclusion, the libertarian position would insist on the elimination of pollution since it involves the invasion of one person -- through effluents or emissions -- on another. Yet to eliminate all pollution would be to bring the economy to a screeching halt. Libertarians have struggled with the question of how much pollution should be thought acceptable and why.

Neurocognitive free will.

Free will is an apparent paradox because it requires a historical identity to escape its history in a self-guided fashion. Philosophers have itemized design features necessary for this escape, scaling from action to agency and vice versa. These can be organized into a coherent framework that neurocognitive capacities provide and that form a basis for neurocognitive free will. These capacities include (1) adaptive access to unpredictability, (2) tuning of this unpredictability in the service of hierarchical goal structures, (3) goal-directed deliberation via search over internal cognitive representations, and (4) a role for conscious construction of the self in the generation and choice of alternatives. This frames free will as a process of generative self-construction, by which an iterative search process samples from experience in an adaptively exploratory fashion, allowing the agent to explore itself in the construction of alternative futures. This provides an explanation of how effortful conscious control modulates adaptive access to unpredictability and resolves one of free will's key conceptual problems: how randomness is used in the service of the will. The implications provide a contemporary neurocognitive grounding to compatibilist and libertarian positions on free will, and demonstrate how neurocognitive understanding can contribute to this debate by presenting free will as an interaction between our freedom and our will.

Tyranny by Collusive Minorities

Contemporary politics in most western countries can be modeled with two dominant left and right factions, with some third parties, some of whom are non-interventionists. Although unsuccessful, they occasionally claim widespread support. Treating such claims as valid I develop a model of political competition relying on asymmetric preferences and the ability to trade votes, or logroll, to show why majority non-interventionist positions fail against interventionist minorities. This loss would occur even in the presence of majority support for the libertarian position on any given issue. This result explains any multi-issue outcome in which an overall majority opinion is not implemented.

Why (and how to) trust Institutions? Hospitals, Schools, and liberal Trust

This is a paper about how we relate to institutions. Its aim is two-fold: accounting for what it is to ‘trust an institution’, and cashing out the right attitude to have towards public institutions. The descriptive account shows that ‘trusting institutions’ is a complex and ambivalent phenomenon, which oscillates between proper trust (as a two-place relation) and mere reliance, depending on the social function of the institution at hand. The normative proposal highlights the merit of a liberal form of trust in public institutions, as opposed to totalitarian and libertarian attitudes. To do this, the paper, reviewing a large set of public and private institutions, focuses on two cases, healthcare and educational institutions.

The Netherlands: Political development and data for 2017

The year 2017 was a period of contradictionary development in terms of political stability in the Netherlands. On te one hand, the Mark Rutte II cabinet, the longest serving cabinet since the Second World War, was the first since 1998 to complete the entire term. On the other hand, the highly volatile 2017 national elections yielded the most fractionalized parliament in Dutch history. The ensuing cabinet formation was the longest on to date.

IN DEFENSE OF NON-CAUSAL LIBERTARIANISM

Abstract Non-Causal Libertananism (NCL) is a libertarian position that aims to provide a non-causal account of action and freedom to do otherwise. Non-Causal Libertarianism has been recently criticized from a number of quarters, notably from proponents of free will skepticism and agent-causation. The main complaint that has been voiced against NCL is that it does not provide a plausible account of an agent’s control over her action, and, therefore, the account of free action it offers is inadequate. Some critics (mainly agent-causationists) have even gone so far as to claim that NCL does not offer a plausible account of action. This paper is intended to defend NCL against these charges. It addresses specifically, The Disappearing Agent Objection, Peter van Inwagen’s Mind Argument, and some objections by Randolph Clarke.

Child sexual abuse, moral panics and emancipatory practice

This article explores the shared interest of sociologists and social workers in moral panics when considering the public policy challenge of child sexual abuse. Enacted paedophilia is one aspect of the latter. The utilisation of moral panic reasoning in pro-paedophile arguments in the past 50 years is described and the recent version of that reasoning is addressed critically. A critical realist framework is adopted to offer immanent and explanatory critiques of moral panic theory when applied to child sexual abuse. Social work practitioners can reflect on the ideological struggle in the academy between an orthodox child protection position, on the one hand, and a libertarian position that endorses freedom of speech and action, on the other.

Direct to consumer genetic testing and the libertarian right to test.

I sketch a libertarian argument for the right to test in the context of 'direct to consumer' (DTC) genetic testing. A libertarian right to genetic tests, as defined here, relies on the idea of a moral right to self-ownership. I show how a libertarian right to test can be inferred from this general libertarian premise, at least as a prima facie right, shifting the burden of justification on regulators. I distinguish this distinctively libertarian position from some arguments based on considerations of utility or autonomy, which are sometimes labelled 'libertarian' because they oppose a tight regulation of the direct to consumer genetic testing sector. If one takes the libertarian right to test as a starting point, the whole discussion concerning autonomy and personal utility may be sidestepped. Finally, I briefly consider some considerations that justify the regulation of the DTC genetic testing market, compatible with the recognition of a prima facie right to test.

Migrant Political Participation and Voting Behavior in Romania

The results of the first round 2014 presidential elections in Romania predicted a comfortable win for the incumbent Prime Minister Victor Ponta, the president of the Social Democratic Party. After the first round, Ponta held a 10% lead over the Christian-Liberal Alliance candidate Klaus Iohannis. The runoff campaign was marked by reports displayed on all TV channels showing the Romanian Diaspora not being able to vote abroad. Surprisingly, Klaus Iohannis, who obtained 54% of the votes, won the second round of elections. Iohannis obtained 89% of Diaspora’s votes, adding a 4% gain in front of his contender. In most studies on electoral behavior, the focus for explaining why people go to vote is centered at the level of the “country, election, electoral cohort or individual voter” (Franklin 2004). Notably absent from these studies is the impact Diaspora on the election results and the predictors of turnout. The impact on national elections of this category of citizens is not to be neglected and it becomes important especially in democratizing states. In this vein we focus on the predictors that lie behind the political participation and preferences of Romanian Diaspora. We will test two basic models that explain participation (Franklin 2004). First there is research that focuses on the social determinants of voting (Verba and Nie 1972) labeled as “the baseline model”. Another stream of studies includes electoral system effects and political system format (Blais and Aarts 2006, Cox 1997, Franklin 2004). We claim that Romanian Diaspora voters participate in higher numbers in presidential elections when the number of voting stations increases. Romanian diaspora consistently votes with center right wing parties and candidates. This vote is associated with liberal policy preferences and support for issues that promote libertarian attitudes. We test these hypotheses with elections results data from 2000 to 2014 coupled with data collected from Votulmeu.com an online Voting Advice Application from the 2014 presidential elections in Romania.