Libertarian Research Articles

Obiektywistyczna teoria prawa własności intelektualnej i jej krytyka

Among many libertarian theories of property, the objectivist “creationist” is one of the most interesting – especially when applied to the problem of intellectual property. First, it is deontological and rules out fiduciary titles to ideal goods based on the positive law. Second, it legitimizes both patents and copyright and regards these institutions as kinds of property. This of course poses a challenge for a system that claims that a right to (acquire) property is absolute. Third, Ayn Rand’s philosophy cherishes great minds of entrepreneurs, inventors and artists, thus making its stance on IP even more significant. Set in Lockean desert-justice, labor theory of property, objectivism claims that an act of projection of a labor onto the nature comprises both physical and mental aspects. A thing to be appropriated needs to be recognized as “a good” first (and thus it is created; moreover, ideal goods are created ex nihilo). Although, the creationist theory cannot overcome the difficulties produced by equally absolute titles of things and ideal goods (and thus it is to be regarded as inconsistent), it is interesting for the legal philosophers and jurists alike. It evokes not only the question of axiological basis for the intellectual property, but also of the correctness of propertarian model of copyright and patents.

THE TROLLEY PROBLEM AND AGGRESSION

Abstract:This essay considers complications introduced by the Trolley Problem to the discussion of whether and when harming some for the sake of helping others would be unjustified. It first examines Guido Pincione’s arguments for the conclusion that the permissibility of a bystander turning a runaway trolley from killing five people toward killing one other person instead may undermine one moral argument for political libertarianism and against redistributive taxation, namely that we may not harm some people in order to help others to a greater degree. It then considers both the bearing on Pincione’s argument of recent objections to the permissibility of turning the trolley, as well as the soundness of the objections. Finally, the essay considers the relevance of trolley cases for developing a theory of aggression, insofar as aggression is the unjustified use of force that is either foreseen or intended.

Historical Moral Responsibility: Is the Infinite Regress Problem Fatal?

AbstractSome compatibilists have responded to the manipulation argument for incompatibilism by proposing an historical theory of moral responsibility which, according to one version, requires that agents be morally responsible for having their pro‐attitudes if they are to be morally responsible for acting on them. This proposal, however, leads obviously to an infinite regress problem. I consider a proposal by Haji and Cuypers that addresses this problem and argue that it is unsatisfactory. I then go on to propose a new solution inspired by the libertarian theory of Robert Kane.

Fudging Nudging: Why Libertarian Paternalismm is the Contradiction It Claims It's Not

In this piece I argue that so-called “libertarian paternalism” is as self-contradictory as it sounds. The theory of libertarian paternalism originally advanced by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and given further defense by Sunstein alone, is itself just a sexy ad campaign designed to nudge gullible readers into thinking that there is no conflict between libertarianism and welfare utilitarianism. But no one should lose sight of the fact that welfare utilitarianism just is welfare utilitarianism only if it sacrifices individual liberty whenever it is at odds with maximizing societal welfare. And thus no one who believes that people have rights to craft their own lives through the exercise of their own choices ought to be duped into thinking that just because paternalistic nudges are cleverly manipulative and often invisible, rather than overtly coercive, standard welfare utilitarianism can lay claim to being libertarian. After outlining four distinct strains of libertarian theory and sketching their mutual incompatibility with so-called “libertarian paternalism,” I go on to demonstrate at some length how the two most prevalent strains — namely, opportunity set libertarianism and motivational libertarianism — make paternalistically-motivated nudges abuses of state power. As I argue, opportunity set libertarians should recognize nudges for what they are — namely, state incursions into the sphere of liberty in which individual choice is a matter of moral right, the boundaries of which are rightly defined, in part, by permissions to do actions that do not maximize welfare. And motivational libertarians should similarly recognize nudges for what they are — namely, illicitly motivated forms of legislative intervention that insult autonomy no less than do flat bans that leave citizens with no choice but to substitute the state’s agenda for their own. As I conclude, whatever its name, a political theory that recommends to state officials the use of “nudges” as means of ensuring that citizens’ advance the state’s understanding of their own best interests is no more compatible with libertarianism than is a theory that recommends more coercive means of paternalism.

On the role of indeterminism in libertarian free will

In a recent paper in this journal, “How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?” Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility … [he made] “two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism” – one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role – “both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument”. In this paper, I respond to Franklin's criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will in general and to do justice to the complex historical debates about it, one must distinguish different kinds of control agents may have over events and correspondingly different kinds of freedom they may possess.

Nozick's Libertarian Project: An Elaboration and Defense. By Mark D.Friedman. Pp. x, 212, London/NY, Continuum, 2011, $120.00.

Nozick's Libertarian Project: An Elaboration and Defense. By Mark D.Friedman. Pp. x, 212, London/NY, Continuum, 2011, $120.00.

The Irrelevance of the Impossibility of Pure Libertarianism

The Irrelevance of the Impossibility of Pure Libertarianism

The Role of Media in Conflict Management: The Case of Electoral Conflicts in Kenya

The Role of Media in Conflict Management: The Case of Electoral Conflicts in Kenya Col (Rtd) Zachary K Chebii Abstract The role played by media in conflicts has been an issue of discussion all over the world. Although media influence has increased tremendously in the last decade, researchers are yet to agree on the degree and magnitude of its influence in conflicts. The context analysis of Kenya election coverage and post election conflict of 2007/08 revealed that media has a ‘double-edge’ role in electoral conflict situation i.e. conflict escalation and de-escalation roles. The conflict escalation role is more prevalent with vernacular (local) media stations while the conflict de-escalation role is predominant with nationwide mainstream stations. This affirmed the study conceptualized framework developed from libertarian theory and social responsibility theory of media reporting. In addition, people’s response to conflict coverage is persuaded by their age, gender and social status as human variables. Therefore, to mitigate conflict reporting misrepresentation, specifically in weak democratic states, a common approach to conflict reporting should be designed and adhered to. More importantly, there need to be stringent regulations and control of vernacular (local) FM stations which are prone to manipulation by political elite. This should be coupled with training of journalists on conflict reporting and development of a standard conflict reporting procedure. Lastly, media houses should be discouraged from running parallel tallying centres, a mandate reserved for legitimate electoral body. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jgpc.v3n2a3

Sanfter Paternalismus, meritorische Güter, und der normative Individualismus

Paternalistische beziehungsweise meritorische Politik versucht, auf die Entscheidungen der Individuen zu deren eigenem Wohl Einfluss zu nehmen, auch wenn keine Dritten davon betroffen sind. Dies scheint im Gegensatz zum normativen Individualismus zu stehen, der unserer modernen Demokratie als Leitbild zugrunde liegt. Der sanfte Paternalismus sieht durch die Existenz von Verhaltensanomalien die Notwendigkeit paternalistischer Politik begründet, möchte aber hier mit sehr niedrigschwelligen Maßnahmen arbeiten, die insbesondere die Entscheidungsmöglichkeiten der Betroffenen offen lassen. Tatsächlich unterliegt er jedoch den gleichen möglichen Einwänden wie die ‚harte‘ Variante. Sobald wir jedoch davon ausgehen, dass die Menschen über ihr Tun und auch über ihre jeweils handlungsleitenden Präferenzen reflektieren können, widerspricht Paternalismus nicht mehr notwendigerweise dem normativen Individualismus. Die Einsatzmöglichkeiten des sanften Paternalismus sind, soweit man das bisher beurteilen kann, jedoch eher begrenzt. Die vielfach geäußerte Kritik an diesem Konzept ist teilweise berechtigt, schießt aber teilweise auch weit über das Ziel hinaus und scheint zum Teil auch eher ideologisch motiviert zu sein.

Liberty Icons: Linguistic and Multimodal Notes on the Cultural Roots of Digital Technologies

Since the famous 1984 Apple Television Ad , personal computers and the Internet have become icons of popular culture that embody libertarian values. Indeed, they have been described as the necessary tools for the empowerment of the individual and the realization of a peer-to-peer decentralized democracy. This libertarian representation has become a frame, perceived as universal and celebrated all over the world, on a daily basis, through the creation of user-generated contents. I believe that both personal computers and the Internet are American cultural products not only because of the very peculiar historical blending out of which they originate – a mixture of Cold War industrial research culture, US counterculture and DIY ethos (Turner 2006) – but, mainly, because of the founding concept that they are associated with, i.e. freedom. Adopting a functional linguistic/multimodal perspective, my article will explore the conceptual/semantic mapping of digital discourse through the analysis of a corpus of texts that goes from 1984 Apple Ad to Hillary Clinton’s Internet Freedom Speech in order to show how the current mainframe global discourse on digital technologies is permeated with a concept of freedom that combines the US founding rhetoric of liberty together with cybernetics, gnosticism and psychedelic narrations.

Provocation: Rethinking Rhetorical Ontology: An Intersection Between the Work of James Arnt Aune and Bruno Latour in the Field of Rhetoric

The Technocracy brethren were certainly very badly advised when they put no flavoring matter into their dose. H.L. Mencken (1933, p. 505) ... the current 'poverty of strategy' on the Left has something to do with the rejection of a tradition [rhetoric] that emphasized the study and practice of strategic J.A. Aune (1994, p. 5) When coming to terms with the legacy of James Amt Aune, I am struck by the extent to which Aune's thinking was almost constantly operating on multiple levels--the argumentative, the material, the practical. Aune engages economics in discussion of substantive questions in a way that rhetorical scholars rarely engage with texts. Aune's work breaks from the rhetorical mold in that it often engages directly with the material--one of the elements that marked Aune as a self-described old fashioned (Aune, 2001, xiii-xiv) or Marxist materialist. My contention in this paper will be that Aune's work reflects assumptions consistent with studies and ANT's ontology, and that a similar turn in rhetoric will help us make sense of Aune's writings about economics, as well as to better cope with topics including but not limited to economic and practice, climate science, gender, and anything else where empirical data and non-human objects are part of the conversation. Before I critically address Aune's work, I want to clarify what I mean by an project here. In political and sociology, recent scholarship has undergone what has been called an ontological turn, which is understood in reaction to a perceived division between political and factors and factors related to non-human objects, which can be understood broadly to refer to anything existing in the physical world (including, potentially, the human body, or at least the parts of it which are not thinking). This turn is often grounded in the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour, a scholar whose work is largely classified as part of science studies, a branch of sociology interested primarily in observing the scientific method. However, scholars in the social sciences who focus on questions explicitly outside the scientific method--such as conventional political science, anthropology, and even rhetoric--have appropriated ANT's ontology to look at more conventional artifacts in a context that includes non-humans and scientific evidence. In this essay I examine Aune's economic scholarship as an instance of two important divergences from the rhetorical norm: its focus upon non-human objects that are hard (unlike, for instance, speeches and other written/spoken texts) to describe as humanistic artifacts; and its use of an ontology which assumes extant, permanent physical reality that remains regardless of its mediation by discourse. I suggest that Aune's methods make similar assumptions and reach similar conclusions to that of science students such as Latour, and that when working with Aune's work and with work on similar topics, rhetorical scholars will be well served by acknowledging and working with ANT and with object-oriented ontologies. AUNE'S MATERIALIST ECONOMICS: MORE THAN MARXIST MATERIALISM? A trend in Aune's scholarship was the connection of seemingly disparate topics and ideas, having the function of creating histories of ideas at the same time that he was critiquing specific articles of discourse. In Selling the Free Market: the Rhetoric of Economic Correctness, Aune does not merely analyse the discursive strategies used by the American right wing to sell unbridled capitalism to the American people--the stated goal of the book--but rather takes readers on a tour de force that gives insight into the economic ontology of libertarians (which he does not believe to be as objective as its proponents would claim). Perhaps most dramatically, Aune makes the case that libertarian theories about big government and its effect on politics and discourse parallel similar claims about false consciousness in Marxism, despite libertarianism's frequent claim to reflect a common sense understanding of the world in contrast to the Left's hermeneutics of suspicion, a trend which Aune critiqued in his previous book Rhetoric & Marxism (1994). …

Nostra patria é il mondo intero: Libertarian internationalism in the era of mass migration and the development of the South American labour movement (1870 – 1920)

From 1870 to 1920 the internationalist ideas in multi-ethnic countries of the Americas were strongly influenced by revolutionary syndicalism. The distinctively international and trans-cultural working class identity of multi-ethnic subaltern classes in South America developed in the context of European mass immigration, urbanisation, and industrialisation. Many thousands of immigrants contributed to social struggles for better living and working conditions fighting against political exclusion. The examples of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay illustrate that the subjectification of the international proletariat can be seen as collective identity construction of a libertarian subculture which developed in response to global capitalism. The revolutionary movements in South America and Europe formed the Libertarian Atlantic as one international movement.

From Son of the Bourgeoisie to Servant of the Revolution The Roots of Daniel Guérin’s Revolutionary Socialism

This article explores the early years of Daniel Guerin (1904–88), a prominent and original figure on the French left from the mid-1930s onwards, in order to better understand his transformation from a son of the grande bourgeoisie into a leading revolutionary socialist and campaigner for decolonisation, racial equality, homosexual liberation and peace. It is based on a close reading of Guerin’s own retrospective representation of this period through his several autobiographical or semi-autobiographical works, as well as published and filmed interviews. This public self-representation is complemented and partly challenged by original research on other sources not intended for public consumption, including correspondence and other private papers. The article examines the influence of Guerin’s extremely wealthy yet also highly cultured, liberal, Dreyfusard family, especially his antimilitarist father’s Tolstoyan leanings and social conscience. It also highlights, notably through an analysis of the young Guerin’s poetry and novels and his intense friendship with the Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac, the disillusion provoked by the Geat War and the importance of a spiritual crisis which he experienced during the 1920s. Two other personal experiences had a profound impact on Guerin’s consciousness: first, his belated exposure to the realities of Parisian working-class life (deepened by a series of homosexual relationships with young proletarians), and secondly his awakening to the realities of French colonialism through his travels in the Middle East and in Indochina. These factors and his subsequent discovery not just of Marx, but also of Tolstoy and Gandhi, are essential, it is argued, to an understanding of the roots of the deeply ethical libertarian socialism for which Guerin would become known in later years.

The Impossibility of Pure Libertarianism

In its simplest and most abstract form, libertarianism is a theory of political and economic organization which states that once a set of basic rights has been defined and allocated (“self-ownership” in particular), any distribution of resources, goods, and welfare that arises from this initial allocation of rights is just provided no individual rights have been violated. The converse claim is also part of the libertarian doctrine: in order to achieve a just allocation of resources, goods, and welfare, we only need to determine a special set of rules that define for each individual what they may or may not do and the outcomes they can bring about. In a libertarian society (made up of libertarian citizens who adhere to these rules), rights settle most and—depending on the libertarian theory in question—perhaps even all of the relevant issues. We take this to be true for all libertarian traditions, left and right. Any differences between libertarians pertain only to the nature and domain of rights and not to the fact that a rights structure is primary for determining the just society or that the social order is derived solely from a rights

Modernioji laisvė ir lygybė kaip demokratinis vartojimo projektas

Straipsnyje aptariama filosofinė hipotezė, teigianti, jog šiuolaikinė demokratijos kultūra remiasi individualiu vartojimu bei kultūriškai įreikšminamu vartotojiškumu ir funkcionuoja kaip bene išimtinai ekonominis reiškinys. Siūloma šią kultūrą traktuoti kaip amžinų laisvės ir lygybės siekių mitinį įteisinimą, tampantį šiuolaikinių žmonių sutelkimo būdu bei tuo pat metu prieštaringa jų valdymo ir kontrolės forma. Straipsnis baigiamas išvadomis apie būtinybę ieškoti kitų būdų, kaip įtikinamai pagrįsti bei normatyviai įteisinti egalitarinės ir libertarinės kultūros bei politikos teorijų praktinį įgyvendinimą, mėginant ją kaip normą įtvirtinti visame pasaulyje.

Media Ownership and Control Versus Press Freedom in a Democratic Africa

The deregulation of the broadcast industry in Africa has helped politicians to advance their ambitions at the expense of the ethics of the profession of journalism. In Nigeria, there are prevalent cases of the state media being used by government to run political campaigns of only the political parties of the ruling class. This is the same story where private media organizations are owned by chieftains of some political parties in the country. Such media (both print and electronic) are used as propaganda machineries by these party chieftains and also used as media for carrying out negative reports about the party in power. Many African countries have similar situations. This paper looks at how the ownership of media organizations across the continent has interfered with the standards of professionalism in journalism. The paper will use the social responsibility theory and the libertarian theory to serve as theoretical framework. The paper will dwell more on the role of ownership in the media coverage of some African countries from 2011 to 2012 and try to make comparison with what is obtainable in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

Gouvernance d'Internet, gouvernance de Wikipedia : l'apport des analyses d'E. Ostrom sur l'action collective auto-organisée

Quel pourrait être l’apport des analyses d’E. Ostrom dans le champ de la gouvernance sur Internet ? Nous justifions d’abord notre appel au modèle du choix institutionnel, en montrant que le « système Internet » ne relève plus seulement d’une évidente logique de biens privés et d’une claire logique de biens publics, mais aussi aujourd’hui d’une nouvelle logique « d’appropriateurs » de ressources limitées, au sens de E. Ostrom (et notamment des ressources énergétiques et environnementales). Nous analysons ensuite la gouvernance de l’institution Internet comme un régime de légitimité faible (associant autorégulation libertaire, co-régulation normative et multi-régulation organisée), puis la gouvernance du collectif Wikipedia comme un régime de consensus approché (associant vigilance mutuelle, régulation des conflits et sanctions graduées). Les analyses d’E. Ostrom sur les systèmes auto-organisés permettent enfin de justifier pour Internet la légitimité du contrôle local (à chacun des trois niveaux de règles que distingue E. Ostrom : choix opérationnels, choix collectifs et choix constitutionnels) et la nécessaire réflexivité des choix (dans ce que E. Ostrom appelle les multiples arènes locales, où s’élaborent ces règles).

The natural rights of children

What does libertarian theory, Murray Rothbard's theory in particular, tell us about the rights of children? The two foundational principles of Rothbardian libertarianism are the sanctity of private property and the rule of non-aggression. Persons, including children, are "self-owners". Yet children, at a young age, are not yet capable of functioning fully as "self-owners." They must be cared for, and the caring will necessarily involve some degree of aggression in the form of supervision and restraint. Parents and other caregivers play the role of trustees; and just as the beneficiary of a trust has the right to petition a court to change trustees or terminate the trustee relationship, so a child, able to express his preferences when it comes to the nature and degree of supervision and restraint to which he will be subjected, should equally enjoy that right while, in terms of property rights, a biological caregiver may have better "title" than an adoptive caregiver to be the child's "trustee" given the child's inability to express a preference for one or the other. What may seem to a contemporary sensibility as an extreme degree of childhood independence in the choice of caregivers and other freedom from supervision and restraint was common in pre-industrial America and continues to be the rule in some native cultures.

Libertarianism: what everyone needs to know

Libertarianism: what everyone needs to know

Justice, Reason, and Luck in Rationing Lifesaving Medical Resources

Justice, Reason, and Luck in Rationing Lifesaving Medical Resources