August 6, 2010
The Lockean Proviso and Federally Managed Lands
On my recent vacation, I visited a number of national parks (specifically: Crater Lake, Redwood, and Yosemite). This got me thinking about the moral and political aspects of federal land management, including the National Park System. Libertarians are often skeptical of government ownership of anything. However, in this post I want to argue that the Lockean Proviso actually demands such a system of government land management, and so such a system should be supported by libertarians of the Nozickian/Neo-Lockean sort, such as myself. Let's start at the beginning. Locke holds that initially all of earth's natural resources were held in...
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Topic(s):
Contemporary Thinkers
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Environmental Policy
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Historical Thinkers
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John Locke
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Libertarianism
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Philosophy
,
Political Philosophy
,
Politics
,
Private Property
,
Robert Nozick
,
The State of Nature
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March 9, 2010
Deontic Utilitarianism, Liberty Utilitarianism, and Deontologism
I just came across the following passage by J.J.C. Smart in Smart and Williams'
Utilitarianism: For and Against: What Bentham, Mill and Moore are all agreed on is that the rightness of an action is to be judged solely by consequences, states of affairs brought about by the action. Of course we shall have to be careful here not to construe 'state of affairs' so widely that any ethical doctrine becomes utilitarian. For if we did so we would not be saying anything at all in advocating utilitarianism. If, for example, we allowed 'the state of having kept a promise'...
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Topic(s):
Amartya Sen
,
Civil Rights
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Deontologism
,
Ethics
,
Free Speech
,
J.J.C. Smart
,
Libertarianism
,
Philosophy
,
Political Philosophy
,
Politics
,
Robert Nozick
,
Utilitarianism
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February 20, 2006
Libertarianism and Corporations
One of the key problems of strict (non-consequentialist) libertarianism is how the state is to successfully perform its function of protecting citizens from force or fraud without the funding acquired from confiscatory taxation schemes. The problem is that libertarian commitments in the region of political morality do not permit the government to violate the private property rights which individuals have in the hypothetical "state of nature," and in the state of nature individuals own all of their income, not just what's left after taxes. The government exists to enforce these property rights. Robert Nozick believes (see his book Anarchy, State,...
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