Smith famously considered justice to be strictly negative in nature: something we satisfy simply through abstaining from theft, coercion, and other violations of libertarian rights.
These are the only acts that are generally disapproved of in a way calling for punishment [], p. Smith grounds his view in a deeply social view of moral psychology. Thus, benevolence along with justice is a pillar of society. However, we cannot expect or force people to care for distant strangers in the same way as they care for themselves. And trying to organize a society along these lines would lead to disaster. Smith was extremely skeptical about government officials, writing about how they seek fame and power, think themselves morally superior, and are more than willing to serve their own interests and those of well-connected businessmen rather than the public good Smith [], pp.
And, perhaps foreshadowing Hayek, Smith argued that governments are generally incapable of knowing enough to guide large numbers of people. Human beings make their own decisions and respond to circumstances, thus thwarting any systematic plans the government might lay out for them. Libertarian arguments of this kind cast the state as an arbitrator, an impartial agent that makes fair and productive cooperation between citizens possible, much like a referee enables fair play by administering the rules of the game.
Once governments begin benefiting one party over another, whether this be certain groups in society or business interests, such involvement is in principle off-limits and likely to backfire as it will favor whoever is politically well-connected or favored at the time. The minimal state, then, is the only state capable of structuring complex and deeply interdependent societies in ways that are mutually beneficial. Of course, this discussion still omits many other members of the libertarian or classical liberal family of views.
Yet others see classically liberal requirements flowing from a public reason or justificatory approach Gaus , Libertarian and classical liberal theories conceive of distributive justice as largely sometimes exclusively historical in nature. To ask whether justice obtains in the world is mainly to ask whether people have been justly treated, principally whether their rights to their persons and possessions have been respected. As a result, they reject theories that look merely at outcomes or end-state distributions.
The most common mode of just acquisition is through the legitimate transfer of prior just holdings.
This is why libertarians generally defend noncoerced, nondeceptive market relations as just. Of course, not all modes of legitimate acquisition can depend on prior just holdings—there must be a starting point, an original acquisition. The broader point is that libertarians generally accept that individuals can carry out such acts of original acquisition.
More precisely, they accept that individuals can acquire unowned goods unilaterally, without having to ask the consent of approval of other people, some governing body, or anything else. The argument for not needing the permission of others to use and appropriate the external world is relatively straightforward.
The moral benefits of private ownership are important, and if there is a good justification for having a system of private property, it should be possible to derive a justification for acts that begin to bring about such rights as well. Any view that would require the consent of others, or some kind of government legitimation, creates barriers to acquisition and thus threatens these moral benefits Van der Vossen , ; Mack According to Locke, when people work on previously unowned objects, subject to certain provisos, they turn those objects into their private property.
The most famous interpretation, again, seeks to ground property in the prior rights of self-ownership. On this view, when people labor they quite literally extend their claims of self-ownership over external objects, thus drawing them into their rights-protected sphere. This argument suffers from well-known problems. For instance, since laboring is an activity, the idea of mixing it with an object seems at best a metaphor for something else.
But in that case, the argument is incomplete: we still need to know what really grounds property rights Waldron More importantly, it simply is not true that mixing something owned with something unowned is sufficient for appropriation. As Nozick pointed out, if I pour a can of tomato juice that I own into the unowned ocean, I lose my tomato juice—I do not gain an ocean Nozick , pp.
Third, if labor-mixing really were sufficient for generating claims in objects, why should this be restricted to unowned goods? Why not say that mixing my labor with something already owned generates a claim of coownership Thomson , pp. In light of these and other objections, many have offered different defenses of private property.
These justifications depend neither on accepting a prior thesis of self-ownership, nor on the affiliated thesis that self-ownership rights can be extended outwardly through labor. Instead, these arguments point to the moral importance of people having security over external resources, whether this is understood in terms of support for political and civil liberties Gaus , our ability to be project pursuers or purposive agents Lomasky ; Mack , or the ability to be the authors of our lives Tomasi An influential line of argument ties the justification of property to the material prosperity and well-being that it brings about.
Rights of private property serve to divide the external world into a number of discrete, individual parts, each exclusively controlled by its particular owner. Organizing the social world in this way is preferable to collective use or ownership because it helps avoid collective action problems. Since these justifications of property do not rest on a prior principle of self-ownership, they are not committed to seeing property rights as in any way absolute, immune to just regulation, or even precluding any and all forms of taxation.
Despite what is sometimes suggested Freeman , virtually all libertarians that reject self-ownership as a starting point also accept that property rights need specification, can be instantiated in quite different, yet morally acceptable forms, and might be overridden by other moral considerations.
Such views do not entail the impossibility of unilateral original appropriation either. Libertarians and their critics are concerned with the issue of original appropriation primarily because it demarcates a major fault line in political philosophy.
Such a view is viable if one can establish the possibility of unilateral appropriation, without essential reference to the existence of the state or law. Libertarianism is committed to a strong guarantee of basic liberty of action. However, even views that endorse the strongest possible form of self-ownership do not guarantee such liberty. For if the rest of the world natural resources and artifacts is fully owned by others, one is not permitted to do anything without their consent—since that would involve the use of their property.
Since agents must use natural resources occupy space, breathe air, etc. The question arises, then, what constraints if any exist on ownership and appropriation. Libertarian theories can be put on a continuum from right-libertarianism to left-libertarianism, depending on the stance taken on how natural resources can be owned. At one end of the spectrum sits the maximally permissive view of original appropriation.
This view denies there are any constraints on use or appropriation Rothbard , ; Narveson , ch. As a result, this view sees natural resources as initially unprotected.
Such a theory does not live up to libertarian ideals very well. Nozick interprets the proviso to require that no one can be made worse off as a result of use or appropriation, compared with a baseline of non-use or non-appropriation.
But this interpretation is problematic for at least two reasons. This would be true even if the owners extracted almost all of the benefits of cooperation, and that seems unfair. Others interpret the Lockean proviso as requiring something like a sufficientarian requirement, such that people must have access to an adequate share of natural resources Lomasky ; Wendt This view might invoke differing conceptions of adequacy, such as well-being or the ability to be self-governing as in Simmons , At the other end of the spectrum, left-libertarians think it implausible that people who first use or claim natural resources thereby become entitled to unequal benefits.
Since natural resources are not created or produced as such, left-libertarians claim that the value of these resources belongs in some sense to everyone, This common ownership of the world supports some egalitarian constraints on appropriation and use. What we might call equal share left-libertarianism—advocated by Henry George and Hillel Steiner , for example—interprets the Lockean proviso as requiring equally valuable shares of natural resources for everyone. Thus, while individuals are morally free to use or appropriate natural resources, those who thereby acquire more than their share understood in terms of per capita value owe compensation to others.
This constraint is enduring significance. It applies at the moment of appropriation, and encumbers subsequent through time. Others claim that the equality requirement is supposed to also compensate for disadvantages that result from different natural abilities such as the effects of genetic differences. Thus, Otsuka claims that the Lockean proviso prohibits appropriations that diminish the opportunities of others for well-being beyond the opportunity obtained by appropriating or using a natural resource.
In his discussion of appropriation, Locke invokes the idea of distributive shares only three times sections 31, 37, and All appear in the context of the quite different prohibition on letting things spoil. In these cases, and in these cases alone, Locke sees appropriation as taking what belongs to others. At this point, left-libertarians often claim intuitive support for an egalitarian proviso. When multiple people are presented with a previously undivided resource, equal division is the intuitively fair approach.
An objection, however, is that such intuitions apply only to circumstances that ignore relevant conditions. For instance, while Otsuka is correct to claim that if two persons are stranded together on an island, equal division is the intuitive solution, this may not be true if one person arrived earlier, already cultivated, say, two-thirds of the island, while leaving more than enough for the second person to independently make a living, is willing to cooperate, trade, and so on.
In that case, the latecomer insisting that she has a right to half the island is not only counter-intuitive, but probably just wrong. The intuition of equal division becomes even less appealing if we imagine more than two parties, capable of production, trade, and cooperation, arriving at different times.
What such an equally good shot comes to, however, is much less clear. Whatever interpretation of the proviso one accepts, however, libertarians left and right agree that once persons enjoy legitimate rights over their property, these are more or less immune to other claims of distributive justice. There is little room in the theory for thinking that certain distributions or material outcomes are morally significant as such. See, e. Thus, Nozick argues in his famous discussion How Liberty Upsets Patterns that because any system of property must allow gifts and other voluntary transfers, and because these will significantly upset whatever distribution is put in place, there is very limited room for concerns with distributional equality.
Since treating people as moral equals means respecting them as the holders of these rights, and since such rights will be exercised in ways that will not equalize material outcomes, forced redistribution counts as unjust. None of this is to say that libertarians are not concerned with outcomes at all. John Tomasi , p. This seems to overstate the matter considerably, but it is certainly true that many libertarians see their policies as promoting the general good, and this plays an important role in their justification.
Hence, libertarians are wont to point out that being poor in a free society is much better than being poor elsewhere, that markets in general do not work to the detriment of the poor, and so on. Libertarians are highly skeptical of political authority and state legitimacy. Since people are, quite simply, independent and equal beings, with none naturally subordinated to any other, states like all other agents ought to respect the moral rights of individuals, including their rights over their persons and their legitimate possessions.
For this reason, libertarians typically require something like voluntary consent or acceptance for legitimate state authority. Unfortunately, all states fail to satisfy this requirement for many of their subjects. As a result, they use massive amounts of force in ways that are morally impermissible. States violate the rights of citizens by punishing people for self-regarding conduct e. Similarly, states violate the rights of their subjects by forcibly transferring their legitimate possessions to preferred others e.
States violate the rights of citizens when they forcibly prevent them from innocently contracting and associating with others, exercising their religion, occupy certain professions because of their ethnic background, gender, or sexual orientation, and much, much more. In reply, libertarians typically argue that many of the effects of states are extremely negative.
Moreover, many of the positive effects that states can bring about can also be obtained through voluntary mechanisms. Libertarians tend to be more hopeful about the possibility of anarchic provision of order, public goods, as well as charitable giving. Even though libertarians are generally quite hostile to state authority, this does not mean that the state cannot permissibly undertake certain minimal activities.
This includes most obviously the enforcement of individual rights and freedoms. Some theorists, such as Hayek , argue that it can be permissible for people to be forced to pay for basic police services. But this argument seems problematic within libertarian theory. If people do not agree to their legitimate possessions being used for these purposes, it would be unjust to force them to pay for these services, even if they clearly benefit a benefit as a result.
After all, libertarians generally deny that merely receiving a benefit suffices to justify enforceable requirements to pay. To survive and to flourish, individuals need to engage in economic activity.
The right to property entails the right to exchange property by mutual agreement. Free markets are the economic system of free individuals, and they are necessary to create wealth. The Virtue of Production.
Much of the impetus for libertarianism in the seventeenth century was a reaction against monarchs and aristocrats who lived off the productive labor of other people.
Libertarians defended the right of people to keep the fruits of their labor. This effort developed into a respect for the dignity of work and production and especially for the growing middle class, who were looked down upon by aristocrats. Natural Harmony of Interests.
Libertarians believe that there is a natural harmony of interests among peaceful, productive people in a just society. But we all prosper from the operation of the free market, and there are no necessary conflicts between farmers and merchants, manufacturers and importers. Only when government begins to hand out rewards on the basis of political pressure do we find ourselves involved in group conflict, pushed to organize and contend with other groups for a piece of political power.
They understood that war brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family and economic life, and put more power in the hands of the ruling class — which might explain why the rulers did not always share the popular sentiment for peace.
Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their own societies against foreign threats; but throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on all sides of the conflict. Libertarianism is a deep and rich philosophy, with many nuances and cases that cannot all fit into a single article.
Indeed, after centuries of intellectual, political, and sometimes violent struggle, these core libertarian principles have become the basic structure of modern political thought and of modern government, at least in the West and increasingly in other parts of the world.
However, three additional points need to be made: first, libertarianism is not just these broad liberal principles. The non-aggression principle NAP is often described as the foundation of present-day right-libertarian philosophies. The principle defines aggression and initiation of force as violation of these rights. The NAP and property rights are closely linked since what constitutes aggression depends on what libertarians consider to be one's property.
While the principle has been used rhetorically to oppose such policies as victimless crime laws, taxation and military drafts , use of the NAP as a justification for right-libertarianism has been criticized as circular reasoning and as rhetorical obfuscation of the coercive nature of libertarian property law enforcement because the principle redefines aggression in right-libertarian terms. While there is debate on whether right-libertarianism and left-libertarianism or socialist libertarianism "represent distinct ideologies as opposed to variations on a theme", right-libertarianism is most in favor of private property and property rights.
This contrasts with left-libertarianism in which "unappropriated natural resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner". Right-libertarians are also referred to as propertarians as they hold that societies in which private property rights are enforced are the only ones that are both ethical and lead to the best possible outcomes.
There is a debate amongst right-libertarians as to whether or not the state is legitimate. While anarcho-capitalists advocate its abolition, minarchists support minimal states, often referred to as night-watchman states. Minarchists maintain that the state is necessary for the protection of individuals from aggression , theft , breach of contract and fraud.
They believe the only legitimate governmental institutions are the military , police and courts , although some expand this list to include fire departments , prisons and the executive and legislative branches. Another common justification is that private defense agencies and court firms would tend to represent the interests of those who pay them enough.
Right-libertarians such as anarcho-capitalists argue that the state violates the non-aggression principle by its nature because governments use force against those who have not stolen or vandalized private property, assaulted anyone, or committed fraud.
Linda and Morris Tannehill argue that no coercive monopoly of force can arise on a truly free market and that a government's citizenry can not desert them in favor of a competent protection and defense agency. Right-libertarian philosopher Moshe Kroy argues that the disagreement between anarcho-capitalists who adhere to Murray Rothbard 's view of human consciousness and the nature of values and minarchists who adhere to Ayn Rand 's view of human consciousness and the nature of values over whether or not the state is moral is not due to a disagreement over the correct interpretation of a mutually held ethical stance.
He argues that the disagreement between these two groups is instead the result of their disagreement over the nature of human consciousness and that each group is making the correct interpretation of their differing premises. According to Kroy, these two groups are not making any errors with respect to deducing the correct interpretation of any ethical stance because they do not hold the same ethical stance.
The idea of taxation as theft is a viewpoint found in a number of political philosophies. Under this view, government transgresses property rights by enforcing compulsory tax collection. Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy which advocates the elimination of the state in favor of individual sovereignty in a free-market capitalism. The most well-known version of anarcho-capitalism was formulated in the midth century by Austrian School economist and paleolibertarian Murray Rothbard.
Rothbard coined the term and is widely regarded as its founder. He combined the free market approach from the Austrian School with the human rights views and a rejection of the state he learned from 19th-century American individualist anarchists such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker , although he rejected their anti-capitalism , along with the labor theory of value and the normative implications they derived from it. In Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, there would first be the implementation of a mutually agreed-upon libertarian "legal code which would be generally accepted and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow".
This legal code would recognize sovereignty of the individual and the principle of non-aggression. Classical liberalism is a political philosophy that advocate civil liberties under the rule of law , with an emphasis on economic freedom. Closely related to economic liberalism , it developed in the early 19th century, building on ideas from the previous century as a response to urbanization and to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States.
It drew on the classical economic ideas espoused by Adam Smith in Book One of The Wealth of Nations and on a belief in natural law , [74] utilitarianism [75] and progress.
Right-libertarianism has been influenced by this school of liberalism. It has been viewed as an outgrowth or as a variant of it [23] and it is commonly referred to as a continuation or radicalization of classical liberalism. Conservative libertarianism is a political philosophy that combines laissez-faire economics and conservative values.
Conservative libertarianism advocates the greatest possible economic liberty and the least possible government regulation of social life, but harnesses this to a belief in a more traditional and conservative social philosophy emphasizing authority and duty.
Conservative libertarianism prioritizes liberty as its main emphasis, promoting free expression , freedom of choice and laissez-faire capitalism to achieve socially and culturally conservative ends as they reject liberal social engineering , [79] or in the opposite way yet not excluding the above conservative libertarianism could be understood as promoting civil society through conservative institutions and authority such as family, fatherland, religion and education in the quest of libertarian ends for less state power.
In American politics, fusionism is the philosophical and political combination or fusion of traditionalist and social conservatism with political and economic right-libertarianism. Minarchism is a political philosophy supportive of a night-watchman state , or minarchy , a model of a state whose only functions are to provide its citizens with the military , the police and courts , protecting them from aggression , theft , breach of contract and fraud and enforcing property laws.
Robert Nozick received a National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , [86] where Nozick argues that only a minimal state limited to the narrow functions of protection against "force, fraud, theft, and administering courts of law" could be justified without violating people's rights.
Traditionally, liberalism 's primary emphasis was placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government and maximizing the power of free market forces. The philosophy emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States, [88] advocated a limited government and held a belief in laissez-faire economic policy.
Neoliberalism emerged in the era following World War II during which social liberalism was the mainstream form of liberalism while Keynesianism and social democracy were the dominant ideologies in the Western world. It was led by economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman , [95] who advocated the reduction of the state and a return to classical liberalism, hence the term neo-classical liberalism.
However, it did accept some aspects of social liberalism such as some degree of welfare provision by the state, but on a greatly reduced scale. Hayek and Friedman used the term classical liberalism to refer to their ideas, but others use the term to refer to all liberalism before the 20th century, not to designate any particular set of political views and therefore see all modern developments as being by definition not classical.
Right-libertarianism has been commonly referred to as a continuation or radicalization of classical liberalism [35] [36] and referred to as neo-classical liberalism. The concept of neolibertarianism gained a small following in the mids [97] among commentators who distinguished themselves from neoconservatives by their support for individual liberties [98] and from libertarians by their support for foreign interventionism. Paleolibertarianism is a political philosophy developed by theorists Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell that combines conservative cultural values and social philosophy with a libertarian opposition to government intervention.
Paleolibertarianism is a controversial current due its connections to the Tea Party movement and the alt-right. However, these movements are united by an anti- Barack Obama stance, their support of the right to keep and bear arms and as a result an anti- gun control stance in regard to gun laws and politics instead of further ideological overlaps.
In the essay "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement", Rothbard reflected on the ability of paleolibertarians to engage in an "outreach to rednecks " founded on social conservatism and radical libertarianism. In Europe, former European Union-parliamentarian Janusz Korwin-Mikke supports both laissez-faire economics and anti-immigration and anti-feminist positions.
Propertarianism [] [] is an ethical philosophy that advocates the replacement of states with contractual relationships.
Propertarian ideals are most commonly cited to advocate for a state or other governance body whose main or only job is to enforce contracts and private property. Right-libertarianism Right-libertarianism , [1] [2] [3] [4] or right-wing libertarianism , [1] [5] [6] is a political philosophy that advocate civil liberties , [1] natural law , [7] free-market capitalism and a major reversal of the modern welfare state. Age of Enlightenment List of liberal theorists contributions to liberal theory.
Schools of thought. Regional variants. Related topics. Bias in academia Bias in the media. Anti-imperialism Argumentation ethics Civil libertarianism Counter-economics Decentralization Economic freedom Free market Free-market environmentalism Free migration Free society Free trade Free will Freedom of association Freedom of contract Homestead principle Individuality Individualism Liberty Limited government Localism Marriage privatization Natural and legal rights Night-watchman state Non-aggression principle Non-interventionism Non-politics Non-voting Polycentric law Private defense agency Private property Public choice theory Restorative justice Self-ownership Single tax Small government Spontaneous order Stateless society Tax resistance Title-transfer theory of contract Voluntary association Voluntary society.
Austro-libertarianism Bleeding-heart libertarianism Christian libertarianism Consequentialist libertarianism Geolibertarianism Green libertarianism Natural-rights libertarianism Neo-libertarianism Paleolibertarianism Technolibertarianism. Long Tibor R. Machan Wendy McElroy H. New Left Old Right. Libertarian hip hop Libertarian science fiction.
See also: Definition of anarchism and libertarianism. Main article: Non-agression principle. Main article: Property rights economics. Main articles: Anarchism and Night-watchman state. Main article: Taxation as theft.
Main article: Anarcho-capitalism. Main article: Classical liberalism. Main article: Conservative libertarianism. See also: Fusionism. Main article: Minarchism. Main article: Neoliberalism.
Main article: Neolibertarianism. Main article: Paleolibertarianism. Main article: Propertarianism. Rothbard, Murray 1 March Reprinted at LewRockwell. Goodway, David Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. The situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, 'minimal statism' and an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated by such theorists as Rothbard and Nozick and their adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism'.
It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition". Marshall, Peter Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Harper Perennial. Carlson, Jennifer D. In Miller, Wilburn R. London: Sage Publications. ISBN Newman, Saul The Politics of Postanarchism. Edinburgh University Press. It is important to distinguish between anarchism and certain strands of right-wing libertarianism which at times go by the same name for example, Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism.
There is a complex debate within this tradition between those like Robert Nozick, who advocate a 'minimal state', and those like Rothbard who want to do away with the state altogether and allow all transactions to be governed by the market alone.
From an anarchist perspective, however, both positions—the minimal state minarchist and the no-state 'anarchist' positions—neglect the problem of economic domination; in other words, they neglect the hierarchies, oppressions, and forms of exploitation that would inevitably arise in a laissez-faire 'free' market. The individual freedom invoked by right-wing libertarians is only a narrow economic freedom within the constraints of a capitalist market, which, as anarchists show, is no freedom at all.
A reflection on Nozick's ethics ]. Revista de ciencias sociales in Spanish. ISSN Miller, Fred 15 August The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Retrieved 31 July Baradat , p. Kymlicka , p. Vallentyne Left-libertarians, by contrast, hold that natural resources e.
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