The essay argues that while there is no general agreement on whether moral realism is true, there is general agreement on at least some of the moral obligations that we have if moral realism is true. Given that moral realism might be true, and given that we know some of the things we ought to do if it is true, we have a reason to do those things. Furthermore, this reason is itself an objective moral reason. Thus, if moral realism might be true, then it is true.

Does social justice lose all application in the (imaginary, of course) condition in which people are morally flawless? The answer, I will argue, is that it does not — justice might still have application. This is one lesson of my broader thesis in this paper, that there is a variety of conditions we would all regard as highly idealistic and unrealistic which are, nevertheless, not beyond justice. The idea of “circumstances of justice” developed especially by Hume and Rawls may seem to point in a more realistic direction, but we can see that this is not so once we distinguish between conditions of need for norms of justice, conditions of their emergence, and conditions of applicability of the standard of justice. Justice, I argue, can have application even in conditions where no mechanism of justice is present or needed, such as the case of internalized motives of justice.

Must principles of justice be practical? Some political philosophers, the “implementers,” say yes. Others, the “idealists,” say no. Despite this disagreement, the implementers and idealists agree on what “practical” means, subscribing to the “implementation-prediction” (IP) conception of practicality. They also seem to agree that principles of so-called “ideal theory” need not be (and often are not) IP-practical. The implementers take this as a reason to reject ideal theory as an approach to principles of justice, while the idealists do not. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the IP conception of practicality. The implementers make a mistake, then, by requiring principles of justice to be IP-practical. But the idealists make a mistake, too, by rejecting in general the requirement that principles of justice be practical. For there is a plausible alternative conception of practicality that political philosophers should accept: the “experimentation-learning” (EL) conception. EL-practicality makes for a more realistic and epistemically accessible standard of practicality, and thus should be welcomed by the realistically-inclined implementers. It also preserves a crucial role for ideal theory, so should be welcomed by the idealists, too.

INTRODUCTION

In any society relatively few disputes are brought to judges for resolution. Most are handled informally or forgotten. Fewer still are cases that go to trial. Most are settled. Compromises are reached even in cases where issues are hotly contested and where millions or billions of dollars in damages are claimed. Recently, for example, one of the most controversial lawsuits of our time, the Agent Orange case, was settled. In that case, veterans of the Vietnam War, their spouses, and their children alleged that a defoliant — Agent Orange – used in Southeast Asia contained dioxin and was responsible for deaths, debilities, miscarriages, and birth defects suffered by members of the plaintiff class. Class members argued that the manufacturers of the defoliant, seven major chemical companies, knew that it was tainted and should be made to compensate them for their injuries, claiming billions of dollars in damages. The case received national exposure and became a rallying point for veterans, a means they hoped to use to publicize their plight and to spur Congress to come to their aid. On the eve of trial, the case was settled. The defendants, who denied liability throughout the pretrial period, agreed to pay the veterans $180 million. In turn, the plaintiff class agreed to drop the suit. Thus ended a controversy which not only presented novel legal issues and tested the ability of the federal courts to handle complex lawsuits, but concerned the well-being of a large number of veterans, their spouses, and their handicapped children as well.

I take it as my assignment to criticize the Gauthier enterprise. At the outset, however, I should express my general agreement with David Gauthier's normative vision of a liberal social order, including the place that individual principles of morality hold in such an order. Whether the enterprise is, ultimately, judged to have succeeded or to have failed depends on the standards applied. Considered as a coherent grounding of such a social order in the rational choice behavior of persons, the enterprise fails. Considered as an extended argument implying that persons should (and possibly must) adopt the moral stance embodied in the Gauthier structure, the enterprise is, I dunk, largely successful. Considered as a set of empirically falsifiable propositions suggesting that persons do, indeed, choose as the Gauthier precepts dictate, the enterprise offers Humean hope rather than Hobbesian despair.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick seeks to demonstrate that principles of justice in acquisition and transfer can be applied to justify the minimal state, and no state greater than the minimal state. That approach fails to acknowledge the critical role that forced exchanges play in overcoming a range of public goods and coordination problems. These ends are accomplished by taking property for which the owner is compensated in cash or in kind in an amount that leaves him better off (by his own lights) than before the transaction. Forced exchanges use coercion to form the state, but the just compensation requirement guards against redistribution state imposed redistribution for collateral purposes. Once these forced exchanges are allowed to form a state, then they may be used thereafter to justify the powers of taxation and eminent domain used to support infrastructure (roads, sewers, public utilities) that neither the minimal state nor private markets can supply.

Natural rights theorists such as John Locke and Robert Nozick provide arguments for limited government that are grounded on the individual's possession of natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Resting on natural rights, such arguments can be no more persuasive than the underlying arguments for the existence of such rights, which are notoriously weak. In this article, John Hasnas offers an alternative conception of natural rights, “empirical natural rights,” that are not beset by the objections typically raised against traditional natural rights. Empirical natural rights are rights that evolve in the state of nature rather than those that individuals are antecedently endowed with in that state. Professor Hasnas argues that empirical natural rights are true natural rights, that is, pre-political rights with natural grounds that can be possessed in the state of nature, and that, when taken together, they form a close approximation of the Lockean rights to life, liberty, and property. He furthers argues that empirical natural rights are normatively well-grounded because respecting them is productive of social peace, which possesses instrumental moral value regardless of one's conception inherent value. Professor Hasnas thus offers his conception of rights as solved problems as an alternative and potentially more secure footing for the traditional natural rights arguments for limited government associated with Locke and Nozick.

As Sir Thomas Browne solemnly observed in his Religio Medici, “Heresies perish not with their authors but, like the river Arethusa, though they have lost their currents in one place, they rise up in another.” So too with the economist's valuation of life, the heresy being that–without seriously challenging the current concept of subjective valuation of changes in risk–economists have regressed to the once-persistent belief that it bears some quantitative relation, if not to expected earnings, at least to the utility of expected earnings or capital or consumption. This old-tyme recipe for estimating the value of a human life – notwithstanding the ornate convolutions and occasional intellectual effronteries to be found in the more recent versions–is much like that for calculating the value of a two-week honeymoon for a loving couple by reference to their anticipated outlays (including foregone earnings) plus perhaps an allowance for the probability of non-consummation owing to frigidity in either.

The question that I address in this paper is whether there is a right to privacy. It is not the question whether in the United States there is a legal right to privacy or, more particularly, a constitutional right to privacy. There are any number of ordinary legal rights and specific constitutional rights that might be so described, and the U.S. Supreme Court has referred also to a generic “right to privacy” that is implicit in the U.S. Constitution. Nor is the question that I address whether persons have a moral claim to privacy that others ought to respect. I assume that in many circumstances, respecting a person's claim to privacy is productive of the good and, if so, that the claim ought to be respected. Rather, my question is whether persons have a right to privacy not dependent on positive law, such that it ought ordinarily to be respected without regard to the consequences, good or bad, simply because it is right.

The words “liberty” and “liberalism” have a common root, reflecting the commitment of the original or classical liberals to a free society. Over the last century, the latter term has come to represent a political position that is willing to sacrifice liberty in the economic realm for the sake of equality and/or collective welfare. As a consequence, those who wish to reaffirm the classical version of liberalism – those who advocate liberty in economic as well as personal and intellectual matters – have invented a new word from the old root; they call themselves libertarians. Both in doctrine and in etymology, then, partisans of this view define themselves by their allegiance to liberty. Yet they spend most of their day-to-day polemical energies defending property rights and the economic system of laissez-faire capitalism that is based upon such rights. Evidently there is a strong link between liberty and property at work here. What is that link?

The history of political thought is full of ideas and controversies about precisely this question. My goal here is to raise the question in a specific form, one that I think captures a basic difference in approach between classical liberals and most libertarians today. The difference is not in the substance of the position – it is not a disagreement about how the ideal society would be constituted – but rather in the way the position is to be defended. The key question is: can the right to property be derived from the right to liberty?

Of course a property right is a right to kind of freedom.

This essay defends deliberative democracy by reviving a largely forgotten idea of corruption, which I call “cognitive corruption”—the distortion of judgment. I analyze different versions of this idea in the work of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bentham, and Mill. Historical analysis also helps me rethink orthodox notions of corruption in two ways: I define corruption in terms of public duty rather than public office, and I argue that corruption can be both by and for political parties. In deliberative democracy, citizens can take off their party hats and may be more influenced by the force of the better argument than in party democracy.

The classical liberal doctrine of free expression asserts the priority of speech as an extension of the freedom of thought. Yet its critics argue that freedom of expression, itself, demands the suppression of the so-called “silencing speech” of racists, sexists, and so on, as a threat to the equal expressive rights of others. This essay argues that the claim to free expression must be distinguished from claims to equal speech. The former asserts an equal right to express one’s thoughts without interference; the latter the right to address others, and to receive a hearing and consideration from them, in turn. I explore the theory of equal speech in light of the ancient Athenian practice of isegoria and argue that the equality demanded is not distributive but relational: an equal speaker’s voice should be counted as “on a par” with others. This ideal better captures critics’ concerns about silencing speech than do their appeals to free expression. Insofar as epistemic and status-harms provide grounds for the suppression and exclusion of some speech and speakers, the ideal of equal speech is more closely connected with the freedom of association than of thought. Noticing this draws attention to the continuing—and potentially problematic—importance of exclusion in constituting effective sites of equal speech today.

Moral theorists often say such things as “But surely A ought to do such and such,” or “Plainly it is morally permissible for B to do so and so,” and do not even try to prove that those judgments are true. Moreover, they often rest weight on the supposition that those judgments are true. In particular, they often rest theories on them: they take them as data.

Others object. They say that nobody is entitled to rest any weight at all on judgments such as those. They say, not that the judgments are false, but that there is no reason to believe them true. They say, more generally, that there is no reason to think of any moral judgment that it is true. I will call this The No Reason Thesis.

Is there reason to think The No Reason Thesis true? There are lots of arguments for it in the literature, but I want to focus on one of them in particular. I think that the one I will focus on lies behind all the others, but no matter if it does not: I suggest that if this argument fails, they all fail.

We have taken the “why be moral?” question so seriously for so long. It suggests that we lack faith in the rationality of morality. The relative infrequency with which we ask “why be prudent?” suggests that we have no corresponding lack of faith in the rationality of prudence. Indeed, we have so much faith in the rationality of prudence that to question it by asking “why be prudent?” sounds like a joke. Nevertheless, our reasons and motives to be prudent are every bit as contingent as our reasons and motives to be moral–or so I argue in Sections II and III.

A second theme of this essay is that conflict between morality and self-interest is contingent as well. The moral perspective, as characterized in Section IV, does not require a universal regard for others, whereas the kind of self-interested perspective characterized in Section III does not require a wholesale disregard for others. Both perspectives make room for a deep although not universal other-regard–or so I argue in Section V.

This paper points to a lost and ignored strand of argument in the writings of liberalism's earliest defenders. These “classical” liberals recognized that market liberty was not always compatible with individual liberty. In particular, they argued that labor markets required intervention and regulation if workers were not to be wholly subjugated to the power of their employers. Functioning capitalist labor markets (along with functioning credit markets) are not “natural” outgrowths of exchange, but achievements hard won in the battle against feudalism. Further, and crucially, the existence of such markets required closing off other market choices.

This essay begins by dividing the traditional problem of free will and determinism into a “correlation” problem and an “explanation” problem. I then focus on the explanation problem, and argue that a standard form of abductive reasoning (that is, inference to the best explanation) may be useful in solving it. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of the abductive approach, I apply it to three standard accounts of free will. While each account implies the same solution to the correlation problem, each implies a unique solution to the explanationproblem. For example, all libertarian-friendly accounts of free will imply that it is impossible to act freely when determinism is true. However, only a narrow subset of libertarians have the theoretical resources to defend the incompatibilist claim that deterministic laws (qua deterministic) undermine free will, while other libertarians must reject this traditional incompatibilist view.

Responsibility is often thought of as primarily a legal concept. Even when it is moral responsibility that is at issue, it is assumed that it is above all in moralities based on law-centered patterns and models that responsibility takes center stage, so that responsibility is a legal concept at its core, and is applicable to the realm of private morality only by extension and analogy.

Psychologically based accounts of personal identity over time start from a view of persons as experiencing subjects. Derek Parfit argues that if such an account is to justify the importance we attach to identity it will need to provide a deep unity of consciousness throughout the life of a person, and no such unity is possible. In response, many philosophers have switched to a view of persons as essentially agents, arguing that the importance of identity depends upon agential unity rather than unity of consciousness. While this shift contributes significantly to the discussion, it does not offer a fully satisfying alternative. Unity of consciousness still seems required if identity is to be as important as we think it is. Views of identity based on agential unity do, however, point to a new understanding of unity of consciousness which meets Parfit's challenge, yielding an integrated view of identity which sees persons as both subjects and agents.

Does the welfare state help the poor? This surprisingly simple question often generates more heat than light. By the welfare state, I mean transfer programs aimed at helping the poor through the direct redistribution of income. (This excludes general economic policy, antitrust, the volunteer military, and many other policies that affect the well-being of the poor.) Defenders of the welfare state often assume that the poor benefit from it, while critics suggest that the losses outweigh the gains. The most notable of such criticisms is Charles Murray's Losing Ground, which suggests that the welfare state has failed to achieve its stated ends.