Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Why All Welfare States (Including Laissez-Faire Ones) Are Unreasonable
- Measuring Opportunity: Toward a Contractarian Measure of Individual Interest
- Deontic Restrictions Are Not Agent-Relative Restrictions
- Why Even Egalitarians Should Favor Market Health Insurance
- Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice
- The Dual Role of Property Rights in Protecting Broadcast Speech
- Regulation of Foods and Drugs and Libertarian Ideals: Perspectives of a Fellow-Traveler
- Profit: The Concept and Its Moral Features
- Natural Property Rights: Where They Fail
- Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class
- Libertarianism as if (the Other 99 Percent of) People Mattered
- On the Failure of Libertarianism to Capture the Popular Imagination
- Imitations of Libertarian Thought
- Index
Libertarianism as if (the Other 99 Percent of) People Mattered
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Why All Welfare States (Including Laissez-Faire Ones) Are Unreasonable
- Measuring Opportunity: Toward a Contractarian Measure of Individual Interest
- Deontic Restrictions Are Not Agent-Relative Restrictions
- Why Even Egalitarians Should Favor Market Health Insurance
- Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice
- The Dual Role of Property Rights in Protecting Broadcast Speech
- Regulation of Foods and Drugs and Libertarian Ideals: Perspectives of a Fellow-Traveler
- Profit: The Concept and Its Moral Features
- Natural Property Rights: Where They Fail
- Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class
- Libertarianism as if (the Other 99 Percent of) People Mattered
- On the Failure of Libertarianism to Capture the Popular Imagination
- Imitations of Libertarian Thought
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
In this essay I wish to consider the implications for theory and practice of the following two propositions, either or both of which may be controversial, but which will here be assumed for the sake of argument:
(L) Libertarianism is the correct framework for political morality.
(M) The vast majority of our fellow citizens disbelieve (L).
The question I will address is how we as libertarians ought to respond to this pairing. I say we libertarians because, as I am using the term here, someone who subscribes to (L) is, definitionally, a libertarian. Of course, one who rejects (L)—or (M)—may, as an exercise in the logic of political theory, scrutinize the relationship between these two propositions. But for those who find themselves members of a political minority that unsteadily oscillates between the minuscule and the merely negligible, the implications are of more than academic interest. They concern nothing less than how one ought to live one's life among others, where the others are substantially more numerous than oneself. This is, then, an investigation not only of libertarian theory but also of libertarian praxis in the actual political world and those possible worlds that are its near neighbors.
It may be useful to say a few words concerning what I do not intend to pursue in this essay. First, I do not intend to argue for the truth of either proposition. In other contexts I have had my say on matters of political justification and on why an order of basic rights that are predominantly rights to noninterference meets the justificatory challenge better than any alternative political order.
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- Problems of Market Liberalism , pp. 350 - 371Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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