Abstract: In Escape from Leviathan, Jan Lester sets out a conception of liberty as absence of imposed cost which, he says, advances no moral claim and does not premise an assignment of property rights. He argues that, so conceived, liberty implies libertarian property rules, free-market anarchy, and the maximisation of welfare. However, analysis of Lester’s conception of liberty shows it to be inconsistent with liberty as ordinarily conceived, and further reveals that maximising liberty, as Lester conceives it, would run counter to self-ownership, private property, open markets, and improving welfare. Lester seems to arrive at his conclusions only because, in his arguments, he abandons his own account of liberty and derives his conclusions instead from familiar libertarian assumptions about property rights.

Download Paper: A Critique of Lester’s Account of Liberty.

Abstract: I offer consequentialist and deontological arguments for a competitive market in human organs, from live as well as dead donors. I consider the objections that a market in organs will frustrate altruism, coerce the desperate, expose under-informed agents to unacceptable risks, exacerbate inequality, degrade those who participate in it, involve a kind of slavery, impose invidious costs, and impair third-party choice sets. I show that each of these objections is without merit and that, in consequence, the opposition to markets in organs is an untenable endorsement of death, suffering and the suppression of freedom.

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Abstract: The dominant tradition in Western philosophy sees rationality as dictating. Thus rationality may require that we believe the best explanation and simple conceptual truths and that we infer in accordance with evident rules of inference. I argue that, given what we know about the growth of knowledge, this authoritarian concept of rationality leads to absurdities and should be abandoned. I then outline a libertarian concept of rationality, derived from Popper, which eschews the dictates and which sees a rational agent as one who questions, criticises, conjectures and experiments. I argue that, while the libertarian approach escapes the absurdities of the authoritarian, it requires two significant developments and an important clarification to be made fully consistent with itself.

Download PDF: “Two Concepts of Rationality”