Question

How does Libertarianism differ from Equal Rights arguments in the theory of Ethics and Economics?

Answer 1

Answer

Libertarianism is a family of view's in political philosphy. Libertarian strongly value individual freedom and see this as justifying strong protections for individuals freedom. Thus, libertarians insist that justice poses stringent limits to coercions. While people can be justifiable forced to do certain things (most obviously to refrain from violating the rights of other's) they can't be coerced to serve the overall good of society or even their own personal good. As a result libertarians endorses strong rights to individual liberty and private property defend civil liberties like equal rights for homosexuals endorse drug decriminalization open borders and oppose most military intervention's.

Libertarian positions are mosts controversial in the realm of distributive justice. In this contexts libertarians typically endors something like a free market economy an economic order based on private property and voluntary market relationships among agent. Libertarians usually see the kinds of largescale coercive wealth redistribution in which contemporary welfare states engage as involving unjustified coercion. The same is true of many form of economic regulation including licensing laws. Just as people have strong rights to individual freedom in their personal and social affair libertarians argue they also have strong rights to freedom in their economic affairs. Thus rights of freedom of contract and exchange freedom of occupations and private property are taken very seriously.

Just as Nozick may have seen libertarianism as the best way to express a host of moral's considerations in the realm of justice so too many other libertarians embrace different principle as the foundation of their theories. Such authors seek to honor people as rightsholders or sovereign individual whom we need to treat as the primary claimants of their lives and bodies. But they also seek to avoid some of the implausible elements of full selfownerships. View like this treat selfownership neither as necessary maximally strong nor as selfevidents or foundational.

Libertarian theories can thus be defended in many different way. This is true both of theories that give pride of place to selfownership and of theories that do not. Example of the former include Eric Mack (2002 - 2010) who sees selfownership right as among several natural rights grounded in our nature as purposive beings. In Macks view the protections and freedom's offered by the idea are justified in order to grant to all individual's a separate sphere in which they can act in accordances to their selfchosen purposes. Similarly Lorens Lomasky (1987) derives rights from a related although slightly differents conception of people as project pursuers. John Tomasi (2012) argues that strong rights over our bodies are required by the ideal of democratic legitimacies. According to Daniel Russell (2018) selfownership rights provides the only way that people who live together can all genuinely live their own lives.

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