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Parsing Political Philosophy
A revised version of this post, expanded in scope but somewhat shorter, is here. This is a work in progress. It is my attempt to replace vague terms like “conservative” and “liberal” with a more...
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Rights, Liberty, the Golden Rule, and the Legitimate State
A right, as opposed to a privilege, is capable of universal application within a polity. The only true rights, therefore, are liberty rights, which are negative rights. So-called positive rights are...
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The Meaning of Liberty
If you were a physicist who was writing about Einstein’s special theory of relativity, would you bother to list the ways in which non-physicists define the concept? I doubt it. But at least one of the...
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Positive Liberty vs. Liberty
There is a special kind of liberty known as “positive liberty,” which is inimical to “liberty,” as that term is properly understood. To show why, I begin by expanding on an earlier post, where I offer...
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Merit Goods, Positive Rights, and Cosmic Justice
A merit good is said to be something that an individual or society should have on the basis of some concept of need, rather than ability and willingness to pay…. [T]he concept … lies behind many...
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More about Merit Goods
This is a follow-up to “Merit Goods, Positive Rights, and Cosmic Justice.” That post was inspired by a post at Austin Frakt’s blog, The Incidental Economist, about which John Goodman had this to say:...
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Parsing Political Philosophy (II)
This is a work in progress. The first version is here. This version expands the range of political stances by adding Despotism to Anarchism, Minarchism, and Statism. Also, this version goes into more...
View ArticleThe Invention of Rights
Negative rights are those rights that do not impose claims against others. Such rights include: freedom from force and fraud (including the right of self-defense against force) property ownership...
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