Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: Over the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in leftlibertarianism, which holds (roughly) that agents fully own themselves and that natural resources (land, minerals, air, and the like) belong to everyone in some egalitarian sense.Left-libertarianism agrees with the more familiar right-libertarianism about self-ownership, but radically disagrees with it about the power to acquire ownership of natural resources.Merely being the first person to claim, discover, or mix labor with an unappropriated natural resource does not-left-libertarianism insists-generate a full private property right in that natural resource.Left-libertarianism seems promising because it recognizes both strong individual rights of liberty and security and also grounds a strong demand for some kind of material equality.It seems, that is, to be a plausible a form of liberal egalitarianism.In a recent review essay of a two-volume anthology on leftlibertarianism (edited by two of us), Barbara Fried has insightfully laid out most of the core issues that confront left-libertarianism. 1 We are each left-libertarians, and we would like to take this opportunity to address some of the general issues that she raises.We shall focus, as Fried does much of the time, on the question of whether left-libertarianism is a well-defined and distinct alternative to existing forms of liberal egalitarianism.More specifically, we shall address the following fundamental issues raised by Fried (and others): (1) Does the notion of self-ownership have any determinate content?(2) What is the relation between self-Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried
Source: Philosophy & Public Affairs
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2127338335