LiberaLaw

In response to my comments about bargaining power, quasibill plausibly suggests that “If contract enforcement is left to moral sanction, bargaining power would seem to be a perfectly acceptable consideration,” even from the standpoint of libertarians committed to the non-aggression principle. To put the point more sharply, if “moral sanction” were all that was at issue, and such libertarians still objected to talk about bargaining power, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that their objection wasn’t really rooted in concerns about aggression. The conversation we’ve been having makes it a natural next step to consider the more general issue of the range of formal or quasi-formal options short of the use of force that might be available in a stateless society to safeguard a range of morally significant interests. (As I suggest in my recent post on rights , I think many of these interests ought to be talked about as rights, but I don’t think anything directly related to my current ...

Here's what I'll call the Simple Account of a right: A moral subject, S , has a right against a moral agent, A , that A not engage in a specified course of conduct, C , provided that ( i ) it is wrong, all things considered, for A to engage in C and ( ii ) C constitutes ( a ) an all-things-considered harm to S , or ( b ) a failure to fulfill a duty owed by A to S . What makes the Simple Account simple is that it defines rights in terms of moral duties. Wherever there's a (perfect, in the Kantian sense) duty , there's a right that the duty be fulfilled. I offer the Simple Account as a deliberate alternative to accounts of rights in accordance with which a right is a moral claim that can be backed up by means of force (however defined). Tendentiously, I'll refer to these as Narrow Accounts. I think the distinction between the rights-violations that can and the rights-violations that cannot be remedied using force is important, and I do not mean to trivialize...