| | Some folks on SoloHQ may be interested in the fact that a fairly prominent academic philosopher, James P. Sterba--of the University of Notre Dame philosophy department--has been arguing for years that libertarianism implies positive (entitlement type) rights. Nearly every one of his books repeats this claim--see, for example, the most recent, The Triumph of Practice Over Theory in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2005)--despite the fact that libertarians such as Eric Mack, Jon Narveson, Douglas Rasmussen and I have worked to disabuse him of this notion. (It is noteworthy that Sterba manages to get his anti-libertarian position published all over the place, with pretty formidable publishing houses, whereas when I propose a work defending libertarianism to these same houses, I receive a flat rejection!)
Sterba's argument is based on the premise that in certain emergency circumstances (those Locke, Rand, Mack, I, and others all acknowledge to be possible but very special in conditions of liberty) basic rights may be disregarded (at least temporarily); from this, in a typical geometrical-analytical philosophical fashion, he deduces that these rights are not binding even in normal circumstances, so that the very poor, for example, may take "the surplus wealth" of the rich to enable them to function effectively and this should then be codified in a just system of laws.
In response to the point about how these "hard (emergency, exceptional) cases make bad (ordinary, normal) law," Sterba argues that in bona fide free societies like those libertarians champion, these cases would not be exceptional but quite numerous, even typical. (In short, he takes issue with the case that argues that in free societies there would be comparatively fewer poor who are helpless, strictly unable to fend for themselves [as distinct from being negligent or otherwise imprudent and deserving of their poverty] the other systems such as the welfare state. My forthcoming Libertarianism Defended [Ashgate, 2006], draws on a wealth of historical and analytic evidence to prove him wrong on this point.)
|
|
