The Concept of Nature in Libertarianism

There is a rather thinly-veiled suspicion amongst some compatibilists that libertarians are able to embrace their claims about the nature of the human will only in virtue of a general readiness to suppose that human beings occupy a very special place within the order of nature. This readiness, they imagine, is borne of an assumption that many of those compatibilists eschew – the assumption that the universe is theistic and that an omniscient and benevolent god has provided for human beings to be specially positioned within it. Though the world might conceivably be indeterministic, these compatibilists believe, there is no scientifically acceptable ground for supposing that the indeterminism involved might be of such a kind as to provide for anything like freedom of the will – and they are therefore wary and mistrustful of the libertarian's willingness to accept that the will itself might be the locus (at least on some occasions) of an indeterministic form of operation. To accept this, without taking oneself to have other grounds for embracing the idea that the powers of human beings need not be rooted in ordinary sorts of physics and metaphysics, seems to them wildly unmotivated; it is therefore inferred that probably, their libertarian opponents do believe themselves to have such other grounds. But I am both a libertarian and an atheist. In this paper, therefore, I want to try to defend libertarianism against the charge that it flies in the face of what we know or are justified in believing about the order of nature – and indeed, try to make out the beginnings of a case for the view that libertarianism should, on the contrary, be regarded as the position of choice for those who take their science seriously. Libertarianism is generally explained in introductory volumes as a multiply conjunctive doctrine – and I propose to consider some possible forms of objection to its naturalistic credentials in an order suggested by this conjunctive form. The first of its two main conjuncts is incompatibilism, which alleges incompatibility between determinism and something that for now, in deference to the tradition, I will simply call 'free will'. I do not intend, in this paper, to examine the arguments for incompatibilism, nor the various critiques to which they have been subject1; I want rather to focus here on a particular feature of the incompatibilist's claim, viz. that it is a claim about whether free will is incompatible with determinism, where free will is thought of as a property possessed only (at any rate in its earthly manifestations) by human beings. This represents, in my view, the traditional incompatibilist's seminal error, and is the main obstacle to the construction of a plausible naturalistic version of libertarianism, as I shall shortly explain. The second main conjunct of the libertarian position is itself conjunctive. It is generally represented as a belief about what response should be adopted to the incompatibilism expressed by the first main conjunct; the libertarian reacts to the incompatibility she discerns between free will and determinism, it is said, by asserting that (i) we do indeed have free will and (ii) that (therefore) determinism must be false. Some worries about whether or not a libertarian position can properly respect naturalism unsurprisingly 1 1 I do so in considerably more detail in my (2012).

Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

Human Affairs

This paper argues that the position on free will which is defended in ‘Freedom: An Impossible Reality’ is not, as Tallis claims, a compatibilist view, but actually a version of libertarianism. While endorsing many aspects of that libertarian view itself, the paper raises questions about how one of the central arguments for Tallis’s view is supposed to work, and queries whether it really follows from the fact that we need to stand apart from nature in a certain sense, in order to develop the kind of abstract knowledge that is constituted by the body of scientific law, that our own actions are not mere manifestations of what Tallis calls the ‘habits of nature’. It is also suggested that while a strong case can be made for many varieties of human exceptionalism, Tallis’s view of animal behaviour may be too simple and that there are examples of animal agency which cannot be explained merely by the associative learning which appears to be the highest grade of animal cognition that Tallis...

People evolved as part of an ecosystem, making use of the Earth's bounty without reflection. Only when our ancestors developed the capacity for moral agency could we begin to reflect on whether we had taken in excess of our due. This outlines a 'green libertarianism' in which our property rights are grounded in fundamental ecological facts. It further argues that it is immune from two objections levelled at right-and left-libertarian theories of acquisition: that Robert Nozick, without justification, divided people into those who were able to acquire unowned resources, and those would could not; and, that left-libertarian attempts, such as Hillel Steiner's, to separate choice from circumstance cannot account for the fact that not only people's decisions to have children, but even their decisions to continue living, affect people's entitlements to use the natural world.

Benjamin Hale and Andrew Light, eds., The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics , 2015

Because of its support for strong rights of private property and relatively unregulated capitalism, libertarianism is often perceived as being fundamentally incompatible with the kinds of policy goals demanded by a thoroughgoing commitment to environmentalism. But, this paper argues, taking property rights seriously means taking pollution seriously. And indeed, given the stringency with which libertarians support the right of private property, it may mean taking the problem of pollution far more seriously than most of us would or should be willing to accept. This paper explores the radical implications of rights-based libertarianism for the problem of pollution, surveys some attempts by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and Eric Mack to avoid the most implausible of those radical conclusions. It concludes that none of these attempts are entirely successful, but notes that they exhibit a surprising degree of consensus on the ultimate goal: a principle of "live and let live." Future research in this area should be directed toward further developing the theoretical foundation of this goal and its ramifications for various questions of environmental policy.

A contribution to the praxeology of nature conservation – the Austro-libertarian context, 2024

This paper explores nature conservation through an Austro-libertarian lens, emphasizing human action, property rights, and individual responsibility. It argues that conservation efforts are anthropocentric and driven by economic trade-offs. The study highlights the effectiveness of market mechanisms and voluntary actions, asserting that private ownership fosters better conservation practices. It critiques state intervention and radical environmentalism, advocating for minimal government involvement and promoting decentralized, market-based conservation efforts.

2016

In this dissertation, I investigate the implications of libertarian morality in relation to the problem of climate change. This problem is explicated in the first chapter, where preliminary clarifi ...

The Review of Politics, 1996

Liberalism and Deep Ecology are usually regarded as mutually exclusive. However, the “evolutionary” tradition of liberal thought, rooted in David Hume and Adam Smith, and including Michael Polanyi and F. A. Hayek, provides a foundation for their reconciliation. Linkage is through Hume and Smith's conception of sympathy, which today means empathy. For Hume, sympathy extends into the animal realm. Sympathy is essential for certain scientific work, and provides an foundation for both liberal and ecological ethics. Deep ecologists such as Arne Naess use the same concept. Linkage is first to biocentric ethics, and then, through examining natural beauty and, via Michael Polanyi's tacit knowledge, ecocentric ethics. The work of Hayek suggests how modern society might be harmonized with the requirements of nature. This deepens J. Baird Callicott's pioneering approach, uniting it with Lewis Hinchman's recent analysis. Liberalism's and Deep Ecology's foundations both benefit from their mutual integration.

The "conservative ecologist" represents those persons who value the environment but who do so from within the context of classic liberalism, with its emphasis upon individual liberty within a democratic society. Consequently, while such persons are considered conservative only to the degree that modern progressives have co-opted the term "liberal" to reflect their own comparatively socialistic values, they particularly cherish individual freedom and libertyespecially in terms of making free choices within the marketplace-over any other ecological value. The conservative ecologist could be described as more ideologically affiliated with libertarianism than with socialism. Their orientation is not valued within the modern environmental movement and is in fact antithetical to the political-economic vision of that movement. This paper discusses the nuances of the role of the "conservative ecologist" within the comparatively collectivist environmental mainstream, describing how collectivist approaches to social and environmental ecology have failed while classically liberal, pro-free-market approaches create sufficient affluence to allow for environmental protection and sustainability.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93(2): 319-334., 2015

Libertarians claim that our experience of free choice is indeterministic. They think that when we choose, our choice feels open in a way that would require indeterminism for the experience to be accurate. This claim then functions as a step in an argument in favour of libertarianism, the view that freedom requires indeterminism and we are free. Since, all else being equal, we should take experience at face value, libertarians argue, we should endorse libertarianism. Compatibilists, who think that freedom is consistent with determinism, respond to this argument in a number of ways, none of which is adequate. This paper defends a stronger compatibilist response. Compatibilists should concede, at least for argument’s sake, that our experience of freedom is in a sense libertarian. Yet they should also insist that our experience is in another sense compatibilist. Thus, even if libertarian descriptions of experience are phenomenologically apt, there is still a sense in which the experience might be veridical, assuming determinism. This response undermines a central motivation for libertarianism, since it removes any presumption in favour of libertarianism based on experience.