Nonautonomous sentient beings and original acquisition

Is freedom a plausible political value for animals? If so, does this imply that animals are owed legal personhood rights or can animals be free but remain human property? Drawing on different conceptions of freedom, I will argue that while positive freedom, libertarian self-ownership, and republican freedom are not plausible political values for animals, liberal 'option-freedom' is. However, because such option-freedom is in principle compatible with different legal statuses, animal freedom does not conceptually imply a right to legal self-ownership. Nonetheless, a concern for animal option-freedom means that humans do have a pro tanto duty of non-interference. Arguments familiar from the liberal tradition moreover imply that such a duty speaks for drastic reforms of existing animal law. But it does not imply wholesale abolitionism: it neither rules out positive duties towards animals nor means that we should abandon all interactions with animals.

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2009

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2018

Is freedom a plausible political value for animals? If so, does this imply that animals are owed legal personhood rights or can animals be free but remain human property? Drawing on different conceptions of freedom, I will argue that while positive freedom, libertarian self-ownership, and republican freedom are not plausible political values for animals, liberal ‘option-freedom’ is. However, because such option-freedom is in principle compatible with different legal statuses, animal freedom does not conceptually imply a right to legal self-ownership. Nonetheless, a concern for animal option-freedom means that humans do have a pro tanto duty of non-interference. Arguments familiar from the liberal tradition moreover imply that such a duty speaks for drastic reforms of existing animal law. But it does not imply wholesale abolitionism: it neither rules out positive duties towards animals nor means that we should abandon all interactions with animals.

Ethics, 2012

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2009

In this paper I develop a natural resource based account of just redistribution. First, I show how rights to natural resources derive their singular importance from conditions rights have to meet. Then, I turn to the problem of self-ownership and defend a natural resources based solution against the view that we should state by moral fiat that everyone just is a self- owner. After discussing why my solution is a unifying handle on diverse intuitions we have about differential abilities and the fair distribution of their results, I conclude that our just rights to natural resources entitle each of us to an unconditional initial capital grant (not as a basic positive right). In the end I criticise Rawls' classification of abilities and disabilities as products of circumstance and list some pre-theoretical intuitions my account succeeds in sustaining.

Journal of social philosophy, 2005

I sketch the outline of a theory of property rights for nonhuman animals, and address the major objections to such an idea.

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).

In this paper I argue that the potentially environmentally destructive scope of a libertarian property rights regime can be narrowed by applying reasonable limits to those rights. I will claim that excluding the right to destroy from the libertarian property rights bundle is consistent with selfownership and Robert Nozick"s interpretation of the Lockean proviso.

2009

Health Care Analysis, 2011

While libertarianism may be a marginal movement, its ideas have a profound impact on, among others, environmental politics, economics and law. Libertarians are not famed as friends of nature but is that because they cannot, as a matter of principle, value nature as other than resources? I examine consequentialist, deontological and teleological versions of left-and right-libertarianism on three dimensions: their concepts of metaphysical nature, biological nature, and human naturethe latter subdivided into what characterizes humans and what distinguishes them from other animals. While the almost exclusive focus of libertarians on economics and political economy helps to explain their current disregard for nature, I suggest that a positive 'new world' versus a negative 'old world' appreciation of wilderness helps to identify where evolution might be feasible.