The philosophy of Aristotle (384–322, b.c.e.) remains a beacon of our culture. But no part of Aristotle's work is more alive and compelling today than his contribution to ethics and political science — nor more relevant to the subject of the present volume. Political science, in his view, begins with ethics, and the primary task of ethics is to elucidate human flourishing. Aristotle brings to this topic a mind unsurpassed in the depth, keenness, and comprehensiveness of its probing.

The aim of this long essay is to explain why the philosopher-ruler of Plato's Republic descends “with regret” or having been “compelled” from his contemplation of the Forms to rule the state. It offers a new, optimistic interpretation of his goal in so descending, namely to try to make everyone into a philosopher. After a brief introductory section, I turn to the argument of the Republic to show both that the philosopher's understanding of the Good causes him to try to maximize the amount of good in the cosmos, and that, since every rational person is capable, in virtue of his rational soul, of becoming a philosopher, this amounts to adopting the aforementioned goal. In the third section, I argue that the source of his regret cannot be that he sacrifices his own happiness in descending. Here the vehicle is a consideration of the “Plotinian” reading of the Republic, whose conclusion is that once he has achieved knowledge of the Forms, the philosopher can neither increase his happiness by further study, nor lose his happiness. Hence, if he is true to his goal, he has to try to improve the lot of others. In the next section, I argue that the Timaeus' account of the Demiurge's construction of the cosmos helps us to understand both the nature of the ruler's attempts to make everyone a philosopher and why he also understands that he will inevitably fail. Here the key idea is to link the Timaeus' account of Necessity or the Wandering Cause with the circumstances facing the philosopher in ruling the state. In the conclusion, I sketch how this account of the philosopher's reason for descending suggests that the best or ideal city in the Republic is not the tripartite kallipolis, but is rather a version of the City of Pigs.

This essay argues that we have a duty to protect biodiversity hotspots, rooted in an argument about the wrongful imposition of risk and intergenerational justice. State authority over territory and resources is not unlimited; the state has a duty to protect these areas. The essay argues that although biodiversity loss is a global problem, it can be tackled at the domestic level through clear rules. The argument thus challenges the usual view of state sovereignty, which holds that authority over territory, resources, and migration (all of which are connected to the protection of biodiversity hotspots) is unlimited.

Inequality in income and wealth distribution in society is said to be a great concern to many social critics. Rarely is the issue of inequality in income or wealth distribution, as such, a concern for the majority of Americans as individuals, however.

G. A. Cohen famously argued that fundamental normative principles (for example, concerning justice) are “fact-free” in such a way that their truth is independent of non-normative facts. For our purposes here, we take Cohen’s claim as given. Our focus is on what might be thought of as the “other side” of this issue — on whether the non-normative facts that determine what might be feasible for us to accomplish are value-independent. We argue that they are not, that people have reason to think that the normative properties of different possible options can and sometimes do have a crucial impact on their feasibility. In other words: facts about feasibility are partially dependent on Cohen’s “fact-free moral principles.”

In this article the implications of our nature as both autonomous and heteronomous beings is discussed. It is suggested that our condition as part-dependent creatures calls for a reconsideration of the nature of both freedom and liberalism, and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jean-Paul Sartre is used to illustrate the natural and historical dimensions of our dependency. The conclusion reached is that neither deep ecological re-enchantment nor full-blooded cornucopianism are possible, and that we need to take our nature as semi-dependent creatures seriously as we seek ways of negotiating our way through our environmental problems.

A remarkable feature of contemporary political discourse is the dominance of morality. One legacy of logical positivism (which was dominant from the mid-1930s until the end of the 1960s) and analytical (or linguistic) philosophy was the reluctance of political theorists during the twentieth century to engage in substantive argument about appropriate social ends or individual rights and values. Philosophers were content to describe the linguistic framework within which related political proposals were discussed without offering any proposals themselves. It was felt that the philosopher was not especially qualified to give political advice or make any recommendations. The technical political theorist was properly confined to the second level of inquiry, that is, explanation of the meaning of concepts, not the first level, which was concerned with questions of how we ought to live, or issues of public policy. Economists and sociologists might have the technical skills appropriate for inquiries into public policy, but as to the big questions—such as the ends and purposes of man and society—almost anybody could make pronouncements. The important point was that reason was incapable of adjudicating between rival versions of the good life.

There has been a flood of scholarship over the years on whether there is a “right to privacy” in the Constitution of the United States. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) was, of course, the Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to this river of commentary. A subject search for “privacy, right of” in the College of William and Mary's on-line library catalog located 360 book titles. A perusal of the leading law review bibliographic indices turned up still more. Whether the Constitution contains some sort of “right to be let alone” is plainly one of the central questions of contemporary constitutional discourse.

My aim is to map some ethical ground. Many people who reject consequentialism and deontology adopt virtue ethics. Contemporary forms of virtue ethics occupy quite a variety of positions (as did ancient forms), and we do not yet have any satisfactory view of the whole territory that we call “virtue ethics.” Also, I think that there is a lot of logical space outside consequentialism and deontology not occupied by virtue ethics. In fact, I am myself rather more attracted to the environs of virtue ethics than to virtue ethics itself, which particular environs I shall come to later. But, first, we have roughly to locate virtue ethics.

The authors of Habits of the Heart (Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton; hereafter, simply Bellah) charge that America is losing the institutions that help “to create the kind of person who could sustain a connection to a wider political community and thus ultimately support the maintenance of free institutions.” Bellah fears that “individualism may have grown cancerous – that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentials, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”

Proponents of the liberal free market order should, I will argue, take seriously the concerns that motivate Bellah and company: citizens of a liberal regime cannot live by exchanges alone. Liberal constitutionalism depends upon a certain level and quality of citizen virtue. But while the need for virtue is often neglected by liberal theorists, it is far from clear that the actual workings of liberal institutions have drastically undermined virtue in the way Bellah's dire account suggests. That analysis serves, moreover, as the springboard for a radically transformist argument that seeks, not so much to elevate and shape, but to transcend and deny, the self-interestedness that the free market exercises. Having argued against Bellah's analysis and prescriptions, I shall attempt to show how the phenomena he describes are open to an interpretation that is happier from the point of view of a concern with virtue. I shall end by using Tocqueville to suggest that combining liberal capitalism with intermediate associations like voluntary groups and state and local government helps elevate and shape self-interest, promoting a citizenry capable of and insistent upon liberal self-government.

I critically consider four purported economic-efficiency arguments for egalitarian redistribution of income or wealth. (1) Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest aggregate happiness” criterion has been used (by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, Abba Lerner, and more recently Richard Layard) to argue for wealth transfers toward the poor based on the supposition that they register higher happiness from a marginal dollar. Drawing from Vilfredo Pareto and Lionel Robbins, however, I argue that modern economic theory is not about individual happiness, let alone aggregate happiness, and therefore does not support (nor refute) any happiness-based case for wealth redistribution. (2) Theories based on a “social welfare function” misapply the economic way of thinking in a different way. (3) Other writers have framed redistribution as a public good, and public goods provision by the state as a voluntary collective means of satisfying individual preferences, thereby using modern economic theory to formulate a rationale for redistributive policies based on Pareto-efficiency. I criticize this rationale for resting on suppositions about actual preferences that are self-immunized against falsification. (4) James Buchanan made a related case for taxing inheritances based on the supposition that in constitutional deliberation behind a veil of ignorance we would agree to such a policy based on our preference for a certain kind of fairness. I find this argument non-economic, equally unfalsifiable, and no more plausible than alternative suppositions about our common preferences. The economic way of thinking does speak clearly, however, about how taxes on income or wealth discourage its production, the more so the higher the marginal tax rate.

A central idea of contemporary philosophical egalitarianism's theory of justice is that involuntary inequalities or disadvantages—those that arise through no choice or fault of one's own—should be minimized or rectified in some way. Egalitarians believe that the preferred institutional vehicle for fulfilling these obligations of justice is some form of a welfare state. Of course, contemporary egalitarians disagree about the best way to interpret or understand their theory of justice and institutions: Which inequalities are chosen and which are unchosen? What form of a welfare state will best serve justice? However, no contemporary egalitarian denies that egalitarian justice requires a welfare state that will redistribute income and wealth to aid the involuntarily disadvantaged.

Discrimination against particular groups has existed throughout history and in all types of societies. Few would challenge the idea that inequality of income based on discrimination is unjust. The more problematic issues are the extent to which discrimination is in fact a significant source of inequality and whether such discrimination-based inequality is inherent in a capitalist system.

There is little doubt that discrimination can affect a group's income. But the link is by no means automatic or certain. Thus, the incomes of blacks, particularly in past decades, seem surely to have been lowered by discrimination. Yet other examples are less clear. Jewish and Japanese Americans, for instance, have had incomes substantially above those of white non-Jewish groups, despite evidence of discrimination against them.

Scholarly discussions of the turn of the 20th century progressive movement frequently ignore or give but glancing attention to the progressives’ racial views and policies. Those who do pay greater attention to them nonetheless tend to dismiss them as being somehow “paradoxical” or inconsistent with what they regard as the movement’s core, “democratic” principles. The purpose of this paper, accordingly, is to explain the origin and nature of the movement’s core principles, and to show how the reformers’ racial views and policies, far from being inconsistent with these principles, were in fact their natural outgrowth. The progressives’ support for the colonial subjugation of the Filipinos, as well as the disfranchisement and segregation of American blacks, reflects, in other words, the transformation in the character or content of public policy necessitated by the reformers’ rejection of the “individualism” of the American founding in favor of a new conception of “individualism” chiefly inspired by early 19th century German idealism.

For many contemporary liberals, Anglo-American democracy seems unimpeachably the best political form. In contrast, adherence to democratic values seems an area in which most Marxian regimes, and perhaps Marx himself, are strikingly deficient. Further, Marxian theory insists on the existence of oppressive ruling classes in all capitalist societies and on the need for class struggle and violent revolution to achieve a more cooperative regime – theses which liberal social theories tend to dismiss peremptorily. From the perspective of modern liberal democratic theory, Marxian arguments seem prima facie outlandish and even morally objectionable.

1. A NOTE ON INTERPRETATION

It became clear in the discussions at the conference at which Professor Brody's paper was given that he and I had slightly different interpretations of his paper. He apparently regards the rights violations to be justified (having to do with the initial appropriation of land) as events in the distant past, and any resulting compensation as being due to our contemporaries only as heirs of people injured in the distant past. To me, one of the attractions of his analysis is that it allows one to dispense with such tenuous arguments and consider rights violations occuring at this very moment, and the compensation due for them. If every individual has the right to use all uncreated resources, then when I use force to keep you out of my living room I am violating your rights; although (according to Professor Brody) that may be an appropriate rights violation, it still imposes on me the obligation to compensate you. These comments were originally written on the assumption that Professor Brody intended the argument to be interpreted in this way; since I believe it is a more interesting argument in that form than in the form apparently intended by its author, I will maintain that interpretation throughout my comments.

2. CRITIQUE

Professor Brody's solution to the problem of Lockean entitlements is ingenious and in some ways attractive, but I find it unsatisfactory in the form presented here. The problem is that, in spite of the author's claims to the contrary, it seems impossible, in principle, to decide how much compensation each person is entitled to.

This essay argues that the territorial rights of states derive from the property rights of the individuals that make up those states. The argument draws from the Lockean tradition of justification of political powers. Persons in the state of nature have natural rights. Those rights are first-order substantive rights (the right to property), and second-order executive rights (the right to enforce the right to property.) In the social contract, individuals transfer to the state their executive rights, not their substantive rights. The state can thus define the boundaries of property rights and adjudicate property disputes, but does not legitimately own land itself. The article discusses and rejects, for deontic and consequentialist reasons, positions that justify collective and state ownership of territory. Some important consequences follow from the argument: First, no actual state has territorial rights, since no actual state wields delegated powers in land. Second, notwithstanding the preceding conclusion, actual states have an obligation to exercise their (putative) territorial powers consistently with the respect for private property.

I argue that none of the main accounts of autonomy in the literature can explain the fact that people who undergo a certain subtle but powerful kind of indoctrination are not autonomous or self-governing in reflectively acquiring and endorsing the views, values, goals, and practical commitments that they are successfully indoctrinated to adopt. I suggest that, assuming there are historical conditions on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement, there is a condition that specifically concerns emotions: the person’s emotional state and dispositions, and her web of emotional dependencies. I explain what we know so far about the kind of indoctrination on which I focus, and I motivate the claim that people who are successfully indoctrinated in this way are not self-governed in reflectively acquiring and endorsing even the first views and values that they adopt as a result of indoctrination. I argue that this heteronomy is not explained by any of the accounts that postulate historical conditions on autonomy: neither by classical accounts such as Rousseau’s and Piaget’s, nor by so-called historical accounts in the contemporary literature, nor by relational accounts. I argue that an accurate account of autonomy must include an emotional condition on autonomous reasoning and reflective endorsement that goes beyond the emotional conditions postulated or implied by historical accounts, and I offer a tentative sketch of this condition.

This paper considers prevailing environmental policy in the United States with the emphasis on liberty, markets, utilizing information, entrepreneurial discovery, and the economic analysis of political decisions (public choice). The general discussion is illustrated by the concern over global warming and policies for addressing this concern. The political incentives to confront environmental problems directly with mandates, restrictions, and subsidies ignore the power of liberty and market incentives to solve problems by fostering an impressive network of information transfer, increasing innovation, and expanding prosperity. Indeed, most environmental policies systematically suppress liberty, censor the communication of information, and retard innovation and prosperity, with the result that they provide less environmental quality at greater cost than is possible. While such flawed policies might be justified in cases where pollution problems pose clear, serious, and immediate threats, we argue this is not true of global warming, and the most effective response to concerns over carbon emissions may be limiting the discretionary power of government to take direct action and rely on the indirect effects of liberty and market incentives to move us beyond the petroleum age more quickly and efficiently than will result from the direct action of government.

In this essay I examine restrictions on labor as takings of property: a liberty to work is property, and restrictions of that liberty are takings. I set property in one’s labor within a unified framework for all forms of property, understood as a social institution for balancing two freedoms: freedom to act even if it interferes with someone else, and freedom from interference. As such, property includes not only possession but also use and disposition. To restrict use or disposition is to alter those freedoms, which is a taking of property, including property in one’s labor. I understand such takings to be justified insofar as they benefit the persons whose freedoms are altered, taking up the question of when restrictions on use and disposition of labor are to the benefit or the harm of excluded workers. Appreciating that labor is property, and that restrictions on labor are takings, reframes the justificatory burden that restrictions on labor must bear. And where that justification is lacking, this approach reframes the nature of the wrongs that unjustified restrictions perpetrate, especially against the most vulnerable workers.