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November 08, To top. English American Examples. Sign up for free and get access to exclusive content:. Free word lists and quizzes from Cambridge. Tools to create your own word lists and quizzes. Word lists shared by our community of dictionary fans. Sign up now or Log in. Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English. Click on the arrows to change the translation direction.
Follow us. Choose a dictionary. Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English. Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English. Grammar Thesaurus. Word Lists. Choose your language. My word lists. Tell us about this example sentence:. The same is true of many forms of economic regulation, including licensing laws. Just as people have strong rights to individual freedom in their personal and social affairs, libertarians argue, they also have strong rights to freedom in their economic affairs.
Thus, rights of freedom of contract and exchange, freedom of occupation, and private property are taken very seriously. In these respects, libertarian theory is closely related to indeed, at times practically indistinguishable from the classical liberal tradition, as embodied by John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant.
It affirms a strong distinction between the public and the private spheres of life; insists on the status of individuals as morally free and equal, something it interprets as implying a strong requirement of individuals sovereignty; and believes that a respect for this status requires treating people as right-holders, including as holders of rights in property.
It is popular to label libertarianism as a right-wing doctrine. But this is mistaken. For one, on social rather than economic issues, libertarianism implies what are commonly considered left-wing views. While all libertarians endorse similar rights over the person, left-libertarians differ from other libertarians with respect to how much people can appropriate in terms of unowned natural resources land, air, water, minerals, etc.
While virtually all libertarians hold that there is some constraint on how resources can be appropriated, left-libertarians insist that this constraint has a distinctively egalitarian character. It might require, for instance, that people who appropriate natural resources make payments to others in proportion to the value of their possessions. As a result, left-libertarianism can imply certain kinds of egalitarian redistribution.
The family of views making up libertarianism includes many different members. Philosophically most distinctive, perhaps, offers a particular moral theory. This theory is organized around the view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things. This theory sees libertarian policy conclusions as the result of not merely empirical truths or real-world feasibility constraints, but as following from the only defensible and restrictive moral principles.
Some libertarians of this kind consider freedom the paramount value. They hold, for example, that each person has a right to maximum equal negative liberty, which is understood as the absence of forcible interference from other agents e.
Most, however, focus more on the idea of self-ownership. Famously, this view is attributed to Robert Nozick Cohen ; but see the discussion below. On this view, the key libertarian starting point is that people have a very stringent perhaps the most stringent possible set of rights over their persons, giving them the kind of control over themselves that one might have over possessions they own. The idea of self-ownership is attractive for many reasons. We recognize people as self-owners when we recognize that there are things that may not be done to a person without their consent, but which may be done with consent.
We consider assault wrong for similar reasons, but allow voluntary boxing matches. The principle is a strong endorsement of the moral importance and sovereignty of the individual, and it expresses the refusal to treat people as mere things to use or trade off against each other.
Some libertarians hold that people enjoy full self-ownership. We can define full self-ownership as a logically strongest set of ownership rights one might have over oneself. The notion has some indeterminacy, as there can be more than one strongest set of such rights. Still, there is a determinate core set of rights. Control rights are central to self-ownership in order to distinguish between certain things like physical contact that may be done to a person with, and may not be done to a person without her consent.
Full-self ownership, in other words, offers protections against others doing things to us against our will. Obviously, full self-ownership offers the strongest possible version of the benefits of self-ownership more generally. And in many contexts, this is highly attractive. It offers a principled objection to clearly objectionable forms of paternalism or legal moralism.
And so on. At the same time, full self-ownership does can out other moral considerations, including ones that are often thought relevant to justice. Consider the view, made famous or infamous by Robert Nozick , that people have a right against being forced to assist others, except as a result of their agreement or wrongdoing.
Such a view rules out redistributive taxation aimed at reducing material inequality or raising the standards of living for the poor. One can a respect people as the primary controllers of their lives, labor, and bodies. This means working for whomever they want, on the terms they want, and keeping the gains. Recognizing this leaves little room for redistributive taxation. Or one can b endorse the enforcement of certain distributions.
But in that case, the theory must endorse taking what people innocently produce through their own labor, redirecting their work to purposes they did not freely choose. This latter option is unacceptable to anyone endorsing the idea of full self-ownership.
As Nozick wrote, it involves claiming a kind of control over the lives of others that is similar to a claim of ownership in them. And this is unacceptable , p. In part because it seems to lead to conclusions like these, the idea of full self-ownership is very controversial. A related, but different, worry concerns not duties of assistance, but cases in which a person in extreme need can be greatly benefitted as a result of using another person.
Suppose, to use an extreme example, we can save ten innocent lives by gently pushing an innocent person to the ground. Full self-ownership asserts that this would not be permissible.
Again, the idea is roughly that since individuals are normatively separate, they cannot permissibly be used to benefit others without their consent. A third worry is that full self-ownership may permit voluntary enslavement. Just as people have, on this view, the right to control uses of their persons, they also have the right to transfer their rights over their persons to others, for example through sale or git. Theorists who endorse the possibility usually argue that libertarian self-ownership is about giving people control over the permissible uses of their person, not about the necessity of some psychological capacity to control their person.
See e. Vallentyne ; Steiner A fourth concern about the counter-intuitive nature of full self-ownership points out its restrictive implications. Full self-ownership might seem to condemn as wrongful even very minor infringements of the personal sphere, such as when tiny bits of pollution fall upon an unconsenting person. Prohibiting all acts that can lead to such minor infringements poses an unacceptable limit to our liberty. But from the point of view of self-ownership, there is no principled difference between minor infringements and major infringements.
Thus, this objection goes, self-ownership theory must be rejected Railton ; Sobel This objection, however, is of dubious force as it presupposes an even more implausible conception of full self-ownership than its defenders have reason to endorse.
Suppose we understand the moral benefits that self-ownership confers along two dimensions: protections from unwanted uses of our bodies, and liberties to use our bodies. Since maximizing the protection-dimension implausibly restricts the use-dimension, the correct response is not to reject self-ownership, but rather to loosen the protection-dimension somewhat in order to enhance the use-dimension.
Doing this would allow minor infringements for the sake of self-ownership. Nevertheless, many libertarians do reject full self-ownership. Thus, one could accept limited non-consensual duties of assistance, say, and accept some reduction in the control-dimension of self-ownership. Others, as we have already seen, reject the idea that self-owners have the power of transfer themselves into voluntary slavery.
Either way, the result will not be a theory of full self-ownership, but one that approximates that idea. Weakened conceptions of self-ownership, however, raise important questions. For one, if self-ownership turns out to have multiple dimensions that can be weakened in light of competing considerations, it loses some of its theoretic appeal. Once we start trading off the idea against other considerations, those considerations are thereby admitted into the libertarian moral universe.
This raises complicated questions about their relative weights, appropriate trade-off rules, and so on. Moreover, if trade-offs are possible between these dimensions, we will want to know why we should sacrifice one in favor of the other.
And in order to answer that question, we may need to invoke some further, underlying value. This threatens the status of self-ownership as a foundational principle in libertarian theory. Presumably, foundational principles are not based on underlying values. For many libertarians, this is not much of a concession, however. If few endorse full self-ownership, even fewer endorse it as a foundational principle. Such a move would also avoid a final kind of objection, this one more theoretical in nature.
This objection holds that, upon inspection, the idea of self-ownership is neither as simple nor as clear-cut as it initially appeared. One version of this objection points to the indeterminacy of the idea of ownership.
Positive law recognizes a wide variety of ownership arrangements, including ones that consist of very different kinds of rights than the self-ownership theorist defends. There may be no clear general notion of ownership to which one can appeal to defend self-ownership. Instead, ownership claims may be conclusions of intricate moral or legal arguments Fried , However, if self-ownership is understood to be importantly analogous to ownership in general, this poses no objection. Instead, it shows a more fruitful way for theorizing our rights over our persons are more fruitfully Russell While Nozick is typically read as someone who treats full self-ownership as a premise or foundational principle see especially the influential discussion in Cohen , it is far from clear that this is correct.
One obvious problem is that Nozick invokes the idea of self-ownership only once in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. And while that passage is oft-quoted, in terms of his arguments, the idea as such does little work in the book. Part II of Anarchy, State, and Utopia develops a large number of arguments against redistributive conceptions of justice which do not invoke or rely on the idea of full self-ownership. Nozick also invoked ideas that contradict reading him as a proponent of full self-ownership as a foundational principle.
He argued that self-ownership is an expression of the Kantian requirement that we treat people only as ends in themselves suggesting that the Kantian idea, and not self-ownership as such, is foundational. Some remain committed to the idea and have offered responses to all the objections above.
Just as Nozick may have seen libertarianism as the best way to express a host of moral considerations in the realm of justice, so too many other libertarians embrace different principles as the foundation of their theories. Such authors seek to honor people as rights-holders or sovereign individuals, whom we need to treat as the primary claimants of their lives and bodies.
But they also seek to avoid some of the implausible elements of full self-ownership. Views like this treat self-ownership neither as necessary maximally strong, nor as self-evident or foundational. Libertarian theory can thus be defended in many different ways. Examples of the former include Eric Mack , who sees self-ownership rights as among several natural rights grounded in our nature as purposive beings.
Similarly, Loren Lomasky derives rights from a related, although slightly different, conception of people as project pursuers. John Tomasi argues that strong rights over our bodies are required by the ideal of democratic legitimacy. According to Daniel Russell , self-ownership rights provide the only way that people who live together can all genuinely live their own lives.
Many libertarian theories invoke insights from economics. An influential strand of thinking in this tradition, closely related to F.
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