French President Emmanuel Macron at a press conference, June 13, 2017 (Frederic Legrand - COMEO / Shutterstock.com).Law and Norms: The Case of Kevin Durant and the NBA
Conservatives and some other stripes of political thinkers have placed great emphasis on the importance of norms in a society. It is not just the law that matters. It is the norms that operate in conjunction with the law. The same thing, of course, happens in other areas. Recently, the Golden State Warriors became NBA champions and by some measures they may have been the best team of all time. But I regard the team as having been formed in an illegitimate way, through the inappropriate actions of Kevin Durant, even though his actions were perfectly in accord with NBA rules. At…
When Friedrich Hayek Met Bruno Leoni
This year would have been Bruno Leoni’s 101st birthday but for his tragically early death in 1967. Leoni was an Italian lawyer cum academic who was one of Europe’s leading classical liberal thinkers in the post-War era. Friend to the leading classical liberals of the age—counting Hayek, Buchanan, and Alchian as friends—Leoni was not only a pioneer of law and economics thinking but also an early adopter of public choice theory.
Law and Moral Obligation II: A Response to Ilya Somin
Ilya Somin has posted an essay at Volokh that narrows that gap between our views on the source of the moral obligation to obey the law—I certainly agree, for example, that there are exigent circumstances in which one might be not merely entitled but obliged to disobey—but our underlying disagreement persists: whether the calculation itself is an individual or a political one.
Law and Moral Obligation
Here and at Volokh, Ilya Somin and Mike Rappaport have been conducting a fruitful exchange over the extent of individuals’ moral obligation to obey the law, but the debate should not obscure the deeper and important philosophical ground on which they apparently agree: a shared assumption that the duty arises from something like an individual utility function. Their dispute seems to pertain to whether the individual should deploy his or her moral calculus at the personal (Somin) or systemic (Rappaport) level. The tougher question is whether any society so conceived and so dedicated—namely, one in which individuals calculate their moral obligation to obey the law as atomized individuals—can long endure.
Friday Roundup, September 13th
I've made several posts the past few weeks to Liberty Fund's upcoming Constitution Day Symposium on federalism. Regarding this important topic, our Online Library of Liberty has the deepest bench of online resources for further reading and study. Enjoy! So the current Liberty Law Talk is a discussion with Eric Mack on Friedrich Hayek's great trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty. If you haven't yet waded into all three volumes, then this podcast is a great introduction. For our feature review essay this week, Richard Gamble evaluates John Lukacs' latest effort, History and the Human Condition. Gamble observes that Lukacs' work demands humility…
Present at the Creation: The Free Market Counterrevolution
Mark Blaug’s Economic Theory in Retrospect argues that the Keynesian revolution in economics after the publication of The General Theory was a unique event in economic history because of its rapid and almost complete conversion of the economics profession to its central ideas. Frank Knight’s Presidential Address to the American Economic Association in 1951 actually acknowledges this victory of Keynesian ideas within the economics profession but laments that Lord Keynes has successfully dragged economic thinking back to the dark ages. Keynes himself argued forcefully in The General Theory that a revolution in thinking was in order given how difficult it…
Social Justice is the State
In response to: What is Social Justice?
Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag on 25 February 1848.Samuel Gregg’s essay, “What is Social Justice?” is an important reminder that many different moral traditions – including the Catholic natural law tradition – may lay claim to the vocabulary of “social justice” and to an associated notion of the “common good.” As articulated by Gregg, this natural law tradition can employ the language of “social justice” without construing social justice as fundamentally a call for an egalitarian or egalitarian-leaning distribution of material well-being or material resources that are conducive to material well-being. That natural law tradition offers a thick understanding of human well-being and of the sort of social…
More Responses
What is social justice? Sam Gregg’s essay answers this question by reviewing the origins and evolution of the concept. I find little to quibble with in Sam’s remarks and I am certainly in no position to make them a fortiori. My contribution will therefore be to offer an explanation for why social justice theory is both…
John Tomasi Rearranges the Deck Chairs on the Good Ship Liberalism
The number of contradictory positions associated with the words “liberal” and “liberalism” have led some to conclude that such expressions are now so unstable in their meaning that they lack sufficient descriptive power of any lasting significance. Of course, the same could be said of terms used to describe most modern political positions, including “conservatism” and “socialism.” Liberalism, however, seems particularly amorphous inasmuch as the phrase is associated with figures as apparently different in their starting points and conclusions such as Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls, but also David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
Or is it? In his new book Free Market Fairness, the political philosopher John Tomasi challenges and seeks to overcome some of the internal divisions among those who ascribe to the liberal nomenclature. Rather than attempting a synthesis of competing schools of liberal thought, Tomasi outlines what he is very careful to specify as a “hybrid” (87) political theory that draws upon classical liberalism and libertarianism on the one hand, and what he calls high or left liberalism on the other. Tomasi does not seek to somehow ground classical liberal institutions on the basis of left liberal moral imperatives, or vice-versa. Instead he argues for what he calls market democracy as a “justificatory hybrid . . . which combines insights from the classical and liberal traditions at the level of moral foundations” (95).
