The aim of this paper is to show, contra the right-libertarian critique of
social justice, that there are good reasons for defending policies of social
justice within a free society. In the first part of the paper, we will
present two influential right-libertarian critiques of social justice, found
in Friedrich Hayek?s Law, Legislation and Liberty and Robert Nozick?s
Anarchy, State and Utopia. Based on their approach, policies of social
justice are seen as an unjustified infringement on freedoms of individual
members of a society. In response to this critique, we will introduce the
distincion between formal and factual freedom and argue that the formal
principle of freedom defended by Hayek and Nozick does not suffice for the
protection of factual freedom of members of a society, because it does not
recognize (1) the moral obligation to help those who, without their fault,
lack factual freedom to a significant degree, and (2) the legal obligation
of the state to protect civic dignity of all members of a society. In the
second part of the paper, we offer an interpretation of Kant?s argument on
taxation, according to which civic dignity presupposes factual freedom, in
order to argue that Kant?s justification of taxation offers good reasons for
claiming that the state has the legal obligation to protect factual freedom
via the policies of social justice.
On the formal principle for curves on projective surfaces
