Libertarian personal responsibility

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 621-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Preiss

While libertarians (by most accounts) affirm personal responsibility as a central moral and political value, libertarian theorists write relatively little about the theory and practice of this value. Focusing on the work of F. A. Hayek and David Schmidtz, this article identifies the core of a libertarian approach to personal responsibility and demonstrates the ways in which this approach entails a radical revision of the ethics and American politics of personal responsibility. Then, I highlight several central implications of this analysis in the American political and economic status quo. First, this analysis makes a mockery of so-called libertarian/conservative ‘fusionism’, such that libertarian personal responsibility cannot partner with meritocratic conservative thought to provide a plural grounding for rejecting progressive or redistributive economic policy. Next, preferred libertarian policies threaten the status, esteem and social bases of self-respect of citizens who are worse-off through little or no fault of their own. Finally, these policies undermine the ethics of personal responsibility that Americans from across the ideological spectrum value and many conservatives and libertarians celebrate. In the American status quo, those who value personal responsibility must reserve a central place for policies that mitigate opportunity and distributive inequalities.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Hannes Peltonen ◽  
Knut Traisbach

Abstract This foreword frames the Symposium in two ways. It summarises the core themes running through the nine ‘meditations’ in The Status of Law in World Society. Moreover, it places these themes in the wider context of Kratochwil's critical engagement with how we pursue knowledge of and in the social world and translate this knowledge into action. Ultimately, also his pragmatic approach cannot escape the tensions between theory and practice. Instead, we are in the midst of both.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anuj Bhowmik ◽  
Maria Gabriella Graziano

AbstractThis paper analyses two properties of the core in a two-period exchange economy under uncertainty: the veto power of arbitrary sized coalitions; and coalitional fairness of core allocations. We study these properties in relation to classical (static) and sequential (dynamic) core notions and apply our results to asset markets and asymmetric information models. We develop a formal setting where consumption sets have no lower bound and impose a series of general restrictions on the first period trades of each agent. All our results are applications of the same lemma about improvements to an allocation that is either non-core or non-coalitionally fair. Roughly speaking, the lemma states that if all the members of a coalition achieve a better allocation in some way (for instance, by blocking the status quo allocation or because they envy the net trade of other coalitions) then an alternative improvement can be obtained through a perturbation of the initial improvement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iona Heath ◽  
Anna Stavdal ◽  
Johann Agust Sigurdsson

As doctors, we see every working day the pervasive effects of different forms of structural violence and discrimination that undermine the hopes and aspirations of those on the losing side. This leads to powerlessness, fear and anger. Anger is not only forward facing but also directed toward, systems, institutions, governments—rather than individuals. At its best it is a protest against the status quo. We point out that leadership is one of the core values of our professionalism. In the light of what we see and hear, we have a responsibility to use the anger that this engenders within us to speak truth to power: this speaking is leadership. Our message is: feel the fear and the anger, use it to change the world, and enfold leadership in hope and the pursuit of justice.


Suicide in the forms of martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and self-immolation is mired in controversies regarding religious roots, nomenclature, motives, and valor. Although the admiration ebbs and flows, at least some idealization of such elective deaths is discernible in every religious tradition treated in this volume. Traditional support ranges from tales of ascetic heroes who conquer personal passions to save others by dying, to tales of righteous warriors who suffer and die valiantly while challenging the status quo. While the lionization of elective death is a persistent theme in world religions, just as persistent are disputes about the core notions that justify it, such as altruism, heroism, and religion itself. This volume offers critical analyses by renowned scholars with the literary and historical tools to tackle the contested issue of religiously sanctioned suicide. Three chapters treat contemporary phenomena with disputed classical roots (chapters on Salafist Jihadists, on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, and on the Branch Davidians and Heavens' Gate), while eleven focus on classical religious literatures which variously celebrate and disparage figures who invite self-harm to the point of corporeal death (chapters on Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Sikh, Tamil, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Daoist traditions, as well as on their diverse branches and special expressions). Overall, the volume offers astute scholarly insights which counter the axiom that religious traditions simply and always embrace life at any cost.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-171
Author(s):  
Iulia Bobăilă ◽  

Ecocritical Perspectives and Narrative Tensions in Belén Gopegui’s Snow White’s Father. The relationship between literature and ecology has come to the fore in the last few decades and has encompassed several dimensions approached within the evolving framework of ecocriticism. In this context, our purpose is twofold: to explore the possibilities of an ecocritical reading of Belén Gopegui’s novel Snow White’s Father and to highlight the way in which the characters’ uncomfortable questions, the fully-articulated answers and those still latent make up an intricate network of narrative tensions. At the core of the novel lies an all-pervading need of self-questioning and collective reassessment of values, interactions and ethical limits. Its characters are marked by doubt and hesitations regarding the reasons that make them strive for a change or defend the status quo they are fond of. Gopegui is able to perform a delicately-balanced walk on a tightrope between stern anti-capitalist principles and complex human motivations. Keywords: system, ideology, capitalism, ecocriticism, collective subject


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Walzer

The work organisation model of crowdwork almost paradigmatically stands for "work 4.0". Networking and digitalisation accelerate the already-existing tendency towards an "escape from the restrictions of German employment law", away from hierarchy and back to the market. The thesis addresses the disruptive dimension of this development and asks for adequate protection for crowdworkers. The protection of crowdworkers is examined on the basis of the leading German crowdwork platforms. As a first step, the thesis provides an overview of the fundamentals, as well as the factual and legal framework of crowdwork. Subsequently, it assesses the general terms and conditions of the platforms examined on the basis of general civil and commercial law. The core elements of the thesis are the analysis of the status quo of employment law protection de lege lata, as well as the examination whether and to what extent the legal protection for this form of employment can and must be extended de lege ferenda.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 921-939 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Gordon

The literature on the unfree character of temporary migrant labour has drawn much needed attention to the poor working conditions faced by migrant workers and opened up an important space to challenge those ubiquitous claims by defenders of the current political-economic status quo of the freedom expressed at the core of neoliberalism. However, there is a risk to focusing on legal unfreedom to the exclusion of a broader critique of the logic of capitalist reproduction, the very premise of which is the private ownership of society’s productive wealth and the alienation of the majority of people from that wealth. Unfreedom and coercion are systematic to capitalist market relations, and all wage labour, including that of formally ‘free’, is unfree. This article examines different conceptions of labour unfreedom and concludes with a discussion of unfree labour in the neoliberal context.


Author(s):  
Rongyan Zhou ◽  
Julie Le Cardinal

AbstractIndustry 4.0 is a great opportunity and a great challenge for enterprises. Nowadays, how to adjust the strategy according to the new situation to deal with the opportunities and challenges brought by Industry 4.0 is a hot topic. The paper investigates what is Industry 4.0 and compares the different fourth industry revolution programs in various countries and takes advantage of bibliometric to investigate which technologies play an important role in Industry 4.0. What is more, the status quo, challenges and development directions faced in various fields in the industrial 4.0 era are elaborated. The paper not only combs the research direction for researchers, but also presents the status quo of practical application for enterprises. The paper contributes to showing a leading role for theory and practice of industry 4.0.


2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Wohlforth

Most scholars hold that the consequences of unipolarity for great power conflict are indeterminate and that a power shift resulting in a return to bipolarity or multipolarity will not raise the specter of great power war. This article calls into question the core assumptions underlying the consensus: (1) that people are mainly motivated by the instrumental pursuit of tangible ends such as physical security and material prosperity and (2) that major powers' satisfaction with the status quo is relatively independent of the distribution of capabilities. in fact, it is known that people are motivated powerfully by a noninstrumental concern for relative status, and there is strong empirical evidence linking the salience of those concerns to distributions of resources. If the status of states depends in some measure on their relative capabilities and if states derive utility from status, then different distributions of capabilities may affect levels of satisfaction, just as different income distributions may affect levels of status competition in domestic settings. Building on research in psychology and sociology, the author argues that even capabilities distributions among major powers foster ambiguous status hierarchies, which generate more dissatisfaction and clashes over the status quo. and the more stratified the distribution of capabilities, the less likely such status competition is. Unipolarity thus augurs for great power peace, and a shift back to bipolarity or multipolarity raises the probability of war even among great powers with little material cause to fight.


Public Choice ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
James D. Laing ◽  
Sampei Nakabayashi ◽  
Benjamin Slotznick

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