Category Archives: libertarianism

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (5/6)

Posted on by under book review, Health Care Series, libertarianism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism, political philosophy

4200 words, 25 minutes’ reading time

For part 1, go here. For part 2, go here. For part 3, go here. For part 4, go here.

5. Pettit on employment-at-will
I said above that I agree in a broad way with Pettit’s critique of employment-at will. Let me put it this way: I agree that employment-at-will, at least as currently practiced in the American labor market, is a highly problematic institution, one that frequently exemplifies domination for just the reasons Pettit gives. But while this may sound like substantial-enough agreement, I think it conceals some subtle but significant disagreement. In this post, I want to work through some of the agreement and the disagreement.

Though Pettit doesn’t put things quite this way, I think we can probably agree that two things make employment-at-will problematic. One is its asymmetric character. The other are the stakes involved when it’s invoked and exercised. Continue reading →

Philip Pettit’s Republicanism: A Series (1/6)

Posted on by under book review, libertarianism, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism
  1. Introduction

We’ve been discussing Philip Pettit’s Republicanism in our online discussion group since March of this year. Our July 21 meeting focused on Chapter 5, “Republican Aims and Policies”: “what a state ought to achieve, and what form it ought to assume, in the modern world” (Republicanism, p. 129). Chapter 5 is the first of four in the book that explicitly ties the book’s theoretical claims to political practice, concretizing what would otherwise be a rather abstract set of theses.

I’ve had some conflicted thoughts about Pettit’s republicanism from the beginning of our discussions, crystallized by his account in Chapter 5 of a pet topic of mine, at-will employment. Having recently finished the book, I sat down over the last few weekends to put my thoughts in order. I have no idea whether these thoughts are of general interest, but in any case, I’ve written up a series of five longish blog posts on Republicanism (five excluding this one), and sketched out a bunch of shorter digressions that were originally footnotes but ended up taking on a life of their own. Starting tomorrow, I’ll post the first of the five posts here, followed by one post per week. I haven’t yet written up the digressions, so there’s no telling when (or if) they’ll appear. But they’re digressions, after all. They can wait. So can you. Continue reading →

Markets with and without Limits

Posted on by under book review, ethics, General announcements, libertarianism, liberty and the left, moralism

Some more bragging to compensate for the free-riding modesty of PoT’s bloggers: Roderick Long has an article out on the dispute over markets with and without limits: “The Limits of Anti-Anti-Commodification Arguments: James Stacey Taylor in Markets with Limits versus Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski in Markets without Limits,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 37:2 (Fall 2023), pp. 1-10. The publication date is given as 2023, but the issue just came out. Continue reading →

Understanding Rightwing vs. Leftwing

Posted on by under libertarianism, political philosophy

I have spent my whole adult life as a libertarian or classical liberal of one kind or another. And throughout this long period—for I am not young—I have been puzzled as to whether I should think of myself as leftwing or rightwing or centrist, or whether I should, like many libertarians, reject the conventional left–right political spectrum altogether. So now, herewith I propose to try to sort this out.

Continue reading →