Archives for March 2010

Inalienable Rights: Part III A Litmus Test for Liberalism

Surely it is not too much to ask a modern liberal theory of justice that it provide a coherent account of why some contracts, e.g., self-sale contract, should be deemed invalid and why the rights such contracts would legally alienate are inalienable. In that sense, the theory of inalienable rights provides a historical litmus test for liberalism.

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Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument

What is the inalienable rights theory that descends from the Reformation through the Enlightenment and that answers the classical apologies for slavery and autocracy based on implicit or explicit voluntary contracts?

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Inalienable Rights: Part II Intellectual History

Where did the ideas behind the inalienable rights theory emerge in the history of thought?

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Why is Non-democratic Government Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things?

Is Democracy Government based only on the Consent of the Governed? Classical liberalism takes the most basic question about a social institution as: “consent or coercion.” Democracy is often characterized as “government based on the consent of the governed” so non-democratic government is then typically condemned as being involuntary and coercive. This common condemnation of [...]

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Are the self-sale and self-rental contracts on the same moral footing?

Neverfox’s comment to my last post, Why Was Slavery Wrong?, was so rich that I will reply by this new posting, rather than just a comment on the comment.

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