The moral status of economic liberty is a critical point of contention within liberal theory. Classical liberals, including Tomasi, suggest that economic activity is fundamental for exercising personal autonomy and its protection to be to the overall benefit of all persons. By contrast,...

Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some things we might see as important and they require us to do other things...

Hume developed an original and revolutionary theoretical paradigm for explaining the spontaneous emergence of the classic conventions of justice—stable possession, transference of property by consent, and the obligation to fulfill promises. In a scenario of scarce external resources, Hume’s...

This is a revised and expended version of an earlier paper setting out the central features of John Rawls's political philosophy and paying special attention to its relationship to his early work in moral epistemology. It will appear as the entry on Rawls in the Revised 2019 Edition of the Int'l...

We interpret Adam Smith on reputation, commutative justice, and defamation laws. We address two major questions. The first question concerns whether Smith thought that “one’s own” as covered by commutative justice included one’s reputation. Several passages point to the affirmative. But...

I argue that Locke meant the Second Treatise to show three things: how both property rights and charity claims derive from the same source; how these distinct, semi-autonomous value domains can come into conflict with each other; and how man can adjudicate those conflicts (and others) in the...

Nietzsche scholars have thus far failed to reach a consensus on the status of Nietzsche's political theory. Recent attempts to cement Nietzsche's reputation as an important political thinker contribute much to our understanding of the thinker, but leave many of his more overtly political...