This paper uses hypothetical contractarianism to consider the value of children’s rights laws as a means of protecting children. Laws protecting children from their parents have the unintended but predictable consequence of making child-rearing less desirable for some parents and thereby...

Robert Aumann's agreement theorem and subsequent work shows that people who are rational in a certain Bayesian sense cannot agree to disagree on matters of fact, as long as there is common knowledge of this common rationality. This result hinges on a type of epistemic impartiality: a rational...

Despite much theoretical discussion the enforceability of constitutional constraints, the question has received little empirical attention. After discussing the theoretical arguments for and against the proposition that constitutions are capable of protecting individual liberty against...

The argument for democracy over dictatorship is often made on second-best grounds. Given the possibility of self-interested leaders, opportunities for predation are decreased by distributing political authority among a number of individuals. This second-best argument loses cogency under...

Rational ignorance and related models of voter choice have been accused of psychological implausibility or even incoherence. Although such models run counter to folk psychological understandings of choice, this paper argues that they are consistent with widely-accepted dual process theories of...

We consider the relative robustness of libertarian anarchy and liberal democracy to meddlesome preferences. Specifically, we examine how the liberty of those wishing to engage in externally harmless activities is affected by people who wish to prevent them from doing so. We show that intense,...