The connection between a theory of human nature and normative political theory is a puzzling one. Despite the depredations suffered by naturalistic theories of ethics and politics at the hands of prescriptivist (and other) moral philosophers, the temptation to found a political theory on some allegedly unalterable facts of human name is an abiding one for philosophers of differing political persuasions.
Ayn Rand occupies a curious position among American novelists: Both her friendly and her hostile critics scarcely regard her as a novelist at all. As an imaginative writer as well as a systematic philosopher, Rand achieved a strikingly unusual combination of roles; her political and moral theories, however, engross virtually all the analytical attention given her work, while the quality of her imaginative writing is almost entirely ignored.
The right of one person necessarily entails the obligation of another person or persons. If you have a right to life, I have the obligation not to kill you; if you have a right of free speech, I have the obligation not to stop you from speaking. The first half would be pointless without the second. If any given person has the right to enter the United States, who is it that has the obligation? Every person in the United States? Or only the person whose property the immigrant wishes to inhabit? Or perhaps, no one person in the United States, only the U.S.
Volume 8, Number 1 (1986)
Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia presented his by-now-famous view that “a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified.” He went on to say that only such a state is justified. Since then, the view has been frequently presented that a more extensive state than the one proposed by Nozick is warranted-as has the view that only a less extensive state, or no state at all, is morally permissible.
In this paper I will attempt to analyze laws limiting emigration, migration, and immigration from the libertarian perspective. I will defend the view that the totally free movement of goods, factors of production, money, and, most important of all, people, is part and parcel of this traditional libertarian philosophy. Like tariffs and exchange controls, migration barriers of whatever type are egregious violations of laissez-faire capitalism.
In recent years, with the increasing respectability of “applied philosophy” in the academic world, more and more philosophers have been writing extended treatments of specific public issues and offering recommendations as to how, morally speaking, these issues should be resolved. This essay shall review the state of the debate about one rather narrow issue that has just begun to receive some of this attention-the ethics of immigration restriction.
The problems posed by free emigration and immigration often lead to confusion among libertarian theorists and lovers of freedom. In the first place, libertarian doctrine traditionally declared itself, with no qualifications or reservations, in favor of the principle of complete freedom of emigration and immigration.
In recent years, as libertarian policy analysts have put their minds to the question of tax reform, some have succumbed to the lure of a broad-based, proportional, or flat, income tax. Under these proposals, the current progressive multirate structure would be replaced by a single rate that would apply to all taxpayers. Moreover, all forms of income would be taxed; in other words, an attempt would be made to create a “perfectly” broad taxbase.
The influence of moral philosophy on the rise of laissez faire is a topic that several scholars have examined.
