Despite already having the most expensive healthcare system in the world, the U.S. is facing rapidly rising costs, a growing population not covered by health insurance, and outcomes that are no better, and frequently worse, than those seen in the majority of developed nations with universal healthcare. Popular justifications of keeping the state out of healthcare appeal to protecting individual liberty; those who assert that there is a universal right to healthcare usually fail to address this claim. This paper describes the kinds of obligations in healthcare that are consistent with, if not demanded by, theories of justice that emphasize liberty. I give three different perspectives on liberty, and compare their relationship with healthcare obligations. First, I examine a plausible account of liberty, based on the condition of equal freedom, given by Immanuel Kant and Arthur Ripstein, and show how this account necessitates a system of universal public healthcare. Second, I grant the specifically libertarian approach to liberty through inviolable self-ownership, which seeks to limit the abilities of the state – using a reasonable interpretation of the Lockean proviso, as given by left-libertarians such as Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka, this approach undoubtedly brings about increased equality in a society, which would have positive implications for healthcare access. Third, I grant furthermore the right-libertarian limited reading of the proviso, and demonstrate that even with Robert Nozick’s unhindered rules for property ownership, right-libertarianism properly understood obligates the state to act in many important aspects of healthcare.

The thesis will examine the harm principle, as originally described by John Stuart Mill. In doing so, it will defend that, though unintended, the harm principle may justify several principles of distributive justice. To augment this analysis, the paper will examine several secondary authors’ interpretations of the harm principle, including potential critiques of the thesis itself.

Denna uppsats är en granskning av Robert Kanes libertarianska teori om viljeansträngningar, hur dessa kan lösa det problem som det så kallade turargumentet utgör för en libertariansk händelse-kausal teori och om hans teori ger en bra redogörelse för fri vilja, framför allt i samband med moraliska konflikter. Jag undersöker också Randolphs Clarkes kritik mot Kanes teori, som bland annat går ut på att de dubbla viljeansträngningarna är irrationella, att de inte behövs för att bemöta turargumentet och att Kanes teori inte tillför tillräckligt mycket för att ge en typ av fri vilja som vi inte redan skulle kunna ha i en deterministisk värld. Jag kommer fram till att Kanes teori kan bemöta turargumentet på ett ganska bra sätt, men att den inte tillför något som skulle kunna ge fri vilja även om fri vilja skulle vara omöjlig i en deterministisk värld. Som libertariansk teori misslyckas den alltså.

A review of the philosophical and psychological literature on free will is presented. Three major positions are identified: libertarianism, hard determinism and compatibilism (or soft determinism). The latter enjoys widespread and largely unchallenged support in psychology. Substantive conceptual and empirical grounds are presented which suggest that psychologists may be dismissing free will at their peril. It is argued, first of all, that belief in the reality of free will has profound implications for conceptions of human action, of moral responsibility, of the form and veracity of scientific accounts and of the validity of scientific reduction. Moreover, the results of a multi-disciplinary survey of academics reveal that 80% of those surveyed believe free will is real. Contrary to popular assumptions in psychology, determinism is not endorsed by many scientists outside of psychology, nor does belief in free will reflect naive belief in mind-body dualism. Modern libertarians reject both dualism and reductionism, distinguishing instead between different levels of scientific explanation. The findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for cognitive, social and clinical psychology, and directions for further research are suggested.

This dissertation locates the origins of the modern conservative movement in the intellectual history of the 1930s and 1940s. I argue that it was during the years of the Great Depression, when laissez-faire capitalism was most discredited, that a group of conservative academics and intellectuals began to lay the foundations for its postwar resurgence. Angered by the New Deal, those intellectual activists honed their free market ideology and began to develop a network through which to distribute it. As a result, they began to lay the intellectual and institutional foundation for the conservative movement. This dissertation recovers a number of narratives that reveal the rudimentary makings of a movement. It was during the 1930s and 1940s that economist Henry Simons worked to turn the University of Chicago's economics department into a bastion of free market sentiment; Leonard Read, after a decade of free market advocacy, created the first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1946; legal scholar Roscoe Pound, worried by the spread of legal realism in the academy and growth of government in Washington, dramatically moved to the political right to make common cause with conservatives; Albert Jay Nock, his protégé Frank Chodorov and Felix Morley created a network of conservative writers and publications that paved the way for William F. Buckley's National Review ; and writers such as Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson made the case for laissez-faire in the pages of popular publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune . Historians have generally attributed the rise of the modern right to the conservative political mobilization in response to the civil rights movement, campus agitation of the 1960s, and the campaign for women's rights. As a result, historians tend to view the modern conservative movement as a distinctly postwar social and political phenomenon. This dissertation enriches that account by revealing the ties the modern conservative movement has to the years of the Great Depression and the debate over the government's role in the economy.

Darbe, pasitelkiant įvairias šiuolaikinės politinės filosofijos teorijas, analizuojama galia ir trys jos aspektai: ekonominė galia, politinė galia ir galia-žinojimas. Darbe parodoma, kad politinė galia yra daug labiau suvaržanti individo laisvę veikti nei ekonominė galia, su sąlyga, kad ekonominė galia nesinaudoja politinės galios priemonėmis. Taip yra dėl to, kad nepaklusnumo ekonominei galiai kaštai yra gerokai mažesni nei bet kada anksčiau. Kita vertus, nepaklusnumas politinei galiai, tiek prieš daugelį metų, tiek ir dabar reiškia politinės galios darinių agresiją paklusti atsisakančio individo atžvilgiu. Su trečiuoju galios aspektu yra kiek sudėtingiau. Kaip tik čia filosofo darbas įgauna didelę svarbą. Pasak Foucault, Deleuze‘o ir kt., intelektualai turi analizuoti ir mėginti suvokti, kaip mus veikia internalizuotos galios sampratos bei įvairios savaime-suprantamybės, kurios lemia mūsų paklusnumą ar nepaklusnumą galiai ir mūsų požiūrį į įvairias jos apraiškas. Kitaip sakant, filosofas turi reflektuoti minties santykį su galia. M. Foucault ko gero geriausiai suformulavo šią problemą iškeldamas savąjį politinės filosofijos klausimą: Kaip galia gamina tiesos diskursus, kurie turi tokį stiprų poveikį mums? Siekiant atsakyti į pastarąjį klausimą analizuojama socialistinė tradicija, jos santykis su galia ir galios santykis su socializmu. / The work deals with the analysis of power and its various aspects, namely economic power, political power and power-knowledge. Throughout the work various models are used that are drawn from various contemporary authors, M. Foucault, M. N. Rothbard, G. Deleuze, Z. Bauman among them. The work tries to answer the question posed by M. Foucault: How does Power create truth-discourses that have such a great effect upon us? To answer this question the tradition of socialism is analyzed. The analysis of socialism provides a clear cut example how Power can be augmented via various discourses that are sympathetic towards its growth and how various attempts by the Power to suppress socialism have actually entrenched and radicalized the socialist discourse among its adherents.

Malgré le nombre et la qualité des travaux sur le néolibéralisme, la pensée néolibérale britannique est encore mal connue aujourd’hui, notamment parce qu’elle est souvent ramenée à sa seule dimension négative, telle qu’elle s’exprime par exemple dans le célèbre essai publié en 1944 par Friedrich Hayek, La route de la servitude, où se trouve développée une critique systématique de toutes les formes d’interventionnisme économique. Afin d’enrichir les recherches existantes, nous avons entrepris de dégager la dimension positive de la pensée néolibérale, à partir d’une enquête terminologique sur les définitions que les néolibéraux donnent du mot néolibéralisme et de ses équivalents, comme libertarianisme. Il apparaît que, loin de prôner le laissez-faire communément imputé aux libéraux classiques, les néolibéraux ambitionnent de mettre en ordre les activités marchandes en fixant le cadre juridique du marché, c’est-à-dire en affinant les lois qui règlementent les comportements des agents économiques, au premier rang desquels se trouvent les grandes entreprises. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, ce premier néolibéralisme, théorisé durant l’entre-deux-guerres, subit un mouvement de radicalisation doctrinale qui donne naissance à un second néolibéralisme, moins soucieux de circonscrire juridiquement les comportements des agents économiques que de contraindre constitutionnellement ceux des agents politiques, tenus désormais pour uniques responsables des dysfonctionnements du système capitaliste. Au fil du temps, l’édification du cadre constitutionnel de l’État se substitue par conséquent à la construction du cadre juridique du marché. / Although the field of neoliberal studies is rich with diverse and valuable contributions, British neoliberal thought is still little known today, especially since it is often reduced to its negative dimension, as expressed for example in Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1944 essay, The Road to Serfdom, which systematically criticized all forms of economic interventionism. So as to fill this gap in the current state of research, this study sketches out the positive dimension of neoliberalism, starting with a terminological inquiry into the definitions that neoliberals gave of the word neoliberalism and of its equivalents, such as libertarianism. It appears that far from preaching the kind of do-nothing – or laissez-faire – policies commonly ascribed to classical liberals, neoliberals ambitioned to put economic activities in order by setting the legal framework of the market, that is to say by fine-tuning the laws that regulate the behavior of economic agents – first among whom stand corporations. This first neoliberalism, born during the inter-war period, underwent after the Second World War a process of doctrinal radicalization out of which emerged a second neoliberalism, less concerned with legally constraining the behavior of economic agents than with imposing constitutional restraints on the behavior of political agents, who were from then on seen to be the sole cause of all markets disturbances. Over time, creating the legal framework of the market therefore gave way to building the constitutional framework of the state.

This thesis discusses the possibility of social order based strictly on market and liberty principles, thus without a state hegemony. Firstly It's said that the rules of social order don't have to be necessarily products of legislation. That implies that stateless society doesn't mean that rules don't exist at all. Next the thesis explains fundamental principles of libertarian ethics -- self-ownership, homesteading and non-aggression principle. These principles give us the answer why state is an institution incompatible with individuals' rights. In the last chapter, thesis discusses the possibilities of private providing of some public services and goods, which are provided by the state these days. Conclusion is that these public goods don't differ from any other goods provided on private basis, so institution of state isn't that vital as we are forced to believe.

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Denna uppsats är en idéhistorisk undersökning av libertarianismens utveckling i Sverige 1983–2000. Utgångspunkten för undersökningen är en ny forskningsdiskussion som rest frågor om libertarianismens många former i transnationella kontexter, i synnerhet den nordiska, som ett svar på en tidigare amerikaniserad förståelse av ideologins utveckling. Jag ansluter mig till denna diskussion och med min undersökning ifrågasätter jag dels tidigare forsknings inskrivande av libertarianismen i den så kallade ”högervågen” och nyliberalismens historia i Sverige, dels de svenska libertarianernas skrivande av sin egen historia.  Jag kartlägger i undersökningen ett specifikt aktörsnätverk som i en svensk kontext haft en central betydelse för ideologins utveckling. I centrum för detta nätverk stod tidningen Nyliberalen och organisationen Frihetsfronten. I min analys förstår jag ideologin som en föränderlig samverkan mellan detta nätverks materiella praktiker och en uppsättning idéer, vilken givit upphov till först en kanonisering av idéerna, sedan en popularisering av dem och slutligen en fragmentering av ideologin. Min undersökning visar hur aktörernas användning av populärkultur och artefakter samt deras strategiska bruk av medietekniker, som tidningen Nyliberalen, och särskilda platser, som Frihetsfrontens svartklubb Tritnaha, var viktiga i denna samverkan. Vidare pekar jag på hur denna samverkan karaktäriserades av ständig intern splittring inom nätverket som också formade ideologins utveckling. Kanoniseringen bestod i att en uppsättning idéer från framför allt Ayn Rand introducerades inom nätverket under 1980-talet och därinom tillskrevs ett radikalt språk om individens naturgivna rätt till frihet. Populariseringen innebar att dessa idéer knöts till en populistisk retorik och performativ aktivism med drag av ungdoms- och motkultur under 1990-talets första hälft. Ideologins fragmentering innebar tentativt en ny form för denna samverkan i samband med nätverkets digitalisering vid 1990-talets slut. Digitaliseringen medförde ett förändrat medietekniskt bruk hos aktörerna, men också en ny nätverksstruktur i en pluralisering av knutpunkterna för svenska libertarianer. I min diskussion om ideologins fragmentering uppmärksammar jag också vissa libertarianers engagemang i miljöer som senare kommit att förknippas med den så kallade alternativhögern. Min tolkning av ideologins utveckling mot en fragmenterad form visar på ett annat händelseförlopp än det tidigare forskning presenterat. Denna forskning har i stället förklarat libertarianismens utveckling i Sverige antingen som en del av eller som upplöst i ett nyliberalt och marknadsekonomiskt projekt, något som jag visar inte var fallet.