Liberty and Justice


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Hoover Institution Press: Liberty and Justice, Edited by Tibor Machan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 31, 2006

STANFORD—Liberty and Justice (Hoover Institution Press, 2006) marks the final volume in a ten-volume series titled Philosophic Reflections on a Free Society, edited by Hoover fellow Tibor Machan. In this volume the contributors draw from a wide range of classical and modern philosophers—including Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, Rand, and others—to analyze the interdependence of justice and liberty and to attempt to define the most sensible, reasonable principles of justice as they relate to equality, property, gender, and other factors. They compare the libertarian approach of an equal right to liberty for all to the modern liberal focus on “capability,” or entitlements.

Anthony de Jasay, an economist and political philosopher, questions whether justice requires fairness and whether fairness requires immunity from simple bad luck or circumstances in “Justice, Luck, Liberty.” In “The Exercise of Liberty and the Moral Psychology of Justice,” Jonathan Jacobs, professor of philosophy and director of the Division of the Humanities at ColgateUniversity, looks at the moral psychology of justice. Jennifer McKitrick, associate professor of philosophy and of women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, offers a libertarian slant on feminism, showing that liberty for all is not incompatible with justice for women in “Liberty, Gender, and the Family.” If sexist attitudes are ingrained enough to make nongovernmental solutions unworkable, she reasons, it is hard to see why they would not make governmental solutions equally unworkable. In “Libertarian Justice: A Natural Rights Approach,” Machan explains his view that a natural-law method for identifying principles of right and justice is correct.

The authors also examine other key underlying questions such as, How do we recognize justice and where does it come from? Does the state have the power to enforce morality? And are the natural rights that libertarianism upholds just a myth—simply an ideological invention and plainly untenable?

“What is justice?” asked Socrates, some 2,500 years ago. As Liberty and Justice makes clear, we’re still asking—and arguing.

The other volumes in this series include Business Ethics in the Global Market (1999), Education in a Free Society (1999), Morality and Work (2000), The Commons--Its Tragedy and Other Follies (2001), Individual Rights Reconsidered (2001), Liberty and Hard Cases (2001), Liberty and Equality (2002), Liberty and Research and Development (2002), and Liberty & Democracy (2002).

Machan is a Hoover research fellow, professor emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, and holds the R. C. Hoiles Endowed Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University.

Liberty and Justice

Edited by Hoover fellow Tibor Machan

ISBN: 0-8179-4702-7 $15.00, paperback

146 pages July 2006

(Available at the Objectivist Living Bookstore)

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