Loren E. Lomasky

The Impartial Spectator Goes to Washington: Toward a Smithian Theory of Electoral Behavior

When economists pay homage to the wisdom of the distant past (not the most common of professional exercises) it is more likely that a work two decades old is being admired than one two centuries old. Economics is a science , and the sciences are noteworthy for their digestion and assimilation of the work of previous generations. Contributions remain only as accretions to the accepted body of knowledge; the writings and the writers disappear almost without trace. A conspicuous exception to this rule of professional cannibalization is Adam Smith. Since 1776 he has not lacked for honors that have escaped even his most illustrious peers. Who, after all, wears a David Ricardo necktie? So to the author of The Wealth of Nations , all praise!

Is there a Duty to Vote

INTRODUCTION The genre of public service advertisements that appear with two- and four-year cyclical regularity is familiar. Cameras pan across scenes of marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima, a bald eagle soaring in splendid flight, rows of grave markers at Arlington. The somber-voiced announcer remonstrates: “ They did their part; now you do yours.” Once again it is the season to fulfill ones civic duty, to vote. Good citizenship in the final decade of the twentieth century does not seem to require much of the individual beyond simple law-abidingness. We have traveled a far distance from the Athenian agora. However, there exists a remarkable degree of consensus that voting is requisite, that one who fails to exercise the franchise is thereby derelict. Candidates for the nations highest office publicly proclaim that duty; so do ones neighbors and associates–perhaps with some asperity in their voices–when informed that you chose to absent yourself from the polls that they took the trouble to visit. We call that consensus remarkable because, as will become evident, it is exceedingly difficult to develop a persuasive rationale for the existence of a duty to vote. Often that duty is simply taken for granted. Where arguments are given, they typically invoke either fallacious reasoning or dubious empirical premises. A cautious surmise is that the assurance with which the duty to vote is affirmed is not matched by equivalent cogency of justification.

Public Money, Private Gain, Profit for All

What level of financial incentive is necessary in order to encourage the commercial applications of beneficial scientific findings? Some argue that the public and private economic worlds are inextricably intertwined and that all benefit when entrepreneurs seek to turn scientific knowledge into profit. Others believe that the unregulated acquisition of profits is unjustified if it clearly derives from public funds or the nonprofit research activities of others.

Liberty and Welfare Goods: Reflections on Clashing Liberalisms

Among the numerous moral commodities that political orders can produceand protect, classical liberalism assigns primacy to liberty, understoodas noninterference. As the nineteenth century advanced into its secondhalf, this primacy was increasingly seen as myopic. A more defensibleliberalism will devote itself to a wider range of basic human interests:this critique gained virtually unanimous acceptance within the newliberalism. Yet, surprisingly, during the past two decades classicalliberalism seems to have enjoyed a resurrection. This essay arguesthat it is well merited, that the superficial plausibility of the newliberal critique shielded a confusion between the questions of whichgoods matter and how they are properly to be afforded politicalrecognition.

The Small but Crucial Role of Health Care Vouchers

belabor this point have fundamentally misconstrued the purpose of vouchers. The two major functions of health care vouchers are, first, to provide the poor with the means to avail themselves of medical services they could not otherwise afford; and second, to allow persons to choose health care providers and servicesfor themselves rather than have them imposed by benignly (or otherwise) intentioned governmental functionaries. When vouchers are com-

Libertarianism as if (The Other 99 Percent of) People Mattered

In this essay I wish to consider the implications for theory and practice of the following two propositions, either or both of which may be controversial, but which will here be assumed for the sake of argument: (L) Libertarianism is the correct framework for political morality. (M) The vast majority of our fellow citizens disbelieve (L). 1

Once Over Lightly

Book reviewed in this article: The Reahn of Rights. By Judith Thomson. Cambridge: Harvard University

Justice to Charity

Despite what one may be led to believe by breathless reports in the media, the acme of misery in America is not the woes, financial and otherwise, of Donald Trump and Michael Jackson. People lose their jobs, have their assets drained by reversals of fortune, suffer from illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of shelter, and other mishaps. The circumstances in which they find themselves are genuinely distressing. It would be an odd understanding indeed that failed to find these circumstances directly relevant to what morality asks of us. If morality is to count for anything, then surely it must take notice of exigent need. This is not merely the deliverance of a late twentieth-century Western moral consciousness massaged by the blessings of comparative affluence and graced with a newfound awareness of social justice. All traditional ethical codes of which I am aware, sacred and secular, demand that one take the distress of ones neighbor as bearing on ones own activities. “Am I my brothers keeper?” is the question; the well-nigh universal answer is “ Yes .” The disposition to be moved by and respond to distress is the virtue of charity .

But is it liberalism

THE LIBERTARIAN IDEA by Joseph Raz Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. 435 pp.,

Human Rights: An Exuberant Disarray@@@Liberty, Community, and Justice@@@Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community@@@Making Sense of Human Rights: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

59.00 Joseph Razs The Morality of Freedom offers a subtle and arrestingly original reconstruction of liberal theory. Raz argues that standard liberal linchpins such as neutrality, rights, equality, anti‐perfectionism, subjective preference, and individualism fail adequately to ground a liberal order. Rather, he enshrines autonomy as the core value of a justifiable liberalism. Many of Razs subsidiary arguments are insightful, yet his liberal structure ultimately founders. In large measure that is because Raz oscillates uneasily between two opposed rationalesfor the centrality of autonomy. The result is a major contribution to political theory, but also a book that is less than the sum of its parts.