Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership

Abstract

Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counterintuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such as having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people’s rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this essay I consider the most sophisticated attempts to rectify this problem within a libertarian self-ownership framework. I argue that all of these responses are significantly flawed.

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