The deep error of political libertarianism: self-ownership, choice, and what’s really valuable in life

Abstract

Contemporary versions of natural rights libertarianism trace their locus classicus to Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But although there have been many criticisms of the version of political libertarianism put forward by Nozick, many of these objections fail to meet basic methodological desiderata. Thus, Nozick's libertarianism deserves to be re-examined. In this paper I develop a new argument which meets these desiderata. Specifically, I argue that the libertarian conception of self-ownership, the view's foundation, implies what I call the Asymmetrical Value Claim: a dubious claim about the importance of choice relative to other valuable capacities. I argue that this misunderstands what is really valuable in life, and show how it causes libertarianism to generate counterintuitive public policy recommendations.

Propaganda Of Individualism And Alienation In Modern Mass Culture

“…Therefore, education is given to an individual not for the sake of becoming a harmoniously developed socially-oriented person, but so that s/he can sell him / herself at the most expensive price to the employer, outstripping others in this competitive race (Krokinskaya, 2019). In this worldview paradigm, there are several key concepts around which propaganda practices are built (attributed to the ideology of capitalism (Orekhovskiy, 2017), various trends of liberalism (Cescon & Frizzo, 2021), libertarianism (Lowe, 2020), anarchism (Reamer, 2020), etc.) that justify and support the existing order of things.…”