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J. C. Lester

J. C. Lester is an independent philosopher (LSE PhD) and the author of several books and many articles on interpersonal-libertarian philosophy (https://philpeople.org/profiles/jan-clifford-lester). These tend to apply a new philosophical paradigm of libertarianism: an abstract (non-normative and non-propertarian) eleutherology and critical-rationalist epistemology.


 

ARTICLES:

Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”: Three Libertarian Refutations

Issue: 9:2 (the thirty fourth issue)
Peter Singer’s famous and influential article is criticised in three main ways
that can be considered libertarian, although many non-libertarians could also
accept them: 1) the relevant moral principle is more plausibly about upholding
an implicit contract rather than globalising a moral intuition that had local
evolutionary origins; 2) its principle of the immorality of not stopping bad
things is paradoxical, as it overlooks the converse aspect that would be the
positive morality of not starting bad things and also thereby conceptually
eliminates innocence; and 3) free markets – especially international free trade –
have been cogently explained to be the real solution to the global “major evils”
of “poverty” and “pollution”, while “overpopulation” does not exist in freemarket
frameworks; hence charity is a relatively minor alleviant to the problem
of insufficiently free markets. There are also various subsidiary arguments
throughout.