Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law, Administration, and Economics at the University of Wroclaw and an affiliated scholar and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ludwig von Mises Institute Poland. He holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in political economy from King’s College London. He is the author of The Economics of Law, Order, and Action: The Logic of Public Goods, Libertarian Quandaries, and The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty.

Issue: 9:2 (the thirty fourth issue)

Thick moral terms – such as theft, fraud, and counterfeiting – are terms whose
very use implies a definitionally necessary moral evaluation of their content. In
this paper, I shall argue that the philosophy of statism – that is, a philosophy
grounded in the belief in the normative justifiability and desirability of
monopolistic apparatuses of initiatory violence – is necessarily amoral insofar
as it cannot apply thick moral terms in a logically consistent manner. By the
same token, I shall argue that libertarianism – i.e., the view that only
consensual social relations are morally acceptable – is the only general
sociopolitical doctrine capable of accomplishing this task, thus, in contrast to
statism, making its prescriptions susceptible to genuine moral evaluation.

Issue: ()

Issue: 11:2 (The forty second issue)

The purpose of the present article is to reflect on the intellectual origin of the close relationship between Austrian economics and libertarian philosophy. It suggests that the relationship in question is grounded in the fact that personal liberty and individual initiative, in addition to being significant moral values, are also crucial reservoirs of organizational efficiency and developmental drive. This implies that libertarian values can be disseminated, promoted, and implemented particularly effectively as a result of utilizing theoretical insights of the Austrian school, which is singularly committed to explaining the efficiency-enhancing features of the unhampered market process and entrepreneurial rivalry. In this connection, special attention is devoted to the liberty-promoting potential of Austrian contributions to the fields of capital, entrepreneurship, and the firm.