At the end of this week I’m off (if traveling a few blocks from my office counts as “off”) to the Austrian Scholars Conference, where I’ll be giving a paper on Austro-libertarian themes in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. Here’s the first paragraph:
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001) – better known as Elizabeth Anscombe, Liz Anscombe, or G. E. M. Anscombe – was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century Anglophone philosophy, making important
contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and moral philosophy. Yet this monocle-wearing, cigar-smoking, multilingual Cambridge don and mother of seven, a Catholic social conservative who ate out of tuna cans while lecturing and once intimidated a mugger into leaving her alone, who shocked the right with her antiwar activism and the left with her anti-abortion, anti-contraception activism, and who coined the term “consequentialism” (she was against it), is far less well known among Austro-libertarians than among professional philosophers. The aim of this paper is to show why Anscombe deserves the attention of Austro-libertarians.
Read the rest here.
I disagree. I don’t define aggression as an intentional action; as I see it, what makes an action a rights-violation has more to do with what a person does than with why she does it. Only overt acts fall under the jurisdiction of the law – not inner thoughts; hence there’s no basis for treating intentional violations differently from unintentional ones. (That’s also why I’m against punishment, i.e., any coercive treatment that goes beyond what’s needed for restraint and restitution.)
He was asked whether the police had treated him unjustly or unfairly. “Unfairly yes, unjustly no,” he said. “It was unfair to be hit over the head but not unjust since they hit everyone else over the head, too.”
To those who wonder why we advocates of “thick libertarianism” or “dialectical libertarianism” keep insisting that the triumph of liberty depends on promoting the right cultural values – look no further. People who bow, sheeplike, to the commands of American Airlines are unlikely candidates to resist the commands of a government or would-be government.
Whatever you may think about the ethics of foie gras (my own view is that producing it violates a duty, that producing it nevertheless violates no right, that consuming it violates no duty, and that refraining from consuming it is nevertheless a permissible specification of an imperfect duty – but like I said, never mind), there’s something heartening about the insouciantly defiant attitude of 
Wish you’d been a fly on the wall at last month’s Molinari Society symposium on “Anarchist Perspectives”?