This blog post is a reply to a post by JC Lester, which was replying to a post in which I replied to him, because he wrote a post that replied to a post in which I discussed a 2019 paper he wrote. In case that seems hard to follow, here is an ordered list of the sequence of events:
- JC Lester, in 2019, wrote this paper.
- On 2026-01-28, I read the paper and posted about it on X/Twitter.
- On 2026-02-17, JC Lester replied to my post.
- On 2026-02-18, I replied preliminarily to JC Lester’s reply, addressing only the contents of the post itself and not the various papers and articles Lester linked from it. I promised to give a fuller reply later.
- On 2026-02-20, JC Lester replied to my preliminary reply, in two parts: part 1 and part 2.
This post, then, is the promised fuller reply to JC Lester’s replies. It is structured as an article about his views and my views, however, which I hope makes it more interesting to third-party readers, and is at any rate easier for me to write than a linear point-by-point rebuttal.
Contents
1. Introduction
I think I have much in common with JC Lester. For instance:
- Lester is a libertarian writer, and I am also a libertarian.
- Although Lester has published in academic journals, he seems to feel himself to be at the margins of academia, and I have felt similarly as a non-academic.
- In his last reply to me (part 1), he expressed a wish that there were more criticisms of his theories, and I have had similar wishes before.
- Some of his writings have been in the style of dictionary entries, which is a style I have sometimes attempted as well, aside from my actual contributions to Wikipedia and Wiktionary.
The main thing that attracted me to his writings was the overall shape of his core theory, which he described, in the title of his 2019 paper, as “an abstract eleutherology plus critical rationalism”. (An “eleutherology” means a theory of liberty; the 2023 paper gives the name of “eleutheric-conjectural libertarianism” to his overall social theory.) As he described it in the 2019 paper:
An adequate philosophical theory of libertarianism needs to make the following distinctions:
- An abstract theory of interpersonal-liberty-in-itself that is independent of any type of property (i.e., ownership), or normativity.
- The practical and contingent, derived, objective applications of the abstract theory.
- The separate moral and value defences of the abstract theory and its objective applications.
- At every stage the abandonment of ‘supporting justifications’ in favour of critical rationalism, which explicitly uses conjectures and criticisms.
Regarding the first point, in my first engagement with the paper, I criticized Lester’s insistence (you see it in many of his writings) on the great importance of defending a specific conception of ‘liberty’, which, as he clarified to me, he thinks is a concept as central to libertarianism as the concept of ‘utility’ is central to utilitarianism. If the reader is acquainted with libertarian writings and does not believe that the concept is as central as that, Lester simply sees this possibility as a flaw in the mainstream libertarian writings, which are obfuscating the central concept.
What I found attractive was the move from step 1 to step 2. Lester takes his concept of liberty and derives both the norm of self-ownership and the norm of external private property from it, as required to maintain liberty (though not necessarily yet at that stage, morally required). For whatever reason, I found this derivation reminiscent of section 2 of my ethics, where I took a concept of agency and derived the libertarian property norms from it (already as morally required, due to the prior development leading up to it).
This got me to look at more of his work and to comment on it. Lester replied, here and here and here, and made an X (Twitter) account to notify me. I thought that was pretty cool and a good opportunity to clarify some points. So I am replying to his replies, as well as talking about his work more generally. I will do so, and then explain my own approach a bit more to answer some of his questions.
2. Review of Lester’s libertarian theory
I will review JC Lester’s libertarian theory regarding his defense of external property, punishment and damages, and intellectual property.
2.1. Does absence of impositions imply libertarian private property?
Although I was interested in the derivation of property from liberty that Lester presented, I have lost my confidence in precisely that aspect of his work. I will explain the problems with it. In the 2019 paper, Lester had theorized liberty as “the absence of interpersonal proactively-imposed constraints on want-satisfaction”. (Lester doesn’t like it if you say ‘defined’, preferring ‘theorized’.) In the 2023 paper, he prefers the phrasing “initiated” rather than “proactively-imposed”, which he seems to see as synonyms, with “proactive” standing to “reactive” as “initiated” stands to “responsive”. As alternative phrases, he also refers to “want-satisfaction” as “preference-satisfaction”, to “constraints on want-satisfaction” as “imposed costs” or “impositions”, and sometimes to “costs” as “losses”. I will use these phrases interchangeably as indicated.
Here’s the problem I see with this now. In his 2023 book Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny, Jesse Spafford formulated the following idea, which is very similar to Lester’s idea of liberty:
The Moral Tyranny Constraint – A theory of duties is acceptable only if full compliance with that theory would not allow any person to unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably act in a way that would leave others with less advantage than they would have possessed had the agent made some other choice. (Spafford 2023, p. 69)
Spafford says that the word advantage “should be understood to not have any specific content but, rather, function as a placeholder for whatever one takes to be the relevant currency of distributive justice” (Spafford 2023, p. 71). For compatibility with Lester, we should read “less advantage” as “more constrained want-satisfaction”. Then we can see the problem. Spafford argued, throughout his book, that original acquisition of external private property, since it allows the owner to exclude others from the property, leaves others with less advantage than if the agent had not homesteaded the property. I believe this is true, however advantage is conceived of, including Lester’s preferred preference-utilitarian way. And it is proactive/initiated, not reactive/responsive. How does Lester answer this?
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| Infographic based on Jesse Spafford’s social-anarchist theory, originally posted here. |
Lester seems to consider his 2023 paper “a clearer account” than his 2019 paper, but he spends more space on the derivation of external property in the 2019 paper, and it seems more enlightening on his ideas on that, so I will quote from there. In the 2019 paper, Lester says:
Once we have begun to use a natural resource for some purpose, then it typically proactively imposes a significant cost on us if someone takes that resource from us or uses it in a way that flouts our purposes. By possessing and controlling it we might proactively impose a cost on other people too; but this is mainly to the, usually small and reciprocal, extent of the unmodified resource’s want-satisfaction value to them. For to be denied a benefit that someone else has somehow produced—such as a wooden cabin—is not in itself to be proactively imposed on. Therefore, it appears that the least proactive imposition on people’s preference-satisfactions is usually to allow ultimate control to the initial user, and thereafter control by voluntarily agreed transfer (as mentioned above, these interpersonal comparisons plausibly assume only that people are very broadly similar in their responses to certain fundamental choices). Assuming the theory of liberty, this entails that it usually maximally observes, or instantiates, liberty to have personal ultimate control of external resources where one has initiated a use (or subsequently received them by voluntarily agreed transfer). This factual and contingent consequence is also before needing to assume the legal institution of property (or needing to assume morals). However, in order better to protect liberty, it is efficient to institute property rights in such resources. (Lester 2019, pp. 106–107)
That paragraph includes references to eight footnotes arguing with reviewers about the wording and substance of this argument, which I have omitted, so you should check the paper if you think some obvious criticism was overlooked here. However, I believe my comments on it are not addressed in that back-and-forth, as follows.
- There is one strain in Lester’s ideas that really wants to call the exclusion of latecomers a “withheld benefit” rather than an “imposed cost”. It does not seem that he can defend this difference in terminology without assuming his conclusion. It is a constraint on want-satisfaction, and it is not done in self-defense, unless you include the defense of your property into self-defense. But then here there is a danger that Lester is building the libertarian theory of property into the requirement for a cost/constraint’s being “imposed”, and hence assuming his conclusion from the outset.
- There is a different strain in Lester’s ideas, however, that concedes that the exclusion of latecomers is an imposition; “by possessing and controlling it we might proactively impose a cost on other people too”. However, the latecomers’ interference with homesteaded property also imposes a cost. In Lester’s telling, it is inevitable, in a conflict over property, that some costs are imposed on someone. The libertarian property-norm, then, does not achieve the “absence of impositions” but the “minimization of impositions”.
This is similar to his move regarding the “minimization of aggression principle”, where he claims that there are conflicts over property where some aggression is inevitable, and hence the best we can apply is not the libertarian NAP (nonaggression principle) but its more pragmatic cousin, the MAP (minimization of aggression principle). This is an underexplored area; it is unclear whether aggression is ever inevitable in mainstream libertarian theory. But it does seem clear that, given conflicting wants, someone’s want-satisfaction has to be constrained. Lester’s idea, then, is that liberty consists in minimizing the constraints.
2.2. Does minimization of impositions imply libertarian private property?
For Lester, in the above quote from the 2019 paper, minimizing constraints implies respecting libertarian private property, because allowing first-users to exclude further users imposes smaller costs on the further users than disallowing exclusion imposes on the homesteaders. This is a complex claim, so to be clearer (to myself if to no one else), I will write this as a formula. For any given rivalrous resource, let there be a first-user (homesteader) $H$, and a set of later would-be users $L={1,\dots,n}$. Define an institutional regime $E$, where the first-user may exclude others from interference with the resource (exclusive control), and a different institutional regime $N$, where later users may not be excluded (open access / forced sharing / common use). Let $u_j(\cdot)$ be the person $j$’s utility (want-satisfaction) under the regime in question, holding fixed the same physical world and preferences. Then the relevant claim seems to be this:
$$
\forall i\in L:\quad u_i(N)-u_i(E) \;<\; u_H(E)-u_H(N)
$$
Notice that we had to use minus signs to write this out. Lester, in the 2019 paper, isn’t just making an interpersonal utility comparison (the different sides of the $<$ are different persons, hence this is interpersonal) but also a comparison between intrapersonal differences in utility between different institutional regimes. This is inevitable to the claim he is making. And very likely, given his comments on cases where “the public” is affected (pollution, etc.), he might sometimes not want to only make the pairwise claim (each latecomer’s loss is smaller than the homesteader’s loss) but also the claim about the loss of the aggregate of latecomers being smaller than the homesteader’s, as follows:
$$
\sum_{i\in L}\bigl(u_i(N)-u_i(E)\bigr) \;<\; u_H(E)-u_H(N)
$$
So although he frames his theory as talking about preference-utilitarianism, he is committing himself to utilities being capable of being added and subtracted. This is cardinal utility. It is not preference-utilitarianism anymore. It assumes utilities have strong algebraic properties.
Lester downplays the strength of the claim. Even within the 2019 paper itself, Lester tries to make this commitment look like a minimal, rough claim that humans are broadly similar enough in their responses to allow for saying that, generally speaking, this comparison holds as stated. Lester devotes much more space to the issue of utility comparisons in the 2023 paper, as well as in his 2022 paper, “Avoiding Interpersonal Utility Comparisons in Eleutheric-Conjectural Libertarianism”. In those two places, he says that instead of comparing utilities interpersonally, we can do a thought-experiment and imagine ourselves to be in the position of each of the parties involved in the resource clash, as follows:
One can simply imagine oneself successively being on each of the various sides of any posited liberty-clashes (as one may sometimes be in real life). Or, if it seems significantly different and clearer, imagine oneself being in a game whereby one has an equiprobable chance of being in the situation of any of the people whose liberties are clashing. Then the specified task is to choose which remedies, rules, property, or claims (depending on which problem is being addressed) seem likely to minimise any overall, or average, initiated impositions on oneself. (Lester 2022, p. 2)
OK, so let’s account for Lester’s modesty in not claiming any mind-reading powers for himself. Read the same formula above, but instead of reading $u_j(\cdot)$ as the person $j$’s utility, read it as the utility of yourself when imagined in the position of the person $j$. We are still talking, necessarily, about cardinal quantities with strong algebraic properties, not mere ordinal value-scales.
However little knowledge of other people’s minds Lester is claiming, allowing this kind of comparison at all puts him under a lot of pressure from social-democrats, who can now argue that money is a greater utility to the poor than to the rich. That is, where $R$ is a rich person, $P$ a poor person, and $t$ is a transfer, the social-democrat can immediately run the familiar diminishing-marginal-utility argument:
$$
u_P(w_P+t)-u_P(w_P) \;>\; u_R(w_R)-u_R(w_R-t)
$$
Arguing from parity, the social-democrat can say that this is roughly and generally true, without making strong claims about his ability to read minds, etc.; he can read $u_P(\cdot)$ and $u_R(\cdot)$ as the utility of himself when imagined in the position of a poor and a rich person, respectively, rather than the utility of the poor and the rich person themselves, respectively. The argument still seems to work. If that move is allowed for homesteading, there’s no reason why it isn’t allowed for redistribution.
In his reply to me, Lester had said that “social-democrats (like all statists) primarily need to understand economics better. That is what mainly explains why private property promotes welfare and forced transfers undermine it. But some philosophy can help too.” But the above comparison is legitimate in mainstream economics, which defends wealth transfers on precisely such claims (by means of a social welfare function). Libertarians typically appeal to Austrian economics to block the social-democratic argument, but Austrian economics blocks this argument, not by proving that the comparison holds in the other direction, but precisely by saying that these utility comparisons are illegitimate, both interpersonally and intrapersonally across regimes. The Austrians consistently hold to ordinal utility, without any cardinal comparisons in sight. Hence, libertarians cannot consistently appeal to Austrian economics against the social-democrat and at the same time allow themselves these comparisons in defending their property theory. So it is unclear to me how Lester can possibly defend his derivation of private property, although it had seemed so nice to me at first.
2.3. Does minimization of impositions allow for punishment and damages?
In my initial comment on Lester’s 2019 paper, I had somehow still been focusing on absence of impositions and had not quite noticed the move toward minimization of impositions in Lester’s derivations. This is a significant difference between his theory and mine, since my theory is strictly and absolutely deontological, but I was still charmed by what I saw as a parallel between our theories. Hence, I said that Lester’s theory “faces exactly the same problems” of defending “the practices of punishment, and compensation for damages, in the same way” as it defends property rights.
I now realize that this is not true, and I concede that Lester’s conception of liberty is coherent with a notion of punishment. Liberty, in Lester’s sense, does not by itself imply punishment, but aiming at it can give a good reason for punishment if we consider punishment a reactive imposition which can be helpful in minimizing initiated impositions. The helpfulness of punishment to this purpose is a distinct premise, but it is a ‘cheap’ premise, insofar as it is commonly held.
Lester’s papers on punishment, which he had linked to me, are also helpful:
2.4. Can minimization of impositions allow for both intellectual property and ordinary market competition?
It seems that Lester exposes himself to further objections with his defense of intellectual property, however, which was chiefly in his Against Against Intellectual Property: A Short Refutation of Meme Communism (written 2016).
For a given person S, if I can “constrain S’s want-satisfaction” merely by using my own materials to build an instantiation of S’s idea (presumably because S now has a market competitor in selling instantiations of the idea, and thus finds it more difficult to profit from the idea), it is not clear why ordinary market competitors (who compete in building instantiations of unowned ideas, such as a generic type of ice cream, or whatever) do not similarly impose constraints on each other’s want-satisfaction. That is, unless Lester appeals to the “imposed cost” vs “withheld benefit” distinction again, but this would clearly be building the theory of intellectual property into the liberty theory, and thus assuming his conclusion from the outset.
It is unclear how Lester could possibly defend the claim that competition to produce instantiations of unowned ideas produces a smaller total of impositions than competition to produce instantiations of owned ideas. And he doesn’t even try to develop such an argument: in arguing for intellectual property, Lester suddenly makes arguments from “the incentive to produce valuable ideas”, which has nothing to do with his original idea of minimizing imposed costs, and is hence irrelevant to his eleutherology.
3. Clarification of my own views
Having covered the above, I can now clarify my own views on welfare, rationality, and foundations.
3.1. Welfare nihilism
In my preliminary reply to Lester’s reply to my post about his 2019 paper, I said the following:
Due to my previous bad experiences with finding very unclear concepts at the core of all welfare theories, I have adopted a position of nihilism toward welfare theories, where I will criticize their use to defend policies I disagree with, but will also not use them to defend policies I do agree with. It is possible, in principle, that one of Lester’s linked texts can overcome my pessimism about welfare theories; we will see.
Having now looked at the many texts Lester linked from his post, my pessimism is unabated. Welfare theories are terrible and unhelpful. I must answer Lester’s complaint, however, when he said in part 2 of his later reply:
It is not psychologically possible to do this. We can’t help empathising. There is no way that you can honestly say that you have no idea whether a man screaming as he is being tortured has less welfare than someone sitting on a beach in the sunshine drinking a cocktail and smiling. It is just that your implicit theory of welfare is not formalised and precise.
I have no objection to this judgment! I am a logical behaviorist. I believe that the words “pain” and “agony” refer to exactly the former sorts of behaviors (screaming as you are being tortured) and “happiness” refers to exactly the latter sorts of behaviors (smiling). And it is an analytic truth that “happiness is a mental state that has more welfare than pain and agony”; someone would not be a competent language-user who did not agree to use these words in this way. But when someone applies the words pain or agony or happiness, or the relation has more welfare than, to mental states in the absence of indicating behaviors, then this is being unscientific; it may be inevitable to do this to some extent in practical life, but it would be reckless to build an important theoretical conclusion on such a judgment. And this is exactly what is being done in the comparisons of utility mentioned above, regardless whether they are done directly or via a thought-experiment: we are making a generalization about people generally being happier under one kind of institutional regime rather than in another. This cannot be defended.
Again, Lester had said (also in part 2):
A little normal human empathy is all that is required to see that a severely authoritarian society of great scarcity has less welfare than a relatively liberal (in the classical sense) one with great abundance.
Let us separate the claims about authoritarianism and about abundance.
- Regarding abundance, this has actually been disputed in academic literature, in the theory of the original affluent society, where hunter-gatherers are said to have lower standards of living but also fewer wants, and hence can be considered affluent.
- Regarding authoritarianism, every authoritarian regime claims that its specific interventions improve social welfare, even if authoritarianism in general doesn’t always do so.
I believe that both of these claims are wrong, but I do not believe that “a little normal human empathy is all that is required to see” this. Besides, Lester seems to believe that anarcho-capitalism has more welfare than every other regime, and while I am sympathetic to that idea (since it is flattering to my political views), still it takes more than “a little normal human empathy” to argue for it, if that can possibly be done. Again, social-democrats will equally claim that “a little normal human empathy is all that is required to see” that a society with a strong social safety net is happier than one without. The only way I can think to answer them is to follow the Austrians in telling these social-democrats that they are being unscientific in making such an utility comparison; it is up to Lester to try to do a better job, if he thinks he can do so.
3.2. Rationality
In my original post, I had said that “I believe welfarism in all its forms is irrational”. In his original reply to that, Lester linked a blog post arguing against the use of “irrational” to deride theories.
In reply to that post, I want to clarify that I did not mean this in the sense that it “reasons unsuccessfully” in some way.
I meant that welfarism is intrinsically opposed to the pursuit of truth in dialogical inquiry, due to how it permits violations of critical discussion norms in some contexts: e.g., an utilitarian believes that it is sometimes permissible to lie, and lying in critical discussions frustrates their goal of truth-seeking.
The welfarist may claim that his permissions are context-bound, i.e., he can only lie if he is not in the context of a critical discussion. But I can’t read his mind to tell whether he still believes himself to be in a critical discussion. Due to how people can’t read each other’s minds to know if the other person is about to believe himself to be in a circumstance where it is permissible to violate critical discussion norms, a moral theory which is compatible with the social possibility of truth-seeking dialogue must contain an absolute, context-free prohibition on all violations of critical discussion norms. This is a key element in my metaethics.
Maybe this sounds like an unusual way to say “irrational”. But I see reason as primarily the faculty of truth-seeking, and the truth ultimately cannot be sought without inquiry in critical discussions, as Agnes Callard argued in Open Socrates, and as Lester’s own critical rationalism requires.
3.3. Foundations
Similarly, my conception of “foundations” or “justifications” for a theory amounts simply to their defense in critical discussions; it is a dialectical conception. In this post, I have consistently talked about “defending” ideas and avoided talk about “ground”, “support”, “justify”, etc., to make that clearer.
In part 1 of his reply to my preliminary reply to his original reply to my original post about his 2019 paper, Lester expressed confusion as to why a natural-law theorist may be dialectically required to provide a metaethics to support his ethics:
I don’t see that they have any implied duty to do the “supporting” metaphysics. And that might imply an infinite regress as well.
This can only be clarified by appealing to how natural-law theories of ethics are actually criticized by their critics. Natural-law theories, broadly speaking, begin from a philosophical anthropology, which is a metaphysical account of human nature, and then derive axiology and deontology relative to the ideal standard of that nature. Sometimes there is a “state of nature” construct involved, as in Locke, but not always.
In chapter 6 of his textbook The Fundamentals of Ethics, Russ Shafer-Landau raises several common criticisms of natural-law theories of ethics:
- That there may be no “human nature” shared by all humans, conceived either as “animal nature”, as “innate human traits”, or as “common human traits”; (pp. 83–85)
- That the best account of human nature may involve no “natural purposes” (teleology); (pp. 86–90)
- That arguments relying on natural-law, such as those against abortion or same-sex marriage, often rely on ambiguous definitions of terms like “humanity” or “marriage” that assume the truth of the conclusion they are trying to prove, thereby begging the question rather than solving the moral issue; (pp. 90–92)
- More broadly, that nature provides no normative standard, since the only scientific natural laws are unbreakable descriptive laws such as those of physics, rather than the breakable prescriptive laws which natural-law theory appeals to. (pp. 92–93)
It is in order to answer such criticisms that a natural-law theorist must provide a defense of his metaphysical theories as being the best philosophical account of human nature, in a way that either motivates the adoption of teleology or defends the normative conclusions without using teleology, and so on for the other objections. Hence there is no regress, at least not simply from the demand for defenses of one’s arguments, which is an ordinary occurrence in philosophy; if it is somehow impossible to satisfy the critics of natural-law, this must be for some other reason.
Addition 2026-03-18: Lester replied to this post here; you may see that he commented the URL below also.
