In the context of their response to Barbara Fried's vigorous critique of leftlibertarianism, Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka offer a compelling reason for anyone with liberal egalitarian inclinations to take libertarianism seriously. 1 As they see it, the dominant strand of liberal egalitarianism follows in the footsteps of Rawls and focuses on questions about how to organize the social institutions that divide the fruits of cooperation. In contrast, they point out that libertarian theorizing begins with an earlier question, that of how an individual or group of individuals can come to own the natural resources or artifacts used in the production of these fruits. Moreover, they contend that the answer to this question partly determines the appropriate division of the fruits of cooperation, or at least has the potential to do so.In its weakest form, this claim should be uncontroversial. Insofar as there are any natural rights at all, surely they must be taken into consideration in assessing the justice of whatever social institutions directly affect the realization or violation of those rights. More specifically, insofar as libertarian theorizing identifies natural rights of property ownership, social institutions related to the

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The existence of global poverty is uncontroversial. None would deny that there are people in this world who suffer not only relative but absolute deprivation.Recognizing this fact forces those of us who live relatively affluent lives in relatively affluent countries to consider what obligations we have to improve the lot of impoverished people around the world. Those who reject the view that we have extensive obligations to distant strangers often appeal to a distinction between negative and positive duties. Negative duties, we can imagine them saying, are duties not to harm others. They are willing to concede that such duties are stringent, which is to say that they are not easily overridden, but they assert that duties not to harm cannot ground a general obligation to the global poor.Instead, they see any such general obligation as necessarily grounded in positive duties, or duties to help. On one version of the argument, these positive duties are not properly considered duties at all. Helping is instead at most supererogatory and never required. On another version, positive duties count as genuine duties, but are seen as far less stringent than negative duties and therefore more easily overridden. Purported obligations to provide assistance to distant strangers suffering from poverty turn out to be particularly weak, or so it is claimed, because they are properly subordinated to a host of positive duties of assistance to family, friends, community members and fellow citizens, as well as a permission to give special consideration to one's own interests and projects.There are several ways to resist this line of argument. To begin with, one might reject the distinction between negative and positive duties as conceptually confused. One might, for instance, argue that not helping just is a form of harming, which would be to deny that we can even distinguish between

John Harsanyi has offered an argument grounded in Bayesian decision theory that purports to show that John Rawls's original position analysis leads directly to utilitarian conclusions. After explaining why a prominent Rawlsian line of response to Harsanyi's argument fails, I argue that a seemingly innocuous Bayesian rationality assumption, the continuity axiom, is at the heart of a fundamental disagreement between Harsanyi and Rawls. The most natural way for a Rawlsian to respond to Harsanyi's line of analysis, I argue, is to reject continuity. I then argue that this Rawlsian response fails as a defence of the difference principle, and I raise some concerns about whether it makes sense to posit the discontinuities needed to support the other elements of Rawls's view, although I suggest that Rawls may be able to invoke discontinuity to vindicate part of his first principle of justice.

My aims in this paper are to describe and motivate the adoption of what I call a contextual approach to political philosophy. I will first provide a brief characterization of contextualism. I will then contrast contextualism against more common approaches to political philosophy, which I call idealist or schematic, and indicate the problems I see with those approaches and the relative advantages of contextualism. By doing this, I hope to demonstrate the need for further work exploring the possibilities of contextualism.