Nicolás Maloberti

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Fellow at Liberty Fund

The last decade has produced a large literature on the public policy implications of behavioral research. Policy makers, in turn, have increasingly relied on “choice architecture” or “nudges” to address some of the consequences of the individuals’ judgment and decision-making biases documented by that research. However, the possibilities for mitiga...

Standard rationales for the illegality of markets in votes are based on concerns over the undue influence of wealth and the erosion of civic responsibility that would result from the commodification of votes. I present an alternative rationale based on how the mere alienability of votes alters the strategic setting faced by political actors. The in...

Discussions on global justice rest on the implicit assumption that a substantial reduction of the costs of exit from poor countries is not likely to have a significant positive effect on these countries’ institutions and, thus, on their prospects for sustained economic growth. Given the theoretical and empirical support for the contrary causal hypo...

This article formulates a deterrence theory of punishment based on Lockean premises. Following authors such as Warren Quinn and Daniel Farrell, it is claimed that a justification for the right to punish must be built upon the recognition of the importance of a right to issue retaliatory threats. Contrary to those authors, however, the articulation...

The last decade has produced a large literature on the public policy implications of behavioural research. Policymakers, in turn, have increasingly relied on ‘choice architecture’ or ‘nudges’ to address some of the consequences of individuals' judgment and decision-making biases documented by that research. However, the possibilities for mitigating...

This article questions the theoretical value of the standard justification model of the state on the basis of the uniqueness of the long-term equilibrium characterized by the establishment of compulsory protection schemes. Contrary to the suggestion underlying recurrent concerns over liberal theorists’ traditional reliance on the theoretical constr...

I argue that Tomasi’s most fundamental “bleeding heart libertarian” insights are not adequately served by Rawls’s lexical framework and his idealized theory of institutional choice. Perhaps paradoxically, using Rawls’s lexical framework to articulate Tomasi’s declared concerns for both economic liberty and “social justice” gives the latter concern...

This article focuses on the following three novel and original philosophical approaches to classical liberalism: Den Uyl and Rasmussen’s perfectionist argument from meta-norms, Gaus’s justificatory model, and Kukathas’s conscience-based theory of authority. None of these three approaches are utilitarian or consequentialist in character. Neither do...

Could we plausibly believe in the fundamental tenets of classical liberalism and, at the same time, support the state’s raising of immigration barriers? The thesis of this paper is that if we accept the main tenets of classical liberalism as essentially correct, we should regard immigration barriers as essentially illegitimate. Considered under ide...

This article formulates a deterrence theory of punishment based on Lockean premises. Following authors such as Warren Quinn and Daniel Farrell, it is claimed that a justification for the right to punish must be built upon the recognition of the importance of a right to issue retaliatory threats. Contrary to those authors, however, the articulation...

One way in which liberal theories have argued for the legitimacy of the state is by means of a principle of implicit consent. Since Hume, critics have argued that the price of dissent would be too high for such a strategy to be successful. Some theorists have replied that the high price involved in not agreeing to do something does not need to be a...

The most predominant liberal argument for the state is an argument that links the moral permissibility of coercing any given subject, with the benefits yielded to that very same subject. It is not difficult to understand arguments from implicit consent, hypothetical contracts, and fairness as all instances of this type. Within this type of argument...

A critical review of Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism without Inequality.

Robert Nozick famously argued that acknowledging that individuals have certain fundamental natural or prepolitical rights to their lives and property does not preclude the legitimacy of the state, as the individualist anarchist would claim. The reason is that “a state would arise from anarchy. . . even though no one intended this or tried to bring...

The classical formulation of libertarianism seems to be incompatible with the requirements of political legitimacy. Some libertarians have endorsed this result, denying that the state is legitimate. This paper argues, however, that the particular nature of that incompatibility represents a problem for the classical formulation of libertarianism. It...

In “Why Libertarians Should Reject Positive Rights,” Joshua Katz offers a critical response to the argument I developed in “Libertarianism and the Possibility of the Legitimate State.” In this rejoinder, I claim that Katz’s response fails on two accounts. First, it fails to grasp the nature of the problem my article was ultimately concerned with. S...

To hold that individuals' rights people could not permissibly be violated even for the sake of a better protection of those rights, or for the protection of a greater number of rights, has been claimed to be paradoxical. Certainly, there must be a reason for giving rights a central importance in our moral thinking. But why is it that this very same...

This article explains the several problems arising from the common ownership of maritime resources, and the advantages of a system of transferable fishing quotas and of other similar allocations of property rights.