NEWS FOR THE LIBERTARIANS: THE MORAL TRADITION ALREADY CONTAINS THE LIBERTARIAN PREMISES

Arkes claims that the libertarians do not seem to understand that their concerns are already incorporated in the classic understanding of the connection between the logic of morals and the logic of law. To that classic understanding, they run the risk of offering nothing more than a corrosive moral skepticism. For that traditional understanding already contains in its moral logic built-in burdens on people who should legislate casually, with moral pretensions but with no moral substance. He argues further that the libertarians seem to have missed these anchoring points; that the claims of liberty flow only to those beings people call "moral agents"; that the libertarian argument is irreducibly a moral argument; and that when people understand the genuine moral requirements that attach to the making of laws, they realized that they have lifted the bars for legislation.