This article applies unified libertarian theory (ULT) to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, a conflict often dismissed or overlooked in modern scholarship. In reexamining the war, this study argues that Japan’s initiation of hostilities met the threshold of justified coercion under ULT’s standards. Justified coercion does not mean morally correct but rather that the casus belli falls within the descriptive framework of state behavior outlined in “Unified Libertarian Theory: Genesis” (duHoffmann 2025) and will likely not incur the costs associated with unjustified coercion. During the lead-up to the war, Japan was surrounded by hostile empires, vulnerable to economic strangulation, underestimated, and facing a deteriorating security environment. Its interest in securing Korea as a defensive buffer and deterring Russian encroachment was grounded not in an ideology of expansionism but in the preservation of national autonomy. The failure of diplomacy and the demonstrated bad faith of the Russian Empire created a condition of necessity through Russia’s eastward expansion in which preemptive action became the only viable path to survival. Finally, the war’s execution was restrained, targeted, and concluded with a negotiated peace, satisfying the requirement of proportionality. Under ULT, the Russo-Japanese War emerges as a case in which offensive war functioned as a defense of liberty. When evaluating Japan’s strategy and situation holistically and as a response to structural vulnerability rather than simply as a bid for domination, the result is a picture of disciplined statecraft. In doing so, this article affirms ULT’s central claim that force, when bound by ethical clarity and strategic restraint, can serve the cause of liberty without corrupting it.
In this rejoinder, we return to the question of the ownership status of public property by criticizing Dominiak, Israel, and Fegley (2025). According to these authors, the public domain is legitimately owned collectively by domestic taxpayers in virtue of the so-called accession principle. The present paper demonstrates that the use Dominiak, Israel, and Fegley make of the accession principle is untenable since it (a) runs counter to the very purpose of introducing accession to libertarian theory as another mode of title acquisition, and (b) predicts conflict-generating property claims. We also argue that even if the approach under criticism were correct, it would fail to offer what DIF believe it does: a non-ideal theory comprising policy recommendations for politicians in power. In addition, the paper challenges the second pillar of the approach of these three scholars: their ideas for public property management. As we show, those nostrums are at odds with some elementary insights of Austrian economics.
This article defends a formal argument concerning whether a group of rational agents ( A , B , and C ) can be rationally justified in killing a fellow rational agent ( D ) on utilitarian grounds. I do not contest the utilitarian calculus, and I do not claim that utilitarians derive morality from instrumental rationality. I argue instead for a general condition on when a normative claim binds an agent. A claim of the form “ S ought to φ” gives S a reason that S cannot rationally reject only if S already shares the end from which the claim is generated or if S’s acting otherwise is demonstrably incoherent. Utilitarian prescriptions to eliminate a nonconsenting agent satisfy neither condition with respect to that agent. There is no contradiction in D ’s continuing to pursue survival, and D is under no rational compulsion to adopt the end of aggregate welfare maximization. The utilitarian conclusion, however sound within its own framework, therefore carries no authority over D . Since the lethal coercion of a rational agent requires a reason that binds that agent, and the utilitarian prescription supplies none, A , B , and C are not rationally justified in killing D . I call this result the universalizability trap, and I distinguish it carefully from Kantian universalization and from Alan Gewirth’s argument to the principle of generic consistency.
This article introduces the concept of state culture to describe the subtle but profound ways in which the modern state shapes norms, values, language, and social conventions. Although property rights and formal freedoms may persist, cultural life is increasingly influenced—if not dominated—by state interventions. Through education, media control, financial incentives, and regulation, the state fosters a cultural environment that supports its own legitimacy and expansion. This has given rise to phenomena such as wokeness, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) compliance, and cancel culture, which are not spontaneous expressions of civil society but symptoms of a long-standing cultural distortion induced by state power. Many seemingly private decisions—such as corporate censorship and social ostracism—occur within this distorted cultural framework and cannot be interpreted as fully voluntary. As such, libertarians face a dilemma: While they must defend property rights, they must also recognize that culture itself can be corrupted through systematic violations of property rights. Drawing on insights from Murray Rothbard, the article proposes that state institutions, as long as they exist, should be operated in ways that align with the cultural norms that would emerge in a truly free society. The goal is not cultural neutrality—impossible under statism—but the active support of values conducive to liberty: private property, personal responsibility, truth, family, and voluntary cooperation.
The main aspiration of the present article is to elucidate what it would mean for the paradox of blackmail to be solved rather than dissolved . We begin by increasing the sense of paradoxicality of blackmail. To this end, we formalize the paradox. We demonstrate that it relies on a certain prima facie plausible principle of closure (what we call disjunctive closure ). This principle is quite unlike the principle which holds that the permissibility of action A and the permissibility of action B render doing A and B together permissible. On the principle of disjunctive closure, the paradox of blackmail seems to breed a genuine contradiction. Having adequately formulated the paradox, we turn to a normative point: What would count as a satisfactory solution to the paradox of blackmail? Informed by the treatment of paradoxes in logic, we argue that to take the sting out of the paradox of blackmail, we must embrace its core commitments and still explain how apparently contradictory verdicts might nevertheless arise. The upshot of the above considerations only strengthens our contention that what we proposed as a solution to the paradox of blackmail in Dominiak and Wysocki (2026) is indeed an adequate solution rather than a mere dissolution .
