Those who keep criticising us libertarians for being too dogmatic about our insistence on property rights as the source of other rights, look upon the weird controversy over reserving a few hours for women at the Harvard gym, and repent.<\/p>\n
For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.<\/p>\n
An employee who belongs to an orthodox Jewish faith wants to cut a Friday evening meeting short, because he cannot be in a car when Sabbath starts at sundown. Should we accommodate his request? Muslim employees request some changes in meal timings during Ramzan. Should we accommodate them? Obviously, all such requests will cause some <\/em>inconvenience to others.\u00a0 Is the cost too much? Are the beneficiaries a few or many? Are the the benefits worth it?\u00a0 Are the beneficiaries willing to make other accommodations to compensate?<\/p>\n To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people’s religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can<\/em> state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.<\/p>\n Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases.\u00a0 There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those who keep criticising us libertarians for being too dogmatic about our insistence on property rights as the source of other rights, look upon the weird controversy over reserving a few hours for women at the Harvard gym, and repent. For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[93,92,72,36,91],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}