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Libertarian approaches to the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract This study examines the practical implications of libertarian theories of justice in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. First, we show that the libertarian central value of freedom does not just include economic and political autonomy but also one's right to life. Secondly, we demonstrate that lockdown measures are acceptable to libertarianism if they are appropriately implemented. Nevertheless, in contrast to a utilitarian approach, libertarians reject excessive interventions, such as contact‐tracing mobile apps, even if these promote people's welfare. Thirdly, we show that there is a broad spectrum of lockdown implementation methods based on differing interpretations of Lockean property rights. By comparing three kinds of libertarianism, we outline a set of libertarian proposals that use markets for the exchange of permission slips to go out during a lockdown. We then show that libertarianism offers a reasonable and non‐conflicting resolution for the trade‐off between health and people's freedom, thereby illustrating the suitability and legitimacy of a libertarian response to the current crisis.

resolves this hard case, taking proper account of both uncertainty and inequality.
It goes without saying that libertarianism values freedom very highly. 5 Consequently, libertarians often consider coercive interventions to be violations of basic individual rights. Some legal restrictions on individual activities have been introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, and because of the conflict between such restrictions and libertarian core values, libertarianism has been mostly ignored in attempts to defend such policies. At the same time, libertarianism has been abused by those who believe that any kind of intervention is unacceptable. In contrast to that belief, we demonstrate here that libertarianism offers normatively plausible ways of addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, we argue that lockdown measures are acceptable if they are appropriately implemented.
Based on John Locke's concept of property rights, a broad spectrum of libertarianisms and libertarian responses to the pandemic can be formulated, ranging from "right" to "left." By examining these variants of libertarianism and their different policy implications, we show that libertarianism has a plausible way of dealing with the pandemic and its effects. Furthermore, our study shows that it is unreasonable to oppose lockdowns and similar measures in the early stage of a pandemic, when infection spreads dramatically and risks are still largely unknown. 6 Significantly, many of the opponents of such measures are (or consider themselves to be) libertarians of some flavor, but a plausible extension of Lockean libertarianism cautiously supports such measures, even though there are various ways of implementing them. Hence, we also demonstrate here that these opponents' hostility to lockdowns is not coherent with key libertarian values.
libertarianisms. It is also a natural extension of Nozick's argument.
Furthermore, the clean hands principle can apply to a wide range of practical issues, including several issues arising owing to the current pandemic. Specifically, with this principle, one can assess whether and how coercive intervention, such as lockdown measures, can be justified from a libertarian point of view. As in Nozick's argument, the normative requirement is that people must be protected from (even apparently innocent) actions (by others) that could cause a serious threat to their lives.
Although the topic of vaccination raises important moral issues in the current circumstances, 12 with difficult trade-offs between risk reduction and individual freedoms for different age cohorts, it is outside the scope of the present paper. Here we focus on lockdowns and the enforcement of social distancing. 13

| COERCIVE INTERVENTIONS IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Since early 2020 many countries have enforced various measures, such as social (or physical) distancing, to curb the spread of COVID-19. One of the strictest of such measures is lockdown, which comes with the closing of schools and restaurants, restrictions on gatherings, and limitations on the use of public transportation. If the reported number of new infections dramatically increases, an entire city is shut down. Such lockdown measures can be seen as grave interventions in the private sphere, however, and for this reason, there are many people who oppose such interventions. Anti-lockdown protests have occurred in the United States and elsewhere, with the first noteworthy protest taking place in Michigan on April 15, 2020. According to the protesters, lockdown measures violate individual freedom.
Can libertarians endorse lockdown measures? Our answer to this question is positive, provided that these measures are implemented reasonably. People's activities generate non-negligible negative external effects if no restrictions are imposed. Moreover, these effects are unacceptably severe, particularly for the elderly and people with certain disabilities and/or underlying diseases-or, simply put, for "the vulnerable." It has been argued that social distancing and related protective measures are a "public good" that is served to people in the face of a collective action problem involving non-negligible negative externalities. 14 Although people make an effort to maintain social distance to reduce the risk of infection, and although altruistic concern may motivate people to voluntarily implement various protective measures, such voluntary actions are not sufficient to cope with a pandemic. 15 Furthermore, the risk of infection remains unclear in the early stage of a pandemic. For these reasons, the issue can be seen as an urgent collective action problem, which is an important cause for justifiable coercive intervention by a libertarian state. Since people's lives are at risk in an unacceptable and avoidable manner, it seems that the Nozickean minimal state can endorse certain lockdown measures.
Another important policy implication of libertarianism concerns the case of contact-tracing mobile apps, which have been shown in scientific research to be helpful in controlling the spread of  While introducing such apps is expected to promote social welfare in ways that utilitarians can be reasonably expected to advocate, libertarians would either reject such apps, or accept them only with strong reservations, because they violate people's fundamental right to privacy. Moreover, the infringement on this fundamental right is a serious one. Information about people's personal lives collected by tracing apps may be abused, for example (especially if this information falls into the hands of third parties through hacking or a data leak, which is a non-negligible risk). And even the mere possibility of such abuse may encroach on people's social and economic lives. We believe that for this reason, libertarianism rightly rejects sacrificing the individual right to privacy to serve some social or collective objective.
We want to emphasize here that libertarians do not dismiss the relevance of economic situations or health conditions. On the con- Thirdly, libertarianism involves a concept of justice in acquisition, called "the Lockean proviso." The Lockean proviso is a condition for entitling one to acquire and possess previously unowned goods by expending labor. In its original form, the Lockean proviso holds that we can acquire unowned natural resources when there is "enough, and as good, left in common for others." Nozick interprets this proviso as a principle of justice that allows one to acquire original resources when one leaves enough resources for others or compensates them. By this principle, no one is made worse off than they would be if the acquired resources were used collectively as in a "state of nature." This echoes Locke's argument regarding the right to property.
While libertarians largely agree about the first two characteristics, they interpret the Lockean proviso differently. Rightlibertarianism, for which Nozick's theory is representative, interprets it as a "first come, first served" principle, as long as it does not make anyone worse off, but left-libertarians criticize this interpretation because it entails that a single person could be allowed to occupy all of the natural lands if they guarantee other people a meager life. Leftlibertarianism holds that natural resources belong to everyone in an egalitarian manner. 21 In other words, while right-libertarians interpret the Lockean proviso in a minimal sense such that it merely disallows an appropriator to make anyone worse off than in the state of nature, left-libertarians interpret the Lockean proviso such that an appropriator is required to leave enough so that everyone else can enjoy an equal share of natural resources. (In Michael Otsuka's words, the proviso states that "[y]ou may acquire previously unowned worldly resources if and only if you leave enough so that everyone else can acquire an equally advantageous share of unowned worldly resources". 22 ) or a disability. The corresponding theories are called "resource-based left-libertarian" and "opportunity-based left-libertarian," respectively. Despite these differences, all libertarians agree that it is crucial to protect people's lives, such that they can fully exercise their rights.
For this reason, all variants of libertarianism require the minimal state to offer people protection against others doing things to them, unless they voluntarily agree with whatever is being done to them. Everything else being equal, if something is harmful, it must be prohibited, and if someone harms people, they ought to compensate those people for the harm done. Beyond this, restrictions of people's ac- permission slips each day. The question is how these slips are to be distributed among the people. According to libertarians, market exchange is the right distribution method, but they disagree about the right way to allocate the slips initially. This difference boils down to the different interpretations of the Lockean proviso.
The first method to be considered here is a centralized online auction for permission slips. In this auction, the government sells a fixed number of slips one by one after publicly announcing the details. (That fixed number is 200 per day in the above scenario.) People who are interested participate simultaneously in the auction, which can take place on a government website or on the website of some agency hired by the government to execute the auction. Each participant makes their bid, and whoever bids the highest value obtains the permission slip. Assuming that the auction is well organized, the distribution of slips is efficient. 27 Many types of auctioning mechanisms have been proposed in the auction theory literature. In this case, the individual values of slips are assumed not to be strongly correlated with each other, and thus the second-price sealed-bit auction is a reasonable candidate. 28 An advantage of the centralized auction method is that it is financially sound. During a severe pandemic, the government can be expected to face financial difficulties as significant parts of the private sector temporarily need subsidies and medical workers need to be compensated. Hence, the revenue from the auction may be indispensable for the government. A problem for this distribution method, however, is that it might be difficult for vulnerable people to obtain permission slips. Billionaires may place very high bids that cannot be beaten by poor (or even less rich) people. The result could receive in this way to be insufficient. To remedy this inefficiency, in the next step people can exchange their slips in the market. These exchanges are not necessarily organized by the government; private online platforms or any system can be used for voluntary exchanges.
That is, transactions can take place in decentralized markets. The government's role (after the initial distribution) is merely to protect people's property rights in this process. Because of this exchange process, if people prefer to stay at home, they can safely sell their slips. In return, they obtain monetary transfers from those who desire to go out more often. Since this procedure takes account of individuals' preferences, the final distribution of slips is efficient. This is a consequence of what welfare economists call Edgeworth's limit theorem, which states that the outcome of decentralized markets is efficient if the number of participants is large and property rights are properly protected. 29 Notably, all individuals have the same degree of freedom in this method, which implies that a certain type of equality is guaranteed.
Moreover, since people voluntarily exchange their slips depending on their preferences, health conditions, and other circumstances, the final outcome is considered equitable, despite the final unequal distribution of slips. This method is aligned ideologically with resourcebased left-libertarianism. Specifically, the equal initial assignment corresponds to a resource-based left-libertarian interpretation of the Lockean proviso. Resourcists, for whom Steiner is representative, argue that natural resources must be equally distributed among people initially, and that each person must be able to exercise their right to the assigned resource and voluntary transactions. An additional advantage of this method is that its administrative cost should be relatively low since the government's tasks are limited to the initial equal distribution of permission slips and the protection of property rights. Since there may be various obstacles to organizing a centralized auction in the circumstance of a pandemic, this advantage could be crucial.
However, this method is susceptible to the same criticism as is often leveled against resource-based left-libertarianism, which only cares about the equality of external resources, a concept that captures the usual resources, such as wealth, money, land, and means of production, but also the permission slips in the current analysis. The criticism is that this method does not fully recognize the differences in internal resources, such as individual talents and abilities. 30 In the present context, personal health conditions should be considered a key internal resource. Personal health matters because the vulnerable cannot fully enjoy their liberties-for them, the risks associated with going out may make it effectively impossible to realize anything approaching their preferences. In other words, the 20 percent limitation is not safe enough for the vulnerable. Of course, they can sell their slips in the auction, but money cannot wholly compensate for their involuntary stay at home.
A third method aims to compensate the vulnerable for their greater disadvantage. This method attempts to tackle the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph by substituting an opportunity metric for the resourcist metric. An opportunity metric is a hybrid of external and internal resources. A person with low internal resources is considered less advantaged even if they receive the same amount of external resources as the average person. By this method, the vulnerable would be compensated in such a way that they could gain (much) more money than in the resource-based scheme. In practice, the opportunity metric method can be implemented in the same two steps as the resourcist metric method: the first step is the initial assignment, and the second is market exchange. The first step requires a modification, however, while the second stays unchanged to guarantee efficiency. Since personal health conditions and internal resources cannot be transferred, the compensation for the vulnerable is implemented by adjusting the initial assignment of external resources (i.e. through the permission slips).
One way in which the government could implement such a non-uniform initial assignment of permission slips is the following.
Assume that the total number of permission slips to go out on Tuesdays is half of that on Mondays. Because of this, Tuesdays are safer days to go out than Mondays, and therefore someone who belongs to a vulnerable group and who wants to go out might choose to go out on a Tuesday rather than on a Monday. The availability of permission slips for such lower-risk days (i.e. Tuesdays) allows people to choose a degree of risk, thereby increasing their freedom, and helps to satisfy the preferences of the vulnerable, who will try to buy more Tuesday slips. The government could assign more Tuesday slips to the vulnerable, making it easier for them to go outside (relatively) safely. Furthermore, the price of Tuesday slips will be higher than that of Monday slips because the supply of Tuesday slips is smaller and the demand is expected to be higher, and consequently if someone belonging to a vulnerable group sold their Tuesday slip in the market, they would receive a greater monetary transfer (than if they sold their Monday slip).
The result of this varied initial assignment involves a more equi-  can also be refined by using a permission slip method. Assume, for example, that each store or shop issues a fixed number of tickets that can be exchanged for permission slips. The number of tickets issued by each store is determined by the government in their attempt to control the pandemic. Since business activities are restricted by the number of tickets available to each store, we could call this a quasilockdown measure. In this way, restricting business can be combined with a permission scheme. A significant difference between a permission slip scheme like those considered above and more common measures is that the former incorporates incentives through permission slip ownership and exchange, whereas the latter does not.
From a libertarian perspective it is important to respect incentives, and this may lead to improvements of some measures that have been used in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, we want to emphasize that considered libertarian approaches can serve as powerful ethical and political benchmarks for resolving urgent crises in public health in general. By using markets, libertarianism can balance efficiency and equality. Furthermore, provided that people's lives and health are secured, libertarianism fully respects people's liberties and voluntary actions. These points are crucial in a social crisis. As shown by a series of works by Amartya Sen, 31 serious crises can occur when people's entitlement of exchange is not protected (and the crisis becomes more disastrous without democracy). Taking this into consideration, the libertarian approaches become (even) more appealing, especially in the case of (potential) emergency situations that may require restrictions of people's liberties. The approaches considered here identify what kinds of restrictions are reasonably acceptable and, more importantly, prevent the dysfunction of markets, which can cause additional social crises through deprivation of the entitlement of exchange. Hence, in addition to its other virtues, libertarianism is preferable from the point of view of social stability.

| CONCLUDING REMARKS
This study has examined a libertarian perspective on government responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we argued for the legitimacy of lockdown measures, and we showed how libertarian justice could be achieved through voluntary participation in a market mechanism in the lockdown situation. Additionally, we argued that, in contrast to utilitarians, libertarians rightly reject excessive government intervention, such as contact-tracing mobile apps, even if these promote people's welfare. We believe that libertarianism offers a reasonable resolution for the trade-off between health and people's freedom in the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We proposed three ways of using market exchange to increase liberty during the pandemic. Table 1 summarizes these methods and their outcomes. Each corresponds to a certain concept of libertarian justice. We believe that the third method, which tries to equalize opportunities for all people, is the most appropriate way of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic-it can secure liberties for all, and simultaneously deliver sufficient compensation for the vulnerable.
It cannot be dismissed that the vulnerable tend to suffer from COVID-19 in ways for which they are not responsible, and this method takes that into account. 32 One key question remains, however: How do we measure these people's social and health damage? This is a task for future research.