Courses

Jason Brennan

Assistant Professor of Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy

Georgetown University

Jason Brennan (Ph.D., 2007, University of Arizona) is Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Chair and Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He specializes in politics, philosophy, and economics.
He is the author of Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016), Markets without Limits, with Peter Jaworski (Routledge Press, 2015), Compulsory Voting: For and Against, with Lisa Hill (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Why Not Capitalism? (Routledge Press, 2014), Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2011), and, with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
He is currently writing Global Justice as Global Freedom, with Bas van der Vossen, under contract with Oxford University Press. He is also co-editor, along with David Schmidtz and Bas Van der Vossen, of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism.

Blog Posts

Promises and the right to resist injustice

March 26, 2017
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Role of Government

I’ve been working on a project called When All Else Fails: Resistance to State Injustice. The thesis is of the book is simple: We have exactly the same rights of self-defense and defense of others against state injustice that we have against civilians. In the later chapters, I argue this holds true even if you are an agent of the government. (For instance, if a democratic president is about to commit an atrocity, his government-appointed bodyguards have the right to shoot him.) However, one argument for the other side goes roughly as follows: Government agents promise to follow

“America First!” and Anti-Social Communitarianism

February 11, 2017
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Free Markets and Capitalism

The problem with communitarianism is that many communitarians make for bad community members. Many of them are “society first, individual second!” to the point of being anti-social. They aren’t the kind of people you’d want to live near. Look, I get why people like community. I live in a fairly tight-knit community myself. We have little parades and fun runs. Various civics groups throw get-togethers all year long. The PTA works miracles. People know their neighbors. We have block parties. People come out to watch the various dad bands (and even the occasional mom band) play at the

In democracy, minorities are ignored and the voters are ignorant.

December 2, 2016
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Democracy and Voting

The following is the third installment in a four-part debate between Jason Brennan and Philip Pettit on the legitimacy of democracy as a system of social order. You can read Jason Brennan’s first statement here, and Philip Pettit’s first response here. Philip Pettit made some strong empirical claims: With equal universal suffrage, leaders can afford to ignore no one. With unequal suffrage, leaders might only serve the interests of the few. At the extreme, these problems do arise. If only 100 demographically similar people were entitled to vote, I’d expect them to vote selfishly at the expense

Debate: Is democracy overrated? Yes.

November 7, 2016
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Democracy and Voting

The following is the first installment in a four-part debate between Georgetown Professor Jason Brennan and Princeton Professor Philip Pettit on the merits of democracy as a system of social order. You can check out part two, Pettit's response to Brennan, here. "Is democracy overrated?" Yes, democracy is overrated. I agree that democracy is the best performing, most functional system we’ve tried so far. But while most philosophers approach democracy with religious reverence, I see it as nothing but a tool—a means to an end—and a flawed one at that. It’s merely a useful decision-making procedure

Halloween is for Irish people only; for anyone else, it’s racist cultural appropriation

October 31, 2016
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Free Speech

A year ago, lecturer Erika Christakis wrote an email criticizing Yale’s attempt to control students’ Halloween costumes. Christakis suggested that students, as adults, are capable of policing themselves, that the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable costumes is contestable, and that Halloween is holiday meant to allow people to indulge in certain transgressions. Students harassed her until she left her job. You can watch here as a mob of students at Yale University surrounded her husband, Nicholas Christakis, to browbeat him into submission after he stood up for Erika. What’s