Libertarian Responses to Pandemics

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a profound challenge to libertarianism, creating a severe tension between public health imperatives and the protection of individual liberty. In response, a "New Generation" of libertarians—often termed post-Nozickians—has developed accommodating arguments that justify state-imposed restrictions by "positivizing" or "moralizing" the concept of liberty. This article argues that such a conceptual transformation incurs an unnecessary theoretical cost. Instead, I demonstrate that the "Old Generation" framework (traditional Nozickian right-libertarianism), grounded in a strict conception of negative liberty, retains sufficient resources to address pandemic crises effectively without abandoning its core principles. Specifically, the article examines less liberty-infringing alternatives, such as a market-based system of "tradable mobility permits" and the use of incentive structuring to mitigate the "unilateralist curse." I conclude that a fruitful path forward for libertarian theory involves synthesizing the conceptual consistency of the Old Generation with the empirical rigor and social-scientific orientation emphasized by the New Generation.