A long-standing criticism of libertarianism is that it presupposes an unrealistic and undesirable conception of individual identity and of the conditions necessary for human flourishing.
In large part, it is a response to the abuses of capitalist development and its underlying and essentially uncritical conception of individual liberty, which tolerated, and even legitimized, the exploitation of working classes and colonial peoples.
Or perhaps the French trust in exam-enforced meritocracy and public secularism is the obverse of the cultural emphasis on psychology — on a conception of individual character that's less dependent on morality and the capacity for change than on deeply ingrained, even immutable tendencies and traits.
In his major judicial opinions, Brandeis expressed mistrust of both the unlimited exercise of governmental power in the name of the people and a conception of individual liberty resulting in the agreement of a few persons to monopolize an economic activity affecting everyone.
Calls for more democracy are common in Chinese politics, but they almost always refer to improving the party's decision-making bureaucracy and making its lower-ranking officials more accountable rather than promoting a broader conception of individual freedom or political competition.
Smith also had a more restricted conception of individual rights than do contemporary libertarians.
Although the idea of social justice based in a social contract is mentioned in Plato's Republic and was known even earlier, the Republic's conception of individual justice is distinctively virtue ethical.
Starting with Michael Sandel's (1982) famous criticism of Rawls, a number of critics charged that liberalism was necessarily premised on an abstract conception of individual selves as pure choosers, whose commitments, values and concerns are possessions of the self, but never constitute the self.
While Strawson (2009: Part 5) favours the Retentionalist conception of individual specious presents, he does not see the lack of direct experiential connections between successive stream-phases as in the least problematic; but since Strawson also believes that both the Modest and Strong Continuity Theses are false, this is not surprising.
For the artists, this means altering their conception of individual versus collaborative creation.
