A Brief Summary of Michael Otsuka’s “Self-Ownership and Equality, A Lockean Reconciliation”
Michael Otsuka’s position, as outlined in “Self-Ownership and Equality,” puts him fairly strongly on the left. This is because he advocates an egalitarian position which he hopes to put forward as not incompatible with self-ownership, as Cohen would like to argue. He puts forward the thesis that equality of access to welfare between individuals of differing capacities to derive welfare from their resources can theoretically be achieved through an egalitarian distribution of initially unowned worldly resources, as a matter of contingent fact. In that regard, Otsuka is not a hard-left end-all egalitarian, but is by far the left-est of the authors in Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics (Peter Vallentyne) I’ve read so far; namely, Robert Nozick (who is undoubtedly similar in his “Lockean” libertarian approach, and who Otsuka borrows from a little bit but obviously contradicts on some important points), Hillel Steiner, and Phillip Van Parijs. The course of his article is as follows, briefly.
