In Politics, Aristotle argues that to lead a flourishing life, it is imperative that all free men embrace their responsibility in the political system, thereby protecting the interests of their personal lives, social class, and community, as well as instilling virtue in oneself through civil servitude and leadership. Consistent with this theory is the notion, as described by our political philosopher, that inherent human nature holds men to the conviction that they should participate in governmental proceedings, as he finds, “soul and body are the basic constituents of an animal, the soul is the natural ruler; the body the natural subject.” (8). In this statement, one can decipher that Aristotle believes that each citizen rules in how the city-state is governed through a democratic system and is ruled by obeying the laws and keeping allegiance towards the governing body. In the opening pages of Book I, Aristotle produces a strong declaration about those who do not wish to take part in politics, “…human is by nature a political animal, and that anyone who is without a city-state, not by luck but by nature, is either a poor specimen or else super human…for someone with such a nature is at the same time eager for war, like an isolated piece on a board game.” (4). As the collection of political theory progresses, Aristotle examines the necessity of an established community, governing body, social hierarchy, and inter-household status ranking in living a perfectly joyous and happy life, however we first must decide what exactly constitutes this supposed “flourishing life” in ancient Greece.
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Any theory of ownership must always answer the challenge of how initially unowned things can come to be justly owned. Intuitively, the world-ownership hypothesis—that a person may appropriate any number of un-owned resources in the world as long as some conditions are met—faces the objection (among others) that it seems like an arbitrary deviation from an equal-share hypothesis, which would entitle one to an nth of those un-owned resources. This, however, is merely an intuitive claim, reflecting more of an intellectual discomfort rather than a clear picture of the origins of entitlements.
While we have yet to settle on any such picture, other intuitions can present us with a different picture. Israel Kirzner’s article, “Entrepreneurship, Entitlement, and Economic Justice” (1978) provides us with an excellent intuition as to how else these entitlements could come about, through appeal to the idea of value: the chief reason why we gain our entitlements to property is because we have created an economic value in it.
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In Original Rights and Just Redistribution, Hillel Steiner attempts to answer three questions: to what sorts of things do we have original property rights?; how do we distinguish these sorts of things to which we have non-original property rights?; and finally, who counts as being one of ‘us’ with these rights? He begins with the concept of self-ownership: for someone to have any rights at all, he must not be part of another’s bundle of possessions. After establishing that laboring within’s one domain produces products within one’s domain, he asks how initially unowned things outside of one’s domain becomes justly ownable. He concludes that our equal original property rights entitle us to an “equal share of (at least) raw natural resources.”
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[Readings come from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Part II, Sections I & II]
Locke’s Theory of Acquisition
Nozick’s goal in this section of AS&U is to, in his words, “introduce an additional bit of complexity into the structure of the entitlement theory.” To do this, he uses as a starting point Locke’s approach to justice in property acquisition—namely, that ownership of an object originates in one’s mixing of labor with that object. Nozick then proceeds to ask the standard gamut of questions calling attention to some difficulties in Locke’s theory of acquisition, like whether dumping a can of tomato juice in the ocean constitutes “mixing one’s labor” with the ocean. Essentially, the questions seek the strict boundary between what constitutes a mixing of labor sufficient for just acquisition and what does not. Under the Lockean notion of acquisition, it seems that one naïve interpretation would say that improving upon an object entails full ownership of the object. Of course, as Nozick points out, if the stock of improvable unowned objects is limited, this view is unfeasible. He uses the appropriation of a grain of sand as an example of one’s appropriation removing another’s liberty (as Hohfeld uses the word) to act on a previously unowned object, but intuitively suggests that this particular removal is not problematic. The central concern, he says, “is whether appropriation of an unowned object worsens the situation of others.”
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I don’t think I’ve covered feminism anywhere in my blog, so I’d like to quickly render my position for reader reference. It’s certainly more nuanced than what I’ve provided with the following, but this will be a start. I bring this up because I was recently reviewing Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, which portrays a society run solely by women. It’s also been the object of a renewed wave of radical separatist feminism, which often is based on the premise of some sort of fundamental dissimilarity between men and women that makes civil society with both genders unacceptable.
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February 20th, 2009
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John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) is a majestic tale of a prophecy, a king, his wizardly guardian, and the many heroes of his quest. This makes for awesome battle scenes, no doubt, as well as slow-motion 80s sex scenes that always involve the presence of a fire place, fire pit, or 30-plus candles, and bad 80s hair. A byproduct of battle scenes, and sex that eventually leads to more battle scenes, is a lot of dead people.
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A standard Wittgensteinian response to philosophical problems is that they are reducible to mere linguistic puzzles. Since the origins of the so-called problem of induction lie in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740), we might naively expect an inimical view to Hume from a Wittgensteinian standpoint. However, given Hume’s general spirit of philosophy elsewhere, Hume’s empiricism, from the Wittgensteinian standpoint, is at least very robust and sensible. So much ground is shared between these two grand thinkers, that to criticize Hume for his shortcomings is to be unfairly anachronistic toward the first philosopher to truly shatter the grandiose illusions of traditional philosophy. Further, these illusions were the very same ones which Wittgenstein would later come and elegantly but almost perplexingly smash further. Yet, not only must we afford Hume respect and credit for his ideas relative his place in time, as we often do with other philosophical giants, but we must still contend with his ideas in a very real sense in the present. In fact, the ground we will share here with Hume is indeed so great that an effective critique of Hume on any epistemic issue—like problem of induction—does not come easily, and we can only accomplish it with careful precision.
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Imagine the famous scene in the 1973 movie American Graffiti involving mischievous persons attaching the rear axle of a stationary police car via steel cable to a post, an accomplice speeding by, and the intent police officer pulling away in pursuit only to find the car jerked into the air and its rear axle pulled away from under it. With that in mind, now imagine there were two very science-focused vandals intent on wreaking havoc upon police property. One postulates to the other, “Remember American Graffiti? We could attach that police car’s rear axle to a pole; then the car will be immobilized like in the movie, and then the police will look embarrassingly bad in front of everyone!”
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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.
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In the relationship of mankind to nature, there is absolutely no place in it for religion or mythology, just as there is no place for any other false metaphysical statements. As one of my favorite quotes goes (best uttered in a booming voice): “Nature, to be commanded, MUST BE OBEYED.” It turns out that the world has issued us no commands for us to obey relating to worship or ritual, as evidenced by the fact that nature is just so bafflingly indifferent to our commands in dances, sacrifices, very focused thoughts with clasped hands, shuffling processions, and organized flames in front of an idol. Yet lots of people, even those free of myth’s delusions, spend an inordinate amount of time discussing it with great intellectual furor. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are two of many scholars who have made a fortune crusading against Christ. Why? What could the intense study of imaginative, but false stories offer? We can certainly watch the Star Wars films, play its games, and read it books. That’s plenty fun. But are there thousands of Star Wars scholars engaged in constant debate? Put aside the forum geeks for a moment, and focus solely on those in the respected intellectual institutions of society: how many people care about the force, Death Stars, and X-wings?
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