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.
Read more…
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.”
Read more…
[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.”
Read more…
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.
Read more…
