Why left-libertarianism is not incoherent, indeterminate, or irrelevant: A reply to Fried

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 201-215

  Vallentyne, Peter ^a   Steiner, Hillel ^a   Otsuka, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33745666118     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2005.00030.x     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. Barbara Fried, "Left-Libertarianism: A Review Essay," Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (2004): 66-92.
2. See G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 68, 214. 3. Something like this is defended in Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1994). 4. Something like this is defended in Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5. We here construe egalitarianism broadly so as to include leximin. Philippe Van Parijs invokes leximin in his left-libertarian theory of justice. See Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 6. Other rights standardly associated with the concept of ownership are, we believe, implied by these five rights. Rights of transfer, control, and immunity, for example, imply a right to income from one's property, where this latter right is understood as the right to all one can get others to pay, consistent with their rights, from one's choice to rent or sell this property. 7. We here modify and build upon the explication of full self-ownership given by Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, pp. 213-17. Also, for simplicity, we here ignore an important qualification: Assuming that one loses some rights when one violates the rights of others, full self-ownership is incompatible with someone else owning the rest of the world and denying the agent permission to occupy any space (since the agent would be trespassing and lose some rights). A more careful formulation of full ownership is as the logically strongest set of ownership rights over a thing that a person can have compatibly with others having such rights over everything else and granting her permission to occupy the space she occupies. 8. Given the decomposability of full ownership, those who-despite the historical reality of slavery-find the notion of ownership of persons bizarre can simply substitute the relevant bundle of rights. 9. Indeed, one of us has written at length on the subject. See Hillel Steiner, "Working Rights,"in M. H. Kramer, N. E. Simmonds, and H. Steiner, A Debate over Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 10. We also claim that full ownership determinately includes full transfer rights, but for brevity we omit this issue here. 11. See Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality, ch. 1, sec. I. 12. See Fried, p. 68: "Notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) the egalitarian conclusions to which they have been led, left-libertarians have taken great pains to stress that that outcome does not reflect any attachment to broad-based egalitarianism per se, but simply follows from their libertarian commitments.... "13. It is worth noting that, if all physical space is a natural resource, then full self-ownership sets some clear, albeit modest, constraints on the appropriation of natural resources, since it stands in the way of the appropriation of the space that other people involuntarily occupy. This obviously falls far short of the claim that full self-ownership implies egalitarian world-ownership. 14. See
3. Mathias Risse, "Does Left-Libertarianism Have Coherent Foundations?" Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 3 (2004): 337-65.
4. See Fried, p. 88: "But the one thing Lockean libertarianism clearly seems to rule out is a combined tax and transfer scheme designed to compensate individuals for unchosen inequalities in personal endowments."16. This differs from the charge of incoherence raised in the previous section. There the accusation was that any given left-libertarian individual's own principles fail to cohere with one another. Here the charge is that the views of different so-called left-libertarians fail sufficiently to cohere with one another for the label "left-libertarian"meaningfully to apply to them all. The former charge is one of intrapersonal incoherence, whereas the latter is one of interpersonal incoherence. 17. Consider, for example, the internecine "what is equality?"disputes among broadly liberal egalitarian philosophers such as the "luck egalitarians"Dworkin, G. A. Cohen, and Richard Arneson, not to mention the dispute between them and other more Rawlsian liberal egalitarians such as Samuel Scheffler who think that the luck egalitarians are fundamentally mistaken in their approach. 18. That is, for example, Otsuka's aim in Libertarianism without Inequality, ch. 1. 19. Here we adopt Elizabeth Anderson's label for such egalitarians as Dworkin, Cohen, Arneson, and Rakowski. See
5. Elizabeth Anderson, "What is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337.