Does left-libertarianism have coherent foundations?

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 3, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 337-364

  Risse, Mathias ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

equality; left libertarianism; libertarianism; original appropriation; property; self ownership

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845458595     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X04046246     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 1; emphasis added. The other anthology is Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, The Origins of Left- Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings (London: Macmillan, 2000).
2. Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
3. Other left-libertarians are Hillel Steiner, Peter Vallentyne, and Philippe van Parijs (though he speaks of ‘real libertarianism’). See, in particular, Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) and Philippe van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). This article was commissioned as a review of Otsuka's book. However, I focus on Otsuka's first chapter, a modified version of his 1998 article. I neglect most of his rich book, such as material on the justification of punishment in Part II and on political legitimacy in Part III. Otsuka's goal is to develop these themes from a leftlibertarian perspective, and thereby also give a better expression to that perspective. All of that is very much deserving of philosophical discussion. Still, it is Chapter 1 that formulates the core idea of Otsuka's brand of left-libertarianism, and that chapter is thought-provoking enough for me to restrict myself to it.
4. Cf. Vallentyne and Steiner, Origins of Left-Libertarianism, p. 199. Unsurprisingly, such points easily become complex. Steiner, for one, in his Essay on Rights, endorses the will (choice) theory of rights, whereby rights against persons can be held only by those persons who share some element of contemporaneity with the former. So this point regarding environmental concerns would not apply.
5. Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 82–5.
6. See Israel Kirzner, ‘Entrepreneurship, Entitlement, and Economic Justice’, Eastern Economic Journal 4 (1978): 9-25; partially reprinted in Vallentyne and Steiner, Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics, see especially p. 201. Paul expresses a related view: ‘I maintain that 100 percent of the value of a good is the work of human creativity’. See Ellen Frankel Paul, Property Rights and Eminent Domain (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), p. 230. In an article that belongs to a very different corner of philosophy, Bittner attacks the idea that we ever create anything. See Rüdiger Bittner, ‘Masters Without Substance’, in Nietzsche's Postmoralism, edited by Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
7. First, for Nozick, see Vallentyne and Steiner, Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics, pp. 206–7; cf. Section 9 of the current article for a formulation of Nozick's proviso. Murray Rothbard is another well-known right-libertarian. Cf. Murray Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays (Auburn: Von Mises Institute, 1974) and Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (San Francisco, CA: Fox and Wilkes, 1996), see especially pp. 26–37. He does not stress ‘creation’ as much as Kirzner does. His point is that objects must belong to somebody, and whoever has ‘added’ to them has a stronger claim than any other individual or group. Second, although I argue that Otsuka's version of left-libertarianism is incoherent and although I suspect that the only credible way of being libertarian is being right-libertarian, nothing I say should be taken to support right-libertarianism. Instead, my critique is part of a general resistance to libertarian thought.
8. For the Lockean roots of the idea, see Second Treatise, II, 27 in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also Section 3 of Vallentyne's introduction to Vallentyne and Steiner, Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics. For Cohen on self-ownership, see G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 67ff.
9. Gerald Gaus, ‘Property, Rights, and Freedom’, in Property Rights, edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Jeffrey Paul, and Fred Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Alan Ryan, ‘Self-Ownership, Autonomy, and Property Rights’, in Paul, Paul, and Miller, Property Rights; Thomas Munzer, A Theory of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
10. For Cohen, see Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Otsuka defines his ‘libertarian right to self-ownership’ by way of contrast with what he calls the ‘full right to self-ownership’. That full right also prohibits unintentional incursions upon one's body, and the sheer strength of that prohibition leads to problems. See Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality, pp. 12–15.
11. There is an ambiguity in the second item. This might mean either ‘through those voluntary exchanges with other individuals that are unregulated and untaxed’ or ‘through voluntary exchanges with other individuals, which remain unregulated and untaxed’. I assume Otsuka means the second.
12. Michael Otsuka, ‘Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1998): 65-92.
13. Parallels to social choice results suggest themselves because what is at stake is the compatibility of different conditions. As I say above, Arrow's theorem lists conditions that one would want to endorse jointly. As I argue elsewhere, Sen's Liberal Paradox introduces conditions that are motivated on entirely different grounds, but not distinctly incoherent (a Pareto condition and a condition that assigns agents a privilege to determine the relative ranking of two options in a social ranking). See Mathias Risse, ‘What to Make of the Liberal Paradox?’ Theory and Decision 50 (2001): 196.
14. For the four authors mentioned, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Consider how the theistic framework shapes also Henry George's reasoning: ‘If we are all here by the equal permission of the Creator, we are all here with an equal title to the enjoyment of his bounty - with an equal right to the use of all that nature so impartially offers. This is a right which is natural and inalienable; it is a right which vests in every human being as he enters the world and which during his continuance in the world can be limited only by the equal rights of others. There is in nature no such thing as a fee simple in land. There is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land. If all existing men were to unite to grant away their equal rights, they could not grant away the right of those who follow them. For what are we but tenants for a day? Have we made the earth that we should determine the rights of those who after us shall tenant it in their turn? The Almighty, who created the earth for man and man for the earth, has entailed it upon all the generations of the children of men by a decree written upon the constitution of all things - a decree which no human action can bar and no prescription determine. Though his titles have been acquiesced in by generation after generation, to the landed estates of the Duke of Westminster the poorest child that is born in London today has as much right as his eldest son’. See Vallentyne and Steiner, Origins of Left-Libertarianism, p. 199.
15. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: The Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
16. John Christman, ‘Self-Ownership, Equality, and the Structure of Property Rights’, Political Theory 19 (1991): 28-46; partially reprinted in Vallentyne and Steiner, Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics.
17. For the concept of property, see A.M. Honor, ‘Ownership’, in Making Law Bind: Essays Legal and Philosophical (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961); Lawrence Becker, Property Rights: Philosophical Foundations (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); Andrew Reeve, Property (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1986), and references therein.
18. Leif Wenar, ‘Original Acquisition of Private Property’, Mind 107 (1998): 799-819.
19. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality and Locke, Two Treatises of Government.
20. Joint property is central to James Grunebaum, Private Ownership (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), who claims that autonomy is inconsistent with private ownership: such ownership is a mutual agreement to disregard one another's interest, which does not respect autonomy. Instead, property must be handled as joint property: so some democratic process is required in order for autonomy to remain respected. Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality, p. 30, footnote 50 rejects joint ownership as rendering self-ownership worthless. I should note that if my argument succeeds, Grunebaum's may be the way to go if one is concerned to combine ideas of autonomy with egalitarian ideas of world ownership - but this would most plausibly be a way with which most libertarians would be rather unhappy.
21. Otsuka, Libertarianism Without Inequality, pp. 36–7 discusses the related, but different question regarding whether at the time of the original acquisition the settlers should leave enough for the members of all subsequent generations or only for the members of their own generation, and worry about subsequent generations later. My concern arises if we assume Otsuka's answer (worry about subsequent generations later) and then ask how to go about this.
22. Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, p. 73.
23. Rothbard, For a New Liberty, p. 35. A similar point is made by John Hospers, Libertarianism (Los Angeles, CA: Nash Publishing, 1971), p. 65.
24. Wenar, ‘Original Acquisition of Private Property’, p. 804.
25. Thomas Nagel, ‘Equality’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
26. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
27. Christman, ‘Self-Ownership, Equality, and the Structure of Property Rights’ and Christman, The Myth of Property: Toward an Egalitarian Theory of Ownership (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) argues from an egalitarian perspective for a conception of ownership that excludes precisely that second bit of Otsuka's right to self-ownership.
28. Thomas Nagel, ‘Libertarianism Without Foundations’, in Reading Nozick, edited by Jeffrey Paul (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), pp. 192–3.
29. A contractarian version of libertarianism, as championed by Narveson, The Libertarian Idea or David Gauthier, Morals by Agreements (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), can also be addressed in this framework. Such contractarianism will either directly encounter the question of the intrinsic value of common ownership (if questions about ownership arise in a kind of original position) or will have to adopt some other value, or set of values, of which common ownership would then be derivative. Note that Rawls, for one, is a non-libertarian contractarian who thinks about property ‘to sketch in more detail the kind of background institutions that seem necessary when we take seriously the idea that society is a fair system of cooperation between free and equal citizens from one generation to the next’. See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, edited by Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 136. So property rights, for Rawls, are merely instrumentally valuable.
30. For some complications in the formulation of Nozick's proviso, cf. Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 108–12.
31. Thomas Nagel, ‘The Fragmentation of Value’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 138.