Once more into the breach of self-ownership: Reply to narveson and brenkert

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 2, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 57-96

  Cohen, G A ^a  

^a ALL SOULS COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Autonomy; Equality; Freedom; Karl marx; Liberty; Private property; Rights; Self ownership; Socialism

Indexed keywords

EID: 77449115170     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009738415952     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. The "perhaps" which qualifies this attribution at Narveson (p. 2) is effectively cancelled by the first sentence in the footnote attached to the "perhaps" sentence. (In references to Narveson's and Brenkert's papers and to Self-Ownership, numbers following those letters refer to pages, and numbers in parentheses following those numbers denote footnotes. "Ch" stands for Chapter, and "S" for a section of a chapter. Where quotations are not paginated, the reference is the same as in the immediately preceding paginated reference. Unless otherwise indicated, all emphases are in the original.)
2. On the difference between those provisos, see G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 74-79.
3. The quoted passage does not expressly present this disjunct, but Narveson obviously intends it to be in place.
4. It might be objected, to my suggestion that Narveson relies on the nothing-doing principle in his inference to (3), that the principle would impugn his own endorsement of the right of non-owners to seize unowned things (and thereby make them their own). But Narveson's defence of acquisition, though multiply infirm, as we shall see, in other respects, is not, in fact, threatened by the stated principle. For his first-comers need only a liberty (in Hohfeld's sense) to acquire, not a right: that is, they acquire legitimately because they violate no duty in acquiring, even though others do not have (what a right on the acquirer's part would imply) a duty not to block the acquirer's way when he proceeds to attempt to seize some thing.
5. To be sure, you can also interfere with plans, and, if anything, that embarrasses Narveson's emphasis on prohibiting interference, since plans plan activities that are not yet in course. But we may generously set that point aside, and focus on the distinction between interference with and prevention of activity.
6. It certainly isn't interference with possession, which, so Narveson says (Narveson, p. 12), is what "grounds" ownership.
7. Nozick's can of tomato juice [Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 175] rides again. If my project is to infest the ocean with evenly spread tomato juice molecules, how can Narveson declare against my coming to own all that water at least as soon as the juice hits it? [That is, no doubt, a peculiar project, but Narveson is emphatic (Narveson, pp. 4-5) that there is to be no sifting of rational and reasonable projects from other ones by someone other than the agent in question.]
8. Cf. Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), Chapter 13. The chapter is a brilliant defence of the claim that all legitimate property is socially constituted, "that it is law, and not nature, that makes property" (p. 347).
9. Suppose I happen never to have moved beyond a certain small area. Someone else carries out a project which involves building a fence (with materials as yet unused by anyone else) around the edges of that area. This manifestly and severely restricts my liberty, but onlyinvirtue of my potential doings, not my already actual ones. It follows that a concern for liberty requires protection of the right to pursue projects that have not yet been formed.
10. Ronald Dworkin, "What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources," Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981), pp. 283-345.
11. Dancing labour is an exception: see, further, Self-Ownership, p. 170(10).
12. Narveson calls technology "software" (Narveson, p. 15). But he seems to forget that software without hardware (that is, here, physical resources) is impotent.
13. Narveson doesn't actually state any criteria of comparative factor contributions, but he must be relying on a Locke-like one.
14. Michael Otsuka, private communication. Cf. my "Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities", in M. C. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds.), The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 9-29, esp. pp. 18ff.
15. Despite its Marxist air, that is a distinctly reactionary view: see Self-Ownership,Ch 7, S3.
16. On the basis of his sanguine reference to "the astonishing amount of charitable giving in the United States" (Narveson, p. 23). But that giving includes giving to institutions, such as universities, which service not the destitute but the better off, and, as Peter Unger has mordantly remarked, each year well-off Americans give more to each of Harvard, Cornell and NYU than to UNICEF, OXFAM, and IPPF combined Living High and Letting Die (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 60(25).
17. The figures from The Chronicle ofPhilanthropy of October 31, 1996, which (private communication) prompted Unger's remark, don't support Narveson's sunny view of this matter
18. That is the title of Garett Hardin's popular (in both senses) defence of the claim that private property prevents excessive use of resources, in Science, December, 1968. For an excellent response to Hardin, see George Monbiot, "The Tragedy of Enclosure," The Scientific American (January, 1994).
19. See Hal Varian "Distributive Justice, Welfare Economics, and the Theory of Fairness," Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (1974-1975), pp. 223-247, esp. pp. 235-238.
20. There is an accessible introduction to Liska by Norman Macrae in the Economist, March 19, 1983, pp. 23ff.
21. Including, of course, an anarchist one, in which coercion is applied not by the state but by other people.
22. But, presumably, not its only subject: when Narveson is free to walk, then, so even Narveson must think, it is not his will or his mind that does so.
23. Why, by the way, does "mind" travel within scare-quotes which "will" doesn't need?
24. See his "Can Libertarianism sustain a Fraud Standard?," Ethics 104 (1993-1994), pp. 722-738.
25. See his "Liberty and Harm to Others" in W. E. Cooper, K. Nielsen and S. C. Patten (eds.), New Essays on John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supp. Vol. V (1979), pp. 1-9.
26. Narveson claims that the libertarian principle is affirmed by all of Hobbes, Kant, Locke and Mill, that the different things they say "come to precisely the same thing" (Narveson, p. 4(10)), to wit, that principle. Lack of space (rather than of disagreement) prevents me from commenting here on the rest of that quartet: for pertinent points
27. see Self-Ownership, p. 223
28. (on Hobbes), Self-Ownership, p. 189
29. (on Locke), and Self-Ownership, p. 240(16) (on Kant).
30. It is available, at 50p, from Spokesman Books, Bertrand Russell House, Gamble Stret, Nottingham NG7 4ET, England.
31. For a demonstration that it doesn't, see Miriam Cohen Christofidis, "Talent, Slavery, and Envy," in J. Burley (ed.), Ronald Dworkin and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
32. Speaking of negative rights, Michael Otsuka points out, ad Narveson, p. 7(13), that negative rights also require that others refrain from certain omissions (and, therefore, that they undertake certain actions). Imagine that an unconscious B is placed on top of A. If, upon gaining consciousness, B omits to get off A, then he violates A's negative right not to be lain on.
33. My criticism of Brenkert's use of Vallentyne is not a criticism of Vallentyne. Vallentyne probably has a more sophisticated command of the concept of self-ownership than anybody else, including yours truly. It is just that he was not striving to state his full view of it in the bit of text that Brenkert quotes.
34. F1 and F2 are, in fact, logically equivalent: it is not I but Brenkert who thinks that they have different implications. To see that they are equivalent, let p=Xis free, q=xis not prevented from doing anything x wants to do, and r=xis prevented from doing something x wants to do by a law of which x approves. Then F1 = p ⇔ q,and F2 = p ⇔ (qv(q ∧ r)). And, since q and (qv(q ∧ r)) are equivalent, F1 and F2 are equivalent.
35. In the original edition of his "Two Concepts of Liberty," Isaiah Berlin embraced the false view that Brenkert misimputes to me. Berlin acknowledged his error, and corrected it, at p. xxxviii of his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1969). He described Richard Wollheim as "the first writer to point out this error," but he did not name Wollheim, because Wollheim's review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement which then still kept the names of its reviewers secret. Brenkert's reasons for rejecting the view are exactly those which Wollheim pressed and Berlin accepted [Andrew Reeve, who is cited approvingly by Brenkert at Brenkert, p. 35(12), also misimputes the want-centred definition to me. Brenkert might have been encouraged by that, but two demonstrably false imputations aren't any better than one].
36. We've now accumulated five or six reasons, which I shan't list, for denying that I "face [the] dilemma" to which Brenkert refers in Brenkert, at p. 37.
37. I affirmed this account at p. 282 of my History, Labour, and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and I still believed it when I wrote Self-Ownership. I would now reject it, in favour of the "explanatory" account that I proceed to state below. Space forbids presentation of my justification for this change of view.
38. See the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph of Section 3 above.
39. That is, freedom conceived as autonomy, not, as the phrase might here be mistaken to mean: "the independent (of self-ownership) conception of freedom."
40. I disparage the traditional socialist approval of collective autonomy in Self-Ownership, at pp. 260-262.
41. As the reader will see if she looks at the paragraph that follows the one in Self-Ownership, at p. 229 which Brenkert cites in support of his Brenkert (p. 41) claim, and also at the final paragraph of the chapter in question.
42. Narveson thinks itunimportant that Nozick countenances the possibility of contractual slavery, since "wage-work is obviously voluntary in just the sense that normal slavery is not" (Narveson, p. 9(17)). So it is, but that is beside the polemically significant point, which is that Nozick's abnormal because contracted slavery is indeed a case of slavery.
43. I take Brenkert to mean, here, by an "external argument," one which does not apply only against Nozick, but against libertarianism as such: "external argument" does not here mean an argument which, unlike what one might call an "internal argument," uses premisses other than ones that libertarians themselves affirm (Cf. p. 86 above). A demand for an external argument in that latter sense would not be justified by the complaint that libertarians other than Nozick have not been skewered.
44. See his brilliant Machinery of Freedom and Equality (La Salle: Open Court, 1989).
45. He expressed that view in a draft of the article referred to in fn. 22 above.
46. In fact, and as my rebuttal of it will make clear, it is not one point, but two compressed together: one about how self-ownership rights might be acquired, and one about the supposed inconsistency of self-ownership rights with the duties Brenkert thinks we have to those who nurtured us (whatever story we may or may not be able to tell about how self-ownership rights are acquired).
47. That was not always its function: see Self-Ownership, p. 117.
48. Brenkert (p. 50), my emphasis: I ignore the appended "(within such limitations)," which I believe to be ill-judged.
49. I dispute this claim below.
50. Which is not to say that, if people believe that they are self-owners, then it follows, as Brenkert also thinks (see Section 7 above), that all their relations with others will be contractual. What I here assent to is that, when people's relationships actually are more contractual, then, as a matter of sociological fact, one may expect to find a greater tendency to affirm the thesis of self-ownership.
51. Strictly, I'm now in that part of my native patch which is egalitarian but not traditionally Marxist, since one of the problems of traditional Marxism, so I argued, is that some of its briars were tarred with the brush of self-ownership.