As Free and as Just as Possible: The Theory of Marxian Liberalism

As Free and as Just as Possible: The Theory of Marxian Liberalism

Volumn , Issue , 2012, Pages

  Reiman, Jeffrey ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84881085831     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9781118381564     Document Type: Book

References (145)

1. Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, and Michael Otsuka, " Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried, " Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 2 (2005): 201; on the independence of the two basic principles, see pp. 208-210.
2. Locke appears to infer self-ownership from the right to liberty, and uses it as part of his argument for the right to own property for consumption (ST, v:27). Kant rejects self-ownership, holding that only things, and not persons, can be owned. He argues directly from the right to liberty to the right to property (MM, 41, 56). See Sections 4.1 and 4.2, below.
3. Vallentyne et al., " Why Left-Libertarianism Is Not Incoherent, " 201.
4. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis : Hackett, 1979), 47.
5. Interestingly, Cohen recognizes that the question of blameworthiness (which is related to, though not identical to, that of what is our duty) depends on facts about human nature (RJE, 140n55).
6. This assumes that, even if human nature changes, the kinds of basic interests that people have regarding property will remain the same. So, for example, if people become more altruistic, they will still have an interest in having secure possessions even if only to give them away. Charity is not possible without something like ownership.
7. " One should note that acceptance of [the principles of justice in the original position] is not conjectured as a psychological law or probability. Ideally anyway, I should like to show that their acknowledgment is the only choice consistent with the full description of the original position. The argument aims eventually to be strictly deductive.... Unhappily the reasoning I shall give will fall far short of this, since it is highly intuitive throughout " (TJ, 104-105).
8. Nozick ' s prohibition on physical aggression is based on the Kantian prohibition against using other persons for one ' s ends without their consent; but that will rule out fraud as well since it is a means of using others without their consent. And Narveson' s prohibition on coercion is based on a presumed agreement between individuals; and that will rule out fraud since it presupposes that individuals are bound to honor their agreements.
9. Peter G. Stillman, " Property, Freedom and Individuality in Hegel ' s and Marx ' s Political Thought, " in NOMOS XXII: Property, eds. J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (New York : New York University Press, 1980), 153.
10. " When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another " (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 2, MER, 490).
11. See note 22, below, and accompanying text.
12. " Freedom of religion... arises from that multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest. " James Madison, spoken at the Virginia convention to ratify the Constitution, June 12, 1788. See The Founders ' Constitution, vol. 5, Amendment I (Religion), Document 49, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions49.html
13. Writes Nagel, " What capitalism produces is wonderful. "
14. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1991), 93
15. Nariman Behravesh, Spin-Free Economics: A No-Nonsense Guide to Today ' s Global Economic Debates (New York : McGraw-Hill, 2009), 13.
16. Behravesh, Spin-Free Economics, 14.
17. Behravesh, Spin-Free Economics, 15.
18. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey, RECS 2009-Release date: August 19, 2011, at: http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/air_conditioning09.cfm (accessed November 7, 2011)
19. " The Effect of Income on Appliances in US Households " based on information from the 2001 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), conducted by the Energy Information Administration. Released: January 1, 2004. Available at: http://www.eia.gov/emeu/recs/appliances/appliances.html (accessed November 7, 2011).
20. " By some estimates, the recent rapid economic growth in China and India has pulled nearly half a billion people out of poverty " (Behravesh, Spin-Free Economics, 15).
21. See, for example, Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York : Monthly Review Press, 1976).
22. See, for example, the interesting proposals in John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1994), some of which might be compatible with what Marxian Liberalism takes to be a capitalist society.
23. This is why Marx thought the state would no longer be necessary in communism.
24. Marx, " Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, " MER, 4.
25. " It is not the subject who deceives himself, but reality which deceives him. " Maurice Godelier, " Structure and Contradiction in Capital, " in Robin Blackburn, ed., Ideology in Social Science (Glasgow : Fontana/Collins, 1977), 337. Rawls says of Marx' s doctrine of ideology that ideology consists of illusions and delusions, which correspond roughly to what I am calling objective and subjective illusions, and he suggests " being taken in by the surface appearances " is an illusion, and that religion-which Marx notoriously took to be " the opiate of the masses "-is a delusion (LHPP, 359-362).
26. Examples of theories of ideology that trace its distortions to subjective illusions are the attempt by some members of the Frankfurt School to explain the appeal to German laborers of fascism by means of a Freudian account of the persistence of irrational authoritarian attitudes, and the attempt of some sociologists to trace ideology to an existential need to reify a mythic worldview as protection against the terrors of meaninglessness. For the former, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston : Little, Brown, 1973).
27. For the latter, see Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York : Doubleday, 1966).
28. " The principles at the summit of our conviction are grounded in no facts whatsoever" (RJE, 229).
29. Cohen writes: " if any facts support any principles, then there are fact-insensitive principles that account for that relationship of support " (RJE, 247).
30. Perhaps this is itself a product of the still more fundamental Kantian principle that human beings are ends-in-themselves.
31. G. A. Cohen points out that this description does not fit the family, since the family is largely constituted by choices that people make (RJE, 116-140). I agree with Cohen on this, and with the implication he draws from it, namely, that principles of justice apply to individual choices, not only to the design of institutions (see Section 5.5).
32. I think that the mistake that Cohen is making here, and in which he is not alone, is in reading " then " in the lexical principle as signifying a temporal relationship of before and after, when it signifies a moral relation of primary and lesser urgency.
33. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1st edition (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1971), 225.
34. Rodney Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1989), 14 (cited in PL, 7n7).
35. Considerations a and b, together, form much of the basis of Allen Wood ' s argument against the idea that Marx criticizes capitalism as unjust. See Allen Wood, " The Marxian Critique of Justice, " Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1971-1972), 244-282
36. Allen Wood, " Marx on Right and Justice: A Reply to Husami, " Philosophy & Public Affairs 8 (1978-1979), 267-295.
37. See, for example, Iris Marion Young, " Toward a Critical Theory of Justice, " Social Theory and Practice 7, no. 3 (1981), 279-302.
38. See also Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1977), 207.
39. See also Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York : International Publishers, 1970), 201-202.
40. Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York : Norton, 1970), 42-53.
41. See G. A. Cohen, " Review of Allen Wood ' s Karl Marx, " Mind 92, no. 367 (July 1983), 440-445.
42. See also, Norman Geras, " The Controversy about Marx and Justice, " New Left Review 150 (1985), 47-85
43. Jeffrey Reiman, " The Possibility of a Marxian Theory of Justice, " Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplemental volume VII: Marx and Morality (1981), 307-322.
44. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edition (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1978, originally published 1739-1740), Book III, part ii, section 2, 495, emphasis in original.
45. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke ' s Political Thought (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82.
46. See Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1992), 10.
47. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 79.
48. François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, " The Ecclesiastical Ministry, " quoted in I. Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York : Penguin, 1995), 116.
49. Thomas Jefferson, " A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, " in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julien Boyd (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1950), vol. 2, 545.
50. On the implications of this idea, see Jeffrey Reiman, Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD : Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 5-11.
51. On Locke ' s views about the ground of moral obligation, see the discussion in Simmons, Lockean Theory of Rights, 26-28.
52. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edition (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1978), Book III, part i, section 1, 469.
53. On this, see W. D. Hudson, ed., The Is/Ought Question (London : Macmillan, 1969).
54. That I would replace the current language of " intuitions " with that of " reasonable judgments" should suffice to indicate that I in no way endorse the view, associated with G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross, that we have intuitions-in the sense of direct knowledge-of values or principles of right. These are claims of self-evidence that Locke would rightly reject (see Essay, 1:3:4), and I reject them too. Our competence to make correct moral inferences is not an ability to see or intuit self-evident facts, anymore than our competence to judge relative height is.
55. Robert Ernest Hume, The World ' s Living Religions (New York : Charles Scribner ' s Sons, 1959), 276-278.
56. Number 13 of Al-Nawawi ' s 40 Hadith Qudsi.
57. Sahih Muslim Book 020, number 4546.
58. This shows, by the way, that the Golden Rule is more than a principle of logical consistency. It only holds if one also believes that people are equal.
59. Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1994), 41.
60. David Hume, " Of the Original Contract, " in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. Miller (Indianapolis : Liberty Fund, 1985), 465-487; see esp. pp. 470, 471, 475.
61. " The very fact that a choice clearly is extremely detrimental to [individuals] may itself be grounds for concluding that it was made in a moment of incompetence; at that point it becomes reasonable to respect the choices they would have made had they been competent rather than the choices they actually made. " Steven Luper, The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2009), 161
62. Eric T. Freyfogle, On Private Property: Finding Common Ground on the Ownership of Land (Boston : Beacon Press, 2007), 7.
63. For the argument for this way of determining our duty, see generally, Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7-33
64. Immanuel Kant, " On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use, " in P erpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis : Hackett, 1983; " On the Proverb " originally published 1793), 73.
65. Jan Narveson, " Property and Rights, " Social Philosophy & Policy 27, no.1 (Winter 2010), 114.
66. Narveson, " Property and Rights, " 114.
67. Narveson, " Property and Rights, " 115.
68. Narveson, personal correspondence, November 9, 2011.
69. Narveson, " Property and Rights, " 112.
70. Narveson, " Property and Rights, " 109-110.
71. Narveson, " Property and Rights, " 119.
72. Jan Narveson, " Moral Problems of Population, " Monist 57, no. 1 (1973), 65-66.
73. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses (London : Dent and Sons, 1973; originally published 1755), 87.
74. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis : Hackett, 1994; originally published 1651), pt. II, chap. xvii, p. 109
75. See, for example, G. William Domhofff, W ho Rules America? (E nglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967)
76. M. Green, J. Fallows, and D. Zwick, The Ralph Nader Congress Project, Who Runs Congress? (New York : Grossman, 1972)
77. Edward S. Greenberg, Serving the Few: Corporate Capitalism and the Bias of Government Policy (New York : Wiley, 1974)
78. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London : Merlin Press, 2009; originally published 1969)
79. " The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time " (C, I, 39).
80. " It is... this money-form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers " (C, I, 76).
81. Thomas Nagel, " Rawls on Justice, " in Reading Rawls, ed. Norman Daniels (New York : Basic Books, 1975), 13.
82. R. M. Hare, " Rawls ' Theory of Justice, " in Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls, 107
83. see also Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1977), 173-174
84. Needless to say, it will not be easy to determine what these minimum incentives and lowest increases will be. They cannot be assumed to be simply equivalent to what people say they will take and give in return. Presumably they could be identified by collecting data on different arrangements within societies as well as on other societies with different levels of incentives and of productivity. In the examples here, I assume that they have been so identified. I say more about this issue in Section 5.5.
85. " Taxation on earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor " (ASU, 169, see also
86. I say more about the meaning of this " necessity " in Section 5.5. See also note 6, above.
87. Jan Narveson, Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD : Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 19.
88. Narveson, Respecting Persons, 21.
89. Cohen opens his discussion quoting such a conversation from Narveson ' s " Rawls on Equal Distribution of Wealth, " Philosophia 7 (1978), 281-292 (cited in RJE, 27).
90. The quoted phrases are from TJ, 131.
91. For this reason, I do not consider " the social bases of self-respect " a separate primary good that might then be distributed by the principles of justice, as Rawls suggests in his last work (JF, 60). I take it that a just society will convey respect to people in the structure of society, which is constituted by their fellows ' behavior. Members of such a society will then have all the social bases for self-respect that can be given-the rest will be up to them.
92. Kant, " On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use, " in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis : Hackett, 1983; " On the Proverb " originally published 1793), 73.
93. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 54.
94. Corpus Juris Secundum: Property 73, sec. 43 (Eagan, MN : Thomson West, 2004), 48.
95. W. L. Burdick, Handbook of the Law of Real Property (St. Paul, MN : West Publishing, 1914), 61-67.
96. Eric T. Freyfogle, On Private Property: Finding Common Ground on the Ownership of Land (Boston : Beacon Press, 2007), xx.
97. V. G. Kiernan, " Private Property in History, " in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson, eds., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1976), 376.
98. Kiernan, " Private Property in History, " 376-377.
99. Kiernan, " Private Property in History, " 387-391.
100. Peter Garnsey, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007), 186.
101. Garnsey, Thinking about Property, 188.
102. Alan Watson, Roman Law and Comparative Law (Athens, GA : University of Georgia Press, 1991), 49.
103. Bryan A. Garner, ed., Black' s Law Dictionary, 7th ed. (St. Paul, MN : West Group, 1999), 527-528.
104. Jan Narveson, " Property and Rights, " Social Philosophy & Policy 27, no. 1 (Winter 2010), 122
105. A. M. Honoré, " Ownership, " in A. G. Guest, ed., Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, First Series (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1961), 107-147.
106. Lawrence C. Becker, " The Moral Basis of Property Rights, " in J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman, eds., NOMOS XXII: Property (New York : New York University Press, 1980), 190-191.
107. Becker, " The Moral Basis of Property Rights, " 191
108. Becker, " The Moral Basis of Property Rights, " 192.
109. This general idea is accepted by Philippe van Parijs in Real Freedom for All: What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1995)
110. Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2009).
111. See Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York : International Publishers, 1970; originally published 1884), 103, 112-114.
112. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, capitalist countries saw the growth of popular suffrage leading to increased use of the state ' s power to regulate capitalism for the common good and, in particular, to protect workers from the vagaries of the market.
113. See Chapter 1, notes 15-19, and accompanying text.
114. Since the natural environment is everyone ' s home, I take it that the parties understand their interest in raising their material standard of living as subject to due respect for the natural environment, which is in everyone ' s interest.
115. Rawls ' s lexical prioritization of protecting basic liberties over maximizing the worst-off's share of goods depends on the society having reached a level of civilization at which " the basic liberties can be effectively established " (TJ, 132). Until a society has reached that level, basic liberties may be restricted to increase material well-being, though such restrictions are " granted only to the extent that they are necessary to prepare the way for the time when they are no longer justified " (TJ, 132). A similar condition applies to the lexical priority of the basic liberties in Marxian Liberalism.
116. I was convinced of this by John Roemer; though I do not agree with Roemer that a Marxian understanding of exploitation can do without the notion of force. See John Roemer, " What Is Exploitation? Reply to Jeffrey Reiman, " Philosophy & Public Affairs 18 (1989), 90-97
117. Jeffrey Reiman, " Why Worry about How Exploitation Is Defined?: Reply to John Roemer, " Social Theory and Practice 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 101-113.
118. I take it as obvious that, even in the advanced nations of the world, the point has not been reached at which everyone has goods sufficient for genuine freedom.
119. Wood, for example, writes that Marx criticizes equal right " by showing how it necessarily leads to a defective mode of distribution even in its socialist form. To do away with these defects [Marx] says one must ' wholly transcend the narrow horizon of bourgeois right ' represented by all principles of equality. Marx alludes to Louis Blanc ' s slogan ' from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs ' precisely because this is not in any sense a principle of ' equality. ' " Allen Wood, " Marx on Right and Justice: A Reply to Husami, " Philosophy & Public Affairs 8, no. 3 (Spring 1979), 292 (emphasis mine).
120. The " effective conquest of scarcity " does not mean the total elimination of scarcity or, for that matter, of work. It means the reduction of scarcity to that point at which the desire to labor is itself sufficient to motivate whatever work remains necessary for the satisfaction of everyone ' s needs. Thus it coincides, for Marx, with the point at which " labour has become not only a means of life but life ' s prime want. "
121. For this reason, and in light of the fact that Marx is talking about a time when " labour has become... life ' s prime want, " it is a mistake to think that Marx ' s communist slogan means that people will be required to work as much as they are able. In any event, it should not be understood this way in the context of Marxian Liberalism. See RJE, 208-209, 225, 407 n. 85 and accompanying text.
122. For example, some part of people ' s shares in the distributive scheme might take the form of health services that would be provided by the state if that were the best way to provide them efficiently and reliably.
123. Martin O ' Neill, " Liberty, Equality and Property-Owning Democracy, " Journal of Social Philosophy 40, no. 3 (Fall 2009), 382.
124. O ' Neill, " Liberty, Equality and Property-Owning Democracy, " 385.
125. James E. Meade, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 71
126. cited in Amit Ron, " Visions of Democracy in ' Property-Owning Democracy ' : Skelton to Rawls and Beyond, " History of Political Thought, 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 181.
127. Nien-he Hsieh, " Justice at Work: Arguing for Property-Owning Democracy, " Journal of Social Philosophy 40, no. 3 (Fall 2009), 402.
128. Waheed Hussein agrees: " What matters... is changing how decisions are made in economic life, and it is not clear that expanding the class of owners in a managerial economy will have much effect in this regard. "
129. Waheed Hussein, " The Most Stable Just Regime, " Journal of Social Philosophy 40, no. 3 (Fall 2009), 415
130. Hsieh, " Justice at Work, " 403.
131. It should be obvious that I am here sketching only the outlines of this sort of society, the details of which would have to be further worked out. For example, as capitalists, workers might lose the wealth they own, and some provision would have to be made for this, without eliminating the risks that give owners an interest in effi-ciently using their productive assets, along with the possible gains that give owners an interest in innovation
132. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Alan Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A645, B673.
133. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A658, B686.
134. Paul Guyer, " Kant ' s Principles of Reflecting Judgment, " in Paul Guyer, ed., Kant ' s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 7
135. Guyer, " Kant ' s Principles of Reflecting Judgment, " 4.
136. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A665-666, B693-694; emphasis in the original.
137. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; originally published 1807).
138. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957; originally published 1841).
139. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 70.
140. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 79-80.
141. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 80.
142. See, for example, Marx ' s " Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction," and " Religion, Free Press, and Philosophy, " in L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat, eds., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), 67-92, 109-130
143. " Capital Punishment, " in L. S, Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 487.
144. George Sher, Desert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 14. Sher applies his criticism to both economic desert and desert of punishment, which I think, for reasons that I will state presently, are quite different matters. Accordingly, I set aside Sher ' s objection regarding desert of punishment.
145. Rawls writes: " justice as fairness does indeed abandon the ideal of political community if by that ideal is meant a political society united on one (partially or fully) comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine. That conception of social unity is excluded by the fact of reasonable pluralism " (JF, 198-199). J ü rgen Habermas essentially agrees with Rawls on this point. See Jü rgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 278-279.