Self-ownership, Marxism, and Egalitarianism: Part II: Challenges to the Self-ownership Thesis

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 1, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 237-276

  Mack, Eric ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

autonomy; distributive justice; egalitarianism; exploitation; Lockean proviso; self ownership; slavery

Indexed keywords

EID: 85004477267     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X02001002004     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 12. Subsequent page citations to this book will appear within the text: they will be designated by a ‘C’.
2. For a recent anthology of essays exploring left-wing libertarianism, see Left- Libertarianism and its Critics, edited by Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000).
3. I dwell on some of these questions in the second section of Eric Mack, ‘Right-Wing Liberalism, Left-Wing Liberalism, and the Self-Ownership Proviso’, in Liberal Institutions, Economic Constitutional Rights, and the Role of Organizations, edited by K. Ladeur (Baden Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997): pp. 9–29.
4. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 262–4. Subsequent page citations to this book will appear within the text: they will be designated by ‘N’.
5. For a more extended discussion, see Eric Mack, ‘The Self-Ownership Proviso: A New and Improved Lockean Proviso’, Social Philosophy and Policy 12(1) and Eric Mack, ‘Right-Wing Liberalism, Left-Wing Liberalism, and the Self-Ownership Proviso’. The fourth section of the latter essay explicitly takes up the dilemma posed by the cases of Able and worker Z.
6. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), Book II, paragraph 27.
7. Reasonable friends of the market do not expect there to be ‘perfect competition’ that eliminates ‘producer surpluses’. See, for example, F.A. Hayek, ‘The Meaning of Competition’, in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) and F.A. Hayek, ‘Competition as a Discovery Procedure’, in New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
8. Bernard Williams maintains that it is a necessary truth that, if one has an important need, others are obligated to service that need. Bernard Williams, ‘The Idea of Equality’, in Philosophy, Politics, and Society, second series, edited by P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962): pp. 121–2.
9. So deeply historical (in Nozick's sense) is our moral thinking that advocates of principles of assistance often appeal to the imagined historical injustice of people having been subject to an unchosen (and, hence, unfair) natural and social lottery. The demand for assistance is then cast as a demand that the outcome of this lottery be redressed, that the winners in this lottery compensate the losers. See, for instance, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 100–101.
10. Of course, different libertarians put things together differently. Something very much like a defense of libertarian rights on the grounds that such a system of rights maximizes autonomy, for example, see Horacio Specter, Autonomy and Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).