Self-ownership, Marxism, and Egalitarianism: Part I: Challenges to Historical Entitlement

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 1, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 75-108

  Mack, Eric ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

egalitarianism; historical entitlement; moral rights; self ownership

Indexed keywords

EID: 85004489571     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X02001001004     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
2. G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Cohen's book is largely an integration of many previously published articles, some of which go back to the late 1970s and the 1980s.
3. J.S. Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1956), p. 13. This essay's focus on the anti-egalitarian conclusion should not obscure the radically antimoralist and anti-paternalist dimensions of self-ownership libertarianism.
4. As Cohen puts it, ‘libertarianism disturbs some Marxists, since… an appeal to selfownership is latent in the standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation’ (C: 12).
5. Hillel Steiner, ‘The Natural Right to the Means of Production’, Philosophical Quarterly 27 (January 1977): p. 43. As Steiner also points out, the argument of ‘How Liberty Upsets Patterns’ only undermines purely patterned conceptions of justice. The argument does not show any incoherence in a doctrine that combines a pattern for initial holdings with acceptance of what arises by just steps from those initially just holdings. (But, one might argue that once one is partially liberated from pattern worship, even the proposal that initial holdings be patterned will lose its luster.)
6. Cohen acknowledges that this projection may seem ‘hysterical’, but ‘we have to consider the upshot of general performance of transactions of that kind, and then the projection is entirely realistic’ (C: 25).
7. I ignore here interesting questions concerning how great Chamberlain's consumer surplus is, that is, how much less that US$250,000 would have been sufficient to elicit his training and performance. For a critique of the taxing of the producer surpluses of self-owners, see Cohen (C: 217-223) and Eric Mack, ‘Gauthier on Rights and Economic Rent’, Social Philosophy and Policy 9(1) (winter 1992).
8. I discuss the Self-Ownership Proviso more systematically in Eric Mack, ‘The Self- Ownership Proviso: A New and Improved Lockean Proviso’, Social Philosophy and Policy 12(1): 186-218 and 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): 9-29.