Search Results

Left-libertarianism marries a very thin reading of Lockean self-ownership with an extraordinarily expansive reading of Locke’s famous proviso that those who appropriate common resources must leave “enough, and as good” for all others. Left-libertarians have argued that those twin commitments justify a redistributive system that is egalitarian in effect, without direct appeal to egalitarianism. To reach that conclusion, however, left-libertarians have had to give both self-ownership and the Proviso highly strained interpretations. The motivation for doing so clearly seems to be to get to the desired conclusion (some form of egalitarianism). At the end of the day, then, left-libertarianism is probably best viewed as egalitarianism in drag.

This chapter examines from a secular standpoint the notion that the earth belongs to humankind collectively by offering a view on the ownership status of the earth that it calls Common Ownership. It first considers collective ownership of the earth and some of its conceptions, especially Common Ownership, before describing what work Common Ownership does in an engagement with libertarianism. It then defends Common Ownership against objections in terms of the value of the environment and discusses two alternative conceptions of collective ownership. It relates the results to global justice and shows how Common Ownership enters into debates in the philosophical literature. Finally, it explores one version of left-libertarianism and one of Thomas Pogge's arguments for the claim that the global order harms the poor.

Explains why Lockean voluntarism, even when remedied of the problems discussed in Ch. 5, might be criticized by liberal egalitarians on the following grounds: it allows for the legitimacy of highly illiberal or inegalitarian political societies. Argues that such illiberal or inegalitarian societies would in fact be legitimized by the actual consent of their members when freely given in circumstances of equality. Therefore defends a voluntaristic, left‐libertarian account of political legitimacy that differs in crucial respects from the hypothetical contract approaches of liberal‐egalitarian Kantians such as John Rawls and Thomas Nagel.

This chapter closes out the book by arguing that the various theoretical and practical recommendations made throughout the work can be readily embraced by adherents of a wide variety of comprehensive moral and political theories on both the left and the right, including left- and right-libertarianism, the difference principle and other provisions of John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, any of the various forms of luck egalitarianism, as well as certain comprehensive theories of equality of opportunity. The chapter also discusses the overall relationship between exploitation and economic inequality, and offers some final reflections on both the degree and the demographics of any inequality that might obtain in a liberal capitalist society in which the policies suggested by this theory of exploitation were implemented and enforced.

The Lockean radicals developed two internally consistent resolutions to Locke’s property problem. But what should we draw from the radicals as we seek to address that problem today? The chapter argues that we should reject the right-wing solution offered by Hodgskin and Spooner in favor of a version of the left-wing solution crafted by Bray and George. It begins by showing why Lockeans reject the Hobbesian interpretation of natural rights, according to which everyone has a liberty to everything but a claim to nothing: If Hobbes were right, we would not enjoy equal high status, but rather equal susceptibility to one another’s arbitrary impositions. The reasons that count against the Hobbesian conception of natural rights, however, also count against a right-wing interpretation of Lockean natural rights. For if we are not common world-owners, we are liable to be subject to the arbitrary impositions of those who do come to own the world. But does this mean we should follow contemporary left-libertarians in interpreting our common right to the world as a right to own privately an equal division of the world? Or should we follow Bray and George in interpreting our common right as a right to share equally in governing and using the world as a permanently public resource? The chapter argues that the left-libertarian picture cannot accommodate an adequate conception of equality, and that we must develop a left-Lockean political economy on the assumption that the world is a permanently public common resource.

Charitable tax subsidies are, at heart, redistributive. Some individuals receive benefits and others pay for these benefits, both voluntarily and involuntarily. At first glance, it appears that the redistribution effectuated by the subsidies violates commonly held notions of distributive justice. After all, the subsidies treat charities that serve the wealthy the same as charities that aid the poor. How can spending public funds on the wealthy in this manner be considered just? This chapter shows that such activity is just according to expansive interpretations of resource egalitarianism and left-libertarianism that account for expensive tastes and talent pooling. These understandings argue that individuals with expensive tastes deserve compensation to put them on equal footing with individuals with ordinary tastes when pursuing their visions of the good life—just as individuals who lack financial resources deserve compensation equal to that of the financially advantaged when pursuing their life plans.

This chapter considers various arguments both for and against taxing inherited wealth, each of these being associated with some or other type of libertarian outlook. Libertarianism in the Lockean guises (‘left’ and ‘right’ varieties) is distinguished from its classical liberal alternative, which downplays the Lockean emphasis on private property rights in favour of a more defeasible case for small government and low taxation. These different perspectives generate a variety of quite different arguments about inheritance, some more persuasive than others. Some attention is paid to the common claim that inheritance taxes ‘punish’ virtue and generosity. It is then argued that a Rignano scheme may be particularly attractive in light of certain left-libertarian commitments and as a way of accommodating a classical liberal concern about perpetual savings.

The author surveys contrasting models of political economy and social democratic efforts to reform labour markets and welfare states. The paradoxical conclusion is that social democratic parties have lost less electorally in countries where welfare states have been weaker and labour markets less regulated - the liberal welfare state countries. The severest challenges are faced by those social democratic parties that, historically, were builders or co-builders of large, highly decommodifying welfare states, as in the Nordic and continental-conservative countries. In Germany, social democrats have lost votes to the Greens and the Left Party while in the Nordic countries they have been outflanked by the mainstream conservatives, while losing to the populist right, both of whom have embraced welfarism.

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, did for left-Lockeanism what Spooner’s contemporaneous mature work did for right-Lockeanism: It took up and developed a line of thought that an earlier author pioneered and, in the process, established a conceptual framework that would survive into the twentieth century. Like Bray, George attempts to solve Locke’s property problem by arguing that people are required to form and maintain political arrangements that protect our common positive right to share the world as equals. But unlike Bray, he does not lean heavily on a labor theory of value. He argues instead that traditional landownership subjects the landless to landowners’ arbitrary power, even when labor exchanges between the two parties leave everyone richer than they were before. In order to respect our common right to the world and the freedom from domination it mandates, governments need not, as Bray argues, seize the means of production and subject them to direct collective control. Rather, they need only require landholders to rent their land from the community at competitive market rates. Once governments pool these rents into a public fund, citizens can enjoy their natural common right within an otherwise competitive market economy. This blueprint would inspire the left-libertarian property theory that has recently emerged to challenge right-libertarianism around turn of the twenty-first century.

This chapter clarifies the place that natural resources should have within an egalitarian theory, as one important set of advantages and disadvantages amongst many which drive access to wellbeing. It rejects some rival views which suggest that natural resources are the only things that matter from the point of view of distributive justice, or that natural resources or their value are the only thing we should distribute so as to bring us closer to equality. It claims instead that natural resources are, in a slogan, ‘tremendously important but nothing special’ as drivers of human wellbeing. It then draws out the implications of this view for important questions about natural resource appropriation, climate justice, and intergenerational justice.

Philosophers have tended to see property through the lens of natural resource acquisition. Discussions often focus on agrarian models inherited from Locke in which income and wealth derive from land use. But these models no longer make sense in a service-sector economy. In advanced societies, wealth overwhelmingly derives from the activities of lawyers, chefs, designers, coders, or teachers providing services to others. And once we recognize that in modern economies services are at the core of wealth creation, it becomes more difficult to reject (traditional) libertarian claims about redistribution. In particular, so-called left-libertarian views that attempt to defend redistribution on natural resource grounds become much harder to defend.