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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2020
Debates about libertarianism and redistribution often revolve around self-ownership. There are two main reasons for this: first, self-ownership is often featured in Lockean accounts of property that endow us with a claim to the resources that are up for redistribution. Second, self-ownership has sometimes been mustered as a way of resisting the additional labor that is said to be required by redistributive schemes. In this essay, I argue that these appeals to self-ownership are misguided. However, unlike most critics of these appeals, I don’t wish to claim that redistribution is therefore vindicated. On the contrary, my main goal is to show that there are alternatives to invoking self-ownership that are more effective and that better capture the core intuition behind libertarian objections to redistribution.
1 Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1980 [1690]), sec. 27.Google Scholar
2 David Schmidtz points out to me (personal communication) that the extent to which Nozick viewed self-ownership as central to his account is unclear at best, and that G. A. Cohen’s hostile reconstruction may have affected our views of the matter. Still, Nozick’s specific discussion of property, at least, seems broadly to follow Locke’s account, which he sympathetically exposits and develops. And his discussion of forced labor clearly does revolve around questions of self- and other-ownership, as we will see.
3 Rothbard, Murray, Toward a New Liberty (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1973), 37. See alsoGoogle Scholar Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 174–75.Google Scholar
4 Cf. Gibbard, Allan, “Natural Property Rights,” Nous 10 (1976): 77–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Kant, Immanuel, Lectures on Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1980), 165.Google Scholar
6 For a more detailed Lockean theory of property, see Moller, Dan, Governing Least: A New England Libertarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 See, e.g., Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1739–40]), 491; andGoogle Scholar Murphy, Liam and Nagel, Thomas, The Myth of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 See Moller, “Property and the Creation of Value,” Economics and Philosophy 33 (2017): 1–23 for further discussion and qualifications. Examples of what I am criticizing can be found in, e.g., Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia and Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); or Richard Arneson, “Lockean Self-Ownership: Towards a Demolition,” Political Studies 39 (1991): 36–54 and Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
9 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 172.
10 Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality, 240. See also ibid., 213–25, and G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 181–225.
11 Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality, 70, 244.
12 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 101.Google Scholar
13 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 172.
14 Notice that nothing here depends on the strength of the self-ownership claim in play, i.e., that Cohen, say, is discussing maximally strong self-ownership (compatible with universal self-ownership). You still have to pay the butcher and your landlord.
15 Taylor, Robert, “A Kantian Defense of Self-Ownership,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (2004): 67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 Ibid., 68.
17 Ibid., 67.
18 Cp. Thomson, Judith Jarvis, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 149–75.Google Scholar
