G.A. Cohen has produced an influential criticism of libertarian‐ism that posits joint ownership of everything in the world other than labor, with each joint owner having a veto right over any potential use of the world. According to Cohen, in that world rationality would require that wealth be divided equally, with no differential accorded to talent, ability, or effort. A closer examination shows that Cohen's argument rests on two central errors of reasoning and does not support his egalitarian conclusions, even (...) granting his assumption of joint ownership. That assumption was rejected by Locke, Pufendorf and other writers on property for reasons that Cohen does not rebut. (shrink)

The theories of Locke, Hume and Kant dominate contemporary philosophical discourse on property rights. This is particularly true of applied ethics, where they are used to settle issues from biotech patents to managerial obligations. Within these theories, however, the usual criticisms of private property aren’t even as much as intelligible. Locke, Hume and Kant, I argue, develop claims about property on a model economy that I call “Frontier Town.” They and contemporary authors then apply these claims to capitalist economies. There (...) are two problems with this application: First, we’ll be considering the wrong kind of property: The only property in Frontier Town are means of life. Critics, however, object to property in concentrated capital because they associate only this kind of property with economic coercion and political power. Second, the two economies differ in central features, so that very different claims about empirical consequences and hence about fairness and merit will be plausible for each. This second problem, I argue, is a consequence of the first. I conclude that Frontier Town theories are more likely to distort than to illuminate property issues in capitalist economies. (shrink)

Margaret Kohn argues for a reappraisal of early twentieth-century left-republican French political theory, known as ‘solidarism’. Solidarism recognises private property as legitimate, but at the same time argues that the collective nature of economic production gives rise to a claim to social property. It is social property that should underlie the case for social justice and social rights, not the standard liberal claims to individual autonomy. This paper provides an appraisal of Kohn’s recovery of solidarism, taking as its main theme (...) the relation between property and social justice. The paper first offers a typology of four theories of justice (right- and left-libertarianism, luck and relational egalitarianism) and discusses the relation of each of these to the concept of property. Then it argues that solidarism is akin to left-libertarianism in the way it formulates justice as a claim to social property. Finally, it argues that solidarists cannot escape grounding their theory in a non-property based fundamental principle, which makes the theory much less distinctive from egalitarian theories of justice than may appear at first sight. (shrink)

This article makes the normative case for a differentiated approach to the sovereignty of states over natural resources. In the first half of the article, drawing on the example of the Yasuní-ITT-Initiative, I will argue that countries commit a moral wrong when they exploit natural resources for their own benefit, but that they have the moral right to do so given the current structure of the international system. In the second half of the article, I address the question of whether (...) states' rights over natural resources can be justified. Central to my argument will be the distinction between “control rights” and “income rights.” Only control rights, I will argue, can be justified as inherently tied to collective self-determination. (shrink)