Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679- 1749) fu poetessa, drammaturga e filosofa. La vivacità intellettuale e la forte determinazione le permisero di aggirare il pregiudizio di genere e di sottrarsi alle dinamiche di marginalizzazione femminile tipiche dell’età moderna. Pur celandosi dietro l’anonimato, Cockburn prese parte attiva al dibattito filosofico del tempo, intervenendo soprattutto in materia di morale. Le sue opere filosofiche, scritte in difesa di Locke o di Clarke, custodiscono, nonostante il dichiarato intento apologetico, tratti di originalità e indipendenza, particolarmente evidenti nella (...) teoria dell’obbligo morale, nell’interpretazione modale della dottrina lockeana d’identità personale, nell’ipotesi di una natura ontologica dello spazio. (shrink)

Sufficientarian libertarianism is a theory of justice that combines libertarianism’s focus on property rights and non-interference with sufficientarianism’s concern for the poor and needy. Persons are conceived as having stringent rights to direct their lives as they see fit, provided that everyone has enough to live a self-guided life. Yet there are different ways to combine libertarianism and sufficientarianism and hence different types of sufficientarian libertarianism. In the article I present and discuss three types, and I argue that the last (...) one overcomes the problems of the other two. The first type combines libertarianism with a sufficiency principle in what is sometimes called the ‘ethics of distribution’. The second incorporates modest welfare rights into a libertarian theory of justice. The third endorses a sufficientarian Lockean proviso for practices of private property within a libertarian theory of justice. I argue that it is superior to the others. (shrink)

Locke, además de justificar un derecho natural a la propiedad privada, también sostiene que todos los hombres tienen un derecho natural a la caridad. En el presente trabajo me propongo defender la hipótesis de que el derecho a la caridad postulado por Locke se explica por la presencia en su teoría de la propiedad de elementos procedentes de la teología cristiana. Cumpliría la función de garantizar que, en el contexto de una economía monetizada donde los individuos son, además, desigualmente industriosos, (...) se cumpla el designio divino de que todos los hombres dispongan de medios para preservarse. (shrink)

The Basic-Income Guarantee is a governmental programme of income redistribution that enjoys an increasing predicament among academic and political circles. Traditionally, the philosophical defence for this programme has been articulated from the standpoint of social liberalism, republicanism, or communism. Recently, however, libertarian philosopher Matt Zwolinski also tried to reconcile the Basic-Income Guarantee scheme with libertarian ethics. To do so, he resorted to the Lockean proviso: to the extent that the institutionalization of private property impoverishes certain people by depriving their access (...) to natural resources, these people deserve compensation and the most pragmatic way of providing this is through a Basic-Income Guarantee. This paper examines Zwolinski’s arguments and responds by demonstrating that the Basic-Income Guarantee is incompatible with libertarian ethics: the current levels of poverty are not caused by the institutionalization of private property and the Basic-Income Guarantee does not constitute a pragmatic approach to eradicate poverty. (shrink)

Creo que la defensa de John Locke del derecho a castigar está en tensión con su defensa de la igualdad humana. El propósito central de este artículo es mostrar que esta tensión podría ser resuelta si la justificación del derecho a castigar de Locke se basa en el concepto de confianza. Este concepto es claramente usado por Locke para justificar el derecho de resistencia. Pienso que también es posible usarlo para justificar la existencia del derecho a castigar. Pero, incluso si (...) esta justificación fuera exitosa, algunos problemas permanecen. I believe that John Locke's defense of the right to punish is in tension with his defense of human equality. The main purpose of this article is to show that this tension could be resolved if Locke's justification of the right to punish is based on the concept of trust. This concept is clarley employed by Locke to justify the right of resistance. I think that it is possible to use it also to justify the existence of the right to punish. But, even if this justification were succesful, some problems remain. (shrink)

This article is interested in the general question of what justifies territorial rights over unoccupied places, including places that are not occupied but are situated within the territorial borders of a state. This question arises because one of the most common defenses of rights over territory makes use of the idea of occupancy and has difficulty explaining such rights in places that are not occupied. It explores this question through an examination of the claims and arguments in the Canadian Arctic, (...) which provides an historically specific test case for the merits and plausibility of the various arguments appealed to. It argues that territorial rights in unoccupied places, including the Canadian Arctic, are justified on different grounds than in occupied parts of the territory, and that the justification also affects the kinds of rights—particularly over resources—that such states can claim. (shrink)

:Following Locke, philosophical discussion of private property has tended to focus on the acquisition of natural resources as central. In this paper I first pursue the idea that the resource paradigm doesn't apply to most developed economies, and show how this creates problems for many accounts of property. My second ambition is to draw a normative conclusion by showing that redistribution of wealth generated in the context of services is more difficult to justify compared with the natural resource paradigm philosophers (...) have often focused on. (shrink)

In the United States, the identities of criminal offenders are matters of public record, accessible to prospective employers, the press, and ordinary citizens. In European countries, the identities of offenders are routinely kept hidden, with some exceptions. The question addressed in this discussion concerns whether the public disclosure of the identities of offenders is part and parcel of their legal punishment. My contentions are that public disclosure is not conceptually part of legal punishment, necessary to serve substantive penal aims, or (...) likely to enhance penal aims. At times, it will conflict with defensible aims of legal punishment. Other values might support or require the public identification of criminal offenders, but the aims of legal punishment do not appear to do so. (shrink)

This essay presents a dialogical framework for treating philosophical disagreements as persuasion dialogues with analogical argumentation, with the aim of recasting philosophical disputes as disagreements over analogies. This has two benefits: it allows us to temporarily bypass conflicting metaphysical intuitions by focusing on paradigmatic examples, similarities, and the plausibility of conclusions for or against a given point of view; and it can reveal new avenues of argumentation regarding a given issue. This approach to philosophical disagreements is illustrated by studying the (...) role of argumentation by analogy in disputes over Lockean justifications of intellectual property rights, and disagreements over whether artificial agents should be treated as moral agents. Finally, a nonexhaustive list of possible global and local points of contention over analogical arguments is identified in order to highlight potential avenues of argumentation in disagreements over analogies. (shrink)

“Resilience” is booming. No longer a mere metaphor or abstract reference to dispositional properties, the resilience of communities or social-ecological systems is increasingly grounded in specific first-order properties. Consequently, resilience now constitutes a contentful and achievable partial conception of a good society. Yet political philosophers have taken little notice. The current article first discerns within recent social-scientific literature a set of attainable and measurable first-order properties that constitute “community resilience” or “ecological resilience.” Then, specifying “resilience” as the resilience of high-HDI (...) democratic societies to environmental disasters, infrastructure failures, and economic collapse, the current article argues from within a liberal framework that both “classical” and “egalitarian” liberals must treat resilience so understood as a necessary condition of legitimacy and justice; and this conclusion forces an overhaul of these liber... (shrink)

The central claim of Kant's political philosophy is that rational agents sharing a territory can justifiably be forced to live under a state; they have, in Kant's words, a duty of right to leave the state of nature. Perhaps something along these lines is entailed by any theory of state legitimacy, but the point raises special difficulties for Kant. He believes that rational agents have a right to freedom; that is, he believes that a rational agent's external freedom - her (...) ability to set and pursue ends for herself without being subject to the choices of others - can justifiably be restricted only for the sake of external freedom itself. To establish that human beings can be forced to join a civil condition, it will therefore not do to show that the state promotes security, prosperity or any other such value: Kant has to show that human beings living side by side need a state to be free. (shrink)

In this paper, I first argue that waste is best understood as (a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process. I next argue for the immorality of waste. My concluding suggestions are that (W1) if one person needs something for her preservation and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it, and refuses (...) to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second may be morally wrong and that (W2) if one person needs something for her preservation understood according to her metric and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it according to his own metric, and refuses to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second is morally wrong. (shrink)

La relación entre patrimonio y derechos políticos en la obra de John Locke ha sido ampliamente discutida. Por un lado, se encuentran posiciones como las de Kendall y Tully que atribuyen un carácter democrático a la concepción lockeana sobre la sociedad civil. Por otro, interpretaciones como las de Ashcraft que le asignan un sesgo revolucionario e igualitario, próximo a la concepción de los Levellers. Sin embargo, a la luz de una serie de documentos, es posible discutir estas interpretaciones, como ya (...) lo han hecho diversos intérpretes parcialmente. Se mostrará aquí que Locke supone que la discusión parlamentaria compete a quienes, representando a los diferentes sectores productivos, discuten la promoción de sus actividades y que los trabajadores, al no disponer de la formación necesaria para la discusión sobre los asuntos públicos, no son considerados para participar del ejercicio parlamentario sino sólo de una resistencia excepcional. (shrink)

Este trabajo estudia críticamente seis posibles límites a la apropiación privada, individual, unilateral y desigual en el estado de naturaleza descripto por John Locke. I) la restricción expresada bajo la forma de dejar suficiente y tan bueno en común para otros; II) la prohibición del desperdicio de los frutos perecederos; III) asociada a esta segunda condición pero aplicada a la tierra, la prohibición de cercar tierra cuyos frutos se desperdicie; IV) la limitación propuesta por Macpherson, según la cual es una (...) condición de la apropiación mezclar el propio trabajo de modo personal con el objeto; V) el principio de caridad como derecho del necesitado a los medios de subsistencia; VI) la limitación que advierte Simmons, según la cual es posible derivar del principio de caridad un derecho al auto-gobierno, esto es, a no ser esclavizado a cambio de brindar, como es el deber del propietario al necesitado, los medios de subsistencia. (shrink)

Allen Buchanan has argued that a widely defended view of the nature of the state – the view that the state is a discretionary association for the mutual advantage of its members – must be rejected because it cannot adequately account for moral requirements of humanitarian intervention. This paper argues that Buchanan’s objection is unsuccessful,and moreover, that discretionary association theories can preserve an important distinction that Buchanan’s alternative approach to political legitimacy cannot: the distinction between “internal” legitimacy (a state’s ability (...) to morally justify itself to its own members) and “external” legitimacy (a state’s ability to morally justify itself to humanity more broadly). (shrink)

Left-libertarianism is a version of Lockean libertarianism that combines the idea that each person is the full rightful owner of herself and the idea that each person should have the right to own a roughly equal amount of the world's resources. This essay argues against left-libertarianism. The specific target is an interesting form of left-libertarianism proposed by Michael Otsuka that is especially stringent in its equal world ownership claim. One criticism advanced is that there is more tension than Otsuka acknowledges (...) between private ownership of self and equal ownership of the world. This emerges once one notices that self-ownership should not be conceived merely in a thin, formal way but also as a thicker substantive insistence on wide individual freedom. A second criticism is that in other respects the formal idea of self-ownership that Otsuka and other left-libertarians embrace is an extreme doctrine that merits rejection. (shrink)

En Anarquía, Estado y utopía, Robert Nozick sostiene que los derechos naturales liberales se siguen de las restricciones morales indirectas a la acción y que éstas, a su vez, reflejan el principio kantiano subyacente de que los individuos son fines y no simplemente medios. En el presente trabajo se indaga en los supuestos fundamentos kantianos de la filosofía política de Nozick y en las relaciones que existen entre el concepto kantiano de dignidad y la propiedad sobre sí mismo, concepto este (...) último que suele ser aceptado como el fundamento último de la teoría de la justicia de Nozick. Se concluirá que, pese a ciertas similitudes, el concepto de propiedad sobre sí mismo resulta incompatible con el concepto kantiano de dignidad. Se concluirá, asimismo, que el concepto de propiedad sobre sí mismo ofrece una clave de lectura consistente de la obra política de Nozick y que en consecuencia, para tales fines, debe ser preferido por sobre el concepto kantiano de dignidad. (shrink)

Libertarians have long been divided over how best to interpret the Lockean proviso, which requires that one leave “enough and as good” in common for others after one’s appropriation. This article sheds light on this exegetical question in relation to its qualitative part through a contextual analysis of Locke’s often neglected writings on ….

Este artículo estudia la aplicación de la ley de la naturaleza en el estado de naturaleza. En este sentido, se analizará la definición abstracta de libertad, su correspondencia con el concepto práctico de libertad natural y la oposición de este último con la esclavitud que supone nacer sometido a un gobierno despótico. Posteriormente, se considerará la potestad de infringir castigos bajo pena capital y su derivación, a través de la guerra justa, en la figura de esclavitud legítima. De este modo, (...) se plantearán las tensiones que surgen al contrastar la crítica del absolutismo y la conquista con la legitimación de un poder privado despótico. (shrink)

Although John Locke’s theory of appropriation is undoubtedly influential, no one seems to agree about exactly what he was trying to say. It is unlikely that someone will write the interpretation that effectively ends the controversy. Instead of trying to find the one definitive interpretation of Locke’s property theory, this article attempts to identify the range of reasonable interpretations and extensions of Lockean property theory that exist in the contemporary literature with an emphasis on his argument for unilateral appropriation. It (...) goes through Locke’s argument point-by-point discussing the controversy over what he said and over what he perhaps should have said to make the most valuable and coherent argument. The result is an outline of Lockean theories of property: a menu of options by which one might use appropriation to justify property rights. Supporters only need to pick the version they find most plausible, but opponents should be aware of the entire menu. Anyone claiming to refute appropriation-based property rights must address not only one but all potentially valid versions of it. (shrink)

The concept of ḥalāl products or food is gaining worldwide attention because of its recognition as an alternative benchmark for safety, hygiene and quality assurance of what is consumed. Thus products or foods produced in line with ḥalāl prescriptions are acceptable to Muslim as well as many non-Muslim consumers. Given the significant role of ḥalāl awareness in the life of Muslims and their obligations to be Sharīʿah compliant, this paper addresses the determinants of Muslim consumers’ awareness of ḥalāl products or (...) foods in the city of Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia. It is argued that many factors have a bearing on the awareness of ḥalāl products or food but unfortunately most of the previous studies focused mainly on the ḥalāl certification logo. In order to fill the void, this paper delves into other factors that can influence the awareness of Muslims on ḥalāl consumptions. Using Partial Least Square-SEM, this study found that religious belief, ḥalāl exposure, Ḥalāl-logo, and health reasons are the determinants of Muslims’ awareness about ḥalāl consumptions. (shrink)

Esta ponencia se propone demostrar que, para John Locke, el individuo posee derechos inalienables, pero que la misma naturaleza humana tiende a establecer ciertas relaciones de poder que lo esclavizan. La constatación teórica e histórica de este postulado lleva a Locke a sostener que la salida del hombre de esa situación de enfermedad debe liberarlo no de las relaciones de poder, que pueden ser legitimadas, sino de sus propias pasiones que lo llevan a juzgar con parcialidad sus derechos y a (...) intentar someter a otros a los designios de su amor propio. Para ello, el contrato social lockeano busca elaborar un equilibrio entre los derechos inalienables de los hombres y la construcción de un espacio comunitario que haga posible la justicia en las relaciones humanas y, por lo tanto, emancipe al hombre del estado de enfermedad en el que se encontraría si no existiese el poder político. La función del poder político surgido en el contrato social es, pues, la de respetar-reestablecer el equilibrio entre libertad e igualdad que debe primar entre los hombres. (shrink)