disorderlyvision
02-24-2010, 11:30 AM
http://liberalaw.blogspot.com/2010/02/natural-law-and-non-aggression.html
The strand of libertarian thinking anchored in the work of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand gives pride of place, as far as political ethics are concerned, to the non-aggression principle (NAP), which holds that no one may initiate force against another person. As commonly read in libertarian circles, the principle precludes the initiation of force against someone else’s property as well as her person. (For convenience, we can call these the person-aspect and the property-aspect of the NAP.) Leonard Read (who did not, perhaps, take it quite seriously enough) famously summed up this principle by observing that it was compatible with “anything that’s peaceful.” In this post, I want to ask whether an important expositions of the natural law tradition in which Rothbard and Rand were both rooted can ground something like the NAP.
Rothbard emphasized in The Ethics of Liberty that the natural law theory he offered there was a theory of politics, that is, as he put it, of “the just use of force.” He did not intend to propose a general theory of ethics, and he stressed that serious moral questions extended well beyond questions about when force was appropriate. At the same time, he seems plausibly to have believed, it's most important to get clear on the moral limits of violence. As long as rejecting aggression was accepted as a ground-rule, people could get along satisfactorily even if their views on other moral questions differed. That didn't mean that all moral stances compatible with a commitment to non-aggression were equally good.
By rooting his position in the natural law tradition, Rothbard plausibly implied that political ethics was a subset of natural law ethics more broadly construed. On this view, natural law political ethics wouldn't be seen as free-standing; rather, natural law convictions about proper limits on the use of force would flow from natural law ethics more generally. This way of thinking about the relationship between political ethics and general ethics doesn't follow strictly, of course; perhaps there are moral principles that are concerned exclusively with the use of force and don't depend on more general principles. But it seems more economical and elegant to suppose that, if there are more general natural law principles of ethics, principles of political ethics are intelligible and justifiable in light of those more general principles.
There are obviously multiple strands in the natural law tradition. Rothbard was especially fond of the Spanish Scholastics, whom he saw as in many ways the precursors of the Austro-libertarians. But their own thought was grounded in the earlier work of Aquinas and Aristotle. And subsequent descendants of Aquinas have reworked the Aristotelian tradition to which he was a major contributor in ways quite different from those of the Scholastics so dear to Rothbard.
The position of the contemporary “new classical natural law” theorists is an obvious example. It reflects the influence of the post-World War II analytic tradition in English-language philosophy, and is particularly dependent on the work of the late G. E. M. Anscombe. My purpose here is not to consider all of its intricacies but to consider how closely the conclusions supported by this particular variety of natural law thinking can be brought to resemble Rothbard’s in one specific way. My question is: to what extent can a plausible version of NCNL theory support something like a Rothbardian version of the non-aggression principle?
NCNL theory features two key components: basic goods and basic practical principles.
The goods are aspects of human welfare. They include life, speculative knowledge, practical reasonableness, friendship, religion, self-integration, æsthetic experience, and play. (Some heterodox NCNL thinkers—I’m one—have been inclined to include more subjective aspects of welfare, like sensory pleasure and peace of mind [thanks to Mark Murphy for the latter] on the list, and I’ve argued, too briefly, that there is good reason not to include self-integration. The details aren’t crucial.) What matters, in general, is not just what counts as a basic aspect or dimension of welfare or well being. What’s significant, instead, is that these aspects of welfare aren’t reducible to anything else (either a substantive good like pleasure or felt satisfaction, or a formal good like preference-satisfaction) and that each category and each instance of each category is incommensurable and non-fungible.
It is possible, the NCNL theorists emphasize, to choose among instances of various aspects of welfare in various combinations. And our choices are constrained by reason in two ways—to be reasonable, they must be for real goods rather than illusory ones (like emotional satisfaction untethered to objectively satisfactory states of affairs in the real world) and they must be consistent with the principles of practical reasonableness (about which more anon). But provided a choice is a choice for a real good and is otherwise consistent with the demands of practical reasonableness, there will be no objective way to rank one choice as “better” or “worse” than another (except in terms of the actor’s own prior commitments).
This basic fact of incommensurability and non-fungibility renders consequentialism a non-starter. For standard consequentialism, at least, depends on the ability to rank-order states of affairs incorporating many different aspects of welfare. And if there is no rationally inescapable way to combine all of the goods realized in a given state of affairs—as one cannot if the assignment of weights to different instances of different goods must be a matter of choice rather than of rational necessity—then there will be, can be, no objectively required ranking of states of affairs in the standard consequentialism demands. (Classical utilitarianism offers the possibility of objective ranking by focusing on the amount of pleasure embodied each possibility to be ranked; but as early as Mill it was becoming apparent that this sort of Benthamite project was inattentive to crucial aspects of the human experiences of valuation and moral judgment.)
This same fact of incommensurability grounds what we might see as a first approximation of the NAP framed in terms of NCNL theory: the Pauline Principle. The term “Pauline Principle” reflects St. Paul’s exasperated rejection (in Romans 3:8) of the notion that we might reasonably do evil to bring about good. The twist in the NCNL version of this principle, though, is that the principle is not seen as dependent on previously specified deontic norms. The idea behind the principle is often cashed in something like this way: a set of rules (say, the Ten Commandments) is treated as given; and the Pauline Principle is understood as stipulating that the rules should be treated as exceptionless, so that they may not be violated even in pursuit of particularly good consequences.
Framed this way, the principle appears unavoidably arbitrary. Why should I accept the relevant moral rules in the first place? And what reason, exactly, does the Pauline Principle give me to treat them as exceptionless?
Thus the strength of the NCNL version. The NCNL theorists don’t offer a version of the Pauline Principle that begins with a set of specific moral rules treated as givens. Rather, they derive it in large part simply from the idea that there are objective aspects of human welfare.
Their version of the Principle can be framed like this: don’t purposefully or instrumentally cause harm to any basic aspect of a moral subject’s welfare.
Now, consider someone contemplating an attack on someone else’s welfare. How might the attacker reason? If her action is to be reasonable, she will need to act in order to participate in some aspect of well being or in order to foster someone else’s participation in some dimension of welfare. Presuming she correctly understands what she is doing as an attack on some aspect of someone else’s good, then she needs to see her attack as justified in virtue of the good she seeks to realize or pursue. It can’t, ex hypothesi, be because the good she’s attacking is valueless. But the good she’s attempting to realize doesn’t, couldn’t, outweigh the good she’s attacking: it’s not commensurable with it. So any purposeful attack on an acknowledged basic good in the service of another acknowledged basic good will be unreasonable, because it will involve treating a genuine good as if it weren’t a genuine good, or as if it could be rationally subordinated to another genuine good when it can’t.
Another way the point is sometimes made by NCNL theorists is to say that attacking a basic good directly amounts to the choice to make being an attacker of basic goods part of one’s identity. Thus, Grisez talks about treating oneself as giver of life and death when one chooses to attack someone’s life.
There’s obviously more to be said about this argument, and my purpose here is not to spell out all of its ramifications or to defend it against all possible objections. The point of this post is to talk about the degree to which the NCNL approach to natural law theory might be able to justify something similar to a Rothbardian NAP. But I wanted to outline the basis an NCNL theorist might offer for the Pauline Principle so it would be clear how the NCNL version differs from other versions of “Don’t do evil to bring about good.” No detailed moral principles are presupposed: all the argument needs to get off the ground is the recognition that certain aspects of welfare are, indeed, aspects of welfare and that they’re incommensurable and non-fungible.
There are multiple princples of practical reasonableness, according to the NCNL theorists. The other one that matters most for our purposes here is the Golden Rule. As the NCNLs formulate it, it amounts to: don’t make arbitrary distinctions among persons. In particular, (a) one shouldn’t make distinctions among persons except when in reasonable pursuit of intelligible aspects of human flourishing (friendship, for instance, requires distinctions between friends and non-friends) and (b) one shouldn’t, in any case, treat others—even when in otherwise reasonable pursuit of an intelligible aspect of welfare—in a way such that one would be resentful if one were treated that way oneself.
This principle, and the other practical principles that needn’t concern us here, are all, on the NCNL view, absolute and exceptionless. That is, there is never a time when it is reasonable to ignore the Golden Rule or the Pauline Principle. But there’s one fairly obvious difference between the two. The Pauline Principle rules out certain generically specifiable action-types absolutely. For example: any instance of targeting noncombatants in war-time is fairly clearly going to be an instance of purposefully causing harm to one or more basic aspects of well being. So it’s possible to be quite clear in general terms about various sorts of conduct that will always be inconsistent with the Pauline Principle. And this means, in turn, that someone potentially on the receiving end of such conduct will have an absolute right not to be subjected to the ill effects of that conduct.
Note that the Pauline Principle is quite compatible with causing unintended but foreseen harm, harm as an anticipated but unsought by-product or side-effect of action intended to realize or pursue a genuine good. (Thus, it can allow for the use of force to defend oneself or others: one’s purpose in this case needn’t be to cause harm, but simply to repel or resist an attack.) But the fact that the harm isn’t purposeful or instrumental doesn’t mean it’s automatically permissible. There will be multiple constraints on bringing about unintended harms. But the most important will be the Golden Rule (to which I’ll come in a moment): one may not impose a risk of unintended but anticipated harm on someone else if one would resent the imposition of a similar risk, in comparable circumstances, on oneself or one’s loved ones.
It’s clear that the Pauline Principle provides very solid grounding for the person-aspect of the NAP. Any purposeful or instrumental violence against a person’s body, mental health, or peace of mind will clearly be ruled out by the Pauline Principle; using force to defend oneself or others will be permissible, but imposing unreasonable risks of harm on others won’t.
It’s not as clear, though, that NCNL theory can ground the property-aspect of the NAP. That’s because property rights, from the NCNL perspective, are rooted in the Golden Rule.
Just as there’s an absolute right not to be treated in a manner inconsistent with the Pauline Principle, while there’s also an absolute right not to be treated in a manner inconsistent with the Golden Rule. But what the Golden Rule requires will vary far more from situation to situation than what the Pauline Principle requires. Thus, mid-level general norms that flow from the Golden Rule—like Keep promises or Avoid rudeness—may admit of a variety of exceptions.
The NCNL theorists begin from what they see as essentially Aristotle’s point of view: everything in principle belongs to everyone, but there are good reasons to give responsibility for each thing to someone or some group of people in particular, for the benefit of all. Their view, in effect, is that property rights flow primarily from the Golden Rule. This basic principle fairness, along with some contingent but persisten facts about human nature and the human situation, impose some limits on what might count as a just property regime. Finnis focuses primarily on three (the labels are mine):
1. incentivization: in general, a just property system will be one that facilitates people’s contribution to the productivity of a community’s economy through the use of incentives; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would incentivize people to engage in productive activity as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
2. stewardship: in general, a just property system will facilitate stewardship—taking good care of property, cultivating and developing it responsibly, and preventing it from falling into disrepair; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would likely foster the effective stewardship of property as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
3. autonomy: in general, a just property system will be one that facilitates people’s autonomy—their freedom to determine the contours of their own lives and major life choices without intrusion by others; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would hep people to be autonomous as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
Each of these rationales is plausible and persuasive, but I suggest that several others might also be relevant, too (thanks to a variety of philosophers and social theorists for suggesting these to me):
generosity: in general, a just property system will be one that makes it possible for people to be generous; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would enable people to be generous as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
reliability: in general, a just property system will enable people to rely on their expectations that otherwise just property rules will continue in force, that decisions made about individual claims in light of such rules will be respected, and that otherwise just property titles will be respected; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would honor people’s past expectations or enable them to depend on their expectations in the future as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
productivity: in general, a just property system will be one that ensures that property is put to its most productive use; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would ensure that property was put to its most productive use as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
compensation: in general, a just property system will be one that makes it possible for people to receive, and likely that they will receive, compensation for the goods and services they provide to others; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would enable people to be compensated for providing goods and services as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
identity: in general, a just property system will take reasonable account of people’s identity-constitutive attachments to pieces of property; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would protect people’s identity-constitutive attachment to pieces of property as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
simplicity: in general, a just property system will be one that features rules that are simple—that are easy to formulate, articulate, learn, and apply; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule is simple as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
peacemaking: in general, a just property system will be one that features rules that minimize conflict—notably by clearly allocating responsibility for particular things to particular people; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would be conflict-minimizing as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
coordination: in general, a just property system will be one that coordinates people’s interactions by making possible the aggregation of information about their interests and needs and the determination of appropriate production patterns and distribution levels for goods and services; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would foster this kind of coordination as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
These additional concerns (1) add to the support for a system of private property provided by the considerations adduced by the NCNL theorists and (2) further constrain the kind of systems that could reasonably count as just.
Continued in next post
The strand of libertarian thinking anchored in the work of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand gives pride of place, as far as political ethics are concerned, to the non-aggression principle (NAP), which holds that no one may initiate force against another person. As commonly read in libertarian circles, the principle precludes the initiation of force against someone else’s property as well as her person. (For convenience, we can call these the person-aspect and the property-aspect of the NAP.) Leonard Read (who did not, perhaps, take it quite seriously enough) famously summed up this principle by observing that it was compatible with “anything that’s peaceful.” In this post, I want to ask whether an important expositions of the natural law tradition in which Rothbard and Rand were both rooted can ground something like the NAP.
Rothbard emphasized in The Ethics of Liberty that the natural law theory he offered there was a theory of politics, that is, as he put it, of “the just use of force.” He did not intend to propose a general theory of ethics, and he stressed that serious moral questions extended well beyond questions about when force was appropriate. At the same time, he seems plausibly to have believed, it's most important to get clear on the moral limits of violence. As long as rejecting aggression was accepted as a ground-rule, people could get along satisfactorily even if their views on other moral questions differed. That didn't mean that all moral stances compatible with a commitment to non-aggression were equally good.
By rooting his position in the natural law tradition, Rothbard plausibly implied that political ethics was a subset of natural law ethics more broadly construed. On this view, natural law political ethics wouldn't be seen as free-standing; rather, natural law convictions about proper limits on the use of force would flow from natural law ethics more generally. This way of thinking about the relationship between political ethics and general ethics doesn't follow strictly, of course; perhaps there are moral principles that are concerned exclusively with the use of force and don't depend on more general principles. But it seems more economical and elegant to suppose that, if there are more general natural law principles of ethics, principles of political ethics are intelligible and justifiable in light of those more general principles.
There are obviously multiple strands in the natural law tradition. Rothbard was especially fond of the Spanish Scholastics, whom he saw as in many ways the precursors of the Austro-libertarians. But their own thought was grounded in the earlier work of Aquinas and Aristotle. And subsequent descendants of Aquinas have reworked the Aristotelian tradition to which he was a major contributor in ways quite different from those of the Scholastics so dear to Rothbard.
The position of the contemporary “new classical natural law” theorists is an obvious example. It reflects the influence of the post-World War II analytic tradition in English-language philosophy, and is particularly dependent on the work of the late G. E. M. Anscombe. My purpose here is not to consider all of its intricacies but to consider how closely the conclusions supported by this particular variety of natural law thinking can be brought to resemble Rothbard’s in one specific way. My question is: to what extent can a plausible version of NCNL theory support something like a Rothbardian version of the non-aggression principle?
NCNL theory features two key components: basic goods and basic practical principles.
The goods are aspects of human welfare. They include life, speculative knowledge, practical reasonableness, friendship, religion, self-integration, æsthetic experience, and play. (Some heterodox NCNL thinkers—I’m one—have been inclined to include more subjective aspects of welfare, like sensory pleasure and peace of mind [thanks to Mark Murphy for the latter] on the list, and I’ve argued, too briefly, that there is good reason not to include self-integration. The details aren’t crucial.) What matters, in general, is not just what counts as a basic aspect or dimension of welfare or well being. What’s significant, instead, is that these aspects of welfare aren’t reducible to anything else (either a substantive good like pleasure or felt satisfaction, or a formal good like preference-satisfaction) and that each category and each instance of each category is incommensurable and non-fungible.
It is possible, the NCNL theorists emphasize, to choose among instances of various aspects of welfare in various combinations. And our choices are constrained by reason in two ways—to be reasonable, they must be for real goods rather than illusory ones (like emotional satisfaction untethered to objectively satisfactory states of affairs in the real world) and they must be consistent with the principles of practical reasonableness (about which more anon). But provided a choice is a choice for a real good and is otherwise consistent with the demands of practical reasonableness, there will be no objective way to rank one choice as “better” or “worse” than another (except in terms of the actor’s own prior commitments).
This basic fact of incommensurability and non-fungibility renders consequentialism a non-starter. For standard consequentialism, at least, depends on the ability to rank-order states of affairs incorporating many different aspects of welfare. And if there is no rationally inescapable way to combine all of the goods realized in a given state of affairs—as one cannot if the assignment of weights to different instances of different goods must be a matter of choice rather than of rational necessity—then there will be, can be, no objectively required ranking of states of affairs in the standard consequentialism demands. (Classical utilitarianism offers the possibility of objective ranking by focusing on the amount of pleasure embodied each possibility to be ranked; but as early as Mill it was becoming apparent that this sort of Benthamite project was inattentive to crucial aspects of the human experiences of valuation and moral judgment.)
This same fact of incommensurability grounds what we might see as a first approximation of the NAP framed in terms of NCNL theory: the Pauline Principle. The term “Pauline Principle” reflects St. Paul’s exasperated rejection (in Romans 3:8) of the notion that we might reasonably do evil to bring about good. The twist in the NCNL version of this principle, though, is that the principle is not seen as dependent on previously specified deontic norms. The idea behind the principle is often cashed in something like this way: a set of rules (say, the Ten Commandments) is treated as given; and the Pauline Principle is understood as stipulating that the rules should be treated as exceptionless, so that they may not be violated even in pursuit of particularly good consequences.
Framed this way, the principle appears unavoidably arbitrary. Why should I accept the relevant moral rules in the first place? And what reason, exactly, does the Pauline Principle give me to treat them as exceptionless?
Thus the strength of the NCNL version. The NCNL theorists don’t offer a version of the Pauline Principle that begins with a set of specific moral rules treated as givens. Rather, they derive it in large part simply from the idea that there are objective aspects of human welfare.
Their version of the Principle can be framed like this: don’t purposefully or instrumentally cause harm to any basic aspect of a moral subject’s welfare.
Now, consider someone contemplating an attack on someone else’s welfare. How might the attacker reason? If her action is to be reasonable, she will need to act in order to participate in some aspect of well being or in order to foster someone else’s participation in some dimension of welfare. Presuming she correctly understands what she is doing as an attack on some aspect of someone else’s good, then she needs to see her attack as justified in virtue of the good she seeks to realize or pursue. It can’t, ex hypothesi, be because the good she’s attacking is valueless. But the good she’s attempting to realize doesn’t, couldn’t, outweigh the good she’s attacking: it’s not commensurable with it. So any purposeful attack on an acknowledged basic good in the service of another acknowledged basic good will be unreasonable, because it will involve treating a genuine good as if it weren’t a genuine good, or as if it could be rationally subordinated to another genuine good when it can’t.
Another way the point is sometimes made by NCNL theorists is to say that attacking a basic good directly amounts to the choice to make being an attacker of basic goods part of one’s identity. Thus, Grisez talks about treating oneself as giver of life and death when one chooses to attack someone’s life.
There’s obviously more to be said about this argument, and my purpose here is not to spell out all of its ramifications or to defend it against all possible objections. The point of this post is to talk about the degree to which the NCNL approach to natural law theory might be able to justify something similar to a Rothbardian NAP. But I wanted to outline the basis an NCNL theorist might offer for the Pauline Principle so it would be clear how the NCNL version differs from other versions of “Don’t do evil to bring about good.” No detailed moral principles are presupposed: all the argument needs to get off the ground is the recognition that certain aspects of welfare are, indeed, aspects of welfare and that they’re incommensurable and non-fungible.
There are multiple princples of practical reasonableness, according to the NCNL theorists. The other one that matters most for our purposes here is the Golden Rule. As the NCNLs formulate it, it amounts to: don’t make arbitrary distinctions among persons. In particular, (a) one shouldn’t make distinctions among persons except when in reasonable pursuit of intelligible aspects of human flourishing (friendship, for instance, requires distinctions between friends and non-friends) and (b) one shouldn’t, in any case, treat others—even when in otherwise reasonable pursuit of an intelligible aspect of welfare—in a way such that one would be resentful if one were treated that way oneself.
This principle, and the other practical principles that needn’t concern us here, are all, on the NCNL view, absolute and exceptionless. That is, there is never a time when it is reasonable to ignore the Golden Rule or the Pauline Principle. But there’s one fairly obvious difference between the two. The Pauline Principle rules out certain generically specifiable action-types absolutely. For example: any instance of targeting noncombatants in war-time is fairly clearly going to be an instance of purposefully causing harm to one or more basic aspects of well being. So it’s possible to be quite clear in general terms about various sorts of conduct that will always be inconsistent with the Pauline Principle. And this means, in turn, that someone potentially on the receiving end of such conduct will have an absolute right not to be subjected to the ill effects of that conduct.
Note that the Pauline Principle is quite compatible with causing unintended but foreseen harm, harm as an anticipated but unsought by-product or side-effect of action intended to realize or pursue a genuine good. (Thus, it can allow for the use of force to defend oneself or others: one’s purpose in this case needn’t be to cause harm, but simply to repel or resist an attack.) But the fact that the harm isn’t purposeful or instrumental doesn’t mean it’s automatically permissible. There will be multiple constraints on bringing about unintended harms. But the most important will be the Golden Rule (to which I’ll come in a moment): one may not impose a risk of unintended but anticipated harm on someone else if one would resent the imposition of a similar risk, in comparable circumstances, on oneself or one’s loved ones.
It’s clear that the Pauline Principle provides very solid grounding for the person-aspect of the NAP. Any purposeful or instrumental violence against a person’s body, mental health, or peace of mind will clearly be ruled out by the Pauline Principle; using force to defend oneself or others will be permissible, but imposing unreasonable risks of harm on others won’t.
It’s not as clear, though, that NCNL theory can ground the property-aspect of the NAP. That’s because property rights, from the NCNL perspective, are rooted in the Golden Rule.
Just as there’s an absolute right not to be treated in a manner inconsistent with the Pauline Principle, while there’s also an absolute right not to be treated in a manner inconsistent with the Golden Rule. But what the Golden Rule requires will vary far more from situation to situation than what the Pauline Principle requires. Thus, mid-level general norms that flow from the Golden Rule—like Keep promises or Avoid rudeness—may admit of a variety of exceptions.
The NCNL theorists begin from what they see as essentially Aristotle’s point of view: everything in principle belongs to everyone, but there are good reasons to give responsibility for each thing to someone or some group of people in particular, for the benefit of all. Their view, in effect, is that property rights flow primarily from the Golden Rule. This basic principle fairness, along with some contingent but persisten facts about human nature and the human situation, impose some limits on what might count as a just property regime. Finnis focuses primarily on three (the labels are mine):
1. incentivization: in general, a just property system will be one that facilitates people’s contribution to the productivity of a community’s economy through the use of incentives; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would incentivize people to engage in productive activity as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
2. stewardship: in general, a just property system will facilitate stewardship—taking good care of property, cultivating and developing it responsibly, and preventing it from falling into disrepair; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would likely foster the effective stewardship of property as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
3. autonomy: in general, a just property system will be one that facilitates people’s autonomy—their freedom to determine the contours of their own lives and major life choices without intrusion by others; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would hep people to be autonomous as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
Each of these rationales is plausible and persuasive, but I suggest that several others might also be relevant, too (thanks to a variety of philosophers and social theorists for suggesting these to me):
generosity: in general, a just property system will be one that makes it possible for people to be generous; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would enable people to be generous as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
reliability: in general, a just property system will enable people to rely on their expectations that otherwise just property rules will continue in force, that decisions made about individual claims in light of such rules will be respected, and that otherwise just property titles will be respected; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would honor people’s past expectations or enable them to depend on their expectations in the future as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
productivity: in general, a just property system will be one that ensures that property is put to its most productive use; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would ensure that property was put to its most productive use as a reason for others to support the rule and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
compensation: in general, a just property system will be one that makes it possible for people to receive, and likely that they will receive, compensation for the goods and services they provide to others; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would enable people to be compensated for providing goods and services as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
identity: in general, a just property system will take reasonable account of people’s identity-constitutive attachments to pieces of property; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would protect people’s identity-constitutive attachment to pieces of property as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
simplicity: in general, a just property system will be one that features rules that are simple—that are easy to formulate, articulate, learn, and apply; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule is simple as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
peacemaking: in general, a just property system will be one that features rules that minimize conflict—notably by clearly allocating responsibility for particular things to particular people; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would be conflict-minimizing as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
coordination: in general, a just property system will be one that coordinates people’s interactions by making possible the aggregation of information about their interests and needs and the determination of appropriate production patterns and distribution levels for goods and services; someone can sometimes reasonably offer the fact that a property rule would foster this kind of coordination as a reason for others to support the rule, and so in support of her claim to a piece of property that would be hers under the rule.
These additional concerns (1) add to the support for a system of private property provided by the considerations adduced by the NCNL theorists and (2) further constrain the kind of systems that could reasonably count as just.
Continued in next post