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)

With growing vigor, political philosophers have started questioning the Westphalian system of states as the main actors in the international arena and, within it, the doctrine of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources. In this article I add to these questionings by showing that, when it comes to migratory natural resources, i.e., migratory species, a plausible theory of territorial rights should advocate a regime of shared sovereignty among states. This means that one single entity should represent their interests and maybe also (...) those of third parties, managing and making decisions over the resource as a whole. Although such a regime might be the tacit goal of existing international conventions regarding wildlife, it remains untheorized in political philosophy and largely under-theorized in international law. By presenting the critical situation of the monarch butterfly in North America, I point to the inadequacy of the compartmentalized current regime, which generates injustice in migration; namely, the phenomenon whereby range states of a given species may neglect or over-exploit it while in their territory, to the detriment of others. I suggest that more flexible and imaginative governance arrangements are needed to deal in a better way with these and similar natural resources. (shrink)

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. (...) By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. (shrink)

Why do we assign to countries rights to all the positive utilities from their natural resources, but hold them under no duty to bear costs for the negative utilities generated by those resources for those beyond their borders? In this paper I suggest that this ‘volcanic asymmetry’ has been overlooked by statist and cosmopolitan theories and that, despite of the arguments that might be given on its behalf, keeping this asymmetry requires further normative justification. I present two ways of getting (...) rid of it, conclude that neither is satisfactory, and point to an alternative path. (shrink)

In this article, I maintain that the social process of labour commodification, through which the individual capability to uphold a decent welfare is bound to participation in the labour market, poses a problem of justice from the republican prospective on freedom as non-domination. I first discuss the reasons we might hold that capitalism brings a form of systemic domination by virtue of one of its intrinsic features: unequal access to the means of production. Then, I argue for a minimum de-commodification (...) of labour power as a criterion of justice, adding that it should be conceived as a cosmopolitan proviso because states unfairly suffer from their limited economic capacity to neutralize capitalist systemic domination. Lastly, I compare the normative account of global justice that I am proposing in this article with sufficientarianism, with the capability approach, and with Thomas Pogge’s ‘Global Resources Dividend’. (shrink)

Distributive justice is one of the central questions of contemporary moral and political philosophy. Discussions on this topic are often presented as a confrontation between two groups of thinkers: libertarians and luck egalitarians. The former emphasize the dependence of the existing distribution on the individual choice and personal responsibility of people, and therefore are skeptical about various redistribution programs. The latter, on the contrary, emphasize the influence of morally arbitrary luck on the economic situation of people, and therefore welcome redistributive (...) measures to compensate for this brute luck. Left-libertarian claims to reconcile these two types of moral considerations. The classical left-libertarian point of view seeks to offset the influence of brute luck through an egalitarian distribution of the benefits of owning natural resources that are independent of anyone’s choice and responsibility. However, this position does not sufficiently take into account the influence of other factors of brute luck and, in particular, genetic endowments on the distribution of economic wealth. This article discusses three approaches that allow left-libertarians to take into account the factor of genetic luck in interpersonal distribution. First, it is Hillel Steiner’s proposal to attribute genetic information to natural resources, the benefits of which are subject to egalitarian redistribution. Second, it is the concept of equal opportunity for welfare by Peter Vallentyne, Michael Otsuka and Eric Roark. Third, it is the universal dominance criterion of Philippe Van Parijs and Kasper Ossenblok. The first two approaches face a number of moral and practical difficulties, but the third approach is able to overcome them. Thus, the universal dominance criterion is the most promising way to reconcile left-libertarianism and justice in the distribution of genetic endowments. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I investigate the implications of libertarian morality in relation to the problem of climate change. This problem is explicated in the first chapter, where preliminary clarifications are also made. In the second chapter, I briefly explain the characteristics of libertarianism relevant to the subsequent study, including the central non-aggression principle. In chapter three, I examine whether our individual emissions of greenhouse gases, which together give rise to climate change, meet this principle. I do this based on the (...) assumption that we are the legitimate owners of the resources we use in those activities. In the fourth chapter, I question this assumption and scrutinize libertarianism’s restrictions on appropriations of climate-relevant resources, which leads me to distinguish between some different versions of the libertarian view. Toward the end of the chapter, I also examine libertarianism’s answer to the political question regarding how emission rights should be distributed. The fifth chapter investigates libertarianism’s verdicts for mere risks of infringement, as stemming from people’s emissions and acts of appropriations. In chapter six, I investigate the libertarian right to self-defense against both the effects of climate change and other people’s climate-relevant activities. In chapter seven, I discuss two intergenerational issues related to climate change: what libertarianism says concerning future generations and how libertarianism might deal with the problem of historical emissions. The eighth chapter explores the implications of libertarianism regarding collective moral wrongdoing in connection to climate change. In chapter nine, I take a look at the libertarian room for governmental responses for tackling climate change. The tenth and final chapter is a summary. The overall conclusion of the dissertation is that libertarianism recommends that we reduce our emissions and decrease our extraction of natural resources such as forests and fossil fuels. Furthermore, governments are permitted to undertake some quite substantial actions in order to fight the causes of climate change. I end with some bottom-up reflections on what these conclusions might say about the plausibility of libertarianism. I claim that although libertarianism after all manages to explain some of our moral intuitions regarding climate change, it is questionable whether libertarianism’s explanation is better than those offered by alternative moral theories. (shrink)

The core idea of libertarianism, considered as a basic moral theory, is that people have certain negative rights and that those rights determine morally right action. Libertarianism is supposed to provide robust explanations to some of our intuitions, such as that it is wrong to steal, kill, rape or enslave other people. However, its exclusive focus on negative rights (i.e., rights to non-interference) makes it incapable of explaining some other intuitions, such as that the utterly rich should help the utterly (...) poor. Although libertarianism can explain why we should never do bad to others, it cannot explain why we should sometimes do good to others. For this reason, libertarianism is not satisfactory as it stands. A natural suggestion, therefore, is that we should either abandon libertarianism in favor of some of its better faring rivals, or revise the theory in order to get rid of the features that make it unsatisfactory. This paper proposes a new libertarian theory of morality: a theory that endorses a utilitarian proviso for use of external resources. I call this theory mid-libertarianism. The basic idea of mid-libertarianism is that individuals are free to do as they want as long as they do not violate the rights of others, given that they maximize utility whenever they use external resources. The paper is divided into four main sections. In this frst section, I introduce mid-libertarianism as a normative ethical theory. In the second main section, I put forward the key arguments for mid-libertarianism, which are, roughly, that it maintains the main explanatory powers of existing versions of libertarianism, while it avoids some of the most severe problems that these theories face. In the third section, I answer some potential objections to midlibertarianism. In the fourth section, I conclude that mid-libertarianism deserves to be taken seriously as a new contender in the normative ethics debate. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss whether the theory of justice as fairness famously proposed by John Rawls can justify the implementation of global principles of socioeconomic justice, contrary to what Rawls himself maintains. In particular, I dwell on the concept of the basic structure of society, which Rawls defines as “the primary subject of justice” and considers as a prerogative of domestic societies. In the first part, I briefly present Rawls’s theory of socio-economic justice and his account of justice between (...) peoples. I then proceed with the analysis of the cosmopolitan counterarguments that have been levelled against Rawls’s dualism between domestic and international justice, which mainly revolve around the outlining of a global basic structure as a consequence of globalisation. Between these two opposing poles, I also discuss the intermediate stance taken by those authors who maintain that the empirical dispute between a domestic and a global basic structure is misleading, because the pressing question is whether the unfair practices and norms that characterise the global economy demand the existence of a global basic structure, regardless of the fact that it already exists or not. Lastly, I collect some points, both theoretical and empirical, that have emerged from the analysis and I argue that the theoretical requirement of a global basic structure can have practical implications even if its existence is contradicted in empirical terms. (shrink)

In this article, I defend a democratic form of the productivist welfare state. I argue that this form of the state can best cope, theoretically and practically, with the diversity of deeply morally pluralistic democratic societies for two reasons. First, the justification of this form of the state rests solely on general facts about human nature, basic human needs, and efficiency considerations in a world of moderately scarce resources. Second, this state does not aim to promote a specific view of (...) justice, but human flourishing more generally, expressed in terms of individual and collective productivity. The proposed democratic productivist welfare state supports its citizens up to the level that allows them to develop and exercise their talents and abilities without providing incentives for free riding. I argue that, under the specific empirical circumstances that I describe, in particular certain informational restrictions concerning the precise productive and destructive capacities of the members of society in practice and the soundness of the Aristotelian principle, this goal may best be achieved in practice by the introduction of an unconditional basic income at subsistence level, if society is sufficiently developed economically to provide such an income. On productivist grounds, such an unconditional subsistence income also addresses, pragmatically and partially, the problem of historical injustices against the weakest members of society and provides all group members with the means for democratic participation. (shrink)

This paper contrasts conceptions of global distributive justice focused on natural resources with human rights–based approach. To emphasize the advantages of the latter, the paper analyzes three areas: (1) the methodology of normative theorizing about natural resources, (2) the category of natural resources, and (3) the view of the system of sovereignty over natural resources. Concerning the first, I argue that global justice conceptions misconstrue the claims made to natural resources and offer conceptions which are practically unfeasible. Concerning the second, (...) I show that contemporary philosophy of justice downplays the plurality of meanings resources have for collectives and argue that conflicts over natural resources can best be accounted for using human rights. Finally, the paper looks at sovereignty over natural resources and argues that rather than dismissing it as unjustifiable on moral grounds, it should be reformed in line with valid principles of international law, most importantly with human rights. (shrink)