Many assume that whenever government is entitled to make a law, it is entitled to enforce that law coercively. I argue that the justification of legal authority and the justification of governmental coercion come apart. Both in ideal theory and in actual human societies, governments are sometimes entitled to make laws that they are not entitled to enforce coercively.

Writers of very different persuasions have relied on arguments about self-ownership; in recent years, it is libertarians who have rested their political theory on self-ownership, but Grotian authoritarianism rested on similar foundations, and, even though it matters a good deal that Hegel did not adopt a full-blown theory of self-ownership, so did Hegel's liberal-conservatism. Whether the high tide of the idea has passed it is hard to say. One testimony to its popularity was the fact that G. A. Cohen for (...) a time thought that the doctrine of self-ownership was so powerful that an egalitarian like himself had to come to terms with it; but he has since changed his mind. I have tackled the topic of self-ownership glancingly elsewhere, but have not hitherto tried to pull together the observations I have made in passing on those occasions. The view I have taken for granted and here defend is that self-ownership is not an illuminating notion—except in contexts that are unattractive to anyone of libertarian tastes. (shrink)

Is it possible to justify territorial rights? Provided a justification for territorial rights can be found, does it ground claims toparticularterritories? And provided a claim to particular territories can be justified, what kind of claim is it? Is it a claim to jurisdiction? A claim to control resources? A claim to control the movement of people across borders? In this paper I review some prominent accounts seeking to answer these questions. After outlining their main features, I focus on some difficulties (...) they encounter, in particular with regard to the justification of exclusion. (shrink)

There is currently a stalemate over the correct approach to legal liability. To take a prominent example, it remains a point of contention whether land owners should be held liable for injuries to trespassers. Many of those who insist that land owners should be held liable for injuries to trespassers maintain this for purely economic or pragmatic reasons. In contrast, those on the other side frequently defend their view on the grounds that, in such trespass cases, owners are not morally (...) responsible for the injuries. We maintain that the best way forward for all parties in this debate is to recognize the existence of “morally responsible liability ”—of cases where owners qua owners are morally responsible for damages caused by their property. Once this is recognized, the debate can be framed in terms of whether there are economic or pragmatic reasons for legal liability to diverge from morally responsible liability. Unfortunately, there is no good account of morally responsible liability in the literature. Taking lessons from the failings of the few extant accounts, we draw on the work of A. M. Honoré and Jeremy Waldron to develop an account of our own. We argue that owners are morally responsible for damages caused by their property when and because their taking ownership of something leads to increased risk to others. We explain how and why such increases in risk come about, and how our account captures our intuitions concerning various cases, including those concerning injuries to trespassers. (shrink)

Controversy surrounds the ‘intrusion’ of the discourse of rights into workplace relationships. This is explored by examining the nature of rights through the analysis of the idea of a ‘right to manage’. Purported justifications of the right to manage in terms of either property or contract are shown to be inadequate, thus illustrating the need to incorporate a degree of consequentialism in the articulation and justification of rights. The value of a rights-approach is argued to lie in the identification of (...) the morally relevant interests affected by management decisions and the correlative obligations of those involved in the workplace, rather than in the introduction of a special set of moral considerations distinctively connected with the idea of rights. (shrink)

Philosophical defenses of property regimes can be classified as supporting either a conservative politics of property rights—the political protection of existing property titles—or a radical politics of direct political intervention to redistribute property titles. Traditionally, historical considerations were used to legitimize conservative property‐rights politics, while consequentialist arguments led to radical politics. Recently, however, the philosophical legitimations have changed places. Conservatives now point to the beneficial economic consequences of something like the current private‐property regime, while radicals justify political redistribution as restitution (...) for historical misappropriations. This shift can be explained by such factors as the failure of state‐directed redistributions of property during the twentieth century to benefit the poor. But there are limitations to the usefulness of historical arguments for radicals, and of consequentialist arguments for conservatives: namely, the undeserving poor and the idle rich, respectively. (shrink)

The Kantian moral foundations of Nozickian libertarianism suggest that the claim that self‐ownership grounds only negative rights to property should be rejected. The moral foundations of Nozick's libertarianism better support basing property rights on moral desert. It is neither incoherent nor implausible to say that need can be a basis for desert. By implication, the libertarian contention that persons ought to be respected as persons living self‐shaping lives is inconsistent with the libertarian refusal to accept that claims of need can (...) sometimes outweigh claims to property. (shrink)

The thesis that an analysis of property rights is essential to an adequate analysis of the state is a mainstay of political philosophy. The contours of the type of government a society has are shaped by the system regulating the property rights prevailing in that society. Views of this sort are widespread. They range from Locke to Nozick and encompass pretty much everything else in between. Defenders of this sort of view accord to property rights supreme importance. A state that (...) does not sufficiently respect property rights is likely to be a totalitarian state, and will also be likely to fail to respect rights of other sorts. (shrink)

Research in recent history has neglected to address the moral foundations of particular kinds of public policy such as the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs). On the one hand, nation-states have enforced a tightening of the IPR system. On the other, only recently have national government and international institutions recognised that the moral justification for stronger IPRs protection is far from being plausible and cannot be taken for granted. In this article, IPRs are examined as individual rights founded upon (...) natural law, personality development, just reward and social utility. It is argued that these foundations cannot be philosophically sustained. IPRs constitute morally indefensible political developments which aim to reproduce the capitalist division of knowledge and labour at national, international and global levels. The need for such a critical approach to the moral foundations of IPRs has increased in importance as a consequence of their role in justifying corporate power, globalisation policies and harmonisation of such. (shrink)

This paper introduces a theory of ownership that is rooted in Israel Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship – The Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership. Its central idea is that natural resources are not available to us automatically as other approaches to justice implicitly assume. Before we can use a resource, we need to do preparatory work in the form of making an entrepreneurial judgement on it. This fact, as I argue, makes it possible to put private ownership as a natural right on (...) a firm normative ground and answer many traditional challenges to private property. (shrink)

According to the standard story, there are two defensible theories of property rights: historical and institutional theories. The former says that you own something when you’ve received it via an unbroken chain of just transfers from its original appropriation. The latter says that you own something when you’ve been assigned it by just institutions. This standard story says that the historical theory throws up a barrier to redistributive economic policies while the institutional theory does not. In this paper, I argue (...) that the standard story is wrong in almost every detail. For a start, neither of these theories are defensible. Both generate absurd consequences when combined with our non-ideal circumstances. In actuality, no unbroken chains of just transfers stretch from original appropriation to what we now possess. And our actual institutions are very seriously unjust. So both theories imply that we actually own almost nothing. I revise these theories so that they avoid this absurd consequence. Yet, when we do this, their distributive implications flip. The institutional theory throws up serious barriers to redistribution while the historical theory tears them down. In our non-ideal circumstances, the distributive implications of these theories are the opposite of what is standardly presumed. (shrink)

It is tempting to think that zebras, goats, lions, and similar animals matter morally, but not in quite the same way people do. This might lead us to adopt a hybrid view of animal ethics such as ‘Utilitarianism for Animals; Deontology for People’. One of the core commitments of deontology is the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm. I explore how this core tenant of deontology applies to non-person, (...) non-human animals and whether hybrid views of animal ethics can accept it. In doing so, I aim to do three things. First, to show that my defence of the DDA can solve a problem surrounding our duties to wild animals, while making only minimal claims about animal moral status. Second, to offer an argument that for many non-person, non-human animals, we should recognise deontological constraints on their treatment, but also see those constraints as importantly different from the constraints against doing harm to persons. Third, to get clearer on how we should understand Utilitarianism for Animals and Nozickian hybrid approaches to animal ethics. (shrink)

This essay examines three potential arguments against high-frequency trading and offers a qualified critique of the practice. In concrete terms, it examines a variant of high-frequency trading that is all about speed—low-latency trading—in light of moral issues surrounding arbitrage, information asymmetries, and systemic risk. The essay focuses on low-latency trading and the role of speed because it also aims to show that the commonly made assumption that speed in financial markets is morally neutral is wrong. For instance, speed is a (...) necessary condition for low-latency trading’s potential to cause harm in “flash crashes.” On the other hand, it also plays a crucial role in a Lockean defense against low-latency trading being wasteful developed in this essay. Finally, this essay discusses the implications of these findings for related high-frequency trading techniques like futures arbitrage or latency arbitrage—as well as for an argument as to why quote stuffing is wrong. Overall, the qualifications offered in this essay act as a counterbalance to overblown claims about trading at high speeds being wrong. (shrink)

Within the small literature on homelessness in political philosophy, freedom-based accounts loom large. Such accounts, however, give rise to minimalism concerns: concerns that these accounts are too modest in what they demand for those who are homeless, particularly when homelessness is considered in the context of wealthier countries. In this paper, I consider the success of minimalism charges against freedom-based accounts of homelessness. I argue that whilst such charges are aptly levelled against two major freedom-based accounts, from Jeremy Waldron and (...) Christopher Essert, a third account can evade or respond to such charges. This is the autonomy-based account of homelessness. Although the autonomy-based account has come in for significant recent criticism on grounds of minimalism, I argue that properly understood and developed, it has the resources to ground a plausible account of homelessness. (shrink)

Arguments about the ownership of natural resources have focused on the claims of cosmopolitans, who urge an equality of global claims to resources, and resource sovereigntists, who argue that national peoples are the proper owners of their resources. This focus is mistaken: Whatever one believes about the in-principle claims of the global community, there remains the practical question of how the national surplus is to be distributed. And in addressing this question, we must look at a distinction heretofore ignored in (...) resource discussions—that between resident workers and citizens. I argue that the extracted value of natural resources should benefit all residents of the states in which they are found, not merely all citizens. By contrast, control of natural resources should be vested in a democratic citizenry, who are nonetheless normatively constrained by the distributive principle described above. I illustrate the argument with data showing the gap, especially in the Gulf States, between principles that allocate benefits to all citizens vs. to all resident workers. My argument is grounded in a broader theory of collective agency as it applies to questions of distributive justice, and it is aimed not only to criticize practices in the Gulf but to support the more inclusive resource policies found in democracies. (shrink)

:Self-ownership has fallen out of favor as a core moral and political concept. I argue that this is because the most popular conception of self-ownership, what I call the property conception, is typically linked to a libertarian political program. Seeing self-ownership and libertarianism as being necessarily linked leads those who are not inclined toward libertarianism to reject the idea of self-ownership altogether. This, I argue, is a mistake. Self-ownership is a crucial moral and political concept that can earn its keep (...) if we understand it not as type of property right in the self, but rather as a set of territorial rights one has over one’s body. This territorial conception of self-ownership, which I call the sovereignty conception of self-ownership, avoids the traditional arguments raised against the property conception of self-ownership and has other benefits besides. Accepting this conception of self-ownership, I argue, has considerable moral and political benefits without taking on the costs associated with other forms of self-ownership. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEntrepreneurs should act as stewards of entrepreneurial rent. Entrepreneurial rent is the difference between the ex post value of a venture and its ex ante costs. It is the result of competition among buyers and sellers within the market process rather than the sole efforts of the entrepreneur. As a result, entrepreneurs should allocate entrepreneurial rent for the benefit of other market participants rather than consuming it for themselves. The moral obligation to steward entrepreneurial rent is consistent with traditional bases (...) of property rights and the norm of social welfare maximization, and it applies to corporations and their shareholders, as well as individual entrepreneurs. (shrink)

In discourses on digitization and the data economy, it is often claimed that data subjects shall beownersof their data. In this paper, we provide a problem diagnosis for such calls fordata ownership: a large variety of demands are discussed under this heading. It thus becomes challenging to specify what—if anything—unites them. We identify four conceptual dimensions of calls for data ownership and argue that these help to systematize and to compare different positions. In view of this pluralism of data ownership (...) claims, we introduce, spell out and defend a constructive interpretative proposal: claims for data ownership are charitably understood as attempts to call for theredistributionof material resources and the socio-culturalrecognitionof data subjects. We argue that as one consequence of this reading, it misses the point to reject claims for data ownership on the grounds that property in data does not exist. Instead, data ownership brings to attention a claim to renegotiate such aspects of thestatus quo. (shrink)

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess (...) their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts. (shrink)

Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two (...) warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes.’ Yet the most legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in the common law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their ova as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant. (shrink)

Locke argues that the consent of market participants to the introduction of money justifies the economic inequalities resulting from monetarization. This paper shows that Locke’s argument fails to justify such inequalities. My critique proceeds in two parts. Regarding the consequences of the consent to money, neo-Lockeans wrongly take consent to justify inequalities in the original appropriation of land. In contrast, I defend the view that consent can only justify inequalities resulting directly from monetized commercial exchange. Secondly, regarding the nature of (...) consent, neo-Lockeans uncritically accept Locke’s account of money as a natural institution. In contrast, I argue that money is an irreducibly political institution and that monetary economies cannot develop in the state of nature. My political account of money has far-reaching implications for the normative analysis of the global monetary system and the justification of the economic inequalities consequent upon it. (shrink)

This review essay contains four parts. The first briefly recounts the contours of Rafe Blaufarb’s thesis in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property. The review is not intended to be a full assessment of the book; rather, Blaufarb’s work sets the stage for the focus of my reflections, which begin in Part 3. Using Louis Althusser’s understanding of law, we can see how the demarcation identified by Blaufarb made possible a further deployment of bourgeois (...) law, which perpetuates the dominant ideology ensuring the concentration of resources in a small number of people, seemingly without obligation to the great majority who hold no power in relation to any resources. Part 4 explains the true inequity which this demarcation has wrought, establishing and perpetuating deep divisions between those who hold the ‘social function’ inherent in property—the power unilaterally to alter social relationships—and those who do not—those who suffer the alteration of social relationships to their detriment. In short, property itself is an ideology of power, the legacy of which is not equality, but exploitation. Part 5 concludes that the great demarcation, which Blaufarb so skilfully explicates, turns out to be nothing in which humankind ought to take any pride. Rather, it has served and serves the purposes of the few to work untold misery and hardship upon the many. (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)

Indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Latin America make land claims and support them with a variety of arguments. Some, such as Zapatistas and the Mapuche, have appealed to the “ancestral” or “historical” connections between specific communities and the land. Other groups, such as MST in Brazil, have appealed to the extremely unequal distribution of the land and the effects of this on the poor; the land in this case is seen mainly as a means for securing a decent standard of (...) living for members of disadvantaged groups. Although there is a large literature on the history as well as the social and political dimensions of land contestations and conflicts in Latin America, the question of whether the land claims put forward by disadvantaged groups can be morally justified has not been adequately examined. In this essay, we investigate the scope and limits of appeals to what we shall call assistance-based, contribution-based, and benefitting-based moral reasons with respect to land claims made by these disadvantaged groups. (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)

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)

In our commonplace understanding of property, the “right to exclude” is seen as its central and defining feature: to own is to exclude. This paper examines the cost, to conceptual and normative clarity, of this understanding. First, I argue that the right not to be excluded is a crucial if overlooked element not simply of liberal understandings of ownership, but even of the right to exclude itself. Second, I argue that our neglect of the right not to be excluded severely (...) undermines the clarity and precision with which matters of ownership are debated within both contemporary politics and political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that the practical implementation of blockchain technology can be considered an institution of property similar to legal institutions. Invoking Penner's theory of property and Hegel's system of property rights, and using the example of bitcoin, it is possible to demonstrate that blockchain effectively implements all necessary and sufficient criteria for property without reliance on legal means. Blockchains eliminate the need for a third-party authority to enforce exclusion rights, and provide a system of universal access to knowledge and (...) discoverability about the property rights of all participants and how the system functions. The implications of these findings are that traditional property relations in society could be replaced by or supplemented with blockchain models, and implemented in new domains. (shrink)

This article argues that parents have a special, shared duty to organize for collective action on climate change mitigation and adaptation, but not for the reason one might assume. The apparently obvious reason is that climate change threatens life, health and community for the next generation, and parents have a special duty to their children to protect their basic human interests. This argument fails because many parents could protect their children from these central harms without taking more general action to (...) combat climate change, let alone to mitigate it. Instead, subtler reasons are advanced, drawing on children’s relational interests or on their interests as moral agents. It is argued that parents owe it to their children to combat climate change because of the indirect impact on current children of serious threats to their children and grandchildren, and of being required to live in a radically unjust world. It is further argued that parents may owe it directly to their more distant descendants to mitigate climate change because of the role current parents played in bringing them into the world. (shrink)

The role of critique in the Anglophone analytical tradition of philosophy of education is outlined and some of its shortcomings are noted, particularly its apparent claim to methodological objectivity in arriving at what are clearly contestable positions about the normative basis of education. Many of these issues can be seen to have a long history within European, and especially German, philosophy of education. In the light of this the discussion moves on to a consideration of similarities and contrasts between the (...) Anglophone and German-inspired deployment of the concept of critical rationality in philosophy of education. The claims to objectivity of the Anglophone tradition are contrasted with a more self-conscious concern for social justice and improvement in other European traditions, which has been followed more recently by a greater scepticism concerning the potential of critique for delivering social justice and improvement in education. This has parallels with the growing Anglophone disillusion with ‘classical’ analytic philosophy of education. This in turn has resulted in a greater awareness of the limitations of critique: its ideological character, its rootedness in specific contexts, its own potential dogmatism and its ambiguities. The various contributions to this volume are briefly described and related to each other. (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)

The Body Ownership Thesis states that each person owns her body. I address a prominent objection, the Generation Problem: the Body Ownership Thesis apparently implies that parents own their children: as we own the fruit of our property, if a parent owns her own body, she must own her child and her child’s body. I argue that a person does not own the fruit of her property when that fruit is a person or the body of a person. Persons have (...) conclusive title to their bodies, but only defeasible title to the fruits of their bodies. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the Rawlsian right to personal property. Adequate discussion of this right has long been absent from the literature, and the recent rise in interest in other areas of Rawlsian thought on property makes the issue particularly pertinent. The right to personal property as proposed by orthodox Rawlsians – in this article, the position is represented by Rawls himself – is best understood, I claim, either as a right to be able to privately own housing (...) and personal items or as a right to actually own these things. I argue, however, that the resources of a Rawlsian theory cannot justify a basic right to property which is as extensive as this. Instead, what can be justified is a more limited set of rights, comparable with the rights we have over objects that we rent. Rawlsian justice, then, has a more radical implications in terms of basic property rights than has previously been thought. (shrink)

I present and defend Reinach's theory of ownership according to which, prior to the positive law, one finds a distinction between possession, ownership and property rights. Ownership is not a bundle of positive rights, but a primitive natural relation that grounds the absolute right to behave as one wishes towards the thing one owns. In reply to some objections raised against it, I argue that Reinach's theory of property is morally and politically non-committal; and that it in fact has the (...) ressources for dealing with the vexing issue of the origin of ownership. (shrink)

While Hegel’s political philosophy has been attacked on the left by republican democrats and on the right by feudalist reactionaries, his apologists see him as a liberal reformer, a moderate who theorized about the development of a free-market society within the bounds of a stabilizing constitutional state. This centrist view has gained ascendancy since the end of the Second World War, enshrining Hegel within the liberal tradition. In this book, Renato Cristi argues that, like the Prussian liberal reformers of his (...) time, Hegel was committed to expand the scope of a free economy and concurrently to ensure that the social practice of subjective freedom did not endanger political stability and order. Aware that a system of mutual advantage failed to integrate the members of civil society and that profound social disharmonies were ineradicable, Hegel adopted the views of the French liberal _doctrinaires_, who sought to realize the principles of the French Revolution by supporting Louis XVIII’s sovereign assertion of the monarchical principle. Not surprisingly, Hegel hailed the French _Charte_ of June 1814 as a beacon of freedom. Endorsement of the monarchical principle was meant to prevent the atomized individuals of civil society from gaining control of the state through appeals to popular sovereignty. This challenges most conventional interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the state and draws it closer to the conservative-authoritarian end of the political spectrum than is usual. (shrink)

This paper carries forward the conceptual clarification of normative theories of business ethics ably begun by Hasnas in the January 1998 issue of BEQ. This paper proposes a normatively neutral framework for discussing and assessing such normative theories. Every normative theory needs to address these seven issues: it needs to specify a moral principle that identifies (1) recommended values and (2) the grounds for accepting those values. It also must specify (3) a decision principle that business people who accept the (...) theory can use. It must determine (4) who the normative theory applies to and (5) whose interests need to be considered. It must also outline (6) in what contexts it applies, and (7) what legal and regulatory structures it assumes. Once clarified, this paper applies the framework to the normative versions of stockholder theory, stakeholder theory, and ISCT. It is concluded that ISCT is the most promising normative theory currently under discussion, but that there are some major issues that ISCT has not dealt with yet. (shrink)

John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital shifted the focus of current thought on capital and economic development to the cultural and conceptual ideas that underpin market economies and that are taken for granted in developed nations. This collection of essays assembles 21 philosophers, economists, and political scientists to help readers understand these exciting new theories.

G.A. Cohen’s book brings together and elaborates on articles that he has written on selfownership, on Marx’s theory of exploitation, and on the future of socialism. Although seven of the eleven chapters have been previously published (1977-1992), this is not merely a collection of articles. There is a superb introduction that gives an overview of how the chapters fit together and of their historical relation to each other. Most chapters have a new introduction and often a postscript or addendum that (...) connect them with other chapters. And the four new chapters (on justice and market transactions, exploitation in Marx, the concept of self-ownership, and the plausibility of the thesis of self-ownership) are important contributions that round out and bring closure to many of the central issues. As always with Cohen, the writing is crystal clear, and full of compelling examples, deep insights, and powerful arguments. Cohen has long been recognized as one of the most important exponents of analytic Marxism. His innovative, rigorous, and exciting interpretations of Marx’s theories of history and of exploitation have had a major impact on Marxist scholarship. Starting in the mid-1970s he has increasingly turned his attention to normative political philosophy. As Cohen describes it, he was awakened from his “dogmatic socialist slumbers” by Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain example in which people starting from a position of equality (or other favored patterned distribution) freely choose to pay to watch Wilt Chamberlain play, and the net result is inequality (or other unfavored pattern). During the subsequent twenty years, political 1 philosophy has benefited from his thinking about the nature and plausibility of the thesis of selfownership, and about the scope and demands of equality. In what follows I will focus solely on the material dealing with self-ownership, but first I shall mention some of the interesting material on Marxism and socialism that I will be ignoring. First, at various points Cohen discusses how something like a principle of self-ownership is latent in the standard Marxist condemnation of capitalist exploitation (e.g., the capitalist steals labor time from the laborer).. (shrink)

The issue of abortion is discussed with reference to the claim that people have a right of control over their own bodies. Do people "own" their own bodies? If so, what would be entailed? These questions are discussed in commonsense terms and also in relation to the jurisprudence of Hohfeld, Honore, Munzer and Waldron. It is argued that whether or not women are morally and/or should be legally entitled to have abortions, such entitlements cannot be derived from a general moral (...) entitlement to do what we will with our own bodies since there is no such entitlement. Whether or not we "own" them, we can have rights duties, liabilities, restrictions and disadvantages as well as rights concerning our own bodies. (shrink)

Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two (...) warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes.’ Yet the most legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in the common law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their ova as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We can best understand Marx’s economic thought by seeing it as implicitly relying upon and reworking a Hegelian philosophy of history, which was deeply salvific and soteriological in its basic structure. Hegel’s philosophy of history reworked the Christian narrative of man’s fall, his redemption through Christ’s atonement, and his return to a state of reconciliation with God in the life of the Christian church. Thus, the loss of the organic form of community found in the Greek polis was a (...) fall that was atoned for in the religious alienation found in both Judaism and Christianity, where man is treated as separated from a transcendent God. The reconciliation between man and God is found, finally, in the reconciliation of the modern, rational state. Early on Marx adopted Hegel’s philosophy of history, but its basic structure remains even in his mature economic work. There he envisions the loss of the organic unity of primitive communism, and the alienation of individuals from the larger social totality of feudalism and capitalism. Under communism, however, individuals are reconciled with the larger social whole through the collective mastery of the products of labor. (shrink)

Lockean approaches to property take it that persons can unilaterally acquire private ownership over hitherto unowned resources. Such natural law accounts of property rights are often thought to be of limited use when dealing with the complexities of natural resource use outside of the paradigm of private ownership of land for agricultural or residential development. The tragedy of the commons has been shown to be anything but an inevitability, and yet Lockeanism seems to demand that even the most robust common (...) property arrangements be converted to privatized units. This often motivates a move away from natural law in the moral analysis of property rights. I argue however that it is not the deontological nature of Lockean principles that are at fault, but rather the manner of their application. Lockean theory often exhibits a bias in favour of private property: assuming that only private property can protect one’s interest in autonomy, and therefore asserting that each individual has a power of private acquisition. Starting with a claim against interference however enables us to mould the appropriate property rights to each individual’s particular interest in autonomy. This sometimes leads to private ownership, but often leads to various forms of commons. (shrink)

Property rights of personal data have been advocated for some time. From the perspective of economics of law some argued that they could lower transaction costs for contracts involving personal data. This may be the case, but new transaction costs are introduced by propertization and the issue has not been settled. In this paper, I focus on a different and potentially more important aspect. In the actual situation, data collectors externalize costs and internalize benefits. An ownership regime that enables every (...) citizen to hold a personal data account, like a bank account, and that gives people ownership rights over secondary use of personal data could correct these misallocations. I hope to shed new light on the normative implications of the issue by offering normative justifications for property rights of personal data (Sections 2–4). Secondly, I present fundamental goals and building blocks of a property regime of personal data (Section 5) and, thirdly, I illustrate how income from personal data ownership could for instance contribute to financing pensions under proper regulation (Section 6). (shrink)

There has been a troublesome anomaly in the UK between cash payment to men for sperm donation and the effective assumption that women will pay to donate eggs. Some commentators, including Donald Evans in this journal, have argued that the anomaly should be resolved by treating women on the same terms as men. But this argument ignores important difficulties about property in the body, particularly in relation to gametes. There are good reasons for thinking that the contract model and payment (...) for gametes are both inappropriate, and that a model based on altruism should be applied to both sexes. (shrink)