What do you make of Glen Weyl’s argument for a common-ownership self-assessed tax? In general, do you think people have strong rights of self-ownership? Do you think that people have strong ownership rights over the natural world, or do you think there are strong egalitarian restrictions on that? where do you stand on left-libertarianism vs right-libertarianism?
I don’t find arguments for common world ownership very persuasive. It’d take too long to go through all the arguments to explain why here, so I’ll just leave my general worry: Common world ownership means we all have a say on everyone else, and it tends to make the world somewhat zero sum. Every new person is an incursion on my ownership rights and dilutes my claims. I prefer institutional mechanisms that create positive sum games. I really Weyl agrees and thinks his proposal gets around this.
As for self-ownership, I think of course we own ourselves, but this doesn’t do much work philosophically. Here’s an excerpt from a paper I wrote with Bas van der Vossen:
Self-Ownership: Almost Uncontroversial
We own different things in different ways. The bundle of rights that constitutes ownership varies from thing owned to thing owned. The strength of these rights also varies. We can own a cat and a car, but our ownership of the cat—which is real ownership—doesn’t allow us to do as much with it as with our ownership of a car. The way we own cats is different from how we own cars, which is different from how we own a guitar, which is different from how we own a plot of land, and so on.
Morally-speaking, not just legally speaking, the kinds of rights we have over these various things varies. But we really can own each of them. If you prefer to say that ownership is “more extensive” when we have the full bundle of rights with no moral constraints on use, that’s fine. But even if there is more or less extensive ownership, it’s still ownership. Your cat is your cat. You are not allowed to torture it, neglect it, or have sex with it, but that’s not because the cat is partially society’s or anyone else’s. Nor is it because you don’t really own it.
Different kinds of moral arguments—such as Kantian deontological principles, or claims about what it takes to realize certain moral powers, or arguments from a privileged “original position”, or reflections on Strawsonian reactive attitudes, or sophisticated Millian consequentialism, or whatnot—lead us to believe that people have certain rights of exclusion and use over themselves, and possibly as well as some other rights over themselves. And once you see how these rights shape up, you notice that people’s rights over themselves amount to the bundle of rights—to exclude, to use, to modify, etc.—that just so happens to look like what we call “property rights”. It is in this sense, then, that we call people self-owners.
More precisely, we can think of self-ownership as being made up of two variables. On the one hand, self-ownership offers protections (in the form of Hohfeldian claim-rights) against unwanted incursions on one’s person. On the other hand, self-ownership offers the freedom (in the form of Hohfeldian liberties) to use one’s person. Since liberties logically entail the absence of duties (including duties correlating to claim-rights), it follows that the two variables (internal to the idea of self-ownership) can be traded off against each other.
The real question, then, is what mix of the two variables internal to the idea of self-ownership (the claim to exclude and the freedom to use) is morally most desirable. This should be obvious, of course. Bas is a self-owner with the freedom to use his person, but this does not license him in punching Jason in the face. Self-ownership is not best understood by completely maximizing on the freedom-variable, to the complete denial of the exclusion-variable. And, again pace Sobel, self-ownership is also not best understood by maximizing on the exclusion-variable, to the complete denial of the freedom-variable.[i]
Every liberal thinks we each have strong rights to freely use our persons, and exclude others from them. Every liberal thinks that a woman has the right to say no to a demand for sex, on the grounds that it’s her body. In this sense, then, all liberals accept some version of a self-ownership thesis, though many of them would not describe their beliefs as such. (On this point, note that G. A. Cohen thought the self-ownership thesis was the essence of liberalism, not libertarian liberalism specifically (Cohen 2000, p. 252).)
However, in this kind of story, the concept of self-ownership can do almost no work in resolving disputes among liberals. What liberals—both left-liberals and libertarians—disagree about is how people own themselves, not that they own themselves. Our disputes about how to best trade off the two variables internal to that very idea. Criticizing someone’s preferred conception of self-ownership, in other words, is like denying their conclusion. It’s a way of registering disagreement, but not an actual argument against their view.
For instance, consider a variation of Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment (Singer 1972). Imagine you see a toddler drowning in a puddle. Suppose you had bad legs and can’t save the child. Suppose also there is a healthy bystander nearby who could save the child, but who says, “I can’t be bothered. I don’t want my shoes to get muddy.” Now, finally, suppose you have a weapon, and so can force the bystander to save the toddler. May you do so? (Are you justified, or at least excused, in doing so?[ii])
Perhaps you think the answer is yes. Does this somehow invalidate or make trouble for the self-ownership thesis? Consider a somewhat related thought experiment. Suppose a car is barreling towards your child, and the only way to rescue him is to push him out of the way onto someone’s lawn. Or suppose your child is injured, and the only way to get him to the hospital and prevent her death is to hotwire a car. Or suppose you’re stuck in the woods when an unexpected, freak blizzard hits in May, and the only way to survive is to break into someone’s cabin. May you do any of these things? (Are you justified, or at least excused, in doing so?)
These are interesting questions, and virtually everyone agrees that the answer to these questions should be some kind of yes. (They disagree on what precise form that yes takes.) But we’ve never met anyone who, upon saying that because, in cases like this, you may be excused or justified in temporarily overriding others’ property rights (with the stipulation that you might owe them compensation in some cases), that property is an inherently problematic concept and that private property doesn’t exist. On the contrary, there are hundreds of years’ worth of common-law cases dealing with such issues, which are meant to show just what property amounts to, not that property doesn’t exist.
Again, something strange is going on with the critics of the self-ownership thesis. In order to show the thesis is incoherent or problematic, they have to make the position out to be something that no one would sensibly defend, and must use arguments that no one would find compelling against other forms of property. The compliment they pay to libertarians is that they straw man the position in order to critique it.
[i] For good discussion of this point, see Mack (2015)
[ii] The difference between justification and excuse is as follows: When a person is justified in doing X, the action is right. When a person is excused, the action is wrong, but her blameworthiness is reduced as a result of duress. So, for instance, killing a murderous intruder in self-defense is a justified, while killing another person because a gunman coerced you into doing it on pain of your own death may be excusable.
The interesting thing about the Weyl proposal is that it is an alternative to private property that could potentially produce better social outcomes from a consequentialist/utilitarian/social welfare point of view. The reason for this is that it overcomes the tragedy of the anti-commons, such that holdouts can extract rents, sometimes at huge expense to society. If Weyl’s proposal would produce better outcomes, would you be in favour of it
What do you make of Glen Weyl’s argument for a common-ownership self-assessed tax? In general, do you think people have strong rights of self-ownership? Do you think that people have strong ownership rights over the natural world, or do you think there are strong egalitarian restrictions on that? where do you stand on left-libertarianism vs right-libertarianism?
I don’t find arguments for common world ownership very persuasive. It’d take too long to go through all the arguments to explain why here, so I’ll just leave my general worry: Common world ownership means we all have a say on everyone else, and it tends to make the world somewhat zero sum. Every new person is an incursion on my ownership rights and dilutes my claims. I prefer institutional mechanisms that create positive sum games. I really Weyl agrees and thinks his proposal gets around this.
As for self-ownership, I think of course we own ourselves, but this doesn’t do much work philosophically. Here’s an excerpt from a paper I wrote with Bas van der Vossen:
Self-Ownership: Almost Uncontroversial
We own different things in different ways. The bundle of rights that constitutes ownership varies from thing owned to thing owned. The strength of these rights also varies. We can own a cat and a car, but our ownership of the cat—which is real ownership—doesn’t allow us to do as much with it as with our ownership of a car. The way we own cats is different from how we own cars, which is different from how we own a guitar, which is different from how we own a plot of land, and so on.
Morally-speaking, not just legally speaking, the kinds of rights we have over these various things varies. But we really can own each of them. If you prefer to say that ownership is “more extensive” when we have the full bundle of rights with no moral constraints on use, that’s fine. But even if there is more or less extensive ownership, it’s still ownership. Your cat is your cat. You are not allowed to torture it, neglect it, or have sex with it, but that’s not because the cat is partially society’s or anyone else’s. Nor is it because you don’t really own it.
Different kinds of moral arguments—such as Kantian deontological principles, or claims about what it takes to realize certain moral powers, or arguments from a privileged “original position”, or reflections on Strawsonian reactive attitudes, or sophisticated Millian consequentialism, or whatnot—lead us to believe that people have certain rights of exclusion and use over themselves, and possibly as well as some other rights over themselves. And once you see how these rights shape up, you notice that people’s rights over themselves amount to the bundle of rights—to exclude, to use, to modify, etc.—that just so happens to look like what we call “property rights”. It is in this sense, then, that we call people self-owners.
More precisely, we can think of self-ownership as being made up of two variables. On the one hand, self-ownership offers protections (in the form of Hohfeldian claim-rights) against unwanted incursions on one’s person. On the other hand, self-ownership offers the freedom (in the form of Hohfeldian liberties) to use one’s person. Since liberties logically entail the absence of duties (including duties correlating to claim-rights), it follows that the two variables (internal to the idea of self-ownership) can be traded off against each other.
The real question, then, is what mix of the two variables internal to the idea of self-ownership (the claim to exclude and the freedom to use) is morally most desirable. This should be obvious, of course. Bas is a self-owner with the freedom to use his person, but this does not license him in punching Jason in the face. Self-ownership is not best understood by completely maximizing on the freedom-variable, to the complete denial of the exclusion-variable. And, again pace Sobel, self-ownership is also not best understood by maximizing on the exclusion-variable, to the complete denial of the freedom-variable.[i]
Every liberal thinks we each have strong rights to freely use our persons, and exclude others from them. Every liberal thinks that a woman has the right to say no to a demand for sex, on the grounds that it’s her body. In this sense, then, all liberals accept some version of a self-ownership thesis, though many of them would not describe their beliefs as such. (On this point, note that G. A. Cohen thought the self-ownership thesis was the essence of liberalism, not libertarian liberalism specifically (Cohen 2000, p. 252).)
However, in this kind of story, the concept of self-ownership can do almost no work in resolving disputes among liberals. What liberals—both left-liberals and libertarians—disagree about is how people own themselves, not that they own themselves. Our disputes about how to best trade off the two variables internal to that very idea. Criticizing someone’s preferred conception of self-ownership, in other words, is like denying their conclusion. It’s a way of registering disagreement, but not an actual argument against their view.
For instance, consider a variation of Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment (Singer 1972). Imagine you see a toddler drowning in a puddle. Suppose you had bad legs and can’t save the child. Suppose also there is a healthy bystander nearby who could save the child, but who says, “I can’t be bothered. I don’t want my shoes to get muddy.” Now, finally, suppose you have a weapon, and so can force the bystander to save the toddler. May you do so? (Are you justified, or at least excused, in doing so?[ii])
Perhaps you think the answer is yes. Does this somehow invalidate or make trouble for the self-ownership thesis? Consider a somewhat related thought experiment. Suppose a car is barreling towards your child, and the only way to rescue him is to push him out of the way onto someone’s lawn. Or suppose your child is injured, and the only way to get him to the hospital and prevent her death is to hotwire a car. Or suppose you’re stuck in the woods when an unexpected, freak blizzard hits in May, and the only way to survive is to break into someone’s cabin. May you do any of these things? (Are you justified, or at least excused, in doing so?)
These are interesting questions, and virtually everyone agrees that the answer to these questions should be some kind of yes. (They disagree on what precise form that yes takes.) But we’ve never met anyone who, upon saying that because, in cases like this, you may be excused or justified in temporarily overriding others’ property rights (with the stipulation that you might owe them compensation in some cases), that property is an inherently problematic concept and that private property doesn’t exist. On the contrary, there are hundreds of years’ worth of common-law cases dealing with such issues, which are meant to show just what property amounts to, not that property doesn’t exist.
Again, something strange is going on with the critics of the self-ownership thesis. In order to show the thesis is incoherent or problematic, they have to make the position out to be something that no one would sensibly defend, and must use arguments that no one would find compelling against other forms of property. The compliment they pay to libertarians is that they straw man the position in order to critique it.
[i] For good discussion of this point, see Mack (2015)
[ii] The difference between justification and excuse is as follows: When a person is justified in doing X, the action is right. When a person is excused, the action is wrong, but her blameworthiness is reduced as a result of duress. So, for instance, killing a murderous intruder in self-defense is a justified, while killing another person because a gunman coerced you into doing it on pain of your own death may be excusable.
I think there is a typo in the bit about Weyl?
The interesting thing about the Weyl proposal is that it is an alternative to private property that could potentially produce better social outcomes from a consequentialist/utilitarian/social welfare point of view. The reason for this is that it overcomes the tragedy of the anti-commons, such that holdouts can extract rents, sometimes at huge expense to society. If Weyl’s proposal would produce better outcomes, would you be in favour of it