1 See, for instance, Nagel, T.’s review in the Philosophical Review 82 (1973);CrossRefGoogle ScholarSchwartz, A.’s ‘Moral Neutrality and Primary Goods’ Ethics (1973);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and most recently Sandel, M.’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982).Google Scholar All future references to Rawls, ’s A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar will be indicated by (TJ,) followed by the page number unless otherwise indicated.

2 (TJ, 273). For a fuller elaboration of this distinction see Meade, J.E.’s Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property (London 1964).Google Scholar See also DiQuattro, ’s ‘The Market and Liberal Values,’ Political Theory 8 (1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a similar distinction between what the author calls the ‘aggregative’ and ‘distributive’ function of prices upon which the theory of market socialism rests.

3 I shall not here repeat, but largely presuppose, Rawls’s arguments showing the dependency of his particular list of primary goods on his conception of the person (with its two moral powers). See, in particular, his ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,’ The Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980), 524ff and ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods,’ in Sen and Williams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (London 1982), 165ff. I am also granting with Rawls (and in the face of, say, Sandel’s recent criticism) that Rawls’s conception of the person is indeed a ‘political’ one (drawn from our public, post-reformational, political culture) and makes no specific metaphysical claims in regard to the nature of persons (or of personal identity) beyond this. See Rawls, ’s ‘Justice as Fairness; Political Not Metaphysical,’ Journal of Philosophy 14 (1985).Google Scholar Future references to these texts will be indicated by (KC,), (SU,) and (PNM,) respectively, followed by page number.

4 See, for instance, Esheté, A.’s ‘Contractarianism and the Scope of Justice,’ Ethics 85 (1978).Google Scholar Also, to some extent, Sandel (1982).

5 I here have Nozick’s libertarian critique of Rawls in mind. See Nozick, ’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York 1974), Ch.4.Google Scholar

6 See his ‘Fairness to Goodness,’ Philosophical Review 84 (1975), 540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 What I am here calling the ‘turn’ to the later Rawls begins (roughly) with his ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’ (1980) and is visible most recently in ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ (1985). In these later works, Rawls explicitly acknowledges a change in his theory of primary goods; originally a predominantly psychological or sociological thesis about what in fact motivates people (about actual empirical incentives), his ‘revised’ account stresses and clearly depends upon a particular moral conception of persons (see KC, 527, for instance, or PNM, 224).

8 What Rawls calls the Aristotelian Principle claims that, other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their distinctive capacities, and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity (TJ, 426). Stated somewhat differently, the claim is that human beings can be motivated by the exercise of their innate or trained abilities purely ‘for their own sake.’

9 Rawls at one point voices a further (although secondary) concern: that socialist ownership may lead to a form of ‘command society’ (TJ, 272). See note #24 below.

10 See Honore, A.M.’s ‘Ownership’ in Guest, A.G. ed., Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence Vol. I (Oxford 1961) 107-47.Google Scholar Honoré insists this model is still the most ‘morally satisfactory’ as a model of original acquisition when taken together with ‘consent and debt’ as derivative forms. Moreover, he claims that the right of exclusive, physical control of a thing is ‘the foundation on which the whole superstructure of ownership rests’ and notes that ‘to exclude others from what one holds is an instinct found in babies and even Ȇ in animals.’ To point to such an ‘instinct,’ however, proves little. As we shall see below, one can with equal certainty point to an instinct in humans to ‘include others’ in what they hold.

11 Hegel was among the first, I believe, to make this point and it was then taken up by Marx and others. In both his Phenomenology of Mind and the Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that the relation of any subject to a given object already presupposes, or is mediated by, a particular pattern of relations between subjects themselves.

12 This fact appears to be a significant discovery of twentieth century anthropology. See, for instance, the collection by Reiter, R. ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (London and New York 1975).Google Scholar Of course there are numerous exceptions, but these appear only to prove the rule. For instance, on one island off the coast of South Korea the women (for various reasons such as body–fat, etc.) are superior pearl divers to the men — pearls being the major source of the island’s livelihood. Here the men as a group take care of the children, cook, clean house, etc. But we must note, it is the women who, in this case, essentially ‘run’ the island; they control all property, major political decisions, and so on.

13 According to a famous claim of Max Black’s every metaphor is ‘the tip of a submerged model.’ The term ‘model,’ of course, is here being meant in its more ordinary sense, whereby it essentially denotes an abstractive representation of some object or state of affairs. (The term is thus not used in the sense intended by logicians whereby a model is the interpretation or embodiment of a formal calculus in which the relation of isomorphism holds between the structure of the formal system and that of its interpretation.) In its more ordinary sense anything can be taken as a model of anything else IFF we can sort out the relevant respects in which one entity is like another (e.g. a grouping of ping-pong balls can model the universe). For something to be a model in this more ordinary sense it appears to suffice a) that the model as representation must be some form of abstraction; it must be less rich in the range of relevant properties than its object or reference, and b) it cannot thus be a model of itself or of something identical to it. One way of classifying models might be according to their degree of existential commitment - those operating at the limits of our rational belief (such as many metaphors) commanding at the same time the greatest degree of belief. See Wartofsky, M.’s ‘The Model Muddle’ in Models (Boston, MA: D. Reidel 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See Goodman, N.Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1976), 68ff, and Ways of World-making (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1978), 129.Google Scholar

15 See Habermas, ’s ‘Labor and Interaction’ in Theory and Praxis (Boston: Beacon Press 1973),Google Scholar as well as his Knowledge and Human Interest (Boston: Beacon Press 1971), ch.3. Habermas distinguishes between a) technical labor or instrumental action, and b) praxis, interactive or communicative action - a distinction which remains fundamental throughout his later works. We must note, however, that the form of labor we are elaborating here tends to undercut the very dichotomy Habermas has established; reproductive labor does so because it is a) labor (the production of use values), and b) communicative, both at once.

16 Hyde, L.The Gift (New York: Vintage Books 1983), ch.6Google Scholar

17 According to the Duden, Deutsches Universal Woerterbuch (1983),Google Scholar the term ‘Pflicht’ originally means no more nor less in both Old and Middle High German than ‘zu pflegen.’

18 See, for instance, Gurevich, A.’s ‘Representations of Property during the High Middle Ages’ in Economy and Society 6 (1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Mauss, M.The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Newton Library 1967)Google Scholar

20 Hein, Hilda ‘Woman and Morality,’ Ms (1979)Google Scholar

21 One might argue that, given woman’s reproductive functions (pregnancy, parturition, lactation, etc.), the suppression of the boundaries separating the body and world has been far more easily performed in her case. This is not to claim, however, that women’s biology determines her ‘personality,’ just that it may historically have facilitated it. See Chodorow, ’s arguments against the cruder interpretation in her The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978).Google Scholar On the contrary, the relative ‘ease of sliding from self to other’ characteristic of so many women, appears to mark male personality in many other cultures or historical periods. See, for instance, Gurevich’s (1977) discussion of the medieval personality.

22 For the distinction between a public and private sphere of ethics I rely on such recent work in feminist theory as Gilligan, ’s In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1982);Google Scholar Chodorow (1978); as well as Dinnerstein (1977) and Elshtain (1981). For the following distinction between the standpoint of the ‘concrete’ versus ‘generalized other’ see Benhabib, S.’s ‘Communicative Ethics and Moral Autonomy’ (Unpublished Manuscript 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 See, for instance, Chodorow (1978), and Dinnerstein (1977).

24 As we noted already in note #9, Rawls also expresses the further concern that socialist ownership may result in a ‘command society.’ Here I can only emphasize that in my discussion of Rawls’s difference principle, it is to be assumed that his first principle of justice (which guarantees the various individual liberties, including freedom of occupation, etc.) is already satisfied. There is thus no question, in this instance, of a centralized state commanding the direction of labor. As I have argued elsewhere the worry that socialist property necessarily leads to a form of command society appears to derive from continuing to conceive property on the model of ‘control’; ‘collective ownership’ then quite naturally suggests ‘collective control’ and, in Mill’s words, ‘no place left for the individual.’ It is my claim, however, that with the notion of ‘responsive ownership’ a wedge is driven for the first time between the very notions of ‘owning’ and ‘controlling.’ See my Towards a New Conception of Ownership (Unpubl. diss.: Harvard 1985), ch.5.

25 Mill, J.S.Principles of Political Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1968), 204Google Scholar

26 I wish to make it clear, however, that I am not arguing for ‘worker sovereignty’ in society. People have claims and entitlements, after all, independently of their laboring role. Instead, the suggestion here is that worker-owned enterprises be considered elements within the democratic order, rather than being viewed as society’s organizational base. Thus, for instance, the control of large-scale public investment (effectively the only guarantee of a society’s future) could be made available to general public deliberation, and decisions made either by a body subject to control by a legislative body, or themselves subject to direct democratic accountability. See Cohen, and Rogers, ’s On Democracy (New York: Penguin Books 1983), ch.6.Google Scholar