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A Challenge to Neo-Lockeanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

John E. Roemer
John E. Roemer*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis, CA95616, U.S.A.
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Extract

The neo-Lockean justification of the highly unequal distribution of income in capitalist societies is based upon two key premises: that people are the rightful owners of their labor and talents, and that the external world was, in the state of nature, unowned, and therefore up for grabs by people, who could rightfully appropriate parts of it subject to a ‘Lockean proviso.’ The argument is presented by Nozick. Counter-proposals to Nozick’s, for the most part, have either denied the premise that people should morally be viewed as the owners of their talents, or have challenged Nozick’s Lockean proviso.

Rawls, and to a more limited extent Ronald Dworkin, deny self-ownership. As Rawls writes: ‘…the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset … The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.’ Behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, those who deliberate about justice are deprived of knowledge about characteristics whose distribution is morally arbitrary. In Dworkin’s proposal for resource egalitarianism, agents calculate the insurance policy they would hypothetically ask for, were they denied knowledge of what talents they will draw in the birth lottery. Compensation for unequal talents is, according to Dworkin, properly made by taxing and transferring income according to the way it would have been distributed as a consequence of such insurance. Dworkin’s veil of ignorance is thin, because agents in the appropriate posture for deliberating about income distribution know their preferences and attitudes toward risk, but not their talents. For both Rawls and Dworkin, the self-ownership premise is challenged by constructing a veil of ignorance in which people are deprived of knowledge of certain personal characteristics, knowledge of which would bias their opinions, from a moral viewpoint.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 697 - 710
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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References

* I am indebted to G.A. Cohen. I thank my co-authors H. Moulin and J. Silvestre for permission to include some material from my joint papers with them, and Ignacio Ortuno for research assistance. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (U.S.).

1 Nozick, Robert Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974)Google Scholar

2 Rawls, John A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar; Dworkin, Ronald ‘What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981), 185–246Google Scholar, and ‘What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981), 283-345

3 Rawls, Theory of Justice, 101–2Google Scholar

4 For further discussion of Dworkin's proposal, see Roemer, John ‘Equality of Talent’ Economics and Philosophy 1 (1985), 151–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Roemer, J. ‘Equality of Resources Implies Equality of Welfare, Quarterly Journal of Economics 101 (1986), 751–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 An essentially similar example is provided in Cohen, G.A. ‘Self-Ownership, World Ownership and Equality,’ Social Philosophy and Policy 3 (1986), 77–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ibid., and Grunebaum, James O. Private Ownership (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1987), 173–4Google Scholar

7 Bob calculates his optimal labor supply as follows. Given that Andrea fishes L1 hours, Bob can calculate the total catch of fish on the lake, for any amount of labor L he expends. The fish, he knows, will be distributed in proportion to the efficiency units of labor they each expend. Thus any labor choice L for him, given Andrea's 1, implies a fish catch Y for him. He can therefore choose L to maximize his utility, u(L,Y).

8 There may be several Nash equilibria, and so this function might not be singlevalued, and would therefore not quite qualify as an allocation mechanism as here defined. This is a detail that is unimportant for my purposes here.

9 Again, this allocation mechanism is not always single-valued.

10 The proof of Theorem 1 is in John Roemer and Joaquim Silvestre, ‘Public Ownership: Three Proposals for Resource Allocation,’ Department of Economics, University of California, Davis, Working Paper No. 307 (1987). As the title of that paper suggests, we propose two other interpretations of what public ownership might consist in. A discussion of the linear equivalent mechanism is also found in Hervé Moulin and John Roemer, ‘Public Ownership of the External World and Private Ownership of Self,’ Journal of Political Economy (in press).

11 Gauthier, David Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986)Google Scholar

12 Kalai, After E. and Smorodinsky, M. ‘Other Solutions to Nash's Bargaining Problem’ Econometrica 43 (1975), 513–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 These ideas are amplified in Roemer, J. ‘The Mismarriage of Bargaining Theory and Distributive Justice,’ Ethics 97 (1986), 88–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.