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David Gordon

10 months ago

in David Gordon on Rawls on Will Wilkinson
You raise some absolutely fundamental issues. I do hold what you call a deontic view of rights. In my view, while it is certainly a relevant question whether a scheme of rights facilitates mutual advantage and well being, the question of what rights people have isn't reducible to the question of what best facilitates mutual advantage. This isn't to say, of course, that consequentialist considerations aren't important. Rather, they aren't in my view all important.

You are certainly right that there should be an answer to why those who don't appear to benefit directly from a scheme of property rights should respect those rights. But I don't think that this answer must be entirely couched in terms of what is to their long-run advantage.

To assume without argument that this view is true would beg the question. But the same holds for assuming the truth of a consequentialist or contractarian view.

10 months ago

in David Gordon on Rawls on Will Wilkinson
I'm grateful for your excellent comments on my article, but I do not think that I'm guilty of the inconsistency you discuss. When I said that Rawls starts off by assuming that people have the task of distributing all the property in society, I did not mean that Rawls thinks that in the original position, titles to property are assigned to individuals. Rather, as both you and I agree, only the general institutions of society are set up in the original position. But Rawls assumes that people in the original position are not limited in setting up these institutions, with their ensuing distributive consequences, by preexisting property rights. In is in this sense that, it seems to me, Rawls assigns the task of distributing property to those in the original position.

Though this is hardly the place to argue the matter, I view with suspicion appeals to what we can reasonably reject. These seem to me to rest on unstated moral intuitions and do not succeed in laying the basis of political morality, as, e.g., Nagel and Scanlon hope.

Herbert Spencer I regard as very much worth studying: in mentioning him, I meant only that it may turn out that Rawls will not be regarded by most philosophers as a major figure.

I hope that you will write more extensively on your ideas.
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Will Wilkinson's picture
Will Wilkinson "But Rawls assumes that people in the original position are not limited in setting up these institutions, with their ensuing distributive consequences, by preexisting property rights. In is in this sense that, it seems to me, Rawls assigns the task of distributing property to those in the original position."

David, I think your problem here has basically nothing interesting to do with Rawls in particular, but counts as a criticism of all contractarians and consequentialists. Whether property rights, as they have in fact been defined and enforced, are worth maintaining or require revising depends on whether those rights are part of a system of institutions that facilitate mutual advantage and well-being.

To assume that the institutions of property as they stand are already-justified constraints on any subsequent reform seems question-begging. Anyone with a non-deontic conception of property rights is going to see those rights as open to evaluation and ask whether emendations in the system of property rights would tend to leave people better off. For example, Smith and Hume (who are to me what Kant is to Rawls) both are worried that the deployment of state coercion for the protection of property can seem to be little more than the maintenance of ill-gotten privilege and both go out of their way to justify property in terms of its effects for the poor.

I'd argue that this mode of reasoning, which implies that property rights need to be justified to those who don't seem to so directly benefit from them, is part of liberalism itself. If we find that certain property claims are not justifiable, and this finding results in a different regime of rights, and eventually a different distribution of property, then we may have "redistributed property" relative to the counterfactual world in which the status quo ante goes forward. But this is a pretty attenuated sense of "distribution", isn't it? Looks to me to be little more than the recognition that property rules (among many others) have distributive consequences. And who is against "distributing property" in this attenuated sense? Allowing women to own businesses, or taking away Disney's perpetual copyright on Mickey Mouse, for example, will indeed change the pattern of property. But that's not BAD. That's GOOD. Seeing the rules of the game as open to evaluation and reform is not some kind of threat to liberty; it's part of what it means to care about it.
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