I understand that you’re joking and realize that I wasn’t speaking for myself when proposing that hypothetical.

What I hoped you’d recognize is that many of us view property rights in the same kind of category, though. Property often represents the results of tremendous personal sacrifice and difficult choices; a significant portion of their lives’ time and effort. Your cavalier attitude about “frustrating rich peoples’ expectations about what they’re entitiled to” suggests that you don’t take this idea very seriously. I tried to form my “frustrating some promiscuous women’s expectations about their entitlement in terms of contol over their bodies” line to try to express how offensive that attitude can be.

The better lesson is that nobody should be “the one in charge of making interpersonal utility comparisons” with respect to basic rights such as these. At least, not the kind that spark coercive remedies.

Should we decide the question of whether or not to permit the rape of women who say “No” on whether some utility function is maximized?

Sure, we might frustrate some promiscuous women’s expectations about their entitlement in terms of contol over their bodies, but maybe some women mean “Yes”, and maybe some experts judge men to get more benefit than women bear costs, etc.

Sorry, but I don’t think that’s the way to decide if these are rights violations.

whether its “rights violations” that I am (supposedly) proposing is exactly the question now isn’t it?

I admit that frustrating rich peoples’ expectations about what they’re entitiled to is a cost. The real question is, how severe are the other costs that would be associated with such actions.

I am indeed averse to interpersonal utility comparison; indeed I see it as the root of most of the evil in the world. As I say, that aversion seems to me a natural consequence of self-ownership, and “completely wack” is not much of an argument against it. (Moreover, as you note, justifying redistributive taxation not only requires justifying interpersonal utility comparison, but the performance of that comparison by people who have no particularly good incentive or skill to do it “well”, and a lot of incentive to do it tendentiously).

Of course one needs some means of comparing degrees of rights-violation, since in the real world there is not and will not soon be perfect respect for people’s side-constraint rights, and so we have to choose among evils. But this doesn’t amount to abandonment of the side-constraints view at all. Believing that murder is always wrong, as a side-constraint, does not preclude one from discussing whether some types of murder are worse than others, nor from considering which sorts of murder we ought to devote the most resources to stopping in the knowledge that we can’t stop all of it.

And again, the point is that the burden of proof is *not on me* to show that redressing past injustices will do more harm than good. It’s on you to show that it won’t, because you’re proposing to initiate lots of specific new rights-violations against specific extant people in order to rectify vaguely defined injustices most of which were done to people long dead, and I’m proposing to just leave people alone.

You seem very averse to the notion that individuals’ well-beings might be comparible. Admittedly assigning that task to government bureaucrats is unappealing, but the idea that individual well-beings are not even vaguely comparible is completely wack.

More to the point, in order to sustain your claim that redressing past injustices will do more harm than good, you’ll have to point to something relevant about once and future rights violations. What’s that going to be if it has nothing to do with how detrimental these were/will be to people’s well-being.

More generally, it’s true that current distributions originated *in part* through quite a bit of injustice of several types. But they are also largely based on just transactions: voluntary wealth creation and trade. Indeed, it is impossible in general to disentangle the just from the unjust portion; too much time has passed and society is too complicated. Defense of existing distributions against mass forced redistribution therefore does not require that one show that they could have come about absolutely justly– only that you cannot redo them without creating a great deal more injustice. Which is manifestly true, and *does* follow from self-ownership, since even if people only unquestionably own their labor, a very great deal of existing wealth has been earned through that labor.

In any case, Cohen et al (if you’ve characterized them correctly) are just plain arguing by implicit assertion. Namely: claiming “there is not much inequality that can be justified on the basis of self-ownership alone” is smuggling in an egalitarian premise, namely that inequality in and of itself needs a positive justification. But it doesn’t; since individuals are incomparable, not equal, in moral worth (which again is what self-ownership really means), inequality in and of itself is morally neutral. The burden of proof is on those who would forcibly change things as they are, not on those who would continue with existing inequality.

Also, initial joint-ownership is not a hypothesis about which we should ask “true or not”. It’s simply another possibility consistent with self-ownership. That’s why all the arguments against initial joint-ownership (many of which are, ironically, consequentialist) are beside the point.

I think consequentialism is the way to go. But, like you, I am not convinced that “egalitarian consequentialism” as you called it is the only approach that can be justified after Cohen. Still whatever you get will at least be close to that approach. The Critical Review arguments of (if I remember right) Wolff and Weinberg, did show that self-ownership (which is at least consistent with the possibility of interpersonal utility comparability) does not straghtforwardly yield the libertarian rights (and corresponding “rights definition of freedom”) that they are very widely believed to yield. That’s why that scholarship is important.

In short: Cohen and his expositers are just talking about what inequalities could be justified on the basis of self-ownership alone. The surprising result: not much.

And don’t forget that existing distributions are not, in fact, based on a just set of acquisitions and transactions (and rectifications of injustices) on ANYBODY’s view. So AT MOST the libertarian is stuck defending them on the grounds that they COULD POSSIBLY been justly arrived at. It’s a fruitless enterprise.

But this won’t work, because different people’s utilities are incomparable, and this incomparability *is* a consequence of self-ownership: it is, in fact, pretty much what self-ownership means. I own myself because I am an end in myself, not a means to anyone else’s ends or to a greater social end of maximization of good overall consequences. And my utility is neither lesser, greater, *nor equal* to anyone else’s. That’s why you need rights to be side-constraints and not balancing acts.

So consequentialist egalitarianism cannot be used to reconcile attacks on property rights with self-ownership.

Okay.

We’re talking about people, right?

Individual people who have individual goals, and respond to incentives?

I think Nozick’s model approximates my sense of our moral obligation to each other to respect each other’s autonomy and limit our interactions to the voluntary (other than defense).

And, his notion of the distributive justice where justly acquired and transferred holdings lead to a just distribution, regardless of how that distribution looks, also squares with my thoughts.

Why should anyone care whether you or Cohen think that in the unworkable fictional state of joint-ownership of everything some idiot might not agree to selling part of it?

This doesn’t seem to go anywhere towards demonstrating that I must change my notions of morality and justice because people in that situation would only sell their property by considering consequences (as opposed to what?).

Your statement,

“…almost anything would make them better off than continued joint-ownership.”

seems to illustrate your acceptance of my point that deciding between joint-ownership and private-ownership requires considering the consequences of these regimes. It can’t be done on self-ownership grounds alone. (That’s Cohen’s point.)

Nozick’s side-constraints view of rights, on the other hand, says that these rights must be respected no matter what the consequences. But, says Cohen, doing so won’t necessarily lead to inequality if the world is jointly owned.

Ergo, if you want to defend non-joint property rights as side-constraints, it will have to be on the basis of the good consequences that flow from such a regime. Once these rights are not absolute but depend on the good consequences, then respecting them absolutely (as side-constraints) can be attacked by arguing that better consequcnes (e.g. for individual autonomy) would ensue if they were respected less than absolutely.