Todd Seavey continues to argue that libertarianism just is the view that the only legitimate function of the state (if it has any legitimate function) is to protect property rights, and that sticking to this view saves us from confusing culture war politics. But the definition of legitimate property rights is confusing culture war politics. There is nothing especially clear-headed, “thin,” or even libertarian about emphasizing the inviolability of property rights.
The contemporary welfare-liberal argument is that redistributive fiscal policy does not violate property rights as long as policy was determined according to certain principles of legitimate democratic procedure. The contemporary environmentalist argument is that reasonable land-use restrictions do not violate property rights because there can be no legitimate right to destroy species or degrade the quality of the environment for future generations. Most people don’t think laws against selling your tissue or organs violate property rights because they don’t think you can “own” these things in the way you can own a digital camera. Many drug warriors deny that drug laws violate property rights because they deny individuals can have a legitimate right to own certain personally and socially destructive substances. And many labor advocates believe that asymmetries in bargaining power violate the property rights of workers by denying them the fair value of their labor.
So if an environmentalist, welfare-statist, paternalist, drug warrior, labor advocate can agree in principle that the sole legitimate function of the state is to protect property rights, where does that leave us? I think it leaves us in a position to see that a philosophy emphasizing the inviolability of property rights has no distinctively libertarian content in the absence of a “thicker” account of the justification and content of these rights. If I was as ambiguity-averse as Todd seems to be, I might argue that the slogan “Let’s stick to property rights!” simply invites us to wade into a impossibly confusing thicket of arguments about what does and does not count as a legitimate property right. These issues are complex. But either you wade in or you forfeit the argument to more intrepid souls.
Todd is right that feminism does not logically imply a concern for liberty in his favorite sense of the term. But then neither does an exclusive concern for the protection of property rights. There are more or less libertarian feminisms and there are more or less libertarian accounts of legitimate property rights. I believe a certain kind of regime of property rights is indispensable to the protection and value of individual liberty. And so are the norms of equality promoted by certain kinds of feminism.
It's days like today that keep me coming back to this page. Here, here.
Even though you contend that welfare liberals, environmentalists, etc. deny that their policies violate property rights, I'm not accustomed to seeing arguments advanced by those groups that actually wrestle with the issue. Maybe they are really as confident as you suggest that their policies don't violate rights, but from my vantage point it more often seems like they just don't consider the impact on property at all. Can you point me to fora in which opponents are actively engaged in debating the content and characteristics of property rights? Thanks.
Check out Karl Widerquist's “A Dilemma for Libertarians”
http://www.usbig.net/papers.html
Good paper. I like how well his reductio case — property-owning monarchy — describes Mencius Moldbug's political philosophy.
Will, I love your blog. That said, I don't think Todd is alone, or strange, since I recently read Locke and he seems to be Seaveyan. This is not an argument for their position, obviously, but I'm merely pointing out that perhaps your claim that Todd lacks a clear head may be too hasty.
I don't understand how you think you're replying to Todd. Todd is saying that property rights are central to libertarianism. You are not disputing this by saying that discussion of property rights are involved in liberal or other policies that clearly don't have property as a guiding principle.
In the examples you give, property is discussed as a response to an objection, not as the reason to propose/oppose the policy or action in question. As further proof that these examples aren't property-focused, they are clearly incoherent: if you own yourself, you own your body. If you own your body, you own your kidney. How are there different senses of “to own”? It's either mine or it's not. The other examples suffer from similar problems. I don't think you could possibly argue that the examples you give are coherent, logically. If you can, that does change things for the relevancy of the examples.
Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that this post is not an argument against Todd, but is rather bringing up a completely different point which is conflicting uses of “property”, not the centrality of property to libertarianism. There are conflicting uses of “truth” and “coercion” and “oppression” but that doesn't stop us from talking about them.
I don't understand how you think I'm not replying to Todd.
Matt, thanks for the suggestion. That was a good paper. It provoked me to think about many things that I have not considered in awhile. The first thing that occurred to me after I read the paper was to appreciate the importance of the idea of a Constitution with enumerated powers. In Will's parlance, our Constitution purported to establish the specific regime of property rights under which we were to live, effectively limiting the influence of the sovereign's will over our lives more strictly than might have, it appears, a pure reference to property rights. The second thing that occurred to me was to question the extent to which each individual incident of full individual ownership that Widerquist identifies can be isolated and distributed. I don't know what the legal precedent is, but it seems to me that it would be awfully hard to grant someone the right to use a piece of property while retaining the right to possess it for yourself. If only certain combinations of incidents can be disentangled and subject to distributed ownership, then it is possible that the idea of a sovereign retaining the power to regulate and tax without bound is inconsistent with the distribution of the remaining incidents, including the power to let things go to waste. Again, thanks for the pointer.
If one can't even agree that he or she owns their own kidney, I don't see how most other ponts of contention in politics suffer from even more ambiguity.
And with Todd above, I think most left-liberals simply don't hold property in such high esteem, rather than have a wholly different conception of it.
I second Dain. And how about an argument against Mencius Moldbug? I think the propertarian-monarchist argument borrowed from Hoppe has a lot of merit, but at the same time I agree with Jeffrey Friedman that it's really “exit” (like Friedman, Caplan and Moldbug I have no faith in “voice”) rather than the Ideal State that we're interested in. So I've wound up with the sort of radical decentralism or “panarchy” promoted by Keith Preston. It's sort of a meta-libertarianism that applies the libertarian skepticism of rational constructivist politics to libertarianism itself, for as good Popperian's we must hold out the possibility that we libertarians are actually wrong and if tried our ideas will fail.
“If one can't even agree that he or she owns their own kidney, I don't see how most other ponts of contention in politics suffer from even more ambiguity.
And with Todd above, I think most left-liberals simply don't hold property in such high esteem, rather than have a wholly different conception of it.”-Dain
Most progressives I argue with don't believe they are upholding the “true” conception of property rights. They say instead that “some things are more important than property rights” or “what good are property rights if you can't afford to eat?” or “the public good is more important than the property rights of individuals”.
The contemporary welfare-liberal argument is that redistributive fiscal policy does not violate property rights as long as policy was determined according to certain principles of legitimate democratic procedure. The contemporary environmentalist argument is that reasonable land-use restrictions do not violate property rights because there can be no legitimate right to destroy species or degrade the quality of the environment for future generations.
And theft doesn't violate property rights either, because in the thief's mind, the stuff should be his anyway.
These people don't have an interesting or alternate view of property rights. They have a silly, absurd, or even self-contradictory view of property rights. You're conceding to them a term that they have no business using, just as an astrologer has no business calling himself a scientist.
Jason, Many distinguished academic political philosophers think that taxation is not even coercive (not that it's justified coercion, but can't count as coercive at all), as long as it accords to just procedure. Which is to say, there is no right to keep the stuff taxed. Outright theft is to liberal democratic fiscal policy as locking a suspected thief in your personal dungeon is to putting a thief in jail after a fair trial. You can SAY that Ronald Dworkin or Liam Murphy or whomever is silly, absurd, or self-contradictory and that the community of political philosophy is full of astrologers, but then it looks just looks like you're desperate to avoid addressing their arguments. Maybe they aren't libertarians because they're right, and you are a libertarian because you won't bother to take serious, accomplished thinkers seriously!
No, not really. “Property rights” are a bundle of things; very few people really believe in Blackstonian “sole and despotic dominion,” which was hardly an accurate characterization even then. Richard freakin' Epstein even believes in (properly circumscribed) eminent domain, because his consequentialist framework leads him there. Similarly, whether you hold an interest-based or will-based account of rights, the precise contours of property rights are going to depend on how their recognition affects people's interests or is necessary for their autonomy, &c.; it's not at all crazy to think that this will vary widely depending on what other interests your philosophy recognizes.
It's true that property rights function much less as a *premise* in such theories; but they're not simply conclusions, either; they do work at a middle level, too, allowing even egalitarian liberals to coherently criticize theft, arbitrary and uncompensated expropriation, &c. Leftists don't usually use the language of property rights because they don't find it a particularly illuminating framework, but that doesn't mean that their claims can't be cashed out in those terms.
I think TGGP's point about exit is an important one (I'm influenced a great deal by Kukathas); I'll post on this later.
Tag team! High-five!
Agreed that property plays a middle role in most liberal political thought. But let me add that some left-libertarians do use self-ownership and property rights as a premise, but then deny that there can be private property rights in land, for example. And some basic income types, like Widerquist linked above, think that denial of a basic income guarantee violates the liberty of the propertyless because property IS so fundamentally important to liberty.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't, alas, take them seriously. If an argument enjoys political currency, you have to take it seriously. But this doesn't make it a true argument, and it doesn't mean that “property” doesn't advance our understanding of rights. It just means that we have to be careful about definitions. I'm not sure that either you or Todd Seavey would disagree with this, so I'm actually not sure where you disagree at all.
a philosophy emphasizing the inviolability of property rights has no distinctively libertarian content in the absence of a “thicker” account of the justification and content of these rights.
If we replace 'property rights' with 'X' we get a generically true statement about political philosophy. A political philosophy emphasizing 'X' has no distinctive libertarian context absent an account of the context of X. Indeed, it has no context at all!
So what is going on here beyond a definitional disagreement? If I may employ a barbarous lit-crit neologism, I fear that Will is trying to selectively 'problematize' bright line concepts. I'm sure there's some philosophy (let's call it Q-ism) out there that contents that a military draft doesn't meaningfully diminish personal liberty because the amount of liberty that can be rightly considered 'personal' is the function of the political process. I don't even find this that implausible. Yet most of us operating in the anglophone liberal tradition would instead say that Q-ism doesn't always privilege personal liberty. We can push the disagreement one step back if we want, but we should do so only if we *really think* that the meaning or justification of personal liberty is ambiguous in this way.
Thus the real question is: what does Will think the rights to property (including self-ownership?) are and how are they justified? I feel like Will is always on the verge of endorsing something like a purely consequentialist account of property rights, and then pulling away. But it seems in this case his justification of liberty may also be purely consequentialist.
Will, how am I doing so far?
If you asked most Americans if you own your body, they will say of course. If you ask them then if you own your own kidney, they will say yes. If you further asked if your kidney could be removed without your consent they will say no.
Yet if you then inquire as to whether you have the right to remove your own kidney and sell it, they will say no – arguing that your choice to sell the kidney to someone privately is “playing God” and denies both justice (in which the “person who need it most” should have it) and respect to God (since your sale of the kidney will probably determine whether someone lives or dies, a function that should be relegated to God).
This is one of those areas where to engage with the real world and its objections to things, you have to realize . . .well, you know, the link. But you know, sometimes in America ya gotta wrestle with that religious belief Tocqueville described so well.
We should maintain certain inalienable rights such as the right to own property. Simply because the majority determines a policy should not mean that the policy doesn't violate inalienable rights. For example, slavery was okay as long as the majority felt it should be so (an old argument, I know).
The ability of the state to separate us from lawfully gained property violates inalienable rights. Further, it destabilizes the capitalist system because we have no assurance that our investment will not be confiscated by the majority.
But, then, I suspect certain political factions work daily toward destabilization of the capitalist system in order to further their own agenda.
We should maintain certain inalienable rights such as the right to own property. Simply because the majority determines a policy should not mean that the policy doesn't violate inalienable rights. For example, slavery was okay as long as the majority felt it should be so (an old argument, I know).
The ability of the state to separate us from lawfully gained property violates inalienable rights. Further, it destabilizes the capitalist system because we have no assurance that our investment will not be confiscated by the majority.
But, then, I suspect certain political factions work daily toward destabilization of the capitalist system in order to further their own agenda.