Peter Vallentyne

Natural properties are those that carve reality at the joints. The notion of carving reality at the joints, however, is somewhat obscure, and is often understood in terms of making for similarity, conferring causal powers, or figuring in the laws of nature. I develop and assess an account of the third sort according to which carving reality at the joints is understood as having the right level of determinacy relative to nomic roles. The account has the attraction of involving very weak metaphysical presuppositions, but fails to capture several features that natural properties are presumed to have.

Earl Conee is a well known contemporary defender of the impossibility of moral dilemmas. In his 1982 paper "Against Moral Dilemmas" he argued that moral dilemmas are impossible because the existence of such a dilemma would entail that some obligatory action is forbidden, which is absurd. More recently, in "Why Moral Dilemmas are Impossible" he has defended the impossibility of moral dilemmas by claiming that the moral status of an action depends in part on the moral status of its alternatives. I will here argue that this claim -- as he understands it -- is sufficiently controversial to undermine the force of his argument.

D. M. Armstrong, Michael Tooley, and Fred Dretske have recently proposed a new realist account of laws of nature, according to which laws of nature are objective relations between universals. After criticizing this account, I develop an alternative realist account, according to which (1) the nomic structure of a world is a relation between initial world-histories and world-histories, and (2) a law of nature is a fact that holds solely in virtue of nomic structure (and not, for example, in virtue of past history).

Left-libertarian theories of justice hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Unlike most versions of egalitarianism, leftlibertarianism endorses full self-ownership, and thus places specific limits on what others may do to one’s person without one’s permission. Unlike the more familiar right-libertarianism (which also endorses full self-ownership), it holds that natural resources—resources which are not the results of anyone's choices and which are necessary for any form of activity—may be privately appropriated only with the permission of, or with a significant payment to, the members of society. Like right-libertarianism, left-libertarianism holds that the basic rights of individuals are ownership rights. Such rights can endow agents—as liberalism requires—with spheres of personal liberty where they may each pursue their conceptions of “the good life”. Left-libertarianism is promising because it coherently underwrites both some demands of material equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting this equality. It is promising, that is, because it is a form of liberal egalitarianism. Left-libertarian theories have been propounded for over two centuries. Early exponents of some form of self-ownership combined with some form of egalitarian ownership of natural resources include: Hugo Grotius (1625), Samuel Pufendorf (1672), John Locke (1690), William Ogilvie (1781), Thomas Spence (1793), Thomas Paine (1795), Hippolyte de Colins (1835), François Huet (1853), Patrick E. Dove (1850, 1854), Herbert Spencer (1851), Henry George (1879, 1892), and Léon Walras (1896).1 It is striking how much of the current debate about equality, liberty, and responsibility has already been addressed by these authors.

This is the first volume of Equality and Justice, a six-volume collection of the most important articles of the twentieth century on the topic of justice and equality. This volume addresses the following three (only loosely related) issues: (1) What is the concept of justice? (2) Is justice primarily a demand on individuals or on societies? (3) What are the relative merits of conceptions of justice based on equality, based on priority for those who have less, and based on ensuring that everyone has a basic minimum, of the relevant goods?

The difference principle, introduced by Rawls (1971, 1993), is generally interpreted as leximin, but this is not how he intended it. Rawls explicitly states that the difference principle requires that aggregate benefits (e.g., average or total) to those in the least advantaged group be given lexical priority over benefits to others, where the least advantaged group includes more than the strictly worst off individuals. We study the implications of adopting different approaches to the definition of the least advantaged group and show that, if acyclicity is required, several seemingly plausible approaches lead to something close to leximin. We then show that significant aggregation is possible, if the least advantaged group is defined as those with those with less benefits than some strictly positive transform of the lowest level of benefits. Finally, we discuss the implications of requiring that, in comparing two alternatives, the cutoff for the least advantaged group of one alternative be the same as that for the other alternative.

In the old days, material egalitarians tended to favor equality of outcome advantage, on some suitable conception of advantage. Under the influence of Dworkin’s seminal articles on equality, contemporary material egalitarians have tended to favor equality of brute luck advantage---on the grounds that this permits people to be held appropriately accountable for the benefits and burdens of their choices. I shall argue, however, that a plausible conception of egalitarian justice requires neither that brute luck advantage always be equalized nor that people always bear the full cost of their voluntary choices. Instead, justice requires that initial opportunities for advantage be equalized---roughly along the lines suggested by Arneson and Cohen. Brute luck egalitarianism and initial opportunity egalitarianism are fairly similar in motivation, and as a result they have not been adequately distinguished. Once the two views are more clearly contrasted, equality of opportunity for advantage will, I claim, be seen to be a more plausible conception of equality.

The teleological/deontological distinction was introduced in 1930 by C.D. Broad] and since then it has come to be accepted as the fundamental classificatory distinction for moral philosophy. I shall argue that the presupposition that there is a single fundamental classificatory distinction is false. There are too many features of moral theories that matter for that to be so. I shall argue furthermore that as it is usually drawn the teleological/deontological distinction is not even a fundamental distinction. Another distinction, that between theories that make the right depend solely on considerations of goodness (axiological theories) and those that do not, is significantly more important

Puzzles can arise in value theory and deontic (permissibility) theory when infinity is involved. These puzzles can arise for ethics, for prudence, or for any normative perspective. For the sake of simplicity, we focus on the ethical versions of these problems. We start by addressing problems that can arise in determining what is permissible, either in a given choice situation when there are an infinite number of options or in infinite sequence of choice situations, each with only finitely many options. There is a common theme here: standard and plausible decision rules, such as the dominance principle or maximising principles, run into conflict with other plausible principles. We then address problems that can arise in determining whether one option is more valuable than another, when the options have infinite, or undefined, value. This includes cases where a single bearer of value has infinite or undefined value, as well as cases where each bearer of value is finite but the total for the collection is infinite or undefined totals. Our focus is on introducing the puzzles, rather than canvassing potential solutions.

Where there is a fixed population (i.e., who exists does not depend on what choice an agent makes), the deontic version of anonymous Paretian egalitarianism holds that an option is just if and only if (1) it is anonymously Pareto optimal (i.e., no feasible alternative has a permutation that is Pareto superior), and (2) it is no less equal than any other anonymously Pareto optimal option. We shall develop and discuss a version of this approach for the variable population case (i.e., where who exists does depend on what choice an agent makes). More specifically, we shall develop and discuss it in the context of a person-affecting framework—in which an option is just if and only if it wrongs no one according to certain plausible conditions on wronging.

G.A. Cohen’s book brings together and elaborates on articles that he has written on selfownership, on Marx’s theory of exploitation, and on the future of socialism. Although seven of the eleven chapters have been previously published (1977-1992), this is not merely a collection of articles. There is a superb introduction that gives an overview of how the chapters fit together and of their historical relation to each other. Most chapters have a new introduction and often a postscript or addendum that connect them with other chapters. And the four new chapters (on justice and market transactions, exploitation in Marx, the concept of self-ownership, and the plausibility of the thesis of self-ownership) are important contributions that round out and bring closure to many of the central issues. As always with Cohen, the writing is crystal clear, and full of compelling examples, deep insights, and powerful arguments. Cohen has long been recognized as one of the most important exponents of analytic Marxism. His innovative, rigorous, and exciting interpretations of Marx’s theories of history and of exploitation have had a major impact on Marxist scholarship. Starting in the mid-1970s he has increasingly turned his attention to normative political philosophy. As Cohen describes it, he was awakened from his “dogmatic socialist slumbers” by Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain example in which people starting from a position of equality (or other favored patterned distribution) freely choose to pay to watch Wilt Chamberlain play, and the net result is inequality (or other unfavored pattern). During the subsequent twenty years, political 1 philosophy has benefited from his thinking about the nature and plausibility of the thesis of selfownership, and about the scope and demands of equality. In what follows I will focus solely on the material dealing with self-ownership, but first I shall mention some of the interesting material on Marxism and socialism that I will be ignoring. First, at various points Cohen discusses how something like a principle of self-ownership is latent in the standard Marxist condemnation of capitalist exploitation (e.g., the capitalist steals labor time from the laborer)..

Bringing together the most influential essays in ethical philosophy throughout the twentieth century, this comprehensive collection examines the issues that form the basis of the modern understanding of a democratic society. The carefully selected articles debate the character of human, legal, institutional, and universal equality and justice. Topics and coverage include contemporary notions of justice and social equality; the conceptual foundation for requiring minimum justice and equality; discussions of who is entitled to justice and equality and who is obliged to provide these conditions; and universal, procedural, legal concepts of justice and equality. This collection is a useful survey on timeless issues of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, law, policy, and international relations alike. This volume is available on its own or as part of the six-volume set, Equality and Justice . For a complete list of the volume titles in this set, see the listing for Equality and Justice [ISBN: 0-415-94142-3].

We defend a version of left-libertarianism, and discuss some of its implications for global justice (and economic justice among nations in particular). Like the better known right-libertarianism, left-libertarianism holds that agents own themselves. Unlike right-libertarianism, left-libertarianism holds that natural resources (land, oil, air, etc.) are owned in some egalitarian sense and can be legitimately appropriated by individuals or groups only when the appropriations are compatible with the specified form of egalitarian ownership. We defend the thesis of self-ownership on the grounds that it is required to protect individuals adequately from interference in their lives by others. We then defend a particular conception of egalitarian ownership of natural resources according to which those who appropriate unappropriated natural resources must pay competitive rent (determined by supply and demand) for the rights that they have claimed. We then go on to apply the principles to issues of global justice. We defend the view that countries owe payments to a global fund for the value of unimproved natural resources that they have appropriated, and that this fund is to be divided on some egalitarian basis among the citizens of the world. We..