Michael Otsuka

Have you a duty to save the greater rather than the lesser number from death when you cannot save all? Most moral philosophers would reply that you do, at least when so doing is of little cost to you and “all other things are equal,” which is to say that death is equally bad for each, and none of the imperiled is family or friend as opposed to a stranger, and so forth. It is, however, surprisingly difficult to provide sound theoretical support for such a seemingly uncontroversial duty. These difficulties highlight some contrasting problems for competing contractualist and consequentialist accounts of morality.

For a prioritarian by contrast to a utilitarian, whether a certain quantity of utility falls within the boundary of one person's life or another's makes the following moral difference: the worse the life of a person who could receive a given benefit, the stronger moral reason we have to confer this benefit on this person. It would seem, therefore, that prioritarianism succeeds, where utilitarianism fails, to ‘take seriously the distinction between persons’. Yet I show that, contrary to these appearances, prioritarianism fails, in ways strikingly parallel to those in which utilitarianism fails, to take this distinction seriously. In so doing, I draw on and develop an earlier critique of prioritarianism by disentangling and pressing two distinct separateness-of-persons objections offered there. One objection is that prioritarianism is insensitive to ‘prudential justifications’. The other is that it is insensitive to the competing claims of different individuals

I presented an earlier version of this paper to the Law and Philosophy Discussion Group in Los Angeles, whose members I would like to thank for their comments. In addition, I would also like to thank the following people for reading and providing written or verbal commentary on earlier drafts: Robert Mams, Rogers Albritton, G. A. Cohen, David Copp, Matthew Hanser, Craig Ihara, Brian Lee, Marc Lange, Derk Pereboom, Carol Voeller, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I owe special thanks to Timothy Hall and Seana Shiffnn for their insightful and helpful comments

Cohen endorses the coercive taxation of the talented at a progressive rate for the sake of realizing equality. By contrast, he denies that it is legitimate for the state to engage in the 'Stalinist forcing' of people into one or another line of work in order to bring about a more egalitarian society. He rejects such occupational conscription on grounds of the invasiveness of the gathering and acting upon information regarding people's preferences for different types of work that would be required to implement such a policy. More precisely, Cohen maintains that the presence versus the absence of such intrusion explains why such Stalinist forcing of the talented is unacceptable whereas the progressive taxation of their income is legitimate. I argue that Cohen's appeal to invasiveness does not adequately capture the moral repugnance of the state's conscripting people into work at a given occupation. I propose that a right to self-ownership, and that which explains such a right, provides a better explanation than Cohen's of why Stalinist forcing is objectionable, whereas progressive taxation is not. 1

In a recent review essay of a two volume anthology on left-libertarianism (edited by two of us), Barbara Fried has insightfully laid out most of the core issues that confront left-libertarianism. We are each left-libertarians, and we would like to take this opportunity to address some of the general issues that she raises. We shall focus, as Fried does much of the time, on the question of whether left-libertarianism is a well-defined and distinct alternative to existing forms of liberal egalitarianism. More specifically, we shall address the following fundamental issues raised by Fried (and others): (1) Does the notion self-ownership have any determinate content? (2) What is the relation between self-ownership and world ownership? (3) How is left-libertarianism different from other forms of liberal egalitarianism (e.g., those of Rawls and Dworkin)?

All left-libertarians believe that natural resources should be governed by an egalitarian principle of distribution. In my own case, this belief gains its support from what I take to be the most defensible interpretation of the Lockean principle of justice in acquisition, according to which one may privatize land and other worldly resources in a state of nature so long as one leaves enough and as good for others. Axel Gosseries is right to press the question of the moral status of worldly resources in a state of nature prior to private acquisition. For Locke, that status was one of common ownership, underwritten by God’s gift of the earth to humankind in common. For Léon Walras, to whom Vincent Bourdeau draws our attention, the earth both initially and inalienably belongs to humanity, and such collective ownership is grounded, not in theistic assumptions, but in the “scientific observation” that human beings are by nature social beings. By contrast, I regard the earth as initially unowned. This supposition should not, however, be understood, as it is by some, as the claim that each is equally free at the outset to privatize any bit of the world as he sees fit as a matter of right. Rather, it should be understood as an initial non-presumption of any rights with respect to the world. Rather than asserting the existence of rights that, as a moral default position, we have with respect to pristine wilderness, I am making a claim that is motivated by the methodological impropriety of presuming any rights with respect to the world at the outset.

I propose that liberal egalitarians and libertarians can find common ground in support of an unfamiliar means of forcing well off individuals to come to the assistance of the least well off. Such means would not, as is typically the case, involve the taxation of the income of all well off individuals. Rather, assistance would be provided by the taxation of only those well off individuals who have been properly convicted of performing justifiably criminalized acts that they had no right to commit. In Section I, I argue that many liberal egalitarians will discover that a strong case can be made for the taxation of only the unjust, since such a scheme would mitigate the objectionable nature of the coercion that must be applied in order to provide for the least well off. In Section II, I argue that libertarians who reject standard schemes of redistributive taxation will not also be able to resist the case for taxation of the unjust. In Section III, I defend taxation of the unjust against the objection that it would call for punishment in excess of what justice permits

I argue that prioritarianism cannot be assessed in abstraction from an account of the measure of utility. Rather, the soundness of this view crucially depends on what counts as a greater, lesser, or equal increase in a person’s utility. In particular, prioritarianism cannot accommodate a normatively compelling measure of utility that is captured by the axioms of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. Nor can it accommodate a plausible and elegant generalization of this theory that has been offered in response to challenges to von Neumann and Morgenstern. This is, I think, a theoretically interesting and unexpected source of difficulty for prioritarianism, which I explore in this article.

The aim of this article is to refute Ronald Dworkin's claim that the provision of an equal opportunity to insure against risks is sufficient to render differences in people's circumstances that are the result of luck consistent with his theory of equality of resources. Section I addresses bad luck in the circumstances of individuals in the form of mental or physical incapacitation resulting from the vicissitudes of nature. Section II addresses bad luck which is the result of the choices of other individuals to give or bequeath.

The aim of this article is to display the main lines of a left-libertarian argument I defend in my book Libertarianism without Inequality. I argue that left-libertarian theory can coherently combine robust rights to self-ownership and egalitarian rights to world-ownership. This allows us to oppose paternalism and consequentialism while defending a strongly egalitarian conception of justice. The model I advocate is one of equality of opportunity for welfare, and I show what justifies this choice. I conclude by clarifying one of the consequences of my theory concerning the legitimacy conditions of political authority: viz. that admitting the existence of illiberal or hierarchical societies is consistent with full respect for people’s status as autonomous, rational agents and for the choices they make in fair circumstances of equality.