Michael Otsuka

G. A. Cohen was one of the most gifted, influential, and progressive voices in contemporary political philosophy. At the time of his death in 2009, he had plans to bring together a number of his most significant papers. This is the first of three volumes to realize those plans. Drawing on three decades of work, it contains previously uncollected articles that have shaped many of the central debates in political philosophy, as well as papers published here for the first time. In these pieces, Cohen asks what egalitarians have most reason to equalize, he considers the relationship between freedom and property, and he reflects upon ideal theory and political practice.Included here are classic essays such as "Equality of What?" and "Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat," along with more recent contributions such as "Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice," "Freedom and Money," and the previously unpublished "How to Do Political Philosophy." On ample display throughout are the clarity, rigor, conviction, and wit for which Cohen was renowned. Together, these essays demonstrate how his work provides a powerful account of liberty and equality to the left of Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Isaiah Berlin.

I assess G. A. Cohen's claim, which is central to his luck egalitarian account of distributive justice, that forcing others to pay for people's expensive indulgence is inegalitarian because it amounts to their exploitation. I argue that the forced subsidy of such indulgence may well be unfair, but any such unfairness fails to ground an egalitarian complaint. I conclude that Cohen's account of distributive justice has a non-egalitarian as well as an egalitarian aspect. Each impulse arises from an underlying commitment to fairness. Cohen's account of distributive justice is therefore one of justice as fairness

In The Right to Threaten and the Right to Punish, Warren Quinn justifies punishment on the ground that it can be derived from the rights of persons to protect themselves against crime. Quinn, however, denies that a right of self-protection justifies the punishment of an aggressor solely on the ground that such punishment deters others from harming the victim of that aggression or others. He believes that punishment so justified would constitute a morally objectionable instance of using the punished individual as a means. Contrary to Quinn, I argue that (1) an individual can, on the very ground of a right to self-protection that Quinn ultimately relies upon to justify punishment, justify the punishment of an individual as a means of deterring others from committing crimes; and that (2) an individual or individuals (including state officials) can, on the ground of vindicating the right of protection that others possess, justify the punishment of an individual as a means of deterring others from committing crimes.

'Moral luck' refers to the phenomenon whereby one's degree of blameworthiness for what one has done varies on account of factors beyond one's control. Applying concepts of Dworkin's from the domain of distributive justice, I draw a distinction between 'option moral luck,' which is that to which one has exposed oneself as the result of one's voluntary choices, and 'brute moral luck,' which is that which is unchosen and unavoidable. I argue that option moral luck is not ruled out on grounds of unfairness. I also offer a non-fairness-based rejection of brute moral luck and defense of option moral luck.

I defend an incompatibilist 'Principle of Avoidable Blame' according to which one is blameworthy for performing an act of a given type only if one could instead have behaved in a manner for which one would have been blameless. First, I demonstrate that this principle is resistant to Harry Frankfurt-type counterexample. Second, I present a positive argument for this principle that appeals to the relation of blame to the 'reactive attitude' of indignation. Finally, I argue against the possibility of blamelessly stumbling into a 'moral blind alley' where one would be blameworthy for whatever one is capable of doing.

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.