Jesse Spafford

While socialists often appeal to community as a foundational value—where they take this value to be best promoted by a socialist economic system—few philosophers have attempted to develop an account of the concept. This paper remedies this oversight by providing a positive account of community qua socialist value wherein greater community is said to exist among the members of some groups to the extent that they have a greater disposition to enhance (and a weaker disposition to diminish) one another’s welfare. In defense of this account, the paper posits three desiderata that any theory of community should satisfy; it then argues that the dispositional account successfully satisfies these desiderata whereas the major rival accounts of community discussed in the literature do not.

Under what circumstances can people convert natural resources into private property? John Locke famously answered this question by positing what has become known as the _Lockean proviso_: a person has the power to unilaterally appropriate natural resources ‘at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others’. This Lockean proviso has been widely embraced by right-libertarians who maintain that a relevant act appropriates only if others are not left worse off. However, this proviso is multiply ambiguous with there being various ways of specifying its distinct elements. Daniel Attas has argued that all proposed specifications render the proviso either implausible or unsatisfied. However, there are three seemingly plausible specifications that he either fails to consider or does not adequately address. This paper attempts to show that these specifications are either unacceptable, go unsatisfied, or fail to support right-libertarianism.

The main philosophical contribution of this review is its critical discussion of luck egalitarianism’s Boring Problem. Luck egalitarians want to draw a distinction between inequalities that are due to luck and inequalities that are controlled by the worse-off party. More specifically, they want to say that the former are unjust while the latter are just. This allows them to maintain that a person who imprudently wastes her resources and ends up worse off than another as a result is not the victim of injustice and is, thus, not entitled to equalizing transfers. The Boring Problem threatens to collapse this distinction. It contends that all inequalities are due to luck because any given inequality is not merely a function of the worse-off party’s will but also the better-off party’s will: had the latter also made some imprudent choice, then there would be no inequality (as both parties would be equally badly off). If this is right, luck egalitarians lose their ability to declare some inequalities controlled and, therefore, just. Against this conclusion, the review argues that there are two senses in which a person might control an outcome. She weakly controls the outcome if it is a function of her will. By contrast, she strongly controls the outcome if she both weakly controls it and also weakly controls every other state of affairs on which that outcome depends. The review then notes that all inequalities are due to luck only if one takes luck to be the absence of strong control. However, it argues that luck egalitarians have three good reasons to insist that luck is merely the absence of weak control. Thus, the Boring Problem fails to undermine their posited distinction between just, controlled inequalities and unjust, luck-based inequalities.

While socialists often appeal to community as a foundational value—where they take this value to be best promoted by a socialist economic system—few philosophers have attempted to develop an account of the concept. This paper remedies this oversight by providing a positive account of community qua socialist value wherein greater community is said to exist among the members of some groups to the extent that they have a greater disposition to enhance (and a weaker disposition to diminish) one another’s welfare. In defense of this account, the paper posits three desiderata that any theory of community should satisfy; it then argues that the dispositional account successfully satisfies these desiderata whereas the major rival accounts of community discussed in the literature do not.

Libertarians are attracted to the self-ownership thesis because it seems to satisfy four important theoretical desiderata. First, the thesis treats all persons equally by assigning them the same initial set of rights. Second, the thesis gives people the strongest set of ownership rights possible. Third, it assigns persons a determinate set of rights. And, finally, it grounds the libertarian rejection of a duty to assist, benefit, or rescue others. This article argues that these four desiderata cannot be simultaneously satisfied. Specifically, it contends that the first three desiderata can be jointly satisfied only if the thesis merely gives people the right to include their owned bodies in various actions (as opposed to a stronger version of the thesis that gives people permissions to do things with their bodies). However, such an interpretation of the thesis will not satisfy the final desideratum. Thus, libertarians face a tetralemma when defining the self-ownership thesis.

This paper argues that the philosophy of explanation can help inform core debates in value theory. Specifically, it argues that there is a consistent parallelism between the properties of explanation and the properties of justification such that one can reasonably infer that any property of explanation has a counterpart property of justification. Thus, by appealing to facts about the nature of explanation, one can derive various conclusions about the justifications offered by normative theorists. The paper illustrates this point by considering a debate within political philosophy over whether inequality requires justification in a way that equality does not. Egalitarians typically presume an affirmative answer to this question. However, libertarian critics note that this justificatory asymmetry cannot be simply assumed without argument. This paper argues that, by appealing to the explanation-justification parallelism, one can resolve this debate in favor of the egalitarians, as there are two properties of explanation, the justificatory analogs of which vindicate the egalitarian presumption.

Luck egalitarians contend that, while each person starts out with a claim to an equal quantity of advantage, she can forfeit this claim by making certain choices. The appeal of luck egalitarianism is that it seems to satisfy what this paper calls the moral tyranny constraint. According to this constraint, any acceptable theory of justice must preclude the possibility of an agent unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably leaving others with less advantage under conditions of full compliance with the theory. This paper argues that claim forfeiture is built into luck egalitarianism specifically to preclude such moral tyranny. However, it contends that the dominant interpretation of luck egalitarianism fails to fully satisfy the moral tyranny constraint. It offers an alternative interpretation that both eliminates the possibility of moral tyranny and rescues the position from two other prominent objections that have been directed against luck egalitarianism.

A popular argument against the unilateral appropriation of unowned resources maintains that such appropriation is impossible because it implies a power to unilaterally impose novel obligations on others—a power which people cannot have given that they are moral equals. However, Bas van der Vossen has recently argued that initial appropriation does not create obligations in this way; rather, it merely alters the empirical facts that, together with obligations, determine people’s practical moral requirements. This paper argues that van der Vossen is mistaken. Specifically, it contends that the creation of obligations is accompanied by a distinctive kind of variation in the obliged party’s practical requirements across possible worlds. Given that initial appropriation entails such variation, the paper argues that such appropriation does, in fact, create obligations.

In “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx famously declares that future communist societies will operate on the principle “from each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs!” This paper argues that there is a distinctly anarchist interpretation of Marx’s principle which takes the principle’s primary demand to be the unconditional provision of goods and services. The paper begins by introducing Marx’s “ability to needs principle” (ANP) and the normative concerns that motivated it. The paper then documents the adoption of the ANP by various prominent anarchists—with the anarchist interpretation then presented as a way of resolving the distinctive complaints that lead them to embrace the ANP. Finally, the paper concludes by arguing that conditional exchange is almost always freedom-diminishing, making the proposed interpretation of the ANP an affirmation of the core anarchist commitment to human freedom.