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.

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.

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.

John Taurek (1977) has famously argued that when faced with the choice between saving one stranger's life and two (or more) different strangers' lives, we should follow a principle that directs us to flip a fair coin to determine whom to save just as we would do when faced with a choice between saving one stranger and a single other stranger. We should flip a fair coin because we treat each of the one and the the many with equal concern and respect only if we give each an equal and positive chance of being saved. We give the one no chance of being saved if we instead follow a principle of saving the greater number in such cases.

In this article, I argue that it makes a moral difference whether an individual is worse off than she could have been. Here I part company with consequentialists such as Parfit and side with contractualists such as Scanlon. But, unlike some contractualists, I reject the view that all that matters is whether a principle can be justified to each particular individual, where such a justification is attentive to her interests, complaints, and other claims. The anonymous goodness of a distribution also matters. My attempt to reconcile contractualist and consequentialist approaches proceeds via a serious of reflections on cases.

Over the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in left- libertarianism, which holds (roughly) that agents fully own themselves and that natural resources (land, minerals, air, and the like) belong to everyone in some egalitarian sense. Left-libertarianism agrees with the more familiar right-libertarianism about self-ownership, but radically disagrees with it about the power to acquire ownership of natural resources. Merely being the first person to claim, discover, or mix labor with an unappropriated natural resource does not—left-libertarianism insists—generate a full private property right in that natural resource. Left-libertarianism seems promising because it recognizes both strong individual rights of liberty and security and also grounds a strong demand for some kind of material equality. It seems, that is, to be a plausible a form of liberal egalitarianism. 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.1 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 of 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)? First, however, we shall set the context by providing some general background on left-libertarianism.

According to one potent challenge to the value and fairness of distribution by lot, the lottery chance of receiving a good is lacking in value or otherwise insignificant or irrelevant in comparison with actually receiving the good. To meet this challenge, I show in Section I that the far greater significance of receiving all of an undivided good needn’t undermine the case for equal lottery chances of the whole good, as compared with an outcome involving equally divided portions of this good. I argue in Section II that it mislocates the value of lottery chances to assume that they must contribute, in themselves, to a person’s well-being. Rather their significance primarily resides in their expected instrumental value in delivering goods of independent value. In Section III, I provide an account of when distribution by lot is perfectly fair in spite of the inevitability of an unequal outcome among equal claimants.

What follows is a sketch of three of the main claims of How to Pool Risks across Generations: The Case for Collective Pensions (Otsuka 2023) with which my symposium commentators critically engage: namely, that (1) by efficiently pooling risks across as well as within generations, (2) collective pensions can realize a form of Rawlsian reciprocity involving fair terms of cooperation for mutual advantage, (3) through the voluntary binding agreements of individuals to join a mutual association that provides social insurance. I respond to their challenges to these claims in my replies that follow their contributions.

This is the second of three volumes of posthumously collected writings of G. A. Cohen, who was one of the leading, and most progressive, figures in contemporary political philosophy. This volume brings together some of Cohen's most personal philosophical and nonphilosophical essays, many of them previously unpublished. Rich in first-person narration, insight, and humor, these pieces vividly demonstrate why Thomas Nagel described Cohen as a "wonderful raconteur." The nonphilosophical highlight of the book is Cohen's remarkable account of his first trip to India, which includes unforgettable vignettes of encounters with strangers and reflections on poverty and begging. Other biographical pieces include his valedictory lecture at Oxford, in which he describes his philosophical development and offers his impressions of other philosophers, and "Isaiah's Marx, and Mine," a tribute to his mentor Isaiah Berlin. Other essays address such topics as the truth in "small-c conservatism," who can and can't condemn terrorists, and the essence of bullshit. A recurring theme is finding completion in relation to the world of other human beings. Engaging, perceptive, and empathetic, these writings reveal a more personal side of one of the most influential philosophers of our time.

Book review of McMahan J. "Killing in War." Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2009. --- Jeff McMahan’s "Killing in War" is, among many other things, a brief against the traditional just war doctrine of the moral equality of combatants – i.e. the doctrine that all combatants ‘have the same moral status, hence the same moral rights, immunities, and liabilities’, including ‘an equal right to kill’, irrespective of whether the war they fight is just or unjust.1 This book is a powerfully argued, nuanced, comprehensive, relentless and impassioned brief against this doctrine. It wages total war against it, eclipsing all past skirmishes. Yet, at the same time that he rejects the moral equality of combatants, McMahan affirms the ‘legal equality of combatants’, according to which ‘legal rights, liabilities, and immunities of combatants are unaffected by’ the justice or injustice of the war they fight. Not only does McMahan affirm that the legal equality of combatants holds as a matter of fact. He also affirms that such legal equality is morally justified at present. In this article, I shall expose and explore tensions that arise as the result of this uneasy combination of McMahan’s affirmation of the legal equality of combatants and his thoroughgoing rejection of their moral equality.

How to Pool Risks across Generations makes the case for the collective provision of pensions, on fair terms of social cooperation. Through the insurance of a mutual association which extends across society and over multiple generations, we share one another’s fates by pooling risks across both space and time. Resources are transferred, not simply between different people, but also within the possible future lives of each person: from one’s more fortunate to one’s less fortunate future selves. The book opens with an investigation of the longevity and investment risk that even a single individual on a desert island would face in providing for her old age. From this atomistic starting point, it builds up, within and across the chapters, to increasingly collective forms of pension provision. By joining together, it is possible to tame the risks we would face as individuals, each with our own private pension pot. A collective pension can be justified as a ‘social union of social unions’: an enduring corporate body, which is formed by agreements to pool risks, in a manner that involves reciprocity between the various individuals who constitute the collective. Even though all individuals age and die, a collective pension scheme remains evergreen, as the average age of members remains relatively unchanged, through the influx of new members to replace those who retire. It is therefore possible to smooth risks indefinitely across as well as within generations, to the mutual advantage of each.

I argue that the Lockean 'enough and as good' proviso provides support for egalitarian as opposed to libertarian or sufficientarian claims over worldly resources. These egalitarian claims apply to contemporary advanced industrial societies with money-based economies as well as primitive agrarian barter economies. But the full 'luck egalitarian' complement of equality of opportunity for welfare cannot be derived from a Lockean approach that focuses on our egalitarian claims to unowned bits of the world. For that, we need to reach beyond Locke, and appeal to complaints of unfairness that have nothing in particular to do with our claims to worldly resources.

In his restriction of prioritarianism to cases in which the same people would exist in all the possible outcomes, Parfit stakes out an unstable position, both for himself and more generally. There is no plausible rationale for a prioritarianism that is so restricted, which is consistent with the key features of Parfit’s elaboration and defence of this view and his other commitments. The principles that might be appealed to, in an attempt to justify such a restriction, give rise to a different view—one that is sensitive to the presence or absence of the competing claims of different individuals, where both the existence and the magnitude of these claims are determined by gains and losses to individuals in a manner that is not fully captured by Parfit’s prioritarian weighting.

Rawlsian justice as fairness is neither fundamentally luck egalitarian nor relational egalitarian. Rather, the most fundamental idea is that of society as a fair system of cooperation. Collective pensions provide a case study which illustrates the fruitfulness of conceiving justice in these latter terms. Those who have recently reached the age of majority do not now know how long they will live in retirement or how well any investments they try to save up for their retirement would fare. From the perspective of the beginning of their working lives, it is therefore rational for each to enter into an agreement with others, who also do not yet know their fates, that, if one turns out to be among the unfortunate whose private pension pots would not have yielded enough for one’s retirement, one will receive much more in retirement, whereas those whose pension pots would have overflowed their retirements will receive somewhat less. These terms are to each person’s expected advantage, which is made possible by a fair sharing of the fruits of social cooperation which arise through the efficiencies reaped by the pooling of the risk of outliving what one could save for one’s retirement on one’s own. It is rational for each to agree to share one another’s fates by pooling risks across both space and time, on fair terms of social cooperation for mutual advantage. Even when collective pensions arise from, and are proportional to, a baseline of unequal income, they can be defended on grounds of reciprocity involving regard for one another as equals.

Delineates the nature of a libertarian right of self‐ownership. Assesses Robert Nozick's claim that taxation is on a par with forced labour. Contends that the most defensible version of the Lockean ‘enough and as good’ proviso calls for acquisition of unowned natural resources that is consistent with equality of opportunity for welfare. Argues, contrary to both Nozick and G. A. Cohen, that a robust right of self‐ownership is compatible with this welfare‐egalitarian proviso across a wide range of circumstances.

Considers the merits of the Locke‐inspired Jeffersonian idea that laws enacted by those who once lived in one's country but are now dead have no authority over the living and hence should lapse unless they are reaffirmed by a democratic majority vote of the living. Considers and rejects consequentialist, communitarian, and Madisonian attempts to justify the authority of the dead over the living. Draws on Ch. 5 to propose and endorse an account based on unanimous Lockean consent of how the laws of the dead can legitimately bind the living.

Offers a reconstruction of John Locke's voluntaristic theory of legitimate political authority with the aim of overcoming the following two problems with tacit consent via residence: that it fails to bind either because it is unfreely given or because it is offered in circumstances of inequality. Builds on the author's defence in Ch. 1 of an egalitarian version of the Lockean proviso to remedy these problems and endorses a highly voluntaristic, pluralistic, and decentralized account of legitimate political authority.

Offers a Lockean account of a natural right to punish, which is grounded in a natural right of self‐protection. Endorses Warren Quinn's derivation of the right to punish from a right of self‐protection, but argues, against Quinn, that his account will succeed only if one is allowed, when justifying punishment, to appeal to the fact that the punishment of the guilty will deter others. Also argues that Quinn's account will succeed only if the right to engage in lethal measures to protect the lives of individuals against innocent aggressors is highly circumscribed.