Alex,

I’m not sure the drowning-rescue case is the best hypothetical for the principle you want to prod me on, because the loss inflicted on the owner of the life-preserver is likely to be nearly zero, and the owner is unlikely to demand any compensation for it. Even if she does, it would be unjust of her to demand a level of compensation that’s disproportionate to the trifling loss imposed by taking the life-preserver. But here goes, anyway.

On my view taking the life-preserver entails taking on a debt to the owner of the life-preserver. As with any debt, you need not be able to repay the debt in full immediately; you just need to be willing to make a good-faith effort at repaying it as quickly as you can. Presumably the stranger that you saved from drowning might also chip in for the compensation—although whether she can be compelled to do so may depend on whether she was aware that you took the life-preserver without permission from the owner. In the case of something as trifling as taking a life-preserver that’s not otherwise in use,

Now, if you realistically expect that you and the drowning stranger together will still never be able to repay a substantial amount of the debt to the owner, then I suppose it would be wrong to take the whatever you’re taking, but I can’t imagine how that would come up in the drowning-rescue case. But in those other cases it may not be so obvious that it’s permissible to take the more precious property without permission.

In any case, I think that if you’re not willing to accept a financial burden, if necessary, as the cost of saving someone from drowning, then what you’re doing doesn’t deserve the name of virtue.

Alex,

Well, my own view is that pragmatic concerns play a role in specifying the correct application of justice to cases where justice alone leaves the question vague. It’s not that they can trump the demands of justice, but rather that they offer some guidance as to what the demands of justice in a specific case are, in that subset of cases where reflection on justice alone would underdetermine the answer.

I do think that some of the emergency cases you have in mind are morally permissible — including grabbing a life-preserver without prior permission from the owner in order to save drowning stranger, or, say, breaking into an empty cabin to survive overnight during a blizzard. But I think it’s a mistake to treat these cases as cases where some other duty or right overrides the duty to respect property rights. Property rights are not simply erased by emergency conditions, but rather the application of them is altered; so, for example, it’s permissible to break into the cabin, but only if, and to the degree that, the person doing so accepts responsibility for paying compensation to the owner, for the use and for any damage inflicted, later on.

Alex,

You’re right that some of the factors I listed in settling abandonment conditions for a given species of property sound a lot like conditions derived from pragmatic concerns. That’s because they are partly derived from pragmatic concerns.

My point of disagreement with the utilitarian position I’m criticizing is not that I think pragmatic concerns never play any role in deliberation about justice (as concerns property rights). Rather, it’s over the role they can properly play. For one, I don’t think that all of the factors to be taken into account in making judgments about abandonment are pragmatic concerns; I would argue that some have to do with agent intent, others are purely conventional, and still others have to do with the content of other virtues, e.g. courage or fairness. More importantly, my view is that the virtue of justice imposes some duties that have vague boundaries; you can justly lay claim to abandoned property, but doesn’t fully specify the exact conditions under which a particular piece of property counts as being abandoned. Precisifying that boundary in order to make judgments in particular cases can take things like calculations of aggregate pleasure, etc. into account. But the fact that conventional and utilitarian considerations play a role in fixing the boundaries of justice does not entail they determine the whole content of justice, or provide the sole reason for being just.

Alex,

Thanks for the replies. For what it’s worth, when I was complaining about top-down ideas of “distribution,” I had most establishment economics in mind, and not just Marxist-Leninist-style command economies. I think it causes a great deal of evil in its state capitalist and managerial forms as well as in its state communist forms. I agree that the people who do it sometimes achieve the aims they set out to achieve (although they often achieve much less than you might expect); but I dispute that those aims are worth achieving at the cost of coercing any single person.

As for air, that’s a fair question; I think the answer to it is that all forms of property ownership allow for constructive abandonment of that property, but the concrete application of the principle for one kind of property doesn’t need to be the same as the concrete application for other kinds. Some things (land) can be left for long periods of time without being abandoned; others (air) can’t really be left at all without being abandoned; and most things (tools, chairs, books, etc.) are somewhere in between. There are lots of things that enter into a judgment about what constitutes abandonment in a given case; some of the salient issues include how easy it is to identify a good as previously owned, how easy it is to identify the owner of it, how much of a coherent separate existence it retains when you leave it, to what extent it could be recovered intact, how fungible the good is, how cheaply replaceable it is, what state it’s in when it’s left, etc. Since exhaled air immediately dissipates into an immeasurably larger atmosphere, from which the individual exhaled molecules become indistinguishable and in which they undergo transformative chemical reactions soon after they enter it, and since the molecules in air are fungible and almost costless to replace, and since the air exhaled is actually, unlike the inhaled air, biological waste that you’re trying to get rid of, air ends up holding up the extreme quick-abandonment end of the continuum. But being subject to instantaneous abandonment is not the same thing as being unownable; it just means that the conditions of ownership are of an especially flighty kind.

As for patents, I actually don’t know whether “owning a patent” is conceptually coherent or not; I think that advocates of patents have said things that are either conflicting or ambiguous about what constitutes owning a patent. If it just means “having the privileges conferred by patent laws or something sufficiently like them,” then that doesn’t answer the question of whether there’s actually any legitimate proprietary interest or not; you still have to determine whether the word “owning” is being used in a literal sense or a merely analogical sense. If it means owning an abstract object such as a scientific or technical discovery, or a multiply realizable set of structural properties, then I don’t know what that means any more than I know what owning the number 2 means. If it means owning a limited set of instances of that abstract object (such as the token of the fact in your own mind, or the tokens of it you wrote down in your notebook), I don’t dispute that you can own those, but that confers no right to determine how other people can or cannot use the token instances in their minds or in books that they own. If it means owning all the instances of the abstract object (including the contents of other people’s minds), then the claim amounts to slavery and is illegitimate as such.

I don’t actually think that the epistemological question here is as simple as foundationalism vs. coherentism. I do think that many philosophers are prone to make errors in a foundationalistic sort of direction, so moving them in a more coherentistic sort of direction may be dialectically useful. But I think the orthodox way of expressing both views ends up making a serious methodological error. There are points in moral deliberation where I think that the “mutual adjustment” going on is a matter of moral reality directly entering into deliberation, and cases where it’s appropriate to make foundationalist-looking appeals in light of that direct awareness (hence my interest in moral intuitionism).

As for the specific second-order intuitions that you’re discussing, I think that the view probably combines some genuine insights blown out of proportion, with some outright errors. As an example of the former, I think it’s true that there is a certain amount of reasonable variability in some of the rules between different species of property and that there may be elements of convention involved which can reasonably differ from case to case or community to community, but that many people make the error of drawing the conclusion that everything to do with property is purely conventional and can reasonably be infinitely varied. (The propensity is related to the sort of errors of inappropriate generalization and rigorization that Wittgenstein exposed in his later work.) As an example of the latter, I think that that sort of view is often reinforced by things such as the utilitarian willingness to subordinate all other forms of virtue to instrumental considerations about general benevolence, which I think is simply a serious mistake about the nature of virtue.

Alex,

Properly speaking, I don’t think it is a matter of “distributing material goods” at all. (It is not as if there were some central depot whence everything is passed out. If there were, we would be in an even worse state than we are now in.) The issue has to do with production and transfer; and the question is properly addressed by looking at individual people putting their labor into making stuff, and asking yourself whether they should be able to keep what they make, under what conditions they should be able to transfer it and to whom, etc. Starting from some set of prior top-level conclusions about the sort of “distribution” you want and then using that to derive the conditions you’ll impose on individual people’s livelihoods seems to me to be the root of a great deal of evil.

You’re correct that I believe that some things can be owned and others can’t, but I’m not sure you’ve chosen the right cases to lean on. I think that air can be owned, under the right circumstances; you own the air in your own lungs, and if you were to capture some air in a bottle (say for use underwater, or in space travel) you’d rightfully own that, too. I’d argue that the “abstract objects” you mention — shapes, numbers, ideas (in the sense in which two people can have the same idea), etc. — cannot be owned because the notion of “owning” an abstract entity doesn’t rise to the level of conceptual coherence. If you have some idea of what it would mean to own the number 2, say, feel free to let me know what that would be; but until I have some explanation in hand of what I’m supposed to argue against I can hardly be expected to give an argument against it.

A better case for you to ask about might be one where something is at least in the same ontological category as the things I think can be owned. Importantly, I deny that you can own people under any circumstances, even though people are concrete particulars like tables, coins, plots of land, etc. But I certainly don’t regard the distinction as arbitrary — anybody who suggests you can own people is wrong, and gravely so — and I don’t think that the reasons for making it are instrumental reasons, either. (In fact I’d argue that any moral theory which could countenance enslaving another rational creature is therefore wrong; slavery is more surely evil than any moral theory is surely correct.) The reasons that I would offer have nothing to do with the effects of slavery (bad though those may be); rather, they have to do with the intrinsic demands of justice. The point being that justice is something valuable for its own sake, not merely for its consequences. But I don’t think that understanding the injustice of slavery is a matter of listing a number of premises that have nothing to do with slavery, and then deriving the injustice of slavery from those premises. As an Aristotelian, I think it’s more a matter of having a number of interlocking ideas that mutually reinforce each other and mutually adjust one another in the course of deliberation. Some (a person’s right to control her own labor and to enjoy the fruits of it; the wickedness of tyranny) may be more obvious than others in a given dialectical context; so you start with the ones that are familiar to your audience and work your way out to those that are less familiar.

As far as “permission” goes, I don’t think your clarification of the point undermines what I argued. If there is a mob out to burn down your house for posting to your blog and I turn them aside — with or without your asking me to do so — I hardly think that amounts to my “permitting” you to post to your blog in any substantial sense. (At best, I permit or do not permit you to post in the sense that weather permits or does not permit a football match.) Again, “permission,” in the primary sense of the word, is only something that it makes sense to give where you the rightful authority to forbid as well as permit; otherwise it is mere imposture. This point has little to do with a distinction between acting and omitting action (although I do think such distinctions are morally relevant); it has a lot more to do with a distinction between offensive and defensive uses of force.

I also don’t think that all instances of resolutely fighting back against aggressors despite overwhelming odds are acts of courage. Sometimes, perhaps even often, doing that is rash, not courageous. In fact I don’t think there is any way of non-trivially spelling out which acts exhibit the virtue of courage and which acts do not without either smuggling in terms that already connect with virtue by definition, or else by engaging in a process of deliberative adjustment like what I mentioned before in connection with justice.

Lauren,

Oh, don’t worry. They do that, too. Straw hats, prison stripes, and casual lynching jokes have all been popular with the burnt cork party crowd.

sncreducer:

So while the message Tyra’s putting out there may be good, the messenger herself lacks credibility.

Therefore you should, what, shoot the messenger? I’d prefer to focus on the message.

As easy as it may be to go around dismissing a statement by a female model as shallow, superficial, narcissistic, self-indulgent, or whatever you please, I think that the vices of the nasty little gossip-rag men who are picking apart Tyra Banks and any other female celebrity they can sink their claws into are doing a lot more damage than whatever vices Tyra Banks might herself have. Why have Tyra Banks’s personal virtues or vices become the main topic of discussion, rather than the sort of overtly sexist malice that she’s rightfully trashing?

What if one thinks (1) that property rights are neither arbitrary nor contingent on extrinsic standards such as aggregate utility, but also (2) that “our [actually existing] property system” is in many ways systematically wrong and unjust? Surely if my position allows for people to be mistaken about the norms to have regarding property, it also allows for me to think that a lot of people actually are.

I don’t think we live in a world where the correct theory of property rights is very widely accepted, or where property rights are in practice taken very seriously—least of all the property rights of the poor and marginalized. I’d submit that if we did, there wouldn’t be an IRS for me to complain about. Sometimes property rights are trashed in the name of “compelling State interests” such as government regimentation of the economy, taxation, government law enforcement, militarism, and anti-terrorism. Other times they are trashed in the name of political privileges masquerading as property rights, and passed off as “the market at work” by the plutocrats and their intellectual bodyguard (e.g. copyrights and patents, government granting and enforcement of unearned land titles, most so-called “privatization” schemes, etc.).

And the idea that the government permits the super-rich to visit space by not taxing them 100% of their wealth is, on my view, on a par with the idea that I am giving you permission to post on your blog by not tracking you down and bashing your head in order to make you stop. The term “permit” is an obfuscation when it is not within the “permitter’s” rightful authority to forbid what she is “permitting.”)

On quite another subject, I take it that “courage is a virtue” is actually true by definition; one of the virtues is what “courage,” in the English language at least, names. The interesting question is what can properly be said to constitute courage.

Richard,

Fair enough.

I’d forgotten your specific position on the nature of moral patient welfare, so I spoke much too loosely. (I didn’t mean to suggest that the issue was paternalism, exactly, in any case.)

In that case we’ll have to precisify my loose talk further than I had precisified it above. The substantive disagreement about what constitutes respecting an individual person then has to do with the sorts of “wishes” (or more precisely, the sorts of considered choices) that you’ve absolutely got to respect, not just the sorts of “interests.”

(And one of the desiderata for libertarian individual rights theories is that the kind of choices in question be specified in such a way that they don’t conflict, thus eliminating the question of whom to sacrifice. How far any given theorist succeeds at that task is, of course, a separate question.)

I actually use my blogging software to generate a separate “blog” consisting of my comments on other sites. The main upshot for me is that I can easily pull down a list of the places I’ve commented recently in order to check back in, but I’ve had a few people tell me that they like following it as a sort-of-blog of its own.

I don’t really know what my actual commenting style is. The commenting style I’d like to have would be short remarks that either help to clarify something conceptually, or else point to some relevant piece of information not mentioned. But I don’t feel like I’m very good at doing that right now, and I tend to post long responses that would often be better suited to a post on my own blog. That, or long responses that I spend an hour on and then abandon halfway through without posting, because I realize that I don’t really know where I want to go with all that.