Comments Elsewhere

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.