Are liberatarian thinkers just rationalizing? Love on natural rights

 S.M. Love makes an interesting observation about the natural rights view, if original acquisition genuinely grounds property rights, then "slavery, serfdom, forced displacement, conquest, and unjust appropriation are the historical foundations of the property rights that exist today". This means nearly all current property titles are illegitimate. As she quotes Singer, "title to land in the United States rests on the forced taking of land from first possessors—the very opposite of respect for first possession." (13)

The internal logic therefore demands massive state rectification, not minimal government. Even Nozick conceded this, acknowledging his view would require a principle of rectification that might necessitate a more extensive state. Yet proponents of natural property rights rarely follow this through. Love is direct about what this suggests: such views risk "serving as ideology that supports existing class structures by reinforcing the status quo distribution of property rights." (13) She does not even apply this just to Nozick as she notes that "Locke's theory of property actively served to justify colonizers' property rights in land and to deny slaves rights to the land they labored on." (13 Footnote 28)

This raises the question that when a philosophical framework consistently is used to or inherently vindicates existing distributions of wealth despite its own logic demanding otherwise, at what point does it just become rationalization of the status quo? Is this a failure of individual thinkers like Nozick or Locke? something more structurally embedded in how these traditions get deployed? This could also be revealing a greater problem with how moral frameworks are actually used. Love briefly invokes Marx here to answer this, for Marx, ideology does this exact thing by emphasizing a set of ideas that presents contingent, historically produced arrangements of power as natural and inevitable, and importantly obscuring the interests they serve. (13 Footnote 27) The natural right view seems to perform a social function rather than exhibit an attempt at genuine philosophical development.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're all separate but equal

During my tutorial with Dylan yesterday, he brought up the SCOTUS case Brown vs. Board of Education in our discussion of a minimal state. Whilst reading Marx, I realized that both the legal implication (state according rights to individuals) and the societal implication (abolishment of the 'separate but equal' doctrine) of the case are relevant to the claims Marx is making.  Marx delineates between two societies -- political and civil -- and further between the two lives one leads in each -- public and private. In a political society, man is entitled to the liberties given to him by the state, and considers himself a member of a functional community. Marx hints at the mirage of political society, writing that man is “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). In such a society, he leads a public life, one in which the state can establish political equality by abolishing “the distinctio...
Read more

What Brettschneider Ought to Admit: Democracy Is Substantive

Although Corey Brettschneider presents his value theory of democracy as a third way between pure proceduralism and outcome-based accounts, his framework collapses into substantivism. Despite insisting that democracy cannot be reduced to “procedure-independent evaluations of outcomes,”(2) he explicitly grounds democratic legitimacy in substantive rights that “limit those policy outcomes that would fail to respect citizens as rulers.” (20). Legitimacy therefore hinges not merely on fair participation but on conformity to three independently specified values—equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity. These values operate as external normative standards against which democratic decisions are judged. Brettschneider treats policies such as ex post facto laws or vote buying as democratically illegitimate regardless of procedural authorization, making clear that outcomes remain subject to direct moral assessment. This is not procedural democracy supplemented by rights; it is ...
Read more

'Enough and as Good' for Whom?

 Both Hobbes and Locke describe a state of nature grounded in equality and natural law. Yet, they reach sharply different conclusions about property. Hobbes denies any possibility of owning property in the state of nature. Locke, by contrast, argues that individuals may aquire private property prior to any government by mixing their labor with common resources. By allowing pre-political appropriation, Locke commits himself to moral constraints on ownership.  Locke introduces these limits through two provisos. The Spoiling proviso requires that an individual only claim ownership over land/natural resources to what one can use before it spoils, critizicing waste as a violation of natural law: "Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy" (21). To me, this limit is relatively clear and intuitive.  More demanding, however, is Locke's second proviso, claiming that appropriation is only legitimate if "enough, and as good" is left in common for others. At first...
Read more