Relation to others· Power and justice
Libertarianism
Axis: Distributive justice — How should wealth and resources be distributed in society?
Each person owns themselves and the fruits of their labor. A distribution is just whenever it results from free exchanges and legitimate acquisitions: coercive redistribution amounts to violating individual rights.
Philosophers 3
Lockeexplicit
If the earth is given in common to all, how can a thing become mine without each person's consent? Locke's answer starts from a title prior to any compact: every man owns his own person, and therefore the labour of his body. By mixing that labour with something held in common, I join to it something already mine and rightfully withdraw it, owing no one's agreement. Property is thus a natural right grounded in labour, prior to the state, which places Locke toward the end of the axis. Yet the famous Lockean proviso, that "enough, and as good" be left for others, inscribes from the outset a moral limit on appropriation.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 5 ("Of Property", labour and the Lockean proviso)
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Aristotleinferable
Distributive justice follows a proportional (geometric) equality: goods and honours are apportioned according to each person's merit, not in equal shares. Refusing arithmetical equality in favour of proportion to merit inclines moderately toward the meritocratic pole, without absolutizing property.
Nicomachean Ethics, V.3 (1131a); Politics, III.9
Thomas Aquinasinferable
Thomas takes up Aristotelian distributive justice, proportioned to merit and rank, but tempers it with the universal destination of goods: private property is legitimate for use and administration, not absolute, and in case of extreme necessity the poor person who takes what he needs to survive does not steal, since then all things are common. This limitation of the right of property in favour of the needy qualifies the meritocratic leaning toward a requirement of sufficiency.
Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 61 (distributive justice); q. 66, a. 7 (theft in necessity)
Characters 1
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Calliclesinferable
He contests equal shares as an extortion by the weak: just distribution, according to nature, gives more to the superior, not an identical portion to all. His rejection of egalitarianism rests not on self-ownership or the desert of labor but on natural superiority; it is by this refusal of equal sharing that he meets, from afar, the anti-redistributive side.
Plato, Gorgias, 483c; 490a-491a
Argument
- Each person owns themselves, their body, their time, their powers; no one else holds a prior right over them, else slavery would be legitimate. It is a that no society confers and none may withdraw.
- Now what I produce with what is mine, and what others freely transfer to me in exchange, extends that ownership: the fruit of labor and free exchange belongs to me on the same footing.
- A distribution is then just according to how it came about, through legitimate acquisitions and transfers, not according to the shape it forms at a given instant: there is no 'right snapshot' of wealth to be enforced.
- Hence, forcibly taking part of my earnings to redraw that snapshot is to dispose of my labor without my consent, thus to treat me as if I belonged in part to others.
Therefore So an imposed redistribution is not a fair sharing but a violation of rights: justice bears on the legitimacy of acquisitions, not on equality of outcome.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the reasoning
- The argument moves from 'I own myself' to 'I own the fruits of my labor', as if the second followed from the first.
- But producing always presupposes a matter I did not create, the land, the resources, and a whole world of institutions, language, and inherited knowledge, without which my labor would be worth nothing.
- To appropriate these common resources without limit is to deprive those who had as good a claim to them as I did: my ownership of myself does not by itself extend to what belonged to no one.
Therefore So full ownership of what one acquires does not follow from ownership of oneself: part of all wealth traces to a common world, over which the collective retains a legitimate title.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position Thought experiment
- Let us ask which rules of society each person would choose without knowing the place they will occupy in it, rich or poor, gifted or infirm.
- In that position, no one would gamble on rules that let a person sink into destitution on the sole ground that their exchanges were 'free': one would first protect against the worst.
- Now justice is what free and equal persons would accept from such an impartial standpoint, not what favors those whom birth has already favored.
Therefore So the mere legitimacy of transfers does not make a just society: a distribution none of us would accept without knowing our place cannot be called fair.
See the page- PrescriptiveMoralDesert or natural lottery?
Do we deserve the fruits of talents and efforts of which we are not the ultimate authors? If our gifts come down to a natural lottery, is meritocracy just?
desert - PrescriptivePolitical & legalTo each according to what?
Should we distribute according to need, according to merit, or equally among all? Three criteria of the just share that sketch three different societies.
each one's share - PrescriptivePolitical & legal Thought experimentA just outcome, or just exchanges?
Is a distribution just by the outcome it produces, a certain sharing of wealth, or by the way each person legitimately came to hold what they have, through labor and free exchange?
a distribution - PrescriptiveMoralOwning oneself
If I own myself and the fruits of my labor, is taxing my earnings a kind of forced labor, or does property already presuppose a social order that makes it possible?
oneself and one's labor - PrescriptivePolitical & legalEquality against liberty?
Does every redistribution restrict the liberty of those it taxes, or does real liberty already presuppose a certain equality of means?
the political order