March 5th, 2015 Locke’s Theory of Acquisition Robert Nozick - Locke views property rights in an unowned object as originating through someone’s mixing his labor with it. - Questions of boundaries o What if the person mixes labor with the land  Does he own the plot, everything under it, the whole Earth? - Someone can be made worse off by another’s appropriation in 2 ways: o Losing the opportunity to improve his situation by a particular appropriation or any one o By no longer being able to use freely (without appropriation) what he previously could - 2 degrees of requirement of Lockean Proviso o Stringent  If you can’t both appropriate and use, Lockean Proviso is no good o Weaker  If you can use but not appropriate, it’s okay - Most theories of property rights will be adequate if at least the weaker requirement of Lockean Proviso is satisfied - Anyone who appropriates and worsens another’s condition by doing so but compensates will not violate the proviso - Once one’s ownership runs afoul to Lockean Proviso, there are limits as to what he can do with (his/the) property if others need it o Ex) If there’s 1 guy with the only source of water, the water becomes everyone’s - A guy that makes a cure for a disease but refuses to give it away is not violating Lockean Proviso because he is not making anyone worse off, nor is he taking away too many chemicals (required to make the cure) such that no one else has access to chemicals - Independent inventors have a burden of proving that their invention couldn’t have cometo exist without themProperty, Title, and Redistribution A.M. Honoré- When someone gets more than is morally justifiable, then it’s unjust for them to get thatmuch and the state will need to do justice. - It is ridiculous to suppose that the justification for acquiring or transmitting property could be settled once and for all at the date of acquisition of transfer o Rules about what constitutes just acquisition may very well change - Private property may be inherently distributive and fruits of an invention should be shared among the group - Rawls and Nozick both say that someone is not worse off if another is made better off bytheir own invention but the someone is not o Honoré disagrees and says the someone is made worse off because he suffers the wrong of being treated as an unequal by the more fortunate members of his group - Ownership (as many Native Americans also believed) is more of a title that trusts that the owners will share his property with others - Today we have weaker social cohesion, so an authority (the state) is needed to make sure distribution takes place. - All therefore turns on what count as just principles of acquisition and transfer of title. o According to Nozick:  A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.  A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principles of justice in transfer from someone else entitled to the holding is entitled to the holding.  No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2. - The complete principle of distributive justice would say simply that distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution. - What Nozick additionally presupposes, without seeking to justify, is that the interest acquired and transmitted is the ownership of property as conceived in western society on the model of Roman law. o First, that the acquirer obtains an exclusive right to the thing acquired, that he is entitled, having cleared the land, made the tool etc. to deny access and use to everyone else. o Secondly he is supposing that the right acquired is of indefinite duration. - There is no doubt that the Nozick rules about just acquisition, transfer and distribution reproduce in outline western systems of property law based on the liberal conception of ownership. o According to these notions, ownership is a permanent, exclusive and transmissible interest in property.Historical Rights and Fair Shares A. John Simmons - Two broadly liberal approaches to dealing with the claims and problems of groups like the Native American peoples. o Native Americans may require some special rights, based on the special vulnerability of their cultural context.  Their tribes’ historical standings as the original occupants of the Americasare irrelevant to their current moral claims. o The alternative liberal approach to this end-state view is to take seriously the historical claims of Native Americans to land and resources as the basis of persistent rights to rectification, beyond anything to which they are entitled simply as equal citizens (or persons) - These arguments enable us to defend a conception of Native American rights to rectification that preserves at least some of the particularity of the claims actually advanced in lawsuits and published arguments by (or on behalf of) Native American tribes. o Native American historical rights are to particularized shares  The relevant entitlements were seldom made precise by any freely chosen (or otherwise responsibly accomplished) just downsizing of holdings.  But their rights are to (currently) fair portions of the actual lands they lived, hunted, and worked on, not to generic fair shares of American land.- Two largest obstacles to understanding or accepting historical rightso The changes in cast that accompany long passages of time and the dramatically different conceptions of property in fact favored by most Native American tribes  Taking changes of cast first, there are obviously two central, relevant possibilities of this sort: - Those involving the death of the victim of wrongdoing and those involving the death of the wrongdoer  There is no doubt that most Native American tribes understood the nature of their property in land and resources quite differently than, say, Locke and Nozick understand property rights. - Tribes regarded themselves as inseparably connected to certain territories, so that their identities depended on continued and in some cases exclusive use of the land.  From a Lockean historical perspective, this Native American conception ofproperty rights will probably be viewed as in certain ways simply mistaken. - Persons have rights of fair access to land and natural resources, and even a nation is not entitled to insist on control over a territory of flexible size.- We must