Distributive Justice, Property Rights and the Commons 

PH1104 / J.Good / Spring 2019 UCONN

Theories of distributive justice seek to specify what is meant by a just distribution of goods among members of society.  

A. Nozick’s Entitlement Theory of Distributive Justice

1. If the world were wholly just, the following inductive definition would exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings:

1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.

2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding. (Nozick)

2. These principles supply the basis for denying the moral permissibility of theft, fraud, enslavement, or government interference unless to rectify violations of those first two principles. Egalitarian Redistribution of Income/wealth is unjust if it violates the principles of just acquisition and transfer

B. The Wilt Chamberlin Example: “…no end-state principle of distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives.”  

4. “Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Some persons find this claim obviously true: taking the earnings of n hours labor is like taking n hours from the person; it is like forcing the person to work n hours for another’s purpose. Others find the claim absurd. But even these, if they object to forced labor, would oppose forcing unemployed hippies to work for the benefit of the needy. And they would also object to forcing each person to work five extra hours each week for the benefit of the needy. But a system that takes five hours' wages in taxes does not seem to them like one that forces someone to work five hours, since it offers the person forced a wider range of choice in activities than does taxation in kind with the particular labor specified. (Nozick)

5. “The man who chooses to work longer to gain an income more than sufficient for his basic needs prefers some extra goods or services to the leisure and activities he could perform during the possible nonworking hours; whereas the man who chooses not to work the extra time prefers the leisure activities to the extra goods or services he could acquire by working more. Given this, if it would be illegitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man's leisure (forced labor) for the purpose of serving the needy, how can it be legitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man's goods for that purpose? Why should we treat the man whose happiness requires certain material goods or services differently from the man whose preferences and desires make such goods unnecessary for his happiness? (Nozick)

C. What is Just Acquisition?

6 .“If past injustice has shaped present holdings in various ways, some identifiable and some not, what now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices? What obligations do the performers of injustice have toward those whose position is worse than it would have been had the injustice not been done? Or, than it would have been had compensation been paid promptly?”

7. Self-ownership allows a person the freedom to mix his or her labor with natural resources, thus converting common property into private property. Locke concludes that people need to be able to protect the resources they are using to live on, their property, and that this is a natural right, provided others are not worse off.

8. Locke’s Theory of Acquisition: “A process normally giving rise to a permanent bequeathable property right in a previously unowned thing will not do so if the position of others no longer at liberty to use the thing is thereby worsened.” 

For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, paragraph 33

9. Examples: 

• Appropriating the only watering hole in a dessert - NOT OK
• a pharmaceutical company which owns the total supply of a life-saving drug - OK

-   a water company which buys up the water supply to sell at profit - OK

• the owner of a private island ordering a castaway off the island - NOT OK
• when .01% own all land and productive assets while the rest have to work for whatever the rich are willing to pay? Is the impoverished wage worker better off than the medieval shepherd? OK or NOT OK?

D. Peter Barnes on the Commons

By the law of nature these things are common to mankind — the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shore of the sea. — Institutes of Justinian (535 A.D.)

10. The Commons: The sum of all we inherit together and should pass on, undiminished, to our heirs. The Romans distinguished between three types of property: res privatae, res publicae and res communes. The first consisted of things capable of being possessed by an individual or family. The second consisted of things built and set aside for public use by the state, such as public buildings and roads. The third consisted of natural things used by all, such as air, water and wild animals. 

11. KEY FUNCTIONS OF THE COMMONS

Basic sustenance - supplies everyone’s food, water, fuel and medicines.

Ultimate source -  of all natural resources and nature’s many replenishing services.

Ultimate waste sink - recycles water, oxygen, carbon and everything else we excrete, exhale and throw away.

Knowledge bank and seedbed - holds humanity’s vast store of science, art, customs and laws, seedbed of all creativity.

Communication - through shared languages that are living products of many generations.

Travel - the commons for land, sea and air travel.

Community - the village tree, the public square, Main Street, the neighborhood and the Internet.   

E. The Market and the Commons

12. The economy is divided between the market and the commons. The market encompasses private things (which we mostly manage for short-term monetary gain), while the commons comprises shared things (which we manage, or should manage, for shared long-term life enhancement). Two basic problems with the market: unsustainability and wealth inequality.

13. Privatization (or Piratization) of the Commons by corporations for the past 300 years. Internalizing profits, externalizing costs The Corporation as a machine for internalizing profits and externalizing costs 

“If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.” - Former Republican Governor of Alaska Walter Hickel

14. With one hand, corporations take valuable stuff from the commons and privatize it. With the other hand, they dump bad stuff into the commons and pay nothing. The result is profits for corporations but a steady loss for everyone else, to whom the commons belong.

15. Example of corporate piracy of the commons: The government give-away of the ownership rights to the electromagnetic spectrum: In 1995, for example, Congress decided it was time for Americans to shift from analog to digital television. This required a new set of broadcast frequencies, and Congress obligingly gave them—free of charge—to the same media companies to which it had previously given analog frequencies free of charge, despite the fact that the airwaves belong to all of us. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole opposed the giveaway. “It makes no sense,” he said, “that Congress would create a giant corporate welfare program. . . . The bottom line is that the [broadcasting] spectrum is just as much a national resource as our national forests. That means it belongs to every American equally.”  

F. Principles of Commons Management

We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949

16. Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons argued that that all commons are self-destructive, but there are many examples of successful commons management: public libraries, blood bands, the internet, sidewalks, parks, wildlife populations managed by hunting and fishing licenses, state and community land trusts, community gardens, public funds like the Texas Permanent School Fund and Alaska Permanent Fund, open source software.  

17. ”...A Community Land Trust is a not-for-profit organization with membership open to any resident of the geographical region or bioregion where it is located. The purpose of a CLT is to create a democratic institution to hold land and to retain the use-value of the land for the benefit of the community. The effect of a CLT is to provide affordable access to land for housing, farming, small businesses, and civic projects. This effect can be achieved when a significant portion of the land in an area is held by a CLT. - Bob Swann, “Land: Challenge and Opportunity”

18. The Sky Trust model: based on the premise that the sky belongs to everyone and must be held in trust for future generations. It requires polluters to purchase emission permits from a trust representing all citizens. The trust’s income can be used for public purposes and/or rebated to citizens through equal dividends.

G. Going Forward with a Commons-based economy  

19. Strengthen common property rights (for airspeeds, watersheds, other ecosystems), overhaul management, make polluters and broadcasters pay.

20. Solving Inequality: paying dividends to owners

21. The Idea for a Social Dividend: Thomas Paine’s Proposal for a “social dividend” 

(Compensation for an individual's loss of her portion of the Commons) Beyond social security, this idea is being explored currently with the concept of Universal Basic Income, related to a negative income tax.

22. A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, citizen's income, unconditional basic income, universal basic income (UBI), basic living stipend (BLS) or universal demogrant) is typically described as a new kind of welfare regime in which all citizens (or permanent residents) of a country receive a regular, liveable and unconditional sum of money, from the government. From that follows, among other things, that there is no state requirement to work or to look for work in such a society. The payment is also, in such a pure basic income, totally independent of any other income. An unconditional income that is sufficient to meet a person's basic needs (at or above the poverty line), is called full basic income, while if it is less than that amount, it is called partial. Basic income can be implemented nationally, regionally or locally. 

23. A view of the Commons supports Marx’s socialist principle of distributive justice: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” Minimal needs: education, healthcare, housing?