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Waldron on Private Property*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Jan Narveson
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo

Extract

Do individuals have a right to private property? That is the question pursued in this lengthy investigation (445 pages). Waldron distinguishes utilitarian arguments from “Right-based” ones. That is hardly an exhaustive distinction, one would think; reliance on its being so would not bode well. But having made such a distinction, he believes that the question comes to whether there are “any good right-based arguments for private property.” This, he thinks, amounts to the question: are any important individual interests served “by the existence of private property as opposed to someother sort of property regime?” The alternative, he thinks, is to turn to utilitarian arguments about property institutions, “rather than having it treated as the basis of right” (p. 5). How we are to measure “importance,” and to whom the proposed regimes are to be important is not discussed. And of course some think that we can, too, have a utilitarian-based theory of rights. And there will be other complaints about Waldron's framework; but we will not be able to go further into such matters here.

Type
Citical Notice/Étude critique
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1990

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References

Notes

1 Lomasky, Loren, Rights, Persons, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). See, notably, p. 125129.Google Scholar

2 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 178.Google Scholar His extremely apt questioning of this has yet to be given a decent answer by any critic of private property I am aware of.

3 We are referred in various places (e.g., footnotes on pages 294 and 320) to a future work entitled Property and Liberty. Tracking this down via a phone call to Professor Waldron, I can report that the book is now to be called Poverty and Freedom and to be published by Routledge, expected ca. the end of 1990.

4 Part of the needed story, I think, is told in my The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).Google Scholar But not all.