G.A. Cohen: Freedom and Money
FREEDOM AND MONEY In grateful memory of Isaiah Berlin G.A. Cohen http://www.utdt.edu/Upload/_115634753114776100.pdf. (I recommend anyone with pdf software to view the pdf file rather than the version below, which is not so clear and easy to read.) Page 1 I have never dedicated an article to a person before. I have considered it to be apretentious thing to do. Whole books are big things: they are manifestly big enough towarrant the device of a dedication. But to dedicate a mere article seems to imply animmodest belief on the author’s part that the intellectual value of his little piece is prettyspecial.For all that, I have dedicated this article to the memory of my sadly late3butimperishably present teacher and friend, Isaiah Berlin. I have been impelled to thisdeparture from normal practice not because I think that what you are reading is trulywonderful, but by my feelings of loss, and of consequent desolation. This article’s theme,freedom, was at the heart of Isaiah’s contribution to our understanding of humanity and of∗All Souls College, Oxford University.1For comments on earlier drafts, I thank Talia Bettcher, Allen Buchanan, Myles Burnyeat, IanCarter, Paula Casal, Bill Child, Ronald Dworkin, Eyjolfur Emilsson, David Estlund, Cécile Fabre,Harry Frankfurt, John Gardner, Olav Gjelsvik, Alvin Goldman, Keith Graham, Henry Hardy,Natalie Jacottet, Mark Johnston, Jeroen Knijff, Matthew Kramer, David Lewis, EmilianoMarambio Catán, Stephen Menn, David Miller, Thomas Nagel, Bertell Ollman, Michael Otsuka,Derek Parfit, Eduardo Rivera López, Peter Rosner, Michael Rustin, Horacio Spector, ArviSreenivasan, Hillel Steiner, Adam Swift, Larry Temkin, Peter Vallentyne, Frank Vandenbroucke,and Jo Wolff, and especially Arnold Zuboff, who rescued me at a number of critical points.A precursor of this article was delivered as the first Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture in May1998 in Haifa. I benefited from searching criticisms by the audience on that occasion.A Spanish translation of an earlier version of this article appeared, under the title "Libertad ydinero", inEstudios Publicos(Santiago, Chile), No. 80, Primavera, 2000.2Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, p. 119 (in his Four Essays on Liberty, OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford, 1969: all Berlin quotations below are from that volume).3Isaiah Berlin died on November 5, 1997. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 2 2the social world, and, in the wake of his recent death, the dedication of the article to himseemed to me so entirely fitting as to be unavoidable.Although I was devoted to Isaiah, and although he was bountifully kind to me, wewere not of one mind on political questions, and we were also not of one mind on thoseacademic questions that mattered, to each of us, because of the political questions on whichthey bear. I have elsewhere set out our disagreements, as I understand them, about thethought, and the personality, of Karl Marx.4Here, I explain a disagreement that we hadabout freedom, and, more particularly, about the relationship between freedom and money.My principal contention, one that contradicts very influential things that Isaiahwrote, is that lack of money, poverty, carries with it lack of freedom. I regard that as anoverwhelmingly obvious truth,5one that is worth defending only because it has been soinfluentially denied. Lack of money, poverty, is not, of course, the only circumstance thatrestricts a person’s freedom, but it is, in my view, one of them, and one of the mostimportant of them. To put the point more precisely – there are lots of things that, becausethey are poor, poor people are not free to do, things that non-poor people are, by contrast,indeed free to do.Now, you might think that few poor people need to be persuaded of thatproposition, that their daily life experience offers ample enough evidence for it; and my owncasual observation suggests that it is a truth which is indeed pretty obvious to them. But,however that may be, many non-poor intellectuals have strenuously denied that lack ofmoney means lack of freedom, perhaps because it is a comfort for well-off people to thinkthat poor people, whatever their other sufferings may be, are not deprived of freedom: thatfalse thought might reduce the guilt that some well-off people feel when they face folk whoare much less fortunate than they are themselves. Or maybe the relevant intellectuals, beingsubtler than the relevant poor people, notice something that the poor people don’t. A poor4See “Isaiah’s Marx and Mine”, in Avishai Margalit and Edna Ullmann-Margaliat (eds.), IsaiahBerlin: A Celebration, The Hogarth Press, London, 1991.5Utterly obvious truths can subvert grand claims, and I think this one does so. Wittgensteinsaid that (good) philosophy “consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1958, para 127, p. 50e. Reminders affirm whatwe already know, not new insights. That is how I understand my effort here, the particularpurpose being to deny the non-obvious, and, in my view, false claim that the poor lack notfreedom but only the ability to use it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 3 3person might say that she feels no longer free to visit her sister in a distant town, when thespecial bus service has been withdrawn. Maybe the intellectual can show that that is just afeeling: that she may feel less free than she was before, but that actually she isn’t. But Idisagree with the relevant intellectuals: I believe that the feeling that the poor womanexpresses represents a correct judgment.The issue that I raise here asserts itself within the frame of a standard politicaldebate, which runs as follows. Right-wing people celebrate the freedom enjoyed by all inliberal capitalist society. Left-wing people respond that the freedom which the rightcelebrate is merely formal, that, while the poor are formally free to do all kinds of things thatthe state does not forbid anyone to do, their parlous situation means that they are not reallyfree to do very many of them, since they cannot afford to do them, and they are, therefore,in the end, prevented from doing them. But the right now rejoin that, in saying all that, theleft confuse freedom with resources. You are free to do anything that no one will interferewith, say the right. If you cannot afford to do something, that does not mean that you lackthe freedom to do it, but just that you lack the means, and, therefore, the ability to do it.The problem the poor face is not that they lack freedom, but that they are not always ableto exercise the freedom that they undoubtedly have. When the left say that the poor, byvirtue of being poor, lack freedom itself, the left, so the right claim, indulge in a tendentioususe of language.Let me set out the full right-wing position on this matter in the form of an argument,with separately indicated steps. In effect, the right-wing reasoning contains two movements,the first being conceptual, and the second normative. For my part, I reject bothmovements. Berlin, by contrast, accepted the first movement: indeed, he did more thananyone else ever has to persuade philosophers, and others, of the soundness of the firstmovement, even though his compassion for suffering people led him to reject, withoutreservation, the second movement.The first movement of the right-wing argument runs as follows:(1) Freedom is compromised by (liability to) interference6(by other people7),but not by lack of means.6See footnote 9 below. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 4 4(2) To lack money is to suffer not (liability to) interference, but lack of means.So (3) Poverty (lack of money) does not carry with it lack of freedom.The conclusion of the first movement of the argument, proposition (3), is aconceptual claim, a claim about how certain concepts are connected with one another. But,in the right’s hands, that conceptual conclusion is used to support a normative claim, a claimabout what ought to be done, which is reached as follows, in the second movement of theargument:(3) Poverty (lack of money) does not carry withit lack of freedom.(4) The primary task of government is to protect freedom.So (5) Relief of poverty is not part of the primary task of government.The conclusion of this argument follows from its three premisses, to wit, (1), (2)and (4). There are, accordingly, only three ways of resisting the argument. A familiar formof left-wing resistance to it challenges proposition (1), by asking how a person canreasonably be said to be free to do what she is unable to do? Another left-wing way ofresisting the argument, also employed, as we have seen, by Berlin and Rawls, is to deny (4),by saying: even if lack of money is just lack of means, lack of means is just as confining aslack of freedom, and, therefore, just as important a thing for the state to rectify. I shall notresist the argument in either of those ways in the body of this paper, which is not to say thatI disagree with those who resist either premiss (1) or premiss (4). I am not disagreeing withthem, or agreeing with them, in the present paper, but simply shelving challenges to (1) and7“Interference” will always mean, here, “interference by other people”. Thus, for example, herlimp will not here constitute an interference with a person’s attempt to negotiate difficultterrain (whether or not it compromises her freedom to negotiate that terrain, which matter isdiscussed in the Addendum to this paper advertised at footnote 10 below).A further significant stipulation. Interference is often understood to be merely one form ofprevention: something interferes when it prevents a person from continuing on a course ofaction on which she has embarked, or, at any rate, when it prevents a person from continuingon a course of action without hindrance. Interference, thus understood, does not occur whereprevention (of another form) does, when, that is, a person is prevented from embarking on acourse of action. But I shall here also call that form of prevention “interference”, since suchprevention by other people is also considered freedom-reducing by the right. (For theimportance of the distinction between interference in particular and prevention in general withrespect to theories of appropriation of private property, see pp. 62ff. of my “Once More intothe Breach of Self-Ownership: Reply to Narveson and Brenkert”, The Journal of Ethics,Volume 2, No. 1, 1998.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 5 5(4) here.8Instead, I shall reject premiss (2), a premiss which, so far as I know, has notbeen resisted in the relevant literature. I believe that the non-standard resistance to theargument that I deploy here is more powerful, because it meets the right on their ownconceptual ground.The rest of this article has seven sections. In section 1, I show that the conceptualpart of the right-wing argument has penetrated academic thought which cannot be describedas right-wing. Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls, in particular, and their many followers, haveadvocated the conceptual part of the right-wing argument, which culminates in (3), eventhough, because they do not accept (4), they have not endorsed the right’s normativeconclusion, (5).In section 2, I attempt a refutation of proposition (2). I argue that to lack moneyis indeed to be prey to interference. If that argument is sound, then proposition (3) is false,if, as the right insist, proposition (1) is true, since, if (1) is true, then the falsehood of (2)entails that (3) is false. I believe, moreover, that my argument, if sound, also establishes thatproposition (3) is false whether or not (1) is true, since I cannot imagine how anyone whodoes not think that (2) is true could think that (3) is true. That’s a complicated statement,but it boils down to this: I shall argue that the poor lack freedom, even in the right’s, andBerlin’s and Rawls’s, preferred sense of freedom, where freedom is identified with lack ofinterference,9and whether or not that identification of freedom is too restrictive.Section 3 applies the section 2 argument, to, and against, a number of Berlin’sformulations.In section 4, I seek to fortify, but also to nuance, my argument, by presentingsome analogies and disanalogies between the freedom conferred by money and (directly)state-regulated freedom.8(1) I deal with (1) in the Addendum advertised at footnote 10 below.9Or, strictly, with lack of interference and of liability to interference: my freedom to do A isrestricted if I would be interfered with if I were to try to do A, and not merely if I am actuallyinterfered with. I may be unfree although I suffer no actual interference, because, knowing thatI am likely to be interfered with, I refrain from trying to do A. “Lack of interference” willinclude lack of liability to interference throughout this paper. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 6 6In section 5, I discuss the bearing of certain Marxian theses about the differencebetween bourgeois and pre-bourgeois society on the widespread failure to perceive thatmoney confers freedom and that its lack restricts it.I close (section 6) with a few words about the importance of the semantic tanglethat I believe I am unravelling here. (An Appendix responds to the objection, as it isformulated by Jonathan Wolff, that what I say about freedomdoes not hold for liberty.)101. The most celebrated twentieth century Anglophone political philosophers are IsaiahBerlin and John Rawls. As I have said, both reject11the conclusion of the right-wingargument: Berlin was a social democrat, in the broad sense, and Rawls is a liberal, in theAmerican sense, and, within those political positions, relief of poverty is at the top of thepolitical agenda. Accordingly, Berlin and Rawls both deplore the right’s comparative un-concern about what they would call the ability to use freedom, which, in their view, is whatthe poor lack. But, in my opinion regrettably, they both fully accept the right-wing contrastbetween freedom and money. They agree with the right’s conceptual claim, even though(not at all inconsistently) they reject the right’s normative conclusion.In the following passage, Berlin shows at one and the same time agreement with theright’s conceptualization of freedom12and forthright rejection of the normative conclusionwhich the right build upon that conceptualization:10In an unpublished Addendum on “Freedom and Ability”, which is available from me ondemand, I discuss the relationships that obtain among freedom, means and ability. I show thatthe latter two have a much stronger bearing on freedom than is recognized by those againstwhose views this lecture is directed, and I thereby refute proposition (1): I show that freedomis compromised by lack of means.11It is somewhat zeugmatic to employ the present tense with respect to Rawls and Berlin jointly,since, in its second employment, it is merely (alas) historic. I hope that the reader will forgivethis infelicity, which reduces the number of sentences or clauses that I must enter to fixattributions like the one above.12To be sure, Berlin speaks of “liberty” rather than of “freedom”, but I do not believe that thismakes a substantial difference: as he later expressly said (see The First and the Last, GrantaBooks, London, 1999, p. 58), he used those words interchangeably, and he would certainlynever have said, as his (semi-) defender Jonathan Wolff does, that what holds for liberty doesnot hold for freedom: see, further, the Appendix below. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 7 7It is important to discriminate between liberty and the conditions of itsexercise. If a man is too poor or too ignorant or too feeble to make use ofhis legal rights, the liberty that these rights confer upon him is nothing to him,but it is not thereby annihilated. The obligation to promote education, health,justice, to raise standards of living, to provide opportunity for the growth ofthe arts and the sciences, to prevent reactionary political or social or legalpolicies or arbitrary inequalities, is not made less stringent because it is notnecessarily directed to the promotion of liberty itself, but to conditions inwhich alone its possession is of value, or to values which may beindependent of it.13That Berlin agreed with the conceptual side of the right-wing claim is also revealedin his phrasing of a certain commendation which he offered in 1949 of the FranklinRoosevelt presidency.14Berlin described Roosevelt’s New Deal as a “great liberalenterprise” which was “certainly the most constructive compromise between individualliberty and economic security which our own time has witnessed”.15The Berlincommendation of Roosevelt implies that individual liberty and economic security arecompeting desiderata, that, at least sometimes, more of the one means less of the other, andthat, in Roosevelt’s “constructive compromise”, there was some loss of one of them, or,13Four Essays, p. liii, emphases added.While I am confident that the quoted text agrees and disagrees with the right-wing viewprecisely as I have just claimed that it does, I do not say that Berlin’s discourse in this regionwas consistent, or free of problems. His work on liberty was as profoundly original as it wasinfluential, and it is common, in ground-breaking work, for distinctions to be missed and fordifferent distinctions to be confused with one another. See fn. 32 below, for a demonstration ofsome relevant lapses in Berlin’s text.14I was privileged to see a great deal of Isaiah during his final months, when he was at home,chair-ridden. Just a few days before his death, he encouraged me (I don’t know why hethought I had this kind of influence: he was perhaps harking back to a day when our College,All Souls, was influential in the real world) to encourage the present Labour government toimitate his political hero, Franklin Roosevelt, by instituting a great programme of public workswhich would reduce unemployment and enthuse young people. He confessed himself unableto see why there had been a turn away, in our time, from the use of the state for progressivepurposes, even by a Labour government. He was entirely hostile to total state control - hethought that the claims of socialist planning were illusory - but he was passionately againstThatcherism: he knew that “free” markets destroy people’s lives.15“Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century”, at p. 31 of Four Essays. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 8 8perhaps, of each, for the sake of the other. One may safely say, moreover, that, in Berlin’sview, there was, in the New Deal “compromise”, more sacrifice of individual liberty than ofeconomic security, that, broadly speaking, the New Deal reduced the first for the sake ofincreasing the second. Within the terms introduced earlier, the New Deal, according toBerlin, reduced freedom itself in the interest of rendering the freedom that then remainedmore valuable. Berlin was commending Roosevelt for having rendered American societyless laissez-faire and more social-democratic than it had been. Roosevelt introduced union-supporting legislation that restricted the freedom attached to ownership of productiveassets, social security legislation that removed free disposal over part of earned income, andstate enterprises such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which blocked free exercise ofprivate property in certain domains.Policies of that kind, so Berlin believed, enhance the security of those who suffernot lack of freedom but exposure to disaster in less regulated, more Herbert Hoover- (orMargaret Thatcher-) like, economies. In Berlin’s conception of The New Deal,comparatively poor and powerless people gained security and resources, while wealthypeople lost some resources, and everyone lost some freedoms. In the net result of the NewDeal, on Berlin’s view, security was enhanced, and certain freedoms were rendered morevaluable, at the (justifiable) expense of freedom itself.Although I am happy to join Berlin in applauding the New Deal, I disagree withthe terms in which he chose to commend it. In Berlin’s discourse, freedom and economicsecurity are distinct values which humane politicians must trade off against each other, andthe Roosevelt administration achieved a most intelligent trade-off, in which realisation of thefirst was restricted, for the sake of greater realisation of the second. I do not doubt that,like virtually all distinct values, freedom and economic security can conflict, but I do notagree with Berlin that, in the net effect of the New Deal, economic security was enhanced atthe expense of freedom.I defend that disagreement in sections 2 through 4, but, before I do so, let me showthat, like Berlin, John Rawls also accedes to the right-wing conceptualization of freedom:The inability to take advantage of one's rights and opportunities as a result ofpoverty and ignorance, and a lack of means generally, is sometimes counted -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 9 9among the constraints definitive of liberty. I shall not, however, say this, butrather I shall think of these things as affecting the worth of liberty...the worthof liberty is not the same for everyone. Some have greater authority andwealth, and therefore greater means to achieve their aims.16Although his language is characteristically cautious and the second sentence in thepassage might make it seem that he is merely laying down an innocent stipulation, Rawlshere denies, in effect, that poverty constrains liberty. For he could not have resolved (ashe puts it) to “think of” poverty as affecting (only) the worth of liberty if he had believedthat it affects liberty itself, and the view that poverty does not affect liberty itself is theunambiguous message conveyed by the Rawls paragraph as a whole (only part of which ispresented above).17Given the position struck in the foregoing quotation, it is curious, it seems togenerate an inconsistency, that, at a later point, Rawls argues as follows for “the rule oflaw”:...the connection of the rule of law with liberty is clear enough...if the preceptof no crime without a law is violated, say by statutes being vague andimprecise, what we are at liberty to do is likewise vague and imprecise. Theboundaries of our liberty are uncertain. And to the extent that this is so,liberty is restricted by reasonable fear of its exercise.18It is hard to see why liberty (itself) is restricted by mere fear of its exercise yet not at allrestricted by the impossibilityof its exercise that (Rawls thinks) poverty ensures.1916A Theory of Justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971, p. 204, and cf. Political Liberalism,Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 325-6.17I do not believe that my comments on the Theory paragraph are inconsistent with the PoliticalLiberalism remark (p. 326) that it offers “merely a definition and settles no substantivequestion”. “Substantive question” surely means, there, “substantive normative question”: theconceptual claim that I pin on Rawls sticks.18A Theory of Justice, p. 239.19It has been objected to my use of the passage on p. 204 of Theory that it concerns politicalliberty alone, and not also the liberty of access to goods and services that is the focus of thepresent article.But this objection lacks purchase. Rawls is not saying that poverty fails to restrict politicalliberty, while leaving it open that it may restrict some non-political kind of liberty: nothing in -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 10 102. The right-wing position to which Berlin and Rawls regrettably accede says that povertyis lack of means, and that it therefore entails lack of ability rather than lack of freedom. Ishall challenge that position without questioning the contrast it proposes between means andability, on the one hand, and freedom on the other: I argue that a certain lack of freedomaccompanies lack of money, whatever the relationships among ability, means, and freedommay be, and I am happy to assume, here, with the right, and with Berlin and Rawls, thatfreedom is identical with lack of interference. (In the Addendum advertised in footnote 12 Ichallenge the right-wing (and Berlin/Rawls) position from another direction, by arguing thatthe contrast it employs between means and ability on the one hand and freedom on theother is (anyhow) unsustainable.)Let me state a further assumption that will govern our discussion, an assumption thatmatches the intentions of those who propound the argument under scrutiny here. I shallassume that, in the examples that we shall have occasion to consider, the law of the relevantland is fully enforced, that people, therefore, are prevented from doing all and only thosethings that are illegal, and that they suffer interference when and only when they wouldotherwise behave illegally. The assumption is legitimate, and required, because, when theauthors whom I oppose affirm the freedom of the poor, they are not speaking of a legalfreedom which might lack effective force (such as the legal freedom of a person of thewrong colour to enter a restaurant to which vigilantes forbid his entry), or of a freedomwhich is effective but illegal (such as the freedom of the said vigilantes to bar the entry tothat restaurant of people of the wrong colour). We shall consider only the central case, inhis text suggests that he might countenance the relationship between poverty and non-political liberty as a separate issue. There is, for example, no reason to take the “rights andopportunities” of the first sentence in the quotation from p. 204, or the “aims” of its lastsentence, as, respectively, political rights and opportunities, and political aims. Rawls isreferring to all the rights and opportunities, and all the aims, that obtain or come to obtainwhen political liberty, as he understands the latter, prevails. (Note, further, that the peoplewith whom Rawls parts company, because they treat poverty as a constraint on liberty (itself),do not regard poverty as a constraint on political liberty alone; and poverty is, indeed, moreevidently (on the view Rawls opposes) a constraint on freedom of access to goods andservices than it is a constraint on political freedom proper). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 11 11which the law prevails, and where legal freedom therefore runs alongside what we may calleffective freedom.20Now, in my view, the Berlin position depends upon a reified view of money: that is,it wrongly treats money as a thing, in a sufficiently narrow sense of “thing” that, as I shalllabour to show, money is not, in fact, a thing. The Berlin view is false, because money isunlike intelligence or strength,21poor endowments of which do not always,22indeed,prejudice freedom, as long as freedom is identified with absence of interference. Thedifference between money and those endowments implies, I shall argue, that lack of moneyinduces lack of freedom, even if we accept the identification of freedom with absence ofinterference. Even ifincapacities like illness and ignorance do not restrict freedom, becauseno interference need obtain where they are present, poverty demonstrably implies liability tointerference, and people on the centre-left, such as Berlin and Rawls, accede needlessly tothe right's misrepresentation of the relationship between poverty and freedom when theytreat poverty (as a Labour-leaning think tank23recently did) as restricting not freedom itselfbut only "what can do with their freedom”.2420Note that what a person is effectively free to do, in the present sense, is not identical withwhat a person is able to do, all things considered. Suppose that someone is unable to do A,which, to fix ideas, is to walk across the square: the person in question is paralysed. Then hemay nevertheless possess what is here defined as the effective freedom to cross the square:he has that freedom if, were he not paralysed, and he tried to cross the square, no one wouldprevent him from doing so. The question whether, as the left is inclined to affirm and the rightis inclined to deny, incapacity reduces unfreedom is here set aside: I address it in theAddendum advertised in footnote 10. According to the right, a person may be free to do whathe is unable to do, and no objection to that will be raised here.21Berlin’s “too poor or too ignorant or too feeble” disjunction (see p. 6 above) is, therefore,malconstructed.22I say “do not always”, rather than “do not (ever)”, because of complexities explored in theAddendum advertised in footnote 10. In a word: freedom-removing interference entails arelevant inability on the part of its victim, the inability, that is, to overcome that interference,but inabilities do not in general imply unfreedoms, on an interference-centred view.23That is, the Labour-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) in London.24“The Justice Gap”, IPPR, London, 1993, p. 8, my emphasis: “People are likely to be restricted inwhat they can do with their freedom and their rights if they are poor, or ill, orlack....education...”For a critical assessment of that text, and related ones, see my “Back to Socialist Basics”,New Left Review, No. 207, September/October, 1994, pp. 3-16, which is reprinted in JaneFranklin (ed.), Equality, IPPR, London, 1997, where it is followed by a sharp reply (“Forward toBasics”) by Bernard Williams, one which has not caused me to change my view. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 12 12Now, before I develop my argument, let me make clear what it is not supposed toshow. My argument overturns the claim that a liberal capitalist society is, by its very nature,a free society, a society in which there are no significant constraints on freedom, but thatdoes not mean, and I do not claim it does, that a capitalist society is therefore inferior, allthings considered, or even in respect of freedom, to other social forms. All forms of societygrant freedoms to, and impose unfreedoms on, people, and no society, therefore, can becondemned just because certain people lack certain freedoms in it. But societies havestructurally different ways of inducing distributions of freedom, and, in a society like ours,where freedom is to a massive extent granted and withheld through the distribution ofmoney, that fact, that money structures freedom, is often not appreciated in its fullsignificance, and an illusion develops that freedom in a society like ours is not restricted bythe distribution of money. This lecture exposes that illusion. But that money is, contrary tothe illusion, and to what others claim, a way of structuring freedom, does not imply that amoney society is inferior, in general, or even in respect of freedom, to other forms ofsociety. That may be true, but it is no part of what I am here claiming.Here, then, is my argument for the proposition that poverty betokens an absence offreedom itself, in the sense of “freedom” favoured by my opponents, in which lack offreedom entails presence of interference.Consider those goods and services, be they privately or publicly provided, whichare not provided without charge to all comers. Some of the public ones depend on specialaccess rules (you won’t get a state hospital bed if you are judged to be healthy, or a placein secondary school if you are forty years old). But the private ones, and many of the publicones, are inaccessible save through money: giving money is both necessary for getting them,and, indeed, sufficient for getting them, if they are on sale.25If you attempt access to themin the absence of money, then you will be prey to interference.The argument at pp.13ff below is an extended and (I hope) improved version of the argumentlinking money and freedom in the Appendix of “Back to Socialist Basics”.25More precisely, money is an inus condition of the said getting: see pp. 14-15 below. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 13 13A property distribution just is, as I have argued at length elsewhere,26a distributionof rights of interference.27If A owns P and B does not, then A may use P withoutinterference and B will, standardly, suffer interference if he attempts to use P. But moneyserves, in a variety of circumstances (and, notably, when A puts P up for rent or sale), toremove that latter interference. Therefore money confers freedom, rather than merely theability to use it, even if freedom is equated with absence of interference.Suppose that an able-bodied woman is too poor to visit her sister in Glasgow. Shecannot save enough, from week to week, to buy her way there. If she attempts to boardthe train, she is consequently without the means to overcome the conductor’s prospectiveinterference. Whether or not this woman should be said to have the ability to go toGlasgow, there is no deficiency in her ability to do so which restricts her independently ofthe interference that she faces. She is entirely capable of boarding the underground and oftraversing the space that she must cross to reach the train. But she will be physicallyprevented from crossing that space, or physically ejected from the train. Or consider amoneyless woman who wants to pick up, and take home, a sweater on the counter atSelfridge’s. If she contrives to do so, she will be physically stopped outside Selfridge's andthe sweater will be removed. The only way you won't be prevented from getting and usingthings that cost money in our society - which is to say: most things - is by offering money forthem.So to lack money is to be liable to interference, and the assimilation of money tophysical, or even mental, resources is a piece of unthinking fetishism, in the good old26The private property argument first appeared at pp. 11-15 of “Capitalism, Freedom and theProletariat”, in Alan Ryan (ed.) The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford, 1979, which was reprinted, with extensive revisions, in David Miller(ed.), Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991, the private property argument appearing,there, at pp. 167-72. The argument has been criticized by, among others, John Gray, at pp. 169-70 of “Marxian Freedom, Individual Liberty, and the End of Alienation”, in Ellen Frankel Paulet. al. (eds.), Marxism and Liberalism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, and throughout his “AgainstCohen on Proletarian Unfreedom”, in Ellen Frankel Paul et. al. (eds.), Capitalism, Blackwell,Oxford, 1989; by Andrew Reeve, Property, Macmillan, London, 1986, pp. 109-110; and byGeorge Brenkert, at pp. 29-39 of “Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Autonomy”, The Journal ofEthics, Volume 2, No. 1, 1998. I reply to Gray at pp. 62-5 of Self-Ownership, Freedom, andEquality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, and to Reeve and Brenkert at pp. 79-82of “Once More into the Breach of Self-Ownership”.27That is a point about property in general, one that I am making as prelude to a distinct pointabout money, which is a very special form of property, some truths about which do not holdfor property in general. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 14 14Marxist sense that it misrepresents social relations of constraint as people lacking things. Ina word: money is no object.The value of money is that it gives you freedom, and that is so even though (a) youmay not want to exercise (all the) freedom in question, and (b) money alone never suffices,by itself, to supply the freedom its seekers seek.(a) is true because a person may desire money other than in order to spend it.28She may, for example, desire it because of the power that possessing the freedoms inquestion bestows upon her: she can, for example, threaten to sue others in circumstanceswhere a like threat from a poor person would not be credible. She may also desire moneybecause of the prestige that it brings: many people admire the rich. But the claim thatmoney provides freedom is not prejudiced by these motivational complexities.(b) is true because, in order to buy something, conditions other than possession ofthe required money are necessary: you need to have appropriate information, the seller mustwant to sell, you need to be of an age where you can contract, etc. Money, then, is an inuscondition of the freedom to acquire, an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary butsufficient condition.29But the key point is that the other conditions apply to rich and pooralike, yet the poor, as such, are far less free than the rich are, as such, because in their casethe relevant inus condition is widely unsatisfied, and this makes that condition worthy ofspecial focus. The key truth is that, if you are poor, you are pro tanto less free than if youare rich. To be sure, it is as true of the rich person as it is of the poor one that he is unfreeto take the sweater without paying money: no one is free to take the sweater without payingmoney. But, uniquely for the poor person, this means that he is not free to take the sweater,whereas the rich person is free to take the sweater, by paying money for it.Things other than lack of money can prevent you from overcoming interference:things like ignorance, or stupidity, or ugliness. They constitute lack of freedom, they areinus conditions of unfreedom, in particular circumstances. But they don’t distinguish the28See my Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978 and2000, pp. 300-1.29The concept of an inus condition was introduced by J. L. Mackie in an attempt to illuminatesingular causal claims. My appropriation of his concept here does not imply that I endorse theuse to which Mackie put it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 15 15poor from the rich, and they are not, as poverty is, a pervasive inus condition of unfreedom.Unlike intelligence and beauty, which may or may not serve to extinguish interference underparticular circumstances, the whole point of money is to extinguish interference: that is itsdefining function, even if further conditions are required for it to perform it. Compare: thedefining function of a knife is to cut, but that is not to say that any knife can cut any block ofstone.A final point needs to be made. It is sometimes said, by way of objection to theposition I have defended here, that their riches can bring unfreedoms for the rich from whichthe poor do not suffer: so, for example, their investments may require laborious attention,they are more prey to begging letters, and even, sometimes, to being kidnapped. But myclaim is not that, all things considered, the poor are less free than the rich, though that isundoubtedly true, but that what makes the poor count as poor, their lack of money, makesthem thus far unfree, whatever other unfreedoms – or indeed, freedoms – that mayvagariously cause. It is undoubtedly true that freedom can generate unfreedom, and thatunfreedom can generate freedom. You cannot, for example, be forced to do what you arenot free to do,30and, since being forced to do something is a form of unfreedom, it is a formof unfreedom that requires freedom.But these complexities, too, are beside the point, which concerns what money, inand of itself, immediately does. Despite the indicated complexities, money confers freedom,and those who deny that, those who affirm that the poor as such are no less free than therich as such, do not, after all, do so on the ground that wealth frequently carries freedom-compromising burdens with it.3. Let us now return to Berlin.For Berlin, the favoured freedom, freedom from interference, the freedom that hefamously called negative, the freedom that he distinguished from the ability to use it, is“opportunity for action” (p. xlii), “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and30For the deep bearing of this (for many, surprising) truth on debates about market freedom, seepp. 241-44 of my “Are Disadvantaged Workers who Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to TakeHazardous Jobs?”, which is Chapter 12 of my History, Labour, and Freedom, Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford, 1988. (For a briefer exposition, see my “Capitalism, Freedom, and theProletariat”, in Miller (ed.), pp. 163-5). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 16 16activities” (p. xxxix). And the “absence” of said “freedom is due to the closing of...doorsor failure to open them, as a result, intended or unintended, of alterable human practices, ofthe operation of human agencies” (p. xl and cf. p. xlviii). Yet it seems evident, incontradiction of the contrast between freedom and money on which Berlin insisted, that lackof money implies lack of freedom in just that sense. The woman prevented by her povertyfrom travelling to Glasgow faces just such a closed door. (Under a “smart-card” technologyfor controlling access to the train, that will be literally true, in a physical sense).Now, it might be claimed that I have misused a looseness in Berlin’scharacterizationof negative freedom; that, although he several times said that it was a matterof unclosed doors, his more considered view was that it was to be understood morenarrowly than that, as a matter of doors that are not closed by government, in particular.For he says, at p. xliii, that my negative liberty is determined by the answer to the question:“ow much am I governed?” One might then suggest that, in the passages that I havequoted from pp. xlii, xxxix, and xl (and in the supremely important footnote 1 on p. 130),Berlin misdescribes his own position when he identifies absence of freedom with any closureof an avenue, rather than, in line with p. xliii, with only those avenue-closures that are due togovernment.Yet it was surely the pressure of truth that produced the wider formulations: aperson who blocks my way need not be wearing a government uniform to deprive me,thereby, of freedom.31And blockages by anyone, whether in or out of uniform, standardlysucceed, in a law-abiding society, only by virtue of the state’s disposition to support them.So the contrast between doors that are closed by government and doors that are closed byothers lacks relevant application: it makes a difference only when a certain illegality obtains,and it is absurd to suppose that those who wish to resist the left-wing claim that the poorsuffer an extensive lack of freedom will be content to do so by pointing out that the poorcan, after all, break the law.Berlin offers a curious prognosis regarding “those who are obsessed by the truththat negative freedom is worth little without sufficient conditions for its active exercise”. He31Suppose that two people are prevented from boarding a plane, one because she lacks apassport and the other because she lacks a ticket. Was only the first unfree to board it? Whatthe airline does to the ticketless passenger is exactly what the state does to the passportlessone: block her way. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 17 17says that they “are liable to minimize its importance, to deny it the very title of freedom...andfinally to forget that without it human life...withers away” (pp. lviii-lix). Or, again: “in theirzeal to create social and economic conditions in which alone freedom is of genuine value,men tend to forget freedom itself” (p. liv). But how could this be so, given that, on Berlin’sown reckoning, what they are obsessed by precisely are (certain forms of) valuablefreedom? Berlin’s diagnosis of the supposed error of the left, namely, that they are soconcerned with the ability to use freedom that they confuse it with freedom itself, isinconsistent with his prognosis that they will tend to forget that freedom itself is an essentialvalue. Why should the left insist that freedom be capable of use if they do not, in the end,care about freedom?I believe that Berlin here misdescribes the object of his anxiety, which is rather thatthese champions of the poor come to care so much about the freedoms specificallyassociated with the defeat of poverty, the freedoms associated with having money (whetherone thinks, here, that money is required for freedom of access to goods itself or only for thevalue of that freedom: in what really bothers Berlin, here, that distinction is quite secondary),as opposed to civil and political freedoms (such as freedom of speech, of association, ofassembly and so forth)32, that they come to care too little about the latter. It is a large32The alert reader will note that these are not freedoms with which the New Deal (see pp. 7-8above) could plausibly be regarded as a compromise. But that is a further décalage in Berlin’sposition, and not, I am sure, a reason for claiming that my gloss on what he means here isincorrect. (Roosevelt, so Berlin surely thought, restricted property rights, yet he cannot meanto include just such rights among the “legal rights” with which he identifies “liberty itself” inthe text to fn. 11 above: that would make nonsense of the (putative) contrast in that text, sincebeing poor just means having few property rights).There are other important lapses in Berlin’s text. Consider, for example, his defence, atpp.liii-liv of the Introduction to his Four Essays, of publicly provided education. Among itsrecommendations, he says, is that it satisfies “the need to provide the maximum number ofchildren with opportunities for free choice”, and he presumably means to reiterate thatdesideratum when he speaks, a little later, of “the need to create conditions in which thosewho lack them will be provided with opportunities to exercise those rights (freedom to choose)which they legally possess, but cannot, without such opportunities, put to use”.Now, I take it that, if you have “opportunities for free choice”, you have free choice,or you have it effectively, you have it at will: all you need do, in order to have it, is take theopportunities in question. So, within the terms of the first quoted excerpt, education providesfree choice itself. But that can’t be what education provides according to the second excerpt,which implies that poorly educated children do have “freedom to choose”, but that they lackthe opportunity to exercise that freedom. (Unless, to stretch things to their limits, “legallypossess” doesn’t, here, entail “possess”, but means “possess (merely) legally” - but then -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 18 18mistake, made not only by Berlin but also (by implication) by Rawls, to describe the left aswilling to sacrifice freedom, as such, to the conditions that make it valuable. The distinctionbetween political freedom and money freedom is an entirely different distinction from thedistinction between freedom itself and the conditions that make it valuable.We can now reassess Berlin’s description of Roosevelt’s New Deal (see pp.7-8above). We can confidently insist that, when a person’s economic security is enhanced,there typically are, as a result, fewer “obstacles to possible choices and activities” for him(p. xxxix), and that he therefore typically has more individual liberty, on Berlin’s ownliberty-equals-no-obstacles-posed-or-left-by-others conception of liberty. Perhaps theindividual liberty of already economically secure people was reduced by the New Deal, but,given his own characterisation of liberty, Berlin had no right to the conclusion, implied by histalk of “compromise” between liberty and economic security, that individual liberty as such(and not just that of members of certain classes) was reduced.33Berlin would be abandoning the distinction between (truly) having liberty and being able touse it.)Further uncertainties occur in the “Two Concepts” essay itself. Thus, at pp. 124-5,Berlin appears to conflate human desiderata (such as not starving, being clothed, etc.) that areso urgent that they are needs greater than the need for freedom with “conditions for the use offreedom”, which are another matter.33(1) I do not think the quoted characterisation of the New Deal is compatible with Berlin’s lateracknowledgement, at p. xlvi, that “the case for social legislation or planning, for the welfarestate and socialism” can be based on considerations of liberty.(2) It might be thought that Berlin strongly qualifies his denial that poverty represents anunfreedom when he says, at pp. 122-3 of “Two Concepts”, that, consistently with theconception of freedom as non-interference, I may indeed “think myself a victim of coercion orslavery”, if I hold a “theory about the causes of my poverty” according to which it is “due tothe fact that other human beings <“with or without the intention of doing so”> have madearrangements whereby I am, whereas others are not, prevented from having enough moneywith which to pay for ”. That theory is so weak in its claims as to be, so it seems to me,undeniable, and Berlin himself implies that it is “plausible” (p. 122). Yet Berlin, so one mightinfer, must deny it to sustain his claim that poverty affects not liberty but only the conditionsof its exercise.The asserted inference is, however, erroneous. The pp. 122-3 passage shows a recognitionnot that, as I insist, lack of money, however it may be explained, represents lack of freedom,but that lack of access to money represents lack of freedom, when it has a certain explanation(which, I have just suggested, always is its explanation).My reading of the pp. 122-3 passage is comprehensively confirmed by a statement whichappears at pp. 61-2 of The First and the Last: “A poor man….is….free to rent a room” “in anexpensive hotel”, “but has not the means of using this freedom. He has not the means, -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 19 194. Money provides freedom because it extinguishes interference with access to goods andservices: it functions as an entry ticket to them. I shall now fortify, but also qualify, myargument, by comparing and contrasting money with access tickets to goods and services ina moneyless society.Imagine, then, a society without money, in which, in the first instance, the state ownseverything, and in which courses of action available to people, courses they are free tofollow without interference, are laid down by the law. The law says what each sort ofperson, or even each particular person, may and may not do without interference, and eachperson is endowed with a set of tickets detailing what she is allowed to do. So I may havea ticket which says that I am free to plough and sow this land, and to reap what comes as aresult; another one which says that I am free to go to that opera, or to walk across thatfield, while you have different tickets, with different freedoms inscribed on them. (We couldsuppose, further, that tickets are tradeable, so that I can swap some of my freedoms forsome of yours.)Imagine, now, that the structure of the options written on the tickets is morecomplex than it was above. Now each ticket lays out a disjunction of conjunctions ofcourses of action that I may perform. That is, I may do A and B and C and D OR B and Cand D and E OR E and F and G and A, and so on. If I try to do something not licensed bymy ticket or tickets, armed force intervenes.By hypothesis, these tickets say what a person’s freedoms (and, consequently, herunfreedoms) are. But a sum of money is, in effect, a highly generalized form of such aticket. My statement emphasizes “in effect” because money differs from a state ticket inthat, as we have seen, it is an inus condition of freedom of access to goods, rather than, asthe ticket is, both necessary and sufficient for such freedom of access, in all circumstances.The effect of money for a person’s freedom, is, nevertheless, in standard circumstances,exactly the same as that of owning the sort of ticket I described. A sum of money istantamount to (≠ is) a license to perform a disjunction of conjunctions of actions, actions,perhaps, because he has been prevented from earning more than he does by a man-madeeconomic system – but that is a deprivation of freedom to earn money, not of freedom to rentthe room. This may sound a pedantic distinction, but it is central to discussions of economicversus political freedom”. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 20 20like, for example, visiting one's sister in Glasgow, or taking home, and wearing, the sweateron the counter at Selfridge's. (As far as her freedom to go to Glasgow is concerned, thewoman who is too poor to take the train is like someone whose tickets in the imagined non-monetary economy do not have “trip to Glasgow” printed on them). That money’s effect isthat of a freedom ticket is perhaps more clear when physical money is replaced by creditcards, or by credit accounts that have no compact physical realisation. To improve theparallel, suppose that no physical tickets are issued in the state economy, but that people’sauthorizations with respect to their freedom to use goods are available only on computerscreens. It makes no difference to a person’s freedoms whether the screen records histicket collection or how much money he has.Having drawn this analogy, I now note its limits, and, then, how modest, they are.First, the limits, which reflect the fact, already acknowledged here, that money isan inus condition of freedom.Whereas it is the government that restricts a person's freedom in the moneylesssociety, it is not, standardly, the government, but the owner of the good to which a persondesires access, who, in the first instance, restricts her freedom in the money case. What thegovernment in a money economy does is to enforce the asset-holder's will, inter alia whenthat will is a will to deny access except in return for money. And the strategic role of theasset-holder’s will means both that money does not absolutely ensure access (as a state-issued freedom ticket does), and that lack of money does not absolutely ensure lack ofaccess (as lack of a state ticket does). If Selfridge’s are, for whatever reason, determinednot to sell the sweater that is on display, then an offer of money will not wrest it from them.And if, contrariwise, Selfridge’s are minded to give the sweater away, then the government,far from preventing the (possibly penniless) beneficiary of Selfridge’s largesse from pickingup the sweater gratis, will, instead, protect that gift transaction. Money is not alwaysnecessary for freedom of access to a good, since a generous seller need not demand it, andit is not always sufficient either, because the seller is not obliged to sell.Yet the size of the indicated difference between money and state tickets shouldnot be exaggerated. To take its proper measure, let us enter a complexity into the -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 21 21specification of the state ticket society that matches, to a certain required extent, thecomplexity in monetary economies exposed above.34Imagine, then, that, like money, the state tickets are neither always necessary noralways sufficient to secure goods, because state-appointed asset administrators are free, tosome small extent, to grant access to ticketless people and to withhold it from people withtickets: this is an officially recognized perk of office. The administrators, let us furthersuppose, exercise bias in favour of some citizens and against others to precisely the sameextent that private asset holders do in the money economy. So, in parallel with thecomplexity in the money society noted above, tickets no longer absolutely ensure accessand ticketlessness no longer absolutely ensures non-access, in the non-money economy.But it remains true that the ticket distribution strongly affects freedom; tickets establish whatyou are free and not free to do, not, now, to be sure, as we originally supposed, tout court,but within the feasible set established by asset administrators’ spheres of discretion, andtheir particular intentions. And the size of those spheres of discretion enables us to say thatfreedom of access is largely established by tickets, in the revised state economy.Now, private asset holders have full discretion over their holdings,35and assetadministrators only a partial one,36but that persisting disanalogy makes no difference to thefreedoms that others enjoy, under the stated assumptions. For, in typical real moneyeconomies, there is not much disposition either to give things away gratis or to withholdthings that are (otherwise) on sale from selected moneyed customers,37and, in our parallelstate case, the discretion afforded to and used by the administrators is, by stipulation,comparably modest in size. But freedom of access is, we saw, largely established bytickets in the modified state economy. And we can say, in proper parallel, that freedom of34Arnold Zuboff suggested the rudiments of the complexity that I introduce here.35From the point of view of non-owners, legal property owners are, in a sense, ununiformedstate agents with wide personal discretion.36The state in my story has, of course, the full discretion that Selfridge’s have, and itsadministrators may be compared to fictive Selfridge’s sales assistants who (most unusually!)enjoy a comparable discretion. But that completion of the analogy has no bearing here.37Indeed, as Hillel Steiner has pointed out to me, a too extensive disposition to withhold fromselected would-be customers would derogate from money’s status as a general medium of -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 22 22access to goods is largely established by money in our form of economy.38We cantherefore say that, in the normal case, lack of money carries with it lack of freedom. Theprospect of freedom to travel to Glasgow for the woman too poor to buy the ticket is notmuch enhanced by the possibility that Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains might give her a freeride, since the probability of that is negligibly small. And the discrepancy, in general,between money and freedom, is comparably negligible.5. The feature of capitalism that makes money partly different from state tickets is theseparation, in capitalist civilization, between the state and civil society. Freedom of accessto goods in a market society is not, indeed, decided by the state, but by asset holderswhose decisions the state supports. But a market society is nevertheless one in whichfreedom of access to goods is substantially a function of money, even if the multi-personalagency which grants and denies that freedom in a market society is more complexlystructured than is its counterpart agency (that is, the state and its administrators) in theticket society. In both the state ticket society and the money society, (private and/or state)owners decide what I am free to do in respect of goods and services; and owners decidingwhat I’m free to do in market society is pretty well equivalent to my money deciding that,because of the (systematically39) typical dispositions of owners.Money, and its lack, imply social relations of freedom and unfreedom. Money is,of course, a resource, but it is not a resource like strength or brains. It is, as Karl Marxsaid, "social power in the form of a thing"40, but it is not, like a screwdriver or a cigaretteexchange: money is by definition generally acceptable, and - see the following footnote – it iscompulsorily acceptable as legal tender in fully formed capitalist systems.38Note that,when private asset holders are forbidden not to sell to whoever has the money tobuy what they offer for sale, then money becomes more like a ticket in the first form of ticketeconomy (the one without administrators’ discretion) precisely because there’s a certainguarantee of civil rights: you can’t, now, discriminate oppressively.39See footnote 38 above.40Marx’s statement appears in this passage, which I have discussed at pp. 124-5 of my KarlMarx’s Theory of History: “The less social power the medium of exchange possesses ... thegreater must be the power of the community which binds the individuals together, thepatriarchal relation, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the gild system. each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing ofthis social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.” (TheGrundrisse, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 157-8). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 23 23lighter, itself a thing (meaning, here, by a “thing”, a physical object), for social power is nota thing. If you swap your ten one-pound coins for a ten-pound note, you’ve got a differentthing from what you had before, but the very same money. You’ve got the same license totravel, to acquire goods and services and so on, the same social entitlement, the sameprospects of non-interference that you had before (or nearly the same: the bus conductorwho is happy to accept your pound-coin may refuse to change your ten-pound note, andkick you off the bus).Money is a social power in a sense in which muscles, for example, are not. Whatyou can do with your muscles depends, of course, on social rules and on socially createdmaterial structures - such as roads and doors and staircases. But money (as opposed togold) is not something material, like muscles (and gold), whose practical significance societyaffects, but social in its very essence. Money doesn’t even have to be three-dimensionallyembodied: it can take the form of entries on a computer (see section 2 above), and it could,in principle, be less material still. If people all had wonderful memories and were all law-abiding, and information flowed rapidly from person to person, money could take the formof nothing more than common knowledge of people’s entitlements.41The raison d’être ofmoney is to overcome the interference in access to goods that prevails when money is notforthcoming: that is not true of, for example, muscles, even though big ones may provideaccess to goods when social order breaks down.That the tickets establish a social structuring of freedom is manifest in the stateeconomy. My claim is that money does so quite as much in the private property economy,albeit less manifestly, since a five-pound-note, unlike an equivalent ticket, does not actuallyhave the freedoms that it confers written on it. One purpose of the present lecture is tomake it manifest that money confers freedom quite as much as such a ticket does. It is onlydeficits in knowledge and in cognitive capacity that disable me from knowing whatfreedoms a five-pound note represents. Minds more powerful than ours could look at sucha note and say what disjunction of conjunctions of actions it frees us to perform.41I therefore disagree with John Searle’s claim (The Construction of Social Reality, London,1995, p. 35) that “money must come in some physical form or other”, unless, what I doubt, hewas resting it on limitations in human cognitive and/or moral powers. (Note that even if mentalstates are brain (and, therefore, physical) states, money does not take the form of brain statesin the fantasy sketched in the sentence to which this footnote is attached). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 24 24Notice that I have not claimed that either economy is more attractive than theother. Many will prefer the private property money economy in which my freedom doesnot depend so immediately on the state, but on the decisions of other people that the stateendorses.42But that does not touch the present point, which is that what depends on thosedecisions in the money economy precisely is my freedom.43The message, then, is that the left’s protest against poverty is44a plea on behalf offreedom, and, more particularly, a protest against the extreme unfreedom of the poor incapitalist society, and in favour of a much more equal distribution of freedom.456. The arguments and the conclusions of this article are conceptual in character. Nonormative claim has been defended, or even asserted, although I have allowed myself todeliver certain conceptual claims in a distinctly normative tone of voice.Some people respond to such work by complaining that, in virtue of its purelyconceptual character, it establishes no normative conclusions. Why, then, they ask, is itimportant?The answer is that conceptual claim

Peter Vallentyne SELF-OWNERSHIP FOR EGALITARIANS G.A. Cohen’s book brings together and elaborates on articles that he has written on self-ownership, on Marx’s theory of exploitation, and on the future of socialism. Although seven of the eleven chapters have been previously published (1977-1992), this is not merely a collection of articles. There is a superb introduction that gives an overview of how the chapters fit together and of their historical relation to each other. Most chapters have a new introduction and often a postscript or addendum that connect them with other chapters. And the four new chapters (on justice and market transactions, exploitation in Marx, the concept of self-ownership, and the plausibility of the thesis of self-ownership) are important contributions that round out and bring closure to many of the central issues. As always with Cohen, the writing is crystal clear, and full of compelling examples, deep insights, and powerful arguments. Cohen has long been recognized as one of the most important exponents of analytic Marxism. His innovative, rigorous, and exciting interpretations of Marx’s theories of history and of exploitation have had a major impact on Marxist scholarship. Starting in the mid-1970s he has increasingly turned his attention to normative political philosophy. As Cohen describes it, he was awakened from his “dogmatic socialist slumbers” by Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain example in which people starting from a position of equality (or other favored patterned distribution) freely choose to pay to watch Wilt Chamberlain play, and the net result is inequality (or other unfavored pattern). During the subsequent twenty years, political philosophy has benefited from his thinking about the nature and plausibility of the thesis of self-ownership, and about the scope and demands of equality. In what follows I will focus solely on the material dealing with self-ownership, but first I shall mention some of the interesting material on Marxism and socialism that I will be ignoring. First, at various points Cohen discusses how something like a principle of self-ownership is latent in the standard Marxist condemnation of capitalist exploitation (e.g., the capitalist steals labor time from the laborer). It is precisely because of this that Cohen has taken self-ownership so seriously. Second, Cohen discusses the labor theories of value of Marx and Locke and their connection to Marx’s theory of exploitation. Third, Cohen discusses how contemporary social, economic, and political circumstances make political change much more complex than is used to be for Marxists and socialists. In the early days of Marxism, workers (in the sense of “employees”) as a group made up a majority of the population, and were roughly coextensive with the group of needy people and with the group of exploited people. But things are more complex today, because of the existence of many more stockholding workers, well-paid workers (e.g., managers), and needy non-workers (e.g. poor unpaid homemakers and semi-permanent unemployed people). Finally, Cohen criticizes Marx’s “technological fix” for the problem of justice (roughly: that technological advances will inevitably produce abundance and thereby eliminate the circumstances of justice), and defends a moderate “social fix” according to which under conditions of moderate scarcity people over time can become disposed to comply with the demands of justice. I shall focus solely on the issue of self-ownership—both because it is the dominant topic of the book, and because it is the topic that I am most qualified to comment on. I shall start by rehearsing and endorsing Cohen’s analysis of the thesis of self-ownership. Then I shall identify and motivate an egalitarian view that endorses self-ownership, and which is not refuted by Cohen’s criticisms. The Concept of Full Self-Ownership Cohen gives three more or less equivalent characterizations of universal full self-ownership: ach person enjoys over herself and her powers full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that she has not contracted to supply. (p. 12) ach person possesses over himself, as a matter of moral right, all those rights that a slaveholder has over a complete chattel slave as a matter of legal right, and he is entitled, morally speaking, to dispose over himself in the way that such a slaveholder is entitled, legally speaking, to dispose over his slave. (p. 68) ach person has an extensive set of moral rights (which the law of his land may or may not recognize) over the use and fruits of his body and capacities, comparable in content to the right enjoyed by one who has unrestricted private ownership of a piece of physical property. (p. 117) The core idea is that agents own themselves in just the same way that they can have maximal private ownership in a thing. This maximal private ownership is typically taken to include the right to fully manage (to use, and to allow or prohibit others from using), the right to the full income; the right to transfer fully any of these rights through market exchange, inter vivos gift, or bequest; and the right to recover damages if someone violates any of these rights. Redistributive taxation (e.g., of income or wealth) is incompatible with these rights of maximal private ownership. Throughout, we will understand the claim of full self-ownership to be implicitly conditional upon the agent’s not having committed any previous wrongs (which may lead to partial or full loss of self-ownership) and upon the agent’s not having contractually given up some of his/her self-ownership. No one defends universal unconditional full self-ownership. We should also note that claims of self-ownership can be understood in an ethical sense and in a political sense. Ethical self-ownership concerns the moral rights correlative to the moral duties of others. Political self-ownership concerns the legitimately enforceable moral rights correlative to the legitimately enforceable moral duties of others. The political conception is stronger than the ethical conception in that it asserts that one’s rights of self-ownership are legitimately enforceable, and it is weaker in that it does not rule out having various non-enforceable non-contractual duties to others. My discussion will focus on the political reading, and for brevity references to rights/obligations should be understood throughout as references to the legitimately enforceable obligations. Likewise references to morality should be understood as references to the legitimately enforceable part of morality (justice). Finally, to keep things simple, we’ll assume that all beings with moral standing are fully psychologically autonomous (fully capable of self-governance), and that they pop into existence in this state (as opposed to developing it gradually). The existence of non-human animals, children, non-autonomous adults, and the like introduces a number of extremely important complications that cannot be addressed here. Some Bad Rationales for Full Self-Ownership In Ch. 9 (new) Cohen argues that several considerations which are often taken to support the thesis of full self-ownership do not in fact support it. As he acknowledges, these are only criticisms of supporting arguments, and not criticisms of the thesis itself. Still, the supporting arguments are important, and their failure casts some doubt on the thesis itself.1 One argument in favor of full self-ownership (crudely put) is this: (1) If we are not full self-owners, then we are at least partial slaves. (2) We are not partial or full slaves. So, (3) we are full self-owners. Cohen insightfully points out that the first premiss is false. For the missing rights of full self-ownership may not be held by anyone in the appropriate manner to constitute partial ownership of another. For example, one may have a duty to help another (and thus have incomplete self-ownership), without the other having a right to that help, the right to waive the help, or other ownership rights over the other. Of course the issue is complex, and depends on whether all duties are based on rights held by someone, and on what sorts of rights constitute partial ownership, but Cohen is clearly right that lack of full self-ownership does not entail partial slavery. As Cohen makes clear, most defenders of full (or even partial) self-ownership will reply that even if there is no partial slavery, the relevant issue is whether one is appropriately subject to one’s own will. So a second line of defense of full self-ownership is to appeal to the importance of autonomy (understood roughly as the effective ability to control one’s life as determined by the morally permissible range of choices). But, as Cohen argues, self-ownership does not always support autonomy. First, for those who are poorly endowed, universal full self-ownership may leave them less effective autonomy than some scheme of universal partial self-ownership (e.g., where everyone has a duty to provide the needy with the means of subsistence). Second, even if everyone is equally endowed, universal full self-ownership may provide less autonomy for each than an alternative scheme (e.g., public goods may be under-supplied and thereby fail to increase everyone’s autonomy). Finally, and most importantly, self-ownership is a purely formal notion, and does not ensure that one has any effective autonomy involving physical actions. If the rest of the world is owned by others, no physical action is permitted without someone else’s approval (since anything one does would involve using someone else’s property). In such a situation one has no effective autonomy involving physical actions. So, self-ownership does not ensure (effective) autonomy. It is concerned instead with ensuring that there are certain formal constraints on what others may do to one without one’s consent, rather than with ensuring that one has the means to do things. A third line of defense of full self-ownership is the following: (1) Forced transfer of body parts (e.g., removing someone’s eye to transfer to a blind person) is unjust under current technological conditions. (2) Full self-ownership holds that it is unjust. (3) No theory that rejects full self-ownership can adequately account for the injustice. So, (4) full self-ownership is true. Cohen questions the third premiss. He asks us to consider a case where (starting at some point) everyone is born without eyes, and there is a well-established, state-funded practice of perinatal implantation of perfect state-owned artificial eyes. Sometimes the eyes of adults cease to function (e.g. because of accidents), and when both eyes cease to function they are supplied with an eye from another adult with two good eyes, who is selected by lottery. (Adult implants work only if the eye has been in constant use from birth by some adult.) The mandatory transfer of the eye is not a violation of the “donor’s” self-ownership, because the eyes are owned by the state and only loaned to the users, with it being understood that they may have to give up an eye if their name is drawn in the lottery. If the mandatory transfer in this hypothetical case is as morally problematic as a real life mandatory transfer, Cohen suggests, it is because of the gross interference in the “donor’s” life. And since this gross interference is also present in the real life cases, there is no need to posit full self-ownership to explain why such transfers are unjust. The third premiss is false. As Cohen acknowledges, defenders of full self-ownership will be likely be unpersuaded. For they will likely deny the moral equivalence of the two cases. In both cases there is significant disruption in the “donor’s” life. But in the hypothetical case, defenders of self-ownership will claim, this is unfortunate but not unjust (it was part of the terms of the loan agreement), whereas in the typical real life case it is both unfortunate and unjust (it involves coercively taking something that rightly belongs to a person). Still, Cohen’s discussion insightfully highlights how one can condemn forced transfer of body parts without invoking self-ownership.2 So far we have considered some criticisms of some arguments in favor of full self-ownership. Of course, the unsoundness of several arguments for full self-ownership does not refute the thesis. Let us now turn to some criticisms of the thesis itself. Cohen Against Full Self-Ownership Full self-ownership says nothing about the ownership of the non-agent part of the world: natural resources (unproduced resources) and artifacts (produced resources). Cohen very insightfully explores the implications of combining full self-ownership with various views about the ownership of the rest of the world. He concludes that the thesis of full self-ownership must be rejected primarily because it is incompatible with adequate protection of autonomy combined with adequate promotion of equality of condition.3 Libertarianism is the view that agents are full self-owners. The most common form is right-libertarianism, which combines full self-ownership with the view that the rest of the world is initially unowned, or held in common, and that portions come to be privately owned as agents mix their labor with, or first occupy, or perform some other type of activity on, portions of the unowned world, perhaps conditional on some sort of minimal compensation conditions (e.g., that no one be made worse off). Cohen rightly criticizes this view for failing to adequately promote equality of condition and for failing to adequately protect effective autonomy (since a self-owner who owns nothing else has little effective autonomy). Left-libertarianism endorses full self-ownership, but holds that natural resources (understood as including the natural resource component of artifacts) are owned in some egalitarian sense. It might seem that egalitarians can endorse full self-ownership by endorsing left-libertarianism. Cohen argues, however, that each of the main versions left-libertarianism is either insufficiently egalitarian or gives insufficient protection to autonomy. According to one version of left-libertarianism, natural resources are jointly owned in the sense that all decisions about use, etc. are to be made through a collective decision-making process. One form of this view holds that all decisions are to be made by unanimous agreement. Although this view would presumably guarantee rough equality of condition (since everyone must agree to any arrangement), Cohen rightly rejects it on the grounds that no one would have any effective autonomy. For although it holds that each person is a full self-owner, no one has the right to do anything (e.g., stand in a given spot, eat an apple, or even breathe) without authorization from every other person. This is because every action requires the use of some natural resources (e.g., to occupy a spatial location), and so no one is permitted to do anything without approval from others. Although Cohen (rightly) rejects the joint ownership of natural resources because it fails to ensure a minimal amount of autonomy for each person, he notes that right-libertarians cannot reject it on these grounds. For right-libertarianism does not guarantee that people have any effective autonomy. It just insists on the formal autonomy guaranteed by self-ownership (which the above version of left-libertarianism also insists on). It sees no problem, for example, with a situation in which one person (or group of people) through luck or hard work comes to own all non-agent resources, so that all others require her permission to do anything. Of course, collective decision-making need not require unanimity. It might only require a majority. But this version of joint ownership of natural resources would neither guarantee equality of condition (since a majority could decide to exclude others from benefits), nor leave agents any effective autonomy (since they would still require authorization from others for every action). So this is not a plausible way of combining full self-ownership with social ownership of natural resources either. A second version of left-libertarianism holds that natural resources are equally owned by all in the sense that everyone is entitled to an equally valuable share of the natural resources. This avoids the above problem of collective authority over the natural resources, and thus over individual choices, because it divides up natural resources into equally valuable private shares. The most natural way of evaluating different shares of natural resources is in terms of their competitive value determined by supply and demand under relevant market conditions (e.g., their price at an auction). Each person would owe a tax equal to the value of any natural resources that he/she has appropriated, and the social fund so generated would then be divided equally among the members of society. If there is only one generation of agents, then agents could be charged the purchase price of the natural resources that they have appropriated. If there are many generations, then a more natural approach is to charge agents periodic rent for the natural resource that they have appropriated.4 Cohen rightly rejects this second approach primarily because it does nothing to compensate for inequalities in brute luck (e.g., in initial personal endowments or later events). Because each person gets an equal share of the social fund, and full-self-ownership prohibits coercive redistributive taxation, nothing is done to help alleviate the burdens of bad brute luck. On the basis of his examination of these two approaches Cohen concludes that no combination of full self-ownership and egalitarian ownership of natural resources adequately ensures both the protection of autonomy and the promotion of equality. Although I agree with this conclusion, further argument is needed before it is reasonable to draw this conclusion. For there are other, more plausible, conceptions of egalitarian ownership of natural resources with which full self-ownership can be combined. Below, I shall identify some such conceptions. First, however, I will discuss why egalitarians should endorse some form of self-ownership. The Need for Some Form of Self-Ownership Some form of self-ownership is, I claim, a plausible constraint on the demands of equality. Unconstrained teleological egalitarianism holds that equality should be maximally, or at least adequately, promoted. Under some circumstances, it therefore judges it just (and perhaps required by justice) to torture, kill, or involuntarily enslave innocent people. It will do so whenever such treatment is the most effective means to the end of equality (e.g., if it will make certain resources available for the purposes of equalization). But it is unjust to torture, kill, or involuntarily enslave innocent people. The ends do not always justify the means. Hence unconstrained teleological egalitarianism is mistaken. Obviously, the issue is complex and controversial, and I am here simply outlining—rather than developing—an argument. Egalitarianism must recognize some constraints on the admissible means of promoting equality. The most plausible grounds for these constraints are, I think, generated by some form of self-ownership and some account of ownership of natural resources. In particular, some form of self-ownership is necessary to adequately recognize that there are some things that others may not do to an agent without his/her consent (e.g., various forms of physical contact), and that those very things are permissible if the agent gives his/her consent and the owners of other involved resources give their consent. Again, this is highly controversial. A constraint against torture need not be accompanied by a right to waive the constraint, as self-ownership holds. But only waivable constraints, I would argue, adequately recognize the formal rights of control that agents have over the use of their persons. The assumption that some form of self-ownership imposes constraints on equality promotion need not be the assumption that full self-ownership imposes such constraints. Full self-ownership gives agents various control rights over the use of their persons. But it also gives them rights to transfer those rights to others, and tax immunities for the possession and exercise of these rights. One can endorse a partial form of self-ownership (e.g., control rights) without endorsing full self-ownership (with full tax immunities).5 Indeed, the unrestricted right to transfer tax immune wealth by gift must, I believe, be rejected by egalitarians—at least for cases of wealth being transferred to a person of a younger generation. For without some such restriction, wealth dynasties will be generated, and no plausible form of egalitarianism can accept those.6 For simplicity, however, I shall ignore this concern below, and focus on how full self-ownership can be combined with a plausible conception of the ownership of natural resources. If full self-ownership is so combinable, then so are weaker forms. The Ownership of Natural Resources Revisited As Cohen recognizes, the significance and plausibility of self-ownership can be assessed only in the context of plausible assumptions about the ownership of natural resources. For full self-ownership has no substantive implications on its own. It all depends on its interplay with the ownership of natural resources. The rights of full self-ownership are conditional upon not having voluntarily given them up and upon not having committed previous wrongs. And this means that whatever rights full self-ownership “initially” bestows, they may—depending on the terms of ownership of natural resources—be immediately lost because of the use of natural resources that belong in part to others, or because of the terms governing the legitimate appropriation of unappropriated resources. If, for example, all natural resources are owned by others (e.g., privately by some individual or jointly by society), then agents may own none of their products made from natural resources (they may involve theft and trespass), and they may owe others services or products as compensation for violation of their property rights. So, self-ownership can only be fully assessed as part of a package that includes a plausible view about the ownership of natural resources. As Cohen’s discussion of joint ownership of natural resources shows, a plausible conception of the ownership of natural resources should allow unappropriated resources to be used by agents without the permission of others and without any loss of the rights of self-ownership. More specifically, it should be common-use-based in the sense that (roughly) agents are permitted to use an unappropriated natural resource as long as they violate no one’s self-ownership, no one else is currently using it, and perhaps subject to certain other conditions.7 A plausible conception of the ownership of natural resources should also be unilateralist in the sense of allowing appropriation of unappropriated natural resources without the consent of others—as long as certain conditions (to be discussed below) are met. For it is most implausible to hold that the consent of others is required when communication with others is impossible or extremely difficult or expensive (as it almost always is). And even when communication is relatively easy and costless, it’s unclear why one needs the consent of others as long as one makes an appropriate payment for the natural resources appropriated. We have already considered three common-use-based, unilateralist conceptions of natural resource ownership (in conjunction with full self-ownership). Radical right libertarians—such as Rothbard (1978, 1982) and Kirzner (1978)—hold that that there are no compensation conditions on the appropriation of unappropriated resources. Agents are free to take ownership of whatever unappropriated natural resources they find (or mix their labor with). Obviously, this is a non-starter from an egalitarian viewpoint. Lockean right libertarians (such as Nozick 1974) hold that the only condition is a Lockean proviso, which requires roughly that no individual be made worse off (in some appropriate sense) by the appropriation. It seems quite plausible that satisfaction of some form of a Lockean proviso is a necessary condition for just unilateral appropriation. But Lockean libertarians are mistaken in holding that it is sufficient for just appropriation. For private property rights over natural resources typically bring the owners benefits (even after making payments to ensure that no one is made worse off). Consequently, people are willing to pay for these rights, and the rights have—relative to the initial condition of self-ownership, common use, and the obligation to compensate anyone made worse off by appropriation—a competitive value (market clearing price).8 Given the valuable nature of rights over natural resources, there is no reason why an appropriator should pay less than this competitive value. This view, in conjunction with full self-ownership was developed and defended by Henry George (1879, 1892) and others, and is known as Georgist libertarianism.9 Given the existence of multiple generations, the most plausible version of this approach is to require that rights over natural resources be rented at the competitive rent value. For if the natural resources were purchased at their competitive value, and these funds were allocated among the existing members of society, members of future generations would be deprived of the value of the natural resources. Equal share left-libertarianism (e.g., Steiner’s theory), considered above, is a version of Georgist libertarianism. It holds that the competitive rents should be divided equally among all members of society. Cohen rightly criticized this view for not being adequately egalitarian. Because it divides the social fund equally, no special compensation is provided to those who suffer unchosen disadvantage. The commitment to equal division, however, is not a necessary commitment of Georgist libertarianism (which only requires full self-ownership and the payment of competitive rent for appropriation). A more plausible view, I think, is an equality-promoting Georgist conception, according to which the social fund from rents is spent to promote equality of unchosen advantage. It focuses spending on the disadvantaged rather than dividing the fund equally. It is thus significantly more egalitarian in terms of equality of effective opportunity for a good life.10 This conception is compatible with full self-ownership. A main attraction of this combination is, I think, that it restricts the demands of equality to the spending of the social fund. The size of the social fund is determined by the competitive value of natural resource appropriated—and not by the amount needed to eliminate unchosen disadvantage. This view treats natural resources as resources to promote equality, but it gives clear recognition to the normative separateness of persons, and places clear—and arguably plausible—limits on our duties to others. Cohen and most egalitarians, however, would reject equality-promoting Georgism on the grounds that the taxes (rents) that it requires agents to pay are based solely on the competitive value of the natural resources that they own. As a result, agents with more advantageous unchosen personal endowments (e.g. productive talents) pay the same taxes as those with less advantageous unchosen personal endowments who own equally valuable natural resources. Most egalitarians will agree with the spending policy of equality-promoting Georgism, but they will reject the Georgist taxation policy that limits taxes to the competitive value of natural resources appropriated. Most egalitarians will want those with greater unchosen advantage to pay higher taxes. Doing this will further promote equality—both by the leveling down effect of imposing the taxes and by the leveling up effect from spending them. Most such egalitarians may grant that the payment of competitive rent is a necessary condition for just appropriation, but they will deny that it is a sufficient condition. A natural way of modifying the Georgist position to take into account the above consideration is to hold that, in addition to paying the competitive rent, appropriators must pay a tax equal to up to 100% of the net benefits (net of the competitive rent) that they reap from the appropriation. Of course, in practice it is not viable to tax agents 100% of the benefits they reap from the appropriation of natural resources. The required information about benefits is impossible to obtain and even enough information for rough approximations would be very costly to obtain. Furthermore, full benefit taxation leaves no incentive to make productive use of natural resources (since it leaves no net benefit to the agent). For these reasons, the full benefit taxation approach should be understood as setting a maximum tax that can be charged. The actual tax charged will be whatever maximizes net tax revenues (after deducting administrative expenses). Consider then the equality-promoting, full benefit taxation conception of natural resource ownership. This is like the equality-promoting Georgist view considered above except that, in addition to paying competitive rent, appropriators must pay taxes (up to 100%) on the benefits they reap from appropriation. This approach has the effect of treating all benefits of applying personal talents to appropriated natural resources as a social asset. It is, however, compatible with full self-ownership. First, as we have seen, any assumption about the ownership of natural resources is compatible with full self-ownership. Second and more importantly, this view of the ownership of natural resources is compatible with a relatively secure self-ownership. For, like the Georgist conception, it imposes the obligation to pay the benefit taxation only on those who appropriate natural resources. Agents are free to use unappropriated natural resources under the terms of common use without acquiring any obligation to pay rent or benefit taxes. It is thus possible for agents to avoid having to pay the tax.11 Equality-promoting, full benefit taxation libertarianism should be attractive to many egalitarians. It is not, however, a form of pure egalitarianism. For its endorsement of full self-ownership does some real work in limiting the admissible ways in which equality may be promoted. Agents may not be killed, tortured, or assaulted without their consent. Nor may they be coerced into providing involuntary services for others (e.g., mandatory labor for the state). Nor do agents owe any taxes merely because they exist or because they use natural resources. Nor are taxes imposed that effectively require agents to work in their most productive capacity (e.g., the “tax slavery” that results if each person owes a tax equal to the value of his/her maximally valuable annual product). If, however, agents appropriate natural resources, then they must pay the competitive rent plus taxes equal to up to the full value of the net benefit from appropriation (net of competitive rent). Of course, more demanding (less constrained) conceptions of the ownership of natural resources are possible. Purist egalitarians could hold that anyone who uses natural resources thereby incurs the obligation to do whatever is necessary to maximally promote equality. Although such an approach is formally compatible with (initial) full self-ownership, it gives no real role to self-ownership, since agents must use some natural resources (e.g., to stand on or to breathe), and hence immediately lose their self-ownership. More weakly, one could hold that the obligation to promote equality maximally is incurred by anyone who appropriates (as opposed to uses) natural resources. This leaves some real role for self-ownership, since in principle agents could decide not to appropriate. But it has the result that appropriators may be subject, under certain conditions, to involuntary service (e.g., when their skills are needed by society), forced transfer of body parts (e.g., from an advantaged person to a disadvantaged person), or even torture (e.g., when it provides important information that reduces the suffering of the disadvantaged). Because these implications seem implausible, nothing more demanding than equality-promoting full benefit taxation (or something like it) seems promising for egalitarians.12 More generally, something in the general area between equality-promoting Georgism and equality-promoting full benefit taxation seems promising for egalitarians. Each is compatible with full self-ownership and is more plausible than joint-ownership and than equal-share Georgism. They each avoid the problem of requiring the consent of others to use natural resources by holding that common use is permitted and involves no waiving of any rights of self-ownership. They also hold that appropriation of natural resources without the consent of others is legitimate as long as appropriators pay the relevant rent and taxes. Georgism requires agents to pay competitive rent, and thus typically allows agents to benefit from appropriation, with agents with greater productive capacities typically reaping greater benefits. Full benefit taxation, on the other hand, taxes away up to the full benefit of appropriation. If equality of unchosen advantage is the only concern of justice, then both equality-promoting Georgism and equality-promoting full benefit taxation are flawed (because inadequately egalitarian). Most of Cohen’s writing (e.g., Cohen 1989) make it seems that Cohen is committed to a pure form of egalitarianism, and if he is, then he will reject both these views. But in places (e.g., his rejection of joint ownership of natural resources, and his endorsement of the idea of an egalitarian bill of rights) he seems to favor some sort of constrained version of egalitarianism. For those favoring this latter approach, both equality-promoting Georgism and equality promoting full benefit taxation are, in conjunction with self-ownership, promising views. The key difference between the two concerns whether agents are entitled to the net benefits of their labor (net of competitive rent). Equality-promoting Georgism says they are, and equality-promoting full benefit taxation say that they aren’t. I shall not attempt here resolve this issue. My main claim is simply that something in this general area is a promising conception of the ownership of natural resources for non-purist egalitarians. This is not to say, however, that egalitarians should endorse full self-ownership. So far I have simply assumed full self-ownership and explored some conceptions of the ownership of natural resources. As suggested in the previous section, I believe that full self-ownership is too strong in that it gives agents the right to transfer tax immune wealth by gift (and bequest) to members of later generations. Such a right can give rise to wealth dynasties, and that is unacceptable from an egalitarian perspective. Egalitarians need, I suggest, to endorse a form of self-ownership, but it need not—and should not—include that right to make untaxed gifts. But that’s a topic for another occasion.13 Conclusion Cohen’s discussion of self-ownership is extremely insightful and important. I have not here addressed all the criticisms that he raises against full self-ownership. I have focused on his claim that full self-ownership cannot be combined with a conception of ownership of natural resources to produce a plausible egalitarian theory, and suggested that this is not obviously so. For, although joint ownership of natural resources leaves individuals no freedom to do anything without the consent of others, and equal share ownership does too little to compensate for unchosen disadvantage, there are plausible accounts of the ownership of natural resources that avoid the problem of requiring the consent of others to do anything while taking the promotion of equality more seriously. In particular, accounts that permit unilateral use and appropriation of natural resources, but which impose tax liabilities on those who appropriate equal to either the competitive value of the rights claimed or to the full net benefit they realize from appropriation, seem promising. Although I have not given anything even approximating a full defense of such accounts, enough has been said, I hope, to show that more investigation into the ownership of natural resources is needed before egalitarians reject all forms of self-ownership. Needless to say, without Cohen’s ground-breaking work on the topic, the importance of this investigation for egalitarianism would not have been adequately recognized.14