G. A. Cohen on Self-Ownership, Property, and ... - Tom G. Palmer

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242 Critical Review Y,l. 12, No. 3It would require too long a digression to offer a full critique ofwhat is wrong with blaming the victims of communism for failing tolive up to its “high” moral standards. I will merely suggest an hypoth-esis that seems simpler and more straightforward than the claim thathuman beings have not yet proven good enough for socialism: social-. ism is not good enough for human beings. .<strong>Cohen</strong> errs in thinking that rational parties would never refuse towork or bargain or allow their abilities to decay if they were notcompensated unequally. He simply dismisses the possibility: “Nolibertarian would want to defeat the Ablehfirm argument (for theconsistency of equality and self-ownership) on so adventitious abasis” (<strong>Cohen</strong> r995,97). According to <strong>Cohen</strong> (ibid., 97-98), the libertarian“would want, instead, to overcome it by pressing . , , [a]more fundamental objection , . . that to affirm joint ownership ofthe world is, as the story of Able and Infirm might be thought toshow, inconsistent with achieving the purpose and expected effectof self-ownership.” But <strong>Cohen</strong>’s hypothetical opponent need notchoose on which basis to refute <strong>Cohen</strong>’s arguments, for theAble/Infirm story does not show what <strong>Cohen</strong> claims that it shows,<strong>Cohen</strong> has not demonstrated that joint owners would not or shouldnot agree to division of their assets; nor that the distribution of asurplus over what is necessary to sustain both Able and Infirm mustbe evenly divided; nor that Able couId not bargain for a greatershare on the basis of a threat to diminish her productivity or herproductive effort. Finally, real-world experience with joint ownershipcontradicts <strong>Cohen</strong>’s rosy egalitarian description and raises theissue of why joint ownership should ever be seriously considered inthe first place.*. 1’:.*t :z .:.i...!. r: .i’I?.i-
Palmer <strong>Cohen</strong> on Property and Equality 243may be, but why must or should they be? Classical liberals and libertariansare open on the question of whether particular bits of land orother resources should be considered jointly or individually owned.15What is unatgued for by <strong>Cohen</strong> (aside fiom asserting that it is “intuitivelyrelevant”), but is of dubious plausibility, is the idea that everyresource other than our own persons should be considered the jointproperty of all human beings, or perhaps of all rational agents. If rationalagents were to be discovered on Mars, would the joint ownersof Earth be required to obtain the permission of every rational Martianbefore any terrestrial resource might be used, and would theagreement have to be unanimous across species? This would be astrange basis on which to build a theory of jurisdiction over scarceresources. As almost all previous writers on property have emphasized,requiring the permission of everyone before anyone could pickan apple would result in the extinction of humanity. Joint ownership. requiring unanimous approval to every act of transformation of resourcesis ultimately rejected by <strong>Cohen</strong>, on the ground that it interfereswith any reasonable sense of autonomy, but it is not clear why itshould even be entertained in the first place.There may be good reasons to believe that very early in its actualhistory, property took one of various forms of positive community,principally familial, as Fustel de Coulanges (1864), Maine (1888), andother anthropologists and historians of property have shown; but thatis not <strong>Cohen</strong>’s argument. Nor are the forms of positive communitydescribed by legal historians consistent with the egalitarian ownershipdescribed by <strong>Cohen</strong> as “joint ownership,” for they did not encompassall humans or all rational agena, but were always forms of communitythat established rights against all nonmembers ofthe owning communities.As Locke noted of common property, “And though it be common,in respect of some Men, it is not so to all Mankind, but is thejoint property of this Country, or this Parish” (Zuo nedises, 11.35). Inthis respect, “negative community~’ i.e., the idea that all have a rightto appropriabe unowned objects, is a far more egalitarian startingpoint than any form of “positive community,”which in every formever observed was a nonuniversal, group-limited right. This issue wascarefully considered by the modern natural-law writers on property,who distinguished between negative community and positive community,the latter corresponding to the joint ownership that <strong>Cohen</strong>proposes as the pmper baseline.16It is remarkable that figures such as <strong>Cohen</strong> persistently overlook
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