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

Pulmer * <strong>Cohen</strong> on Property and Equality 245Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and therebymakes it his Properfy. (Ibid., 11.27)’’It is property in one’s person that justifies the appropriation of that towhich everyone earlier had a right. <strong>Cohen</strong>’s attempted. rebuttal doesnot shake this connection; <strong>Cohen</strong>’s case against libertariatlism rests onbasic errors of reasoning and fails on its own terms.There are certainly many observable scenarios in which one oranother form of joint ownership is highly desirable, such as partnerships,co-ops, various sorts of clubs and religious institutions, andmarriages, but there is no reason to posit that joint ownership is theonly rational or desirable arrangement, nor that property in severaltyis irrational or immoral. Nor does <strong>Cohen</strong> even offer any goodreason as to why joint ownership should be seriously entertained atall; the only justification that <strong>Cohen</strong> offers for attempting to workthrough the logic of joint ownership is that joint ownership is “intuitivelyplausible.” To say that one’s intuition tells one that a claimis reasonable or probable is hardly to offer an argument on its behalf’,and, in any case, ‘‘joint ownership” or “positive community” hascertainly been considered by defenders of several property and decisivelyrejected for very good reasons, as opposed to mere intuition.Finally, <strong>Cohen</strong> has failed to demonstrate that the unequal divisionof joint products is irrational (much less. that it is immoral).The central pillars of <strong>Cohen</strong>’s polemic against conjoining propertyin one’s person with several property rest on errors of reasoning; hisargument against the conjunction of property in one’s person withseveral property will have to proceed without his often-cited but erroneousclaims about the bargaining situation of self-owners whoown the world jointly. His bare assertion of the “plausibility” of positivecommunity is not an argument for a policy that has been rejectedfor clear and compelling reasons by many other writers on the topic.It may be that libertarian claims about the conjunction of propertyin one’s person and property in the world are false, but, if so, it is notfor the reaso‘ls that <strong>Cohen</strong> has advanced.I ’NOTESr. <strong>Cohen</strong>’s criticisms have appeared in numerous forms and publications, notably<strong>Cohen</strong> 1985, <strong>Cohen</strong> r986a, <strong>Cohen</strong> 1986b, and <strong>Cohen</strong> 1989, and havebeen revised and collected together in <strong>Cohen</strong> 1995.