Bentham on Equality

Bentham is the principal founder of the consequentialist moral theory we call utilitarianism. For a rather harsh critique of a fully developed application of utilitarianism (that of Peter Singer) which will help you to grasp both the nature of the theory and some of its limitations, see this article by Peter Berkowitz that I cribbed from David Johnson's Daily Phlog:

http://www.peterberkowitz.com/otherpeoplesmothers.htm

Berkowitz asserts that utilitarianism does not, contra Singer, entail the principal of equality. Bentham vigorously disagrees, and in the passage we are reading this week he gives an interesting argument for it. Let's discuss on Monday how and whether that argument works to support a rough equality of ownership.

Hard-Wired for Empathy, Fairness

This review of Alison Gopnik's new book The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life describes some fascinating new neurological research about how babies' minds and brains work. Among other things, very young children seem to have an acute and subtle sensitivity to others' intentions, and a powerful sense of empathy. One might easily infer from these innate tendencies a strong propensity to develop a sense of property rights. These directly inferred property rights might be of many sorts, not just those arrangements we now see in the industrialized world (such as those framed by Smith), but some such rights or other seem inevitable if these findings about infant cognitive development are right.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23694

Thinking About Adam Smith

For our purposes, one thing to notice about The Wealth of Nations is the broadly utilitarian presuppositions it embodies. It has as strong a dose of individualism as does Rousseau, for example, and a marked preference for maximization of quantifiable goods.

Smith argues against the protection of domestic markets, on the grounds that this "unnatural" (watch out for the emotive force of that term!) regulation of markets will be 1) unnecessary if domestic products are cheaper than imports 2) have no effect if they cost the same, and 3) be harmful (i.e., to the individual purchaser) if they are costlier. But he has just completed an account of the salutary effects and general preferability of healthy local markets. Here an individualist bias may cause him to miss a larger potential collective benefit in stability, mutual assistance, and collective security possible with well-crafted and flexible regulation.

It is worth noting that he is not uniformly against government regulation. Most of the places he rails against it pertain specifically to mercantilist capitalism (state-sponsored international trade monopolies, such as the British East India Company, etc.) that were rampant under European colonialism. He is quite correct; such policies generated vast wealth at the direct expense of both domestic and foreign workers.

Smith's occasional excesses perhaps illustrate one danger of leaning too heavily on the Lockean notion that property relations have a basis in nature. We don't want to discard the insight simply because it risks exaggeration, however...

Adam Smith's Invisible Hands

Here is a fairly comprehensive treatment of Smith's use of the metaphor of the invisible hand, showing that our fixation on it since the mid-twentieth century is misplaced.

econjwatch.org/file_download/252/2009-05-kennedy-watchpad.pdf

Rousseau

It's pretty clear, even from this excerpt from The Origins of Inequality, that Rousseau prefers what he calls savagery to civilization, and thinks it's all been downhill -- though inevitably and irreversibly so -- since we abandoned near-total self-sufficiency. Leaving aside the dubious historicity of this image, what he seems most vociferously down on is the ownership of land -- just the concern Shelby raised with respect to Locke. As we saw, it's not so clear that full ownership is the right model for land use rights even on Lockean assumptions, given what we now understand about ecological processes and the scarcity of sustainably productive land in the current century. Perhaps, unlike the obviously appropriate private ownership of personal items like clothes and toothbrushes, all land should be held in some sort of commons trusts, and leased to those who will use it wisely.

Owning and Possessing

Shelby is quite right to observe that owning and possessing are closely allied, though distinct. In fact, possession is neither necessary nor sufficient for property. I can, at least under prevailing cultural practices, rightly claim to own something that is long out of my possession, such as the circular saw I loaned to a colleague six months ago, or the car I bought in graduate school that someone stole in Chicago (wherever it is it's still mine, dammit, and I want it back even if it is 40 years old now). Likewise I may possess many things that do not belong to me, such as the snowblower my neighbor stores in my garage in exchange for letting me use it, the stack of library books on my desk (both cases of justified possession that do not entail ownership) or the Bob Dylan CD I once vindictively hid from my ex-wife when she moved out (a clear case of theft and other moral limitations).

Yet frequently we do possess what we own, and also own what we possess, and possession (or the control over things that it implies) seems a logical precursor to more formal property arrangements. We might speculate that the rightful ownership Locke describes as existing in a state of nature could have grown out of the pragmatic and psychological attachment people tend to have to the things they make, use, and identify with.

Lockean Limits on Property

I take the following as a preliminary list of how Locke thinks property acquisition is naturally limited by the same principles that justify it:

1. "Enough and as good" clause

2. Spoilage proviso

3. Rational purpose (need fulfillment for enjoyment of life)

4. Charity (an entitlement of the needy, not merely a duty of the comfortable)

In respect of this last restriction, here is a passage from the First Treatise (I, 42): "God, the Lord and Father of all, has given no one of his Children such a property, in his peculiar portion of the things of this World, but that he has given his needy Brother a Right to the surplusage of his Goods, so that it cannot be justly denied him, when his pressing Wants call for it...As Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest Industry...so Charity gives every man a Title to so much out of another's Plenty, as will keep him from extream want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise."

As before, we will want to see whether such an entitlement has a credible secular parallel to justify it.