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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2015
In this short essay I argue that the main insight of Murphy and Nagel’s book, The Myth of Ownership, that people have no right to their pre-tax income, is not supported by their claim that the right to private property is not a natural right. The non-naturalness of the right to private property, I argue, is irrelevant to their moral argument. The plausibility of their moral conclusion derives from the thesis (which they also seem to endorse) that people have a right to the fruits of their labor, maintaining, however, that there is no possible conception, morally speaking, of what the fruits of one's labor are, independent of a system of legal and social norms that constitute the terms of fair bargaining, pricing, etc. People can only have a right to a fair assessment of the added value of their labor, and the latter cannot make any sense independent of the entire system of norms prevailing in the relevant society. I argue that this last conclusion is not affected by the nature of the right to private property.
I am indebted to Scott Altman, David Enoch, Marshall Cohen, and Ed McCaffery for comments on previous drafts.
1. Murphy, Liam & Nagel, Thomas, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. Ibid. at 74.
3. Ibid.
4. This conception of a natural right roughly accords with the traditional Marxist distinction between human rights and civil rights. Human rights are those people have in virtue of being human beings, and civil rights are those people have in virtue of being subjects of a political entity.
5. There is a clear indication in the text that Locke was aware of this difficulty in his argument, since he was at pains to show that at the political stage, there is an additional argument for the right to private property that Locke attributed to a form of tacit consent associated with the introduction of money.
6. Hegel, G.W.F., Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, T.M. (Oxford: University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent account of Hegel’s argument, see Waldron, J., The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) at ch. 10.Google Scholar
7. In fact they actually indicate an acceptance of the Hegelian line of thought. (See supra note 1 at 45.) Furthermore, the Hegelian argument is compatible with the thesis that the right to private property is a product of laws and conventions.
8. Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, ed. by Macpherson, C.B. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1980) at sec. 27.Google Scholar
9. That is how Marx, also understood, and actually subscribed, to this moral insight. Thus, his famous doctrine is put forward about the surplus value of labor that the capitalist steals from the workers. It is also how Nozick understood Locke’s premise. See his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974) at 175.Google Scholar
10. In fact, the libertarian position is even more dubious: not only that it must hold that the pricing of an ideally free market is necessarily fair, but libertarianism must also hold that any other alternative system that may attach different pricing to the added value of labor is necessarily not fair.
11. The Marxist argument is very instructive here: since Marx believed that it is inherently wrong for some people to own the means of production, he was able to claim that the capitalist actually steals the surplus value of the laborer’s work and therefore free market pricing of labor is necessarily unjust. I am not suggesting that Marx expressed himself in these moral terms. But there is a moral argument here that, even if wrong, is not necessarily absurd.