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Gauthier, Property Rights, and Future Generations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Kevin Sauvé
Kevin Sauvé*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary, Calgary, ABCanadaT2N 1N4
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Extract

In Morals by Agreement David Gauthier proposes four criteria for classifying a society's advancement toward ‘higher stages of human development.' Significantly, these criteria — material well-being, breadth of opportunity, average life-span, and density of population — do not include as an equally valuable achievement the society's capacity to sustain its standard of living (288). Nonetheless Gauthier presents three arguments intended to show that a community founded on his distributive theory will view depletionary resource policies as unreasonable and unacceptable. I shall contend that these arguments do not succeed in motivating sustainable rates of resource exploitation. Furthermore, I argue that if truly just and rational resource use policies can be arrived at, such policies could only succeed by employing a conception of property rights substantially different from Gauthier's.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 163 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1995

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References

1 Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986. All page numbers refer to this volume.

2 Consistent with this reasoning, your poisoning of the river could inadvertently kill me, and yet this would not be a moral wrong; for, on Gauthier's theory, property acquisition predates the markets on which morality depends.

3 Hume argued that temporal overlap is essential for questions of justice to arise between individuals. For discussions of Humean pre-conditions for justice see Barry, Brian ‘Circumstances of Justice and Future Generations,’ in Sikora, R.I. and Barry, Brian eds., Obligations to Future Generations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1978)Google Scholar and Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984).Google Scholar Unlike Gauthier (299), both Barry and Parfit reject the Humean requirement that justice requires mutual interaction.

4 Two general points about this example. First, its postulation of a monopoly does not clearly run counter to Gauthier's restrictions against monopolies, since these only apply to initial acquisitions and inheritance, not to situations where market forces so consume a resource that only one owner remains. Second, the example is a simplification: there have been few, if any, instances in which a mineral resource has been completely depleted; moreover, a technically advanced society might well replicate naturally occurring chemicals, though often at great cost. Complete depletion is most common in cases of species, ecosystems, fossil records, and kinds of human artifacts.

5 For a discussion of the Intergenerational Prisoner's Dilemma, see Parfit 382-83.

6 For a critique this and other arguments for inheritance, see Haslett, D.W. ‘Is Inheritance Justified?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 15 (1986) 122-55.Google Scholar

7 Non-market relations between parent and child in Gauthier's society are discussed in Baier, Annette ‘Pilgrim's Progress,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (1988) 315-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In reply, Gauthier admits that suckling children are market parasites, but he claims that this will be true in any distributive scheme, and expresses his general hope ‘that persons will freely choose the affective ties needed to base an ongoing intergenerational contract in emotion as well as in reason.’ ‘Moral Artifice,’ same Journal, same issue, 418.

8 This assumption finds some support in biology, where much is explained if we assume individual organisms (unknowingly) tend toward behavior that is in the long-term interests of their species. See Dawkins, Richard The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976).Google Scholar

9 Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the 1992 Harvard-MIT Graduate Philosophy Conference and the 1993 Canadian Graduate Students’ Conference in Philosophy. I am grateful to participants in those conferences, as well as Michael Milde, Dale Miller, and the reviewers of this Journal for their helpful comments. I also gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting my research through a Doctoral Fellowship.