Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
1 Flanagan, Thomas, “The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian Lands and Political Philosophy,” this Journal 22 (1989), 589–602.Google Scholar All references will be to this article unless otherwise cited.
2 Griffin, Nicholas, “Aboriginal Rights: Gauthier's Arguments for Despoliation,” Dialogue 20 (1981), 690.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Flanagan calls it “original appropriation” but, since the indigenes have already appropriated the land (an appropriation recognized, for what it is worth, by Canadian law), its reappropriation by Europeans would seem to be more like second-hand original appropriation!
4 One could, of course, make the efficiency of the market into an analytic truth—as is sometimes implicitly done in laissez-faire apologetics. But no policy prescriptions follow from a tautology, and all substantive issues still have to be decided although they are couched in new terms.