Historical Entitlement Research Articles

The Methodological approach of AbdulAziz al-Khayat in refuting Jewish claims regarding the historical entitlement in Bayt al-Maqdis

تقوم فكرة الوجود اليهودي بفلسطين وبيت المقدس على وجه الخصوص عند اليهود على أساس زعمهم بالأحقية التاريخية لذلك الوجود، وسلكوا في سبيل ذلك كل أنواع التجنِّي، بدءًا من التدليس في الحقائق التاريخية، وانتهاءً بسلوك المنهج الميكافيلي (المصلحي) في سبيل تحقيق ذلك الادِّعاء الفاسد، الذي قام على ردِّه وبيان فسادِه عددٌ من الباحثين والكُتّاب المعاصرين. وكان مِن أبرز مَن كَتب في هذا المجال الدكتور عبد العزيز الخياط في كتاب له بعنوان "اليهود وخرافاتهم حول أنبيائهم والقدس". ولم يسلك الخياط في بحثه الأسلوب العاطفي الذي يخدش في صحة المعلومة التاريخية، ويُضعف من طريقة عرضها. وقد بنى كتابه رحمه الله على أُسسٍ علمية متينةٍ، أهمها اعتماد دلالات النصوص الشرعية الثابتة، ثم الاعتماد على القرائن التاريخية والأثرية للبرهان على صحة ما يستنبطه من المعاني المعقولة من تلك النصوص، كما اعتمد في الرد على كذب اليهود على أسلوب الاحتجاج عليهم بما جاء في التوراة نفسها من معلومات لا يمكنهم إنكارها، واعتمد أيضًا أسلوب الرد بتناقض أقوال حاخاماتهم وكبرائهم وأهل المعرفة بالآثار منهم، ثم من خلال تقريرات علماء وباحثين وكُتّاب غربيين، يقرؤون مزاعم اليهود بعين الناقد الحيادي، بحيث شكلت الأساليب بمجموعها ردًّا مَنهجيًا مُحكمًا، لا يَسَعُ إنكارُه بحالٍ، ويأنَسُ القلب إلى صحته ومعقوليّته.

Stoic Indulgence, Gratuitous Restraint: White Feelings and Campus Art

The 2010s saw a revival of reactionary politics on college campuses, which now appear to have paved the way for contemporary right-wing culture-war talking points regarding K–12 education. Revanchist attitudes around race, as well as gender and sexuality, can be linked to White Americans’ affective attachments to ideas of historical entitlement, which can be seen both in campus responses to university art programming and in acts of student vandalism. I describe a campus gallery exhibition I organized in 2016 around the theme of White affect, and I make connections between expressions of rage, anguish, and reasonableness on the part of White people within White-dominated institutions of art and education, before considering what possibilities and difficulties may exist for leading substantive classroom discussions and projects that engage explicitly with race generally, and Whiteness in particular.

Private Duty Creation in Theories of Distributive Justice

Historical entitlement theories of property rights, which claim that individuals can acquire moral property rights over natural resources by appropriating them, traditionally face a strong objection: it is widely implausible that a single individual can unilaterally impose duties on everyone around him and yet, apparently, this is exactly what such theories allow. In this essay, I argue that the same problem appears in all other theories of distributive justice and if this problem was a reason to reject historical entitlement theories, it would also be a reason to reject all rival theories. Which means that as long, as one is committed to any theory of distributive justice at all, she, at the risk of inconsistency, cannot rely on the aforementioned objection to criticize historical entitlement theories.

Jeffersonian Trembling: White Nationalism and the Racial Origins of National Security

This essay examines how the project of national security was beset by the affective intensities of “Jeffersonian trembling.” While white nationalists today see themselves as threatened with dispossession and the loss of historical entitlement, mainstream supporters of the movement to colonize US blacks leveraged their fear to export insecurity and precarity onto African Americans. The claim of “white genocide” dates back to biopolitical anxieties that drove the colonization movement to control and manage the chimera of black population excess. Such efforts required the conversion of blacks into data so that they could be brought under a regime of “algorithmic governmentality.” Instead of targeting individual black bodies, white nationalism read the latest data about black people in toto as a threat. Different in scale from the surveillance techniques that overseers, patrollers, and other agents of slaveholding society employed, colonization represented a security algorithm for tackling a data problem that was the size of the African American population itself. In this history, we can detect how the logic of security is always a racialized formation that is intimately connected to feelings of insecurity.

In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy by Katrina Forrester

Reviewed by: In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy by Katrina Forrester Akira Inoue Katrina Forrester. In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 432. Cloth, $35.00. In the Shadow of Justice presents a powerful reconstruction of Anglophone political philosophy. Although the central focus of the book is on the origin and influence of John Rawls's theory of justice, it also uncovers the significance of British political theories (especially Brian Barry's theory) in ways that contrast them with the Rawlsian liberal egalitarian idea. The book is, thus, a work of intellectual history that engages with the traditions of normative political theories. By referring extensively to the literature of philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and the archived materials of Rawls, Katrina Forrester puts forward two provocative theses. First is that the core idea of Rawls's liberalism is framed by the liberalism of postwar America, that is, antistatist, pluralist liberalism; second, it continues to survive as a dominant political ideology to this day by abstracting the intellectual building blocks away from political and socioeconomic realities. According to the first thesis, Rawls's anti-interventionist and republican idea lurking behind his theory of justice reflects postwar liberalism. Although Rawls's thinking went through minor changes, specifically in a more egalitarian direction, the postwar-liberal idea was intact. It was reinforced by Rawls's visit to Oxford in 1952–53. At that time, he encountered the Labor revisionists who attempted to embrace both equality and decentralization in order to reconcile them with market efficiency. In addition, he proceeded to work on justice under the influence of Oxford ordinary language analysis. Since then, Rawls has treated justice implicitly or explicitly as rules of a game that are applied to social practices in an egalitarian manner. The notions of social cooperation and the basic structure exemplify this. This way of understanding justice enabled Rawls (and his followers) to detach his framework from the realities of the 1970s and 1980s. This leads to the second thesis. Forrester provides the following evidence for it: Rawls's justification of civil disobedience in a restrictive way, his (and their) neglect of the acute problems of racism and colonialism, his marginalization of the issues of justice in international politics, his limited treatment of the interests of future generations, and his (and their) underestimation of the impact of the New Right. These issues that Rawls (and his followers) restrictively treated, neglected, marginalized, and underestimated are fundamental issues of justice and legitimacy in contemporary society. However, the Rawlsian framework cannot help sidestepping these issues in order to fend off the collapse of the fair game of a society. Forrester thus concludes that it is time to see the Rawlsian philosophy as a product of its time. Forrester reveals the limitations of Rawlsian philosophy by contrasting it with other political theories: British political theories and the Lockean libertarian theory. Among the former, Barry's theory is pivotal. For example, Barry criticized Rawls's theory of intergenerational justice as tied too closely to moderate economic growth. To include the concerns of later generations about resource depletion and environmental destruction, Barry decoupled intergenerational justice from growth. Forrester opines, "Only Barry tried [End Page 527] to do so" (203). She thus holds Barry's fundamental challenges against Rawls's framework in high regard, but the background of Barry's challenges remains unaddressed. The Lockean libertarian theory also plays an important role in unearthing the problematic features of Rawlsian liberal egalitarianism. Robert Nozick attacked Rawls's vision for games of fair division and presented a historical entitlement theory of justice as a better alternative to liberal egalitarianism. Forrester analyzes how Rawlsians' response to Nozick promoted the abstraction of morality from political realities so as to deny the noninstitutional claims about historical entitlements and defend the forward-looking focus on egalitarian justice in light of the ideal of Kantian moral persons. This, Forrester contends, encouraged the Rawlsian neglect of historical injustices. However, this may be questioned for two reasons. First, Nozick's entitlement theory influenced prominent egalitarian theorists such as G. A. Cohen, his disciples, and leftlibertarians...

Liquid indigeneity

ABSTRACTIsrael/Palestine is a site of bitter struggle over definitions of indigeneity and settlerness. In 2008 the first Palestinian “indigenous wine” was released, introducing a discourse of primordial place‐based authenticity into the wine field. Today, winemakers, scientists, autochthonous grapes, and native wines reconfigure the field of gastronationalism. Palestinian and Israeli wine industries can now claim exclusive historical entitlement in a global era in which terroir, that is, the idiosyncratic place, shapes economic and cultural value. Against the dominance of “international varieties,” this indigenous turn in the wine world mobilizes genetics, enology, and ancient texts to rewrite the longue durée of the Israeli/Palestinian landscape. The appropriation of the indigenous grape illustrates the power of science, craft, and taste to reconfigure the human and nonhuman politics of settler colonialism. [settler colonialism, science, gastronationalism, authenticity, wine, terroir, Israel, Palestine]

Sufficientarian-Libertarianism and Basic Income

Le présent essai soutient une position qui s’inscrit dans le courant dit « libertarien » tout en explorant les implications de la politique qui prône un revenu de base et suscite présentement un débat vivace à travers le monde, y compris au Japon. Il existe diverses formes d’éthique libertarienne. Ici, dans la lignée de Nozick, la « propriété de soi » et la clause lockéenne sont reconnus comme deux rouages essentiels de l’argumentation qui conduit à leur ajustement en vue d’une éthique spécifique. Nous examinons comment Nozick défend la « propriété de soi » : son argumentation respecte la séparabilité des personnalités et elle accorde une grande importance à l’élaboration libre par chacun d’un mode de vie lui convenant. Une fois révisées la nature du droit dit « d’appropriation » et de la clause dite « lockéenne », nous réinterprétons cette position centrale des libertariens en considérant la position fondamentale de Nozick comme prenant appui sur une conception égalitariste de la notion de dispositions suffisantes. Les avantages de cette position sont dus non seulement à l’adéquation entre la théorie et un principe de distribution, mais encore à l’image de l’individu doté d’une propriété de soi réaffirmée, dans la vision libertarienne que Nozick déploie. Cette approche fournit les bases de la morale d’une activité libre exercée sur les marchés : ce point est essentiel pour les auteurs libertariens, qui refusent toute aliénation de la propriété privée et toute redistribution. Une version simplifiée du revenu de base une fois définie en l’adaptant à des cadres variés, dont le cadre japonais nous mène à conclure que le revenu de base, quoique séduisant, est partiellement conforme aux thèses libertariennes et qu’une version minimale serait à retenir.

Rawls, self-respect, and assurance

This article adapts John Rawls’s writings, arguing that past injustice can change what we ought to publicly affirm as the standard of justice today. My approach differs from forward-looking approaches based on alleviating prospective disadvantage and backward-looking historical entitlement approaches. In different contexts, Rawls’s own concern for the ‘social bases of self-respect’ and equal citizenship may require public endorsement of different principles or specifications of the standard of justice. Rawls’s difference principle focuses on the least advantaged socioeconomic group. I argue that a historicized difference principle (i) considers the relative standing of racial, gender, and other historically stigmatized groups; (ii) provides their members assurance by weakening incentives to manipulate justice to another group’s advantage; and (iii) may result in policies resembling reparations, though justified by forward-looking considerations of self-respect and public assurance. I then examine how disrespectful justifications were historically used to forcibly include indigenous peoples as citizens. While Rawls thinks providing citizens one package of basic liberties signals respect, indigenous self-government could better support self-respect. I invoke Rawlsian international justice, which calls for mutual respect between peoples. Indigenous peoples’ status should reflect their past and persisting peoplehood, providing assurance by weakening incentives to unjustly transform international into domestic contexts.

Beyond a Boundary: Washington’s Historic Districts and Their Racial Contents

Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s there was a wave of citizen-initiated preservation activity in Washington, DC, much of it directed towards identifying and expanding neighbourhood historic districts. These efforts were driven by several different events and influences that coalesced in the period: a new sense of local control that came with the establishment of municipal self-government in the District of Columbia after 1975; the expectation that a comprehensive historic preservation law would be enacted in the district; the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of the legality of preservation controls in 1978; and the renewed salience of the idea of place that affected everything from community art and neighbourhood activism to urban design and architectural theory. This paper addresses this moment of intense activity by investigating the ways in which preservation advocates in one neighbourhood, Dupont Circle, sought to expand their historic district. The proposal to add several square miles of new territory to the designated historic area was led by a predominantly white preservation organization, the Dupont Circle Conservancy. The proposal aroused significant opposition from a group calling itself the 14th and U Street Coalition, which styled itself as the representative of African-American interests and historical identity in neighbouring Shaw. They protested that the Dupont Circle preservationists were attempting to annex their neighbourhood and with it, their history. At first glance this conflict appears to be a predictable case of inner city gentrification fought along the lines of racial identity. But when examined more carefully, the series of claims and counter-claims embedded in the conflict exposed a more nuanced set of issues related to skin tone, class, and historical entitlement. The conflict highlighted the absence of any agreement about what constituted the historicity of such a historic area and cast doubt over who might be qualified speak on behalf of the history contained in such an area.

Beyond a Boundary: Washington’s Historic Districts and Their Racial Contents

Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s there was a wave of citizen-initiated preservation activity in Washington, DC, much of it directed towards identifying and expanding neighbourhood historic districts. These efforts were driven by several different events and influences that coalesced in the period: a new sense of local control that came with the establishment of municipal self-government in the District of Columbia after 1975; the expectation that a comprehensive historic preservation law would be enacted in the district; the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of the legality of preservation controls in 1978; and the renewed salience of the idea of place that affected everything from community art and neighbourhood activism to urban design and architectural theory. This paper addresses this moment of intense activity by investigating the ways in which preservation advocates in one neighbourhood, Dupont Circle, sought to expand their historic district. The proposal to add several square miles of new territory to the designated historic area was led by a predominantly white preservation organization, the Dupont Circle Conservancy. The proposal aroused significant opposition from a group calling itself the 14th and U Street Coalition, which styled itself as the representative of African-American interests and historical identity in neighbouring Shaw. They protested that the Dupont Circle preservationists were attempting to annex their neighbourhood and with it, their history. At first glance this conflict appears to be a predictable case of inner city gentrification fought along the lines of racial identity. But when examined more carefully, the series of claims and counter-claims embedded in the conflict exposed a more nuanced set of issues related to skin tone, class, and historical entitlement. The conflict highlighted the absence of any agreement about what constituted the historicity of such a historic area and cast doubt over who might be qualified speak on behalf of the history contained in such an area.

Territorial Rights: Concept and Justification

This article begins by analysing the idea of territorial rights. It argues that the rights over territory standardly claimed by states can be separated into three main elements: the right of jurisdiction, the right to the territory's resources and the right to control borders. A full justification of territorial rights must therefore address each of these three elements. It proceeds to examine theories that treat states as the primary holders of territorial rights. Utilitarian theories (such as Sidgwick's) maintain that states acquire such rights simply by maintaining social order over the relevant territory. Such theories are insufficiently discriminating and cannot deal adequately with the issues raised by invasion and secession. An alternative view adds the condition that the state must be the legitimate representative of the people who (innocently) occupy the territory, but this too faces an objection. A historical version of the statist theory claims that states gain territorial rights by increasing the value of territory over time, but such historical entitlement theories are implausible in the case of states. In contrast, the article argues that an adequate justificatory theory of territorial rights must treat peoples – nations or indigenous groups – as the primary bearers of these rights. Peoples gain such rights by adding material value to the territory in question, and endowing it with symbolic value. After responding to objections from global egalitarians and others, the article concludes that such a justificatory theory can unite the three elements of territorial rights distinguished at the outset.

Nils Holtug and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Egalitarianism: New Essays on the Nature and Value of Equality

Egalitarianism: New essays on the Nature and Value of Equality is a collection of papers presented at a conference on egalitarianism at the University of Copenhagen in 2004. Edited by Nils Holtug and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and first published by Oxford University press in 2007, Egalitarianism brings together a comprehensive and cohesive body of work from some of today’s leading thinkers in the field of egalitarian theory. The contributors to the volume are: Richard J Arneson, Linda Barclay, Thomas Christiano, Nils Holtug, Susan Hurley, Kasper Lippert Rasmussen, Dennis McKerlie, Ingmar Persson, Bertil Tungodden, Peter Vallentyne, Andrew Williams and Jonathan Wolff. The aim of the volume is “...to bring greater clarity to the issue and (the chapters) can be seen as contributions to the ongoing project of developing an adequate egalitarian theory”. The book is divided in to a general introduction followed by four parts each exploring different aspects of equality theory and with each part providing the backdrop for the subsequent sections. The general introduction provided by the editors gives an overview of the main topics to be explored and provides a comprehensive and manageable introduction to the subject for lay readers. The subsequent chapters, while of a more technical nature, are not beyond the grasp of students or interested parties. Part one—Foundations for Equality, provides a defence of egalitarianism with Thomas Christiano providing a compelling argument for egalitarianism as the fundamental principle of distributive justice and Ingmar Persson providing a defence of extreme egalitarianism. In Chapter Two, Christiano presents an argument for the main claim that egalitarianism is the fundamental principle of distributive justice. The purpose of this claim is twofold: in order to show why we have “good reason to give our allegiance to the principle of equality” (p41) and to provide the basis of his rejection of the levelling down objection. By focusing on the pre-adult phase of life and the principle of well-being, Christiano attempts to show how ideas of sufficiency, historical entitlement and self-ownership are inferior (second order) to the principle of equality and why egalitarianism is the fundamental principle of distributive Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2011) 14:361–362 DOI 10.1007/s10677-011-9270-2

Gandhi Is Dead

Gandhi Is Dead Adam Krause (bio) Slum Tours, says the steel shingle outside my office, and inside in the air conditioning I have brochures that show happy people, freckles standing out like flies on their faces, with a horde of grateful children clinging to their long, pink, khaki-shorted legs. "This could be you!" I tell my prospective customers, who stumble in off the Rajpath, dazed from heat stroke, squinting at shadows after a morning of craning their necks toward the bright sky to take in India Gate, Parliament House, the Flame of the Immortal Jawan and all the other towering monuments. "Look lower," I tell them. "I know of a simple place, a village in the heart of the city, where the houses stand from fortitude alone and the women weave quilts out of nothing but tradition. The people of this village may look wretched to your eyes, but they are the [End Page 81] distillation of all that endures. They await you. They are India's true immortal flame." I serve the tourists fine white cups of strong tea while they discuss in hushed voices their schedule for the afternoon, and I know when they begin to nod and look guilty that I have them. After they have paid their fee in cash, my peon Dinesh takes them twenty kilometers to the south, to a suburban enclave where department stores and golden arches rise above the cracked pavement. Behind it is a landfill, a swollen mountain range of sewage, cabbages and glass bottles, and cutting through it like a ravine is Kahargapur Pahari. Out of the four million or so slumdwellers in Delhi, the inhabitants here are the most reliable I could have chosen. They have none of the sense of historical entitlement endemic to Old Delhi's Muslim slums or the itinerant unpredictability of the children who throng around the railway station. They are, by and large, reasonable businesspeople who are willing to weave rugs, read palms, and teach visitors how to cook chapattis on a flat iron disc above a fire or how to twist cigarettes into perfect cylinders with professional, gnarled bidi-rollers' fingers. In exchange I provide, for a minimum of bribes, water, sanitation, a few schools and a de facto lease on the city's unwanted land. I leave this arrangement out of what I tell to my customers, even the occasional Indian one, like the light-skinned girl in a white blouse, her sunglasses pushed up into the glittering crest of her hair that I know would be soft to the fingers, who sits across from me now. "So you're interested in the Teaching for Today program?" I say. This is one of our most popular packages, allowing visitors to teach whatever they wish, usually the ABCs, for a few hours to an audience of children who have been rounded up beforehand for this purpose. She opens her eyes slightly, startled. "No, I thought I would just volunteer my time," she says, "not pay to do it. Surely your schools can use a volunteer who speaks Hindi. I can teach the children how to do science experiments, for instance. We can make solar ovens." "Solar ovens," I say. "Yes." I take off my reading glasses and put aside the half page of stiff white bond paper that compromises her résumé. "Ms. Deshpande, let me make clear where the money you invest in Kahargapur Pahari goes. It is disseminated among the most infirm there, the one- or no-legged, those with milky cataracts on their eyes who cannot even bestir themselves to tan a hide or roll a cigarette. Only a small portion goes to the necessary costs of lighting and air-conditioning this office. You would be [End Page 82] lucky to get so much efficiency from an NGO, let alone an operation like this, which is profitable to everyone." She nods, biting her lip, and as I do all day long with my tourist customers, who juggle moral scarves while their eyes hunger to be shown the hard truths they promised themselves to find—the sharp edge of the world they had sailed for—I watch her think...

Historical Entitlement and the Practice of Bequest: Is There a Moral Right of Bequest?

Entitlement theorists claim that bequest is a moral right. The aim of this essay is to determine whether entitlement theorists can, on their own grounds, consistently defend that claim. I argue that even if there is a moral right to self-appropriated property and to engage in inter vivos transfers, it is a mistake to contend that there exists an equivalent moral right to make a bequest. Taxing or regulating bequest does not violate an individual’s moral rights because, regardless of whether bequest safeguards certain interests, those interests are not the interests of a living, morally inviolable being. Instead, they are the interests of a deceased entity that has lost the ability to track what it values and pursue projects in accord with those values – a quality that by entitlement theorists’ own arguments renders persons morally significant and deserving of rights in the first place.

What counts as original appropriation?

I here defend historical entitlement theories of property rights against a popular charge. This is the objection that such theories fail because no convincing account of original appropriation exists. I argue that this argument assumes a certain reading of historical entitlement theory and I spell out an alternative reading against which it misfires. On this reading, the role of acts of original appropriation is not to justify but to individuate people’s holdings. I argue that we can identify which acts count as original appropriation against the background of a general justification for a practice of property rights. On this view, what I will call ‘natural’ acts of original appropriation are acts by which a person begins to satisfy the general conditions for justified ownership. Finally, I offer an interpretation of John Locke's theory of appropriation along these lines and argue that it provides an attractive reading of his view.

Social Indicators and the Study of Inequality

As we near the close of the twentieth century, communist regimes have collapsed and the productivity of capitalism is universally acclaimed. In all the Western democracies, welfare state institutions are being challenged. The challenge is, arguably, the most fundamental in the United States. Proposals to privatize public education and oldage insurance are now mainstream. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act represents the most recent, and is likely to be the most influential, change in public policy for the poor. By eliminating the historical entitlement to welfare, and devolving responsibility for welfare programs to the states, the Personal Responsibility Act dramatically changes the nature, level, and locus of government responsibility for the poor. Other policy changes-such as the creation of the Children's Health Insurance Program and Child Care and Development Block Grant-have expanded resources and state-level discretion for the provision of support. Supporters of the retrenchment and devolution of federal programs predict that these changes will improve the fortunes of the most disadvantaged Americans and help close the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Critics predict that these same changes will harm the poor and increase inequality. The disagreement stems, in part, from different expectations about the intermediate impact of devolution on government, community, and family systems. Some observers argue that government has displaced support from the family, community, and voluntary sectors; they expect government retrenchment to enhance the capacity and contribution from these nongovernmental systems. Others argue that government has a unique capacity to support disadvantaged populations and to promote greater equality in economic and social outcomes; they fear that government retrenchment will create a level of need that will overwhelm private systems and force individuals to turn to unreliable and unacceptable alternatives. Efforts to confirm or disprove predictions such as these are creating new opportunities, along with new challenges, for scholars who are interested in questions about economic security and equality. New opportunities are arising with the natural experiments that are created as state and local governments revise, redesign, and reduce a variety of income assistance and social service programs. New challenges are arising as analysts attempt to track the rapidly changing policy landscape and collect data with which to evaluate the impact of the changes. The New York City Social Indicators Survey (SIS) project represents one effort to track the consequences of policy and devolution for inequality and well-being in the largest and most diverse city in the United States. The project uses a telephone survey to collect data from a repeated cross-sectional sample of the entire city population. The survey will collect detailed information on families' economic resources, assets, external support, and health and well-being. By analyzing these data by population and over time, we hope to address questions that are at the core of current debates about inequality in the United States: How great is inequality? Does income inequality exaggerate, or reflect, inequality in material and social living conditions, health, and well-being? Is inequality on these dimensions growing or shrinking? And what effect have devolution and social policy reform had on the magnitude of income and other forms of inequality? In the following sections, we present first-year findings from the project. We begin with an overview of the issues that motivated the project and a brief summary of our measures and data-collection methods. The next sections use data collected in 1997 to tell the story of income and outcome inequality in the city-first, in terms of comparisons between the well-being of New Yorkers and the rest of the U.S. population; second, in terms of the well-being of poor and economically secure residents of the city. …

The Myth of the Patterned Principle: Rawls, Nozick and Entitlements

Robert Nozick's claim that the Difference Principle is patterned constitutes the enduring legacy of Anarchy, State and Utopia. Like all patterned principles, Nozick argues, the Difference Principle determines the nature of a just distribution of goods on the basis of unhistorical considerations, and therefore fails to respect rights established through historical entitlement. I argue that the Difference Principle does not satisfy Nozick's criteria for patterning; nor does it raise the philosophical problems that Nozick associates with patterned principles. Since the Difference Principle does not define a specific preferred distribution of goods, the principle cannot require that the distribution of goods vary with the distribution of a particular pattern variable, as Nozick claims. The decisive contrast between Rawls and Nozick, in fact, concerns the status assigned to historical considerations, and not the status of entitlements.

Self-ownership, Marxism, and Egalitarianism

Part I of this essay supports the anti-egalitarian conclusion that individuals may readily become entitled to substantially unequal extra-personal holdings by criticizing end-state and pattern theories of distributive justice and defending the historical entitlement doctrine of justice in holdings. Part II of this essay focuses on a second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion. This route combines the self-ownership thesis with a contention that is especially advanced by G.A. Cohen. This is the contention that the anti-egalitarian conclusion can be inferred from the self-ownership thesis without the aid of additional controversial premises. Cohen advances this contention, not because he wants to support the anti-egalitarian conclusion, but rather because he wants to emphasize the need for one to reject the self-ownership thesis if one is to reject the anti-egalitarian conclusion. In Part II of this essay, I support this second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion by reinforcing Cohen's special contention while rejecting his challenges to the self-ownership thesis. Cohen's special contention is reinforced by way of an explanation of why the redistributive state must trench upon some people's self-ownership rights. One important challenge to the self-ownership thesis is answered through the articulation of a new and improved Lockean proviso. Another challenge offered by Cohen is answered by arguing that the philosophical costs of denying the self-ownership thesis are as great as the self-ownership libertarian maintains. Thus, I defend both of the key elements of self-ownership libertarianism, the self-ownership thesis and the anti-egalitarian conclusion.

Self-ownership, Marxism, and Egalitarianism

This two-part article offers a defense of a libertarian doctrine that centers on two propositions. The first is the self-ownership thesis according to which each individual possesses original moral rights over her own body, faculties, talents, and energies. The second is the anti-egalitarian conclusion that, through the exercise of these rights of self-ownership, individuals may readily become entitled to substantially unequal extra-personal holdings. The self-ownership thesis remains in the background during Part I of this essay, while the anti-egalitarian conclusion is supported in two ways. First, I offer a reconstruction of Robert Nozick's well-known `How Liberty Upsets Patterns' argument against all end-state and pattern theories of distributive justice; and I defend this reconstructed stance against what might (otherwise) seem to be telling criticisms. Second, I defend the two key principles of Nozickian historical entitlement theory (the principle of just transfer and the principle of just initial acquisition) against criticisms offered by G.A. Cohen. Part II will center on Cohen's contention that the crucial basis for the anti-egalitarian conclusion is the self-ownership thesis. There I argue that Cohen is correct to hold that he must reject the self-ownership thesis if he is to avoid the anti-egalitarian conclusion; but he is wrong to think that he has an adequate basis for rejecting this thesis. Thus, both elements in the libertarianism under consideration are vindicated. And, the self-ownership thesis plays a surprisingly direct role in vindicating the anti-egalitarian conclusion.

Aboriginal Entitlement and Conservative Theory

It is noteworthy that much of recent liberal scholarship aimed at empowering aboriginal peoples, and supporting their land rights, has often unwittingly embraced the conservative Lockean‐Nozickian tradition rather than the tradition of left‐leaning thinkers. Many of the supporters of aboriginal land rights tend to view property rights as contingently determined historical entitlements which are established independently of the state’s authority, thereby creating structures which morally bind the authority of the state. This, in fact, also represents the view of the conservative supporters of untrammelled capitalism. Secondly, there is often little discussion of the bundle of rights which are derived from these acts of original acquisition. This may lead one to the assumption that these supporters of aboriginal land rights agree with the conservative view that all the recognised components of modern liberal ownership, from the right to use, to the right to income, are acquired in the initial events associated with historical entitlement. It is my argument in this paper that basing aboriginal land claims solely on customary historical entitlement results in too close an alignment with a conservative ideology which has been used to support unrestrained capitalism.