Allan Gibbard’s question is whether what he calls “hard libertarianism” or what he calls Locke’s “soft libertarianism” support what he calls “widespread unencumbered ownership.” His answer is no.
Somewhere in our discussion, Prof. Brown is going to ask you to list different things that might be meant by “has a right to,” as in “I have a right to my house.” So put on your thinking caps.
Hard libertarianism is the view that a person’s moral rights can only be altered by that person’s consent. No one can just take away your rights.
Locke is not a hard libertarian when it comes to property rights. He thinks that everyone starts off with the right to use all of the earth’s resources. More precisely, he thinks that everyone has what lawyers call the liberty to use the earth’s resources. When he says that everyone has the right to use the earth’s resources, he means no one would do anything wrong by using them.
Locke’s theory is that this right can be lost when other people labor on some part of the world. I can lose my right to pick up acorns in a field if Professor Brown has done the work to plow the field. Note that this can happen even if I did not agree to give up my rights. She did the work, she gets the property right. Since her property right to the field is incompatible with my liberty right to use the field, I lost my right because of something she did and not through my own consent. So Locke isn’t a hard libertarian about property rights.
You can ask why labor has the effect of terminating the common owners’ rights. That’s a good question. It is why Locke scholars have jobs. My best guess is that what Locke means by “common ownership” is that everyone has the right to use enough of the earth’s resources to stay alive and even thrive a bit. If labor improves these resources, and everyone benefits from the system of private property that encourages people to labor, then no one’s common ownership rights are actually terminated. Everyone still has the right to use enough of the earth’s resources to stay alive and even thrive a bit even if they don’t have the right to use the quite large amount of land that they would need to stay alive and thrive a bit in a different world, namely, one without property rights. I can’t say I’m completely crazy about this, since it doesn’t sound much like common ownership to me. But it’s the best I can do. Anyway, this kind of question is very much a live issue among Locke scholars.
One other interesting tidbit is that Locke is a hard libertarian when it comes to political authority. He thinks that the state gets the power to make and enforce laws only over those who consent to obey it. That is a little curious. Why is hard libertarianism correct for political authority but not for property? Real libertarians, people who are stern and consistent about it, do not draw such a distinction.
We ended with a discussion of an AI written answer to one of our old essay prompts on the Gibbard article.
The computer pretty much filled up the paper by repeating the question sandwiched in between standard introduction and conclusions. It did not say anything.
Here are two questions to think about.
Would it get a passing grade in a college course? I believe the consensus answer was that it would.
Should it get a passing grade in a college course? I think at least the majority opinion was that it probably should not.
I did not feel great about that myself. If all that a college degree means is that you did work that could have been produced by a computer that knows how to rewrite a question in grammatical sentences, who is going to take it seriously?