著者

井上 彰

出版者

JAPANESE POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION

雑誌

年報政治学 (ISSN:05494192)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.59, no.2, pp.2_276-2_295, 2008 (Released:2012-12-28)

参考文献数

21

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Left-libertarianism has attracted our attention as one of the powerful strands of political philosophy. Left-libertarianism endorses the thesis of self-ownership and reinterprets the Locken proviso in an egalitarian manner. It holds, roughly, that while people own their mind and body, unowned resources should be distributed equally among them.   This paper attempts to specify the merits and limits of left-libertarianism. On the one hand, left-libertarianism has two merits. First, left-libertarians demonstrate the possibility of justice as a system of perfect duties in such a way that the thesis of self-ownership is reasonably weakened. Second, the left-libertarian (re)interpretations of the Lockean proviso lead us to see the plausibility of the proviso as an egalitarian principle of justice. On the other hand, there are two problems with left-libertarianism. First, some inequalities resulting from the difference of people's native endowments are left unattended in the left-libertarian argument, mainly because left-libertarians fail to distinguish voluntariness from non-coerciveness; the thesis of self-ownership guarantees the latter, not always the former. Second, left-libertarianism is vulnerable to real-life uncertainty. Given that uncertainty is a characteristic trait of our market society, this implication seems fatal to the left-libertarian argument.