Ridiculous read on what is fundamentally an anti-authoritarian philosophy. Read John Stuart Mill, one of Nussbaum's biggest influences (unfortunately not mentioned in the article).
It's a far stretch to say a philosopher (JS Mill) who is widely known as one of the foremost voices on "negative liberty" is a significant influence on the notion that governments must ensure a citizen's "right to flourish".
You are arguing with a fact: Mill's influence on Nussbaum. Reconsider. You also clearly don't know anything about Mill, whose writing is all about what you say it's not.
"Though Mill is an advocate of limited government in ways that one might expect given his defense of basic liberties in On Liberty, he is no libertarian. He emphatically rejects the idea that legitimate government is limited to the functions of affording protection against force and fraud (PPE V.i.2). Instead, he thinks that there are a variety of ways in which government can and should intervene in the lives of citizens—sometimes as coercer and other times as enabler or facilitator—in order to promote the common good."
You can't reduce philosophy to the people involved. After all, the foundations of neoconservatism drew heavily on ideas introduced by Trotskyists [1]. That's about as dramatic of a political about-face as it gets.
You have a very simplistic understanding of what is voluntary and what is involuntary, and taking such an understanding as the basis of your moral and political thinking can only lead to utter confusion.
how the word "voluntary" is actually used by people is complex in interesting ways. People report (degrees and shades of) involuntariness and coercion in lots of different situations. For example "I hate this shitty job but I don't have a choice". So as a matter of language use there's lots of different kinds of involuntariness that doesn't cleanly map onto any libertarian-ish view. At which point libertarians tend to make the move of proposing their own, much more narrow definition of "voluntary". Which implicitly embeds normative assumptions that would need to be argued for, which libertarians fail to do.
What do you think Mill would say about Nussbaum's capabilities approach? Whether or not "Mill was a libertarian," my sense is that he would object on basically libertarian grounds (i.e. he would see CA as paternalism).
To me it is fundamentally a Millian approach to the question.
"Mill thinks that the state can and should require parents to provide schooling for their children, ensuring that this kind of education is available to all, regardless of financial circumstances, by subsidizing the costs of education for the poor so that it is available free or at a nominal cost."
It's fundamentally not Mill's approach. As a utilitarian, Mill got to dodge questions like "what is human flourishing?" Nussbaum, I believe, refers to her interpretation of virtue ethics to answer that question and give CA ultimate grounding.
I'd be wary of quoting that article like it's some authority. At a glance, it reads as skeptical of Mill. The harm principle is the basis of his thinking and he was very concerned about paternalism. I think it's quite likely he would view CA as an overreach.
> As a utilitarian, Mill got to dodge questions like "what is human flourishing?"
What do you mean? What is the thing that utilitarian founders like Mill wanted to promote in the world? How is that not connected to human flourishing?
Utilitarism says that we should maximize utility; it doesn't say we have to do so by focusing on "human flourishing" or that every individual must get the same capabilities as Nussbaum does. Moreover, utiliarians don't agree about what utility is, and not all of them would say "human flourishing" is a synonym.
Nussbaum's specific list of capabilities isn't anticipated by Mill, but that doesn't mean Mill dodges questions like what is human flourishing. Mill wrote a lot about politics and what makes human life go better, both in terms of what is ultimately valuable and what it is crucial to nurture in people for them to experience such value. His views on education, freedom of expression and more in political theory are in that way covering some of the same ground that Nussbaum does with here capabilities approach.
“The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government
I think the key difference between these two views on rights could be summed up as. One side sees rights as a moral sanction to an action in a social context. The other side sees a right as a moral claim to be fullfilled by someone.
Well I think if you have a moral claim over someone else - their failure to fullfill that claim is going to be an issue that has to get resolved with or without their consent.
My attempts to describe what I think is the logical consequence of that view of rights should not be taken as an endorsement of it.
This is exactly what I think the danger of bad philosophy leads to, people confusedly believing they have a claim to control people just for existing. The right to pursue life do not require an automatic claim to control the life of others merely for existing. The "right" to a certain quality of life does, however imply a belief that it must be provided by some means.
Every claim to property over any parcel of land is fundamentally a coercive taking in that it tries to forbid everyone else, billions of people, from using that piece of land. Any attempt to enforce that land claim is an initiation of aggression against other people freely moving about in the world. In that way any system of property, libertarian or not, has at its root coercion. Some coercion is table stakes for civilization and that is ok.
> Every claim to property over any parcel of land is fundamentally a coercive taking in that it tries to forbid everyone else,
Something can't be "taken" if it's not owned.
Property rights systems exist because people use property to achieve their life's values, and having billions of people argue over how to use land is not enactable (I hope that's obvious).
People's lives are not served by telling billions of people who want to use a plot of land to "fight it out", and thus governments have reasonably enacted systems that gives gives people both physical and intellectual property based off their. efforts.
This isn't to be said that property systems can't be improved, our intellectual rights property system obvious has many ways it could be improved (and it changes as we discover new knowledge). The end goal of these political policies though is to create social systems that allow individuals to maximally pursue their life.
Property systems goals are NOT to give everyone a certain quality of life.
Take a look at even the most communist/anarchist society you can imagine (the kind with people who hate those who own property), and you will see systems of an authority being grasped for that help coordinate use of material means in order to avoid violence. Reality cannot be escaped.
Sure it can, someone can take land in the plain everyday sense that they occupy it and tell others to stay out. But that act, and any attempts to enforce it, is coercive and aggressive. Which proves that any system with property rights, including every libertarian proposal ever made, is coercive. That's ok but it also means that your "is it voluntary?" complaints are futile and self-defeating.
> Property rights systems exist because people use property to achieve their life's values
What's your empirical evidence for that claim? The actually existing legal construct of property in countries around the world, and in international treaties, in fact serves a whole range of goals. In every prosperous country on earth there is room for both private property and taxation for public provision. In empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness the top is consistently dominated by democratic countries with extensive welfare states funded by taxes
https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#pa...
Where is that happening? Unless you are talking about taxes, which are only yours if you believe that you made that (government-supplied!) money by yourself without infrastructure like plumbing, roads, schools and hospitals to educate and heal your employees, a strong legal system to enforce property rights…
Just look at corporations. Nearly everyone who has gotten insanely wealthy in the US in the last 100 years or so has done so through a corporation, or some other liability-protection business structure. These business formations are nothing more than government-provided, and government-enforced, fictions.
True. Without the understanding of the judicial system that a corporation is more than the sum of its parts it would be much easier to directly litigate against company execs.
Also known as a mere bunch of people who enforce their decisions using monopoly on violence.
> by yourself without infrastructure like plumbing, roads, schools and hospitals to educate and heal your employees, a strong legal system to enforce property rights…
Surely a government cannot do it by itself either? Who’ve decided that the decision should be deferred to them and not me or someone else? Oh, right, it was decided using the infrastructure and processes imposed by the government.
The only realistic alternative to “it’s not truly yours” is not global horizontal fair decision-making, it is a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions on behalf of (ie instead of) other people. That’s a road to serfdom paved by well intentioned naïve people.
> Who’ve decided that the decision should be deferred to them and not me or someone else?
The people through the process of democracy, where you also have a say as a voter and potential candidate. Property rights is a legal construct, created by the state. A technology if you will. Part of the rules of that construct is that property can be taxed for public provision purposes.
> The people through the process of democracy, where you also have a say as a voter and potential candidate.
“The process of democracy” is hand waving. There is a complex web of institutions and traditions that reinforce themselves. What country would be more “democratic”: the one where people can vote for one of several handpicked candidates or the one where they can impose their will through community organizing and strikes? The one where billionaires own media and put forward their agenda or the one where the media landscape is dominated by self-sustained media co-ops?
> Property rights is a legal construct
That’s the main issue I have with your view. Property rights are a construct as much as the legal system is a construct, democracy is a construct, the state is a construct and “the rules” you appeal to are a construct. There is no any primacy of the state and the government.
A lot of what you say is true, but in my opinion you are romanticizing right-libertarianism. I’m pretty happy to not have to continually and physically defend my possessions from my will-to-power neighbors. To me the life you describe sounds like The Road by Cormack McCarthy (spoiler: it isn’t fun)
Property didn't just appear in your hands out of thin air. Unless maybe you appeared naked on a deserted island and made everything yourself from scratch. It's only "your" property because of the social structures that make it so.
If you want to know what Nussbaum has to say about it, you should probably read them yourself.
You sound like someone who appreciates the costly systems that protect their property, but finds those “collective” efforts inconvenient to acknowledge.
“Property” is most definitely a social aspect of reality. It does not water down its usefulness, or moral rationale, to recognize that any view of property beyond “things you can physically defend without help from others” involves social agreements and efforts.
I don’t think dismissing others good points out of hand is the best way to communicate your own ideas.
Human beings benefit so much from social agreements it is profound. This is not news to game theorists, but some people seem to find it to be a bitter instead of sweet pill.
The question for the animal which creates exponentially more value for itself via many and varied social constructs, than any other animal, is to optimize positive sum social structures (in form and depth), and avoid and mitigate negative sums. Not deny their obvious existence or that our own existence (and freedom) as individuals and a species would be significantly curbed without them.
I do appreciate property and property rights (which I fund to be defended by my taxes). They are my only material means (aside from my bare hands) for achieving my values for myself and people I love.
If you have "collective efforts" you want funded or built, you're free to ask people voluntarily to put their lives, children, families etc. on hold for whatever cause you think is important that I don't see that you have insight into.
But at some level, people who live together have to be able to make some decisions together.
The top level of that is what we call “government”.
It complicates things that governments are as prone to dysfunction as any other structure. And that governments are often weakest at the job of improving themselves.
This is getting a bit abstract.
The specifics of what a government taxes and for what matter. The line would be only to tax for things that generate a net positive expected sum for all citizens, and only in cases where the positive sum is significant and only achievable as an agreement at the top level of society. And these systems are monitored and adapted or cancelled based on their actual, not envisioned, impact.
There isn’t going to be a general answer to the question of whether taxation is good or bad. Only cases where the net benefits are positive and negative. Real or imagined.
I share the view that blind redistribution does not deliver positive returns in reality or in any sober theory.
But the societal level returns we get, from real (not unmeasured, not just imagined or ideologically assumed) surpluses of common efforts, are a legitimate source for funding those efforts.
> If you have "collective efforts" you want funded or built, you're free to ask people voluntarily to put their lives, children, families etc. on hold for whatever cause you think is important that I don't see that you have insight into.
Such collective efforts are already underway. One is called the United States, a system where the legal construct property is bounded and compatible with taxation for public provision. The US is a club of people who have banded together for common goals and with democracy as a tool for updating the system. If you don't want to be part of that club then leave.
I don’t think you will find any disagreement on either point.
“Democracy” is often used as a general term for governments that in some sense are a delegation of citizen power. Even though a pure democracy would remove the delegation.
As a practical matter, the US model has devolved into a party-duocracy. Power at all levels has nearly completely centralized at the national level of each majority party. Of which there are only two. The extreme minimum of choice even for a Republic.
Incorrect, it was founded with more goals than that. It also has the mechanism of democracy for updating over time, and such updates have added prosperity producing things like taxation for public provision of education, infrastructure and much more. Which means that the initial version of the technology called the United States have long since gotten various updates.
There is certainly an emotional reaction that happens when something you consider yours is lost. We have all felt it at some point. But consider: everything you have was either stolen from somebody else at some point in the past, or created from resources that were stolen from somebody else, probably before you were born.
I'd reply that a properly regulated and bounded bundle of property rights is compatible with taxation for public provisioning of e.g. police, judiciary, health care, infrastructure, education and many more things. If you disagree with that then the discussion would move back to more fundamental normative background questions. Like how can a valid claim to property come about in the first place. For example if you think a necessary condition for a valid property claim is that the holding can be traced back through a chain of voluntary transaction then most current holdings of land in the US are unjustified, since they trace back to genocidal oppression by european settlers. In addition there are dire problems for other libertarian talking points about property.
