Self-ownership, freedom, and equality
G. A. Cohen (Author)
In this book G.A. Cohen examines the libertarian principle of self-ownership, which says that each person belongs to himself and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else. This principle is used to defend capitalist inequality, which is said to reflect each person's freedom to do as as he wishes with himself. The author argues that self-ownership cannot deliver the freedom it promises to secure, thereby undermining the idea that lovers of freedom should embrace capitalism and the inequality that comes with it. He goes on to show that the standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation implies an endorsement of self-ownership, since, in the Marxist conception, the employer steals from the worker what should belong to her, because she produced it. Thereby a deeply inegalitarian notion has penetrated what is in aspiration an egalitarian theory. Purging that notion from socialist thought, he argues, enables construction of a more consistent egalitarianism
eBook, English, 1995
Cambridge University Press : Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Cambridge, New York, 1995
1 online resource (x, 277 pages) : illustrations
9781461949114, 9780511521270, 9780511962448, 1461949114, 0511521278, 0511962444
861693061
Introduction : history, ethics and Marxism
Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain : how patterns preserve liberty
Justice, freedom, and market transactions
Self-ownership, world-ownership, and equality
Are freedom and equality compatible?
Self-ownership, communism, and equality : against the Marxist technological fix
Marxism and contemporary political philosophy, or, Why Nozick exercises some Marxists more than he does any egalitarian liberals
Marx and Locke on land and labour
Exploitation in Marx : what makes it unjust?
Self-ownership : delineating the concept
Self-ownership : assessing the thesis
The future of a disillusion